MISS KINGSLEY'S TRAVELS.*
Miss KINGSLEY has given us a very striking and original book of travels. Most travellers digest, abstract, and edit their original notes, diaries, and impressions into a concerted piece of literature. They try, that is, as far as possible to correlate their facts and to give their readers a connected impression. Miss Kingsley has made no such attempt. Abandoning any notion of symmetry in her work, and regard. less of all ideas of literary architecture, she has simply flung her " bush notes " and the other memorials of her journeys into a sort of wild disorder and laid them before the public. That there are immense advantages in this system who can deny ? This plan of writing pats us much more directly and much more rapidly in touch with our subject. Com- pared with the regular and ordinary books of travel, Miss Kingsley's pages are what a Kodak photograph is to a finished drawing. The photograph is far superior in vividness and characterisation,—unless, of course, the drawing is the work of a very great artist. Many of Miss Kingsley's bush or canoe episodes are given us by verbal photographs of extraordinary power. By telling us frankly and exactly what she saw, and exactly how it impressed her—usually the impression was a comic one—we get a glimpse into the very heart of Africa. Indeed, to turn the pages of Miss Kingsley's book is to feel that one is turning an African kaleidoscope. Each turn brings up new pictures in unending stream, but pictures, as in the kaleidoscope, where there are certain constant features,—the rank tropical vegetation, the slimy rivers, the grinning black faces, the crude coloured cottons, and the hot, moist atmos- phere. Whether this kaleidoscopic way of describing far countries is better than the old-fashioned method we shall not attempt to decide. It is enough to say that Miss Kingsley tells us she could not have written in any other way, and that her present book is a very fascinating piece of work. A more readable book of travels it would indeed be hard to name.
It is difficult to know exactly where to begin when one attempts to review Miss Kingsley's book. There are few or no generalisations, and amusing or interesting episodes follow each other in such quick succession that the choice is bewildering. The only general impression, indeed, that one gets from Miss Kingsley's eminently cheerful pages is curiously enough the impression of death in its myriad forms hovering over the whole West Coast. Not only is there death in the climate and in the soil, but death from swift and virulent diseases. Man, too, has boldly supplemented Nature. In no part of the world is the science of poisoning so far advanced as in West Africa. We have all heard of the Calabar bean and its uses, but this is only one of the many substances that the natives use for murder or suicide. Nor is murder confined to the use of poison. The knife, the club, the gun, all have their places in the hierarchy of homicide. Murder and suicide are, again, by
• Travels in West Africa. By Mary IL Kmgaley. With Illustrations. London : Macmillan and Co. no means the only direct methods of abating man's life. Human sacrifice, on a scale which is known nowhere else in the world, adds to the hideous darkness of the death cloud. Nor does Nature refuse to do her part. Flood and fire, and pestilence and famine, are there also. While the vegetable world gives the poisoner unrivalled opportunities, deadly reptiles and wild beasts add to the army of death, which on the West Coast is always mobilised. But Miss Kingsley's good spirits are proof against these depressing influences. West Africa is to her a pleasant and a cheerful place, and in spite of the shadow of death which lies across her book, she keeps the reader in perpetual good humour. The drollery of men and things is what strikes her, not the tragedy. Not Bunt lachrymn rerum but Sunt rims rerum is her motto.
The chapter in Miss Kingsley's book which lends itself best to discussion in a review is that which deals with the fetish. She makes no attempt to give us a coherent theory of the fetish and juju, or to elaborate a system of negro theology, bat instead lays before us a very valuable series of facts observed by herself. Her account of the effects of witchcraft on the natives is most curious, and deserves quotation in spite of its length :- " The idea of the majority of deaths arisine, from witchcraft is, I believe, quite true if you will read witchcraft as poison. In a dull sort of way sometimes the black man understands it so too, as is shown by his very generally regarding the best remedy for witching as being a brisk purgative and emetic, accompanied of course with suitable ceremonies. The belief in witchcraft is the cause of more African deaths than anything else. It has killed and still kills more men and women than the slave-trade. Its only rival is perhaps the small-pox, the Grand Kraw-Kraw, as the Krumen graphically call it. At almost every death a sus- picion of witchcraft arises. The witch-doctor is called in, and proceeds to find out the guilty person. Then woe to the un- popular men, the weak women, and the slaves; for on some of them will fall the accusation that means ordeal by poison, or fire, followed, if these point to guilt, as from their nature they usually do, by a terrible death : slow roasting alive—mutilation by degrees before the throat is mercifully cut—tying to stakes at low tide that the high tide may come and drown—and any other death human ingenuity and hate can devise. The terror in which witchcraft is held is interesting in spite of all its horror. I have seen mild, gentle men and women turned by it, in a moment, to incarnate fiends, ready to rend and destroy those who a second before were nearest and dearest to them. Terrible is the fear that falls like a spell upon a village when a big man or big woman is just known to be dead. The very men catch their breaths, and grow grey round the lips, and then every one, particularly those belonging to the household of the deceased, goes in for the most demonstrative exhibition of grief. Long, low howls creep up out of the first silence—those blood-curdling, infinitely melancholy, wailing howls—once heard, never to be forgotten. The men tear off their clothes and wear only the most filthy rags ; women, par- ticularly the widows, take off ornaments and almost all dress ; their faces are painted white with chalk, their heads are shaven, and they sit crouched on the earth in the house, in the attitude of abasement, the hands resting on the shoulders, palm down- wards, not crossed across the breast, unless they are going into the street. Meanwhile, the witch-doctor has been sent for, if he is not already present, and he sets to work in different ways to find out who are the persons guilty of causing the death. Whether the methods vary with the tribe, or with the individual witch- doctor, I cannot absolutely say, but I think largely with the latter. Among the Benga I saw a witch-doctor going round a village ringing a small bell which was to stop ringing outside the but of the guilty Among the Cabindas (Fjort) I saw, at different times, two witch-doctors trying to find witches, one by means of taking on and off the lid of a small basket while he repeated the names of all the people in the village. When the lid refused to come off at the name of a person, that person was doomed. The other Cabinda doctor first tried throwing nuts upon the ground, also repeating names. That method apparently failed. Then he resorted to another, rubbing the flattened palms of his hands against each other. When the palms refused to meet at a name, and his hands flew about wildly, he had got his man. The accused person, if he denies the guilt, and does not claim the ordeal, is tortured until he not only acknowledges his guilt but names his accomplices in the murder, for remember this witchcraft is murder in the African eyes. It is not just producing the parlour tricks of modern spiritualists. If be claims the ordeal, as he usually does, he usually has to take a poison drink. Among all the Bantu tribes I know this is made from Sass wood (sass =bad ; sass water= rough water ; sass surf —bad surf, &c.), and is a decoction of the freshly pulled bark of a great hard wood forest tree, which has a tall unbranched stem, terminating in a crown of branches bearing small leaves. Among the Calabar tribes the ordeal drink is of two kinds : one made from the Calabar bean, the other, the great ju-ju drink Mbiam, which is used also in taking oaths. In both the sass-wood and Calabar bean drink the only chance for the accused lies in squaring the witch-doctor, so that in the case of the sass-wood drink it is allowed to settle before administration, and in the bean that you get a very heavy dose, both arrangements tending to produce the immediate emetic effect indicative of innocence. If this effect does not
some on quickly you die a miserable death from the effects of the poison interrupted by the means taken to kill you as soon as it is decided from the absence of violent sickness that you are play."
In another part of that portion of Miss Kingsley's book which deals with the fetish there are to be found some eery interesting accounts of the feelings in regard to funeral observances which possess the native mind. As she very pertinently says, a West African native if he were able to understand the Antigone would grasp its Inner meaning far more clearly and sympathetically than an any European. She illustrates her meaning by a most pathetic story which she was told on the Coast by Miss Slessor :-
" An old blind slave woman was found in the bush, and brought into the mission. She was in a deplorable state, utterly neglected and starving, her feet torn by thorns and full of jiggers; and so on. Every care was taken of her and she soon revived and began to crawl about, but her whole mind was set on one thing with a passion that had made her alike indifferent to her past sufferings and to her present advantages. What she wanted was a bit, only a little bit, of white cloth. Now, I may remark, white cloth is anathema to the Missions, for it is used for ju-ju offerings, and a rule has to be made against its being given to the unconverted, or the missionary becomes an accessory before the fact to pagan practices, so white cloth the old woman was told she could not have, she had been given plenty of garments for her own use and that was enough. The old woman, however, kept on pleading and saying the spirit of her dead mistress kept coming to her asking and crying for white cloth, and white cloth she must get for her, and so at last, finding it was not to be got at the Mission station, she stole away one day, unobserved, and wandered off into the bush, from which she never again reappeared, doubtless falling a victim to the many leopards that haunted hereabouts To provide a proper burial for the dead relation is the great duty of a negro's life, its only rival in his mind is the desire to have a burial of his own. But, in a good negro, this passion will go under before the other, and he will risk his very life to do it. He may know, surely and well, that killing slaves and women at a dead brother's grave means hanging for him when their Big Con- sul knows of it, but in the Delta he will do it. On the Coast, Leeward and Windward, he will spend every penny he possesses and, on top, if need be, go and pawn himself, his wives, or his children into slavery to give a deceased relation a proper funeral."
We might give a dozen more curious and interesting quotations from Miss Kingsley's fetish chapters in regard to ghosts, bush souls, murder, the worship of such strange gods as the fetish Boofima, and the secret societies which flourish in every tribe. We must, however, leave these matters, and pass on to say something about the extremely interesting appendices on trade and labour and disease in West Africa, into which Miss Kingsley has crowded a great deal of most curious and valuable information. The first- named appendix ends, however, with a generalisation with which we most emphatically differ. She tells us that slavery is, for divers reasons, essential to the wellbeing of Africa,— " at any rate, for the vast regions of it which are agricul- tural." We do not believe it for a moment. Something of the same kind could have been said as truly when we abolished domestic slavery in India,—i.e., that its abolition made domestic life for the upper classes an impossibility. Just the same thing was said when plantation slavery was abolished in our West Indian possessions, at the Cape, and in the United States. Yet in none of these places has the predicted ruin followed. People will tell you that Mahommedanism cannot possibly exist without slavery,—that, in fact, to abolish slavery in a Mahom- medan country is mere persecution. Yet the millions of Mahommedans of India have got on very well without slavery, and Mahommedanism is more, not less, flourishing there than it was sixty years ago. Of course slavery always seems essential to any state of society where it exists, and its abolition is therefore inconceivable except by the exercise of the political imagination. Plato would, no doubt, have declared it impossible to produce a really great and good citizen in a really great and good State without slaves, yet Plato would have
been wrong. So, we venture to think, is Miss Kingsley,— unless, of course, the West Coast climate beats the white man
so completely that he can only just touch the coast. If he is ever to get true control over West Africa he must abolish slavery. Only by doing so can he make his tenure secure. If he tolerates, or rather accepts it, his rule will go like that of the Portuguese. Without the antiseptic of some moral idea like that of emancipation, white rule in Africa is doomed to ruin.
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