The white men at Sunyani—Contrast between civilisation and barbarism—The little fort—The suffrage movement—“I am as mud in the sight of my people!”—The girl who did not wish to marry the King—The heavy loads carried by the Hausas—The danger of stubbing a toe—An Ashanti welcome—The Chief's soul—The unpleasant duties of the Chief's soul—The blood of sheep versus the blood of men—A courteous lady of Odumase—The Commissioners of Ashanti—Difficulties of crossing flooded streams—One way of carrying fowls—The last night in the wilds.
At Sunyani there are usually six white men, namely a Provincial Commissioner, a medical officer—the relief had come up with me—three soldiermen, and a non-commissioned officer, and I think my sympathies are rather with that colour sergeant. The other men are all of one class, but he must be utterly alone. The houses and the men were equally delightful. I was taken into a mud-built house with a thatched roof, large and spacious. There were, of course, only holes for windows and doors, and the floors were of beaten earth, but it was most wonderfully comfortable and homelike. The Commissioner was a great gardener, my room was a bower of roses, and there were books, the newest books and magazines, everywhere. I should like to have stayed a month at Sunyani. Think of it! everything had to be carried eighty miles on men's heads, through a dense forest, across all manner of watercourses, where the white ant refused to allow a bridge to remain more than a fortnight, and yet one felt in the midst of civilisation. They told me I was brave to come there, but where was the hardship? none, none. It was all delightful. But there was another side. Close to the European bungalows was a little fort to which the men might retire in case of danger. They did not seem to think that they would ever be likely to require it, but there it was, and I, who had seen the old-time forts along the Coast, looked at this one with interest. It had a ditch round it, and walls of mud, and these were further strengthened by pointed stakes, bound together with barbed wire. An unpleasant place for a naked man to rush would be the little fort at Sunyani. Close against its wall so as to shelter the office, and yet outside so as not to embarrass the people, is the post and telegraph office, and so fast is civilisation coming to that outpost, that they take there for stamps, telegrams, and postal orders something like fourteen pounds a week.
I wandered round seeing everything, from the company of Waffs, exercising in the morning, to the hospital compound where the wives of the dresser and the wives of the patients were busily engaged in making fu-fu. For this is a primitive place, and here are no nursing Sisters and European comforts, and I must say the patients seem to do very well without them.
And only ten years ago, here and behind at Odumase, was the centre of the great rebellion against the white man's power; but things are moving, moving quickly. Only a week before I went up Messrs Swanzy had opened, with a black agent in charge, a store in the native town, and the day I arrived the agent brought his takings to the Commissioner for safe keeping in the treasury within the fort. It was such a tiny place, that store, simply a corrugated-iron shack, wherein were sold cotton cloths, odds and ends of cheap fancy goods, such as might be supposed to take the eye of the native, and possibly a little gin. Everything had to come on men's heads, so the wares were restricted, but the agent was well pleased with his enterprise, for that first week he had taken over £150, and this from a people who were utterly unaccustomed to buying.
0567
“Things are changing, things are changing fast,” said the Commissioner, and then he laughed and said that what bothered him most was the advance the suffrage movement was making. It wasn't yet militant, but he didn't know how it was going to end. The women had actually arrived at some idea of their own value to the community, and refused to marry the men their fathers had provided, if they did not happen to meet with their approval. Again and again a Chief would come to the Commissioner—a girl had declined to marry the man chosen for her, her father had appealed to the Chief, and the young lady, relying on the support of the British Government, had defied them both.
“If this woman do not marry the man I tell her to, then am I as mud in the sight of my people!” the Chief would say, flinging out protesting hands, and the Commissioner was very often as puzzled as he was.
On one occasion he came down to his court to find sitting there a good-looking girl of about seventeen, with a baby on her back. She waited patiently all through the sitting of the court, and then, when he had time to give attention to her, explained herself. She had a complaint to make. The King, or head Chief, had married her. Now the Commissioner was puzzled to know why this already much-married man had burdened himself with a wife who manifestly did not want him, and why the lady objected to a regal alliance. The King was brief and to the point. He considered himself a much injured man. The girl's parents had betrothed her to a man in her childhood, and when she grew up she did not like him, and preferring someone else, had declined to marry him. The King had been appealed to, but still she defied them, so, willy-nilly, to prevent further trouble, he had married her himself.
How that case ended I do not know. But I asked one question: “Whose is the baby?” And the baby it appeared was child to the man whom her parents and the King had rejected, so that Nature had settled the matter for them all. Whoever had her there was no getting over that baby.
Sunyani is one of the great halting places for the Hausas and Wangaras who come down from Wenchi, so on the French border and here I was introduced into great compounds, where the men who bring down cattle and horses and other goods from the north take up their abode, and rest before they start on their wearisome journey through the forest to Kumasi. I had come through in five days, but these men generally take very much longer. The Hausa carries tremendously heavy loads, so heavy that he cannot by himself lift it to his head, and therefore he always carries a forked stick, and resting his load on this, rests it also in the fork of a tree, and so slips out from underneath it. Again and again on our way up had we come across men thus resting their heavy loads. He must walk warily too, for they say so heavy is the load that the Hausa who stubs his toe breaks his neck. Slowly he goes, for time as yet is of no consequence in West Africa. A certain sum he expects to make, and whether he takes three months or six months to make it is as yet a matter of small moment to the black man, apparently, whatever his race.
0572
After I had been all round Sunyani, and dined at the mess, and inspected the fort and the hospital, they arranged for me to go to Odumase, five miles away.
Odumase is on the extreme northern border of Ashanti, and in fact the inhabitants are not Ashanti at all, calling themselves after their own town, but it was here that the rising that overwhelmed Kumasi in 1900-1 was engineered and had its birth. Here, as a beginning, they took sixty unfortunate Krepi traders, bound them to a tree, and did them slowly to death with all manner of tortures, cutting a finger off one day, a toe the next, an arm perhaps the next, and leaving the unfortunate victims to suffer by the insects and the sun. And here, when they had taken him, they brought back the instigator of that rebellion, and showed him captive to his own people. He was no coward, whatever his sins, and he stood forth and exhorted his people to rescue him, reviling the white men, and spitting upon them. But his people were awed by the white man's troops, and they let him be taken down to Kumasi, where he was tried, and hanged, not for fighting against the British raj, but for cold-blooded murder.
So to Odumase Mr Fell took me, explaining that because I was the first white woman to go there, the people would greet me in Ashanti fashion, and I was not to be afraid.
It was well he explained. Long before we could see the town, running along the forest path came the Ashanti warriors to meet me, and they came with yells and shouts, firing off their long Danes, so that presently I could see nothing but grey smoke, and I could hear nothing much either for the yells and shouts, and blowing of horns, and beating of tom-toms. It is just as well to explain an Ashanti welcome, else it is apt to be terrifying, for had I not been told I certainly should never have realised that a lot of guns pointing at me from every conceivable angle and spouting fire and smoke, were emblems of goodwill. But they were; and then I was introduced to the chiefs, and took their photographs. And now I have an awful confession to make. I have taken so many Ashanti chiefs that I do not know t'other from which. They were all clad in the most gorgeous silken robes, woven in the country, in them all the colours of the rainbow, and they were all profusely decorated with golden ornaments. They had great rings like stars and catfish on their fingers, they had all manner of gold ornaments on their heads, round their necks, round their arms, and on their legs, and they had many symbolical staffs with gold heads carried round them. Always, of course, they sat under a great umbrella, and their attendants too wore gold ornaments. Some of the latter were known as their souls, and the Chiefs soul wore on his breast a great plate of gold. What his duties are now I do not know, I think he is King's messenger, but in the old times, which are about ten years back, his duties were more onerous. He was beloved of the Chief, and lived a luxurious life, but he could not survive his Chief. When his master died, his sun was set, and he was either killed or buried alive with him. Moreover, if the Chief had an unpleasant message to a neighbouring chief, he sent his soul to carry it, and if that chief did not like the message, and desired war, he promptly slew the messenger, put his jaw-bone in a cleft stick and sent it back. Altogether the Chiefs soul was by no means sure of a happy life, and on the whole I think must infinitely prefer the pax Britannica.
It takes a little time though before peace is appreciated. The last time Mr Fell had been to Nkwanta, the big town I had passed through, he found the place swimming in blood, and many stools reeking in it. It was only sheep's blood luckily, for Nkwanta had quarrelled with a sub-chief, and this was celebrating his reconciliation.
“If the white man not be here,” said Nkwanta through his interpreter, “plenty men go die to-day.”
“Oh, sheep are just as good,” said the Provincial Commissioner.
“Well perhaps,” said Nkwanta, but there was no ring of conviction in his tones.
Odumase the white men almost razed to the ground as punishment for the part it took in the great rebellion, but it is fast going up again. Many houses are built, ugly and after the white man's fashion, and many more houses are building. We passed one old man diligently making swish, that is kneading earth and water into sort of rough bricks for the walls, and I promptly took a photograph of him, for it seemed to me rather remarkable to see him working when all the rest of the place was looking at the white woman. And then I saw an old woman with shaven head and no ornaments whatever; she was thin and worn, and I was sorry for her. “No one cares for old women here,” I thought, I believe mistakenly, so I called her over and bestowed on her the munificent dole of threepence. She took my hand in both hers and bowed herself almost to the ground in gratitude or thanks, and I felt that comfortable glow that comes over us when we have done a good action.
I was a fool. There are no poor in West Africa, and she was quite as great a lady as I was, only more courteous. As I left Odumase she came forward with a small girl beside her, and from that girl's head she took a large platter of most magnificent plantains, ripe and ready for eating, which she with deep obeisance laid at my feet. If I could give presents so could she, and she did it with much more dignity. Still, I flatter myself she did like that threepenny bit I was very very loath to leave Sunyani. It was a place on the very outskirts of the Empire, and the highest civilisation and barbarism mingled. It must be lonely of course, intensely lonely at times, but it must be at the same time most interesting to carve a province out of a wilderness, to make roads and arrange for a trade that is growing.
They are wonderfully enthusiastic all the Commissioners in Ashanti, and when I praise German methods, I always want to exempt Ashanti, for here all the Commissioners, following in the footsteps of their Chief, seem to work together, and work with love. In the very country where roadmaking seems the most difficult, roadmaking goes on. The Commissioner at Sunyani had sent to the King of Warn telling him he wanted three hundred men to make a road to the Tano River, and the King of Warn sent word, “Certainly”; he was sending a thousand, and I left the Commissioner wondering what on earth he was to do for tools. So is civilisation coming to Ashanti, not by a great upheaval or desperate change, but by their own methods, and the wise men who rule over them, rule by means of their own chiefs. I have no words strong enough to express my admiration for those Ashanti Commissioners and the men I met there in the forest. We differed only, I think, on the subject of treefelling, and possibly had I had opportunity to learn more about things, I might have found excuses even for that.
The rainy season was upon us, and it was time for me to go back. The medical officer, who had just been relieved, was coming down with me, and this medical officer was very sick with a poisoned hand. It was my last trek in the bush, and I should have liked to linger, but the thought of that bad hand made me go faster, for I would not keep him from help longer than I could help. So we retraced our steps exactly, doing in four days what I had taken five to do on the way up, and this was the more remarkable because now it rained. It rained heavens hard, and the little streams that our men had carried us through quite easily on the way up, were now great, rushing rivers that sometimes we negotiated with a canoe, and sometimes laboriously got over with the aid of a log. It really is no joke crossing a flooded African stream on a slimy log. I took a picture of one, with the patient Wangara crossing. Then my men carried me in my hammock to the log, and with some little difficulty I got out of that hammock on to it. I had to scramble to my feet, and the man beside me made me understand that I had better not fall over, as on the other side the water was deep enough to drown me. I walked very gingerly, because the water beneath looked unpleasantly muddy, up that tree-trunk, scrambled somehow round the root and down the other branch, till at last I got into water shallow enough to allow of my being transferred to my hammock and carried to dry land, there to sit and watch my goods and chattels coming across the same way. I felt a wretch too, for it had taken close on twenty men, more or less, to get me across without injury, and yet here were a company of Wangaras or Hausas, and the patient women had loads on their heads and babies on their backs. No one worried about them.
For perhaps the first time in my life I was more than content with that station in life into which it had pleased my God to call me. I do not think I could wish my worst enemy a harder fate than to be a Wangara woman on trek, unless perhaps I was extra bitter, and wished him to taste life as an African fowl. That must be truly a cruel existence. He scratches for a living, and every man's hand is against him. I used to feel sometimes as if I were aiding and abetting, for I received on this journey so many dashes of fowls that neither I nor the medical officer could possibly eat them all, and so our servants came in for them. More than once I have come across Grant sitting resting by the roadside with a couple of unfortunate fowls tied to his toes. In Grant's position I should have been anything but happy, but he did not seem to mind, and as I never saw the procession en route, I was left in doubt as to whether he carried them, or insisted on their walking after him. I saw that he had rice for them, and told him to give them water, but I dare say he did not trouble.
0585
The last night out, my last night in the bush I fear me for many a long day, we stopped at a village called Fu-fu, and I went to the rest-house, which was built European fashion, and was on the edge of the forest, at some distance from the village.
I found my men putting up my bed in a room where all the air came through rather a small hole in the mud wall, and I objected.
“Where?” said my patient headman, who after nearly a fortnight had failed to fathom the white woman's vagaries.
There was a verandah facing the town and a verandah facing the forest, and I promptly chose the bush side as lending itself more to privacy. Very vehemently that headman protested.
“It no be fit, Ma, it no be fit. Bush close too much”; so at length I gave in, and had the bed put up on the verandah facing the town. On the other end, I decided, the medical officer and I would chop. For we had been most friendly coming down, and had had all our meals together.
Before dinner I think the whole of the women of that village had been to see me, and had eaten up the very last of my biscuits, but I did not mind, for was it not the end of the journey, and they were so interested, and so smiling, and so nice. We had dinner, and we burned up the last of the whisky to make a flare over the plum-pudding; and then the medical officer wished me good night and wended his way to his house somewhere in the town, Grant and the cook betook themselves to another hut nearer the town and barricaded the door, and then suddenly I realised that I was entirely alone on the edge of this vast, mysterious, unexplainable forest. And the headman had said “the bush no be fit.” I ought to have remembered Anum Mount and Potsikrom, but I didn't. I crept into bed and once more gave myself up to the most unreasoning terror. What I expected to come out of that forest I do not know. What I should have done had anything come I'm sure I do not know, but never again do I want to spend such a night. The patter of the rain on the iron roof made me shiver, the sighing of the wind in the branches sent fingers clutching at my heart; when I dropped into a doze I waked in deadly terror, my hands and face were clammy with sweat, and I dozed and waked, and dozed and waked, till, when the dawn came breaking through the clouds at last, it seemed as if the night had stretched itself into an interminable length. And yet nothing had happened; there had been nothing to be afraid of, not even a leopard had cried, but so tired was I with my own terrors that I slept in my hammock most of the way into Kumasi.
And here my trip practically ended. I stayed a day or two longer, wandering round this great, new trading-centre, and then I took train to Sekondi, stayed once more with my kind friend, Miss Oram, the nursing Sister there, gathered together my goods and chattels, and on a day when it was raining as if never again could the sun shine, I went down in the transport officer's hammock for the last time; for the last time went through the surf, and reached the deck of the Dakar, bound for England.
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