Bound for Sunyani—The awe-inspiring-forest—The road through the forest—The people upon that road—Ofinsu and an Ashanti house—Rather a public bedroom—Potsikrom—A night of fear—Sandflies—Attractive black babies—A great show at Bechem—A most important person—The Hausa who went in fear of his life—Coronation night at Tanosu—A teetotal party—The medical officer\'s views on trees—Beyond the road—Sunyani.

I talked to the Commissioner, and those talks with him made me want to go somewhere out into the wilds. Kumasi was beginning to look strangely civilised to me. It was a great trading-centre, and presently it would be as well known, it seemed to me, as Alexandria or Cairo, or at the other end of the Continent, Buluwayo. I should like to have gone into the Northern Territories, but the rainy season was upon us, and if that did not daunt me—and it would not have done so—I had to consider the time. I ought to be back in London. I had intended to be away for six months, and now it was close on eight since I had come out of the mouth of the Mersey.

“Go to Sunyani,” said the Chief Commissioner, “and go on to Odumase, where the rising began at the beginning of the century. You will be the first white woman to go there, and I think you will find it worth your while.”

So I interviewed the head of the transport service, and by his kindness was supplied with seventeen carriers, and one hot day in June started north.

They had doubts, these kind friends of mine, about my capabilities as a traveller, at least they feared that something might happen to me while I was in their country, and they told me that a medical officer was starting north for Sunyam that day and would go with me.

I looked up the medical officer and found him in the midst of packages that he was taking with him beyond civilisation to last for a year. He was most courteous, but it seemed to me that he felt the presence of a woman a responsibility, and I was so sure of myself, hated to be counted a nuisance, that when he said he had intended to go only as far as Sansu that night, I expressed my intention of going on to Ofinsu, and hinted that he might catch me up next morning if he could.

So by myself I set out into the heart of the rubber country north of Kumasi. I was fairly beyond civilisation now. Ten years ago this country was in open rebellion against English rule, and even now there are no European stores there; there is no bread, no kerosene, no gin—those first necessities of an oncoming civilisation; it was simply the wild heart of the rubber country, unchanged for hundreds of years. It has been known, but it has not been lightly visited. It has been a country to be shunned and talked of with bated breath as “the land of darkness.” The desert might be dared, the surf might be ventured, the black man might be defied, but the gloom of the forest the white man feared and entered not except upon compulsion. The Nile has given up its secrets, the Sahara yields to cultivation, but still in Africa are there places where the all-conquering white man is dwarfed, and one of them is the great forest that lies north of the capital of Ashanti.



0527

Here we know not the meaning of the word forest. England\'s forests are delightful woods where the deer dwell in peace, where the rabbits scutter through the fern and undergrowth, and where the children may go for a summer\'s holiday; in Australia are trees close-growing and tall; but in West Africa the forest has a life and being of its own. It is not a thing of yesterday or of ten years back or of fifty years. Those mighty trees that dwarf all other trees in the world have taken hundreds of years to their growth. When a slight young girl came to the throne of England, capturing a nation\'s chivalry by her youth and innocence, the mahogany and kaku and odoum trees were old and staid monarchs of the forest. When the first of the Georges came over from Hanover, unwelcome, but the nation\'s last hope, they were young and slim but already tall trees stretching up their crowns to the brilliant sunlight that is above the gloom, and now at last, when the fifth of that name reigns over them, at last is their sanctuary invaded and the seclusion that is theirs shall be theirs no longer. For already the axe is laid to their roots, and through the awe-inspiring forest runs a narrow roadway kept clear by what must be almost superhuman labour, and along that roadway, the beginning of the end, the sign that marks the peaceful conquest of the savage, that marks also the downfall of the forest though it is not even whispered among the trees that scorn them yet, flows a perpetual stream of traffic, men, women, and children. Backwards and forwards from the north to Kumasi and the sea they come, and they bear on their heads, going north, corrugated iron and cotton goods, kerosene, and flour, and chairs, all the trifles that the advance of civilisation makes absolute necessaries; and coming down they bring all in their season, hides, and heavy cakes of rubber, and sticks of dried snails, and all the other articles of native produce that a certain peace has made marketable along the way or in the markets of Kumasi.

The spell was upon me the moment I left the town. That road is like nothing else in the world. The hammock and the carriers were dwarfed by the great roots and buttresses of the trees to tiny, crawling ants, and overhead was a narrow strip of blue sky where the sunlight might be seen, but only at noon did that sunlight reach the roadway below. We travelled in a shadow pleasant in that heat; and on either side, close on either side, were the great trees. Looking down the road I could see them straight as a die, tall pillars, white and brown; ahead of me and close at hand the mighty buttresses that supported those pillars rose up to the height of perhaps ten men before the tree was fairly started, a tall trunk with branches that began to spread, it seemed to me, hundreds of feet above the ground. And between those tree-trunks was all manner of undergrowth, and all were bound and matted together with thickly growing creepers and vines. It was impossible to step an inch from that cleared path. There would be no getting lost in the bush, for it would be almost impossible for the unpractised hand to get into the bush. There is nothing to be seen but the brown, winding roadway, the dense green of the undergrowth, and the trunks of the trees tall and straight as Nelson\'s column and brown or white against the prevailing green. And there are all shades of green, from that so pale that it is almost golden to that so dark it is almost black, but never a flower breaks the monotony, the monotony that is not monotony but dignity, and the flowers of an English spring or an autumn in Australia would but cheapen the forest of the Gold Coast. There must have been orchids, for sometimes as I passed their rich, sensuous smell would come to my nostrils, but I only knew they were there by my sense of smell just as sometimes I smelt a strong smell of mice, and knew, though I could not see them, that somewhere in the depths of the gloom were hidden away a great colony of fruitarian bats that would not come out into the daylight.



0531

When there was a village there was, of course, a clearing, and on the first day I passed several villages until at last I came to Ofinsu, where I had arranged to spend the night. Ofinsu is on the banks of a river, and the road comes out of the forest and passes broadly between two rows of mud-walled houses with steeply pitched, high-thatched roofs, and my carriers raced along and stopped opposite a small wooden door in a mud wall and rapped hard.

For the first time on my travels I had really excellent carriers. They were Krepis from beyond the German border, slight, dark men with slim wrists and ankles, and crosses cut as tribal marks on each cheek, and they were cheerful, smiling, willing. When I remembered my before-time tribulations I could hardly believe these were actually carriers who were going along so steadily and well, who were always up before me in the morning, and in as soon as I was at night, who never lingered, never grumbled, never complained, but were simply ideal servants such as I had never had before in my life save perhaps for a day, as when I went to Palime from Ho, and such as I shall count myself extremely lucky if I ever have again.

“We have got good carriers,” the transport officer had said, “though you don\'t seem to believe it”; and he proved his words, for never have I travelled more comfortably than I did on that one hundred and sixty miles to Sunyani and back.

The knocking at the little door brought a black lady with a shaven head and a blue cloth wrapped round her middle. She was a woman past all beauty, and very little was left to the imagination, but she threw open the door and indicated that we were to enter, and she looked at me very curiously. Never before had a white woman come to Ofinsu.

I entered, and this was my first introduction to an Ashanti house, a house that seems to me singularly suited to the climate and people. It is passing away, they tell me, and I for one am sorry.

We went into a courtyard open to the sky, and round it, raised at least two feet from the ground, were the rooms, I suppose I must call them, but though there was a roof overhead and walls on three sides, walls without windows, the fourth side was open to the central courtyard. When I entered the place was crowded; Hausas or Wangaras—I never could tell one from the other—were settled down on the platforms, and their loads—long bundles made up for carrying on the head—were all over the place. I said nothing. I am generally for the superiority of the white man and exact all the deference that is my due, but clearly these people were here first, and it seemed to me they had it by right, only how I was to bathe and sleep in a house where everything was so public among such a crowd I did not know.



0535

But my hostess had other views. No sooner had I entered than she began clearing out the former guests, and in less than a quarter of an hour the place that had seemed so crowded was empty, swept and garnished for my accommodation. My bed was put up on one platform, my table and chair on another. “Get table quick and chair, so can play cards,” Grant instructed my headman, and behind, through a little door that may be seen in the picture, was a place that answered for a kitchen, and a cup of tea was quickly produced for my comfort. It was weird going to sleep there in the open, but it was very, very delightful. I rigged up in the corner of one of the rooms—I have no other names for them—with ground sheet and rugs, a little shelter where I could have my bath in comfort, but I undressed without a qualm and went to bed and slept the sleep of the woman who has been in the open air the livelong day and who, happily for herself, can indulge her taste and sleep in the open air all night.

I took a picture of my open-air bedroom with my valuable headman and two small children who belonged to the household I had invaded in the foreground. But that was before I went to bed at night. At earliest dawn, before the dawn in fact, my headman was at my bedside wanting to pack up and start.

That night\'s lodging cost me one shilling and threepence. The headman told me one shilling was enough, so I bestowed the extra threepence as a dash on the shaven old woman who had done all for me that my servants could not do, and she seemed so delighted that I was left wondering what the Wan-garas who had given place to me had paid.

Just as the sun was rising we crossed the Ofin River, and I found there assembled the entire population of the village to look at the strange sight—a perfectly courteous, polite people who never crushed or crowded though they looked their fill. I can only hope I was a success as a show, for certainly I attracted a great deal of attention, but of course I had no means of knowing whether I came up to expectations. It took some time to get my goods and followers across the river in the crank canoe which is only used in the rainy season, for usually the Ofin River can be waded, and while I waited on the farther shore I looked with interest at the other people who were waiting for their loads to be ferried across.

The men were Hausas or Wangaras, some wearing turbans, some with shaven heads, and clad in long, straight, shirt-like garments, while the women excited my deepest compassion. They may have been the men\'s wives, I know not; but by whatever name they were called they were slaves if ever I saw slaves. They had very little on besides a dirty, earthen-coloured cloth hitched round their loins, their dark faces were brutalised and depressed with that speechless depression that hardly realises its own woes, and their dusty hair that looked as if it had not been washed for years was generally twisted into short, thick, dusty looking plaits that were pressed downwards by the weight of the load they one and all carried. They carried children, too, on their backs, tiny babies that must have been born on the journey, or lusty youngsters that were a load in themselves. But a Hausa will carry an enormous load himself—sometimes up to 240 lbs.—so it is not likely he will have much consideration for his women. It may be, of course, that their looks belied them, but it seemed to me that they cared little whether Fate drowned them there in the swirling brown waters of the river or brought them safely through to the other side to tramp on, footsore, tired, weary, heartsick—if these creatures who looked like dumb beasts had life enough in them to be heartsick—to their destination three months away in the north.



0539

They waited there as I passed, and they looked at me dully and without interest; presently their loads would be brought across and they would be on the march again, and I went on pitying to Potsikrom.

The forest was getting denser and denser. There were fewer towns and clearings on this day—nothing but the great trees and the narrow ribbon of road with the strip of blue sky far, far away. It was very awe-inspiring, the forest. I should have been unspeakably terrified to pass through it alone, but my chattering men took away all sense of loneliness. There was not much to see, but yet the eternal trees had a most wonderful charm. It was like being in some lofty cathedral where the very air was pulsating with the thought of great and unseen things beyond the comprehension of the puny mortals who dared rashly to venture within the precincts. No wonder the Ashanti gave human sacrifices. Sacrifice, we all know, is the basis of all faith, and what lesser thing than a man could be offered in so great a sanctuary?

And that afternoon we came to Potsikrom, a little village deep in the forest.

The rest-house was a mud building with a thatch roof somewhat dilapidated, and built not after the comfortable, suitable Ashanti fashion, but after the European fashion, possibly in deference to some foolish European who probably regarded all the country as “poisonous.” That is to say, it was divided into two rooms with holes in the clay, very small holes for windows, and, saving grace, a door at each side of one of the rooms. In the corner of one of these impossible rooms I saw, to my surprise, a camp-bed put up, and for the moment thought it was mine. Then I saw a suit of striped pyjamas which certainly were not mine, and realised it must belong to the medical officer whom I had left at Kumasi the day before. His boys had stolen a march ahead, and, thinking to do better than the white woman, had put up his bed in what they considered the most desirable place, thinking doubtless that possession was nine points of the law.

I certainly didn\'t desire that corner, but I felt my authority must be maintained, and so I asked:

“Who that bed belong to?”

“Massa,” said a grinning boy.

“Take it down,” said I.

Up came the Chief\'s clerk. All these Ashanti chiefs now have a clerk who can write a little English and so communicate fo............