Читать книгу A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland - Meg Gehrts - Страница 3

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By Major H. Schomburgk, F.R.G.S.

It was after my return from my first West African cinema expedition, in June 1913, that I made up my mind to try and film native dramas in their true and proper settings.

My aim was to visualise, as it were, for the European public, scenes from African native life as it once was all over the continent, and as it is even now in the more remote and seldom-visited parts; and it was further my object to so present the various incidents as to ensure their being pleasing and interesting to all classes and conditions of people.

To this end, then, it became necessary for me to find a white woman capable of acting the principal parts, supported by native supers. My thoughts at once reverted to Miss Gehrts, a lady with whom I have been acquainted for some little while, and whom I knew to be a keen sportswoman, a good rider, and possessed of histrionic ability of no mean order.

It did not take me long to persuade her to accept the offer I made her; but her parents raised many objections, based principally on the supposed dangers and privations which they assumed—not altogether wrongly—to be inseparable from the trip. These objections, however, were eventually overcome, the enterprise was undertaken and brought to a successful conclusion, and this book is one result of it.

Personally, I must confess to not being altogether favourably impressed with the ordinary African "travel book" of the typical globe-trotting woman writer: the kind of one, I mean, who either conscientiously and carefully hugs the coast, or else ventures but a little way into the hinterland along the ordinary caravan routes, and then puts upon record a long string of facts and fancies which only serve to raise a smile on the faces of those who really know their Africa, exemplifying, as they almost invariably do, that, with regard to this vast and most wonderful continent, more than perhaps anywhere else, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Miss Gehrts' book—and I say so frankly and freely without fear or favour—is not of this sort. She quitted the beaten track altogether; so much so that north of Sokode she was absolutely the first and only white woman the natives had ever beheld. She had, therefore, the satisfaction of seeing these interesting peoples—the Tschaudjo, the Konkombwa, the Tschokossi, and many others—in their original unspoilt state of free and proud savagedom.

I am pleased to say that she appreciated the opportunities afforded her, using her powers of observation to very good purpose indeed, and with results that were not a little surprising even to old dwellers in the country. For instance, it was she who discovered the curious industry of making beads from palm nuts, described in Chapter VII, as also the unique fortified native village of which a plan and drawing, as well as a full and most interesting description, will be found in Chapter XII.

For these reasons I am inclined to dissent from the view, expressed by her in her foreword, that the book possesses no scientific value. I also disagree with most of what she has written in the opening chapter concerning myself: it is far too flattering.

On the other hand I cannot praise too highly the work done by her in connection with the expedition. I am only afraid that no reader will either appreciate or understand, from her very self-restrained narrative, what she really underwent while acting in the dramatic pieces.

Miss Gehrts also took charge of the commissariat, and I am sure that every member of the expedition will be only too pleased to certify that a better could not have been evolved than the one that was run so easily and beautifully by "our little mother," as the "boys" used to call her.

Finally, I should like to say that this book possesses the distinction of being the first published record of a journey through Togoland ever written by anybody, man or woman, black or white. It is, therefore, in a sense unique, and I wish it all the success that, in my humble opinion, it deserves. I cannot say more: nor can I say less.

HANS SCHOMBURGK.

London, July 9, 1914.