Читать книгу West African studies - Mary Henrietta Kingsley - Страница 11

However, we will not go into that now. I beg to refer you to Bishop Ingram’s Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years, for the history of England’s philanthropic efforts. I may some day, perhaps, in the remote future, write myself a book on America’s effort, but I cannot write it now, because I have in my possession only printed matter—a wilderness of opinion and a mass of abuse on Liberia as it is. No sane student of West Africa would proceed to form an opinion on any part of it with such stuff and without a careful personal study of the thing as it is.

The natives of this part of the West coast, the aboriginal ones, as Mrs. Gault would call them, are a different matter. You can go and live in West Africa without seeing a crocodile or a hippopotamus or a mountain, but no white man can go there without seeing and experiencing a Kruboy, and Kruboys are one of the main tribes here. Kruboys are, indeed, the backbone of white effort in West Africa, and I think I may say there is but one man of all of us who have visited West Africa who has not paid a tribute to the Kruboy’s sterling qualities. Alas! that one was one of England’s greatest men. Why he painted that untrue picture of them I do not know. I know that on this account the magnificent work he did is discredited by all West Coasters. “If he said that of Kruboys,” say the old coasters, “how can he have known or understood anything?” It is a painful subject, and my opinion on Kruboys is entirely with the old coasters, who know them with an experience of years, not with the experience of any man, however eminent, who only had the chance of seeing them for a few weeks, and whose information was so clearly drawn from vitiated sources. All I can say in defence of my great fellow countryman is that he came to West Africa from the very worst school a man can for understanding the Kruboy, or any true Negro, namely, from the Bantu African tribes, and that he only fell into the error many other great countrymen of mine have since fallen into, whereby there is war and misunderstanding and disaffection between our Government and the true Negro to-day, and nothing, as far as one can see, but a grievous waste of life and gold ahead.

The Kruboy is indeed a sore question to all old coasters. They have devoted themselves to us English, and they have suffered, laboured, fought, been massacred, and so on with us for generation after generation. Many a time Krumen have come to me when we have been together in foreign possessions and said, “Help us, we are Englishmen.” They have never asked in vain of me or any Englishman in West Africa, but recognition of their services by our Government at home is—well, about as much recognition as most men get from it who do good work in West Africa. For such men are a mere handful whom Imperialism can neglect with impunity, and, even if it has for the moment to excuse itself for so doing, it need only call us “traders.” I say us, because I am vain of having been, since my return, classed among the Liverpool traders by a distinguished officer.

This part of Western Africa from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas was known to the geographers amongst the classics as Leuce Æthiopia: to their successors as the Grain or Pepper or Meleguetta Coast. I will discourse later of the inhabitants, the Kru, from an ethnological standpoint, because they are too interesting and important to be got in here. The true limits of the Grain coast are from the River Sestros to Growy, two leagues east of Cape Palmas according to Barbot, and its name came from the fact that it was hereabouts that the Portuguese, on their early expeditions in the 15th century, first came across grains of paradise, a circumstance that much excited those navigators at the time and encouraged them to pursue their expeditions to this region, for grains of paradise were in those days much valued and had been long known in European markets.

These euphoniously-named spices are the seeds of divers amomums, or in lay language, cardamum—Amomum Meleguetta (Roscoe) or as Pereira has it, Amomum granum Paradisi. Their more decorative appellation “grains of Paradise” is of Italian origin, the Italians having known and valued this spice, bought it, and sold it to the rest of Europe at awful prices long before the Portuguese, under Henry the Navigator, visited the West African Coast. The Italians had bought the spice from the tawny Moors, who brought it, with other products of West Africa across the desert to the Mediterranean port Monte Barca by Tripoli.

The reason why this African cardamum received either the name of grains of Paradise or of Meleguetta pepper is, like most African things, wrapt in mystery to a certain extent. Some authorities hold they got the first name on their own merits. Others that the Italian merchants gave it them to improve prices. Others that the Italians gave it them honestly enough on account of their being nice, and no one knowing where on earth exactly they came from, said, therefore, why not say Paradise? It is certain, however, that before the Portuguese went down into the unknown seas and found the Pepper coast that the Italians knew those peppers came from the country of Melli, but as they did not know where that was, beyond that it was somewhere in Africa, this did not take away the sense of romance from the spice.

As for their name Meleguetta, an equal divergence of opinion reigns. I myself think the proper word is meneguetta. The old French name was maneguilia, and the name they are still called by at Cape Palmas in the native tongue is Emanequetta. The French claim to have brought peppers and ivory from the River Sestros as early as 1364, and the River Sestros was on the seaboard of the kingdom of Mene, but the termination quetta is most probably a corruption of the Portuguese name for pepper. But, on the other hand, the native name for them among the Sestros people is Waizanzag. And therefore, the whole name may well be European, and just as well called meleguetta as meneguetta, because the kingdom of Mene was a fief of the Empire of Melli when the Portuguese first called at Sestros. The other possible derivation is that which says mele is a corruption of the Italian name for Turkey millet, Melanga, a thing the grains rather resemble. Another very plausible derivation is that the whole word is Portuguese in origin, but a corruption of mala gens, the Portuguese having found the people they first bought them of a bad lot, and so named the pepper in memory thereof. This however is interestingly erroneous and an early example of the danger of armchairism when dealing with West Africa. For the coast of the malegens was not the coast the Portuguese first got the pepper from, but it was that coast just to the east of the Meleguetta, where all they got was killing and general unpleasantness round by the Rio San Andrew, Drewin way, which coast is now included in the Ivory.

The grains themselves are by no means confined to the Grain Coast, but are the fruit of a plant common in all West African districts, particularly so on Cameroon Mountain, where just above the 3,000 feet level on the east and southeast face you come into a belt of them, and horrid walking ground they make. I have met with them also in great profusion in the Sierra del Crystal; but there is considerable difference in the kinds. The grain of Paradise of commerce is, like that of the East Indian cardamom, enclosed in a fibrous capsule, and the numerous grains in it are surrounded by a pulp having a most pleasant, astringent, aromatic taste. This is pleasant eating, particularly if you do not manage to chew up with it any of the grains, for they are amazingly hot in the mouth, and cause one to wonder why Paradise instead of Hades was reported as their “country of origin.”

The natives are very fond of chewing the capsule and the inner bark of the stem of the plant. They are, for the matter of that, fond of chewing anything, but the practice in this case seems to me more repaying than when carried on with kola or ordinary twigs.

Two kinds of meleguetta pepper come up from Guinea. That from Accra is the larger, plumper, and tougher skinned, and commands the higher price. The capsule, which is about 2 inches long by 1 inch in breadth, is more oval than that of the other kind, and the grains in it are round and bluntly angular, bright brown outside, but when broken open showing a white inside. The other kind, the ordinary Guinea grain of commerce, comes from Sierra Leone and Liberia. They are devoid of the projecting tuft on the umbilicus. The capsule is like that of the Accra grain. When dry, it is wrinkled, and if soaked does not display the longitudinal frill of the Javan Amomum maximum, which it is sometimes used to adulterate. This common capsule is only about 1½ inches long and ½ an inch in diameter, but the grain when broken open is also white like the Accra one. There are, however, any quantity on Cameroons of the winged Javan variety, but these have so far not been exported.

The plants that produce the grains are zingiberaceous, cane-like in appearance, only having broader, blunter leaves than the bamboo. The flower is very pretty, in some kinds a violet pink, but in the most common a violet purple, and they are worn as marks of submission by people in the Oil Rivers suing for peace. These flowers, which grow close to the ground, seeming to belong more to the root of the plant than the stem, or, more properly speaking, looking as if they had nothing to do with the graceful great soft canes round them, but were a crop of lovely crocus-like flowers on their own account, are followed by crimson-skinned pods enclosing the black and brown seeds wrapped in juicy pulp, quite unlike the appearance they present when dried or withered.

There is only a small trade done in Guinea grains now, George III. (Cap. 58) having declared that no brewer or dealer in wine shall be found in possession of grains of Paradise without paying a fine of £200, and that if any druggist shall sell them to a brewer that druggist shall pay a fine of £500 for each such offence.

The reason of this enactment was the idea that the grains were poisonous, and that the brewers in using them to give fire to their liquors were destroying their consumers, His Majesty’s lieges. As far as poison goes this idea was wrong, for Meleguetta pepper or grains of Paradise are quite harmless though hot. Perhaps, however, some consignment may have reached Europe with poisonous seeds in it. I once saw four entirely different sorts of seeds in a single sample. That is the worst of our Ethiopian friends, they adulterate every mortal thing that passes through their hands. I will do them the justice to say they usually do so with the intellectually comprehensible end in view of gaining an equivalent pecuniary advantage by it. Still it is commercially unsound of them; for example for years they sent up the seeds of the Kickia Africana as an adulteration for Strophantus, whereas they would have made more by finding out that the Kickia was a great rubber-producing tree. They will often take as much trouble to put in foreign matter as to get more legitimate raw material. I really fancy if any one were to open up a trade in Kru Coast rocks, adulteration would be found in the third shipment. It is their way, and legislation is useless. All that is necessary is that the traders who buy of them should know their business and not make infants of themselves by regarding the African as one or expecting the government to dry nurse them.

In private life the native uses and values these Guinea grains highly, using them sometimes internally sometimes externally, pounding them up into a paste with which they beplaster their bodies for various aches and pains. For headache, not the sequelæ of trade gin, but of malaria, the forehead and temples are plastered with a stiff paste made of Guinea grain, hard oil, chalk, or some such suitable medium, and it is a most efficacious treatment for this fearfully common complaint in West Africa. But the careful ethnologist must not mix this medicinal plaster up with the sort of prayerful plaster worn by the West Africans at time for Ju Ju, and go and mistake a person who is merely attending to his body for one who is attending to his soul.