West African studies Part 26

Another chief of no mean capacity is Bob Manuel, of Abonema, exceedingly neat, almost a dandy in appearance, a very shrewd trader, clear and concise in his speech, honourable in all his dealings, of a very reserved temperament; but a charming man to talk with, once started on any topic that interests him or his visitor.

Owing to some peculiarities in their dress, the New Calabar chiefs are very different to the chiefs in other parts of the Delta. They never appear outside of their houses unless robed in long shirts (made of real india madras of bold check patterns, in which no other colour but red, blue and white is ever allowed to be used) reaching down to their heels; under this they wear a singlet and a flowing loin cloth of the same material as their shirts. Of late years, during the rainy season, some of them have added elastic-side boots and white socks, but the most curious part of their get-up is their head-gear, for since about 1866 they have taken to wearing wigs. These are only worn on high days and holidays and at special functions, but the effect sometimes is so utterly ridiculous as to be more than strangers can look at without laughing. Imagine an immensely stout and somewhat podgy negro with elastic-side boots, white stockings, long shirt, several strings of coral hung round his neck and hanging in festoons down as far as where his waistcoat would end, did he wear one, a Charles II. light flaxen wig, the latter topped up by an ordinary stove-pipe black silk hat!

This fashion of wearing wigs, I am afraid, was unconsciously inaugurated by me, having taken with me in 1865 to New Calabar some wigs that I had used in some private theatricals in England. A chief named Tom Fouche saw them, and was enchanted with a n.i.g.g.e.r's trick wig, the top of which could be raised by pulling a hidden silk cord, and eventually he became the proud possessor of my stock, and produced a great sensation the first public festival he appeared at. Previous to this I never saw a wig in New Calabar; as a matter of fact, they have no excuse for them, a bald-headed native being an almost unheard-of curiosity, and grey or white heads are very scarce. Alas! like all pioneers, I did not reap the reward I should have done, as I left the New Calabar river before the fashion had caught on, and Messrs. Thomas Harrison and Co., of Liverpool, became the princ.i.p.al purveyors of wigs to the Court of New Calabar.

These people are remarkable for the bold stand they have made against the persecution of their neighbours almost from the day their founder planted his foot on the New Calabar soil, or mud rather, I should say; besides their wars with the Bonny men, they were often attacked by the Bra.s.s men, allies of Bonny. With the Okrika men they were almost constantly at war. This latter was a kind of guerilla warfare carried on in the creeks, and consisted in seizing any unprotected small canoe with its crew of two or three men or women and cargo, the latter generally being yams or Indian corn, the custom being on both sides to eat these prisoners.

The Church Missionary Society established a mission here in 1875, but during the war of 1879 and 1880 the missionary had to leave. Their success had not been brilliant up to this date, owing, no doubt, in some measure, to the immense power wielded by the Ju-Ju priests in New Calabar.

It was not until 1887-8 that the missionaries were able to again commence their labours amongst these people, and then not in the princ.i.p.al town. Archdeacon Crowther, however, succeeded about this time in getting a plot of ground in Bob Manuel's town, Abonema, for the purpose of building a mission station. As to the success of this last effort I can't speak from personal observation, as I left this river shortly afterwards myself; in fact, it was on my last visit to Abonema that I conveyed in my steamer, the _Quorra_, the missionary and his wife to their new home from Bra.s.s. They were a young couple of very well educated and most intelligent Sierra Leone natives.

BONNY AND THE PEPPLE FAMILY

This river was the most important slave market in the Delta, as a matter of fact surpa.s.sing in numbers of slaves exported any other single slave-dealing station on the West or South-West Coast of Africa.

According to Mr. Clarkson, the historian of the abolition of the slave-trade, this river and Old Calabar exported more slaves than all the other slave-dealing centres on the West and South-West Coasts of Africa combined.

It is a well-known fact that for about two hundred years the average annual output of slaves through the Bonny River was about 16,000 (this included the shipments from New Calabar), totalling up to the immense number of 3,200,000 souls taken out of this part of Africa during two centuries.

The above figures do not represent the total depletion this part of Africa suffered during this time. To the above immense number of slaves exported must be added the number of lives lost in the raids made on the Ibo villages for the purpose of capturing the people to sell as slaves; we must also add the number that died on their way down from the interior to the coast, and to these again must be added the slaves refused by the European trader by reason of any defect, malformation, or incipient signs of disease. The fate of these poor souls was sad; but perhaps many of their brethren envied them their quick release from the cares of this world. The native slave-dealer was too practical a man to burden himself with mouths to fill that he could not immediately turn into cloth, rum, gunpowder or coral, so oftener than otherwise he would simply tell his own n.i.g.g.e.rs to drop their canoe astern of the slave ship, cut the rejected slaves heads off, and cast their bodies into the river to feed the sharks, this often taking place within sight of the European slaver.

A very moderate allowance for loss of life between the interior and the slave-ship from the above-mentioned causes would be at the least 40 per cent.; thus totalling the immense number of 4,480,000 souls sent out of this one district in about two centuries. The greater number of these were Ibos, a slave much sought after in the olden days by planters in the West Indies and the Southern States of America.

I have mentioned these latter facts here to point out to my readers that the so-called benevolent domestic slavery as practised on the coast of Western Africa and tolerated in Her Britannic Majesty's West African Colonies, must, as a natural consequence, lead to a deplorable loss of life, though not in so wholesale a manner as the export of slaves led to in former days.

The Bonny people claim to be descended from the Ibo tribe, but I should be inclined to think that their proper description to-day would be a mixture of Ibos, Kwos, Billa, and sundry infusions of blood from inter-marriage with the female slaves brought down by the slave-dealers from places lying beyond and at the back of the Ibo people.

Whatever their origin may have been, a commercial spirit is, and has been since their first intercourse with Europeans, a very highly developed trait in their character. As I have already shown, they were the greatest slave traders in Western Africa, and when that, for them, lucrative trade was finally put a stop to by the treaty signed on the 21st of November, 1848, between Her Britannic Majesty's Consul and King Pepple, whereby King Pepple was to receive an annual present of $2,000 for six years--[previous to this, one, if not two treaties had been signed by King Pepple, with Her Britannic Majesty's representatives, with the same object; but the greed of gain had been too much for his dusky Majesty, combined with the continued presence on the coast of the Spanish slave-dealers; one of the latter being established at Bra.s.s as late as 1844]--they then turned their whole attention to the legitimate trade of palm oil, and soon became the largest exporters of that article on the West Coast of Africa. Their trade in this article had not been inconsiderable since 1825, at which date the Liverpool merchants had seriously turned their attention to legitimate trade.

In 1837-38, the export of palm oil was already about 14,200 tons, all carried in sailing vessels princ.i.p.ally owned in Liverpool, and mostly by firms that had been in the slave trade.

Like the natives of Bra.s.s, many of these people have embraced the Christian faith, the Church Missionary Society having placed one of their stations here in 1866, some two years earlier than the Bra.s.s Mission was commenced.

Their endeavours have certainly met with considerable success in prevailing upon a large number of the natives to give up many of their Ju-Ju practices; amongst others, the worship of the iguana, an immense lizard, which from time immemorial had been the Bonny man's t.i.tular guardian angel. They not only got them to give up worshipping this saurian, but also, to mark a new departure in their religious ideas, the missionaries prevailed upon the people to organise a general iguana hunt; so, following the old saying of "the better the day, the better the deed," one Easter Sunday, about the year 1883 or 1884, or about twenty-two years after the establishment of the mission, the bells of the mission church rang out the signal for the wholesale slaughter of these reptiles. To such an extent and with such good will did the people work that day, that by evening time not one was left alive in the town.

That day it was everybody's job to kill these reptiles, but it was n.o.body's job to clear away the dead bodies, there being no County Council in Bonny to see to the scavenger work after this animal St.

Bartholomew; the consequence was the stench was so great from the decaying bodies that every European predicted a general sickness would be the natural outcome of it all; but no such unlucky event happened, and the natives did not seem to notice the extra strong perfume very much--one of them observing, to a growl about it by a white man, that "it be all same them trade beef you sell we people for chop."

The Bonny men until late years were steeped in all the most vile practices of Ju-Juism--sacrificing human beings to their various Ju-Jus, and eating all their prisoners captured in war, certain of their Ju-Ju practices demanding an annual human sacrifice. If at this time they happened to be at peace with their neighbours, and consequently without any prisoner to be sacrificed, the Ju-Ju men would disguise themselves in some fantastic dress (some Europeans have said they disguise themselves as leopards; I have never seen this disguise used, and doubt it very much), and prowl about the town and its byeways, seizing for their purpose in preference some stray stranger that might be staying in the town; failing a stranger, some noted bad character belonging to the town in whose fate no one would be greatly interested would be seized upon. To say these practices are completely stamped out would be, perhaps, not quite the truth; but that they are being stamped out I feel convinced, and considering what believers in Ju-Ju these people have been, I think I may say fairly quick.

The common sense of the people is a.s.sisting very much, and the women are showing themselves capable of something better than what their former state condemned them to. The final decision to slaughter the iguana some years ago was brought about by them in a great measure on solid common sense grounds, for had not the iguana been their mortal enemy for years by eating their fowls and chickens before their eyes, thus destroying about the only means a woman of the lower cla.s.s, or one who had ceased to please her lord and master, had of making a little pin money.

The Ju-Ju house of Bonny, once the great show place of the town, has now completely disappeared and its hideous contents are scattered; strange to say, I saw, only a few weeks ago, in the house of a lady in London, one of the sacrificial pots of native earthenware that had done duty for many generations in the Bonny Ju-Ju House.

A description of this Ju-Ju house may be interesting to some of my readers. It was an oblong building of about forty feet long by thirty broad, surrounded by mud walls about eight or ten feet high; one portion over where the altar stood had had sticks arranged, as if the intention had been at some time to roof it over; at the end behind the altar the wall had been built in a semicircle; the altar looked very much like an ordinary kitchen plate rack with the edges of the plate shelves picked out with goat skulls. There were three rows of these, and on the three plate shelves a row of grinning human skulls; under the bottom shelf, and between it and the top of what would be in a kitchen the dresser, were eight uprights garnished with rows of goats' skulls, the two middle uprights being supplied with a double row; below the top of the dresser, which was garnished with a board painted blue and white, was arranged a kind of drapery of filaments of palm fronds, drawn asunder from the centre, exposing a round hole with a raised rim of clay surrounding it, ostensibly to receive the blood of the victims and libations of palm wine.

To one side, and near the altar, was a kind of roughly made table fixed on four straight legs; upon this was displayed a number of human bones and several skulls; leaning against this table was a frame looking very like a chicken walk on to the table; this also was garnished with horizontal rows of human skulls--here and there were to be seen human skulls lying about; outside the Ju-Ju house, upon a kind of trellis work, were a number of shrivelled portions of human flesh.

Whilst writing about the wholesale slaughter of iguanas I forgot to mention that this was not the first time an animal that was Ju-Ju and held in high veneration had had a general battue arranged for it. The monkey used to hold a place in Bonny equal with the iguana, but for some reason or another it fell from its high estate, and was as ruthlessly slaughtered by its quondam worshippers.

Other Ju-Jus were the shark and the Spirit of the Water, or supposed guardian angel of the Bar. The bull was at one time worshipped, but not of late years; but still fresh beef was Ju-Ju, and twenty years ago no Bonny gentleman would touch it.

Like fresh beef, milk of cows or goats was never used by natives, neither were eggs eaten by Bonny men or any of the neighbouring coast tribes.

Native houses in Bonny are very little different to the general run of native houses along this coast, as far as the external appearance goes; but inside they are perfect Hampton Court mazes to the uninitiated. A noticeable peculiarity is that the entrance door and all the other doorways in a native house have a fixed barrier about eighteen inches high between each room from whence start the doorways proper. This forms a very favourite seat of the master of the house or his wife, but one must never step over them while any one is sitting on them; a man stepping over one while a man is sitting there means "poison for eye,"

as the natives express it, which means to say your action will cause them sickness. A man doing the same when a female is sitting in this position has a much more significant meaning, and for a slave would entail a good flogging.

No community of natives demonstrates the peculiar workings of domestic slavery so well as these people, for in no other place on the coast can any one find so many instances of the rapid rise of a bought slave from the lowest rung of the slave ladder to the topmost.

The bought slave was quite a different cla.s.s to the son of a slave born in Bonny of slave parents; for outside the direct descendants of the Pepple family, the freemen of Bonny could be counted on one hand; therefore, a slave born in Bonny was looked upon as being almost equal with a freeman. These were called Bonny free; and the Bonny free, though they boast of their birth, can't boast of the most brains, for the most intelligent men of these people--especially during the last fifty years--have been bought slaves, with few exceptions.

In 1837, the then reigning King Pepple had to get Captain Craigie of H.M. Navy to a.s.sist him in a.s.serting his rights, a slave of his having usurped his place. A few years after, in 1854, this same King Pepple was deposed by his chiefs for making continuous war on New Calabar, and thus draining the wealth of the country, as well as for his cruelties to his own people; they, at the same time, found out another charge against him that he was an usurper, as there was a young man named Dapho Pepple, a son of his elder brother, who was ent.i.tled to the throne, and, with the a.s.sistance of the late Consul Beecroft, the change was made and the fighting King Pepple was taken away to Fernando Po, and eventually found his way to England in 1857; there he resided four years, was carefully looked after by the temperance party, and eventually became a convert to Christianity. Several sets of verses were strung together for and about him by the goody goody papers of the time. He made strong appeals to the British public for 20,000 to establish a mission in his country; but in this matter I am afraid he was not successful, as the mission was never started by him, and on his arrival home in Bonny River, in August, 1861, there was a dearth of current coin in the royal pockets.

The following is King Pepple's address in verse, which, he a.s.serted, he spoke when seeking funds to establish a mission in his country. He only asked for a modest 20,000. I never heard what he got, but one thing I do know, whatever he did get, he never expended a shilling of it for the purpose it was given him:--

Beloved bretheren, Young and old, I come to day to ask for gold To help the missionary c.o.o.ns Who brave Bonny's hot simoons.

Tooralooral! Rich and poor, A pewter plate is at the door!

Now why must each of you decide Your heart and purse to open wide?

It is because the imbued sin That e'en now lurks each heart within Tooralooral! with all its might Is prompting you to close them tight.

And then it must not be forgot That h.e.l.l is wide and awful hot, And gibbering fiends around us grin With joy to see us tumble in.

Tooralooral! don't forget The Devil he may have you yet.

But would you from destruction turn, Nor 'mid sulphurous vapours burn, But each become a blessed spirit, And kingdom come with joy inherit.

Tooralooral! tip us a bob, To help us on our holy job.

Remember, friends, we are but dust, And die in course of time we must.

To show the seeds have taken root By yielding up the proper fruit, Tooralooral! are you willing To subscribe another shilling?

If you will help to save the n.i.g.g.e.r Your crown of glory shall be bigger, More white your robes, your sandals smarter, When we shall meet above herear'ter Tooralooral! Psalms and Hymns, Cherubs sweet and Seraphims.

Fields of glory, floods of light, Sweet effulgence, Angels bright, Sounds symphoneous, jewels rare, Sheets of gold and perfumed air.

Tooralooral! fellow men, Hallelujah! and Amen.

By what specious reasoning he succeeded in prevailing upon the authorities at the Foreign Office to countenance his return to Bonny, or what he described as his dominions, I know not. The fact, however, is on record that he did get this permission, and that he found some good friends in London to a.s.sist him with sufficient cash to pay 900 down on account of the charter of the _Bewley_, a small vessel of only about 180 tons register, which was to carry him and his consort, the Queen Eleanor, better known in Bonny as Allaputa, and their royal suite, which consisted of nine English men and two English women; amongst the former he had nominated the following officials, viz., premier, secretary, an a.s.sistant secretary, three clerks, and one doctor, a farmer, and a valet for himself. Mrs. Wood, the gardener's wife, was to be schoolmistress, and the other English woman was to act as a maid of honour to the Queen Eleanor. All these people had agreements for salaries varying from 60 to 600 per annum, some of them with an allowance of 15 for uniform; several of the agreements contained a clause that stipulated that the king was to supply them with suitable apartments in the royal palace.

On arriving in the Bonny river, these poor people had a rude awakening, for they found that the king was not wanted by his people, had no royal palace, and no revenues. However, they did not immediately quit the service of the dusky monarch, but held on in the hope of getting sufficient arrears of pay out of him to pay their pa.s.sages home; they had some reason for their action, for the old king still had a strong party friendly to him in the town. The king funked landing amongst his late subjects, and he remained on board the _Bewley_, until the 15th of October, landing at last with many misgivings. Strange to relate, the same day the walls of the Bonny Ju-Ju house crumbled to bits, caused, no doubt, by the heavy rains, but the king looked upon it as an omen boding no good to him.

When the king landed, the captain of the _Bewley_ gave the European suite notice that he could not supply them with food any longer, as the king was not able to pay him what he owed the ship.

These poor people now found themselves in a sad plight, but the Liverpool supercargoes in the river gave them quarters in their different sailing vessels and hulks. Those who wished to try their luck in some other place on the coast had their pa.s.sages paid by the supercargoes of the river; Miss Mary, the queen's maid of honour, was about the first to be sent home, the gardener and his wife left in November, and by the end of December the last of the king's white suite left the river. None were ever paid their arrears of wages, the king being with difficulty made to find 10 towards the pa.s.sage money of the doctor. Strange to relate, though these eleven white people could not be said to have pa.s.sed their time in Bonny river under the best conditions for health, being cooped up on board a vessel of only 180 tons register, yet only one of them died, that one being the king's valet.

All had remained more than two months in the river, some four months, at a time, when, according to some authorities, the coast climate is most to be dreaded.

King Pepple never regained his ancient sway over the Bonny people, and after lingering in very indifferent health a few years, during which time he was every now and again springing some new intrigue on his people, he pa.s.sed away at Ju-Ju Town, where he had been living almost ever since his return to his native land, for his health's sake, he a.s.serted, but rumour had it that he felt himself safer away from the vicinity of his more powerful chiefs.

After his death, the affairs of Bonny went back into the hands of the four regents, as they had been since the death of King Dapho up to the time of King Pepple's return in 1861, and in a great measure remained during the few years Pepple lived.

These regents had originally been appointed by the late Acting Consul Lynslager on the 1st of September, 1855, and were the heads of the following houses:--