Gaboon

“ These savannahs (savánas) add an indescribable charm to the Gaboon Coast, especially when the morning and evening suns strike them with slanting rays, and compel them to stand out distinct from the setting of eternal emerald. The aspect of the downs is civilized as the banks of the Solent; and the coast wants nothing to complete the "fine, quiet old-country picture in the wilds of Africa" but herds of kine grazing upon leas shining with a golden glory, or a country seat, backed by the noble virgin forest, such a bosquet as Europe never knew. ”

“ Now one of the first things that struck the traveller was that in this country animal life was exceedingly scarce, and this was curious because the Gaboon Country is situated in one of the hottest parts of Africa where every place teems with life. ”

“ The natives at the Gaboon, to whom these excellent people are sacrificing themselves, are said to present more favorable points of character than those in most other parts of Africa. They are mild in their manners, friendly to Europeans and Americans, and disposed to imitate them in dress and customs. They own many slaves among themselves, but treat them with singular gentleness, and never sell them to foreigners. They are very indolent, and make no adequate improvement of their advantages for agriculture and trade. Their country is excellent for grazing, and the cattle of the best kind ”

“ A few years have made such changes that the Fang of the Gaboon, instead of boasting of cannibalism, would indignantly deny it. In the interior they still practice it as an insult to the enemy. But on the Gaboon they insult the enemy by charging it against them.
“The African,” says Booker T. Washington, “lives like a child, in the realm of emotion and feeling.” And a white man among Africans lives much in that same realm. ”

“ Gaboon and French Congo (5,000) , a French Colony in W. Africa fronting the Atlantic, between the Cameroon country and the Congo State, and stretching inland as far as the head-waters of the Congo River; in the NW. is the great Gaboon estuary, 40 m. long and 10 broad at its mouth, with Libreville on its N. bank; along the coast the climate is hot and unhealthy, but it improves inland; the natives belong to the Bantu stock; the French settled in it first in 1842, but only since the explorations of De Brazza in 1876-86 have they begun to extend and colonise it. ”

“ The French, too, hold not only the inlet of [Pg 299] the Gaboon, but a large portion of the coast, together with an extensive inland section, which was ceded to them by the Berlin Conference, when the Congo State was established.
A NATIVE OF THE GABOON RIVER.
One of the chief negro tribes of West Africa, the Fans, occupy the coast line of Lower Guinea. They are a fine race, but are pronounced cannibals. Since they have come in contact with Europeans this revolting practice has been less prevalent.
The Fans have long been famed for their skill in forging weapons and making poisoned arrows. ”

“ The theory of an external soul deposited in an animal appears to be very prevalent in West Africa, particularly in Nigeria, the Cameroons, and the Gaboon. Among the Fans of the Gaboon every wizard is believed at initiation to unite his life with that of some particular wild animal by a rite of blood-brotherhood; he draws blood from the ear of the animal and from his own arm, and inoculates the animal with his own blood, and himself with the blood of the beast. ”

“ When the palaver ended and the tide served, a fierce tornado broke upon us, and the sky looked grisly in the critical direction, north-east. Having no wish to recross the Gaboon River during a storm blowing a head wind, I resolved to delay my departure till the morrow, and amused myself with drawing from the nude a picture of the village and village-life in Pongo-land.
The Mpongwe settlements on the Gaboon River are neatly built, but without any attempt at fortification; for the most part each contains one family, or rather a chief and his dependants. ”

“ I was four weeks on the way, from Liverpool, and landed at Batanga, in Cameroon, two hundred miles north of the equator. On the second voyage I was five weeks on the way, and landed at Libreville (better known as Gaboon) in the Congo Français, almost exactly at the equator. Libreville was the capital of the French Congo. Gaboon is properly the name of the bay or great estuary upon which Libreville is situated, and is one of the very few good harbours on the west coast. ”

“ Indeed, the ascendency the Gaboon trade attained to in the middle parts of this 19th century was an artificial one, the natural outlet for the trade being the districts round the mouth of the Ogowé river, which penetrates through a far greater extent of country than the rivers Rembwe and Ncomo, which form the Gaboon estuary or Rio Gabon of Barbot. ”

“ One of my first experiences in Gaboon reminded me that I was again in the land of death, when I assisted in the burial service of the beautiful young wife and bride of a fellow missionary, less than three months after their arrival in Africa. So far away from home we enter deeply into each other’s sorrows. ”

“ This demoralization of domestic life is even worse for the Mpongwe women than for their absent husbands. There is a large settlement of white men in Gaboon, most of them government officials.... Nearly all the Mpongwe women become the mistresses of these men.... The marriage tie in Gaboon has long ceased to be a “tie.”... The Protestant Christians of Gaboon are a very small community; but they are the best Christians I have known in Africa. They alone of the Mpongwe have good-sized families of healthy children. They are the living remnant of a dying tribe. ”

“ The Gaboon men are often almost black, whilst the women range between dark brown and cafe au lait. The beard, usually scanty, is sometimes bien fournie, especially amongst the seniors, but, whenever I saw a light-coloured and well-bearded man, the suspicion of mixed blood invariably obtruded itself. It is said that during the last thirty years they have greatly diminished, yet their habitat is still that laid down half a century ago by Bowdich, and all admit that the population of the river has not been materially affected. ”

“ The country around Gaboon is more open than most parts of West Africa. A dense undergrowth of shrubbery and long grass grows up each year, which towards the end of the dry season is burned off by the natives, in some places to clear their gardens, and in some places for the fun of seeing it burn. ”

“ It happened that a short time before this a white trader of Gaboon, a young man whom I knew very well, who had been in Africa less than a year, returning one night by boat from Elobey Island to the mainland, was drowned. [361] The body was never recovered, and indeed, it is not unlikely that he was immediately seized and devoured by the sharks. Not one of the crew was lost, and although we could not formulate a charge against them, we more than suspected foul play on their part. No one will ever know the tragedy of that young man’s last hour. ”

“ The Mpongwe women of Gaboon who have long been in contact with the French are without comparison the most cultivated, best-looking, most artful, and most dissolute women of the entire coast. The story of their licentiousness, as Tertullian once said of the women of the ancient stage, had best remain hid in its own darkness lest it pollute the day. Most young men of other tribes coming among them as Bojedi did are like country boys [320] arriving in the city, and are easy quarry. ”

“ THE WISE ONES At Gaboon, in the French Congo, one sees all the successive stages in the process of civilization. First, there is the savage, whose whole apparel is a little palm-oil and a bit of calico half the size of a pocket-handkerchief ”

“ There are extensive plantations, but the people are too lazy to take example from them.
Before we hear the loud cry à table, we may shortly describe the civilized career of the Gaboon. In 1842, when French and English rivalry, burning hot on both sides of the Channel, extended deep into the tropics and spurned the equator, and when every naval officer, high and low, went mad about concluding treaties and conquering territory on paper, France was persuaded to set up a naval station in Gorilla-land. ”

“ The people from the Gaboon country, at the bottom of the Gulf of Guinea, were said to be invariably ill-disposed, and lastly, those from the Congo and farther south from the coasts of Angola, though counted less robust than the other negroes, were more handy as mechanics, and more trustworthy. ”

“ The traveller is no longer in the "dilemma of Frère Jean," and, except at the river-mouth and at the adjacent villages, there is none of that officious complaisance which characterizes every hamlet in the Gaboon country. The men appear peculiarly jealous, and the women fearful of the white face. Whenever we approached a feminine group, it would start up and run away; if cooking ground-nuts, the boldest would place a little heap upon the bottom of an upturned basket, push it towards us and wave us off. The lowest orders will submit to a kind of marriage for four fathoms of cloth ”

“ The mouth is of vast width, and both jaws bristle with a terrible array of sharp-pointed teeth.
The African species all belong to the same genus, of which the Crocodile of the Nile is the type.
At the Gaboon, the negroes hunt their enemies either with muskets or a kind of harpoon. Their vulnerable points are the attachment of the anterior limbs, and, of course, the eyes. It is here that their assailants endeavour to mark them. They are killed every day without their number appearing to be sensibly diminished, and, what is singular enough, without their seeming to grow mistrustful. ”

“ But the season was particularly unhealthy, everybody was ill; we should have had to spend the night in pestilential marshes, where we were certain to get fever, and as I had hardly got clear of that we had caught in the Cazamanze River, I had to refuse the tempting offer. We spent several days in the Gaboon, amongst a race of negroes who struck me as being more intelligent and more easy to civilise than any others on the coast. The women, too, had better features than most negresses. Aquiline noses were to be seen among them and lips of moderate size, and some had an almost European look. ”

“ There is a man in Gaboon of whom the whole community believes that he frequently changes himself into a leopard in order to steal sheep and to devour a whole sheep at a meal. This he does also when he would avenge himself upon his enemies. This particular man denies that he has any such power. But sometimes men confess or claim that they themselves possess it; and in some cases they seem to believe it. A broken-hearted chief once told Du Chaillu how that his son, who had been his joy and hope, had been accused of killing two men of the town by turning into a leopard. ”

“ Gaboon was discovered by the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century, and by 1521 there was a Catholic mission settlement on the coast between the {7} mouths of the Congo and the Ogowe. Cape Lopez is named after one of them, Odoardo Lopez, who came out there in 1578. In the eighteenth century the Jesuits had extensive plantations on the coast, with thousands of slaves, but they were as far from penetrating to the hinterland as were the white traders. ”

“ From the A-Shira territory comes this pernicious drug, which with alngn, or "brandy," is the great " civilising medium " throughout the Gaboon and Ogoway lands. The A-Bongos, Ma-Yombes, and Ba-Fyots. Scattered amongst the A-Shango forests, and farther east towards the great river, are the frail leafy huts of the pigmy A-Bongos (Obongo) , a shy, timid people living on roots, berries, and game. They are the 0-Koas (A-Koas) , v
Fan Women and Child on the Banks of the Ogoway. ”

“ It was 12.30 P.M. before the mission boat turned her head towards the southern bank, and her crew began to pull in the desultory manner of the undisciplined negro.
The morning had been clear but close, till a fine sea breeze set in unusually early. "The doctor" seldom rises in the Gaboon before noon at this season; often he delays his visit till 2 P.M., and sometimes he does not appear at all. On the other hand, he is fond of late hours. ”

“ The Mpongwe women have the reputation of being the prettiest and the most facile upon the West African coast. It is easy to distinguish two types. One is large-boned and heavy-limbed, hoarse-voiced, and masculine, like the "Ibos" of Bonny and New Calabar, who equal the men in weight and stature, strength and endurance, suggesting a mixture of the male and female temperaments. Some of the Gaboon giantesses have, unlike their northern sisters, regular and handsome features. ”

“ Chapter IV.— The Minor Tribes and the Mpongwe.
The tribes occupying the Gaboon country may roughly be divided into two according to habitat—the maritime and those of the interior, who are quasi-mountaineers. Upon the sea-board dwell the Banôkô (Banaka) , Bapuka, and Batanga; the Kombe, the Benga and Mbiko, or people about Corisco; the Shekyani, who extend far into the interior, the Urungu and Aloa, clans of Cape Lopez; the Nkommi, Commi, Camma or Cama, and the Mayumba races beyond the southern frontier. The inner hordes are the Dibwe (M. du Chaillu's "Ibouay") , the Mbúsha ”