But one man of the ruling race—Overlooked Elmina—Deadly fever—The reason why—Magnificent position—Ideal for a capital—Absence of tsetse—Loyal to their Dutch masters—Difficulty in understanding incorruptibility of English officials—Reported gold in Elmina—The stranded school-inspector—“Potable water”—Preferred the chance of guinea-worm to trouble—Stern German head-teacher—Cape Coast—Wonderful native telegraphy—Haunted Castle—Truculent people.
Elmina means, of course, the mine, and the reason for the name is lost in the mist of ages. Certain it is there is no mine nearer than those at Tarkwa, at least two days' journey away, but in the old Portuguese and Dutch days Elmina was a rich port. It is a port still, though an abandoned one, and you may land from a boat comfortably on to great stone steps, as you may land in no other place along the Guinea Coast. On the 17th of May in this year of our Lord, 1911, there raged along the Coast a hurricane such as there has not been for many a long day, and the aftermath of that hurricane was found in a terrific surf, which for several days made landing at any port difficult, in some cases impossible. The mail steamer found she could land no mails at Cape Coast, and then was forgotten, neglected Elmina remembered, and the mails were landed there, eight miles to the west, and carried overland to their destination.
Yet is there but one man of the ruling race in Elmina, and the fine old Castle, where the Portuguese and Dutch governors of Guinea reigned, is almost abandoned to the desecrating hand of the negro officials—Custom and post office men! Why, when the Gold Coast was looking for a capital, they overlooked Elmina is explained usually by the declaration that yellow fever was very bad there; and I conclude it was for the same reason that they passed it by when they wanted a seaport for the inland railway. Somehow it seems an inadequate reason. It would have been cheaper surely to search for the cause of the ill-health than to abandon so promising a site. The reason lies deeper than that. It is to be found in that strong feeling in the Englishman—that feeling which is going to ruin him as a colonising nation now that rivals are in the field, unless he looks to his ways—that one place in “such a poisonous country” is as good or as bad as another, and therefore if people die in one place, “let's try another beastly hole.” Die they certainly did in Elmina. It was taken over from the Dutch in 1874, and in 1895 the records make ghastly reading. “Yellow fever, died,” you read, not once but over and over again. Young and strong and hopeful, and always the record is the same, and now, looking at it with seeing eyes and an understanding mind, the explanation is so simple, the cure so easy.
Round this great Castle is a double line of moats, each broad and deep and about half a mile in extent, and these moats were full to the brim of water, stagnant water, an ideal breeding place for that entirely domesticated animal, the yellow-fever mosquito—stegmia, I believe, is the correct term. Get but one yellow-fever patient, let him get bitten by a mosquito or two, and the thing was done. But sixteen years ago they were not content with such simple ways as that. It seems there was a general sort of feeling then along the Coast, it has not quite gone yet, that chill was a thing greatly to be dreaded, and so instead of taking advantage of the magnificent position so wisely chosen by the Portuguese mariners, where the fresh air from the ocean might blow night and day, they mewed themselves up in quarters on the landward side of the Castle, so built that it is almost impossible to get a thorough draught of air through them. The result in such a climate is languor and weariness, an ideal breeding ground for malaria or yellow fever. And so they died, God rest their souls; some of them were gallant gentlemen, but they died like flies, and Elmina, for no fault of its own, was abandoned.
0212
And yet the old Portuguese were right. It is an ideal site for a capital. The Castle is on a promontory which juts out into the sea, and is almost surrounded by water, for the Sweetwater River, which was very salt when I was there, runs into the sea in such a fashion as to leave but a narrow neck of land between the Castle and the mainland. The land rises behind the town, it is clear of scrub and undergrowth, so that horses and cattle may live, as there is no harbour for that curse of West Africa, the tsetse fly; there is sufficient open space for the building of a large town, and it is nearer to Kumasi, whence comes all the trade from the north, than Sekondi, which was chosen, instead of it, as a railway terminus. A grievous pity! It is England's proud boast that she lets the man on the spot have a free hand, knowing that he must be the better judge of local conditions and needs; it is West Africa's misfortune that she had so evil a reputation that the best and wisest men did not go there; and hence these grave mistakes.
I had always believed that every coloured man was yearning to come under the British flag, therefore was I much astonished to hear that in 1874, when Britain took over this part of the Coast, the natives resented the change of masters very bitterly. They would not submit, and the big village to the west of the fort, old Elmina native town, was in open rebellion. At last the guns from the fort were turned upon it, the inhabitants evacuated it hastily, it was bombarded, and the order went forth that no one should come back to it.
Even now, thirty-seven years later, the old law which prohibits the native from digging on the site of the old town is still in force, and since the natives were in the habit of burying their wealth beneath their huts, great store of gold dust is supposed to be hidden there. Again and again the solitary official in charge of Elmina has been approached by someone asking permission to dig there, generally with the intimation that if only the permission be granted, a large percentage of the hidden treasure shall find its way into the pockets of that official.
“It is hard,” said Dr Duff, “for the native mind to grasp the fact that the English official is incorruptible, and the law must be kept—but I confess,” he added, “I should like to know if there really is gold in old Elmina.”
The town has been a fine town once. The houses are substantially built of stone, they are approached by fine flights of stone steps, there are the ruins of an old casino, and picturesque in its desolation is an old Dutch garden. If I were to describe the magnificent old Castle, I should fill half the book; it is so well worth writing about. I walked up the hill behind the Castle where they have built up the roadway with discarded cannon, and there I took photographs and wished I had a little more time to spare for the place, and vowed that when I reached England the British Museum should help me to find out all there is to be known about this magnificent place and the men who have gone before.
0216
For the man of the present it must be a little difficult to live in, if it is only for the intense loneliness. It must be lonely to live in the bush with the eternal forest surrounding you, but at least there a man is an outpost of Empire, the trade is coming to him, he may find interest and amusement in the breaking of a road or the planning of a garden, while the making of a town would fill all his time, but in Elmina there are no such consolations. The place is dead, slain by the English; the young men go away following the trade, and the old mammies with wrinkled faces and withered breasts lounge about the streets and talk of departed glories.
I had not expected to find one white man here, and I found two, the other being a school-inspector who was on his way along the Coast inspecting the native schools. He was in a fix, for he had sent on his carriers and stores and could get no hammock-boys. They had promised to send them from Cape Coast and they had not come. The medical officer made both us strangers hospitably welcome, but stores are precious things on the Coast and one does not like to trespass, so he was a troubled school-inspector.
“I think I'll walk on to Kommenda,” said he.
“I wouldn't,” said I, the only one who knew that undesirable spot.
We made a queer little party of three in that old-world Castle, in the old Dutch rooms that are haunted by the ghosts of the dead-and-gone men and women of a past generation. At least, I said they were haunted, the school-inspector was neutral, and the medical officer declared no ghosts had ever troubled him. I don't know whether it was ghosts that troubled me, but the fact remains that I, who could sleep calmly by myself in the bush with all my carriers drunk, could not sleep easily now that my troubles were over, and I set it down to the haunting unhappy thoughts of the people who had gone before me, who were dead, but who had lived and suffered in those rooms; and yet in the day-time we were happy enough, and the two men instructed me as one who had a right to know in things African. The school-inspector was very funny on the education of the native. His great difficulty apparently was to make the rising generation grasp the fact that grandiloquent words of which they did not understand the meaning were not proofs of deep knowledge. The negro is like the Hindoo Baboo dear to the heart of Mr Punch. He dearly loves a long word. Hygiene is a subject the Government insist upon being taught, only it seems to me they would do more wisely to teach it in the vernacular so that it might be understood by the common people. As it is, said my school-inspector, the pupils are very pat; and when solemnly asked by the teacher what are the constituents of drinking water, rap out a list of Latin adjectives the only one of which he can understand is “potable.”
“Tut, tut,” said the inspector, “run along, Kudjo, and bring me a glass of drinking water”; and then it was only too evident that that youthful scion of the Fanti race who had been so glib with his adjectives did not understand what “potable” meant.
0220
Afterwards in the eastern portion of the Colony I was told of other difficulties and snares that lie in the way of the unlucky schoolmaster. In Africa it is specially necessary to be careful of your water, as in addition to many other unpleasant results common in other lands there is here a certain sort of worm whose eggs may apparently be swallowed in the water. They have an unpleasant habit of hatching internally and then working their way out to the outer air, discommoding greatly their unwilling host. Therefore twice a week in every English school the qualities of good water and the way to insure it are insisted upon by the teacher. But does that teacher practise what he preaches? He doesn't like guinea-worm, but neither does he like trouble, wherefore he chooses the line of least resistance and chances his water. If the worst come to the worst and he has guinea-worm, a paternal Government will pay his salary while he is ill.
At least up till lately it always has. But a change is coming over the spirit of the dream. The other day there arose in Keta, a town in the Eastern Province, a German head-teacher who got very tired of subordinates who were perpetually being incapacitated by guinea-worm, a perfectly preventable disease, and, as the Germans are nothing if not practical, there went forth in his school the cruel order that any teacher having guinea-worm should have no salary during his illness. There is going to be one more case of guinea-worm in that school, then there is going to be a sad and sorry man fallen from his high estate and dependent on his relatives, and then the teachers will possibly learn wisdom and practise what they preach. But in Elmina my school-inspector seemed to think the Golden Age was yet a long way off.
I left him and the medical officer with many hopes for a future meeting, and one afternoon took up my loads and having sent a telegram to the Provincial Commissioner—how easy it seemed now—set out for Cape Coast eight miles along the shore.
There is very little difference in the scenery all along the shore here. The surf thunders to the right, and to the left the land goes back low and sandy, covered with coarse grass and low-growing shrubs, while here and there are fishing villages with groves of cocoa-nuts around them, only the houses instead of being built of the raffia palm are built of swish, that is mud, and as you go east dirtier and dirtier grow the villages.
It took us barely two hours and a half to reach Cape Coast, one of the oldest if not the oldest English settlement on the Coast. It was the original Capo Corso of the Portuguese, but the English have held it since early in the seventeenth century, and the natives, of course, bear English names—in Elmina they have Dutch names—and remember no other masters.
Cape Coast is a great straggling untidy town with rather an eastern look about it which comes, I think, from the fact that many of the houses have flat roofs. But it is a drab-looking town without any of the gorgeous colouring of the east. The Castle is built down on the seashore behind great walls and bastions, and here are the Customs, the Commissioner's Court, the Post Office, all the mechanism required for the Government of a people, but the old cannon are still there, piles of shot and shell and great mortars, and in the courtyards are the graves of the men and women who have gone before, the honoured dead. Here lies the lady whom the early nineteenth century reckoned a poet, L. E. L., Laetitia Landor, the wife of Captain Maclean who perished by some unexplainable misadventure while she was little more than a bride, and here lies Captain Maclean himself, the wise Governor whom the African merchants put in when England, in one of her periodic fits of thriftless economy, would have abandoned the Gold Coast, and here are other unknown names Dutch and English, and oh, curious commentary on the hygiene of the time, in the same courtyard is the well whence the little company of whites, generally surrounded by a people often hostile, must needs in time of siege or stress always draw their water.
They say Cape Coast like Elmina is haunted, and men have told me tales of unaccountable noises, of footsteps that crossed the floor, of voices in conversation, of sighs and groans and shrieks for help that were unexplained and unexplainable. One man who had been D.C. there told me he could keep no servant in the Castle at night they were so terrified, but as I only paid flying visits to take photographs I cannot say of my own knowledge whether there is anything uncanny about it. There ought to be, for there are deep dungeons underground, dark and uncanny, where in old days they possibly kept their slaves and certainly their prisoners-of-war. There was no light in them then, there is very little now, only occasionally someone has knocked away a stone from the thick walls, and you may see a round of dancing sunlight in the gloom and hear the sound of the ceaseless surf. An officer in the Gold Coast regiment told me he wanted to have a free hand to dig in the earth here, for he was sure the pirates who owned it in the old days must have buried much treasure here and forgotten all about it, but he was a hopeful young man and looked forward to the days when the Ashantis should come down and besiege Cape Coast again as they had done in the old days, and he pointed out the particular gun on the bastion that in case of such an event he should train on the Kumasi road and blow those savages into the next world. I have seen those fighting men of Ashanti since then and I do not think they are ever coming to Cape Coast, at least as enemies, which perhaps is just as well, for the gun which that gay young lieutenant slapped so affectionately and called “Old Girl” is pretty elderly and I fancy might do more damage to those loading than to those at the other end of her muzzle.
But I did not lodge at the fort. The medical officer, it was always the medical officer to the rescue, very kindly took charge and I was very comfortably lodged in the hospital. And here I had proof of the wonderful manner in which news is carried by the birds of the air in West Africa. I had thought that the Provincial Commissioner was going to put me up, and I instructed my boys to that effect.
“Ask way to Government House,” which I thought lay to the west of the town. As we passed the first houses a man sprang up.
“Dis way, Ma, I show you,” and off he went, we following, and I thought my men had asked the question. Clearly Government House was not to the west, for we went on through the town and up a hill and up to a large bungalow which I was very sure was not Government House, unless we had arrived at the back.
I got out protesting, but my boys were very sure and so was our guide.
“Dis be bungalow, Ma. Missus come.”
Then I knew they were wrong, for I knew the Commissioner had no wife. But they weren't after all, for down the steps breathing kindly welcome came the medical officer's wife, a pretty bride of a couple of months, and she smilingly explained that the Commissioner had asked her to take me in because it would be so much more comfortable for me where there was another woman. “I suppose he sent you on,” said she.
But not only had he not sent me on, but he knew nothing of my coming, and was waiting in Government House for my arrival. The town, then, knew of my expected coming and his intentions with regard to me almost before he had formulated them himself. At any rate, it was none of his doing or his servants' doings that I went straight to the hospital, and the telegram stating my intention had only been sent that morning. So much for native telegraphy.
Round Cape Coast, in my mind, hangs a mist of romance which will always sharply divide it from the town as I saw it. When I think of it I have to remind myself that I have seen Cape Coast and that, apart from kindly recollections of the hospitality with which I was received, I do not like it. The people are truculent and abominably ill-mannered, and I do not think I would ever venture to walk in the streets again without the protection of a policeman.
There were two white women there, so they had hardly the excuse of curiosity, as we must have been familiar sights, yet they mobbed me in the streets, and when I tried to take photographs of the quaint, old-world streets, hustled and crowded me to such an extent that it was quite out of the question. And they did this even when I was accompanied by my two servants and my hammock-boys.
“These Fanti people catch no sense,” said Grant angrily, when after a wild struggle I had succeeded in photographing a couple of men playing draughts, and utterly failed to get a very nice picture of a man making a net. I quite agreed with Grant; these Fanti people do catch no sense, and I got no photographs, for which I was sorry, for there are corners in that old town picturesque and quaint and not unlike corners in the towns along the Sicilian coast. What they said of me I do not know, but I am afraid it was insulting, and if ever my friends the Ashantis like to go through Cape Coast again I shall give them a certain amount of sympathy. At least it would give me infinite satisfaction to hear of some of them getting that beating I left without being able to inflict.
I do not think a white woman would be safe alone in Cape Coast, and this I am the more sorry for because it has belonged so long to the English. Perhaps Dr Blyden is right when he says, and I think he spoke very impartially when speaking of his own people, that the French have succeeded best in dealing with the negro, I beg his pardon, the African. They have succeeded in civilising him, so says Dr Blyden, with dignity. The English certainly have not.
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