Читать книгу Alone in West Africa - Mary Gaunt - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Rejoicing-, half-eastern and wholly tropical, on arrival of the Governor—Colonies governed and held as the Romans held their colonies of Britain—Great g-ulf between the black and the white—The barrier of sex—Received as a brother but declined as a brother-in-law—Lonely Fort St. James—The strenuous lives led by the men of the past—Crinted walls—The pilot's wife—Up the river in the Mungo Park—The river devil's toll—“Pass friend and all's well.”

When I was a little girl the Queen held something the same place in my mind as the Almighty. The ruler of the nation hardly had any personality. She was there, of course, and people talked about her as conferring great benefits upon us; but so we also talked about God in church and when we said our prayers at night. As a family, we objected to saying prayers in the morning. They were not supposed to be necessary till you had arrived at mature years, say, five, and by then, I suppose, we had imbibed the idea that we could really take care of ourselves very well during the day-time. So the Queen, too, was in the same category as God and Heaven, that distinctly dull place, which was to be the reward of good works on earth, and His Excellency the Governor took her place in the minds of all young colonials. Of course, as I grew older, I realised that the Governor was a man like unto other men, that he could be talked to like an ordinary man, could ask you to dinner, and even take a polite interest in your future; but, still, some of the rags of the childish vagueness and glory clung round him, and so I was quite pleased to find myself on board a steamer with a real live Governor. More, I sat next him at table; we discussed the simple commonplace doings of ship-board life together, and as we arrived at the buoy I shared in the little fuss and bustle which the landing of such an exalted personage always makes. And he wasn't really such a very exalted personage in his own opinion. There was a merry twinkle in his nice brown eyes as he admitted that his gold-laced coat, made to be worn on state occasions such as this, was a great deal too hot for the Tropics, and that its donning must be left to the very last moment; and so I stood on the flag-dressed deck by myself and watched the land of my dreams come into view.

A long, low shore is the Gambia—a jutting point, with palms upon it, running out into a glassy sea, from which is reflected the glare of the tropical sun. There was a little denser clump of greenery that marked the site of Bathurst, the capital; and, as we drew closer, we could see the roofs of the houses peeping out, bright specks of colour that were the flags, and the long line of red on the wharf, the soldiers turned out to welcome the returning Governor.

This is the only place along that line of surf-bound coast where a ship may come up to the wharf and land her passengers dry-shod; but, to-day, because the captain was in a hurry, he dropped us over the side in boats, and we landed to all the glory of a welcome that was half-eastern and wholly and emotionally tropical. The principal street of Bathurst, the only street worth mentioning, runs all along the river-side, with houses on one side and the wharfs and piers on the other; and the whole place was thronged with the black inhabitants. The men shouted and tossed their hats and caps when they had any; and the women, the mammies, as I learned to call them later, flung their gaily coloured cloths from their shoulders for their dearly loved Governor to walk over; and the handful of whites—there are twenty-five English and some French and Swiss—came forward and solemnly shook hands. He had come back to them, the man who had ruled over them for the last ten years, and white and black loved him, and were glad to do him honour.

In the midst of great rejoicing, a good omen for me, I set my foot on African shore. I began my journeying, and I looked round to try and realise what manner of country was this I had come to—what manner of life I was to be part and parcel of.

These colonies on the West-African coast are as unlike as possible to the colony in which I first saw the light, that my people have helped to build up. I fancy, perhaps, the Roman proconsul and the officials in his train, who came out to rule over Britain in the first century before Christ, must have led lives somewhat resembling those of the Britons who nowadays go out to West Africa. One thing is certain, those Italians must have grumbled perpetually about the inclemency and unhealthiness of the climate of these northern isles; they probably had a great deal to say about the fever and ague that was rife. They were accustomed to certain luxuries that civilisation had made into necessities, and they came to a land where all the people were traders and agriculturists of a most primitive sort. They were exiles in a cold, grey land, and they felt it bitterly. They came to replenish their purses, and when those purses were fairly full they returned to their own land gladly. The position describes three-quarters of the Englishmen in West Africa to-day; but between the Roman and the savage Piet of Caledonia was never the gulf, the great gulf, which is fixed between even the educated African and the white man of whatever nationality. It is no good trying to hide the fact; between the white man and the black lies not only the culture and the knowledge of the west—that gulf might, and sometimes is bridged—but that other great bar, the barrier of sex. Tall, stalwart, handsome as is many a negro, no white woman may take a black man for her husband and be respected by her own people; no white man may take a black girl, though her dark eyes be soft and tender, though her skin be as satin and her figure like that of the Venus of Milo, and hope to introduce her among his friends as his wife. Even the missionaries who preach that the black man is a brother decline emphatically to receive him as a brother-in-law. And so we get, beginning here in the little colony of the Gambia, the handful of the ruling race set among a subject people; so the white man has always ruled the black; so, I think, he must always rule. It will be a bad day for the white when the black man rules. That there should be any mingling of the races is unthinkable; so I hope that the white man will always rule Africa with a strong hand.

The Gambia is the beginning of the English colonies on the Coast, and, the pity of it, a very small beginning.

In the old days, when Charles the Second was king, the English held none of the banks of the river at all, but contented themselves with a barren little island about seventeen miles from where Bathurst now stands. One bank was held by the French, the other by the Portuguese; and the English built on the island Fort St. James to protect their interest in the great trade in palm oil, slaves, and ivory that came down the river. Even then the Gambia was rich. It is richer far to-day, but the French hold the greater part of it. The colony of the Gambia is at the mouth of the river, twelve miles broad by four hundred long, a narrow strip of land bordering the mouth of a river set in the heart of the great French colony of Senegal—a veritable Naboth's vineyard that our friends the other side of the Channel may well envy us. It brings us in about £80,000 annually, but to them it would be of incalculable value as an outlet for the majority of their rich trade.

At first I hardly thought about these things. I was absorbed in the wonder of the new life. I stayed at Government House with the Governor, and was caught up in the little whirl of gaieties that greeted his return. The house was tropical, with big, lofty, airy rooms and great wide verandahs that as a rule serve also as passageways to pass from one room to another; for Government House, Bathurst, is built as a tropical house should be—must be—built, if the builder have any regard for the health of its inmates. There were no rooms that the prevailing breeze could not sweep right through. There was a drawingroom and a dining-room on the ground floor, but I do not think either Sir George or I, or his private secretary, ever used the drawing-room unless there were guests to be entertained. The verandahs were so much more inviting, and my bedroom was a delightful place. It ran right across the house. There was no carpet, and, as was only right, only just such furniture as I absolutely needed. The bed was enclosed in another small mosquito-proof room of wirenetting, and it was the only thing I did not like about the house. There, and at that season, perhaps it did not very much matter, for a strong Harmattan wind, the cool wind of the cold, dry season, was blowing, and it kept the air behind the stout wire-netting fresh and clean; but I must here put on record my firm belief that no inconsiderable number of lives in Africa must be lost owing to some doctor's prejudice in favour of mosquito-proof netting. A mosquito-proof netting is very stout indeed, and not only excludes the mosquito, but, and this far more effectually, the fresh air as well. The man who has plenty of fresh air, day and night, will be in better health, and far more likely to resist infection if he does happen to get bitten by a fever-bearing mosquito, than he who must perforce spend at least a third of his time in the vitiated air of a mosquito-proof room. This I did not realise at Government House, Bathurst, or if I did, but dimly, for there in December the strong Harmattan would have forced its way through anything. I spent most of my time on the verandah outside my own room, where I had a view not only of the road that ran to to the centre of the town but right away across the river. Here I had my breakfast and my afternoon tea, and here I did all my writing.

In Africa your own servant takes charge of your room, gets your bath, and brings you your early-morning tea; and here in Bathurst in this womanless house my servant was to get my breakfast and my afternoon tea as well, so the first thing to be done was to look out for a boy. He appeared in the shape of Ansumanah Grant, a Mohammedan boy of three-and-twenty, a Vai tribesman, who had been brought up by the Wesleyan missionaries at Cape Mount in Liberia. When I engaged him he wore a pink pyjama coat, a pair of moleskin breeches, and red carpet slippers; and, when this was rectified—at my expense—he appeared in a white shirt, khaki knicker-bockers, a red cummerbund, and bare feet, and made a very respectable member of society and a very good servant to me during the whole of my stay in Africa.