Chapter II: Entrée Into Abeokuta

Before entering the great metropolis upon so solemn an occasion, it was necessary to remove the soil of four days’ travel. Houses there were none; so, claiming the protection of the tall maize, we ‘cleaned ourselves,’ literally, not sneeringly, and dressed as rapidly as possible. We found beasts awaiting us, wretched ‘tattoos,’ cat-hammed wretches, rats, which people here impudently call horses, all skin and bone, very like asses, ten hands high, with goose rump and hanging head, skeletons which a strong man could easily pull over, requiring, like the old Irish post-horse, a quarter of an hour’s flogging before they can be got out of a walk, and ever ready, like Paddy on the rare occasions when he is not sober, to fight at a moment’s notice. In the latter point the ponies of Yoruba may compare with those of Maharatta-land; their tempers are peculiarly bad, as indeed one must expect from all low-bred animals, quadruped as well as biped.

Leaving Agbameya at burning noon, we rode through thick bush, here and there broken with patches of cultivation. The soil was sandy and sterile, here and there showing water-rolled pebbles of the drift period—doubtless nothing but eight months of tropical rain and the fiery heat of the sun prevent its being desert as Sindh. There were, however, fine crops of yam and chestnut-like koko. Here also, as in Unyamwezi, the people are fond of planting together several _semences_, especially beans, maize, and manioc: the land is carefully prepared with the hoe, and dwarf heaps, in whose summit a hole is drilled, receive the seed. This season’s crop is the second; it was planted in August—the first being in March and April—and the harvest will be reserved for seed: when it fails a famine is often the result. The Yorubas have a tradition that maize comes from the East; it was possibly imported, together with millet, by the Phœnicians under Hanno (B.C. 600), who could not have grown wheat near the tropical seaboard. As everywhere in Africa, some of the fields are carefully kept, whilst the others are wretchedly weed- grown. Happily for the people, the rains, which this year have been scant, are now setting in. Amongst the shrubs the African marigold was conspicuous, there was a pretty little blue flower said to close at 2 P.M., and there were a few odoriferous plants which made the bush not unpleasant. _En revanche_, we passed many a spot whose characteristic odour was that of a corpse. Perhaps in some cases it may have proceeded from death: the Egbas cast the bodies of slaves, poor strangers, and travellers into the bush, from superstition as well as from pure idleness. Generally, however, it came not from death, but from life: throughout this part of Africa there is a large black ant—the chhungu uvundo of Zanzibar—whose fetor is overpowering. I remarked a large pod, which on pressure discharged a yellowish milk: the people rub this juice on the hair to expel its surplus population, and of the plant they make a fine fibre for fishing-lines.

The easily-made route was for the most part a mere bridle-path, kept in tolerable condition by the tramping of the market-people, and the rain must frequently take upon itself the privilege of forcing a way down the king’s high road. A few sheds, where palm wine and native beer were vended by men and women stretched in the most negligent of positions under the warm shade, were the only signs of settlements, and we were disappointed in our hopes of finding the promised half-way house. The sun shone fiercely at first starting: it was soon tamed by heavy clouds, which presently burst in a short shower, and the glare of the ground was greatly mitigated. All who met us addressed some civil word, and were respectful as Madeiriense: the vast variety and the complexity of their salutations will afterwards be alluded to. My nag snatched a leaf of maize, when an old woman in the field somewhat blatantly scolded it for stealing her property, which reminded me of Mungo Park’s ‘standard law of Africa:’ ‘If an ass should break a single stem of corn, the farmer may seize the animal, and if not satisfied by the owner, he can kill and eat it, but not sell or work it.’ This must be rather a severe penalty where donkey-flesh is a favourite food. After about six miles of bush and outlying farm, with a few little rivulets between, we crested a wave of clearer land, and sighted for the first time Abeokuta—Understone.

There are three natural divisions of country: the rainless, devoid of vegetation, and consequently termed desert; the pastoral, covered like prairie-land with herbage and bush, but deficient in forest; and the agricultural, clothed primally with continuous woods, and subsequently with second growths of bush and forest, or with savannahs, the results of old and yearly burnings. Of the latter description is this part of Egba-land: the bush, however, making allowance for the quantity and quality of tropical vegetation, is much like what beautiful Goodwood must have been in the days of the Heptarchy, as yet unconverted into lawn and grove and bushy dell; all of which will be done, and, until that still distant day, the land can hardly be said to be ready for civilization. The only sign of commencement is that the primeval forest has been extirpated immediately about the city, and has given place to the long crab-grass which now monopolizes the soil, and which presently must be taught to disappear before Bahama grass, or some similar and less exhausting growth.

‘By secret charms our native land attracts,’

they say. This may be true or not: it is certain, however, that in strange countries there are secret influences that disenchant, that repel. I feel them here. The scene before me wants neither grandeur nor beauty; there is a gorgeous growth around; hill, water, forest, and homestead—the constituents of beauty in landscape—all are present; yet, brooding over them all, darkening sun and sky, and clothing earth with sombre hues, is the sadness of a stranger-land. And it is a sadness which must endure. Those who tear themselves from Europe ever recognize the sensation in the comfortable seats which the New World affords them. They always think of what they call their ‘home;’ a word which has no meaning to their children. Those who hold emigration to be England’s first want, should, in common humanity, advocate the system which prevailed some century ago in the Western Hebrides, whence whole villages emigrated, to found, in a hemisphere beyond the Atlantic, settlements which in name and nature were the exact copies of their ancient homes.

The first aspect of Abeokuta was decidedly remarkable. The principal peculiarity was the fantastic breaking of the undulating plain by masses of grey granite—the rose-coloured is not easily seen—between twenty and thirty in number, sometimes rising two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet above the lower levels. White under the sun’s glare, and cast in strange forms—knobs, pinnacles, walls, backbones, scarps, and logans—they towered over the patches of dark trees at their bases and the large brown villages, or rather towns, which separated them. There was a long dorsum, which nearly bisected the town from north to south, and which lay like a turtle’s back between the scattered lines of habitations. The schorl, the sandstone formations, and the iron conglomerates were thrown into shade by these masses protruded from below. The country not a little reminded me of features which I have described in Eastern and Central Africa—Unyamwezi and the lands between the Nyanza Lake and Ugogo: in the prairies of the great West, Independence Rock afforded a similar spectacle. In some places the habitations seemed as close packed as cells in a honeycomb; in others they were broken by bush, whose growth is encouraged because fire- engines are unknown. The ground was exceedingly complicated. Our guides pointed out to us the sites of the chief towns, Ake and Ikijá, Bagura and Owu, the Rock Olumo—‘the builder,’ or capitolium—and other places which a few minutes afterwards were forgotten. A line of denser and more regular trees marks the course of the river, and blue distance, rolling here and there in long waves, broken by dwarf cones and subsiding into a mysteriously hazed horizon, formed a charming prospect after our confinement in the trough-like river.

Beyond the first sight of the town remained some two miles before reaching Ake, our intended quarters in the modern metropolis of Egba- land. Continuing our ride, I remarked another truly African custom which prevails from Kruland to the eastern coast, and which has the knack of puzzling new comers. The primeval forest has been cleared away around the town, yet there is not a vestige of cultivation; and if you ask for the farms, you are told that they are distant some five to twenty miles. The reason is that if placed within reach nothing could defend them from the depredations of robbers and cattle. These circum-urban wastes might easily be purchased for cotton-growing. Before sinking good money, however, it would be advisable to perpend whether we could render valuable—even with the aid of coloured ‘professors’ and quadroon ‘emigration-agents’—what the Yorubas cannot.

Before reaching the Agbameya gate of Abeokuta, we had a something of excitement. The ‘doctor’ had descended from his Rosinante, and a battle royal was the result. My wretched tattoo rose with a scream high upon its hind spindles. Unwilling to be involved in the game of biting, pawing, and kicking, and not knowing the beasts to be unshod, I tried to dismount, hitched my foot in the stirrup, which did not open with a spring, and had the pleasure of hearing the sound of war over my back. The results were a few bruises, and the resolution of carrying for the future a stout stick, wherewith to belabour belligerents’ heads. A fall was a bad omen to begin with, but, as says good Edom o’ Gordon,

‘Thame luiks to freits, my master dear,

Then freits will follow thame.’[35]

Besides which it was a Friday, and it let me off cheap.

The celebrated defences of Abeokuta, which have played in Yoruba history the part of the wall of China and the lines of Torres Vedras, next appeared. They are seventeen to eighteen miles in circumference. To the northwards, however, in the direction of the hostile Ibadan, they are three in number, and the extreme circumference may be twenty miles—somewhat larger than Thebes of the hundred gates.[36] The metropolis itself, measured by perambulator, was found to be four miles by two. Though Abeokuta is wholly on the left, they extend over the right bank of the Ogun River, and there take in a tract of cleared and level ground. To any but an ‘old African’—and such the familiar aspect of everything around makes me already hold myself—it is a marvel that man should be stopped by such an obstacle. I can only explain it upon the principle which, a score of years ago, rendered a regiment of cavalry impotent to face a drain four feet broad. The wall is hardened mud, good material, but only five to six feet high, without embrasure, and only here and there pierced with a round aperture by way of loophole. In some places it is ‘weather-boarded’ with palm-leaves, whose smoke would soon clear away the defenders. A hundred-pound bag of powder hung to a peg and provided with a slow match would blow a hole in it big enough for a Cape waggon to pass through. It is approached by an equally efficient moat, a ditch perhaps five feet broad, wet with sundry rain puddles, half choked with bushes, and requiring a dozen fascines or dead bodies to make the passage perfectly comfortable. The larger entrances, exclusive of those leading to farms, are five in number; three to the north, viz., those of Abáka, Ibadan, Oshyelle; and two southerly, viz., the gates of Aro and Agbameya. Each is provided—for the benefit of warders, who take toll by day and who close the entrances and keep watch at night—with a hollow bastion, in no way differing from an old matted house, and here and there a rusty veteran of a carronade lies in the shade of its own shed. The town inside would burn like tinder. On a windy night five hundred men, taking the proper direction, and firing it skilfully, might do any amount of damage, and thoroughly demoralize its defenders. Against the attacks of Africans, with their instinctive horror of walls, it is safe; and the granite eminences, holes, caves, and forest clumps of the interior would render it more dangerous to assault in form, if defended by resolute men, than any barricade upon the Boulevard. It is doubtless the latter consideration that concentrated the Egbas round the Rock Olumo. Africans universally avoid, as the Tibetans seek, these vast masses of mineral, which, attracting the sun’s heat, and radiating it throughout the night, render their vicinity in torrid lands sultry and unwholesome.

Beyond the Agbameya gate lay another long tract of uncleared ground, with rises and falls, separated by dwarf ravines and, in some places, by flowing streams. My companions had ridden on out of respect for the sun; my jaded beast could fight, but not canter, so I left the bridle loose, and it led me through elaborately crooked and intricate streets to its own manger. On the road were several market-places, large and small. These people, like the Mexicans, make their markets and fairs take the place of shops, and there is a great gathering on every fifth day, which ends the Egba week. The most remarkable is Shekpon, ‘Do-the-bachelors- good;’ so called from the facility with which Cœlebs can eat, drink, and smoke without wife or servant. Methinks in these days, when we are so ‘hard up’ for nomenclature that the ‘Army and Navy’ must be turned into the ‘Navy and Army,’ I may venture to propose ‘Do-the-bachelors-good’ as a very neat name for the next new club. Beyond this place the path assumed the aspect of civilization; it was smooth, broad enough for small-wheeled carriages, and was drained on both sides by a ditch—easy here to recognize the European hand! On a wall of granite—the south- western slope of the Ake Hill—I saw what I had read of, the minutest of local lions in a land where ‘pot-holes’ are by no means rare. These are two ‘eyes,’ contiguous hollows in the rock, about one foot in diameter, showing by their white gutters, like tear-streaks, that water issues from them. It never flows, however, save during and after the rains, and is probably collected in a fissure behind them.

Presently a most unmistakable church, the true English barn, pierced with tall windows and abutted by a steeple, which of course had a clock—a nearer approach showing the belfry to be of lumber and the church and steeple to be mud, roofed with thatch—provided with a schoolroom like the church, but without the steeple, and a bit of ‘green,’ scattered over with not unfamiliar trees, formed the startling termination to the ride. Entering _solus_ the aspiring ‘compound’ of the Church Missionary Society, I found our consort the doctor, and he introduced me to the inmates, Dr. and Mrs. Harrison, who were occupying the house lately built and tenanted by the Rev. Mr. Townsend. A kind invitation was extended to myself. Commander Bedingfield found quarters in the neighbouring village of Eruwan, under the roof of Mr. Robert Wike, general merchant, of the firm of Southam, Wike, and Co., Manchester. We were thus all near one another, and, of more consequence still, considering the immense importance of our undertaking—I say ‘our’ as the historical bellows-blower used ‘we’ in addressing his organist—we were all in the vicinity of the king who resents the conduct of those that take up their abode beyond the shadow of his wing.

After dinner, at the exile’s hour of 3 P.M., we set out, accompanied by Dr. Harrison, to stroll about, to collect fresh impressions, and to enjoy new sensations. Around us was the town or township of Ake, so called after the old and now destroyed capital of Egba-land. It is the head-quarter village of the collection now forming the metropolis, and it gives the title to the king—Al (from _li_, to have) Ake, pronounced by Europeans Alake, meaning lord of Ake: we were therefore justified in assuming it to be typical of an Abeokutan village.

Our first survey was of the mission compound, a large grassy oblong, garnished with umbrella-trees (a species of ficus), cut by paths and surrounded by an ample-gated mud wall, backing the various tenements and outhouses. The position is nearly due north of the Ake Hill, or Rock, and the site is somewhat higher than that of the other settlements. The houses are mostly lumber, with tall flying roofs of thatch, and remarkably badly built for health. Instead of being raised on piles or pillars, so as to admit a free draught of air beneath, they are placed upon the damp ground—the subsoil is a tenacious clay, arresting the rain, which oozes through the valleys without forming springs—and they are wholly ignorant of an upper story. Even in Tuscany none but the poorest ever consent to sleep upon the _pian terreno_—what then must be the results in a land like this? Opposite Dr. Harrison’s, and in the south-eastern corner, are the lodgings of the bachelor missionaries and the catechists, under command of the Rev. Mr. Wood. Behind these lie a dispensary and various offices. On the southern side is a shed intended for stabling. Amongst other things it contains one of the two brass six- pounders sent as a present to the Alake of Abeokuta by the home Government; the other is in the house or palace of Somoye, the Ibashorun.[37] This gun is covered with a matting: the metal is in good order, but the carriages and wheels are so worm-eaten that they would break down during the first march. The neglect of these useless weapons has been made a subject of grievance against the Abeokutans; but what can be expected? When Sayyid Said, miscalled the ‘Imam’ of Maskat, lost his larger guns in an ill-fated attempt upon a coast tribe in Eastern Africa, they were shortly afterwards returned, with the message that their captors could not afford to keep weapons that ‘ate so much powder.’ A few swivels, the old ‘bases,’ East Indian jezails and zumbaraks, and, for guns of position, ‘falconets,’ or light four- pounders, might have been a welcome present, but what can these people do with brass six-pounders? They cannot even melt them down.

Besides which, guns are, like knives and scissors, unlucky presents. Almost invariably, throughout the length of India, wherever we have made a gift of cannon to a native prince, we have been compelled to recover it, _vi et armis_, from himself or from his successor.

Beyond the stables lies the printing-office, whence issues, once a fortnight, the local paper, partly English, partly Egba, and called ‘Iwe Irohin,’ ‘The Book of News.’ The subscription is two shillings per annum, and the editor is our host, Dr. Harrison, a man who, not undistinguished at Cambridge, has brought himself down to writing leaders ‘adapted to the meanest intellect.’ The superiority of a regular coinage over the local cowrie; the propriety of supplanting the hoe with the plough—such are the abstruse theses which now attract his facile pen. The printer’s devils are black youths, some of them Abeokutans, paid four dollars to five dollars per mensem. They handle their ‘long primer’ with some dexterity, and there is a handy little press, paper only being now wanted.

On the east and north sides of the compound are the native employés of the establishment,—Mr. Allen, one of the schoolmasters; Mr. Wilhelm, a ‘Christian visitor;’ and Miss Vincent, who has charge of all the little converted misses. The most interesting part of the mission grounds is the village of New Christians: it is called Wasimi, or Come-and-Rest, an ‘Alabama’ in Africa, and it clings to the eastern wall of the compound. As might be expected from that mortal energy which the Anglo-Saxon has so successfully distributed about the world, poor African Come-and-Rest is approached by all the preparations for severe and protracted toil, gins, saws, cotton-presses, and what not. ‘Come-and-Rest’ is in fact a would-be workhouse.

But again Anglo-Saxon impetus has failed in converting the haven of refuge into a workshop, and the African _vis inertia_ has here also been successful. I never saw more than four men at work amongst the gins, and then half a dozen squatters were chatting with and staring at them, whilst a woman or two sat by with baskets of popped maize and boiled palm-kernels to recruit exhausted nature. In North America the gin-house is the proper working place of ‘old hands or very young ones, of breeding women, sucklers, and invalids;’—here it is of sturdy men. There are seven presses, but seldom more than one at a time is in use; half an hour is required to fill it by five men, plus a dozen who look at the workmen, and who in due time take a spell. They average per diem, in the seven presses, sixteen bales of 112-125 lbs. each, and they have never exceeded eighteen. In a long shed hard by are two parallel lines of circular gins, which, though known to tear the cotton fibre, were judged better for Africa, as requiring less toil than the heavy and complicated roller, or even the modified East Indian charkha. They cost in England three pounds, here about four pounds ten shillings; and perhaps half of the machinery lies upon the ground, all dirt, mud, and rust. Rusty it is landed from the steamer, rustier it is sent up in a canoe to Abeokuta, and there it lies upon the ground, rustiest, because the people will not work. I could mention a respectable body of gentlemen which has spent thousands of pounds sterling upon such vagaries, in the fond belief, though perhaps not wholly so, that the words of every glib-tongued negro are true, and that all those ingenious implements are whirring and working at Abeokuta as they would whirr and work at Manchester. A small steam-engine might, indeed, do better; but fuel is dear, and then who, as the Kanuri say, would ‘make his skin cold’ with labour, when he can sit in the shade? Again, there are many who, like Mr. Leighton Wilson, decry introducing machinery into Africa, lest it should render the African lazy or lazier. I submit to the reader whether this be not a famous jump into the ‘pit called Absurdum.’

There was nothing to see at Wasimi, nor could I observe that the lanes were cleaner, the houses better, or the people superior, except in the number of their rags, to their pagan neighbours. Judging from the variety of large mortars—the best are those made from the shea or butter-tree—indigo dyeing seemed to be the principal industry. A little beyond Wasimi lay the house of Mr. Robbins, an African from Sierra Leone, trading here as agent for the Manchester Cotton Association. The compound was approached, as the barbarian ever loves, by a tall and imposing gate, distinguishing the house of a prince from that of a pauper. The colours—red, blue, and yellow—were those of the Crystal Palace; the green, crimson, and black were not. I rather admired the hall, a long, low, massive _pièce_, whitewashed inside, with the heaviest square beams for ceiling, and a central row of dumpy columns, alternately flutings and facets, with beadings between, wholly ignorant of base or capital, and painted black and dark green. Their object was to support the short, ponderous rafters of the roof. Timber in these lands is expensive, and can hardly be depended upon; besides, it can be divided into two varieties,—the over-soft and the unduly hard. The effect, however, has that resemblance to Egyptian which every effort of art emerging from the savage seems to assume, perhaps because in these lands it most closely resembles the aspect of outside nature, and thus is forced into the human brain. At any rate it is immeasurably superior to the Five Classical Orders done by the carpenter, in timber, at Halifax and throughout Canada.

We prolonged our walk northwards, through the aspiring township Eruwan, and there we saw another small lion, ‘Orange Cottage, the beautiful residence of the Messrs. Crowther,’ as the Pilgrim to his Grandmother’s land is fain to call it. This edifice reminded me of third-rate training stables in some ultra-cockney part of England—say tailoring Leamington, and, as my companions were struck by the same thought, the comparison may be accepted as correct. It is roofed with zinc or iron; the walls are a composite of clay; the verandahs are supported by pillars of dry mud. It is partly painted, and wholly hideous, its ugliness being surpassed only by its pretentiousness. We entered, and read a somewhat remarkable list of articles for sale or ‘swop,’ concluding with penknives, gentlemen’s coats, jack-knives, mouth-harmoniums. The Rev. Mr. Crowther, senior, a man of whom all classes speak well, is now founding a new mission station at the mouth of the Nun, or Southern Niger.[38] He was proposed for a bishopric in West Africa, and the measure was dropped, I believe, only because the white shepherds showed a settled determination to turn and rend a black pastor. But a man may be highly respectable as a Churchman, without being fit for the episcopate. His sons, however, have left Abeokuta, not wholly _volentes_, but perhaps, on the whole, not quite for the country’s ill.

These, then, are my first impressions of Abeokuta. The streets are as narrow and irregular as those of Lagos, intersecting each other at every possible angle; and when broad and shady, one may be sure that they have been, or that they will be markets, which are found even under the eaves of ‘the Palace.’ The sun, the vulture, and the pig are the only scavengers. The houses are made of tamped mud—the sun-dried brick of Futa and Nupe is here unknown—covered with tall, flying roofs of thatch, which burn with exemplary speed. At each angle there is a kobbi—a high, sharp gable—or elevation to throw off the heavy rain. The form of the building is the gloomy hollow square, totally unlike the circular huts of the Krumen and the Kafirs. It resembles the Utum of the Arabs, which, extending to Usagara and Unyanyembe, in Central Intertropical Africa, produced the ‘Tembe,’ and which, through the ‘Patio’ of Spain, found its way into remote Galway. There are courts within courts for the various subdivisions of the polygamous family, and here also sheep and goats are staked down. The sexes eat alone; every wife is a ‘free dealer;’ consequently there is little more unity than in a nunnery. In each patio there is usually some central erection intended as a store-house. Into these central courts the various doors, about four feet wide, open through a verandah or piazza, where, chimneys being unknown, the fire is built; and where the inmates sleep on mats spread under the piazza, or in the rooms, as the fancy takes them. Cooking is also performed in the open air, as the coarse earthen pots scattered over the surface prove. The rooms, which number from ten to twenty in a house, are windowless, and purposely dark, to keep out the sun’s glare; they vary from ten to fifteen feet in length, and from seven to eight in breadth. The furniture is simple: rude cots and settees, earthen pots and coarse plates, grass bags for clothes and cowries, and almost invariably weapons, especially an old musket, and its leather cases for ammunition. The number of inhabitants may vary from ten to five hundred, and even more in the largest. There is generally but one single large outer door, with charms suspended over it: the reason for this paucity of entrances will appear when the ceremonies of an ‘Oro Day’ are alluded to. Finally, the tenements in Yoruba show by their absence of defence a safer state of society than the similar erections in Central Africa. These have flat roofs, well protected with clay against the firing of the assailant; those would readily be burned.

Wending our way homewards in the shades of evening, we stopped at a house where we were refreshed with music proceeding from a something not unlike the mouth-harmoniums above advertised; and that nothing might be wanting to the enjoyment of a somewhat touchy tympanum, there was what is politely termed ‘singing.’ My companions ‘chaffed’ me for my undisguised preference of a tom-tom and a squeaking reed which were sounding the requiem of some worthy hard by, and all explanations were in vain. Will the reader be as inaccessible? The tom-tom and the squeaking reed, unlike more pretentious instruments, recall no reminiscences, provoke no comparisons; they are in keeping with all around them; they are in the minor key; they offer no direct insult to taste. Malibran and Mario, Liszt and Paganini, would hardly be enjoyable in one of these Abeokutan cow-houses. What, then, must it be to hear one’s own especial favourites, one’s mementos of past enjoyment, hammered out into a sonata of a discordant, gingling, rattling, musical bellows, alias seraphine, or burlesqued by the dilettante’s flute—that type of gentle dulness which waxes cross when it lags behind the accompaniments—or outraged with that _voce di gola_, that throaty English voice, which the fog, the habit of speaking with shut lips, and the practice of closing the larynx when producing gutturals, seem wholly to disconnect with the ‘petto’? Besides which, there is melody in the tom-tom, as every East Indian will tell you. ‘He who does not understand the palm-bird’s note,’ says the Yoruban proverb, ‘complains of the noise it makes.’ Mungo Park declares his belief that ‘the elephant’s tusk, hollowed out like a bugle, comes nearer to the human voice than any other artificial sound.’ And yet, so thoroughly artificial is taste in music, I have seen a Highland regiment charmed with their bagpipes, and yet loud in their abuse of the East Indian ‘nai.’

An equally edifying exercise was the perusal of an article in a paper terming itself the ‘Manchester Examiner.’ The writer, by characterizing the late Mr. Foote, one of the ablest of African _employés_, as ‘a fussy and irritable official,’ frustrated his purpose of stating a certain amount of truth[39] by what Locke calls a ‘compound ignorance’ of the entire subject, which ignorance to those upon the spot was more amusing than any travesty. On the way housewards we met a ‘big beggarman,’ with bare head, European shirt and small-clothes, dirty and torn, and a begging bowl in fist, like an Asiatic Fakir. This person is no other than H.M. the Alake’s brother. He became a Christian, and—some say—a semi-lunatic; others, who know something of his character, declare that he purposely goes in tatters, hoping that his brother will not molest him, and moreover will leave him a legacy.

After which we retired to find comforts that best prove the humanizing influence of the last-created sex, and we thought with the wise—

‘Qu’on est heureux de trouver en voyage,

Un bon souper, mais surtout un bon lit.’

But, before the sound rest which we have a right to expect, we must briefly analyze the small amount of ‘reading up’ which the last week has required.

The literature is not extensive. There are at present four small volumes upon the subject of Abeokuta, which it will be well to remember was not visited by Clapperton and Lander. Two of these were written by authoresses, one by a white author, and the other by a ‘cullurd pussun.’ _Place aux dames_—let us give precedence to the fair.

Miss Barber, of Brighton, who has never been in Africa, published some years ago a novelette bearing the striking title of ‘Oshielle,’ purporting to describe country ways in Yoruba, even as Mr. St. John did ‘Village Life in Egypt.’ The little volume was apparently intended to aid the ‘Coral Fund.’ This is a collection ‘made up, as its name implies, of small donations.’ Coral is a favourite article of commerce in these regions:—I plead guilty to having interpreted the title-page literally, understanding it as a fund to purchase coral, as ladies will buy blankets, for the poor benighted African, and probably others have done the same. ‘Oshielle’ is written in a friendly, kindly, and amiable spirit, overlaying the black with copious whitewash, and forming a sad contrast with reality. ‘The beautiful earth is one vast flower-garden’—a ranker bush is rarely seen. ‘The forsaking of aged parents, the murder of infant children, and other such vices (?) of heathenism are unknown amongst Africans.’ Oh, Miss Barber! These things in Africa are the rule, not the exception. Even in your favourite Abeokuta a man is annually sacrificed; and within the walls of Ikriku a victim is offered up to the Ogun every six years. Ikeredu contributes an annual murder;[40] and how many more are slain I would rather not say. The mildness and humanity of the people are the theme of praise. Perhaps the worst part of the Egba’s character is his horrible cruelty to inoffensive animals: he delights in torturing them, and, unlike the higher races, such as the Mongol and other pastorals, he lacks the qualifications for reclaiming them. He will ruin a horse’s temper in a week, he gives pain for pleasure, and he takes a bestial delight in rendering wretched the beings of which other and nobler races make companions. In the work of a stranger one must expect a variety of contradictions. Thus the first chapter opens with ‘Meroke,’ the heroine, ‘at home.’ In the two initial sentences there is the usual contradiction to be expected from those who read and write Africa by books and not by eyesight. ‘Even the wing of the crow, as he flies past, casts a perceptible shadow on the sunny ground.’ And yet a few lines afterwards we read, ‘There is no blue sky above; the atmosphere is filled with a soft, shining, veil-like haze.’ But why bruise these pretty butterflies? Is it their fault that they are so brilliant and so ephemeral?

Miss Tucker, after a study of Eastern missions, in which she had peculiar advantages, put forth in 1853, without, however, previously visiting West Africa, ‘Abbeokuta; or, Sunrise within the Tropics.’ It is another neat little sketch—prettily stippled, _musqué, couleur de rose_, touched with the grace of a lady’s hand, and no more like the original than is Hyperion to a satyr. Pity it is that clever people, reviewers, and others, write of places they never have seen: in that line there is but one successful book—Elphinstone’s ‘Cabul;’ of failures there are a thousand, from Dr. Lord downwards. Some art appears, however, in this book. It opens, à la Alphabet James, with a scene in which two Christian cavaliers—one, Sir Henry Leeke, R.N., t’other, the boy Ajai, _i.e._, ‘struggling for life,’ and amongst celestials known as the Rev. Mr. Crowther—meet in the romantic shades of the Church Missionary House, Salisbury Square, where, on Friday, the last day of October, 1851, the anagnorisis leads most classically up to the peripateteia. But there are necessarily errors in painting natural objects, such as the artist made who, when sketching from a photograph, converted the Meccan pilgrim’s ‘_hamail_,’ his Koran, into an ignoble powder-flask. For instance, we read that Olumo the Builder, a mass of gneissoid granite, is a porphyritic rock. Again, that ‘at one spot the intervening space forms a deep but low cavern, capable of giving shelter to a considerable number of persons.’ There is no vestige of such cavern; the eaves of the rock—if I may so call them—project like roofs; and the little pauper colony now squatting there has supplied them with clay walls—an architecture very common at Abeokuta. Mr. Bowen, an eye-witness, rightly describes it as ‘the shelving sides of an immense rock.’ Again, ‘Ogboni’ is _not_ ‘a civil governor of each town.’[41] The ‘lady Tinabu’ is _not_ the ‘sister of Akitoye.’ The little volume, however, is popular at home: in 1858 it had reached the sixth edition—which suggests a reflection. Let me labour to draw these descriptions from the life, to paint black, black, to produce the most careful of sketches. They will be rough, and somewhat grotesque, because they are honest; they will disenchant, because they lack fictitious feeling and unreal romance. Consequently, will they ever see a reprint? I am sorry for, but do not envy, the success of ‘Sunrise within the Tropics.’

‘Eternal summer gilds them yet,

But all except their sun is set.’

Such false views of living societies, however skilfully drawn by the ‘prettyfiers’ of Africa, cannot conduce to any good.

I now proceed to my own sex, which may be treated with less of ceremony. The Rev. Mr. Bowen, or more probably his Charleston publishers, entitles his work ‘Central Africa.’ This custom has of late become far too common. A gentleman who lived for a few months at the little Portuguese island of Mozambique was compelled by the bookseller to call his two octavos ‘Travels in Eastern Africa.’ Another, who sailed down the Western Coast, and borrowed all his interior from volumes long ago published, appears before the public with the grandiloquent title, ‘Six Years of a Traveller’s Life in Western Africa.’ Mungo Park, who did three times more than all three together, modestly chose ‘Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa.’ Mr. Bowen’s ‘Central Africa’ describes a run of one hundred and seventy miles or so into a country long since explored by Clapperton, Lander, and a host of minor travellers.

Mr. Bowen appears to have been another Dr. Krapf, who had high ideas of missionarizing Africa: the latter gentleman proposed a chain of stations stretching across the continent: the former more modestly contented himself with a weak regiment of six hundred men, and, possibly, martyrs. The expense was easily managed. Fifty cents per annum from each member of the Society would produce three hundred thousand dollars, which is enough. Landing on the coast in February, 1849, after a preliminary tour through Liberia and among the inland Golas—the ‘Gullah niggers’ of the Southern States—Mr. Bowen lost his coadjutor, Mr. Goodall, and sailed to Badagry, which he reached on the 5th August, 1850. His first view was to establish the ‘Central African Mission’ at Igboho, on the outskirts of the great continent. With two intervals of return to America in 1853 and 1856, he remained in Africa from 1849 to 1856. During those seven years he visited the Alake of Abeokuta, and—with difficulty, for the natives sensibly believe that every town which the white spy enters shall presently be destroyed[42]—he inspected Bi Olorun Kpello, Awaye, Oke- Efo, Ilori, the Asehin, sovereign of Isehin, the Are of Ijaye, and the Alaketu of Iketu. The first station was founded in October, 1853, at Ijaye, one hundred and twenty miles from Lagos; another at Lagos, about two years afterwards; and a third at Ogbomosho, one hundred and seventy miles from Lagos. [N.B.—These are not my distances.] After leaving Africa, Mr. Bowen’s travels in ‘Central Africa’ were printed in 1857 by the Southern Baptist Publication Society of Charleston; and in May, 1858, his ‘Grammar and Dictionary of the Yoruban Language’[43] was accepted, and afterwards printed and published by the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Washington.

This Central African traveller is quite a patriot, and withal, somewhat truculent. He had been a Texas Ranger in his youth. He played, it is said, a good ‘shyooting-iron’ in 1851 during the Dahoman attack upon Abeokuta—the reverend gentleman was at first rather pleased with his own militancy, but he afterwards regretted it. We can hardly, therefore, wonder that his style and sentiments savour much of the arm of flesh. As regards his characteristically New World vaunts, no harsher treatment is required than to quote in 1863 what was written by him in 1857. For instance, ‘America’ (_i.e._, the then United States) ‘is more powerful in the control of mankind in general than any nation that ever has existed, or ever can exist, while the seas, continents, deserts, mountains, and rivers of the globe retain their present form’!! We read of America’s ‘victories in the name of the living God;’ and we are not unprepared to be told that that nation is ‘the appointed arbiter of earth.’ Poor Europe is of course nowhere. Despotism is doomed to perish there; the king and queen, the lord and the landlord, the ‘coach and six,’ the servant in livery, the ‘mediæval fogy in certain civilized countries,’ shall equally become extinct, like the deinornis and the dodo. England is of course the vilest of nations. An expedition to the Niger—in which we always fail—would be very easy to Mr. Bowen’s government. He predicted a sure ‘whipping’ to the Britishers when they first attacked Lagos; and, prophet-like, he exulted in the correctness of his prophecy, though he, as a white man, ran no little risk, and though the Britishers were shedding their blood for such as he. There are also ungenerous remarks touching English explorers—the elder and the younger Park, Clapperton, and others, up to Messrs. Laird and Oldfield. All the honour given to poor Richard Lander for his noble discovery of the Nun, or Niger’s direct mouth, is that he ‘floated down the Niger from Yauri to the sea, but forgot to observe whether there was any real impediment to navigation by steamers’!!!

These are silly, _ad captandum vulgus_, stock sentiments, without which in those days an American’s book could hardly appear in America; and thus they may admit of some palliation. But the reflections upon El Islam penetrate us with the profound dogmatic ignorance of the author. How well Mr. Bowen is fitted to teach or to convert the Moslem is evident from one word.[44] He names a Fula Mussulman, Absalom—son of David—instead of Abd-el-Salam, and tells us with wondrous puerility in a foot-note that ‘such names as David, Mary, &c., are common amongst Moslems.’ Had Mr. Bowen ever read his Sale’s Koran? It is evident to me that any Alufa or Mullah at Ilori or Hausa could have astonished the Texan with his knowledge of the Old Testament.

The Rev. John Newton—the ‘old African blasphemer’ reformed—mentions a significant phrase prevalent on the coast in his day. The white man, after a certain length of residence, ‘grew black,’ not in complexion, but in disposition, and becoming perfect dupe to charms, necromancies, &c., put more trust in such things than the wiser sort of natives. Mr. Bowen shows the first symptom of the disease, which consists in attributing all European deaths by fever and dysentery to poison, and a perfect confidence in slow poison. The same mental malady is found amongst the old East Indians. I know a man who tells the tale of his having been poisoned some twenty years ago. But when the Asiatic and the African are determined to do the trick, they so administer their drug that there is ‘no mistake;’ and if they fail it is by an overdose, as an ounce of arsenic instead of a few grains. At Iketu, Mr. Bowen, after being warned of poison, received a bottle of milk from the king. His boy Sam had seen a Fula man pull a leaf out of the bottle, a portion of the contents of which were given to a dog. The animal shivered, returned them, and recovered. Upon re-administration next day the same symptoms recurred. Mr. Bowen then determined that if he had given the whole, not the half, dose to the dog, death would have resulted; and he ‘drank no more milk in Iketu.’

Mr. Robert Campbell, a coloured man, and a ‘professor,’ we are told by his introducer, who does not say Professor of Philosophy or Political Economy, or of what,[45] seems to have visited Yoruba on an errand of ‘_industrie_,’ in the French, not the English, sense. The introduction informs us that the writer, ‘acting upon a commission, received from bodies’ (fugitive negroes?) ‘in the United States and Canada, visited the land of his forefathers’ (who were certainly English) ‘to investigate its condition.’ He left Liverpool in June, 1859, touched at the usual mail stations on the West African coast, landed at Lagos, and went up to Abeokuta, where, under a new self-bestowed title, ‘Commissioner of the Niger Valley Exploring Party,’ he made with the Alake and the chiefs a treaty, to which I shall presently revert. Having extended his trip to Moslem Ilori, and the surrounding country, he returned to Lagos on the 10th April, and concludes the little volume which he wrote, or caused to be written, in this style: ‘We landed at Liverpool on the 20th May, 1860, in good health, although we had been to——Africa.’ ‘Pilgrimage to my Motherland’ contains one hundred pages, respectfully dedicated to certain friends of Africa, Messrs. Christy, Ashworth, and Ralston. It and its subject are ‘heartily recommended’ to the public by the introducer, the late Sir Culling E. Eardley, Bart.

In this hearty recommendation I can by no means concur, for reasons which will be adduced at greater length in a future page. Suffice a few words here. We are explicitly told, and more than once, that ground amongst the Egbas is ‘deemed common property, any individual enjoying the right of taking unoccupied land, as much as he can use, wherever and whenever he pleases.’ This may be ignorance, and to a certain extent it is warranted by the incuriousness of Mr. Bowen, who asserted long before Mr. Campbell that ‘there is no property in land, or rather that land in Yoruba is common property.’ The corollary is that any number of Christian converts or colonies of Africo-Canadians can be permanently settled in the Egba country. I distinctly assert that the reverse is the fact, and that all such theories foisted on the public with a view to emigration are likely to do mere injury. The country is by no means a ‘no-man’s land,’ and ignorance of this vital point would certainly lead to those agrarian wars with which New Zealand has scandalized the civilized world. There are two ideas incomprehensible to Europeans, but part and parcel of the African mind. The first, which here requires only enunciation, is that a slave-born man is a slave for ever. The second is the non-alienation of land. Whatever be the tenure of property in ground, it cannot permanently be given or sold. A chief will, for a quit-rent, permit any stranger to cultivate unreclaimed commons, but the bargain is purely personal. If the original tenant die, the heir or successor is expected by another ‘dash’ to obtain renewal of the lease, and his refusal would justify, in the African mind, his ejection. On the other hand, if the chief attempt to raise his terms, the heir might insist upon not paying a sum higher than the original quit-rent, and amongst the more civilized tribes the voice of the people would be on his side. No resident in West Africa will ignore that what I have stated is the fact, and those who are unacquainted with the coast should beware of the fallacies of Messrs. Bowen and Campbell.

That the animosity of the coloured man should at times break out is not to be wondered at. The negro must be pitted against the white, that is part of the _métier_ of the Métis, who is honoured by his mother’s and despised by his father’s side of the house. The Messieurs Crowther, we are informed, though full-blooded blacks, are treated with the utmost respect by all the Abeokutans—a curious comment upon this is the present expulsion of the junior members of the family. There is a tale told of the ‘Professor’ at Lagos, that on one occasion, when a European colony in Yoruba was spoken of, he swore with fury that ‘no white man, if he could help it, should ever plant foot in Western Africa.’ By the money, then, of the white dupe, he would establish himself there, and, like the Sierra Leonites of Abeokuta, he would deny and drive out his benefactors.

Of course the book abounds in such errors as the following:—‘Not unfrequently I heard the term ‘agayen’ (meaning simply canoe-man) reproachfully applied by the people of the interior towns to my interpreter.’ The word is ‘Igáen,’ and it refers to the ‘Ga’-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast,—‘canoe-men,’ as they are called in the English of Lagos. They are far from being despised in Yoruba; but in some places, as at Benin, every English-speaking black is supposed to be a Gold Coast man, and this has not tended to raise the reputation of the ‘Igáen.’ These unintentional blunders are excusable; there are others I have shown that are not so.

[Footnote 35: These lines were quoted by Mungo Park during his last walk with Sir Walter Scott, who exhorted him to turn back because his foot slipped.]

[Footnote 36: From the Aro gate to Alabama, the longest diameter, the distance is said to be six miles.]

[Footnote 37: The word is thus written by Mr. Bowen; Mr. Crowther prefers ‘Obashorun,’ and the vulgar generally use ‘Bashorun.’ It is difficult to define the functions of this dignitary, who is at once viceroy, premier, and commander-in-chief.]

[Footnote 38: At the time the above was written I had not met Mr. Crowther, sen. Since then a personal acquaintance with him has by no means diminished the respect with which his widely spread reputation in West Africa had prepared me to regard him.]

[Footnote 39: I simply mean that the destruction of Porto Novo was an unfortunate performance, justified only by the traditional policy of the ‘the coast.’]

[Footnote 40: This year was an exception, the victim having impiously levanted.]

[Footnote 41: Mr. Bowen very properly writes the word Ogboni, but strangers cannot detect the _g_.]

[Footnote 42: We read of a white man, who, compelled to camp under a tree outside the Awaye gate of Yoruba, was visited by hundreds, and heard the women sing—

‘Oibo gun sidi Akpe.’

‘The white camped at the foot of the Akpe thorn.’

Which is truly an echo of Mungo Park’s well-known episode.]

[Footnote 43: The book, a thin folio, is favourably spoken of. Unfortunately it does not enter into the scholarship of a very difficult language, and thus only half teaches the learner. As might be expected from the _ser studiorum_, there are grotesquenesses of style and orthography. Why, for instance, should we read, in ‘Compound Consonants,’ that _dż_ is sounded like the English _j_ in _jug_? Has the English _j_ hurt Mr. Bowen’s feelings, that he thus unceremoniously cuts it? and why trouble _ṡ_ with a diacritical dot when _sh_ does quite as well?]

[Footnote 44: P. 198.]

[Footnote 45: I believe Mr. Campbell to have been a schoolmaster in Canada: of course due deference to the dark face forbids the philanthropist the use of the humbler title.]