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WJIITE AFRICANS AND BLACK








WHITE AFRICANS


AND


BLAC~K


BY


CAROJLINE SINQGER
AND


CYRUS LE


ROY BALDRIDGE


NEW YORK
W.W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.
PUBLISHERS




COPYRIGHT 1929, C. L. BALDRIDGE




3E 'I           Es1EII13*.3                          *      3
HESE sketches and impressions are the dual record of fourteen
months in Africa spent mainly on the West Coast, that district
from which the black population of the United States was drawn.
Taking no more luggage than we would under ordinary traveling conditions, we moved from port to port and entered the far interior. Such transportation as offered, we used: motor lorries; jungle omnibuses catering only
to black passengers; launches; canoes; flat-bottomed river boats; and cargosteamers-nine of these, sailing under six different flags. When there were
trains, we rode in them; when none, we trekked.
This travel was beset with discomfort and, where sanitation, at its best,
is poor, with dangers of tropical plagues. Hotels were few and of the frontier type. We took what shelter we could find. We lodged with missionaries
of many nationalities and sects. Traders rented us spare rooms over shops.
We occupied Government Rest Houses or, equipped for camping, dwelt
alone in Bush villages.
Africa is usually presented as a grandiose side-show composed of freaks,
Topsies, savages, burnt-cork comedians, or safari-porters and houseboys.
But the traveler discovers that on the ""mysterious dark Continent," among
the ""trackless jungles" he must present passport and credentials to white
police. Africa, except forlorn Liberia and proud Abyssinia, is possessed by
whites. Blacks do not provide all the comedy in the tragicomic scene.
Consistently the grotesque has been stressed by those whose vision prejudice
distorts. Photographers among these, handicapped from the start by problems of photographing black flesh with its complex reflections, and by peculiarities of tropical light, have too often searched exclusively for the bizarre.
We seek to convey the human beauty, the dignity and intelligence possessed by African peoples belonging to widely diversified areas and tribes;
and to intimate the clash between White and Black, bewildering to both.
C. S. AND C. L. B.
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77vv             PA JYA KAR I v                                    Ulf
B Y DAY, the village is a shade too tidy, a shade too sanitary for authenticity. The rest houses for travelers, cylindrical mud huts capped
with conical roofs of straw, are oversized and much too plumb.
Windows abound. True, they are for the most part blocked up; but still
there are windows. Milled doors swing upon hinges. The bridge by which
we came requires of one no acrobatic poise, for it is broad and sensible, being
of logs laid crosswise on a frame instead of a pair of poles laid straight across
bound with fibrous creepers and slippery from countless footfalls of bare feet.
But then, it is a village of importance, for it lies where trains, coming from
seacoast and interior, writhing like frenzied snakes (there was profit in creating curves where land lay flat), meet biweekly for exchange of passengers
and freight. Shaken, as if rolled in barrels, the passengers arrive. There is no
hotel. On the West Coast there rarely is. And when there is, having seen the
sheets, one wishes to escape. So between late afternoon arrival and morning
departure the village shelters not only blacks from second-class and third,
bringing their belongings on their heads, but whites from first-the occasional government official, white officer for black troops, map-maker, judge,
the missionary, and now and then a trader searching for palm kernels and
palm oil. Like lines of foraging black ants walking upright, their porters
come, bearing tin bathtubs, folding tables, folding cots and chairs, steel
boxes, duffie bags, bedding rolls, cooking pans, teakettles and teapots, padlocked cases of food and drink, water filters, live fowls, and now and then a
domesticated monkey as household pet, or a dog with its servant who daily
must remove the multitudinous vermin it collects.
Letting lodgings, selling foodstuffs, the village prospers as few can. And
if too sleek, it also wears a mien too decorous. But then, above it on a high
hilltop there dwells the living symbol-in khaki shorts-of the Great White
5


-* -V "




Chief overseas, that strange monogamist, pictured, no doubt, as occupying
with his one wife a government bungalow of gargantuan size and well removed from native populations. From here, by day, is ever visible the village,
dwarfed by distance to an orderly arrangement of yellow mushrooms about
which figures, insect small, move back and forth.
The faintly starred and moonless night is kind. Absorbing hill and bungalow it smoothes away the town's unnatural elegance. From the half-dozen
nearby huts which encircle the chief's open palaver house, where daily endless confabulations and public trials take place, there comes the pleasant
drone of men talking, talking. There is little outright laughter. Bush people
smile easily, but they are not given to boisterousness. Their laughter has a
quality of pensiveness. Laughing, they seem to bear within a secret knowledge wholly sad. It is the mannered, individualistic seaport folk, rubbing
elbows daily with the whites, who shriek and cackle their enjoyment.
The talkers loll in raffia hammocks such as are used for carrying chiefs and
white men while on trek. Few have chairs. Mostly, they sit upon their
haunches, their faces dimly lit by lantern-light, their shadows sprawling in
fantastic murals on the walls.
Meanwhile, with gentle motions, the strangers' women, and women sent
to serve them by the chief, stoop above the cooking fires, bending tirelessly
from the hips. Thus an African woman bends above her crude hand-plough
the whole day long, often times bestrode by a heavy infant cradled in the
deep curve of her back and snugly bound to her by cotton cloth or, if she is
unclothed, by skins. Among the cooks there are no men. While black man
cooks for white, he will not, if a woman is about, prepare the food he likes
for himself. Already two smiling girls with downcast eyes have come to
humor and to serve our servants. Mastery of foreign cookery, like mastery of
the sewing-machine, is beyond the powers, so black men think, of those inept
creatures, women folk. Pans of boiled cassava, yams, or full-flavored country
rice, the women bring. And these are dressed with greens, with a puree of
peanuts, hot palm oil, or with oil and stock-fish brought from Norway and


6




distributed throughout the land by traders, black and white. Hotly peppered, these foods are appetizing. But the white man learns to take them
frugally or dedicates to them one meal each week. Noon on Sunday is the
favorite hour for "native chop" so that torpors and muddy-mmdedness produced by heavy food can be slept off without imperilling Trade or State. The
only chicken killed is ours. Common enough fowls seem to be, but so few
of any brood survive tropical pestilence and sudden death that they are cherished for great occasions or for sale to the carnivorous whites whose continuous consumption of them is wondrous and terrific. And there is not one
piece of meat.
Game is scarce. Few blacks are permitted arms. Those possessed are clumsy
muzzle-loading flintlocks of another age which native smiths are forbidden
to reproduce. Only now and then a Mende hunter from the savannahs, the
grasslands, brings antelope. Cattle and sheep are precious but poorly nourished on the lush, quick-growing herbage. Shambling and lean, they are
brought from the far north by Filane nomads, whose patrician aquilinity
remains the only vestige of a mysterious white heredity. Great distances these
animals are marched through country where leopards abound, through infected belts where the fatal nagana borne by tsetse flies depletes the herds.
A cow is three times as costly as a strong young wife and is proof, completely
visible, of its owner's prosperity The rich man does not kill and eat his wealth,
although upon his demise, honoring him, his mourners do. However, if a cow
should die by illness or by accident.... But from using milk the bush folk
turn away, revolted, as they do from eating eggs which, when found (the
hens, harum-scarum and undisciplined, leave eggs about undated in the sun)
are hoarded and sold undated to egg-eatmg whites who pass. Completely
content with one oily meal a day, black people seem to be.
And now in the other huts, the men served first, using their hands, eat with
great privacy, fearing enemies or evil sprites.
The kitchen fires go out. Doors close. The huts assume a mask-like blankness for the night.


7




Quiet is the bedroom which adjoins our own, occupied by a swaggering
hawk-nosed Kissi, his childlike wife and half a dozen retainers who, though
slavery is by law abolished, differ racially from their employer and obey him,
without servility, but still as people owned obey. That the young man is
Moslem is evidenced not by robes and sandals alone-for many pagans
assume this dress without derangement of their inner life-but by his
pretty one's abasement, which has a subtly meretricious quality. She is
demure. But I think she is so designedly, not unselfconsciously as pagan
women are. It is often stated by the governing whites-despite the missionary's protest-that any pagan, Moslemized, has made an upward step.
This child, littered with European jewelry of dubious gold, is set apart from
other women here by a mincing self-consciousness, equalled only by the
preciousness of half-Europeanized women of the larger coast settlements,
unduly inflated by newly acquired monogamy, Charleston sandals, and
coverings for their upper parts. A favorite toy, chosen for her charms and
not her usefulness, the girl, as if in fearful anticipation of the day those
charms may pass, undetected from behind her husband's back, plunges long
glances into the eyes of passing men, searching for reaffirmation of their
potency.
From the tranquil village we are shut away. Against our room's front door
the boys pile trunks, although the villagers are fellow tribesmen. Their own
possessions, tied in cloths, they place beside our own; also a chicken in a wicker
crate. Deterred from closing the back door they set a lighted lantern in it
and unroll a sleeping-mat close by. They had rather we barricaded ourselves,
allowing them to share elsewhere the airless quarters of a relative or friend.
Reluctantly, the girls depart. The boys lie down together, thin grass mat
beneath, overhead projecting eaves. One has a cotton blanket, and one the
cotton cloth which is otherwise his skirt. Enthroned on cots, we are swathed
in blankets; for the hot night is cold, being less hot than the day. There are
mosquitoes. Things possibly more venomous trickle from above, flopping
upon the mosquito-nets in which we are enveloped.
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Peace complete is the peace of a sleeping African village with all live things
indoors and no lights anywhere. But now the peace is zigzagged with a
vibrant pattern. Across the compound someone plays upon a xylophone, a
thing of hollow gourds and polished wooden keys. The phrases of the melody
are long and complicated utterances, not the usual reiteration of one simple
statement which benumbs the senses of the alien whites while it exhilarates
the blacks. At unpredictable intervals a singer sustains the high notes with
cries as wild and barbarous as a bagpipe's skirl. If lullaby at all, this is a
strange disturbing lullaby, indeed.
And suddenly the room becomes a great seashell, its walls vibrating with
caged storms which blew and broke when Africa was new. Painful is so much
sound. As African sunlight, piercing the eye, torments the brain, so the thunderous drumming, saturating the flesh, racks the bones. The xylophone's
pigmy tones, the smnger's cries, are lost.
Called to life, figures darker than the darkness pass, feet moving loosely,
arms relaxed like puppets dangling on a string. Speechless they meet, and
meeting weave and interweave in an endless dance. Above the drums a tenor
voice of moving purity takes up the xylophone's lost melody, making of
it a recitative answered antiphonally by a chorus which grows more fullthroated, more intense as its numbers are mysteriously increased.
The boys upon their mat lie still. "Get up. Get up!"
They gaze at me with rolling eyes but will not stir.
"Porro! Porro!" And having made these owlish sounds, they duck out
of sight.
Not so senseless, however, are these sounds. On the tram I met a young
map-maker who told me of the Porro, describing it, on hearsay, most extravagantly. A secret order of unknown antiquity, the strongest organization of
its kind on this West Coast, it is composed entirely of men, but differs from
other secret orders in that it draws not from one tribal group for membership, but from four: the Loko, the Limba, the Mende and the Temne. White
men almost never see-he made this fact quite clear-the Porro dance. He
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hinted that it would be an orgiastic ritual. For so it is that many prefer their
Africa and Africans, convinced that beneath the people's smiling amiability
there must lie, not emotion shared by white and black alike, but an immediate substratum of witchery and brutishness.
Night passes. In that grey moment, the African dawn-which, when it
comes, is then already gone-the hill, the window-shapes, return. I, peering
around the hut, descry a drummer now who with one hand has beat the
whole night long upon a giant drum laid crosswise on a hollowed log from
which, as from a megaphone, the bombinations pour; while with the other
hand he strikes a syncopated rhythm with metal castanets.
I see also at least one hundred puppets in an orderly ballet as if upon a single
string. According to their size the dancers range with great precision from
a child of eight or ten to a gigantic black, the leader and the soloist. Alike,
they wear white shirts splashed over the upper arms and backs with bloodred dye. Alike, they wear white cloths about their loins, except the little
boys whose legs are wholly bare. Held by diagonal corners in two hands each
one has a blood-red handkerchief.
Feet pattering rhythmically, the white and scarlet circle swings. The
dancers with one movement turn about and dance with feet that leap but
are restrained. The circle swings. The circle breaks. Upholding blood-red
kerchiefs in salute the puppets face the shadowed doorway of a hut. The
tenor sings his lonely song; the chorus answers him. The shuffling circle, as
at first, revolves again.
I do not see him come, the gaunt old man. Nor had I seen another drum, a
hollowed log slung between forked branches by our hut. The seven bludgeon
strokes fall upon the other rhythms like a cannonade. My nerves attuned to
night-long drumming are pained by silence now. And when I look again it
is to see the drummer stilled, the puppets, one by one released from their
enchantment, speechless, speed away.
The huts preserve their mask-like placidity. Then doors fly open. Women
appear. As if pursued by demons, fowls rush forth. The cowering famished,                          uo..
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dogs sniff hungrily about the huts. Strangers depart hastily with sleeping
mats and bundles on their heads. Too many porters eye our luggage. Dismissed, the extras yelp and protest, but tiring soon of histrionics, stop to stare.
The village has assumed the tempo of a junction town anywhere.
But slowly, slowly from the far hut before which the drummer and the
dancers spent the night there comes to us a kingly man. Portly he is, but
inclined to feebleness. Regally he trails a blood-red robe of thick upholstery
stuff. His crown is solidly composed of leather packets, amulets which
wandering Moslems sell. Beneath his robes protrude chains and belts of
charms. He comes in state. Above his head a cotton umbrella faced with
green is held. Behind him another bearer staggers with a worn and greasy
swivel chair. For this old man the puppets danced, the oratorio was sung.
He is Pa Makari, Temne king, and Master of the Porro.
How old this man is no one knows. Time m Africa is blurred. Blacks
know not their ages, nor do they care. They are born into a world of changeless green, into a communal society which subordinates the individual to the
tribe. The sun comes up; the sun goes down. Sowings there are and reapings, sowings and reapings. Ultimately, man is conquered by spirits. For
another world, he quits this one of changeless green. The tribe goes on. For
many whites, for most Anglo-Saxons-the Portuguese, the Spanish, and
some French give up the thought of any other home-time redivides into
periods between arrivals and the dates when home-leaves are due. And thus
it is that clocks in West Africa so universally are stopped while calendars go
on, the days ticked off with pencil marks.
All who knew this grey-headed Paramount Chief in his youth are gone
except one counselor; for his rule was just begun when the white government
reached out and drew his kingdom into Empire's maw. That he would reign
so long was unforeseen. Chance once determined it for him. At his coronation
the young king pressed his flattened hand upon a leopard pelt in which small
seeds were concealed. Each seed adhering to his uplifted palm was counted
as a year, the total number as his reign, to end with death. One by one those;,
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who knew the secret of the seeds have gone and now the number, long outlived, is known to only two. For untold years chance has been cheated, death
evaded, by mutual consent of the old men-or so the story goes-a mutual
consent, however, which involves the periodic giving of magnificent gifts by
aged chief to aged counselor.
Under similar circumstances one Temne chief, ruler of another branch
of the Temnes, flouted his executioner. Relymg upon the protection, should
he need it, of the white government he refused to give a bribe. Nevertheless
he was beset by a mysterious illness. He had been poisoned. Under the care
of a white physician he was recovering when members of the Porro, entering
the hut, seated themselves about his bed. It was time, they said, for him to
keep his pact with death. And at his bedside they remained, implacably
willing him to die. Defeated by their spell he soon expired.
Our boys, Temnes, and therefore his subjects, go forth to greet him as they
would a relative, affectionately. They arrange him at our doorway in his
swivel chair The cook, his English halting, acts as interpreter
"Are there black men in the land from whence you come?"
"And do they not die of cold?"
He has been often told that Africans should stay at home, that they perish
quickly in the white man's land.
"If Africans, why did they leave their homes?"
Awkward for me, the answer is. He does not give it second thought. Nor,
as yet, do many educated blacks who have not yet been abroad and had free
access to the records of the white man's shameful trade in blacks. The old
man is disinterested. Only recently the white government decreed that here
black men may no longer be enslaved by black. His whole life long he has
enjoyed the easy-going ownership of slaves whose rights were almost equal to
freemen's. And now the newly freed remain, they and their children in the
future guaranteed equality.
It was unknown to all of us that the cook had business with the chief. He
tells a tale. Upon the streets of Freetown, the seaport, he met a wayward


I2




wife, a runaway from the Chief's household. Having eloped with a city man,
a Creole trader, she now regrets the escapade. For the Chief's house and its
security she pines but will not return unless assured by him of welcome....
The chief is done with women. No longer does he know the number of his
wives. Old ones die off and new ones come as gifts from other chiefs and men
who favor him. Enough there are to till his fields... The runaway begs
for a sign, a piece of paper sent by English mail. She cannot read. Her regal
husband neither reads nor writes, but he confides the business to the cook.. The woman may come back.
He bids us visit with him. At home he has a foreign house beside his hut,
of which the upper story is to be our own. With his own eyes he wishes to see
a white man with a pencil make a photograph. Once when the chiefs were
gathered in, and paid homage to their white Chief's son, some one made a
picture of him with a camera.
It is agreed. In three weeks' time we will arrive.
HE is dead. No picture can be made. Along the bush paths the gossip
speeds to this interior village in the Limba people's land that m
the adjoining kingdom the old Temne, who ruled so long, outliving the wives of his youth, outliving all his counselors save one, is dead.
Our trunks are packed, the luggage strapped; but we may not go to his
house, which has a second-story and is square, as foreign houses are, nor may
we go to the houses of his thirty sons. For his village mourns. Therefore,
women, female children, and animals may not move about its streets. Men,
encountering one another, must keep silence. In his wide chieftaincy for
ten days no drums may beat except those of the lads isolated near M —
for their puberty rites. And they must thump their small high-pitched
drums when they go out to bathe, lest women, by looking, defile them at
this time.


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At M —, three miles from Pa Makari's town, the young chief offers us
his largest hut, spacious and beautifully made, its doorway blessed by an
Arabic inscription which he cannot read but which he paid a Moslem to
inscribe. His household-the seven wives of different tribes differing greatly
from each other, their fifteen children, mostly small, three sinewy grandams
who toil constantly as if to prove their usefulness, brothers with wives
and children-come to view and welcome us. Gravely, even the small greet
us in the native manner. Meeting our right hands with their right hands they
do not clasp but touch palm to palm with fluttering, moth-like gentleness.
The fruit of the one orange tree, jade green when ripe, is ours. It is the only
one; black men, planting for the quick and not for posterity, are loath to
plant a tree. Once each day the brother of the chief will bring the cook a
chicken worth ninepence. Water may be had from the chief's own well. His
children and his kinsmen's children are forbidden to annoy. And in the end,
departing, we will leave a gift.
Passive in the passive little hamlet, we await official news of Pa Makari's
death. For he of the scarlet robes and amulets is dead-and yet not dead. And
that is grotesque, since we already know-if the District Commissioner does
not-that two hundred yards behind this hut and near a water hole, guarded
by the Porro, his body lies, wearing no longer the grizzled head we saw, but
his predecessor's mummied skull which served him while he lived as talisman.
His own, cut off by the old counselor when death was near, is hidden somewhere for the coming chief. Thus by decapitating a wise ruler before his
wisdom ebbs away in death the Temnes have preserved intact the wisdom of
their tribe. Guards bar the pathway to the water hole.
Tuesday he died. But the day was unpropitious for entrance to another
world, or so the Medicine Man has said. And, therefore, he is not dead, but ill.
To deceive mischief-making spirits an horrific groaning issues from his big
house, maintained by mourning relatives and audible beyond the compound's
outer wall. At intervals a crier, rushing forth, runs through the streets begging the populace to stir itself, to fetch herbs because a great chief lies ill.
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M ---, prettily placed upon a knoll with outcroppings everywhere of
noble rock, is permeated with listlessness. That it once throve is evident;
but now the huts need thatch, the stockades lean and gape. The chief, a
very minor chief, scarcely more than a headman, for the place is small, wears
a harassed look. Formerly he was a King's Messenger, a liaison maintained
between the white government and its Temne chiefs. He sped the country
over, carrying, in imitation of his superiors, a bamboo walking stick. And
he was given a bright red fez to wear, blue flannel shirt and shorts, and
strips of blue to wind about his legs. With reluctance he relinquished job
and uniform when forced into unsought power by his people's wish. But
once in power, imbued with white ideas, he urged his people to extend the
communal farms. The surplus rice was carried off and sold for English comn.
Rich and richer the village waxed; strong and stronger grew the chief. But
Pa Makari watched.
In the past a surplus excited enemy raids and tribal jealousies. Therefore
the cautious black man long ago learned to raise enough to last the dry season
through and raised not one atom more. This cautiousness earns for them
now a reputation for preternatural laziness. Tradition caught up M -- and
its chief. For each trivial infraction of tribal law, Pa Makari fined the villagers
heavily. Masked members of the Porro, ruled by him, intercepted homecoming harvesters and took their rice. Angered, the young chief went away
He climbed the hill behind the junction town, and when he returned let
everybody know that if the Porro interfered again he would report the matter
to the white officers of black troops. The Porro came by night, stripping a
boy-child from its mother's arms, dragging adult men away; for it will have
as members none who seek its ranks and without forewarning seizes novitiates. The child has not returned. The mother mourns. The village farms conservatively, remaining on the edge of poverty. The chief is timorous now
The mourning, I fear, is not whole-hearted here. However, the men stay
close at home. No public trials are held. The chief remains indoors or, following the shade within his compound, sits outside, chatting with village
I7


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patriarchs who, after all, are not so old, primitive people not having the white
man's means of prolonging life. He plays at African draughts with his men
relatives or listens to his Moslem minstrel. That pretentious rascal, when not
pointed due East salaaming and laving, beats upon a xylophone, giving a performance devoid of artistry with the effect of a cat at large upon the keys.
Accustomed to rhythms which, if complex, are strongly emphasized, the
chief is at a loss. The cunning one, playing for his keep, pretends the formlessness is music of a superior variety. Hoodwinked, our cook, like the chief,
believes he hears some foreign novelty. The babes, at least, are gratified, and
toddling out upon unsteady feet endeavor to move their hips and bellies in a
native dance.
The tempo of the women's work remains the same. Before the housedoors, open for the day, the chief's head wife, a trifle older than the rest, a
woman of perhaps twenty-five, with a brush of palm fronds sweeps away the
footprints of yesterday until the yellow earth is flawless as a ballroom floor.
Skirted to the ankles in bright calico, with a bright cotton kerchief on her
head, her torso and arms quite bare, she is a splendid sight. She has borne the
chief several children and has a nursing baby now, and so her breasts are once
more round and firm. She moves with the secure grace of one whose muscles
respond without conscious effort on her part. The seven wives are all like this.
Among them is a Limba girl, a brown sapling, so young that she has not had a
child, and when she works she casts aside her cotton skirt and goes about
dressed only in successive belts of beads. There is a Loko whose flesh is coppertinged, and when she stands in our doorway, silhouetted against the mormng
sun, balancing a water jar upon her head, we watch her, feigning sleep-for
otherwise, intensely shy, she keeps away. The Mende with a patrician nose
wears a sleeveless loose-hanging cotton blouse, and knots her kerchief on one
side, wearing it like a Paris toque. She comes and goes, remaining for the most
part in her mother's house in a Mende village one day's walk from here. That
is her privilege; she went home to bear a child and there remains while it is
very small.


I8




Like all black folk-who are almost never black, but brown-no two
among these seven women have flesh tinted alike. But all possess small-boned
graceful hands. Black people do. Should these seven be transported to an
isle and there be found in all their loveliness as members of a vanishing race,
how unrestrainedly lyrical I would be! But I am restrained. My lesson has
been learned. In a feeble effort to make peace where everything had gone
awry I told a steamer agent that the young lad whom he, because the tablecloth was mussed, had tongue-lashed most unmercifully, was beautiful to
look upon. This white master with a face badly shaped and sadly mottled
from much whisky and the heat, waited for lightning to cleave the roof and
strike me dead. Blinded by prejudice, whites seldom observe that they are
surrounded by a people of beauty, although a beauty not conforming to the
lithographs of female whites in bathing suits or lingerie which adorn so many
West Coast walls. This beauty escapes most photographers, as dark flesh,
especially when oiled, mirrors a confusion of high-lights amid which indications of structure are lost.
Two grandams and the children, who, unrebuked, make play of work,
squat down before a mountain of palm nuts stacked against our hut's rear
wall. Pulled from the parent stem, the pulpy, fibrous nuts are bruised between stones, gathered up by wives and brother's wives, and then are boiled
in large iron pots. When the oil is extracted the hard round kernels still
remain. These, spread upon grass mats, are dried, then carried to some trading station and sold to Europeans for shipment overseas. From time to time,
when there is need, the wives go out in pairs carrying machetes and return
with great piles of firewood on their heads. A brother's wife weaves a sleepingmat from strands of grass, some of which have been dyed black. The finished
pattern is a tidy plaid. One woman or another, planning for the coming
meal, winnows the rice, tossing it on round grass trays, or spreads shelled
peanuts on mats to sun. A third grandam with her fingers deftly knits a
fishing net of fibres, or cards home-grown cotton, of which there is never
much, and spins it into thread. Sitting at her side, likewise busy with small
'9


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tasks such as twisting fibres into rope, there sits a man no longer vigorous.
These two are slaves who stay on beneath their master's roof indifferent to
the new freedom. And everywhere, everywhere are babies; chewing palm
nuts until their faces shine with smears of oil, playing together like puppies,
falling into everything, getting sleepy and being nursed or tied into cloths
upon their mothers' backs, never quarreling, almost never crying. Fifteen
children, I counted, or thought I counted, m the chief's household. But
when I came to share our sugar in this one compound, I gave out thirty lumps
and none had two.
One moment of disorder and one of sorrow we live through. Taking up a
position in the center of the compound, one of the chief's wives raises her
right hand to heaven, this gesture being accompanied by a piercing scream of
rage. The woman is beside herself. She foams vituperation. However, only
the chief and his men-folk gather around. The women, behind the houses or
inside, discreetly remain at work. Our cook does not look out, but listens
attentively, chuckling to himself. There is a great "palaver," he says, about a
cooking pot.
Some hours earlier I had seen a woman with a mischief-making look unlock
the padlock on the chief's own room. With slyness she went in and then came
out, balancing upon her head with difficulty a tremendous iron cooking pot,
snapping the padlock shut. Now this woman's husband, the brother of the
chief, disappearing within his house, returns with pot and woman. Vituperation ceases like a stream turned off. The men return to the shade. But I see
the brother escort his mischievous wife to the doorway of each of the three
other huts where she makes, apparently, an apology. With some there is the
ritual of shaking hands. "Palaver finish," says the cook. Here in the bush
when all agree that "a palaver finish," it is done. Tomorrow, therefore, the
quarrels of yesterday may not be aired.
Once the women of the chief join with other women in eerie crying before
a neighboring hut. A little girl has passed away. While she was walking
through the street her body doubled and twisted convulsively. There was no
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thought of carrying her to the white doctor. Her people had no hammock
for the trip, the child was much too large to carry on the back. And then a
sixpence for the fee would be required. Moreover, the older women knew
what ailed the child. Not long ago her mother died and her spirit, not yet
finding peace, wandered abroad, haunting the village that she loved. Meeting her child she fell upon its soul, demanding it. Each convulsion was a
manifestation of the ghoulish combat. Should the child sleep, the Medicine
Woman of the village said, she would be conquered by her mother's ghost.
And so for three long days and nights the suffering child was tortured into
wakefulness, held in a sitting position. During the spasms several women
grappled to keep her so, and when signs of lethargy appeared, rubbed golden
pepper in her eyes. The lovesick mother won. Before the hut the people howl
like were-wolves although within, the little brother of the girl lies similarly
stricken. Soon the mother will have won the souls of two.
A tall lad, completely nude, and raving mad, enters the village like a ghost,
flits through the streets with staring vacant eyes and then is gone. He is a
cousin of the cook who feels that something should be done. But that something-a potion, or a powder in his food-is punishable now by foreign law.
And so the lad will perish in the Bush.
In the late afternoon, the women cook, chatting about the kitchen fires.
They draw the water for the baths and everybody bathes. By the unobserving a legend is perpetuated concerning the personal dirtiness of blacks. Ignoring tribal differences, ignoring the fact that many black communities are so
placed that during the dry season a drink of polluted, brackish water is a
luxury, that the habits of nomad peoples have been formed in land continually waterless, it is applied to all alike. Citing as examples sweating stevedores
and porters, its promulgators expatiate upon the body-odor of the race. It
is difficult, even under the most favorable circumstances, to find pretty things
to say of sweating humanity, no matter what its tint. But were black people
so uniformly careless as they are represented then the perpetual intimacy
between whites, who cease to serve themselves in Africa, and their black
21,
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servitors would be insupportable. Also, I fancy, there would be fewer yellow
babies in the shadows of the large communities. The introduction of woolen
garments into the tropics complicates the personal problems of those who
adopt them. So expensive are they for blacks with their limited earning
capacity that great numbers possess neither the conventional undergarments
nor a change of outer clothes. But lectures on hygiene are not included in
sales of coats and pants. Therefore the black man often blunders, and is
cursed.
Means for achieving rudimentary cleanliness exist. There are tough,
frayed-out sticks for brushing teeth. There are sponges of vegetable fibre,
the coarse for adults, the fine for babies. Often there is native soap, a mixture
of wood-ash and palm-oil molded into round grey balls. Hereabouts the
pools are bathing places, the sexes bathing separately. In this compound in
M      are two shelters at the back of the houses, where individuals splash
modestly. The children bathe each other in the open. Babies laid across the
women's knees are scrubbed like boards. Babies, unclad, acquire each day
innumerable layers of dust. Nevertheless, a really fusty baby that one hates
to touch is rarely seen. Wrapped in their night cloths, mantles of calico, they
come to us, all except one which roars unfriendliness. Trustful because
within this enormous family circle they are used to kindliness, like sleepy
kittens they curl, as many as can be held, upon our laps. The others press
against our knees and shoulders. Two hands or even three are slipped within
our own. It is sweet to be surrounded by so much lovingness, despite the fact
that afterwards our khaki clothes are darkly mottled by palm oil with which
each infant was massaged.
On Friday, at some hour known only to the oracular Medicine Man, to
certain adult males, and to the Porro, Pa Makari's body with his predecessor's
head, laid upon a mat, was weighed down with stones and lowered into its
muddy grave. Released from temporary dykes the sluggish water rolled over
him. No vandal, no leopard or hyena can discover and disturb the grave,
bringing torture to the old man's soul.


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For two days, without commotion, increasing numbers of Temne people
filter through our village, going to await silently in the quiet of Pa Makari's
town the word that he is dead. Some men bring sacks of rice upon their
heads, gifts for the dead man's household. Or carrying only machetes, spears
or staffs they are followed by the women with babies on their backs; cooking
pots, gourds of palm-oil or palm-wmine and top-heavy bundles of provisions
upon their heads. The youngest bear the heaviest loads; if there are halfgrown boys the loads are shared with them. Children trot patiently beside or
when they tire are lifted to the backs of larger children and to the shoulders
of the men.
The custom of bringing provisions which are presented to hosts and hostesses is not the boon it seems at first. So long as the food lasts guests must be
sheltered, and they sometimes overestimate their gifts. An elderly American
missionary is at present taking pains to conceal that her vacation, long delayed,
is due. On a similar occasion a friendly pagan chieftainess once came from the
far interior to pay a farewell call. Accompanied by a horde of kinsfolk she
brought sacks of rice, many chickens, sheep and a cow. Until the last bone
was picked, the mission larder bare-a matter of two weeks-the happy
guests were entertained. For these long visits the Creole has an English term,
translated from a native tongue. He says of visitors, "They have come to sit
down on me."
On Sunday night the darkness is alive. It breathes. It speaks with a low,
whispering voice. Unseen, throngs move endlessly along the twining paths
to Pa Makari's town. The passing of young Temne virgins, fresh from the
puberty rites, is marked by pleasurable tinkling, for over their belts of beads
they now wear a sash of white cloth from which, longer than knee-length, a
white cloth tail tipped with small brass bells hangs down behind. Leopards
afar off smelling so much flesh, otherwise pent up at night, make their beastly
noise as of saws dragged through wood and iron.
At four o'clock we stand among the throngs. A solid mass of silent things,
we fill the courtyard of a compound which we cannot see.
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A FAINT and foolish crescent moon swings in the eastern sky. In some
back room a cock crows lustily Another answers, and another. The
Town Crier mounts the thatched peak of the chief's mud hut; not
the large two-story house roofed with tin which was his executive mansion.
Fragments of what the Crier says I gather from the cook and from a mission
boy, also from one of the chief's thirty sons who speaks a sort of English and
wears a tattered army shirt, with three medals hung upon his breast. His
speech, the ragged shirt, the medals, all are mementoes of the year he spent in
the Cameroons when one ruling white tribe-come to Africa to stamp out
tribal wars-leading black soldiers, fought against another white tribe and
its blacks. Why? He does not know.
'Blessings on the people who have come from the four corners of the
kingdom!" The Crier's voice cracks with grief.
""Our beloved chief is ill, is ill! Old men and old women have brought
herbs which do not healV! "    I
A pause. There is no sound. Nobody stirs.
"We could save him if the children would fetch the bull's milk, the vulture's egg, the honey of a wasp!"
A pause. The bull has no milk. The vultures nest elsewhere. The wasp is
honeyless.
""The children have not come!"
"Alas." His voice is anguished. "Our chief is dead. Long live the Temne
people!" Except the Crier's voice there is no other sound. And no one stirs.
"People of the four parts of the kingdom, people of the North, South, East
and West, bring wood. Light your fires. But people of this village, when your
fire is lit put it out. Your chief is dead! "
There is movement, the flare of matches. Close together four fires burn,
then only three.
""Roll the chief's drum, that all may know!"


28




Wave after wave of thunder rolls from the giant drum announcing death.
Against the sky, now faintly light, there bursts a fountain of flame and sound
from beyond the stockade where tribal hunters discharge their antiquated
flintlocks. There is silence.
"People of R —, go home. Search your village for a chief."
Thus is published from the house-top the choice of tribal counselors.
A pot crashes from the roof. The clay vessel from which the chief, in
secret, ate his meals is broken now, beyond the use of any other man.
A dark mass, an impenetrable shadow which spreads outwards from the
base of the chief's house, begins to seethe. There comes from it a cry so harrowing that I, already moved beyond my wont, must weep. The swift dawn
shows the great mass to be the women of the chief's household, wrinkled
ancients and young things half-grown. Kneeling on the earth they sway and
bend as if storm-swept. With handfuls of white dust they shower themselves so that their dark unornamented arms and torsos are streaked, their
unbound hair is powdered grey These are the widows who remain. Since
Tuesday, others slipped away, joining their lovers or returning home to stay.
Close by, the thirty sons, some young, some middle-aged, stand together
in garments rent and dirtied.
The people of R, forming a procession, follow a leader. Cleaving the
crowd they sing, "We are the people of R. We are the people of R -.
Let us be of one mind." At first they march, singing slowly. Their leader
gives the words. But black folk cannot march for long. Soon, each places
two hands upon the shoulders of the one ahead. And thus joined, men and
women, girls and boys, jig; singing the same tune merrily.
The awful heat of full day fills the walled courtyard as molten liquid fills
a cup. Grovelling, the widows moan and screech. The people of R  jig
and smng. Loosed are the Temnes' tongues.
Down the front steps of the chief's two-story house, into this bedlam
comes a figure in robes of red upholstery stuff, wearing upon its grizzled head
the crown of leather-covered charms. A ghost risen from the water-hole!
29


KuAS, /




Before it walks a disheveled wench, a basket of torn and dirty mourning
clothes upon her head. Behind, two bearers follow with the regal swivel
chair. The awful masquerader is the aged counselor, the executioner whose
role demanded that he sever his old friend's head. Upon the wailing women,
the sons, the waiting crowd, he turns eyes wholly blind! Some firmer touch
steadied his feeble hands about the blade. And now to the dancing place the
tremulous old man is led by a wrinkled hag, a Mumbo Jumbo of a woman,
learned in herbs and witchery. Enthroned upon the swivel chair, the pelt of
an antelope beneath his feet, the blind man faces the dancing space, where
those who mourn the dead at the same time pay honor to him, their temporary king.
Around and around, while two men drum, the wives-the younger ones
with babies on their backs-churn in the sun, sweat trickling through the
dust upon their skins. Around and around churn the sons and a score of the
family's men. With much clowning the onlookmg crowd is driven back by
whacks of bushy brushes. Wilder and more boisterous than the rest is a
woman of over forty whom I saw in M-. Since her early widowhood she
has been free, a gallivanting female who, it is said, has given birth to a dozen
vigorous sons, by a dozen different men. She does not keep her place as a
woman, but speaks out in tribal councils and is consulted by the wisest men.
Yesterday she was a visitor in M-. Today she dances in Pa Makari's town.
Tomorrow she will be in R — busying herself about the election of a chief.
From time to time one of the dancers attends the red-robed man, slumped
down with weariness in the swivel chair. I think he sleeps. In the large triangular pocket of his gown sixpences and smaller coins are put, also small
bundles of leaf tobacco, and one contributor places between the faltering
hands a bottle of contraband trade gin.
At last the tired old man is led away. Disbanded, the dancers and onlookers
drift back to the courtyard where meanwhile the people of R - have taken
possession of the palaver house. From the dirt floor a mist of dust rises beclouding the interior with its wooden benches, worn smooth by much sitting,
30;-    v, q  i       4,.,a.~
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its crude stocks fashioned to clamp a man face down, imprisoning wrists and
ankles while he is flogged. Intolerably acrid, the heated air parches the
singers' lips as in a solid wheel they revolve about a pivotal drummer.
He is the one whom I have already seen at a distance and at another time.
With one hand he beats upon a gigantic drum of hollowed wood, laid crosswise on a hollowed log from which, as from a megaphone, the bombinations
pour. With metal castanets fastened to the fingers of the other hand he
strikes upon a clapperless iron bell appended to his wrist. Strangely he, a
man, is dressed as some Nigerian Haussa women are, skirted from above the
breasts, his hair-a wig of vegetable fibres dyed black-like theirs combed
in a high cockscomb adorned with cowrie shells, once used as money everywhere. So Temne women, too, may long ago have coiffed their hair; for in
M      wooden images of dead female children have carved head-dresses like
this. The drummer's face, all bony structure and deep hollows, has a pinched
fanatical look, his eyes, a curiously unwavering gaze. He never knows
fatigue, it is said, because he chews some magic root.
At noon there is a lull. The crowd recedes to doorways and to shade, watching expectantly And soon a cow from the dead chief's herd, caught like a fish
within a net, is dragged into view. The animal, dumb and inert from fear, is
laid before a heap of stones from which, like a flagstaff, rises a bamboo pole.
A white rag droops from the slender tip. This my interpreters, with irritating
reluctance, admit is an altar where placatory sacrifice is made to evil spirits
and the dead. Before the altar stands a man, dressed in a loin cloth, and
strong like a wrestler. His flesh has that rare blackness so deep that light
falling upon it dies and grows lustreless. Gaunt crows in flapping Moslem
robes, Pa Makari's counselors, surround him, pronouncing an incantation.
Then all withdraw except one who, whetting a short blade upon a stone,
hands it to the butcher. Slowly, slowly, with cruel deliberateness as if prolonging to its uttermost a pleasure-giving act, the butcher cuts the dumb
beast's throat. The blood ebbs into a bowl, held by a counselor. The skinning
then proceeds, the great muscles of the butcher rippling oilily. Claimed by


3 '




the chief's sons, the hide is carried off. Brushing the butcher with their rusty
wings, vultures wheel, filling the air with greedy cries and, driven off, return
to the roof-peaks, monstrous weather-vanes with parchment heads and
beady, glistening eyes.
Carrying in his arms bright green leaves of the banana tree, longer than
his childish length, an impish boy runs out. With incredible alacrity the
meat is wrapped in the torn leaves and handed out. Meat-hungry beyond
belief the people are, but only those entitled to a share step out, returning
to their huts exultantly. The entrails are the portion of a minstrel who,
playing upon a one-stringed violin, has paced the village streets. Holding
the bloody mass aloft he shouts and leaps ecstatically. When neither horn nor
hoof remains the villagers go indoors to feast. The butcher, driving his knife
into the earth, cleans it and thrusts it through his belt again. Whimpering,
the vultures drop to gnaw the bloodied dust.
The only color in the empty courtyard's space, a spot of vibrant green,
one leaf-wrapped portion on the altar lies. It is the dead chief's piece.
Having eaten, the people remain indoors until the sunlight is less merciless. Then occasional groups emerge; but the village retamins a look of emptiness. The children, for many days repressed, play violently Two prancing
figures, from whom the women turn away, followed by a drummer and an
older widow with a begging bowl, bear down on me. Like pigmy hunters
camouflaged to fool the jungle beasts, they are rubbed with clay. They are
covered otherwise with garments of dried grass, with dangling bits of skin,
of bone, with hanging charms and here and there a leopard's fang, a leopard's
claw. Hunters, of course, they are. But in my first astonishment I fail to see
that each man has a dagger up his nose, the hilt projecting on his upper lip.
Closing in, the men cut off retreat. Here is the orgiastic dancing which so
many travelers seek. Contorting his body, each one draws the three-inch
dagger from his nose, catching the spurt of blood upon his upper arm, from
whence it is lapped up again by a bright red tongue thrust out between black
lips. Already faint from so much standing in the heat, I grope behind me
3 32
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for the stockade and lean, pretending to myself as they repeat the act that
what I see is certainly not real, not real. Outwardly I keep my calm. I even
pull my stiffened face into a smile, dropping a sixpence in the widow's bowl.
But so soon as I am free, with trembling knees-accompanied by the mirthful interpreters-I speed to M -, to the restful calm of the seven wives
and their domesticity.
After dark we hurry back, hurrying because the cook, almost minvisible
except for the gleam of oiled legs in the lantern light, moves swiftly, pausing
only to hold out a sustaining hand where slender tree-trunks bridge a muddy
water-hole. The village is quiescent. Where this morning deference was paid
the executioner, the people, like children waiting for a treat, watch the
outlet of a shadowed street. So narrow it is that two could scarcely pass, so
twisted that its curves obstruct the view. No woman has ever been its length.
And not all Temne men. For at the hidden end stands the Porro house. As
far as this, accompanied by the chief's war-veteran son, my husband went,
but not until the cook, petitioner in his behalf, had won permission from
Pa Makari's assembled counselors. The cook was left behind. My husband
was shown, guarding the entrance to a walled-in grove, an imposing hut
with roof thatched like a cockscomb instead of peaked and with painted
snakes upon its mud fagade. At either end rose slender poles with sacrificial
pennants at the tips. Beside the doorway rested two head-dresses trimmed
with vultures' quills and ornamented with human skulls.
Where the lane debouches into the open square two men in masks of brass
and scarlet robes appear. One is very short, almost a dwarf, the other, tall.
Their robes are those of cardinals with crosses front and back. Upon their
heads bristling wigs of woven grass are haloed for one brief moment with
fireless fire, with white lights which sputter, flash and fail. Loving the dramatic, as black people do, the villagers scream and fall back pell-mell.       4 D
A fellow countryman of mine once sought to live among African tribes   Lwhich he could call "untouched." Full of such the Liberian interior is said  God
to be; and there he went. But when he found the chief possessed a lantern           )
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and a store of kerosene he went away, denouncing the savages as semicivilized. Sophisticating contact with the outer world is not always indicated by the possession of European things. Slave-raiding and trading
whites so long have touched the continent that tribal life must many times
have been subtly modified. Since the whites put an end to intertribal wars,
although the members of unfriendly clans remain foreigners, venturesome
individuals stray freely from north to south, carrying European articles for
sale, among them machie-made replicas of native things which quickly
undermine the few crafts which these tropical folk enjoy. "Hand-woven
country cloth" offered for sale in the Bush must be keenly examined. It may
be imitation stuff, got from some black trader who bought it elsewhere from
a white or Asiatic who had it sent from Manchester. "Genuine" African
jewelry comes now from abroad. African artisans, therefore, disappear,
unable to procure precious metals since white men took possession of the
gold and the government's silver coins are replaced with paper and brass.
There remain only those who work in aluminum purchased from trading
whites. Thus Temne girls display aluminum lockets and chains wrought in
modes distinctly Victorian, although neither they, their mothers nor their
grandmammas ever saw a lady of that period, or even an oleograph of one.
Modern fireworks are no proof that either of the masked figures in scarlet
robes has been shopping at the coast. Aware of what is useful to magicmakers, it is likely that some black merchant, in league with white traders,
has brought them. Here no one makes brass. But these masks have bland
planes, with the unrealistic modelling of African wood-carvings. In Nigeria
there is a black Moslem community, from which many traders come, where
for generations men-folk have been casting brass. The robes, the churchly
robes? Priests have been here, but surely no cardinals. They bring to mind
a tale told by the young map-maker, that centuries ago Portuguese priests,
sent into this territory, were never seen again, but rumors reached the coast
that they survived as members of a secret sect now known to be the Porro..Such tales abound in Africa.
34
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Seated on two wooden cases, which recently held bottled beer, the red
figures engage in dialogue. So rapidly the jests pass back and forth that my
interpreter, like everybody else, listening with mouth agape, is convulsed
with silent laughter, and gapes again with no thought for me. At last I learn
that every word is praise of the good man of R, who will, if the patriarchs' plans go well, soon be a chief. The taller interlocutor makes scraps of
conversation into song. Marking the rhythm with clapping hands, the
crowd sings, lustily. And then a slender man in robe and round embroidered
cap appears. He has a lean and knowing face. Compared with the mass of
men about him, he is old. If white, he would be middle-aged. The masked
figures bob and bow; in return, the man of R   makes them a gift of leaf
tobacco and of contraband Vermouth, much coveted. Taken with palmwine it is a more explosive drink than either beverage alone. The smaller
clown enthrones him on a box. The three converse, tossing sentences to the
crowd, which claps and sings. Hour after hour black women stand precisely balanced on two feet, spines erect, chins held high, their arms relaxed;
while I, shifting from foot to foot, slouch and grow weak, and finally beseech the cook to light the homeward way.
On Tuesday, both night and day, the people rest. Another cow is butchered for the guests; a sacrifice set upon the altar stones. And some who
trekked long distances, after the noonday heat trek home again.
Before sunrise on the following day, as on the first, we join Pa Makari's
villagers and the remaining guests. The crescent moon, widening now and
more boldly light, hangs in the western sky. In its dim radiance we wait
where a street leads to the woods beyond, makes a right angle turn, abruptly
disappearing behind a line of huts. A tethered sheep bleats shrilly. Women
fill the doorways through which I see embers of the night fires. The greater
men, the big and little chiefs, sit down before the huts in chairs. And graciously some householder offers my husband a seat which he, unthinking,
presents to me! This curious white reversal of black courtesy evokes ejaculations from the women and from the men a ribald laugh.
35


1'




In the semi-darkness I sense, rather than hear, a vibrant disturbance of the
air, a primordial purring of the earth such as might forebode a cataclysmic
quake. Expecting something and yet not knowing what, my nerves grow
tense. Then mere sensation is translated into sound. Seeking to communicate, a remote village beats its drums. Perceptibly the sounds increase.
A clever hoax!
Half-a-hundred warriors armed with flintlocks, swords and spears, forming a solid phalanx, move into view. Hidden by the street's angle never more
than seventy yards away, striking their feet in unison upon the earth, they
simulate war-drumming which still remains afar. Before my mind has fully
grasped the sham, the phalanx is upon us. The carcass of the sheep, run
through and through, is dragged away by howling warriors who overwhelm the village. Discharging clumsy muzzle-loading guns, they swarm
over stockades and walls, arriving breathless in Pa Makari's compound, the
center of the conquered town.
Women pack off the carcass of the sheep, the vanquished foe, the warriors' future reward being mutton stew. Meanwhile the heroes, led by their
one real war-veteran, play hard at victory Small groups detach themselves,
run out, discharge their muskets and, returning, climb the compound walls.
The remaining warriors greet these skirmishers with yells, which terrify the
children (for whom the three days' experience is wholly new) who peek out
of open doors or huddle in confusion on the rickety veranda of Pa Makari's
house. One by one, more than a dozen men, surrounded by the others, dance,
not with African sinuosity, but with leaps and violent revolutions, exhibiting their strength. As if he thought the dancers grew too serious, the warveteran rides upon the shoulders of two men, a victor on a balky horse. This
animal is almost legendary here. Astride his comic steed the veteran whips
about him with a sword, the crude handiwork of a native smith. The flourishes display his vigorous arms. Then laying across his head the flat of the
blade, with a mock show of strength, he bends it until two halves touch his
cheeks-his laughing countenance is looped in iron. Not to be excelled in
36


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comedy, a little fellow bursts through the astonished crowd. Except for a
scanty loin cloth, he is nude and plastered from head to foot with a paste
of ashes. Drolly his rolling black eyes look out of a face entirely grey.
Showing to what an end too much fighting brings a man, he simulates madness. Pretending to dash his brains out on the walls, he darts from side to
side of the wide compound repeating the pretense until exhausted he slips
to the ground, limp as a cast-off sawdust doll.
Pa Makari was, in his youth, a famous warrior. Therefore the Temne
braves, whose strength, since fighting and hunting ceased, is sapped by
trivial tasks and inactivity, honor the dead man's memory and gratify his
ghost. The heat is now too great for violent pleasure. The sourish odor of
fermenting palm-wine, seething and foaming in two large kerosene tins,
brought with gourd dippers from the dead chief's house, revives life in the
sawdust doll. The sweating warriors seek interiors and shade.
Wearing grass skirts two male dancers with vulture feathers and human
skulls upon their heads prance through the streets. In the palaver house the
tireless, staring drummer, dressed as a woman, takes his place. The people
shut themselves away. The children are indoors. Remaining guests and our
young chief of M     depart as if in haste to get away
Into the emptying village, one by one, figures in white splashed with red,
blood-red kerchiefs knotted about their heads, enter from every side.
The war-veteran, eager for our departure, cloaks his anxiety with an
unwavering smile. Making an incoherent English speech, he presents us
with a nicely woven mat, a charming gesture of dismissal, perfect in its
finality.
All night long in M     the Porro drum is audible. From time to time
through the warm night drift snatches of the oratorio.
-W
The first mourning for the passing of a Temne chief is done. Within the
year a second mourning-the fattest of his herd are saved for this-will lay
his ghost, bringing Pa Makari's soul decent rest.
37


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SOAIP AND CALICO
U TPON the upper veranda of a Freetown hotel, once the mansion of
a Creole who rose to wealth and importance, the young man in
white sips ginger-ale and watches the sea. His eyes shadowed with
unyouthful weariness-he is not yet nineteen-are intent upon the distance.
Across the dazzling expanse of reflected light narrow dugouts rowed by
singing boatmen ply, carrying the dawn catch from a fishing village to a
cleft in the town's waterfront where, flayed by the sun, a market gives forth
the stench of fish, both fresh and dried, and acid odors of the slightly fermented cornmeal, more tempting than rice to black foreigners from the
Gold Coast. Unhampered by clean floors and sanitary stalls, such as the
uptown market has, blacks trade with bold-eyed wives of Kru stevedores
who wear loose blouses and "wrap-arounds" of their favorite Manchester
prints, imitation batiks, recognizable as crude copies of those first woven,
dyed and worn by natives of Dutch Java.
Long ago humble Africans in leaves and skins doubtless accepted what was
handed them. That day is done. If cloth sold them fades they will not buy
again. And it is startling to discover the imposing array of fadeless cloths
supplied when there is no market for the other kind! A tribe, as if by agreement, exhibits marked preferences for certain color combinations - by
whom or how styles are determined, no one knows. However, such preferences are subject to erratic alterations, so that traders are embarrassed by
goods become suddenly unpopular and therefore useless. Unless for social
or matrimonial reasons they have become Creolized, the Kru women will not
wear what delights Creole Mammies, and the latter stubbornly refuse fabrics
of yesteryear.
The traders aim to please. The why of this is plain; for if West Africans do
not care to buy they will not collect and sell to whites the products of the
43


Spac- Got~




land. In the vicinity of Old Calabar blacks prize cloths, decorated and dyed
with native indigo by their own craftsmen, and there British firms offer
similar cloths printed by special hand-process in Holland, retaining the inaccuracies of originals.
No women are more exacting than the Jollifs, members of a migratory
Moslem tribe from French Senegal, of whom there is a settlement in British
Gambia. Fine-featured women of amazing beauty and with the mien of
princesses, they are meticulous about their dress and wear sheer white or
delicately colored smocks with graceful, trailing sleeves, and cloths with
vivid stripes. Such importance is attached by them to head-handkerchiefs
that firms award bonuses to employees who create successful modes. Bold
and pictorial central motifs are demanded with brilliant borders, such being
adaptable to the Jollif fashion of tying. And so this year these fine ladies
wear above their foreheads white bicycles or elephants upon backgrounds of
solid black or blue with radiating bars of color ending in broad scarlet hems.
When knotted, the corners issue forth in pointed wmings of red.
Desires of jungle folk are difficult to estimate. A traveling salesman here
tells of how, as a trader, he once interred millions of rejected beads. Upon
arriving in Portuguese Angola he observed that the people valued certain
beads above all others, paying preposterous prices for a single one. To offer
these for sale appeared to be a simple means of insuring patronage. Samples
were sent to Europe, but nowhere could their makers be located. (The similarly mysterious Aggrey beads of the Gold Coast are conjectured to be examples of Egyptian glass.) An order for their duplication was given to a
Czech factory and eventually barrels of them reached Africa and were
offered to the natives who, continuing irrationally to value the old, refused
the new. Beads. Beads. Sick of them the trader at last had a great hole dug
and dumped the millions in.
It is fashionable for Kru women to wear, tatooed in scrawling script upon
their arms, names they bear or the names of lovers. An ancient hag is permanently labelled "Torn Dollar." A young girl seems to have been signed
44


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by an Americo-Liberian statesman. And like their men they have a perpendicular blue line, also tatooed, springing upwards from between the brows.
A peculiar significance this mark is reputed to have. The Krus, a hardy seacoast folk, their activities in the past bordering often upon piracy, have been
n contact with the whites for many centuries. Willing allies of white slavers,
they attempted, even after the inhuman traffic was done, to enslave AmericoLiberian emigrants. Longshoremen and stevedores, their descendants are
today taken aboard all foreign ships during the West African cruise. Long
ago members of the tribe were carried off and to avoid further calamitous
mistakes the tatoo on the brow was substituted for scarifications on the cheeks
which did not differ sufficiently from the markings of other tribes. So goes
the tale.
Since those dark days Americo-Liberians have had revenge. Ruthlessly
Kru men and women, at five dollars a head, have been sent away to Spanish
and Portuguese areas, in labor gangs. By this means Liberians from the ruling
class have often kept themselves in funds, and only recently a Spanish ship
anchored for a week at an obscure and unimportant port where trade is very
slack but which is the home of a newly appointed member of the Cabinet.
But this revenge has not been altogether sweet. The Krus, armed by a foreign
power, attempted a revolution during the Great War. When it failed, those
involved fled. By their departure Liberia lost wage-earners able to pay taxes
and the incomes of Kru headmen and chiefs who had become labor-contractors were reduced, for now fifteen Krus to each hatch, men to operate
the winches, to man the launches, boatmen, kitchen and laundry help can in
most instances be recruited from the Freetown community
Like other sailors these sea-gipsies have a reputation for amorous adventures and it is not unusual for a man upon reaching a port where there are
others of his tribe to desert a southbound ship. "Woman palaver," says the
Mate and watches lest the renegade, rejoining during the homeward trip,
demand full pay upon reaching Monrovla or Freetown. Also they are accused of pilfering. Whether they are more guilty than others of the semi45
o  n  x


I'
(1- '3




Europeanized whose incomes never can keep pace with mounting desires for
things displayed in the larger settlements where trading stations have evolved
into general merchandise stores and traders have become shop-keepers, I do
not know. But their possessions can be very curious. Out of a mud hut I
saw a Kru come wearing an excellent tweed cap, patently of English make,
an immaculate dress shirt and black silk tie. His legs were bare. He carried
a malacca walking-stick and dangling upon his bosom was a monocle which
I am sure no oculist prescribed for him.
The carefree spirit of these sea-gipsies and their love for European things
is reflected by the women. Desultory farmers-as the wives of wage-earning men-many give up tilling the soil. They are great travelers, moving as
deck-passengers between Kru ports, carrying extensive personal baggage,
large mirrors before which they dust themselves with scented talcum, and
portable phonographs with records of American jazz to which, when the
Charleston was danced by white people on the upper decks, and by government folk at balls on land, they danced the Charleston too. The smallest Kru
and every young Americo-Liberian can do this dance which-however
African its source-has come to them from the levees of America.
Each petty transaction in the Kru market is prolonged with banter, no
dramatic element being overlooked. The babble and the songs of chanting
boatmen are faintly audible upon the hotel veranda when the parrots, cherished pets of the hotelkeeper's wife, do not screech. A woman whose eyes are
always blurred with tears, she tells, while handing drinks across the bar, how
when her husband has made enough money-guests are few and import taxes
on liquor high-she will take her birdies and leave Africa. Meanwhile they
eye the young man in white flatly with their profiles, flapping dove-grey
clipped wings and clutching their perches with curved yellow beaks. One
shrieks and the other, a steel-riveter, reiterates, "Hello! Hello!"
Thrust up against the sea and sky the clock m a church steeple announces
ten. The day is already hot. It will be hotter. Somewhere within the hotel a
white man calls, "Boy! Boy! Gin and bitters-then, bath." There is the


46




patter of the Creole steward's feet upon the stair, the sound of water poured
from tins into a stationary tub. How sparingly! Although there is no shortage here, still boys must fetch water from a public pump. In the bed-rooms
waste is circumvented cunningly, for each room, no matter what the number of its occupants, has only one hand-basin and this is filled. But for dirty
water no receptacle is supplied; and so when the communal water's efficacy
is completely done a guest must bellow, "Boy!" into the hall. In time a lad
carries off the basin; in time he returns with it freshly refilled. This is a custom
of West Africa.
The young man awaits the arrival of a northbound English boat. Thus has
he waited day after day until one week has slipped by. Boats are uncertain,
antics of the waves being unpredictable and sheltering ports few Breakwaters built at great expense are sundered in one day Once officials from
France blessed the opening of an inland harbor of the Ivory Coast. During
the ensuing night, a raging sea swept through the river's mouth, demolishing
the white men's engineering feat. Ships must lie at anchor until a calm permits the loading and unloading of passengers and freight. And there are
accidents. The boat upon which we sailed from America is gashed by an
uncharted rock or by a sunken wreck which shifted secretly. Of its limping
journey towards a dry-dock in Dakar, we have heard here. Waiting on the
veranda-if the boat arrives by day-the young man will have knowledge
of its approach even before the company sends a messenger He waits with
eyes averted from the nearer, more lively scene of the hotel's garden and the
intersecting streets, where, from time to time, desultory pedestrians are scattered by twinkling motor-cars bringing white women-there are sometimes
sixty in the town, this being one of the largest West African settlementsfrom their bungalows upon the heights to market at the cold storage plant
where at stated hours each morning fruit and meat from "home" can be had.
As if at a garden party, the women gather in pretty frocks and sun-helmets
to select mutton chops or prime ribs of beef.
Inert his young body is, as if his impatient soul had already sped to the


47




Scotch moors from which he came. And now and then the fingers of one
hand fumble with a handkerchief encircling his arm as if to allay some
worrying discomfort beneath it.
Slowly the morning moves. A hot breath, spiced with frangipani from the
trees about a little school, stirs fragments of London journals so torn that
significance and unity are gone.. a crime wave in America... an
English woman defends compamlonate marriage.  the memoirs of a wife
accused of murdering her husband. a schism rends the Christian churches.  the announcement of a pact for international peace. Gossip, packed
from port to port by officers of cargo boats, is more alive. This man has delirium tremens.. that woman was seduced by her husband's friend..
communistic activities suspected among blacks of Timbuktu.. a few
nights ago a young man leaving a dinner-table walked out of a second-story
window and broke his jaw.
Below, where flowers which unfold reluctantly at dawn dart like flames
from the foliage of the hibiscus and where banana trees cast luminous green
shadows, a Moslem, with a xylophone, a scrawny wanderer begging for
sixpences, serenades the indifferent young man with a sour rendition of
"Tipperary." Across the way a mouse-colored monkey, a runaway, capers
grotesquely upon the house-tops. Overwhelmed by loneliness, discomfited
by so much sun-hot corrugated iron, it sits motionless, twitching a necktie of
raveled rope with nervous fingers, or hangs head downwards from the eaves  4
gibbering at two white men who stride towards the Customs shed with arms
held stiffly and slightly bent as if pace-making for a squad. Exposed between
long woolen hose and shorts, their pale knees are preternaturally thin. There
is no squad. But close behind, matching them in costume and in gait-though
bulkier at the knees-strut two black clerks.
'Whether this capacity for imitativeness is due to a peculiar impressionability or to the fact that, closer to primitive life, their mimetic talents have
not yet been dulled, I do not know. But where black people are in daily con-,     Otact with their alien rulers types emerge which in their faithful imitativeness
48
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are unconscious caricatures. Here in the post office the clerk has a patrician
nonchalance, an aristocratic stoop. He languidly waves me aside, when he has
sold me stamps, drawling, "Kindly pahss. Pahss, please." Whites, having set
themselves up as examples of superiority, confronted by these impersonations
lose their equanimity.
Pointless is the exhortation, "Be African!" when hurled at Freetown Creoles such as the two young clerks or the ponderous trader Mammys. For the
Creoles are not altogether African, but, like Americo-Liberians, are descendants of freed slaves-chiefly from the West Indies, hence the name which
differentiates them. As the result of white enterprise, vaguely altruistic, they
were brought to West Africa, from which they or their forefathers had been
taken, and settled upon land procured from native chiefs. At intervals, bewildered human cargo rescued by English warships from slavers who continued an illicit trade increased their numbers. At once hostility arose between
the strangers and the people of the Bush.
Circumstances having effaced all traces of their African heritage, they
borrowed what they could-and this they continue to do —from  the dominating race. They no longer felt themselves to be Africans. They wore clothes
and lived in houses, poor affairs, which survive today, pathetically ramshackle attempts at elegance, cottages which have degenerated into tenements, shanties roofed sometimes with corrugated-iron, sometimes with
thatch. They went to church-the Creoles enjoy a highly emotionalized
sectarian Christianity. Meetings and Bible Classes abound and hymns are
popular. Their language, purporting to be English, was enriched by direct
translations from native tongues, by quaint distortions but so debased as to
be well nigh unintelligible. Ask a Creole house-boy, "Is your mistress at
home?" If she is not, he replies, "He no live." Ask him something which requires deliberation and before answering it is likely that he will say, "Me go
hang head"; he begs time for thought.
Educated Creoles seek to purify the language, though when a white educator recommended the printing of future schoolbooks in native tongues,


5t




suspecting preference for the "simpler" people of the Bush, they ironically
demanded texts in Creole. But the jargon's spread cannot be checked. Wherever Creoles travel it takes root, Africans being able linguists. And also those
whites who have at any time employed Creoles forever afterwards use Creole
when addressing blacks. It is the lingua franca of the whole West Coast.
Even in Liberia where the English is far less corrupt, though often too flowery
for common speech, the President is forced-as on the occasion of the last
inauguration-to lapse publicly into Creole when addressing interpreters of
Liberian chiefs.
Identifying themselves with the civilization of their white rulers, mastering its conspicuous outward manifestations, if not its inner meanings, the
Creoles looked scornfully upon their fellow Africans as naked heathen, as
indecent savages. The scorned were contemptuous of the newcomers, blacks,
who used the white man's language and possessed no tribal unity. This unhappy situation persists, tainting the atmosphere of Freetown, already turgid
with white-black prejudice. The liveried Creole chauffeur of the Colonial
Secretary scoffs publicly at Boomba, the Temne boy in our employ, because he
wears a cloth instead of trousers. Humiliated and enraged, the lad revives the
Creole history, tragic in its lack of continuity, and using the Creole tongue,
tells me: "He got no country; he got no language; he man-o'-war man."
The Creoles are not Africans. And yet among them are a few who, sensing
the sterility of a borrowed culture, turn wistful enquiring eyes upon Africa.
Of these, a mother and a daughter-the latter's poetry is well received abroad
-maintain a private school where vanishing African crafts and songs are
taught to Creole children whose parents never knew them, and to the children of Bush Africans, town-dwellers and detribalized, by whom they are
forgotten or despised. The multiplication tables droned to native dance
rhythms in the nearby classroom resound pleasantly throughout the hotel.
Up and down the streets, the Creole Mammys pass. In their dress is immortalized a bygone epoch when women wrapped their figures in concealing folds
of cloth, and when covering a heathen from ankle to wrist was held important


52




to the soul's redemption. Among the younger generation some affect store
frocks, narrow, short and sleazy; but the older women-irmtated by the
newly "civilized"- abide by what suited their ancestors, Mother Hubbards
buttoned to the throat and with full sleeves. This season's colors are pale green,
mulberry and puce, covered like wall-paper with floral designs. The skirts
which touch the floor are wide enough for crinolines-eight yards or ten of
widest calico are needed for one dress. Like court-ladies whose trains grow
burdensome the Mammys gather up folds of their enormous skirts revealing
layers of starched petticoats. This morning one displays an underskirt of
yellow plush, an ostentation which the others, hiding their agitation behind
drooped lids, pretend to overlook. For shoes they wear carpet slippers made
by themselves with colored yarns —the prevailing combinations include
cerise, violet and grass-green-cross-stitched upon coarse canvas according to designs which are original or adapted from native homespuns. These
they not only wear but also sell. On Sundays the billowing robes, gay shoes
and multicolored head-handkerchiefs are exchanged by many for gowns of
seemly black, and foreign shoes. Heads, elaborately coiffed, are bare and
ornamented with combs. An awful emphasis the Mammys put upon being
fully clad. Glared at, a little lad, naked and glistening from a surreptitious
bath, seizes a newspaper from the gutter and endeavors with one free handthe other balancing a water tin upon his head-to wrap it about his middle.
Taller than their sisters of the hinterland the Creole Mammys are also
heavier, as if they ate more heartily and were not content with one daily meal.
They possess a slumbrous powerfulness and move along the reddish-yellow
streets smoothly, with the grace of bright-colored ships before a steady breeze.
Neither weak nor clumsy could they be and sustain upon their heads high
pyramids of cloth and colored handkerchiefs; calabashes like buff-colored
bowls filled with bottles of home-made ginger-beer; or handwoven baskets
of which they are inordinately proud, crammed with articles to sell. They are
traders and pass to locations about the town, each one having a place she belligerently calls her own. Creating the atmosphere of a bazaar they sit the
5 3,]r


13 Jin 1
H,
Ij k.1




whole day long in groups, commenting audibly upon the town's affairs and
selling home-made bread, candies, crullers, starch, charms, medicinal herbs,
trinkets, cosmetics and fragments of antimony with which many women,
particularly the Krus and also both men and women of the desert tribes,
enhance the beauty of black eyes by drawing thin lines of blue-an exotic
color on black flesh-along the edges of the upper and lower lids.
Astute traders, these women are-blacks of either sex having a gift for
petty commerce. And their shrewdness is not gainsaid by whites who extend
credit, often depending upon them for distribution of goods throughout the
hinterland and for sidewalk sales to country folk too shy to enter shops or
whose wants are too trivial to merit salaried attention. Exploiting this timidity sagacious Mammys are not above exacting from country customers a great
deal more than is asked for the identical articles within the establishments
before which they squat. Lack of capital does not necessarily deter a Mammy
from entering the business world. If neither she nor her relatives have any
home-made product to hawk, she procures on credit from a friend or white
trader one tin containing fifty cigarettes which retails for two shillings or
two-and-six. To those who can never afford a whole tin she retails cigarettes
at the rate of two for a threepence. Thus when her stock is gone she has a
profit. By repetition of this venture she accumulates a small amount of
capital and looks about ambitiously for additional investments.
"Mammys," these women are called. Lingering as a form of address in the
Creole tongue, the term implies no disrespect. I have heard the Mother Superior in Bathurst chide a Creole ancient, tending the convent's lettuces,
without effect because he greeted her each day with, "'Mornin' Mammy,"
and a bow, half genuflection and half curtsy "Good mornin' Mammy," one
of the passing women calls up to me. Void of expression, her face is blank as
the blankest pause. Is she bold? Does she challenge "white prestige" with impertinence? I cannot say. But I know that if I ignore her, the wide black
visage will be overcast with brutish sullenness. This power to wound the semiEuropeanized which whites possess is a burden almost unendurable. "Good
54


* it,    L-i 6ula     Con't




morning, Mammy," I respond; and far down the street her smile, baring
glittering white teeth, is visible.
Taking his eyes from the sea-they are very blue-the young man sweeps
me with a stare. Ever so slightly his shoulders move as if he shrugged. Or
perhaps he shivers. For the big woman with the laughming mouth is black,
and all black people, Krus, Creoles, or Bush folk, have become abhorrent
savages to him.
His story spanning a year is brief. At seventeen he came to West Africa.
"Invalided home," at eighteen he goes away He does not appear to be acutely
ill. His yellowness is like my own and that of other whites whose flesh, constantly moist with sweat and shielded from the sun, taking on the tint of
ancient parchment with here and there liverish spots, is never a healthy tan.
Still, an unconscious twitching of his lips indicates some inner disturbance,
half-checked.
Groping for a niche in a disorganized post-war world, he came upon the
glittering opportunities offered by trade. His voyage out, the first absence
from his parents, was continuously thrilling. Goodnaturedly, he was hazed,
doused with sea-water and told that he had crossed the equator, only to discover the ceremonial a hoax. To torment him, ship's officers spun yarns of
cannibals and leopards, of white men poisoned; killed by Witch Doctors'
spells, slain by the sun. Their sole experience confined to buying curios and
signing shipping papers, such seafarers are always inclined to hold forth ponderously upon oddities of the hinterland. And when he arrived, there were
the usual pranks of other junior clerks, who often usher a timorous newcomer
minto a desolate bedroom which has been stripped of everything except a mattress on the floor, and serve his first dinner entirely from cans, a can-opener
being laid with the silver beside each plate.
Such are the exigencies of trade that he was then despatched to the far
interior, relieving another whose term was done. Thus men must go to tropical outposts and remain lest, with consequent disaster to soap factories and
cotton mills, the flow of palm oil and calicoes should lapse; the West ircan
55                                                     \<


fl-t    L'. *o    OVA          I




trade m both being subtly related. For if blacks did not wish to buy calico
and kindred foreign products, they would not trouble to sell palm kernels,
so simple is their life, except when government taxes fall due. Directors and
stockholders, surrounded by relatives and friends, may sit at home; but those
who collect raw products frequently do so alone.
Not more than twenty-four hours south of Freetown by cargo boat, before what appears to be a strip of the mainland's beach, humbler freighters
sometimes stop, boats which are not too proud to take on board two hundred
sacks of kola nuts and a half-dozen black deck passengers, bound for the
nearest port. A square of tin set upright and reflecting the sun serves as a
beacon for the guidance of sea-captains. And against this are imposed two
long oars crossed, supporting a red cloth, when cargoes are expected. Curious
about this strange signal interrupting the pale gold undulations of the sand,
I went ashore from the German "tramp." Mounted upon cases of beer I rode
in a ship's tender manned by Krus, the only men able to pilot loaded rowboats
across the treacherous sand-bars of the Liberian and Sierra Leone coast.
Up and over, the craft climbed the waves, slipping down green glass slopes;
up and over while the rowers sang, the phrases of their chant syncopated with
the oars' strokes. Up and over-and land was at last approached. Then turning, the boat crept through a narrow channel and behind the stretch of beach.
Detached from the mainland, it was a clean sand-spit which lay between a
swampy shore and the open sea. A sliver of land, it had been tossed up in the
endless battle between the current of an emptying river and ocean tides.
There, hidden from the steamer by low dunes, canoes were beached where
two bearded white men shared a table sheltered by a roof of palm fronds.
From beside one, a black girl with young breasts and a guileless face rose up
when prodded, and stretching sinuously, dropped down again among black
workmen huddled in fringes of the shade.
Four miles away, beyond the sandspit's far end, barely discernible amid a
cluster of huts upon the mainland, were two buildings with "pan" tops, the
houses of these sole white inhabitants, these two men — hose faces above the
56


v-I /I




beards were absurdly juvenile. Neither was older than twenty-two. One, the
Englishman, served a second term. The other, a homesick German, had but
recently come. But so keen was competition for black patronage, that in this
solitude, despite their youth, there had sprung up between them a fantastic
and morbid enmity It was, very likely, their sole excitement. Sitting beneath their common shelter, I talked with each separately, since they refused
to join in general conversation. Shielding their shipping lists from one another they bade their workmen pile the incoming cargo separately in heaps,
hundreds of feet apart upon the empty shore.
0.. But no competitor enlivened the solitude of the young man waiting
now upon the hotel's porch, eager to be gone from Africa. In an area where
there were no other whites and through which few trekked, he dwelt; his new
home a corrugated iron building, the trading station. Never having supervised another human being, he was confronted with the management of four
black men as old or older than himself; a Christianized Creole from the coast,
a Moslem roustabout from the desert's edge with a keen Semitic face, and two
pagans-the cook and "boy," with whom he could communicate only imperfectly in broken English. Representing three widely differing African
groups, they were to him, however, merely black men, and equally mysterious. He blustered at them, I am sure, for it is thus that white folk so often
conceal private uncertainties. Domestic details of which he had no previous
knowledge, having lived at home, the planning and ordering of meals-he
found irksome. Fresh foodstuffs were either scarce or withheld by the villagers. Therefore the cook resorted to the perpetual use of canned staples as
he had done in the service of this young man's predecessor. When black cooks
trained by inexperienced white men once acquire this easy-going habit-of
the countless cooks few have been trained by women and few have ever seen
a modern kitchen-they are forever afterwards disinclined to exert themselves in marketing. Alligator pears may be had for one penny each; but instead of buying, a cook will open up another can of cabbage. Likewise, when
fresh pineapple is prr-3'vable, he will serve preserved.


57




From daybreak until dark-a trader's day is long, broken only by a rest at
noon, when blacks themselves shrink from the sun-the young man dickered
for palm kernels, palm oil, peanuts and other products, according to the season. Wearing a sun-helmet by day indoors as protection from the concentrated heat focussed by the "pan"- roof, he directed desultory sales of headhandkerchiefs, calico, beads, machetes to be sharpened later by native smiths,
pocket-knives, syrupy drinks in bottles, canned tomatoes, sardines, salmon,
sugar, salt, soap, leaf-tobacco and cigarettes, the knitted woolen caps with
tassels of which African men are fond, and sixpenny cotton shirts imported
from Japan, so flimsy that when I asked a trader's "boy" how long one lasted,
he replied, "Three washings, Missie." That they dissolve explains the remnants worn by Krus; sometimes a pair of shoulders, parts of two sleeves and
indications of a neckband, or the sketchy outlines of what was once a shirt
but which has become a most untidy spider-web. To stimulate good feeling,
he occasionally made gifts of clay pipes.
Devoid of activity were many days. Had this young man possessed the
slightest knowledge of anthropology, he would have found, during his leisure, the observation of peoples unlike himself engrossing; and he would have
been less devastated, less blasted by the later episode. But he was an uninformed, care-free lad of seventeen. His interest, limited to curiosity, was
enfeebled by a conviction that dark pigmentation, kinky hair, and thick lips,
indicate an almost inhuman inferiority, and by the belief that a white man
betraying interest in "inferiors" impairs his dignity The propinquity of black
people only intensified a sense of loneliness nagging his every thought, becoming more unbearable at night despite preoccupation with accounts and correspondence, despite the amusement furnished by his portable phonograph.
So peppered with these machines is Africa-they are brought by whites of
every sort-that soon there will be few tribes which have not heard American-African jazz or the incomprehensible dialogues between "Two Black
Crows." Few Bush folk know that whites play upon musical instruments
other than the missionary's chapel organ, chronically wheezy from damp.
58


A




The wet season came. Rain thunders so upon "pan" roofs that when ceilings are low those who do not shout are never heard. Warm rain curtaining
open windows prevents the passage of air. Interiors grow stale. Nothing is
quite dry. Yeasty spots appear upon woolen clothes, worn during the outbound cruise and laid away for the homeward trip, though they be kept m
waterproof steel boxes. Books fall apart. Mattresses and pillows when touched
belch moldy odors. And in traders' places the atmosphere is charged with
dried fish, soap and chemically dyed cottons. But between downpours, white
clouds fall apart and from a sky intensely blue the sun shines down upon
tilled jungle clearings where in a night the feathery green of new growth has
pierced the soil darkened with ashes and charcoal of former Bush fires.
Villages are dank. Thatched roofs are wet haystacks; but within all is dry
though dense from indoor fires. To the black people whom I have seen, ram
seems to give a special gaiety. Fears of drought and famine are quieted. In
one mission school it was discovered that thirty little girls, converted pagans,
habitually crept out upon the lawn by dark and danced among the formal
flowerbeds in the rain. They were betrayed by discarded English nightgowns,
soaking wet, tucked in bedroom corners and underneath the shrubbery.
Mosquitoes multiply, and danger from malaria, omnipresent, increases.
Blacks, as well as whites, succumb, especially when villages are low-lying,
surrounded by tropical growth or close to flooding rivers and lagoons. Mosquitoes and the fever which they spread cause governments to monopolize
high spots and dry for residence, purer areas from which black folk, likely
to be infected —except household servants-are excluded. Traders do not
often share these higher spheres; for where the English live, class distinctions
are accentuated. Empire Builders of the First Class do not mingle freely with
those of the Second; and in the social scale the traders occupy a slightly lower
status. In these matters I was schooled upon my arrival by a kindly government doctor Cautioning me to drink only boiled water, he said I must wear
a thicker sun-helmet, and a flannel belt about my middle night and day,
adding also that I must never encourage polite attention from lowly traders


59






among his countrymen. Concerning water I am so careful as to be perpetually thirsty. I have thrown away a light-weight pith hat, a French creation
for ladies, and now wear a heavy thing of cork such as are manufactured for
soldiers in India (this, I will discard, preferring sunstroke to a dislocated
neck). I have no flannel band. However, this is not the reason why my benefactor greets me with a quick hard look of disapproval. He caught me at the
waterfront as I embarked with six traders, an agent and his junior clerks,
upon a pleasure jaunt. It would, I am certain, have cheered him considerably had he witnessed my return. In a squall the launch was nearly swamped,
and like Neptune's daughter risen from the sea, streaming with sea-water,
I crept at nightfall through Freetown's streets.
Beds everywhere are shrouded in mosquito-nets which must be tucked in
before the light has waned, else they are pre-empted by ravenous battalions
arriving at dark. But doors and windows are almost never screened, such
protection being costly and objected to as preventing circulation of the sluggish air. During the rainy season, whites wear mosquito-boots as armor
against the low-flying insects, and therefore the ladies in short dinner frocks
resemble booted Cossacks. Traders, if they do not share the hills, live in
second-stories, often above their stores.
Neither hill nor second floor had the young man in the Bush. But he slept
beneath a net, took quinine faithfully every day, wore boots, and then, like
nearly every other white, felt queer and had a chill. A"bout of fever." Nursed
by his servants, he rallied; and when partially recovered, for want of any
other thing to do, went listlessly to work among his calicoes.
One evening, there came through the darkness cries so sharp, so agonizing,
that he ran forth. Partially visible in the murk was a shaggy animal, a giant
monkey running upright like a man, clasping to its breast a screaming child.
At sight of him, the monster, abandoning its burden, sped away.
Hurrying along the Bush path towards the nearby village, the young man
came upon those who cried, a group of women wailing as they bent over the
\angled body of another babe. Its head was crushed. The chief's household


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had been ravaged by a great baboon! One child was dead, the other found
within the wood, half dead from fright.
Not yet well, the young man swooned, passing from unconsciousness to
feverish delirium. Unaware of day or year, during that illness he became
eighteen.... A baboon! Face to face, m broad daylight, I met a baboon walking
along a Bush path followed by others, smaller and younger. A male, the Limba
porters said it was, accompanied by wives and children. Loping upon all
fours, it withdrew to a nearby hillock behind which the others disappeared.
From there he had a splendid view. Neither belligerent nor ferocious did he
seem, sensing perhaps that my husband and I carried no guns. In mutual curiosity we stared, and then, as if of lead, he rolled over the hillock's crest tumbling out of sight. Like the wild hog, the worst mischief that a baboon usually
does is wantonly to destroy half-grown crops..
A man-not an animal-sped through the murk of that evening, a member of the Baboon Society, his body covered with hairy skins, his face masked,
his hands made brutal by iron fingertips. A premature alarm had frustrated
his search for human flesh.
That there are people who still hunger for the taste of human flesh, or partake of it ritualistically, believing that for them it possesses magic properties,
is not remarkable among a folk so long pocketed away from the world's main
paths. And primitive folk are not impressed by their own superiority to animals. They do not always differentiate greatly between themselves and beasts.
Therefore the eating of a stranger or a war captive would be for them no
greater sin than eating hippopotamus or antelope. The Baboon Society, a
cannibalistic cult of the far hinterland, is likened to the better known Leopard Society of this colony and of Liberia, whose members, though every
effort is made by governments to suppress the organization, partake of the
human body to gain supernatural powers.
That his own blond ancestors were likewise given to cannibalism and to
offering human sacrifice, traces of which remain throughout the world pre65
—, t'.. — - /.   ',
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iZ "'e p,   3
DfcE P11




served in common custom, the young trader does not know; nor does he care.
Facts cannot now wipe horror from his mind nor calm his quivering nerves.
Rumors of this incident had reached a Limba village in which I lived. It
was said that a white official, hearing of the episode, sent condolences to the
bereft chief, accompanied by a tactful hint that the predacious beast should
be ensnared. The canny ruler, careful to do nothing which might provoke
white interference and vengeful depradations by blacks, closed the affair.
He politely returned his thanks accompanied by a dead baboon.
Africa is not yet done with the young trader Increasingly uncomfortable
has his arm become. He unwinds the handkerchief, and with the Creole houseboy's aid extracts a fat and full-grown worm from an ulcerous spot, a creature developed from a larva ejected upon him by a mangrove fly. The Creole
assures me that the worm came from an egg laid in dew which dropped upon
the young man as he brushed against a mangrove tree.
Thrust up against sky and sea the clock announces twelve. Raking the
hotel veranda the noon-day sun drives the young man indoors. Upon the
wicker table stands his empty glass. The Creole steward, a perch in either
hand, carries the parrots to their place behind the downstairs bar. Little grey
lizards, imported from the Bush in order to protect the house from insect life,
scuttle across the walls and ceiling. Now and then one drops, lies flattened
upon the floor, comes alive, then once again glides away to pulsate upon the
veranda's balustrade. The monkey has long since disappeared. Public offices
are emptying. Released from the nearby school the children squeal and push,
or walk sedately with books and slates atop their heads. Those with pennies
buy crullers and salt-water taffy from squatting Creole Mammys. At a public
square boys stone the mango trees, bringing down ripening fruit, pungent
with turpentine. Along the streets houseboys carry trays to white masters
who, if they do not live above or close to their business houses, lunch on tepid
or cold food behind locked doors of shops. Wherever there is shade workmen
loll and sleep. From the hotel's kitchen sounds arise. The steward rings a bell.
It is time for "chop."
66


I
-   l,




The young trader does not come down. Only a black man in misfit foreign
clothes, struggling clumsily with fork and knife beneath the hostile eyes of a
white prospector attracted to Freetown by a recent find of platinum, and
flies, and flies-share the boiled mutton, boiled potatoes, and canned Brussels
sprouts.
It is late afternoon when the cargo boat, which the young man awaits,
steams into view with awning-sheltered decks and freshly painted cabins.
A canvas funnel, its widespread wings now hanging limp, is strung from
amidships to entrap air for the black stokers' hell. Among cargo steamers this
English boat is an aristocrat; aboard it the proprieties are strictly observed.
Accepted as cabin passengers, blacks may not, however, eat with whites, but
are placed outside the dining-saloon at tables otherwise reserved for serving
drinks. White women may not promenade between the early-morning tea
and the breakfast hour, decks being set aside at this time for officers and male
passengers in pajamas-it is understood that no black man dares present himself so informally clad.
Out to the anchored boat which has run up a quarantine flag and wheezed,
scuds the government doctor's launch. At one end white sailors gather for
inspection; at the other, black deck passengers and the Krus who, after the
loading and unloading is done, being discharged, will swagger home dressed
in their best, with paper linings of cigar-boxes folded and thrust into breast
pockets as colored handkerchiefs. Like water insects scurrying from every
direction, row-boats and canoes collect about the steamer, rowers sculling
against the tide.
Fresh fish, bananas, hand-woven Creole baskets, starving monkeys, puny
"Bush kittens," and moldy parrots with lusterless eyes are offered for sale;
also snake-skins, cigarette and tea tins covered with colored leather by Moslem craftsmen, native swords with leather scabbards (the blades are stamped
"Sheffield"), spears, elephant-hair bracelets, carved ebony elephants, and
other trinkets shipped from abroad or brought in peddlers' packs from other
parts of Africa. There is movement along the waterfront. Gangs of long

Sierra Leone,'/rthern '?PI o i/


67




shoremen make ready to handle outgoing and incoming freight. Kru women
and other blacks gather to welcome Kru men and deck passengers.
The quarantine flag drops. There is no yellow fever or bubonic plague. The
doctor returns and from the steamer comes the squawk and whimper of
windlasses.
Followed by two black porters carrying trunk and bags, the young man in
white walks rapidly down to the sea, evading the solicitations of two wildlooking blacks who since morning, moving in a cloud of flies, have hawked
the stinking carcass of a leopard, covered over with leaves, slung between
them on a pole. Without a backward glance the young man goes from Africa.
In the hinterland some sturdier fellow now buys palm kernels and sells
calico.
~^                       D A S H
B     EFORE me on the breakfast-table lies a dagger with a cruel curved
blade and an exquisite hilt of silver carved in Arabic designs, the
dagger of a Soussou chief.
The jaunt to the Soussou village yesterday had, despite its underlying commercial significance, the aspect of a family party. The Danish Consul loaned
his motor launch with its crew: a Creole skipper in too-correct yachting
attire, an engineer who kept head and shoulders cool above deck while two
urchins in the pit of the tiny engine-room-a plump Creole, one of those
munching children with puffed cheeks and pudgy legs, and a scrawny Bush
lad-tinkered with the motors. There were hampers of food, hampers of
beer-chemically treated for preservation in the tropics-and a large, neatly
wrapped package, in the custody of the trading firm's Moslem linguist. He
is one of those hundreds of faithful black men attached to business houses on
the Coast whose humble existence is a negation of persistent charges that
68


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black men are universally irresponsible, made by whites who wring their
hands and rant because nomads and pastoral folk with or without elementary
schooling cannot, within a few months, a few years, be transformed into
letter-perfect understudies for trained whites and inoculated over-night
with awe for twentieth century efficiency.
Accompanying the junior clerks and the local agent was the firm's representative out from England. Having been an underling himself, more than
a score of years before, he assumed a gently paternal manner and told the
youngsters how the trading establishment was once a small concern, founded
by his own father. Independent then of a coastwise combine which undermines and swallows up its little competitors, it had no complicated trade,
kept no perishable delicacies on hand for white residents, sold no shoes or
neckties, sold nothing by the yard; but dealt wholesale with native traders
and chiefs who paid in produce, in pepper, gold or ivory. Romance there was
and adventure, but slight knowledge of controlling tropical diseases. Therefore among his intimates many were laid in Freetown's cemetery, their names
graven upon stones or boards. Like others, he fell ill, but was nursed by a
black servant, who scorned the government doctor's remedies and fed him
noxious preparations furnished by a native herbalist. These, he believes, restored him.
I know two priests, an Irishman who has lived in West Africa for the past
thirty years and an Alsatian who has spent forty in a Liberian mission. They
both maintain that they were similarly saved from death by natives who gave
them herbs. And recently, a Frenchman, long a resident in his country's
African possessions, told me that among his friends those who submitted to
the care of temporary wives survived the recent scourge of yellow fever.
One hears much and believes much for which proof, owing to an imperfect
knowledge of the country and its inhabitants, does not exist. However, this
Englishman cherishes a real affection for black folk. And so long as his personal influence persists in this one unit of the stupendous commercial chain
no black man will be humiliated by cuffing or screamed at in the pseud69
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rages considered necessary to impress black subordinates. In the firm's
employ there is an Uncle Tom, a grizzled Creole, for twenty years the
"toffice boy."
Straddling the sides of the heaving launch, we dropped into canoes which
danced shorewards, and in the brief surcease between waves were carried to
the land astride the necks of half-grown black boys-a trying performance
for them and me, six feet tall and heavy.
High upon a promontory, flat as a table top, lies the Soussou village, its only
access an irregular path scaling the earthy cliff, crumbling beneath each step.
Perilously-shod feet slip-I crept upon all fours, while the unshod Soussou
women, carrying five gallon tins of water from a spring drizzling from the
cliff's precipitous front, walked up, walked down, like flies upon a wall, like
people on a plain. One junior clerk, looking back along the way he had come,
reeled into space and was caught by two black boys. His feet sore and infected
from the ravages of jiggers, the agent awaited the chief's hammock and four
carriers. An almost microscopic vermin-many whites examine their feet
daily with magnifying lenses-jiggers burrow into the fleshy parts of the
feet, depositing sacs of eggs which, if not carved out at once, hatch. Vigorously the newly hatched then burrow and propagate.
The Soussou folk, emigrants from the farthest hinterland and Moslems,
once notorious for their trade in captured pagans whom they sold as slaves,
have a mosque. But built by Creole workmen it is more Protestant than
Moorish. Within a mud-walled enclosure lives the chief, a man of arresting
dignity and force, majestic in appearance though a blinded eye mars his countenance. In a purple robe of cotton stuff and turban of twisted cloth he came
forth to greet his visitors, offering the shelter of an excellent guest-hut upon
the promontory's choicest site, an out-jutting point exposed on three sides to
the sea and blessed by every lazy breeze.
Was the chief in health? He was. Were his crops good? They were. Was
the handsome man-child at his feet one of many sons? Yes.
And had he received the money paid his man three days ago for a boat-load
70
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of palm-kernels and also the firm's lavish gift of sugar? Ah, no! The collector
never came from Freetown although boat and boatmen returned. With appropriate head-waggings and cluckings we condemned the miscreant. But
the Moslems politely concealed their feelings. And the chief, as if waiting,
gazed into space.
The linguist offered the neatly wrapped package, and the chief, recalled to
consciousness, surveyed a goodly gift of sugar, another of salt, and seven
yards of calico. For "dash," he had been waiting.
"Dash." This word embedded in native vocabularies from end to end of
the West Coast, spelled "dasj" in early chronicles, is attributed to the first
adventurers, Dutch, Spanish, or Portuguese, by differing schools of amateur
philologists. As a noun it signifies a gift which may be small, a few coppers,
a cast-off razor blade, old shoes; or large, amounting to a bribe. As a verb it
describes the act of giving. "Dash! Dash! Dash! Dash me, Massa! Dash
me, Missie!" This appeal, lusty on the part of menials, adroitly insinuated by
those who have achieved positions of trust, is undoubtedly a relic of the
period before foreign currency and wages, when favors and tasks were compensated with gifts, particularly by whites, and when those wishing to curry
favor paid in advance with tokens of regard. This business of giving survives;
and a gift, or the lack of one, oft-times begets complicated obligations.
The pleas of black folk-other than professional mendicants produced by
the Moslem social order or the diseased and destitute in seaports, estranged
from kinsmen or too far removed from their tribes to claim support-do not
partake of whimpering beggary Though curiously humble and quick to
accept a status of inferiority, blacks somehow retain withal an unconscious
dignity incompatible with servility. Firmly, as if entitled to share the whites'
greater prosperity, the demands of casual servitors are made.
Excepting those who have lived abroad-all cannot overcome mental attitudes of former years-none fathom, I am convinced, the irritation generated in whites by the yammering for "dash." Neither do they understand the
fact that whites, giving under compulsion or contemptuously, bemean re7'
I

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cipients. Nor have many learned the value of intangible rewards. For a black
man of American descent, a partially educated Liberian Customs Official,
having seen a white man fully dressed leap into the surf in order that he might
carry the wife of a visiting rubber magnate ashore, was convinced that this
man had pushed black boys aside in order to usurp their "dash." He asked
me confidentially what was given a white man under such circumstances.
When I replied that kindly acts were motivated by chivalry, by friendship,
by ordinary courtesy, and rewarded solely by appreciation or the doer's inner
satisfaction, he grew impatient, thinking that I hid the truth.
Because of his exalted position, "dash" is due a chief. And if, perchance,
his tribe sells coveted produce, such a gift is often beneficial to trade. Contentedly the Soussou surveyed the sugar, salt, and calico, things which on
the morrow his wives could barter or sell advantageously. His pleasure being
evident, the agent now tactfully interposed the hope that in the future Soussous would keep their shipments of palm-kernels dry; for the last load had
been wet, perhaps with rain (there was no rain), perhaps with spray, and wet
kernels weighing twice as much as dry would not be bought again.
Far vistas claimed the chief's meditative attention. And then from its
sheath beneath his robe he drew a dagger, asking that we examine it. A cruel
curve the short blade had, but the silver hilt was exquisitely engraved with
Arabic designs. Hereafter no Soussou messenger who could not produce this
dagger was to be paid anything. As to the palm-kernels-they would be dry.
West Africa is unfavorable to picnics. There are too many onlookers and
too much insect life. And on this occasion, the hampers having been exposed
since early morning to the sun, the sandwiches made with canned fish and
packed in tin boxes were already putrefying from heat. Sweet biscuits and
tepid beer we had for lunch; but the view on every hand was charming.
The chief, after an interval, reappeared, riding upon a small white horse.
Upon this docile steed, led by an attendant, he and each junior clerk were, in
turn, photographed. One after another the members of the party rode like
children in a pleasure park.
72
0.( A.e




Before our gingerly descent began-the agent swinging in a hammock
between four strapping men, the dizzy clerk sustained on either side- the
chief, in return for sugar, salt and calico, bestowed upon the trading firm one
live chicken, six limes, one dozen eggs.


It is Monday. I am awakened by the linguist who visits our modest abode,
an empty building which, to be free of the hotel, we have rented for a temporary camp. As a contribution from the representative, the agent, and the
junior clerks, he brings the chicken, now dead and denuded of its feathers.
Shortly afterwards there comes another knocking at the garden gate and the
aged Creole "office boy" arrives bearing the limes and eggs, apologizing because the linguist had overlooked them.
I have not breakfasted; and yet a third arrives. Ignoring all barriers, the
gate, the door, a handsome black in embroidered robe and embroidered cap,
a man whom I have never seen before, enters our living quarters.
He speaks no English; but slipping off his sandals kneels, touching outspread slender fingers and forehead to the floor, then rising with a gesture,
delicate and graceful, he draws forth the dagger!
Stupefied, my early morning mmd filled with frayed thoughts from yesterday and half-memories of intervening dreams, I stare at the cruel blade,
at the exquisite hilt, while my visitor waits expectantly in a rocking chair,
slightly timorous of its peculiar bucking motion. Then everything is clear.
Dash!
Coming to town, this elegant courtier, this princely gentleman, discovered-news travels quickly from black to black-that we, my husband and
myself, who gave his chief nothing yesterday, today have everything! From
the breakfast table I take a tall unopened jar of preserved strawberries, imported and therefore an extravagance.
A pleased smile, a gleam of flawless teeth. The dagger is sheathed. A bow,
the sandals are slipped on, the nameless visitor is gone.
I spread my chilly toast with butter from a can.
73




Sierra Leone
Northern 'Province


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THIERE IS DRIUMMING
HE sky, by day sun-bleached and colorless as tin-colorless as the
"pan" roof of the lone Swiss trader's shack which a tornado, sweeping between the rocky buttes during the rainy season, flicked askew
-is a dome of quick-silver tonight across which a full moon slips. Shadows
are illumined by pockets of light and moonlight robs my unshuttered bedroom of privacy. Head-high spears of elephant grass-held to be a sign of
the desert's slow advance westward and the end of fertility-are steel-tipped
with light. Seeping through the porous thatch, the smoke of indoor fires
enshrouds Kamabai in mist, blue in the moonlight and through which the
houses are haycocks in a dissolving view. The Bush paths, the countless trails,
spun by black feet between interior and sea, village and village, are white
where they emerge from the dark of forests. On such a glittering night as this
black folk are filled with ecstasy. But a white man whom I know cowers m
Nigeria. Fearful of the sun by day, as most whites are, he wears on such a
moonlight night as this his cork sun-helmet lest reflected rays addle his brain,
unfitting him for labors as Christian missionary to the Moslem Hausas and
the naked pagans of the Jos plateau.
And there is drumming tonight.
Somewhere, everywhere, always-there is drumming. It is abolished by
law in fretful coast communities where frictions exist between white and
black, between Europeanized blacks and Bush folk; for few Europeans can
brook hot, white nights with booming pulses or black nights when drumbeats intensify the wearying beat of rain. And, too, it is maintained that reversion to native recreations without the discipline of clans and chiefs is
disastrous to the partially individualized. Nevertheless, softly as guitars are
strummed, stealthy palms beat upon kerosene cans or wooden boxes. Hands
clapped in unison produce a faint thunder. And women milling corn or rice,
77
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cassava or yams, syncopating the blows of heavy wooden clubs, the pestles,
with sly raps upon wooden mortars' rims, extemporize rhythms which set
young folk swaying. In Kamabai, it seems, Biriwa Limbas drum continuously.
Last week the virgins were "poured out." The adolescent girls with white
&loths about their kerchiefed heads, graduated from the puberty rites, members of the tribal Bundu Society, accompanied by a woman drummer with
feather-decorated drum and their teachers-two "wise women" dressed as
men-paraded through this and other villages, collecting gifts. Their young
bodies dripping with oil, throats and wrists adorned with new beads, wrapped
in new cloths, these eligibles displayed their charms, undulating amorously;
while an ancient widow, deaf, but able as a man and kindly treated by the
villagers (for she is without kin), undulated in a mimetic dance prophetic
of pleasures awaiting future lovers.
It is the dry season here. From the desert a spent wind, the harmattan,
drifts over the Biriwa Limbas' countryside, relieving the air somewhat of
its depressing humidity. Invisible particles of sand veil the distances, so
that the sun, a fuming red, sets prematurely and rises tardily, in haze. Subtly
rolling into a cloud, dust hides the coastline from the sea. When my husband
and I traveled from the Canary Islands on a "tramp," the shores of Senegal
remained invisible behind a seamless dun curtain. Where the dull sky began
and a duller sea, slithering and unbroken save where porpoises leapt to some
secret music, ended, there was no horizon.
At this period fewer boatmen drown, and Krus, returning home, need not
spend their nights bewailing dead comrades, drumming and dancing, circling and singing, as I once heard them upon the sands of Monrovia. Before
a dead man's house they wheeled and sang the whole night long:
"Ole Johnson, Ole Johnson;
We, your friends, are lonely.
Ole Johnson."
Where swamps are, receding waters further expose reptilian roots of
water-sated mangroves. Pools dry up. From the village of Kamabai few
78


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women-folk go out to fish with their small round fibre nets, taboo for men.
The sharp brusque touch of the hot air is discomfiting to black flesh which
dries and cracks unless lavishly oiled. The people long for the vaporous stews
of the rainy season when temperatures do not shift so cruelly Nights are
now often twenty and thirty degrees colder than the day, a tragedy for folk
without blankets, who sleep in cotton cloths or no cloths at all. Many cough.
The naked babes are chapped; their noses run.
A few Biriwa Limba men work intermittently but without manifesting
enthusiasm. Employed by the Swiss trader as porters, some carry jute bags of
produce weighing two hundred pounds to the railroad's freight terminal, a
distance of one mile, receiving sixpence for each trip. Two hundred pounds!
No man is able to pick up his load alone, and so grunting, protesting companions must lift it to his head; neck muscles bulge, in great globules sweat bursts
from brows, spines seem to telescope perceptibly. The Swiss laments that
Limba men are weaklings, for on the Gold Coast he has known Fantis to carry
loads exceeding these by fifty and one hundred pounds. Working industriously for him, a porter can earn two shillings daily-a large wage; but few
return two days successively. What connection there is between years of
carrying heavy burdens and sudden death (attributed by blacks to poisoning) is not known. Only the other evening, his work on the road done, a
young laborer lay down and died without a word, a groan. A spell was cast
upon him, some said; while others held that he had been poisoned by an enemy
Prior to their domestic service our cook and "boy" carried so many heavy
loads-they are not twenty-that their necks now almost equal their heads
in girth.
Where fifty men or more widen a Bush path into a road so that produce
brought from further inland by porters walking four days can be collected
instead by motor lorries, there is drumming. This labor is not "forced" in
the old cruel sense-not precisely. The men were recruited by their chiefs in
response to demands made by the government. The chiefs had no alternative,
the men dare not disobey their patriarchs. Compensated individually-a
79,-) yc'1,~ ~
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percentage of their earnings will later be taken from them by head-men and
chiefs-they are also housed and fed; but their indifference to the job is comically apparent. The road they build benefits Moslem tribes which in the past
attempted to enslave their forefathers. Frantic spurts of activity followed
by complete repose are incited by a drummer-it is usual to incite black gang
labor m this manner-whose thumping is accompanied by a jangling obbligato supplied by bits of metal strung together upon upright sticks attached to
the drum beaten with flat hands. When the white boss appears in the distance
on his motor-cycle, the drummer thumps, workers shovel uproariously.
The African houses of clay, of mud-and-wattles, of mud, or of bark strips
cleverly interlaced; roofed with grass, with mud, with palms or braided
banana leaves-rise, as do the gigantic Gothic ant-hills, from their environment. Two houses are being constructed nearby Into wooden skeletons of
outer walls-as in the Temne country, houses are circular and rarely have partitions-men and boys squeeze mud balls, mud dumplings. When these dry
the women of the families will apply the exterior and interior finish, coats of
clayey mud with cow-dung as a binder. The framework of the conical roofs,
made separately, will be set in place and thatched by men with grass brought
in great sheaves from the savannahs, the peaks capped with inverted cans or
beer-bottles. Rakish ornaments or charms, I thought these articles, until I
learned that they keep rain from the hearts of ridgepoles, retarding rot.
The making of a house appears a simple task, and yet Kamabai has not
enough; its dwellings, not more than twenty, seethe and overflow Refreshing privacy is apparently not necessary to blacks, still these houses contain an
unusual number of occupants. The crowding is not, I am told, the result of
excessive sociability, but of a common desire to evade taxation by the government. With paying tribute all tribalized people are familiar. Nevertheless,
when taxed by alien rules theroften develop a reluctance combined with
cunning. Tales are current of how whole villages in the French Cameroon,
oppressed by native tax-collectors representing the white government, vanish, melt out of sight. Singly, men go away and therefore are not missed. And


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then one day the houses which were filled with life are found to be abandoned
cocoons from which people and possessions are gone. Somewhere within
the jungle, lost to overseers, lost to the government, a new village has been
founded. In this fashion populations with a grievance cross borders, exchanging one set of rulers for another. And locally, households being taxed,
their numbers tend to shrink mysteriously.
The power of their passive resistance, the only resistance left them, is little
suspected by blacks. "We are like water," says Jeff Faulkner, formerly an
American, the ablest and most picturesque figure in present-day Liberia,
where he has lived for thirty years. "Like water we trickle between the white
man's hands. He seeks to hold us, he interferes, but cannot foresee the direction in which black folk will flow."
Change is presaged here by the activities of two lads of "royal" blood, son
and nephew of the Paramount Chief. According to instructions from the
government which they, being less than half-educated, can scarcely read,
they travel the countryside over counting not households but adult tribesmen, said to number twelve thousand. Struggling with sums, they sit after
each excursion with the official papers laid upon the outspread roots of the
"cotton" tree which, when covered over with beautiful homespuns of the
chief, form a throne upon which he reclines during tribal festivities or palavers too unimportant for adjournment to the palaver house, beneath the
dirt floor of which his predecessor lies buried. Inadequacies of education have
not prevented the nephew from perusing mail-order catalagues, widely circulated on the West Coast; on this important mission he wears a blue broadcloth coat with velvet collar and lapels, suited to the leader of a band or
minstrel show. The sleeves, six inches longer than his arms, are rolled back, and
against his ankles long tails flap. But the brass buttons glow.
It is the dry season, the time for dancing right A.d day, for honoring those
a second time who died during the wet season, such a second mourning being
called in Creole English "a waily " The past harvest was excellent, and careless of the future some sell rice to the Swiss, though before the season ends


8i




many who sell will be buying, paying more than they now receive, or doing
without. From time to time, according to their mood, men clear next season's
farms with fires, burning away grass, underbrush and trees, sweetening the
earth with ash and charcoal. Deplored by whites this age-old practice is, for
every palm-oil tree thus recklessly annihilated lessens a district's wealth.
Diving into the charred and smouldering wastes, vultures with rusty
wings and cadaverous naked pates which go white, go pink, seize singed but
living snakes and lizards. Hyenas, their hunting grounds laid bare, rage and
scream at night, prowling about the mud bungalow which we have rented
from a missionary gone temporarily to another field. In the precincts of the
village there is back-firing, prevention against unexpected Bush conflagrations which so quickly reduce a grass-roofed settlement to ruin. And our
house, beneath a rain of smuts and cinders, stands as in a furnace, walled off
by terrifying flames which make the heat, already intense, unbearable.
Tonight when the moon rose, radiantly outlining the craggy bulk of
Kamabai's sheltering butte, drumming began. But the chief's drum is not
rolled, a foreign bass drum with a shallow tone, presented by the American
missionary, replacing his "tom-tom" with the cavernous voice. Neither is
it the drumming of three tatterdemalions, always tipsy, who came last week
and drummed three days and nights while all except the very old and infants
danced. "Greeters," such visitors are called in Creole; and these had made
their way two hundred miles on foot, passing from village to village, "greeting" chiefs and paying compliments, drumming for food, for palm-wine,
while populations danced. Upon two imported drums, a bass and snare, and
an affair of wood and skins, they beat. Tonight the sounds, high-pitched,
are clear as the clear moonlight. A duet of rhythms is played with sticks upon
two cylinders of wood, crudely fashioned in the form of human beingsweather-beaten dolls, tall as three-year-old children. I came upon them
propped against a tree outside the village in a copse. And once before I heard
them played upon by an enraged householder who, rapping out a curse,
damned an unknown robber.
82


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After the first phrase, a series of muffled crashes in the kitchen betrays a
collapse of order. Chuckling and giggling softly, cook and "boy," hastening
the dinner's preparation, collide, impeding one another. Though not Limbas,
these two, as Temnes, members of an allied tribe, are always welcome in the
village, though they are Christians. That is, they go to prayers daily and twice
on Sunday attend chapel, meekly followed by their wives discreetly covered
from chins to ankles; and yet Mano, the cook, has an incurably pagan look,
and he slaughters the daily chicken as if offering a sacrifice. Laying the creature breast down upon the ground, he spreads wide the wings, and straddling,
pins their tips beneath his feet; snapping the brittle legs like toothpicks between his fingers, he then pulls back the head, cutting the throat, meanwhile
mumbling a singsong, his eyes fixed upon blood curdling the dust. He will not
tell me what he sings, pretending not to understand my questioning. That he
invokes the good offices of some mischievous spirit, I surmise; for he is a rascal.
Yesterday, having shown me a gangling chicken, a stringy, emaciated fowl
purchased in the village, he later reported its disappearance, accusing the
elderly Creole gardener of its theft. The hubbub was fearful. I have evidence
that Mano resold his bargain. And Boomba, the "boy," loyal to his tribesman, at the same time begs me privately to lock our luggage.
Christians, these two; therefore pledged to monogamy, a state difficult
where polygamy is customary. Boomba's monogamy I find more convincing. Work finished, he is content at home, while Mano, spending every idle
hour away, returns from the village with a pleased, a secretive and closed
look. The wife he has was not chosen; a woman twice his age, she came and
"tsat down to him." A Lrimba from some far-off village, widowed and free,
she appeared upon his doorstep-this was her privilege-offering herself as
wife or concubine. A thrifty farmer, she serves him tirelessly And her unfortunate barrenness has been remedied by the adoption of a Temne child.
But Mano remains away from home.
On the other hand, Boomba's delight in his wife and their three children is
evident, though only the infant daughter, a delightful tender thing, actually
83


ol E R A
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belongs to him. Of the small sons, one was taken from the home of a less fortunate relative, the other is his wife's by a former husband from whom, when
he was brutal, she was divorced by flight. Boomba's leisure is spent m sewing,
this, like serving whites, being exclusively a male pursuit. Creole Mammys
and the sophisticated Fanti women of the Gold Coast sew, but black men
usually assume the craft too highly skilled for black females.
Indifference upon the part of young ladies who know that when wed they
will have their simple garments cut and sewn by black men tailors-usually
Moslems, seated with sewing-machines before the shops of Syrians or other
traders-often confronts sewing-teachers of mission schools. How he tried
to "improve" a temporary Temne wife (procured by his house-boy from her
parents for two years, the period of his service with a British firm) was confided by an educated Greek with much amusement as we leaned upon a ship's
rail at night watching festoons of phosphorescence wreathing the boat's prow
He sent her to a mission day-school where she learned to mend, and among
other things to make pillow-cases. Of these she embroidered one for him,
one for herself, with mottoes in red letters: "God is Love"; and "Jesus
Loves Me," demanding explanation of the texts.
Boomba does not embroider as yet, though many Moslem men do, spending
a month decorating a gown with Arabic designs and a customer's family tree
in Arabic script. For the baby he makes ruffled frocks, for the boys, loose
knee-length shirts, and for his wife he recently completed a neatly hemmed
wrap-around and sleeveless blouse with fitted yoke. From cloth formerly
white but, having been tie-dyed by the local Hausa woman in the strangers'
quarter of Kamabai, covered now with a shattered design of indigo blue, this
costume was devised.
That Hausa woman! Dubiously, the missionary, our landlord, views her,
deploring her influence upon pagan women. They are passive, docile, and
upon their submissiveness the stability of the pagan social order rests. But
this stranger, high-spirited, a virago, is a feminist. Five dollars, an English
pound, she paid in Zaria, Nigeria, as apprentice to a dyer. Moving from place
84
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to place, she is economically independent. And well does scandalized Kamabai know that her husband-his most serious occupation, though he does
butchering, seems to be praying within the circle of white stones which forms
his private mosque-when in need of cash must ask her; beg a woman, implore a wife, for money! Her caustic responses are audible to all. Shyly,
Limba matrons hover beyond the high stockade behind which, like a witch,
this tall, proud female with gold rings in her ears dips cloth into dye-pots,
into strange concoctions simmering above low-burning fires. Only a white
man's house-boy, a rich man, or a chief can afford a cloth dyed to order.
Tonight, Boomba, the sedate, the dependable, the smiling (his shining
teeth are so strong that, scorning a bottle opener, he tears the tin caps off
bottles with them), is a youth with glittering eyes and twittering nerves.
From his tremulous fingers knives and forks slip; and he slams doors. The
dulcet note of flute or horn, floating from butte to butte, heard again from
the lowland, unnerves him. As if incapable of motion, he stands stock-still.
In the kitchen Mano emits an excited laugh. Again the note sounds. Then
the drums, as if listening, are mute. A silence. The drums call. The eerie
piping answers. And the drums again are mute.
Who drums? Who pipes?
This I ask a second time, and then a third, before Boomba, ever evasive
when questioned about pagan life, answers. From his muddled English I
pluck out the information that the people of Kamabai call upon their tribal
"Devil"- the name which whites and Creoles have fastened upon any pagan
magic maker, herbalist, tribal oracle, or Medicine Man-to dance m this
shining moonlit world. The drums, the weatherbeaten dolls, silvery from rain
and sun, are used only by members of the Limba's Bon-bom Society, by men
who as boys were initiated by the tribal Devil, taught lore peculiar to the
tribe, to their sex, and circumcised.
The Limbas' Devil has passed this way by day, clad in skins, across his chest
a cow's horn filled (so Boomba says) with poisons so potent that sprinkled
upon a Bush path, they kill the barefooted; administered in food or drink
I!
85                                                /4
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they send those who partake to sleep never to wake. This Devil, moreover,
communicates with the dead, makes charms, brews love potions, weaves spells.
How is it that this Devil, piping eerily, replies from hill, from valley, from
the kitchen yard?
A disembodied spirit for the nonce, he wings playfully where he wills,
blowing a horn, teasing those who call.
Is this credible? Do these two lads, Christians, who make bread with imported yeast, use sewing-machines and take quinine when feverish, believe?
There is no answer Tired of footless questioning, they have cut short the
interview, departing upon velvet feet.
If my search for knowledge m Africa is sincere, I certainly must follow.
The people of Kamabai are hospitable. But from immediate action I am prevented by that lethargy besetting whites at the tropical day's end. Limp from
heat my body is, my mind dull from a ceaseless effort to penetrate that which
is wholly unfamiliar and to which I have no clues. I am incapable of effort.
I wait; after a brief rest I will rise and go forth into the night.
I woke once to find the shining world grown dim, but the drumming, accompanied by song, continuing.
And now the sun rises curtly, inflaming the sky. The drums are silent. As
if reluctant to depart, the Devil, prolonging each dulcet note, pipes from the
kitchenyard, the valley, the hill. There is no other sound save Mano's key
grinding as he unlocks the cook-house door.
All night long, without stopping, cook and "boy" danced with the tribal
Devil. Then they bathed and without resting came to work, moving lightly
as if unwearied. I tell of how I planned to follow, but was a sluggard. From
some private exaltation, this announcement rouses Boomba; he eyes me
solemnly. The dance, I learn, was one for men, the dancing such as is never
beheld by woman, girl, or uncircumcised man-child. Upon a spying female
-black or white-the Devil would invoke a curse so baleful that immediately her nose would wither and drop off!
I missed the show; but my nose, a rather decent one, remains intact.


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JYADAJYIE HAS COTJRAGIL
A CLOUD distended with rain which never fell sagged last night between earth and sky, pressing upon the tall tree-tops. Within the
-forest the imprisoned air, motionless, smelled of decay, smelled of
kerosene from the lantern set upon the ground to frighten wild things away.
A slime of mould crept over luggage straps and shoes. And before the tent's
opening, twisted, damp, night-colored toadstools, as if rooted in water,
sprang mysteriously from the barren yellow clay-the grassless floor of the
forest clearing, bared of every refuge for snake or scorpion.
From the rough-hewn house which has two rooms-one small and the
other smaller-comes Madame into the steamy air of dawn, her face wan,
and already moist with perspiration. She is a drawing-room lady; a blonde
porcelain lady in white slippers and rose-colored frock, followed by a black
lad with bushy hair, small pointed ears set high upon his head. He wears
nothing except a home-spun strip and a rag about one leg above the ankle.
Madame comes to count and feed the chickens. Last night twenty-one were
crowded into two dome-shaped wicker cages. Neither human nor serpent having got at them, there are twenty-one. Yard-boy is joined by
house-boy: they eye the yellow kernels of dried corn scattering from the
pretty, brittle fingers of their mistress. It is the food eaten by their people,
and a shortage threatens. The rains are overdue; the planting therefore delayed. Madame is trim. But it is with a conscious effort that her drooping
shoulders are thrust back. Copied from a Paris mail-order catalogue, her
frock is simple and smart. Yet, besides her husband, there is none to observe,
none to criticize, should she be lax; except, perchance, the almost-white Senegambian, the Station Master; Merno, plantation foreman; or the Syrian.
The educated mulatto keeps to himself. The foreman, the village chief's
eldest son, is an ex-conscript who has visited Europe. But returning to the
89


l




Bush, his military service ended, he discarded the horizon-blue and wears a
cotton mantle of orange calico, draped like those of the Gold Coast majestic
Ashanti and Fanti men, flung across one naked shoulder like a Roman toga.
His boulevardier's sophistication, glib French and foreign walking stick,
twirled as he saunters through the jungle, set him apart. And a smouldering
in his large black eyes, a tightening of cheek-line and chin, forbid his being
addressed-by me, at least-as "boy." A pagan "prince" has risen above
white patronage; but black, he is entitled to no opinions concerning Madame.
Conscripted, shipped away for scientific instruction in organized killing,
he was forced to abandon a bevy of young wives. That they would chastely
pine was not expected. Dispersed and wed to other men, they chaff him on
the village streets. Of three new brides, the First Wife is no more than fifteen, half his age, a winsome, long-legged child whose undeveloped figure
provokes ribaldry within the family circle. Once, lest I miss a jest's significance, she lifted up her cotton tunic so that I might see her unformed breasts;
at which all about us-men, women, and babes-laughed. Pagan women,
except the worldly among the Krus, appear more concerned with contours
than countenances. I have watched adolescent girls in other places massage
their half-formed breasts with palm oil hour after hour, as if modelling clay.
This chit of a matron, flat-chested and narrow-hipped, is competent and
strong. As First Wife, it is she who sees that the square compound surrounded by long rectangular buildings roofed with palm fronds is swept,
sees that the dried corn and plantains are ground, the wood-pile replenished.
When an ordinary load is brought to this clearing it is she who is the porter,
following behind her lord and master, though he is muscled like a boxer. Setting her burden down, she idles, givmg Madame sidelong, appraising glances
until dismissed. Today her exotic beauty is enhanced by unbound hair, its
luxuriant disorder a sign of grief; for she honors the memory of an uncle
whose death in another village was reported yesterday
In a native house one hundred yards away, bordering upon the Bush path
which skirts the clearing, plunging then into the jungle, lives Madame's
(A -,                                              90


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Syrian neighbor, very young and a dealer in kola nuts. Lounging in a skewing steamer-chair before his doorway, he awaits caravans of blacks with nuts
purchased from shy forest peoples by cannier Moslems. Packed into porous
palm-leaf baskets lined with yam leaves, these are shipped by rail to Syrians,
relatives and friends, traders of the inland settlement. Transferred to the
sea-coast by camions, or in boats traversing the lagoons, they again reach relatives and friends, and forwarded to fellow countrymen in Dakar, are finally
sold-a portion reach the European market and many Syrians use them-to
nomad folk who chew them as a stimulant during desert treks.
Destitute, the average Syrian appears upon his arrival-often carrying
citizenship papers from the United States -having traveled steerage or
shared the congested lower deck with black passengers and black labor,
sleeping in a folding chair beneath the sky or, when it rains, beneath a canvas
canopy raised above a battened hatch. At once local police demand a cash
deposit to insure his deportation, sick or indigent; a guarantee of departure
imposed now upon every traveler, although, sotto voce, police declare its
purpose is to embarrass Syrians whose commercial competition is undesired.
Too, ancestral records are required. (Before I reach the Congo, my age, the
obscure Washington town where I was born, my mother's maiden name,
will be scrawled along the whole West Coast.) And here visitors who remain beyond six weeks must produce "judicial records" signed by home
police; for some- this fact is not freely discussed-remain because formerly their lives were far from blameless. If a Syrian has no money, he has
relatives or fellow countrymen who furnish funds, rescuing him with his
dilapidated deck-chair, lunch-basket and shabby box.
This nearby Syrian is a newcomer Attended by a Soudanese couple, he
lives as poorly as do the local blacks. His only intimates are Moslem traders
wearing fine white embroidered robes bought in the great market of walled
Kano, the Moslem city of Nigeria. And upon their index fingers or thumbs
are heavy circlets of silver. It is not for this man's good estimation that
Madame grooms herself; for what this Syrian thinks is negligible. Where


9I




Anglo-Saxons dominate there is no shilly-shallying. Asiatic. Yellow. With
blacks, the Syrian is thrust beyond the social pale. But here he occupies a
vague middle-ground between the races.
Clinging to the symbols of a former life, Madame wages a stubborn battle
against the tropics which vanquish those who stay too long, reducing them to
an indifference embracing everything. Three hours from here by rail she has
a friend who, hungering for a sight of white compatriots, comes from her
plantation home and scans each passing train. Once a woman of delicacy,
she now wears a sun-helmet frayed and soiled, sabots on bare feet, and is
covered only by a shabby frock-a fact too evident. Seven years it is since
Madame, a bride, bade farewell to France, to that which gave her pleasure:
art galleries, theatres, book-stalls along the Seine; visits to the milliner, the
modiste. The long stay, unbroken by any holiday, was unforeseen, as was the
removal from a populous settlement to this lonely clearing walled in by ferns
taller than saplings, by trees from which grey tentacles and streamers of moss
descend, the lush whole knit together by a vine-like palm. When she was married, her husband, a colonial, was employed in the coastwise mahogany trade.
Every year toward the dry season's end, white men-formerly there were
many, concession hunters and also buyers from abroad-commanding blacks
procured wholesale from chiefs, ravage the forests, wrenching out the trees,
choosing the finest, abandoning the less good. The logs, lashed together into
rafts upon which black workmen meanwhile live, are floated downstream
when rivers fill with rain. Towed through mazes of mangrove swamps and
endless lagoons, crossing sand-bars, they arrive alongside cargo boats where,
one by one, the unleashed logs are hoisted aboard. Forest giants, lost in this
last process, strew the coast-playgrounds for crabs, couches for loitering
fisherfolk. Abroad and in America fashions in veneered furniture changed;
the demand for mahogany diminished suddenly. This year the buyers are so
few that in tawdry waterfront cafes of the seaport, proprietors are dolorous,
being unhappily aware that when the logs are out and the buyers return to
"civilization," there will be no reckless celebrations as in bygone years.


92




Like others, Madame and her husband begin anew. Some, having no capital on hand, are far less fortunate. By arrangement with the government
and with Merno's father, one square mile of forest already gutted of the
finest trees, its wounds half-hidden by chaotic growth, has been acquired for
planting. Bound up together are the fortunes of the fragile porcelain lady,
the sturdy pioneer, the pagan "-royal," who wears a straw hat, an aged waistcoat, a skirt of calico-and Merno, the Bush sophisticate. There can be no
coffee and cocoa plantation unless labor is recruited by the chief. And this
he will do, for he grows impoverished. His power is undermined by the village catechist, now the more prosperous, who minds the mud chapel, wears
a frock-coat, rides a bright new bicycle and sells embossed aluminum amulets at five francs each (twenty-five cents) -at best a laborer usually receives five cents a day-upon which appear portraits of Mary and the Holy
Child. When the mahogany boom was at its height, the chief, sending forth
laborers, prospered mightily. Then conscription reduced his men, and later
in this area cutting ceased. In time he will requisition workers, but Madame
and her husband must wait until the rains begin, until the village planting is
completed. Meanwhile, Merno, hired as foreman, controls the household
servants except a Soudanese and a Gold Coast carpenter who will build the
future bungalow The yard-boy he brought from a village in the hinterland;
and the house-boy, over-muscled for finicky indoor tasks, is the son of parents held in bondage by the chief.
When Madame smiles, apologetic finger-tips fly to her lips. For it is seven
years since she visited a dentist. Few West Coast communities support a
dentist. To relieve a toothache there is oil of cloves, whisky and the forceps
of a medical missionary, of the government doctor, or of his wife, who may
have obtained a cursory training for such emergencies. Large ports occasionally attract itinerant professionals with equipment of the archaic footpower type, among them quaint characters who specialize in gold teeth
for those natives who can afford this ornamentation. And there are the
doctors of passing ships.
93


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The cargo steamer upon which my husband and I reached this colony was
accosted, as it anchored off a stark palm-fringed coast, by a black boy in a
dug-out, a curled dry leaf tossing perilously upon the tide. He begged the
ship's doctor to come ashore and pull the aching tooth of his master-also a
doctor, but a landlubber who, fearing the surf, waited in his red-tiled villa
among slanting palms and feathery casuarina trees. A surf-boat capsized;
black oarsmen swam in the shark-infested waters. The ship's doctor replied
that when the Gulf of Guinea calmed he would bring his forceps to the land.
The day was guileless, the air still. The sun shone upon a sea heaving and
shivering as if possessed. At such a time the gangway-ladder becomes useless.
The disembarking passenger is proffered a Mammy-chair, a box wherein two
can sit, caught up from the deck with hook-and-tackle, swung up and out
into space, as cargo is, then lowered into a boat-if the accord between a halfgrown Kru at the windlass, black bo's'n, white mate and local boatman of
some other breed is complete. There is an alternative: the monkey-ladder of
dangling ropes against the ship's side from which one must drop at the precise
moment when the ocean swell boosts up canoe or rowboat. I chose the ladder.
No sport requires steadier nerves than displayed by Lahous, loading and
unloading freight. Finely articulated ebony men with scarlet cloths about
their middles, long torsos and straight backs, they outstrip the raggle-taggle
Krus, who are not bettered by their roving life. Of these men there were more
than one hundred, of whom not one was less than six feet tall; ten oarsmen
to each boat with a helmsman erect, bearing upon a long oar, the only rudder.
No direct course between land and steamer, the distance of more than one
half mile, was possible. Buffeted, beaten back, out-going boats, filled with
palm kernels, with plassava (from which kitchen brushes in America are
made) advanced obliquely. Loaded almost exclusively with "trade" Vermouth-one Dutch boat upon which I traveled carried seven-thousand
dozen bottles of "trade" gin for blacks, manufactured in Holland and consigned to the Gold Coast-the inbound boats cruised indolently, waiting
behind the tumult until a look-out whistled from a tree. At this signal, the
94


a




oarsmen, seated on the gunwales, burst into full-throated song. Flawless
machinery they became, their oiled arms shining pistons. Down; back; up.
The short-handled, carved and painted paddles were dug into the water, the
accents of the chantey coming, as in Kru songs, not upon the strokes but immediately after. In a mad race, abreast a wave, the boats rode, and were
beached with fearful velocity. In this fashion I reached the shore, was seized
with incredible swiftness and set down as the next wave boomed and crashed,
whipping about my ankles, covering my feet with spume.
In the past, such sea-folk, 'tis said, propitiated the rapacious sea with human sacrifice. To the waves, a new-born man-child was fed annually No
lives were lost on this occasion; but, time after time, the heavy Europeanmade boats were thrown end over end, the waves dotted with the heads of
men, littered with paddles and lost cargoes. And sometimes a shuddering
boat, relieved of rowers, righted, and was carried straight and true upon a
wave with only the helmsman upright and rigid in his place.
At dusk the freighter steamed away, the doctor never having been ashore.
A problem more immediate than dentistry occupies Madame this morning,
bringing the grave look to her eyes. The fowls fed, she gives the young Soudanese, her cook, water for the breakfast coffee, poured without waste from
one of two canteens. These hang within a storeroom, an open wing of the
small house surrounded on every side by chicken-wire, fine-meshed, to thwart
cunning fingers of predatory folk whose hunting instincts, curiosity and
newly roused desires exceed awareness of private property's sanctity. Returning the canteen to a hook upon the wall, Madame snaps the padlock
shut upon the door.
Merno brings ill news. The nearly-white Station Master says that his rainbarrel-like those at three corners of the house into which Madame peers as
if anticipating a miracle is dry. Already for many days the only drinking
water available has been purchased in small quantities from the railroad station, while that drawn from a well, diluted yellow mud, has been fit only for
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sanitary purposes. Of this Madame gives a scant portion to the fowls, bidding
the yard-boy recover the remaining drops.
After breakfast coffee, the search begins. The village folk are dry-lipped,
hot-eyed. With spindle-shanked long haired sheep at their heels, a group
stands about the well, dug under government supervision in anticipation of
this annual water shortage at the dry season's end, common to areas where
there are neither rivers nor lagoons. Hauled from the well's pit, a man exhibits an empty bucket. Without comment, trailed by the bleating animals,
the watchers listlessly depart. Of the three or four hundred people, including
Moslem strangers, many, very many, wear rags or leaves bound round one or
the other ankle. Having observed the yard-boy in his misery, I know that
each makeshift bandage conceals a Guinea worm, developed from a minute
crustacean taken in muddy drinking water. Due to some whim this serpentine horror chooses the flesh above the ankle for its egress. How its departure
can be hastened with the minimum of pain, Western scientists know; but the
simple person of the Bush, suffering cruelly, pulls forth the worm, a live
white string exceeding one foot in length, with gentle fingers, a fraction of an
inch each time, careful not to kill the creature lest its broken carcass fester.
There is little activity Beneath a wide-spread bread-fruit tree is the
market where, sprawling upon a mahogany log, men chuckle at a returned
soldier in tattered uniform and service cap, large toes protruding from his
boots, who twangs the raffia strings of a harp, singing and posturing lewdly
before tickled crones, the traders, seated upon the ground. For their amusement they pay from stores arranged upon squares of white cloth, rewarding
him with pinches of powdered chewing tobacco, kola nuts and salt. Tanning
the hide of an antelope, a man dips the skin into an infusion of herbs. "Was
the animal killed recently?" It was. A look passes from Madame to Memo.
The mulatto Station Master is polite; but he has no water. Passing this
way tomorrow, the bi-weekly train will bring bottled waters from Europe,
spring water already stale and often disintegrated from the heat-if thirsty
whites along the line have not already purchased the buffet's stock.
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The catechist apologizes profusely for an antique coat, green on the seams:
mourning for a wife who died recently, he may not yet wear his good one.
Thrice he rides his bicycle around the chapel; and afterwards a buxom girl,
his consolation, serves tepid beer in grimy cups and sticky glasses. In the
hearty laughter of the gathered crowd he joins good-naturedly when his
naked son, a child of five or six, having imbibed deeply from the woman's cup,
sways, then flopping bonelessly upon the dirt floor, lies in a drunken stupor.
Where Madame can find clean water, the catechist does not know; but the
villagers depend, he says, upon muddy pools some miles away.... A slender
Moslem woman seated in the shade gazes with lustrous adoring eyes upon her
month-old babe. When I fondle the mite, laying my cheek against its cool,
satiny flesh, she offers me a velvet blouse, certainly her best, so that my khaki
cannot be soiled. The Moslem infant is like any other, soft, absurdly little and
appealing in its helplessness; but Madame stands aloof.
Alone, in a courtyard's center, is a dwarfed figure, a little wooden man,
an image representing one who died. A realist, the carver was, for he has
given it sun-helmet and foreign jacket painted red. The black face and limbs
are freshly oiled, and from the neck a charm is hung. Perhaps some family
begs its dead to intercede for rain.
In the hollow adjoining the clearing where there was formerly a pool
during part of every dry season, Madame's husband has had five wells dug.
Four are dry clay cups. Overhead disturbed parrots fly top-heavily. Thrashing the branches as he leaps from tree to tree, a monkey gibes. And in the fifth,
which until this morning yielded up diluted mud, a long and venomous darkcolored snake is companioned by a small frog. Against the sides they hop and
writhe, grotesque comrades motivated by one desire-escape. Already death
nears. There is the stench of carrion borne by a creeping line of "driver" ants,
one of the endless ever-moving bands eternally threading savannah and
jungle, before which, if a dwelling is invaded, whites and blacks alike must
flee. Relentlessly, over the well's rim, wide as a strong man's wrist, oozes a
black rope of savage ants.


97




Madame's husband is reminded of an episode before the Great War. Believing two black men to be incendiaries who had burned his camp, he took
them prisoners and started towards the nearest government official, a trek of
many days. En route, it was his custom while he slept to leave them bound to
trees. Their cries, one night, were deafening; they called incessantly in a
native tongue, a language which he, as the natives say, "could not hear."
At last he slept. But in the morning, ready to proceed, he discovered the
prisoners silenced forever by "driver" ants. Within two hours, he judges, the
well will hold the vertebrz of a snake and the tidy skeleton of a frog, from
which quivering tormented flesh was shredded by countless tiny mandibles.
Noon. Fastidiously as Madame grooms herself, so does she attend to
domestic details, endeavoring to recast slave-boy into waiter-maid-valet, and
make a Parisian chef of the suave Soudanese. When the former eats, one hand,
dipped into the common pot, serves. Therefore foreign meals, subdivided
into courses, will forever be to him, I am sure, a mystifying, an aggravating
ritual. He can not tame his strength, curb his violence. Distrait from the
incessant blundering, Madame is also enervated by this morning's search.
And her tone's querulousness-he understands almost no French-undoes
him. Enamel plates arrive improperly dried and are despatched a second time
to the dish-pan. With a table-napkin the "boy" whips Madame's prowling
kitten, and the cloth is taken from him. From these perplexities, he would
run-he has said so-but always, always there is Merno to track him down.
Today there is hors d'ceuvre of canned sausage. The freshly killed fowl is
steeped in a savory sauce which Madame prepared over a kerosene burner
within the house, when she also drenched the imported potatoes with melted
butter from a can-a luxury with which the Soudanese is not trusted. After
canned celery, livened by Madame's seasoning, comes a souffle made with
cocoanuts picked before the shells had hardened. There is pinard thinned
with a little water, also palm-wine (tasting like cider and sulphur) which
Madame's husband drinks.
The mid-day heat's intensity, shrill with singing insects, prevents imme98


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diate resumption of the search. From the jungle comes the rank odor of rotting flesh-some animal has been killed, has died. Beneath the sun the metal
roof "draws," twitches, and the tapping sounds counterfeit the spatter of
ram-drops. In a room adjoining the kitchen the Soudanese drowses. The
"boy" has stolen away to the village. And the yard-boy, his face distorteda face formed for impish laughter, with eyes and mouth tweaked upwards at
the corners-sits in the shade, dealing with the serpent m his flesh.
At this hour beds are too smothering, therefore Madame composes herself
in a deck-chair. The delicate eyelids droop. She sleeps, and I watch the faint
pulsation of her veined temples. Then so quickly that it was not seen at first
by anyone, a poisonous fly, of which there are so many kinds, stabs the slender pallid arms, at it stabbed mine. Five spots are flecked with blood, and
Madame, with a smile, a shrug, goes for the iodine.
Men, women and children, carrying babes, carrying their worldly possessions, trudge along the Bush path. Like flowers, like the silver-white trunks
of kapok trees, the scarlet pods some creepers have, like the steely blue and
orange lizards (called "Moslems" from their habit of bowing, as if at devotions)-the gaudy calicoes of these folk enrapture my eyes, dulled by the
jungle's green monotony, so dulled that they no longer enjoy disentangling
countless lovely patterns of overlapping vegetation. The carpenter reports
that these strangers return on foot from the Gold Coast to a Bush village
twenty miles further There, for reasons of their own, they once settled before, but were deported to their former home during the Great War, so that
the men might be available for military service. The European debacle ended
-its peculiar horrors in tropical colonies are too little appreciated by veterans abroad-their trek began. Walking during the dry seasons, they farmed
during the wet, raising the foodstuffs needed for the long walk. In the meantime, old people died, the young grew up and babes were born.
Memo, who brought bad news this morning, makes another disagreeable
announcement. Madame's husband had asked him why it was that if an
antelope was brought by the chief's hunter, none of it was sent to Madame,


99




since his father agreed always to set aside a portion of freshly killed meat for
Madame, whose health demands some variation from a diet of chicken, canned
beef and eggs. Antelope there was. A goodly portion was purchased by the
cook, apparently for this household, but which-this Merno has discovered
-he and his young wife ate! Callously, the Soudanese acknowledges his
guilt. He and his wife were hungry. Madame's husband storms; but, after
all, a cook who makes cocoanut souffle is not to be replaced, even by Merno, in
the Bush. The quarreling lapses when a lamb is brought, slung across the neck
of a village lad-"dash" from the remorseful chief.
Two, a man and woman, pass, carrying gourds of water upon which large
leaves are floated, lessening losses from splashing. Following Madame, who
carries a parasol-dreading the sun she closes the air-holes of her sun-helmet
with cotton-I set out to locate the pool where the stuff was got. Hardly are
we started when across the toes of her white canvas slippers a vermilion snake
darts towards the clearing. It is venomous. The precious chickens! We return.
The chickens are unmolested; we resume the search.
Except where the felling of many trees has laid waste the forest, leaving
wide spaces grass-grown like meadows anywhere, we travel in a jungle twilight, the air lying against our cheeks so damp that it seems incredible that
there is no water near. After two miles, the pool. The booming of frogs is
lulled at our approach. An inky bog it is, with jade scum disrupted by the
water-carriers who dug into the heavy mud, ladling out that which was less
thick. There is no water here, only a quagmire from which emanates a gaseous odor, sweetish-rotten. Above its jade and black, flutter hundreds of turquoise butterflies. Beneath our feet we crush the wings of those which, settling upon the spongy banks, have been devoured alive by "driver" ants,
while, like a shower of flower-petals, hundreds come winging to their doom.
In the interval of our absence, Madame's husband has been more successful. Led by Merno in another direction, he now returns, yard-boy and "boy"
following with five-gallon tins of brown "water," thick as custard. Boiled
for twenty minutes this is poured through layers of cloth without apparent
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alteration of its consistency A small amount of permanganate is added, and
the filter for drinking water filled with the odious liquid. Tomorrow, should
there be no bottled water on the train....
A tall young Moslem in a hand-woven silk robe, such as tourists buy in
Cairo, his fingers laden with silver, son of an Emir, famous while he lived for
his hatred of white Christian invaders, brings his wife-she has the fine prettiness and carriage of a Jollif-to the clearing, imploring the whites (who
know all) to look after her. Heavy rings of gold drag at both ears, their
harshness padded with red woolen yarn where the lobes were pierced. One
ear, infected, is terribly swollen, so that the slightest pressure produces pain.
Unflinchingly the woman sits, doe eyes fixed upon us, while Madame's husband and mine, using pliers, try again and again, unsuccessfully, to break the
circlet without injury to the ear. It is evident that Madame, entirely kind,
can not, however, minister to the woman. I sponge away the blood, apply
iodine, giving her a tablet of aspirin. On the morrow her husband will take
her to the white doctor, a half-day's trip inland from here by train. He promises. Cool, long-fingered hands-the hands of black folk seem always curiously cool-close over one of mine; I feel the swift, light pressure of her lips.
Evening. Upon one end of the dining-table, moved now to the small front
veranda along the eaves of which Madame has strung a curtain of striped calico, a white basin half-filled with the brownish water is placed before the
gasoline lamp, so that insects not incinerated, lured by the bowl's reflections,
drown. With a faint hissing noise, a faint splattering, hundreds of minute
lives are quenched, so that we dine without annoyance. Habitually the "boy"
has worn a calico as an apron, two ends knotted behind his neck, two behind
his back. Therefore, when fully dressed in front, he is comically unclad behind. But tonight his oiled thighs flash below an olive-drab army shirt, already old, yet newly bought-there are no clothes in America and Europe
too second-hand for shipment to West Africa and sale to blacks. As he turns
about in the cramped quarters, placing pepper, salt and dishes, his shirt-tails
swish and trail upon the table, across the plates. Madame tells him somewhat
IOI


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sharply to remove it, and with one unexpected motion he whisks off the dubious garment. Nettled by the laughter of the Soudanese, a nonplussed Hercules clad in a breech-cloth serves a Parisian dinner in courses, dashing between cook-house and veranda, across the clay floor of the clearing.
The cook-house is soon dark. Soudanese, Gold Coast carpenter, "boy" and
Merno leave. Beside his hut, the yard-boy plays upon an instrument, a simple
bow of wood. Its single string, resting against his slightly parted lips so that
his mouth acts as a sounding board, is manipulated with what might be halves
of a broken arrow. With one, vibrations are created, while moving the second
from one position to another, he regulates the pitch. A little quavering, sobbing melody comes from the shadows. Then the yard-boy is off to the village where there is drumming. But no one dances beneath the moon save the
minstrel of the market place who has been drinking, and whose display of
sexual ecstasy provides his companions, small boys and girls and the mature
drummer, with merriment. Upon the clearing falls a hush shot through with
the insistence of chirping insects, the lamb's piteous bleat and a night-bird's
limpid note repeated at measured intervals, like water dropping into a pool.
The kerosene lantern, lighted to frighten wild things away-not knowing
its purpose, I at first extinguished this light nightly-burns before the tent.
Twenty chickens the yard-boy tucked away this evening. But having somehow freed themselves, half the number now roost upon the wash-stand, the
luggage, and one is huddled in my cot. Madame comes. Like finger-marks,
dull shadows lie beneath her eyes, but she laughs gaily enough as we rout the
fowls, groggy with sleep, from the kitchen where some sit upon the cooling
stove, fr6m beneath the dusty boards raised upon mud bricks, forming the
cook's day-time couch. At last, the twenty are restored to the wicker cages.
Midway between tent and house Madame pauses, face uplifted. She who
has not complained that one canteen is empty and the other's contents partly
used, who has not uttered one apprehensive word concerning the morrow,
lifts up thin arms imploringly to a drifting cloud and to a moon which rides
the sky within that hopeful augury, a misty circle.
S.                                                 102


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KING I N A GILDED CAGE
JN the King's "palace," a modern bungalow where he receives visitors, lies
a book of anthropology in English, which, when I examined it, opened
where it had been most consulted, where a slip of paper marked the description and explanation of Ashanti ancestor worship.
"The King is here.
Come together.
Rejoice. Rejoice.
Honor the dead."
Two talking drums, tympana studded with brass and hung with charms,
the female drum with a contralto voice and the male drum with resonant bass,
beneath the hands of a royal drummer have since daybreak reiterated this
message-which I have upon the authority of the King's nephew, son of the
King's sister, the Queen Mother who, taking as lovers the finest of the ruling
class, breeds stalwart sons, from among whom the next king will be chosen.
Like a chief the Queen Mother walks beneath a state umbrella, surrounded
by hand-maidens whose hair is coifed in whorls. Of a proud race (whose
former social system was so complex that two large volumes-of which one
lies upon the King's table-are required for its analysis) she has a proud bearing. The people were unfortunately addicted to human sacrifice (at each
Adae criminals and slaves were executed so that they might join the Ashantis'
ancestors as servitors), and conquering weaker peoples. Too, they coaxed the
jungle across Bush paths, blocking commerce and communications. Therefore to end these practices, whites, sacrificing white and black life-the invaders were several times repulsed-conquered them; an easy feat after the
Ashantis, exhausted by internal strife, were loosely reunited by a young overlord; and now railroads connect the thriving interior with two busy ports.
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It is this over-lord, advanced in middle-life, who bids the chiefs not all
of them as in his youth, but those for whom he is responsible in the vicinity of
Kumasi, a fragment of his former kingdom with a mixed population of one
hundred and forty thousand-join him in an Adae: a pagan festival for the
dead, who, if honored, receive honor in the after-world. Since dawn, with
whatever pomp each can afford, they have arrived beneath umbrellas of brocade, beneath humbler sun-shades of yellow cotton faced with green, accompanied by sword-bearers, followed by men carrying imported chairs of state,
which have supplanted the Ashanti stools beautifully hewn from single
blocks of wood. Only the King may have a golden stool. Some chairs are
gilded and ornate, others are commonplace. Their cloths wrapped about the
body below the armpits and with one corner drawn across a shoulder, of silk,
velvet or plush, are new Occasionally a richer chief has a costly Ashanti robe,
either an imported imitation or a homespun woven of silk in narrow strips
cross-striped with contrasting colors alternating with mystical Ashanti signs.
Like Roman-striped ribbons, these strips, entirely unlike homespuns elsewhere in West Africa, are sewn together to make a robe. Heads, shaven of
every hair, are crowned with twisted fillets of cloth, adorned with packets of
leather or gold containing charms. Among the personages who come-the
nephew estimates their number to be seventy-five-many need not; but impelled by old loyalties, respond, bearing gifts.
Of Ashanti grandeur, prior to the nation's subjugation, of which today's
Adae is but an echo, a faded memory, much can be learned from Bowditch
who wrote in i8I7, when whites sought to trade in the hinterland: "The
King's messengers, with gold breast-plates, made way for us.... The
Caboceers, as did their superior captains and attendants, wore Ashantee
clothes of extravagant price, from the costly foreign silks that had been unravelled to cover them, in all the varieties of colour as well as of pattern: they
were of incredible size and weight, and thrown over the shoulder exactly as
a Roman toga. A small silk fillet generally encircled their temples, and many
gold necklaces, intricately wrought, suspended Moorish charms, dearly pur

io8




chased and incased in small square cases of gold, silver, and curious embroidery.... A banc of gold and beads encircled the knee, from which
several strings of the same depended; small circles of gold, like guineas, rings,
and casts of animals, were strung round their ancles... manillas and rude
lumps of gold hung from their left wrists, which were so heavily laden as to
be supported on the heads of their handsomest boys.... Among them was
the executioner, a man of immense size, who wore a massy gold hatchet on
his breast, and with the execution-stool held before him, imbrued with blood... The King's deportment first excited my attention, for native dignity
in princes, whom we call barbarous, was a novel spectacle. His manners were
majestic, yet courteous.... He appeared to be about thirty-eight years of
age, inclined to corpulence, and of a benevolent countenance. He wore a
fillet of Aggry or Accra beads round his temples, a necklace of gold cockspur
shells, strung by their largest ends, and over his shoulder a red silk cord suspending three saphies encased in gold. His bracelets were the richest mixture
of beads and gold, and his fingers covered with rings. His cloth, or lamber,
was of dark-green silk.... He was seated in a low chair, richly ornamented
with gold, and wore a pair of gold castanets on his finger and thumb, which he
clapped to enforce silence."
With his entourage of men-within his immediate household are one
hundred and fifty dependents of whom many hold hereditary posts-the
King approaches. A very black man, plump yet powerful, this King Premph
is impressive, though his head, artificially shaped in infancy to indicate his
caste, has a look of deformity Imperious but with curiously watchful eyes,
he is wrapped in a snowy mantle of white silk, bordered with golden embroideries, cloaking an Ashanti robe, its silken weight supported by a strap en-  /
crusted with gold exposed upon one naked shoulder. Hotly, gold gleams
everywhere; for Ashantis valued the precious metal before whites, prizing it  \
more, organized stock companies for its mining and exportation. The chiefs     ~:jj'
wear upon their index fingers gold rings with an emblem fashioned in the
form of a beetle, said by the nephew to be more venomous than an adder. Th,,
109                                                       -~/
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King wears such a ring, and upon the peak of the gold-colored umbrella,
canopying him during public ceremonials, coils a golden snake.
Lifted into a litter made from a hollowed log, the exterior, like the drums,
covered with brass wrought in Ashanti designs, and lined with leopard pelts;
this King-omnipotent as a young Nero when he was thus carried long agois borne into an open space between his "palace" and the Queen Mother's low
buildmings which enclose a courtyard and a primitive scullery. Before him
upon puny, crooked legs, prance three squat men, not pigmies such as the
hunting folk who flit pixie-like with toy bows and arrows through the jungles
of the French Cameroon, but hunchbacks. The King's buffoons, they wear
unbelted scarlet smocks and flat square hats of beaten gold which have dangling tips of monkeys' tails and quills from vultures' wings protruding from
sides and backs. "Caoutchouc," the senior clown, has been nicknamed by
white traders for his ability to ferret out wild rubber; and by this name he is
now known to blacks as well. After the dwarfs come men shouldering
clay pots said to contain the King's gold, golden ornaments and his coffer's
keys, accompanied by a wizened fellow in leopard-skin hat, the Executioner
-no longer active-with daggers sheathed upon his chest, his cloth suspended from a chain of native-smelted iron, the stuff from which his ancient
gold-handled sword was forged. Carrying dozens of pairs of sandals, their
crossed straps studded with gold knobs, men precede the litter beside which
march swordsmen. Their blades, designed for hacking rather than thrusting,
pointed downwards so that the hilts with spheres of gold-two upon each
hilt with space between for a warrior's grasp-meet, forming a golden barricade above the King's body, until he mounts the throne beneath the umbrella, sitting min a high-backed chair, not new, apparently of Spanish or
Portuguese origin.
/  l  s        "The King is come." The drums shout until sweat streams from the drumZ}  >T7       mer and his assistant, a little lad who will inherit his father's office.
/ x SmHis elbow resting upon the head of an attendant, the King receives homage
i'7   _ -7 t  from the Queen Mother, chiefs and important men, from a European trader
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with a moving-picture camera and two Syrians, who bow in politic humility.
Ranged in semi-circles before the throne are at least four hundred blacks,
mostly Ashanti men, with a sprinkling of Fantis, employed in Kumasi, and
their wives. Wearing fashionable imported clothes and speaking English,
these are visibly uncertain to what extent they, the "civilized," should lend
themselves to a pagan spectacle.
Among the Fantis, a coast tribe which for centuries has trafficked with
whites-with Normans, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and Englishtrafficked in rubber, pepper, gold, ivory and, like the Liberian Krus, in fellow
Africans, receiving rum, guns, and gun-powder, many reach out with terrible avidity not only for products of white industrialism but for ideas of the
white civilization, for books, and newspapers from abroad. Consequently
the Europeanized among them are dubbed the "Gold Coast intelligentzia" by
those who believe that thought can be checked by persistent mockery. But
thinking is not easily repressed, particularly when a people become aware of
their contribution to colonial prosperity. Therefore in Accra, out of the
treasury's surplus with which hospitals, and also a modern harbor and naval
base has been built, there has risen up a government co-educational experiment. Under the leadership of a white who, despite criticism, insists upon
equality for blacks in his faculty, it has become an experiment as advanced
as any in the modern world. Achimota, the name it bears, means, in the Fanti
tongue, "refuge." The school stands where once a jungle was, in which slaves,
escaped from white slave-traders, hid, and which was known as Achimota.
Greeting the King, then the Queen Mother, greetings between chief and
chief, absorb much time. The formless, meandering ritual, now divested of
human sacrifice, is quickened when the King's men, leaping, depart dramatically, returning with clay pots and gourds of frothing palm wine, or single
glass bottles of "trade" gin upon their heads. The King quaffs a ceremonial
draught. The cup, refilled, is passed from personage to personage. Unopened
bottles (one hundred and fifty dollars this treat costs, the nephew says) are
bestowed as gifts. Deeply, underlings drink from gourds and pots. Caout>                                        112




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chouc, reviving, romps hilariously, but no longer young, can not sustain his
mirthful pace. There is drumming. Brandishing swords or spears, youths
become mock warriors, creating valorous deeds from thin air. Each panting
performer, abased before the King, is praised.
Seated close to the throne, tried by the intense light, the confusion, hemmed
m by nearly naked men, sitting and standing-their bodies, radiating a palpable and awful heat, prevent movement of the air charged with gin, palm
wine, and sweat, though free from taints of physical nastiness-I watch King
Premph's face. Never do I observe any lapse of wariness in the gaze which
travels now to a knot of burly fellows with spears, whose eyes are blood-shot,
who chew kola nuts and, drinking heavily, grow turbulent.
As the King was brought into the field, so he leaves it. And to the hinterland the drums announce the Adae's end. After forty days there will be
another at which the King and every chief will wear new cloths. Meanwhile
among the the dispersing guests there is commotion until native police subdue
the turbulent young men. Following the King, I see him turn towards his
official bungalow on foot, his every movement seeming to betray an overwhelming weariness. Only now may he end a three-day fast.
If kingship be burdensome, it is not strange. In the period between youth
and his middle-age he did not practice kmglmess. For as a rebuke to the
Ashanti nation when it was conquered, the young King and his Queen Mother,
who later died, were removed from Kumasi, a capital of mud huts, to a
mediaeval fortress on the coast.
"You should have seen the boy King then," said a black lawyer at Cape
Coast to me, a Fanti, whose interests, broadened by a foreign university and
a long life, transcend tribal limitations and include fellow Africans, both
black and white. "In the presence of his captors his lips curled; not once did
he lower the silk cloth covering his shoulder, to indicate respect."
A brown man with blue eyes, caretaker of Elmina's "slave castle," exhibits /
the rooms which held the prisoners until their banishment to an island off
the eastern coast. Placarded, these rooms are, for all who can read English 1
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though similar labels are absent from dungeons below, where slaves to be sold
in the West Indies and American Colonies were immured, and where-the
story is a legend now-they worshipped a stone, part of the subterranean
structure, from which water trickled to quench their thirst-singing, praying, dancing to it lest the flow cease.
During King Premph's banishment, official attitudes wavered. Many
whites became convinced that problems of white government are reduced if
tribal organizations are at first modified rather than demolished, and when
blacks are encouraged in self-reliance-especially in a climate which seems
unfit for permanent residence of a white governing class. (Of those whom
my husband and I, during this trip, came to know, five whites have died of
tropical diseases within the year ) Scientific research fostered the belief that
Ashantis had possessed well-defined crafts, arts, laws, and a comprehensible
religion; that the faults of their civilization were not unique in mankind's
history Therefore, atoning for previous misconstructions and to allay somewhat the lurking grievances of those whose memories are long, King Premph
was retrieved from the far-away corner where the fractious royal lad, once
stigmatized as a black brute, had been stood.
At ease in European dress, speaking English and French, the father of
grown men who pine for the island exile of their birth, his recollections
of tribal ceremonies and their meanings tarnished, he was reinstated to sit
in judgment upon involved tribal affairs, collect taxes, administer altered
Ashanti laws, receiving a salary from his conquerors. "Peasant farmers,"
cocoa planters, his warriors are become, their tremendous buying power
alarmingly concentrated upon "trade" gin; a pagan people harshly buffeted
by influences of commerce, education, Christian missionaries and reactionary
Moslem proselyters. Standing upon the outskirts of the Adae is a half-black
Arab whom the King must shelter in his guest house, for he is unwelcome
'!     in the local Moslem community Evangelist for a cult originating in India,
for the "Ahmadiyya Movement," he has drifted from the East seeking folII4
r               ers who will accept a Moslem of the Punjab as the "Promised Messiah.", V                - JOc~O  P l


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A stranger in his own country, the King returned; yet the Ashantis rallied
about him, the ancients coaching him in forgotten folk-ways, producing
from secret repositories-this the nephew tells me-accessories of his former
reign, old trappings, the swords, the golden ornaments which I have seen.
Idle for a quarter of a century, the King is busy now. By six each morning
hosts press upon him with their difficulties. And now there is this distressing
violence: the truculent young men, who during the prescribed fast fed their
rage upon gin and kola nuts, are protestants from a village where the King's
Linguist has been set up as chief, displacing one recently de-stooled by order,
not of the King, but of the government. At any price the King must maintain peace between the outraged faction and officials who perverted Ashanti
tradition; between himself and the belligerents; between himself and the
alien government. On the morrow, beginning at dawn, he must preside over
pagan ceremonies in the center of Kumasi, a sprawling inland town, rebuilt
since the plague swept it-this plague's inception is attributed to nomad
Moslems whose superficial and conspicuous religious washings win for them
an unmerited reputation for cleanliness withheld from the nearly naked and
unclad who, if they have not always water for bathing are purified by sunlight. A Europeanized settlement, but like all such West African towns without creative activity which gives a city a heart, a pulse, it has orderly streets
and concrete buildings, districts for Anglo-Saxon traders, for Europeans, a
Syrian quarter, a Moslem Zongo of ten thousand inhabitants-where pagans
prosper there the whites and Moslems flock-and residential suburbs for
official whites. The sites of Ashanti graves are required for additional business
houses; therefore the bones of ancestors, honored at today's Adae, must be
dug up tomorrow and reburied according to their rank m plots reserved by
King Premph for "royals," "princes," "gents" and "ladies" in his own cemetery overlooked by a sorrowing Christ upon a tall imported crucifix. A
Christian, the pagan King became during his exile.
And there is that matter of the metal plaque, inserted in the wall beside the
bungalow's front entrance, immortalizing a white official in whose custody
I 115


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the King returned. Tropical humidity dims its radiance, and only yesterday
the white official who had told me of the King's real greatness, reprimanded
him, however, in my presence, saying: "Here Premph, you must do better.
You must keep that inscription polished."
THE EJLIIS IJNAL GESTURE
T        HOUGH also a Moslem Filane of that royal breed whose lineage is
supported by chronicles and not folk-lore; though he, too, administers a rich province-such administration tempered by the supergovernment-from a walled city which antedates white invasion, a city of
large houses, their facades decorated with high reliefs of tinted mud in mellow
colors: the Emir of Zaria is not so precious as the Emir of Kano. Therefore his
inaccessibility is not so theatrically preserved. At least my attention was not
officially called to it, else I would not have marched upon him, anguishing the
aged eunuch, riling the Faithful so that they spat.
With viewing Kano's Emir from afar, I was content upon learning that
at the time of his accession to power (and to a salary of twenty-five thousand
dollars annually), when he swore allegiance to the white King, the handful
of white women mn the area, chiefly missionaries and subjects of the same King,
were requested to veil themselves, if present at the ceremonies, lest their white
female faces, frowardly bared, offend the aristocracy of Moslem males. Such
incongruities are inevitable when rulers, officially Christian at home, for
purposes of government-and trade in peanuts, hides, and tin-are forced to
become props for a Christian-hating Moslem regime. These Moslems in
Northern Nigeria have had no word of the swiftly changing Islamic world.
The news would be disquieting.
To see the Emir I stood among his subjects at the palace gates, every other
soul prostrate. Thus I saw him ride to prayers; not, however, to the towering
mosque presented by a white official. Its lower stories are a granary; its
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upper floors a pigeon cote. Overlooking the Emir's palace, overlooking his
women's quarters, it is banned. The muezzin calls from a lower building. As
the Emir passed, the hot, dry air, already sweetened by imported perfumes of
the rich devout, despite less pleasant currents from filth at courtyard doorways-dead jackasses and goats putrefying in the city's pools; currents
wafted from Tuaregs' caravan camels, from dye-pits-grew more thickly
sweet. Like a bride in fluttering white, and covered to the eyes, white ostrich
plumes rising from his turban, he rode upon a splendid Arabian horse, white
plumes upon its red-and-silver headstall, followed by courtiers on foot, one,
holding to his stirrup, singing adulations. Preceded by a black jester m multicolored rags and bright blonde wig who, riding backwards, imitated the
antics of an ape upon a horse, I saw him at another time accompanied by a
score of galloping horsemen.
Peering through a doorway, my husband was permitted to make a portrait
sketch while the Emir sat in conference with the government, a conference
to which he came from his capital m a scarlet motor car bristling with trumpeters who rent the air. However, the portrait did not please; for the Emir's
veil being sheer, it too clearly revealed the lineaments of his black visage. My
husband was bidden to the palace in order that another might be made, a
discreet portrayal of black eyes and womanishly slender hands. Meanwhile,
I prowled about the streets of Kano, the city of 120,000 blacks, wherein no
white may stay except one who makes a Hausa-English dictionary; prowled
about the bazaar where wide embroidered robes and full trousers of blue
home-spun cost as much as do a white man's clothes at home; where bridles
and saddles of dyed leathers and colored sandals may be had. Though European products displace the native-made, this market, famous prior to white
occupation and a goal for travelers who came long ago from Timbuktu
bringing Moslem culture, is famous still.
Then, all unforeseen, a princeling in white silk brocades, surrounded by
attendants carrying silver-mounted spears, was deposited at our feet, left
upon the doorstep of an empty store-building where we shared makeshift
17


I\,F:N Ch     AN
NI'.&e 1 A




quarters with a trader. There had been the roar of a motor lorry, which ceased
after a horrific clank. Marooned was the Emir's eldest son, a minor ruler
(also a successful wholesale dealer in peanut crops), and his retinue of elegant
Moslem gentlemen. Dejected, the royal party was disinclined to proceed
afoot. We asked them in. Cosseted as tenderly as a sickly woman, the Crown
Prince of Kano entered among swords and spears. If racked by prejudice, he
kept his pain concealed, and sank unhesitatingly upon cushions which my
infidel hands laid; lowering his veil, he partook with me of sweet biscuits and
ginger-ale. And among his attendants none washed; none spat. It was otherwise in Zaria.
The Emir of Zaria "rules" half a million tax-payers, while the Emir of
Kano administers a province of three times as many. A lesser man, he is,
however, noted for knowledge of the Koran, for mastery of Moslem law, and
is therefore a personage. Of him grumbling tales abound, tales such as fell
upon the ears of King Shahriar when Sheherazade whiled away the nights.
Disguised as a common man, he walks abroad, 'tis said, and spying out fair
damsels, has them hustled to the palace where, despite the pleas of relatives,
they are detained. Comely girls, it is declared, shun the streets, and the market
is avoided by the younger among the gipsy women of the nomad Filanes, milk
and butter vendors-women of the elusive pastoral folk among whom many
are light brown or copper colored, whose dark eyes, like those of some veiled
Tuaregs, hold amber lights, and whose black hair is often ringleted or nearly
straight. With herds and flocks they pass in and out of darker tribes, preserving some mysterious racial integrity which many Moslemized, slave-holding
Filanes have lost.
Sternly monogamous are the Filanes of the open spaces, said to be pantheists, worshippers of some single force which rules the herders' universe. Betrothed in childhood, girls are not, however, later forbidden to choose other
husbands than those selected by their parents. They love best the men who
survive tests of endurance such as one recently held in Zaria. Invading the
market place came youths and small boys who submitted to lashings with
ii8


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cowhide whips, every stroke laying wide the flesh, while mirrors or pieces of
tin were held before their faces in order that they might watch their countenances, for if an aspirant flinches or grimaces he is dishonored. While girls
showered gifts upon the men they favored, old men rubbed ash and powdered
herbs into the raw wounds to cleanse them and insure permanent scars-such
marks are borne with pride. It is popularly asserted that those who weaken,
cast off by their clans, wander afar and are those nomad Filanes who become
town-dwellers, house-boys, laborers, forever shamed and never seen by their
kinsmen again.
Round-faced and black, the Emir of Zaria came to a doorway of his palace,
a goodly mud-building, its entry corridor sustained by arches. Revealing
teeth, orange-colored from the use of kola nuts, he smiled merrily, though
gravity is a tenet of Moslem etiquette. In repose, faces of Bush pagans are
wistful, even melancholy, but quiet laughter seems always to lie close to the
surface of their lives, while proper Moslems appear sunk hopelessly in doldrums. The unseeing eyes-I might as well have been transparent-the unsmiling faces encountered upon the streets of Kano produced in me a sense
of chill, until I understood that they evidenced good manners. The only
gestures of friendliness came from the Emir's police who, at the appearance
of any white, whip crowds aside, and form a personal bodyguard (until dismissed with "dash"); and from women of the lower classes, engaged in petty
trade or hard labor Females, their manners did not matter; it is likely they
knew no better than to smile.
To my husband the Emir of Zaria gave his shapely hand. Perhaps I was
mistaken, but thinking it extended also in my direction, I squeezed it heartily
-with instantaneous effect upon the eunuch, sitting cross-legged before the
entrance to the women's quarters. Frantically, as if polluted, the ancient
scooped up dust with which he scrubbed wrists and ankles-a dispensation
permitted Moslem travelers in the desert when no water is at hand. He was,
at the moment, separated from his imported tea-kettle of blue enamel-ware,
carried by every good West African Moslem for ceremonial washings. And
I 19
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then from the men in the entry came a murmuring, and several, as if verging
on nausea, spat.
Prior to the second visit, when his portrait was drawn, I received a message
imploring me not to address the Emir, not to seize his hand. And so, ignored,
isolated like a leper, I remained in a dark corner. All the corners of the audience hall were dark, even that which held the throne and its patrician occupant, for the only light in the domed room, almost two stories high, came
through small windows at the ceiling.
"Move the throne," I whispered.
Wrapped in befitting dignity, the Emir stood aside, half-choked with
a cloud of dust, cobwebs and chicken feathers which mounted as my husband and I-contrary to the canons of "white prestige" in West Africa,
which do not permit whites, particularly of Anglo-Saxon origin, to engage
in manual labor-shoved the throne. A platform of wood, covered with red
flannel and studded with fluted caps of beer bottles-thus are the finest doors
of Kano studded-we pushed it into a ray of light.... A week has passed. Far from Zaria I stand upon a vast, fertile plain
occupied by four whites, connected with the railroad, and Hill Pagans-vigorous farming folk, unclad except for strips of woven grass or leather, or
brief kirtles of fresh leaves and smears of haematite, who for centuries, from
their villages fortified by rock and tree-high cacti, withstood invading
Moslems whom white peace has now let in. My husband and I-he is, as usual,
counting luggage, paying porters-await a train, due yesterday, but which
came upon a boulder. A train rolls in from another direction. A fearful
trump calls my attention to an open window framing a head, turbaned and
thickly veiled. Moslems, sprung from everywhere, abase themselves....
Across the bowed backs, black eyes roll at me, crow's-feet about them betraying a veiled smile. The Emir of Zaria! Another trump; the train rolls on.
Covertly across the window's ledge, a shapely black hand protruding from a
billowing robe waves a sly farewell. Waves until distance robs me of its view


Northern Nigeria




IrI -owIrsowIr Iso"Ir0IxI"a<IwI", v A on  t




PRINTED BY WILLIAM EDWIN RUDGE, INC.
DESIGNED BY C. L. BALDRIDGE
AND MELVIN LOOS
THE TYPE IS LINOTYPE GARAMOND












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