Very heavy going—-Half Assinie—The preventive service station—The energetic officer—Dislike of Africa—The Tano River—The enterprising crocodiles—The mahogany logs—Wicked waste—Gentlemen adventurers—A primitive dinner-party—Forced labour—The lost carrier—“Make die and chopped”—A negro Good Samaritan—A matrimonial squabble—The wife who would earn her own living—Dissatisfied carriers.
We were bound to Half Assinie and the French border and the way was all along the shore, which is a narrow strip of land between the roaring surf and a mangrove-fringed lagoon, and on this strip are the palm-built fishing villages and the cocoa-nut groves that are so typical of the Coast. The last day out from Half Assinie the way was very heavy going indeed. We had our midday meal in the street of a village with the eyes of the villagers upon us, and by the afternoon the “sea was too full,” the sun was scorching, and the loose sand was cruel heavy going for the carriers and the hammock-boys. The sun went down, the cool of the evening came, but the bearers were staggering like drunken men before a shout went up. We had reached Half Assinie, the last important town in the Gold Coast Colony.
Half Assinie is just like any other Western Province Gold Coast town, built close down to the roaring, almost impassable surf, because the people draw much of their livelihood from the sea, and built of raffia-palm bamboo, because there is nothing else to build it of. Only there is this difference, that here is a preventive station, with a white man in command. There is a great cleared square, which is all sand and cocoa-nut palms, men in neat dark-blue uniforms pass to and fro, and bugle calls are heard the livelong day. We arrived long before the rest of our following, and we marched straight up to the preventive officer's house only to find that he was down with fever. But he was hospitable. All white men are in West Africa. The house was ours. It consisted of a square of sun-dried, white-washed mud, divided into three rooms with square openings for windows, mud floor and no ceiling, but high above the walls the palm-thatched roof is raised and carried far out beyond them to form a verandah where we could sit and eat and entertain visitors. It was big enough, never less than twelve and often quite eighteen feet wide, and could be made quite a comfortable living-room were a woman there, but Englishmen and the English Government do not encourage wives. The rooms assigned to the guests were of necessity empty, for men cannot carry furniture about in West Africa, and our host being sick and our gear not yet arrived, the Forestry officer and I, comforted with whisky-and-soda, took two chairs and sat out in the compound under the stars and watched for the coming of our carriers. The going had been so hard they straggled in one by one, bath and bed and chairs and tables and boxes, and it was nine o'clock before we were washed and dressed and in our right minds, and waiting “chop” at a table on the big verandah that the faithful Kwesi, who had been properly instructed, had decorated with yellow cannas from the garden.
There is something about Half Assinie that gives the impression of being at the end of the world. Of course I have been in places much farther from civilisation, but nowhere has the tragedy of the Englishman's life in West Africa so struck me as it did here, and again I must say I think it is the conditions of the life and not the climate that is responsible for that tragedy. The young man who ran that preventive station was cheerful enough; he got up from his bed of fever when he could hardly stagger across the room to entertain his visitors. When he could barely crawl, he was organising a game of cricket between some white men who had unexpectedly landed and the “scholars” among the black inhabitants; and he was energetic and good-tempered and proud of his men, but he hated the country and had no hesitation in saying so. He had no use for West Africa; he counted the days till he should go home. He would not have dreamt of bringing his wife out even if she had wished to come. He was, in fact, a perfect specimen of the nice, pleasant Englishman who is going the way that allows France and Germany to beat us in colonising all along the line. It was his strong convictions, many of them unspoken, that impressed me, his realisation of his own discontent and discomfort and hopelessness that have tinged my recollections of the place.
It should be a place of great importance, for it is but a short distance from the Tano River, and down the Tano River, far from the interior, come the great mahogany logs that rival the logs of Honduras and Belize and all Central America in value. They are cut far away in the forests of the interior; they are floated down the Tano River, paying toll to the natives who guide them over the falls and rapids; they come between tall, silk-cotton trees and fan palms and raffia palms, where the chimpanzee hides himself and the dog-faced monkeys whimper and cry, the crocodile suns himself on the mud-banks, and great, bell-shaped, yellow flowers lighten the greenery. They come past the French preventive station, that the natives call France, a station thriftily decorated with a tiny flag that might have come out of a cracker, past the English station built of raffia palm like the lake village, for this ground is flooded in the rains, through a saving canal, for the Tano River enters the sea in French territory, into a lagoon behind Half Assinie. The lagoon is surrounded by swamp, and the crocodiles, they say, abound, and are so fierce and fearless they have been known to take the paddler's arm as he stoops to his stroke. I did not know of their evil reputation as I sat on a box in the frail canoe, that seemed to place me in the midst of a waste of waters, rising up to the greenery in the far distance, and the blue-white sky above shut down on us like a lid. I was even inclined to be vexed with the men's reluctance to jump out and push when we ran ashore on a sand-bank. They should be able to grow rice in these swamps at the mouth of the Tano River and behind Beyin, and so raise up a new industry that shall save Half Assinie when the mahogany trade is a thing of the past.
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From the lagoon to Half Assinie, a couple of miles away, the logs are brought on a tramway line, and where they land the men are squaring them, cutting off the butts where the journey down the river has split and marred them, and making them ready to be moved down to the beach by the toilsome application of many hands. It reminded me of the way they must have built the pyramids as I watched the half-naked men toil and sweat and push and shriek, and apparently accomplish so little. Yet all in good time the beach is strewn with the logs, great square-cut baulks of red timber with their owners' marks upon their butts and covered generally with a thatch of cocoa-nut palm fronds to keep them from the all-powerful sun. The steamer will call for them some day, but it is no easy thing to get them through the surf, and steamer after steamer calls, whistles, decides that the surf is too heavy to embark such timber, and passes on. And where they have been cut and trimmed, the mammies come with baskets to gather pieces of the priceless wood to build their fires. It seems to me that the trimming is done wastefully. The average savage and the ignorant white is always wasteful where there is plenty, and it is nothing to them that the mahogany tree does not come to maturity for something like two hundred and fifty years, and that the cutters have denuded the country far, far beyond the sea coast.
There are other phases of life in Half Assinie. Usually there is but one white man there, the preventive officer, but when I visited it actually ten white people sat down one night to dinner. For there had landed some white people bound on some errand which, as has been the custom from time immemorial in Africa, was veiled in mystery. They were seeking gold; they hoped to find diamonds; their ultimate aim was to trade with the natives, and cut out every other trading-house along the Coast. Frankly, I do not know what they had landed for—their leader talked of his wealth and how he grew bananas and pines and coffee, and created a tropical paradise in Devonshire, and meanwhile in Africa conferred the inimitable benefits of innumerable gramophones and plenty of work upon the guileless savage—but I only gathered he was there for the purpose of filling his pockets, how, I have not the faintest idea. His dinner suggested Africa in the primitive days of the first adventurers and rough plenty. Soup in a large bowl, from which we helped ourselves, a dozen tins of sardines flung on a plate, a huge tongue from a Gargantuan ox, and dishes piled with slices of pine-apple. The table decorations consisted of beer bottles, distributed at intervals down the table between the kerosene lamps; the boys who waited yelled and shrieked and shouted, like the untamed savages they were, and some of the white men were unshaven and in their shirt sleeves, and the shirts, to put it mildly, needed washing.
“Gentlemen adventurers,” said I to my companion under my breath, thinking of the days of old and the men who had landed on these shores.
“Would you say gentlemen?” said he.
And I decided that one epithet would be sufficient.
How the bugles called. Every hour almost a man clad in the dark-blue preventive service uniform stood out in the square with his bugle and called to the surf and the sky and the sand and the cocoa-nut palms and the natives beyond, saying to them that here was the representative of His Britannic Majesty, here was the white man powerful above all others who kept the Borders, who was come as the forerunner of law and cleanliness and order. For these things do not come naturally to the native. He clears the land when he needs it and then he leaves it to itself and the quickly encroaching bush. The mosquito troubles him not. Dirt and filth and evil smells are not worth counting weighed in the balance against a comfortable afternoon's sleep, and so it came that when I commented on the neatness of Half Assinie, the preventive officer laughed.
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“Forced labour,” said he. “The place was in a frightful state a month ago and I couldn't get anybody to do anything, so I just turned out my men, put a cordon round, and forced everyone to do an hour's labour, men, mammies, and half-grown children, till we got the place clear. It wasn't hard on anyone, and you see.” He was right. Sometimes in Africa, nay, as a rule, the powers of a dictator are needed by the white man. If he is a wise and clever dictator so much the better, but one thing is certain, he must not be a man who splits hairs. Justice, yes, rough crude justice he must give—must have the sort of mind that sees black and white and does not trouble about the varying shades in between.
We came back from the Border by the road that we had gone, the road that is the King's Highway, and an incident happened that shows how very, very easily a wrong impression of a people may be gathered.
When we were in Beyin on our way out, the two headmen who were eternally at war with each other suddenly appeared in accord leading between them a man by the hands.
“This man be very sick.”
This man certainly was very sick, and it seemed to the Forestry officer that the simplest thing would be to leave him behind at Beyin and pick him up on our return journey. He thought his decision would be received with gratitude. Not at all. The sick carrier protested that all he wanted was to be relieved of his load and allowed to go on. The men of Beyin were bad people; if he stayed they would kill him and chop him. The Forestry officer was inclined to laugh. Murder of an unoffending stranger and cannibalism on a coast that had been in touch with civilisation for the last four hundred years; the idea was not to be thought of. But the frightened sick man stuck to his point and his brother flung down his load and declared if he were left behind he should stay with him. There was nothing for it then but to agree to their wishes. He was relieved of his load and he started, and he and his brother arrived at Half Assinie long after all the other carriers had got in. The gentlemen adventurers numbered among them a doctor, and he was called in and prescribed for the sick man. After the little rest there he was better, and started back for Axim, his brother, who was carrying the Forestry officer's bath, in close attendance. By and by we passed the bath abandoned on the beach, and its owner perforce put another man on to carry it.
That night there were no signs of the missing men, but next morning the brother, the man who ought to have carried the bath, turned up. His face was sodden with crying. A negro is intensely emotional, but this man had some cause for his grief. He had missed his brother, abandoned the bath, and gone right back to Half Assinie to look for him. The way was by the seashore, there is no way to wander from it; on one side is the roaring surf that no man alone may dare, and on the other, just beyond the line of cocoa-nut palms, a mangrove-fringed lagoon, and beyond that a bush, containing perhaps a few native farms to be reached by narrow tracks, but a bush that no stranger would lightly dare. But no trace of his brother could this man find. What had become of the sick carrier? That was the question we asked ourselves, and to that no answer could we find except the sinister verdict pronounced by his fellows, “Make die and chopped.” And that I believed for many months, till just before I left the Coast the Forestry officer and I met again and he told me the end of the story. He had made every inquiry, telegraphed up and down the Coast, and given the man up for lost, and then after four or five weeks a miserable skeleton came crawling into Axim. The lost carrier. He had felt faint by the wayside, crawled into the shade of a bush and become insensible, and there had been found by some man, a native of the country and a total stranger to him. And this Good Samaritan instead of falling upon him and making him die as he fully expected, took him to his own house, fed and succoured him, and when he was well enough set him on his way. So he and I and all his fellows had wronged these men of the shore. Greater kindness he could not have found in a Christian land, and in all probability he might easily have found much less.
But Beyin too furnished another lesson for me, not quite so pleasant. All my carriers had come from here, and on our way back they struck. In plain words they wanted to see the colour of my money. Said the Forestry officer, “Don't pay them, else they'll all run away and you will have no one to carry your things into Axim.” That was a contingency not to be thought of, so the ultimatum went forth—no pay until they had completed their contract. That night I regret to state there was a row in the house, a matrimonial quarrel carried on in the approved matrimonial style all the world over, with the mother-in-law for chorus and general backer-up. There was a tremendous racket and the principal people concerned seemed to be one of my women-carriers and the Omahin's registrar in whose house we were lodged. Then because Fanti is one of the Twi languages, and an Ashanti can understand it quite well, Kwesi interpreted for me. This woman, it appeared, was one of the registrar's wives, and he disapproved of her going on the road as a common carrier. It was not consistent with his dignity as an official of the court, he said at the top of his voice; he had given her a good home and she had no need to demean herself. She shrilly declared he had done no such thing, and if he had, had shamefully neglected her for that last hussy he had married, and her mother backed her and several other female friends joined in, and whether they settled the dispute or not to their own satisfaction I do not know, but the gentleman cuffed the lady and the lady had the extreme satisfaction of scattering several handfuls of his wool to the winds.
Next morning none of my carriers turned up; there lay the loads under a tree in front of the house with the orderly looking at them with his sardonic grin, but never a carrier. It was cool with the coolness of early morning. We had our breakfast in the great room, we discussed the disturbance of the night before, the things were all washed up, still no carriers; at last, just as it was getting hot and our tempers were giving out, came a message. The carriers would not go unless they were paid.
“And it's a foregone conclusion they won't go if they are paid,” sighed the Forestry officer as he set off to interview the Omahin and tell him our decision. If the carriers did not come in at once, it ran, we would leave all the loads, making him, the Omahin, responsible for their safety, and we would push on with the Mendi and Kroo-boy carriers in the Forestry officer's employ. Those left behind not having carried out their contract of course would then get no pay at all, and this would happen unless they returned to work within a quarter of an hour. The effect was marvellous. The Omahin, of course, did not grasp how exceedingly uncomfortable it would have been for us to leave our gear behind us, and as we had sixteen Kroo boys and Mendi boys the feat was quite feasible, and promptly those Beyin people returned to work and were as eager to get their loads as they had before been to leave them. So I learned another lesson in the management of carriers, and we made our way without further incident back to Axim.
