Part 25 (1/2)
Vanilla grows with great luxuriance in Cameroons. In Victoria a grove of gigantic cacao trees is heavily overgrown with this lovely orchid in a most perfect way. It does not seem to injure the cacaos in the least, and there are other kinds of trees it will take equally well to. I saw it growing happily and luxuriantly under the direction of the Roman Catholic Mission at Landana; but it requires a continuously damp climate. Vanilla when once started gives little or no trouble, and its pods do not require any very careful manipulation before sending to Europe, and this is a very important point, for a great hindrance--THE great hindrance to plantation enterprise on the Coast--is the difficulty of getting neat-handed labourers. I had once the pleasure of meeting a Dutch gentleman--a plantation expert, who had been sent down the West Coast by a firm trading there, and also in the Malay Archipelago--prospecting, at a heavy fee, to see whether it would pay the firm to open up plantations there better than in Malaysia. I believe his final judgment was adverse to the West African plan, because of the difficulty of getting skilful natives to tend young plants, and prepare the products. Tea he regarded as quite hopeless from this difficulty, and he said he did not think you would ever get Africans at as cheap a rate, or so deftly fingered to roll tea, as you can get Asiatics. No one knows until they have tried it the trouble it is to get an African to do things carefully; but it is a trouble, not an impossibility. If you don't go off with fever from sheer worry and vexation the thing can be done, but in the meantime he is maddening. I have had many a day's work on plantations instructing cheerful, willing, apparently intelligent Ethiopians of various s.e.xes and sizes on the mortal crime of hoeing up young coffee plants. They have quite seen it. ”Oh, Lor! ma.s.sa, I no fit to do dem thing.” Aren't they! You go along to-morrow morning, and you'll find your most promising pupils laying around them with their hoes, talking about the disgraceful way their dearest friends go on, and destroying young coffee right and left. They are just as bad, if not slightly worse, particularly the ladies, when it comes to picking coffee. As soon as your eye is off them, the bough is off the tree. I know one planter who leads the life of the Surprise Captain in W. H. S. Gilbert's ballad, lurking among his groves, and suddenly appearing among his pickers. This, he says, has given them a feeling of uncertainty as to when and where he may appear, ka.s.sengo and all, that has done much to preserve his plantation; but it is a wearying life, not what he expected from his book on coffee- plantations, which had a frontispiece depicting a planter seated in his verandah, with a tumblerful of something cool at his right hand, and a pipe in his mouth, contemplating a large plantation full of industrious natives picking berries into baskets on all sides.
LABOUR.--The labour problem is one that must be studied and solved before West Africa can advance much further than its present culture condition, because the climate is such that the country cannot be worked by white labourers; and that this state of affairs will remain as it is until some true specific is discovered for malaria, something important happens to the angle of the earth's axis, or some radical change takes place in the nature of the sun, is the opinion of all acquainted with the region. The West African climate shows no signs of improving whatsoever. If it shows any sign of alteration it is for the worse, for of late years two extremely deadly forms of fever have come into notice here, malarial typhoid and blackwater. The malarial typhoid seems confined to districts where a good deal of European attention has been given to drainage systems, which is in itself discouraging.
The labour problem has been imported with European civilisation.
The civilisation has not got on to any considerable extent, but the labour problem has; for, being a malignant nuisance, it has taken to West Africa as a duck to water, and it is now flouris.h.i.+ng. It has not yet, however, attained its zenith; it is just waiting for the abolition of domestic slavery for that--and then! Meanwhile it grows with the demand for hands to carry on plantation work, and public works. On the West Coast--that is to say, from Sierra Leone to Cameroon--it is worse than on the South West Coast from Cameroon to Benguella.
The Kruman, the Accra, and the Sierra Leonian are at present on the West Coast the only solution available. The first is as fine a s.h.i.+p-and-beach-man as you could reasonably wish for, but no good for plantation work. The second is, thanks to the practical training he has received from the Basel Mission, a very fair artisan, cook, or clerk, but also no good for plantation work, except as an overseer.
The third is a poor artisan, an excellent clerk, or subordinate official, but so unreliable in the matter of honesty as to be nearly reliable to swindle any employer. Lagos turns out a large quant.i.ty of educated natives, but owing to the growing prosperity of the colony, these are nearly all engaged in Lagos itself.
An important but somewhat neglected factor in the problem is the nature of the West African native, and as I think a calm and unbia.s.sed study of this factor would give us the satisfactory solution to the problem, I venture to give my own observations on it.
The Kruboys, as the natives of the Grain Coast are called, irrespective of the age of the individual, by the white men--the Menekussi as the Effiks call them--are the most important people of West Africa; for without their help the working of the Coast would cost more lives than it already does, and would be in fact practically impossible. Ever since vessels have regularly frequented the Bights, the Kruman has had the helpful habit of s.h.i.+pping himself off on board, and doing all the heavy work. Their first tutors were the slavers, who initiated them into the habit, and instructed them in s.h.i.+p's work, that they might have the benefit of their services in working their vessels along the Slave Coast.
And in order to prevent any Kruboy being carried off as a slave by mistake, which would have prejudiced these useful allies, the slavers persuaded them always to tattoo a band of basket-work pattern down their foreheads and out on to the tip of their broad noses: this is the most extensive bit of real tattoo that I know of in West Africa, and the Kruboys still keep the fas.h.i.+on. Their next tutors were the traders, who have taught and still teach them beach work; how to handle cargo, try oil, and make themselves generally useful in a factory,--”learn sense,” as the Kruboy himself puts it.
To religious teaching the Kruboy seems for an African singularly impervious, but the two lessons he has learnt--s.h.i.+p and sh.o.r.e work-- are the best that the white has so far taught the black, because unattended with the evil consequences that have followed the other lessons. Unfortunately, the Kruman of the Grain Coast and the Cabinda of the South West Coast, are the only two tribes that have had the benefit of this kind of education, but there are many other tribes who, had circ.u.mstances led the trader and the slaver to turn their attention to them, would have done their tutors quite as much credit. But circ.u.mstances did not, and so nowadays, just as a hundred years ago, you must get the Kruboy to help you if you are going to do any work, missionary or mercantile, from Sierra Leone to Cameroon. Below Cameroon the Kruboy does not like to go, except to the beach of an English or German house, for he has suffered much from the Congo Free State, and from Spaniards and Portuguese, who have not respected his feelings in the matter of wanting to return every year, or every two years at the most, to his own country, and his rooted aversion to agricultural work and carrying loads about the bush.
The pay of the Kruboy averages 1 pounds a month. There are modifications in the way in which this sum is reached; for example, some missionaries pay each man 20 pounds a year, but then he has to find his own chop. Some South-West Coast traders pay 8 pounds a year, but they find their boys entirely, and well, in food, and give them a cloth a week. English men-of-war on the West African Station have, like other vessels to take them on to save the white crew, and they pay the Kruboys the same as they pay the white men, i.e., 4 pounds 10s. a month with rations. Needless to say, men-of-war are popular, although service on board them cuts our friend off from almost every chance of stealing chickens and other things of which I may not speak, as Herodotus would say. I do not know the manner in which men-of-war pay off the Kruboy, but I think in hard cash. In the circles of society I most mix with on the Coast--the mercantile marine and the trading--he is always paid in goods, in cloth, gin, guns, tobacco, gunpowder, etc., with little concessions to his individual fancy in the matter, for each of these articles has a known value, and just as one of our coins can be changed, so you can get here change for a gun or any other trade article.
The Kruboy much prefers being paid off in goods. I well remember an exquisite scene between Captain --- and King Koffee of the Kru Coast when the subject of engaging boys was being shouted over one voyage out. The Captain at that time thought I was a W.W.T.A.A. and ostentatiously wanted Koffee to let him pay off the boys he was engaging to work the s.h.i.+p in money, and not in gin and gunpowder.
King Koffee's face was a study. If Captain ---, whom he knew of old, had stood on his head and turned bright blue all over with yellow spots, before his eyes, it would not have been anything like such a shock to his Majesty. ”What for good him ting, Cappy?” he said, interrogation and astonishment ringing in every word. ”What for good him ting for We country, Cappy? I suppose you gib gin, tobacco, gun he be fit for trade, but money--” Here his Majesty's feelings flew ahead of the Royal command of language, great as that was, and he expectorated with profound feeling and expression.
Captain ---'s expressive countenance was the battle ground of despair and grief at being thus forced to have anything to do with a traffic unpopular in missionary circles. He however controlled his feelings sufficiently to carefully arrange the due amount of each article to be paid, and the affair was settled.
The somewhat c.u.mbrous wage the Kruboy gets at the end of his term of service, minus those things he has had on account and plus those things he has ”found,” is certainly a source of great worry to our friend. He obtains a box from the carpenter of the factory, or buys a tin one, and puts therein his tobacco and small things, and then he buys a padlock and locks his box of treasure up, hanging the key with his other ju-jus round his neck, and then he has peace regarding this section of his belongings. Peace at present, for the day must some time dawn when an experimental genius shall arise among his fellow countrymen, who will try and see if one key will not open two locks. When this possibility becomes known I can foresee nothing for the Kruboy but nervous breakdown; for even now, with his mind at rest regarding the things in his box, he lives in a state of constant anxiety about those out of it, which have to lie on the deck during the return voyage to his home. He has to keep a vigilant eye on them by day, and sleep spread out over them by night, for fear of his companions stealing them. Why he should take all this trouble about his things on his voyage home I can't make out, if what is currently reported is true, that all the wages earned by the working boys become the property of the Elders of his tribe when he returns to them. I myself rather doubt if this is the case, but expect there is a very heavy tax levied on them, for your Kruboy is very much a married man, and the Elders of his tribe have to support and protect his wives and families when he is away at work, and I should not wonder if the law was that these said wives and families ”revert to the State” if the boy fails to return within something like his appointed time. There must be something besides nostalgia to account for the dreadful worry and apprehension shown by a detained Kruboy. I am sure the tax is heavily taken in cloth, for the boys told me that if it were made up into garments for themselves they did not have to part with it on their return.
Needless to say, this makes our friend turn his attention to needlework during his return voyage and many a time I have seen the main deck looking as if it had been taken possession of by a demoniacal Dorcas working party.
Strangely little is known of the laws and language of these Krumen, considering how close the a.s.sociation is between them and the whites. This arises, I think, not from the difficulty of learning their language, but from the ease and fluency with which they speak their version of our own--Kru-English, or ”trade English,” as it is called, and it is therefore unnecessary for a hot and wearied white man to learn ”Kru mouth.” What particularly makes me think this is the case is, that I have picked up a little of it, and I found that I could make a Kruman understand what I was driving at with this and my small stock of Ba.s.sa mouth and Timneh, on occasions when I wished to say something to him I did not want generally understood. But the main points regarding Krumen are well enough known by old Coasters--their willingness to work if well fed, and their habit of engaging for twelve-month terms of work and then returning to ”We country.” A trader who is satisfied with a boy gives him, when he leaves, a bit of paper telling the captain of any vessel that he will pay the boy's pa.s.sage to his factory again, when he is willing to come. The period that a boy remains in his beloved ”We country”
seems to be until his allowance of his own earnings is expended.
One can picture to one's self some sad partings in that far-away dark land. ”My loves,” says the Kruboy to his families, his voice heavy with tears, ”I must go. There is no more cloth, I have nothing between me and an easily shocked world but this decayed filament of cotton.” And then his families weep with him, or, what is more likely, but not so literary, expectorate with emotion, and he tears himself away from them and comes on board the pa.s.sing steamer in the uniform of Gunga Din--”nothing much before and rather less than half of that behind,” and goes down Coast on the strength of the little bit of paper from his white master which he has carefully treasured, and works like a n.i.g.g.e.r in the good sense of the term for another spell, to earn more goods for his home-folk.
Those boys who are first starting on travelling to work, and those without books, have no difficulty in getting pa.s.sages on the steamers, for a captain is glad to get as many on board as he can, being sure to get their pa.s.sage money and a premium for them, so great is the demand for Kru labour. But even this help to working the West Coast has been much interfered with of late years by the action of the French Government in imposing a tax per head on all labourers leaving their ports on the Ivory Coast. This tax, I believe, is now removed or much reduced; but as for the Liberian Republic, it simply gets its revenue in an utterly unjustifiable way out of taxing the Krumen who s.h.i.+p as labourers. The Krumen are no property of theirs, and they dare not interfere with them on sh.o.r.e; but owing to that little transaction in the celebrated Rubber Monopoly, the Liberians became possessed of some ready cash, which, with great foresight, they invested in two little gun-boats which enabled them to enforce their tax on the Krumen in their small canoes. I do not feel so sympathetic with the Krumen or their employers in this matter as I should, for the Krumen are silly hens not to go and wipe out Liberia on sh.o.r.e, and the white men are silly hens not to--but I had better leave that opinion unexpressed.
The power of managing Kruboys is a great accomplishment for any one working the West Coast. One man will get 20 per cent. more work out of his staff, and always have them cheerful, fit, and ready; while another will get very little out of the same set of men except vexation to himself, and accidents to his goods; but this very necessary and important factor in trade is not to be taught with ink. Some men fall into the proper way of managing the boys very quickly, others may have years of experience and yet fail to learn it. The rule is, make them respect you, and make them like you, and then the thing is done; but first dealing with the Kruboy, with all his good points, is very trying work, and they give the new hand an awful time of it while they are experimenting on him to see how far they can do him. They do this very cleverly, but shortsightedly, more Africano, for they spoil the tempers of half the white men whom they have to deal with. It is not necessary to treat them brutally, in fact it does not pay to do so, but it is necessary to treat them severely, to keep a steady hand over them. Never let them become familiar, never let them see you have made a mistake. When you make a mistake in giving them an order let it be understood that that way of doing a thing is a peculiarly artful dodge of your own, and if it fails, that it is their fault. They will quite realise this if it is properly managed. I speak from experience; for example, once, owing to the superior s.e.x being on its back with fever and sending its temperature up with worrying about getting some ebony logs off to a bothering wretch of a river steamer that must needs come yelling along for cargo just then, I said, ”You leave it to me, I'll get it s.h.i.+pped all right,” and proceeded, with the help of three Kruboys, to raft that ebony off. I saw as soon as I had embarked on the affair, from the Kruboys' manner, I was down the wrong path, but how, or why, I did not see until a neat arrangement of ebony billets tied together with tie-tie was in the water. Then I saw that I had constructed an excellent sounding apparatus for finding out the depth of water in the river; and that ebony had an affinity for the bottom of water, not for the top. The situation was a trying one and the way the captain of the vessel kept dancing about his deck saying things in a foreign tongue, but quite comprehensible, was distracting; but I did not devote myself to giving him the information he asked for, as to what PARTICULAR kind of idiot I was, because he was neither a mad doctor nor an ethnologist and had no right to the information; but I put a raft on the line of a very light wood we had a big store of, and this held up the ebony, and the current carried it down to the steamer all right. Then we hauled the line home and sent him some more on the patent plan, but, just to hurry up, you understand, and not delay the s.h.i.+p, a deadly crime, SOME of that ebony went off in a canoe and all ended happily, and the Kruboys regarded themselves as having been the spectators of another manifestation of white intelligence. In defence of the captain's observations, I must say he could not see me because I was deploying behind a woodstack; nevertheless, I do not mean to say this method of s.h.i.+pping ebony is a good one. I shall not try it again in a hurry, and the situation cannot be pulled through unless you have, as Allah gave me, a very swift current; and although, when the thing went well, I DID say things from behind the woodstack to the captain, I did not feel justified in accepting his apologetic invitation to come on board and have a drink.
My experiences with Kruboys would, if written in full, make an excellent manual for a new-comer, but they are too lengthy for this chapter. My first experience with them on a small bush journey aged me very much; and ever since I have s.h.i.+rked chaperoning Kruboys about the West African bush among ticklish-tempered native gentlemen and their forward hussies of wives.
I have always admired men for their strength, their courage, their enterprise, their unceasing struggle for the beyond--the something else, but not until I had to deal with Krumen did I realise the vastness to which this latter characteristic of theirs could attain.
One might have been excused for thinking that a man without rates and taxes, without pockets, and without the manifold, want-creating culture of modern European civilisation and education would necessarily have been bounded, to some extent, in his desires. But one would have been wrong, profoundly wrong, in so thinking, for the Kruman yearns after, and duns for, as many things for his body as the lamented Faustus did for his soul, and away among the apes this interesting creature would have to go, at once, if the wanting of little were a crucial test for the determination of the family termed by the scientific world the Hominidae. Later, when I got to know the Krumen well, I learnt that they desired not only the vast majority of the articles that they saw, but did more--obtained them- -at all events some of them, without asking me for them; such commodities, for example, as fowls, palm wine, old tins and bottles, and other gentlemen's wives were never safe. One of that first gang of boys showed self-help to such a remarkable degree that I christened him Smiles. His name--You-be-d--d--being both protracted and improper, called for change of some sort, but even this brought no comfort to one still hampered with conventional ideas regarding property, and frequent roll-calls were found necessary, so that the crimes of my friend Smiles and his fellows might not acc.u.mulate to an unmanageable extent.
This used to be the sort of thing--”Where them Nettlerash lib?” ”He lib for drunk, Ma.s.sa.” ”Where them Smiles?” ”He lib for town, for steal, Ma.s.sa.” ”Where them Black Man Misery?” But I draw a veil over the confessional, for there is simply no artistic reticence about your Kruman when he is telling the truth, or otherwise, regarding a fellow creature.
After acc.u.mulating with this gang enough experience to fill a hat (remembering always ”one of the worst things you can do in West Africa is to worry yourself”) I bethought me of the advice I had received from my cousin Rose Kingsley, who had successfully ridden through Mexico when Mexico was having a rather worse revolution than usual, ”to always preserve a firm manner.” I thought I would try this on those Kruboys and said ”NO” in place of ”I wish you would not do that, please.” I can't say it was an immediate success.
During this period we came across a trader's lonely store wherein he had a consignment of red parasols. After these appalling objects the souls of my Krumen hungered with a great desire. ”NO,” said I, in my severest tone, and after buying other things, we pa.s.sed on.
Imagine my horror, therefore, hours afterwards and miles away, to find my precious crew had got a red parasol apiece. Previous experience quite justified me in thinking that these had been stolen; and I pictured to myself my Portuguese friends, whose territory I was then in, commenting upon the incident, and reviling me as another instance of how the brutal English go looting through the land. I found, however, I was wrong, for the parasols had been ”dashed” my rapacious rascals ”for top,” and the last one connected with the affair who deserved pity was the trader from whom I had believed them stolen. It was I, not he, who suffered, for it was the wet season in West Africa and those red parasols ran. To this day my scientific soul has never been able to account for the vast body of crimson dye those miserable cotton things poured out, plentifully drenching myself and their owners, the Kruboys, and everything we a.s.sociated with that day. I am quite prepared to hear that some subsequent wanderer has found a red trail in Africa itself like that one so often sees upon the maps. When they do, I hereby claim that real red trail as mine.
I confess I like the African on the whole, a thing I never expected to do when I went to the Coast with the idea that he was a degraded, savage, cruel brute; but that is a trifling error you soon get rid of when you know him. The Kruboy is decidedly the most likeable of all Africans that I know. Wherein his charm lies is difficult to describe, and you certainly want the patience of Job, and a conscience made of stretching leather to deal with the Kruboy in the African climate, and live. In his better manifestations he reminds me of that charming personality, the Irish peasant, for though he lacks the sparkle, he is full of humour, and is the laziest and the most industrious of mankind. He lies and tells the truth in such a hopelessly uncertain manner that you cannot rely on him for either.
He is ungrateful and faithful to the death, honest and thievish, all in one and the same specimen of him.
Ingrat.i.tude is a crime laid very frequently to the score of all Africans, but I think unfairly; certainly I have never had to complain of it, and the Krumen often show grat.i.tude for good treatment in a grand way. The way those Kruboys of gallant Captain Lane helped him work Lagos Bar and save lives by the dozen from the stranded s.h.i.+ps on it and hauled their ”Ma.s.sa” out from among the sharkey foam every time he went into it, on the lifeboat upsetting, would have done credit to Deal or Norfolk lifeboat men, but the secret of their devotion is their personal attachment. They do not save people out of surf on abstract moral principles. The African at large is not an enthusiast on moral principles, and one and all they'll let nature take its course if they don't feel keen on a man surviving.
Half the African's ingrat.i.tude, although it may look very bad on paper, is really not so very bad; for half the time you have been asking him to be grateful to you for doing to, or giving him things he does not care a row of pins about. I have quite his feelings, for example, for half the things in civilised countries I am expected to be glad to get. ”Oh, how nice it must be to be able to get about in cars, omnibuses and railway trains again!” Is it?
Well I don't think so, and I do not feel glad over it. Similarly, we will take an African case of ingrat.i.tude. A white friend of mine put himself to an awful lot of trouble to save the life of one of his sub-traders who had had an accident, and succeeded. It had been the custom of the man's wife to bring the trader little presents of fowls, etc., from time to time, and some time after the accident he met the lady and told her he had noticed a falling off in her offerings and he thought her very ungrateful after what he had done for her husband. She grunted and the next morning she brings in as a present the most forlorn, skinny, one-and-a-half-feathered chicken you ever laid eye on, and in answer to the trader's comments she said: ”Ma.s.sa, fo sure them der chicken no be 'ticularly good chicken, but fo sure dem der man no be 'ticularly good man. They go” (they match each other).