Читать книгу Alone in West Africa - Mary Gaunt - Страница 15

Table of Contents

The origin of Sierra Leone—The difficulties of disposing of freed slaves—One of the beauty-spots of the earth—Is it possible that in the future, like Jamaica, it may be a health-resort?—Zachary Macauley's views—Few women in Freetown—Sanitary matters taken out of the hands of the Town Council and vested in a sanitary officer—Marked improvement in cleanliness and health of the town—A remarkable man of colour—Extraordinary language of the Creole—Want of taste in dress when they ape the European—Mrs. Abraham Freeman at home.

I had no intention of going to Sierra Leone, but in West Africa as yet you make your way from one place to another along the sea-board, and not only did Sierra Leone lie directly on my way, but the steamer, the Zaria, in which I was travelling, stayed there for four days.

In the old days, a little over one hundred years ago, England, successfully policing the world, was putting down the iniquitous slave-trade all along the coasts of Africa, and found herself with numbers of black and helpless men, women, and children upon her hands. They had been collected from all parts of the Coast; they themselves often did not know where their homes lay, and the problem—quite a difficult one—was to know what to do with them. To land them promiscuously on the Coast was to seal their fate; either they would be killed or at the very best they would at once relapse into the condition from which they had been rescued. In this dilemma England did perhaps the only thing she could do. She bought from the chiefs a strip of land round the mouth of a river and landed there her somewhat troublesome charges to make for themselves, if they could, a home. Of course she did not leave them to their own devices; to do that would have been to insure their destruction at the hands of the Mendi and Timini war-boys, but she planted there a Governor and some soldiers, and made such provision as she could for the future of these forlorn people. Then the colony was but a little strip of land. It is but a small place still, but the British Protectorate now takes in those warlike Timinis and Mendis, and extends some hundreds of miles inland and as far south as the negro republic of Liberia, which I was on my way to visit.