Robert H. Milligan

“ The Spanish Island of Fernando Po is the most beautiful place in West Africa. Seen from the harbour in the early morning light or in the soft glow of the evening it is a fairy-land of tropical beauty. The bottom of the semicircular harbour is the crater of an extinct volcano and is very deep. The bank is covered down to the water with a lavish growth of ferns, and trailing vines, and flowers of many colours; while above the palm tree is abundant—the most graceful of all trees, and the billowy bamboo tosses in the breeze. ”

“ Even at night the noise does not cease, but only removes to a distance where it no longer disturbs. The people stay in their towns at night, but they usually make more noise than in the day. From a village at the foot of the hill rises the weird and incessant wail of their mourning for the dead, an appalling dirge that chills the blood; from another village near by, a savage noise of war drums and shouting by which they are warning an expected enemy that they are on the watch; from another, the uncouth music of their dissolute dance ”

“ And in the evening when the social instinct is lively and men sit together at leisure in the balmy breeze, under the canvas roof, on a well-lighted deck, the sea so calm as to allay all apprehension, a wall of darkness around us, and the immensity of the sea beyond, as separate from the rest of the world as would be some tiny planet that has separated from the solid earth and rotates upon its own axis, then the charm of travel on the tropical sea is all that the imagination had preconceived,—a lazy, luxurious dream. ”

“ In general the coast of West Africa is not beautiful; although it has a weird fascination for those who have once lived on it. It is low-lying, straight and monotonous: a gleaming line of white surf, a golden strip of sandy beach, a dark green line of forest—and that is all, for days and days and days, and for some two thousand miles, only broken at long intervals by the great estuary that is a peculiar characteristic of African rivers, and by low hills far away on the horizon. ”

“ Each day is exactly like all the others, and the natural surroundings never vary however far they may wander along the beach—three endless lines of colour stretching away to eternity, the dull green forest front, the yellow strip of sand, the white surge of the foaming surf, and beyond it the boundless sea. Even in the darkest night the forest still shows as a blacker rim against the darkness, and the surf-line is white with a whiteness that no night can obscure. ”

“ The laws of growth, seed-time and harvest, rain and sunshine—all the kindly ministry of nature is quiet and unobtrusive, while her cruelty thrusts itself upon the attention because it is her unaccustomed mood. The conception of nature in the African mind is derived from the devastating tornado and the storm upon the sea that threatens to engulf him, from the hard work necessary to procure his food and the scarcity of meat, from sickness that disables him and death that bereaves him of his friends. ”

“ Not having been accustomed to rise so early, my sense of humour is still dormant at that hour; life is always a serious matter to me and a doubtful boon until after breakfast. I yawn, and yawn again, and heave a weary sigh, as I reflect that the clamorous noise which has thus ushered in the day will continue through the long hours until its close.
Soon after our arrival at Efulen Dr. Good and I visited the town of an old chief of some fame, named Abesula. ”

“ Men sacrifice for each other, and we even have martyrs. But in the forest there is no sacrifice, no martyrdom, nor do trees ever confederate; but each fights for itself in a ceaseless and savage struggle. And nowhere else in the forest world is the struggle for existence so remorseless as in the tropic zone of Africa; for nowhere else is variety so profuse and growth so rapid. ”

“ All deaths that we call natural are imputed to witchcraft. As soon as the cry of witchcraft is raised, the people, panic stricken with fear, are transformed to ferocious demons. With wild eyes they rush up and down the street in a body crying out for blood. This is the opportunity of the witch-doctor, either to levy blackmail, or to rid himself of his enemies. When a woman is accused by him, no matter in what esteem she may have been held hitherto, and regardless of her family connections, the people turn upon her in cruel rage and can scarce wait for the ordeal. ”

“ It would be disgraceful to a man to be caught eating with his wife. Her duty is to work for him and to provide for him. She is bought with a price and is a part of his wealth; indeed, a man’s wealth and influence are measured by the number of his wives. The son inherits the father’s wives, all but his own mother. Frequently in the forest one may see a woman staggering along the rough bush-path under a load of forty or fifty pounds, and perhaps carrying her poor babe in a strap hung at her side, while her lordly husband walks before her with only his gun or a knife. ”

“ The sea rolled in with a tremendous swell—the calemma—like a wall of water that looked three stories high, which, as it approached the land, burst into a succession of breakers that raced towards the shore, and striking with the boom of cannon, tossed the white surf high into the air. One always feels, in going through it, that he is fighting a personal foe; there is even something human in the sound of it. ”

“ But, in the first place, like other white men in that climate, I was soon compelled to become my own physician. For even if there is a professional physician at the same station, he cannot be there always; but self-care must be constant, and so one accumulates a considerable experience. And what he does for himself he can do for the natives. For however ignorant he may be of medicine he is wiser than they. When I saw a woman writhing in a convulsion I at least suspected poisoning; but they suspected witchcraft and beat drums around her to drive out the bad spirit. ”

“ Four years have passed, and in all likelihood the chief with his family has been killed long ago, leaving not even a name behind him, but only this haunting cry, that keeps ringing in one’s heart.
So they all are crying to us with outstretched hands; a people who call the white man, Father, and trust him with pathetic confidence until he betrays their trust and smites them with the rod of tyranny. I think I can hear their piteous cry wafted on the winds that wander over the great forest: “We shall all be killed! ”

“ Life is so hard for the African, so bare and comfortless! And when he would fain seek the road to the Better Land so many forces conspire against him that, apart for our faith in God and the love of God, one might think that the world around him was contrived for his defeat. In this dark land one catches only an occasional glimpse of the all-ruling and kindly Providence in which we believe. ”

“ And even yet the belated traveller passing that way hears the screams of the dead man.
But the greatest fear in all Africa is the witch. The witch’s soul is “loose from her body,” and at night she leaves her body and goes about the town, an unseen enemy, doing mischief and wickedness. A young man by the camp fire tells of a witch in his town who for some time had been “eating” the children of the town. It is not the body, but the spirit, that she eats, after which the child sickens, and gradually becoming worse, at length dies. ”

“ Mountain and valley are covered with a forest of green with here and there a tree of red or scarlet, and so dense that one might think he could walk on it. From the top of Efulen hill one looks out on a rolling plain of foliage that stretches away over valley and hill, until it becomes extinct in the dim distance of the empurpled hills. Often in the morning, when the atmosphere of the valleys is clear, an overhanging mist cuts off the tops of the mountains, which appear as elevated table-lands, all of the same height, and precisely level. ”

“ There I baptized sixty-five persons, making in all one hundred and twenty members in the Ayol Church. And, besides, there were nearly three hundred catechumens.
When I reflect on the kind of men and women that these Christians are, and consider the savages they might have been; when I realize the surroundings of darkest ignorance, revolting degradation and horrible cruelty in the midst of which they walk in ways of righteousness and truth; when I think how rough that way is and how very dark the night of Africa, my heart goes out to them all in eager sympathy and solicitude. ”

“ When I left Africa he was in a native town near by, drinking himself to death; nor could he live long. But so great is the multitude hurrying down this same broad road to destruction that one more old man would never be noticed in the crowd.
Ndong Koni who figured in the fire-dance, was the one I have known most intimately of all Africans, and the one who made the strongest appeal to my affections. He was a handsome boy, as light in colour as a mulatto, [288] of gentle manners and affectionate disposition. He came to me and engaged as a boat-boy shortly after I began work among the Fang. ”

“ The children, if they are not accustomed to the white man, scream with fright, and the grown people laugh without restraint. Those in the street laugh still louder and afford every evidence that the rear view of the performance—the unintelligible exertions, the sudden disappearance and the feet lingering on the door-sill—was an entertainment which they would greatly enjoy a second time. The white man gets up out of the dust and the ashes, glares fiercely around and asks if anybody knows where his helmet is. ”

“ He is seldom that; but he does more work singing than he would do not singing. And he sings because, however wronged and oppressed, there is a freedom within him which the white man can never take away; a lightness of heart, a buoyancy of spirit intractable to tyranny.
West Africa is notorious in all the world for its paucity of harbours, and its heavy surf, which at certain seasons rages like a battle, the roar of it like many voices defying the white man that would approach its shores. The surf at one place where we called was so bad that we were seven days discharging one day’s cargo. ”

“ But the greatest wonder of it is that the white man includes the native himself in his program of improvement. He finds him a denizen of the forest, his mental habitudes like her changing moods, now sullen and cruel, now gentle and cheerful for a little while, partaking of her darkness mingled here and there with broken beams of light; and as he clears a way through the deep forest making the darkness light, so he labours that a gleam of heaven’s light may shine down into the benighted native soul ”

“ I have never argued for the salubrity of the African climate; nor am I disposed to protest the general opinion that it is “the worst climate in the world.” The white man never becomes acclimatized, and never will until he develops another kind of blood. One lives face to face with the constant and proximate possibility of death as long as he is on the coast. It is an unnatural consciousness, which, when prolonged through years, tends to become fixed and permanent even when one has removed from the circumstances that were its occasion. ”

“ The mangrove swamp is surely the worst that nature has ever been known to do. My feeling of disgust was intensified by many experiences of after years. Sometimes approaching a town at the ebbing tide, a strong native has carried me on his back from the boat to the solid bank, across a waste of sludge, and sometimes he has fallen in the act. Other times, when one could not wade, they have thrown me a line and have dragged me across in a canoe ”

“ But Makuba would not think of striking a man in a mission boat. He therefore becomes diplomatic. Suddenly in a tone altogether different he says:
“Obianga, the trouble with you is that you are just a bush man; you don’t know anything about civilization. On every big ocean-steamer there is a captain, and every man on board, no matter what tribe he belongs to, obeys the captain.” ”

“ If he remain long in a climate so unnatural to him and in a strange and uncivilized society the likelihood is that there will be an imperceptible and unconscious lowering of moral standards and accommodation to the standards of the society around him. Cruelty which at first shocked him gradually ceases to shock and at length he becomes indifferent, or perhaps himself capable of barbarous deeds from which he would at first have recoiled with horror.
For the men of whom I have been speaking are not inferior to the average man at home. ”

“ I have learned to think more kindly of the African trader and to refrain from criticism because of some whom I have known intimately on these long voyages.
As we sit on deck in the evening the captain tells us that at Lagos, where we are due in a few days, he has seen the natives fight the sharks in the sea and kill them. The shark is the monster of the tropical seas, the incarnation of ferocity and hunger. The native takes a stout stick, six inches long and sharpened at both ends. ”