West African studies Part 21

By all means let him have it; let him have the electric light and a telephone, if he feels he wants it, and will pay for it; but don't force these things, let them come, natural like. The great thing, however, in the sub-commissioner's town is that it should be so ruled and governed that it does not become a thing like our Coast towns now, sink-holes of moral iniquity, that stink in the nose of a respectable African--things he hates to see his sons and daughters and people go down into.

Secondly, I depend on munic.i.p.al Government on the lines I have laid down for the Coast towns. The Government of these munic.i.p.alities would be in the hands of the representatives of the trading firms, and the more important native traders--people, as I hold, perfectly capable of dealing with affairs, and having a community of interests.

The great difficulty in arranging any system for the government of West Africa lies not in the true difficulties this region presents, but in the fict.i.tious difficulties that are the growth of years of mutual misunderstanding and misrepresentation. That great ma.s.s of mutual distrust, so that to-day down there white man distrusts white man and black, black man distrusts black man and white, may seem on a superficial review to be justified. But if you go deeper you will find that this distrust is the mere product of folly and ignorance, and is therefore removable.

The great practical difficulty lies in arranging a system whereby the white trader can work on every legitimate line absolutely free from governmental hindrance. I have too great a respect for the West Coast traders to publish any criticism on them. I hold that the compet.i.tion among them is too severe for them to face the present state of West Africa and prosper as men should who run so great a risk of early death as the West Coast trader runs. I should like to know who profits by their internecine war; I think no one but the native buyers of their goods. Again now, under the present Crown Colony system, the traders, knowing they are the people who have paid for the Government for years, who have given it the money it lives on, naturally ask for something back in the way of local improvements. The Government has now no money to carry out these improvements, unless it borrows it. The Government as at present existing must necessarily waste that borrowed money just as it has wasted the money the traders have paid it; therefore the consequences of improvements under the present system must be debt, which the traders must pay in the end. I would therefore urge the traders to abandon a policy of demanding improvements and protection in their trade relationships with the natives, such as ordinances against adulteration of produce, &c., and to realise that by gaining these things they are but enslaving themselves in the future. Let them rather adopt the policy of altering the form of government before they proceed to urge further governmental expenditure.

If the traders require a dry-nurse system, let them formulate one in place of the one sketched above. I do not, however, think they want anything of the kind, unless they are indeed degenerate; but, if they do, I beg them to bear in mind that you cannot have an Alexandra feeding bottle and a latch key; they must choose one or the other. At present, the Crown Colony system gives neither. Under it the trader is treated like a child, a neglected child, one of those interesting but unfortunate children who have to support an elderly relative, who would be all the better for a cheap funeral.

Upon the missionary and educational side of the system I have advocated I need not enlarge. Just as trade should go on under it free, so should mission effort; there should be no governmental forcing of either, but it should be steadily borne in mind that the regeneration of the considerable amount of broken up stuff which exists in the Coast town regions--the Africans who have lost their old culture and their old Fetish regulation or conduct without being completely Europeanised--is a work that can only be effected by the missionary, and therefore in the hands of the missions should be placed the whole education department, with the one demand on it from the Government that in their schools every scholar should have the opportunity of acquiring a sound education in the rudiments of English reading, writing and arithmetic. Give him this knowledge, and your brilliant young African has demonstrated that he can rise to any examination such as an European university offers him. Under the system I advocate there need be no limitation as to colour in the officials employed in the munic.i.p.alities. In the sub-commissioners' towns the head officials must be Englishmen, but among the regions under the Landes Hoheit in the hinterland, Africans educated as doctors or as traders could have grand careers provided they did honest work.

The consideration of the African side of this system of administration is a thing into which--after all the long recitation I have inflicted on you concerning African religion and law--I am not justified in plunging here. I will merely, therefore, lay before you a statement of African Common Law, so that you may see the African principle through which the Landes Hoheit--the government of Africa by Africans--would work. I am confident that the thing--the African principle--is so sound that it could work; there is no need for us to put our Commerce under it, any more than there is need that we should attempt to put the African's private property under our own law; but a healthy Commerce and a healthy Law should co-operate, and can co-operate.

FOOTNOTES:

[77] Preface by Sir George Goldie to Vandeleur's _Campaigning on the Upper Nile and Niger_, 1898.

[78] The time which a man ought to be expected to remain in West Africa is difficult to determine--representatives of trading firms are expected to remain out two years, and the mortality among them is certainly no higher than among the officials with their twelve months' service. It is contended by the commercial party that it takes a man several months after returning from furlough to get into working order again, that under the twelve months' system no sooner has he done this than he is off on furlough again, in short that the system is foolish and wasteful in the extreme. On the other hand the advocates of the short service plan contend that a man is not fit for work at all after twelve months in West Africa, and that if he is not definitely ill, he has at any rate lost all energy. Personally, I fancy it depends on the individual, and that with a definite policy the short service plan will be quite safe.

CHAPTER XVIII

AFRICAN PROPERTY

Wherein some attempt is made to set down the divers kinds of property that exist among the people of the true Negro race in Western Africa, and the law whereby it is governed.

In speaking on the subject of African property and the laws which guard it in its native state, I must, in the s.p.a.ce at my disposal here, confine myself to speaking of these things as they are in one division of the many different races of human beings that inhabit that vast continent of Africa; and, in order to present the affair more clearly, I must take them as they exist in their most highly developed state, namely, among the people of the true Negro stock, for it is among these people that pure African culture has reached so far its fullest state of development.

The distribution zone of this true Negro stock cannot yet be fixed with any approach to accuracy, but we know that the seaboard of the regions inhabited by the true Negro is that vast stretch of the African West Coast from a point south of the Gambia River to a point just north of Cameroon River, in the region of the Rio del Rey. We can safely say, within this region you will find the true Negro, but we cannot safely say how far inland, or how far down south of the Rio del Rey we shall find him. That this stock extends through up to the Nile regions; that it stretches far away south of the Nile in the interior of the Upper Congo regions, appearing in the Azenghi; that it stretches south on the coast line below the Rio del Rey, appearing as the so-called n.o.ble tribes of the Bight of Panavia, the Ajumba, Mpongwe, Igalwa, and also as Osheba, Befangh, will be demonstrated I believe when we have a sufficient supply of ethnological observers in Africa. But it must be remembered that you can only get the true Negro unadulterated in the coast regions of Western Africa between the Rivers Gambia and Cameroon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A HOUSA. [_To face page 420._]

In the fringe regions of the West Soudan you have an adulterated form of him--adulterated in idea with Mohammedanism, and the Berber races; to the east and to the south with that other great African race division, the Bantu. I venture to think that Bantu adulteration mainly takes the form of language. We have in our own continent many instances of races of greater strength and conquering power adopting the language of the weaker peoples whom they have conquered, when the language has been one more adapted to the needs of life and more widely diffused than their own, and therefore more suited to commercial intercourse.

The Negro languages are poor, and, moreover, they differ among themselves so gravely that one tribe cannot understand another tribe that lives even next door to it. I know 147 such languages in the region of the Niger Delta alone. Now this sort of thing means interpreters, and is hindersome to commercial intercourse, and therefore you always find the true Negro, when he is in a district where he has opportunities of trading with other peoples, adopting their language, and making for use in public life a corrupt English, Portuguese, or Arabic lingo.

Similarly, it seems to me, he has in the regions he has conquered in Southern and Central Africa, adopted Bantu, and much the same thing has happened, and is still happening, there, as happened in Southern and Central Europe. Just as the powerful barbarian stocks adopted Latin in a way that must keep Priscian's head still in bandages and to this day seriously mar his happiness in the Elysian fields, so have the true Negroes adopted the flexible Bantu languages. But it would be as unscientific to regard a Spaniard or a Frenchman as a full-blooded ancient Roman, as to regard many of the Negro tribes now speaking Bantu language as Bantu men.

The Negro has, moreover, not only adopted Bantu languages in some regions, such as the Mpongwe, for example, but he has also adopted to a certain extent Bantu culture. I am sure those of you who have lived among the true Negroes and true Bantu, will agree with me that these cultures differ materially. Africa, so far as I know it, namely, from Sierra Leone to Benguela, smells generally rather strong, but particularly so in those districts inhabited by the true Negro. This pre-eminence the true Negroes attain to by leaving the sanitary matters of villages and towns in the hands of Providence. The Bantu culture looks after the cleaning and tidying of the village streets to a remarkable degree, though by no means more clean in the houses, which, in both cultures, are quite as clean and tidy as you will find in England. Again, in the Bantu culture you will find the slaves living in villages apart: inside the true Negro they live with their owners; and there are other points which mark the domestic cultures of these people as being different from each other, which I need not detain you with now. All these points in Bantu domestic culture the true Negro will adopt, as well as language; but there seem to be two points he does not readily adopt, or rather two points in his own culture to which he clings. One is the religious: in Bantu you find a great female G.o.d, who, for practical purposes, is more important than the great male G.o.d, in so far as she rules mundane affairs. In the true Negro the great G.o.ds are male. There are great female G.o.ds, but none of them occupy a position equal to that occupied by Nzambi, as you find the Bantu great female G.o.d called among the people who are undoubtedly true Bantu, the Fjort. The other, is the form of the State, and one important part of that form is the inst.i.tution in the Negro tribes of a regular military organisation, with a regular War Lord, not one and the same with the Peace Lord.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOUSE PROPERTY IN KACONGO.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BUBIES OF FERNANDO PO. [_To face page 423._]

This, I am aware, is not the customary or fashionable view of race distribution in Africa, but allow me to recall to your remembrance one of the most fascinating books ever written, _The Adventures of Andrew Battel, of Leigh in Ess.e.x_, who for eighteen years lived among the districts of the Lower Congo.

I do this in order to show that I am not theorising in this matter.

Andrew Battel left London on a ship sweetly named _The May Morning_, and having a consort named the _Dolphin_--they were pinnaces of fifty tons each--on the 20th of April, 1589. With very little delay they fell into divers disasters, and Andrew became a prisoner in the hands of the Portuguese at Loanda. He had a very bad time of it, the Portuguese then regarding all Englishmen as pirates and nothing more, except heretics and vermin. Andrew, with the enterprise and common sense of our race, escaped several times from captivity, and, with the stupidity of our race fell into it again, but his great escape was when he fell in with the Ghagas. Well, these Ghagas, Andrew Battel and the Portuguese historians say, were a fearful people, who came from behind Sierra Leone, and when the Kingdom of Congo was discovered by Diego Ca in 1484, the Ghagas were attacking it so severely that, but for the timely arrival of the Portuguese and the help they gave Congo, there would in a very short time have been no Kingdom of Congo left to discover; and to this day Dr. Blyden, who went there on a Government mission, says that up by Fallaba, in the Sierra Leone hinterland, you will now and then see a Ghaga--a man feared, a man of whom the country people do not know where his home is, nor what he eats or how he lives, but from whom they shrink as from a superior terrible form of human being--a remnant, or remainder over, of those people whose very name struck terror throughout Central Equatorial Africa in the 15th century, when, for some reason we do not know, they made a warlike migration down among the peaceful feeble Bantu.

If you will carefully study the account given of the organisation of the Ghagas and also of the organisation of the Kingdom of Congo, I think you will see that in the Ghagas you have a true Negro State form, while in the Congo Kingdom you have something different; something that is nowadays called Bantu. What became of the Ghagas when foiled by the Portuguese in destroying the Kingdom of Congo is not exactly known, but there is a definite ground for thinking that, modified by intermarriage and a different environment, they split up, and are now represented by the warlike South African tribes and East African tribes, such as the Matabele, and the Ma.s.sai, and so on. The modification of this portion of the true Negro stem in the south and the east is akin to the modification the stem has undergone nearer to its true home on the West Coast of Africa, where to the north of Sierra Leone and behind the coast regions of the Ivory, Gold, and Slave Coasts it has, by admixture with the Berber tribes of the Western Soudan, produced the Black Moors, namely the Mandingo, the Hausa, and Oullaf. These Black Moors of the Western Soudan have attained to a high pitch of barbaric culture; it appears to be a further development of the true Negro culture, but it is so suffused with the Mohammedan idea and law that it is not in this state that we can best study the native culture of the pure Negro.

Neither can we study it well in those south and east regions where it has adopted Bantu language and culture to a certain extent.

I will not, however, attempt to enter here upon the question of the continental distribution of the Negro and Bantu stocks; I will merely beg observers of African tribes to note carefully whether their tribe is given to street-cleaning, to keeping slaves in separate villages, or to venerating a great female G.o.d. If it is, it has got a Bantu culture; if, in addition, it has a regular military organisation, or a keen commercial spirit, or a certain ability to rule over the tribes round it, I beg they will suspect Negro blood and do their best to give us that tribe's migration history; and then we may in future times be able to settle the question of race distribution on better lines than our present state of knowledge allows of. Having said that the law and inst.i.tutions of the true Negro stock cannot best be studied in those regions where they are adulterated by alien cultures, it remains to say where they can best be studied. I think that undoubtedly this region is that of the Oil Rivers.

The thing you must always bear in mind when observing inst.i.tutions and so on from Sierra Leone down to Lagos, is that the fertile belt between the salt sea of the Bight of Benin and the sand sea of Sahara is but a narrow band of forest and fertile country, while, when you get below Lagos--Lagos itself is a tongue of the Western Soudan coming down to the sea--you are in the true heart of Africa, the Equatorial Forest Belt; and that it is in this belt that you will get your materials at their purest. Therefore take the regions inhabited by the true Negro. In the regions from Sierra Leone to the Gold Coast, you have, it is true, not much white influence or adulteration, mainly because of the rock-reefed sh.o.r.e being dangerous to navigators. There is in this region undoubtedly a great and yearly increasing so-called Arab, but really Mohammedanised Berber, influence working on the true Negro. The natives themselves have their State-form in a state of wreckage from the destruction of the old Empire of Meli, which fell, from reasons we do not know, some time in the 16th century. We have, however, miserably little information on this particular region of Sierra Leone, the Pepper and Ivory Coasts, owing to its never having been worked at by a competent ethnologist; but the accounts we have of it show that the secret societies have here got the upper hand to an abnormal extent for the Negro state. Then we come to the Gold Coast region which has been so excellently worked at by the late Sir A. B. Ellis. Here you have a heavy amount of adulteration in idea, and, moreover, the long-continued white influence--1435-1898--has decidedly tended to a disorganisation of the Negro State-form, and to an undue development of the individual chief; nevertheless the law-form now existent on the Gold Coast is, when tested against a knowledge of the pure Negro law-form as found in the Oil Rivers, almost unaltered, and I think if you will carefully study that valuable book, Sarbar's _Fanti Customary Law_, you will also see that the State-form is identical in essence with that of the Oil Rivers--the House system.

The House is a collection of individuals; I should hesitate to call it a developed family. I cannot say it is a collection of human beings, because the very dogs and canoes and so on that belong to it are part of it in the eye of the law, and capable therefore alike of embroiling it and advancing its interests. These Houses are bound together into groups by the Long ju-ju proper to the so-called secret society, common to the groups of houses. The House itself is presided over by what is called, in white parlance, a king, and beneath him there are four cla.s.ses of human beings in regular rank, that is to say, influence in council: firstly, the free relations of the king, if he be a free man himself, which is frequently not the case; if he be a slave, the free people of the family he is trustee for; secondly, the free small people who have placed themselves under the protection of the House, rendering it in return for the a.s.sistance and protection it affords them service on demand; the third and fourth cla.s.ses are true slave cla.s.ses, the higher one in rank being that called the Winnaboes or Trade boys, the lower the pull-away boys and the plantation hands.[79] The best point in it, as a system, is that it gives to the poorest boy who paddles an oil canoe a chance of becoming a king.

Property itself in West Africa, and as I have reason to believe from reports in other parts of tropical Africa that I am acquainted with, is firmly governed and is divisible into three kinds. Firstly, ancestral property connected with the office of headmanship, the Stool, as this office is called in the true Negro state, the Cap, as it is called down in Bas Congo; secondly, family property, in which every member of the family has a certain share, and on which he, she, or it has a claim; thirdly, private property, that which is acquired or made by a man or woman by their personal exertions, over and above that which is earned by them in co-operation with other members of their family which becomes family property, and that which is gained by gifts or made in trade by the exercise of a superior trading ability.

Every one of these forms of property is equally sacred in the eye of the African law. The property of the Stool must be worked for the Stool; working it well, increasing it, adds to the importance of the Stool, and makes the king who does so popular; but he is trustee, not owner, of the Stool property, and his family don't come in for that property on his death, for every profit made by the working of Stool property is like this itself the property of the Stool, and during the king's life he cannot legally alienate it for his own personal advantage, but can only administer it for the benefit of the Stool.

The king's power over the property of the family and the private property of the people under his rule, consists in the right of Ban, but not arriere Ban. Family property is much the same as regards the laws concerning it as Stool property. The head of the family is the trustee of it. If he is a spendthrift, or unlucky in its management, he is removed from his position. Any profit he may make with the a.s.sistance of a member of his own family becomes family property; but of course any profit he may make with the a.s.sistance of his free wives or wife, a person who does not belong to his family, or with the a.s.sistance of an outsider, may become his own. Private property acquired in the ways I have mentioned is equally sacred in the eyes of the law. I do not suppose you could find a single human being, slave or free, who had not some private property of his or her very own. Amongst that very interesting and valuable tribe, the Kru, where the family organisation is at its strictest, you can see the anxiety of the individual Kruman to secure for himself a little portion of his hard-earned wages and save it from the hands of his family elders. The Kruman's wages are paid to him, or changed by him, into cloths and sundry merchandise, and he is not paid off until the end of his term of work. So he has to hurry up in order to appropriate to himself as much as he can on the boat that takes him back to his beloved "We" country, and industriously make for himself garments out of as much of his cotton goods as he can; for even a man's family, even in Kru country, will not take away his shirt and trousers, but I am afraid there is precious little else that the Kruman can save from their rapacity. What he can save in addition to these, he informs me, he gives to his mother, or failing his mother, to a favourite sister, who looks after it and keeps it for him, she being, woman-like, more fit to quarrel if need be with the family elders than he is himself. But all private property once secured is sacred, very sacred, in the African State-form. I do not know from my own investigations, nor have I been able to find evidence in the investigations of other observers, of any king, priesthood, or man, who would openly dare interfere with the private property of the veriest slave in his district, diocese, or household. I know this seems a risky thing to say, and I do not like to say it because I feel that if I were a betting man I could make a good thing over betting on it, for experience has taught me that every time an African's property is taken by a fellow African under native law, and in times of peace, it is taken after it is confiscated by its original owner, either in bankruptcy or crime. You will hear dozens of accounts of how everything an African possessed was seized on, etc., but if you look into them you will find in every case that the individual so cleaned out owed it all, and frequently far more, before he or she fell into the hands of the Official Receiver, the local chief.

One of the most common causes of an individual's entire estate being seized upon is a conviction for witchcraft. Every form of property in Africa is liable to be called on to meet its owner's debts, and the witch's is too heavy a debt for any individual's private estate to meet and leave a surplus. For not only does the witch owe to the family of the person, of whose murder he or she is convicted, the price of that life, but it is felt by the Community that the witch has not been found out in the first offence, and so every miscellaneous affliction that has recently happened is put down to the convicted witch's account. Mind you, I do not say _all_ these claims are _satisfied_ out of the estate of the witch deceased, (witches are always deceased by the authorities with the utmost despatch after conviction) because the said property has during the course of the trial got into the hands of Officialdom and has a natural tendency to stop there. But one thing is certain, there is no residuary estate for the witch's own relations. Not that for the matter of that they would dare claim it in any case, lest they should be involved with the witch and accused as accomplices.

Still, legally, the witch's relations have the consolation of knowing that, if things go smoothly and they evade being accused of a share in the crime, they cannot be called on to meet the debts incurred by the witch. From a family point of view better a dead witch than a live speculative trader.

The reason of this delicate little point of law I confess gave me more trouble to discover than it ought to have done, for the explanation was quite simple, namely, the witch's body had been taken over by the creditors.

Now, according to African law, if you take a man's life, or, for the matter of that, his body, dead or alive, in settlement of a debt, your claim is satisfied. You have got legal tender for it. I remember coming across an amusing demonstration of this law in the colony of Cameroon.

There was, and still is, a windy-headed native trader there who for years has hung by the hair of loans over the abyss of bankruptcy. All the local native traders knew that man, but there arrived a new trader across from Calabar district who did not. Like the needle to the pole, our friend turned to him for a loan in goods and got it, with the usual result namely, excuses, delays, promises--in fact anything but payment; enraged at this, and determined to show the Cameroon traders at large how to carry on business on modern lines, the young Calabar trader called in the Government and the debtor was gently but firmly confined to the Government grounds. Of course he was not put in the chain-gang, not being a serious criminal, but provided with a palm-mat broom he proceeded to do as little as possible with it, and lead a contented, cheerful existence.

It rather worried the Calabar man to see this, and also that his drastic measure caused no wild rush to him of remonstrating relations of the imprisoned debtor; indeed they did not even turn up to supply the said debtor with food, let alone attempt to buy him off by discharging his debt. In place of them, however, one by one the Cameroon traders came to call on the Calabar merchant, all in an exceedingly amiable state of mind and very civil. They said it gave them pleasure to observe his brisk method of dealing with that man, and it was a great relief to their minds to see a reliable man of wealth like himself taking charge of that debtor's affairs, for now they saw the chance of seeing the money they had years ago advanced, and of which they had not, so far, seen a fraction back, neither capital nor interest. The Calabar man grew pale and anxious as the accounts of the debts he had made himself responsible for came in, and he knew that if the debtor died on his hands, that is to say in the imprisonment he had consigned him to, he would be obliged to pay back all those debts of the Cameroon man, for the German Government have an intelligent knowledge of native law and carry it out in Cameroon. Still the Calabar man did not like climbing down and letting the man go, so he supplied him with food and worried about his state of health severely. This that villainous Cameroon fellow found out, and was therefore forthwith smitten with an obscure abdominal complaint, a fairly safe thing to have as my esteemed friend Dr. Plehn was absent from that station, and therefore not able to descend on the malingerer with nauseous drugs. It is needless to say that at this juncture the Calabar man gave in, and let the prisoner out, freeing himself thereby from responsibility beyond his own loss, but returning a poorer and a wiser man to his own markets, and more a.s.sured than ever of the villainy of the whole Dualla tribe.

In any case legally the relatives of a debtor seized or p.a.w.ned can redeem, if they choose, the person or the body by paying off the debt with the interest, 33-1/2 per cent. per annum, to the common rate. Great sacrifices and exertions are made by his family to redeem almost every debtor, and the family property is strained to its utmost on his or her behalf; but in the case of a witch it is different, no set of relatives wish to redeem a convicted witch, who, reduced by the authorities to a body, and that mostly in bits and badly damaged, is not a thing desirable. No! they say Society has got him and we are morally certain he must have been illegitimate, for such a thing as a witch never happened in our family before, and if we show the least interest in the remains we shall get accused ourselves. Of course if a man or woman's life is taken on any other kind of accusation save witchcraft, the affair is on a different footing. The family then forms a higher estimate of the deceased's value than they showed signs of to him or her when living, and they try to screw that value to the uttermost farthing out of the person who has killed their kinsman. Society at large only regards you for doing this as a fool man to think so highly of the departed, whose true value it knows to be far below that set on him. In the case of a living man taken for debt, he is a slave to his creditor, a p.a.w.n slave, but not on the same footing as a boughten slave; he has not the advantages of a true slave in the matter of succeeding to the wealth or position of the house, but against that he can be a free man the moment his debts are paid. This may be a theoretical possibility only, just as it would be theoretical for me to expect my family to bail me out if the bail were a question of a million sterling, but in legal principle the redemption is practicable.

In the case of taking a dead body another factor is introduced. By taking charge of and interring a body, you become the executor to the deceased man's estate. I have known three sets of relatives arrive with three coffins for one body, and a consequential row, for a good deal can be made by an executor; but if you make yourself liable for the body's liabilities care is needed, and there is no reckless buying of bodies with whose private affairs you are not conversant, in West Africa. It is far too wild a speculation for such quiet commercial men as my African friends are. Hence it comes that a Negro merchant on a trading tour away from his home, overtaken by death in a town where he is not known, is not buried, but dried and carefully put outside the town, or on the road to the market, the road he came by, so that any one of his friends or relations, who may perchance come some time that way, can recognise the remains. If they do they can take the remains home and bury them if they like, or bury them there, free and welcome, but the local County Council will do nothing of the kind. A nice thing a set of respectable elders, or as their Fanti, name goes Paynim, would let themselves in for by burying the body of a gentleman who happened to have four murders, ten adultery cases, a crushing ma.s.s of debt, and no earthly a.s.sets save a few dilapidated women, bad ones at that, and a whole pack of children with the Kraw Kraw, or the Guinea worm, or both together and including the Yaws.

This brings us to another way besides witchcraft whereby a gentleman in West Africa can throw away a fine fortune by paying his debts, namely, the so-called adultery. Adultery out there, I hastily beg to remark, may be only brushing against a woman in a crowded market place or bush path, or raising a hand in defence against a virago. It's the wrong word, but the customary one to use for touching women, and it is exceedingly expensive and a constant source of danger to the most respectable of men, the demands made on its account being exorbitant: sometimes so exorbitant that I have known of several men who, in order to save their family from ruin--for if their own private property were insufficient to meet it the family property would be liable for the balance--have given themselves up as p.a.w.n-slaves to their accusers.

There is but one check on this evil of frivolous and false accusation, and that is that when there have been many cases of it in a district, the cult of the Law G.o.d of that region gets a high moral fit on and comes down on that district and eats the adultery. I need not say that this is to the private benefit of no layman in the district, for notoriously it is an expensive thing to have the Law G.o.d down, and a thing every district tries to avoid. There is undoubtedly great evil in this law, which presses harder on private and family property than anything else, harder even than accusations of witchcraft; but it safeguards the women, enabling them to go to and fro about the forest paths, and in the villages and market places at home, and far from home, without fear of molestation or insult, bar that which they get up amongst themselves.

The methods employed in enforcing the payment of a debt are appeal to the village headman or village elders; or, after giving warning, the seizure of property belonging to the debtor if possible, or if not, that of any other person belonging to his village will do. This procedure usually leads to palaver, and the elders decide whether the amount seized is equal to the debt or whether it is excessive; if excessive the excess has to be returned, and there is also the appeal to the Law Society. In the regions of the Benin Bight we have also, as in India, the custom of collecting debts by Dharna. In West Africa the creditor who sits at the debtor's door is bound to bring with him food for one day, this is equivalent to giving notice; after the first day the debtor has to supply him with food, for were he to die he would be answerable for his life and the worth thereof in addition to the original debt. If I mention that there is no community of goods between a man and his wife (women owning and holding property under identical conditions to men in the eye of the law), I think I shall have detained you more than long enough on the subject of the laws of property in West Africa. You will see that the thing that underlies them is the conception that every person is the member of some family, and all the other members of the family are responsible for him and to him and he to them; and every family is a member of some house, and all the other members of the house are responsible for and to the families of which it is composed.

The natural tendency of this is for property to become joint property, family property, or to be absorbed into family property. A man by his superior ability acquires, it may be, a considerable amount of private property, but at his death it pa.s.ses into the hands of the family. There are Wills, but they are not the rule, and they more often refer to an appointment of a successor in position than to a disposal of effects.

The common practice of gifts there supplies the place of Wills with us; a rich man gives his friend or his favourite wife, child, or slave, things during his life, while he can see that they get it, and does not leave the matter till after his death. The good point about the African system is that it leaves no person uncared for; there are no unemployed starving poor, every individual is responsible for and to his fellow men and women who belong to the same community, and the naturally strong instinct of hospitality, joined with the knowledge that the stranger within the gates belongs to a whole set of people who will make palaver if anything happens to him, looks well after the safety of wanderers in Negro land. The bad point is, of course that the system is c.u.mbersome, and, moreover, it tends, with the operation of the general African law of _mutterrecht_, the tracing of descent through females, to prevent the building up of great families. For example, you have a great man, wise, learned, just, and so on; he is esteemed in his generation, but at his death his property does not go to the sons born to him by one of his wives, who is a great woman of a princely line, but to the eldest son of his sister by the same mother as his own. This sister's mother and his own mother was a slave wife of his father's; this, you see, keeps good blood in a continual state of dilution with slave blood. The son he has by his aristocratic wife may come in for the property of her brother, but her brother belongs to a different family, so he does not take up his father's greatness and carry it on with the help his father's wealth could give him in the father's family. I do not say the system is unjust or anything like that, mind; I merely say that it does not tend to the production of a series of great men in one family.

Nevertheless, when once you have mastered the simple fundamental rules that underlie the native African idea of property they must strike you as just, elaborately just; and there is another element of simplicity in the thing, and that is that all forms of property are subject to the same law, land, women, china basons, canoes, slaves, it matters not what, there is the law.

You will ofter hear of the vast stretches of country in Africa unowned, and open to all who choose to cultivate them or possess them. Well, those stretches of unowned land are not in West Africa. I do not pretend to know other parts of the continent. In West Africa there is not one acre of land that does not belong to some one, who is trustee of it, for a set of people who are themselves only life tenants, the real owner being the tribe in its past, present, and future state, away into eternity at both ends. But as West African land is a thing I should not feel, even if I had the money, anxious to acquire as freehold, and as you can get under native law a safe possession of mining and cultivation rights from the representatives living of the tribe they belong to, I do not think that any interference is urgently needed with a system fundamentally just.

After having said so much on African native property, it may be as well to say what African property consists of. It is not necessary for me to go into the affair very fully, but you will remember, I am sure, the old statement of "women and slaves const.i.tute the wealth of an African." The African himself would tell you nine times in ten that women and slaves caused him the lack of it. Still they are undoubtedly a factor in the true Negro's wealth, but to consider them property it is necessary to consider them as property in different cla.s.ses. Here and now I need only divide them into two cla.s.ses--wives properly so-called, and male and female slaves. The duty of the slave is to increase directly the wealth of his or her owner--that of the wife to increase it also, but in a different manner, namely, by bringing her influence to bear for his advantage among her own family and among the people of the district she lives in. A big chief will have three or more of these wives, each of them living in her own house, or in the culture state of Calabar, in her own yard in his house, having her own farm away in the country, where she goes at planting and harvest times. She possesses her own slaves and miscellaneous property, which includes her children, and the main part of this property is really the property of her family, just as most people's property is in West Africa. The husband will reside with each of these wives in turn, yet he has a home of his own, with his slave wives, and his children properly so called, similarly having his own farm and miscellaneous property, which similarly belongs mainly to his family, and this house is usually presided over by his mother, or failing her a favourite sister.

The immediate rule of a husband over his wife may be likened to that of a const.i.tutional monarch, that of a man or woman over a slave to that of an absolute monarch, though true absolutism is in the Negro State-form not to be found in any individual man. The nearest approach to it is, very properly, in the hands of the cult of the Law G.o.d, the tribal secret society, but even from that society the individual can appeal, if he dare, to Long Ju Ju.

The other forms of wealth possessed by an African, his true wealth, are market rights, utensils, canoes, arms, furniture, land, and trade goods.