The white men at Sunyani—Contrast between civilisation and barbarism—The little fort—The suffrage movement—“I am as mud in the sight of my people!”—The girl who did not wish to marry the King—The heavy loads carried by the Hausas—The danger of stubbing a toe—An Ashanti welcome—The Chief\'s soul—The unpleasant duties of the Chief\'s soul—The blood of sheep versus the blood of men—A courteous lady of Odumase—The Commissioners of Ashanti—Difficulties of crossing flooded streams—One way of carrying fowls—The last night in the wilds.
At Sunyani there are usually six white men, namely a Provincial Commissioner, a medical officer—the relief had come up with me—three soldiermen, and a non-commissioned officer, and I think my sympathies are rather with that colour sergeant. The other men are all of one class, but he must be utterly alone. The houses and the men were equally delightful. I was taken into a mud-built house with a thatched roof, large and spacious. There were, of course, only holes for windows and doors, and the floors were of beaten earth, but it was most wonderfully comfortable and homelike. The Commissioner was a great gardener, my room was a bower of roses, and there were books, the newest books and magazines, everywhere. I should like to have stayed a month at Sunyani. Think of it! everything had to be carried eighty miles on men\'s heads, through a dense forest, across all manner of watercourses, where the white ant refused to allow a bridge to remain more than a fortnight, and yet one felt in the midst of civilisation. They told me I was brave to come there, but where was the hardship? none, none. It was all delightful. But there was another side. Close to the European bungalows was a little fort to which the men might retire in case of danger. They did not seem to think that they would ever be likely to require it, but there it was, and I, who had seen the old-time forts along the Coast, looked at this one with interest. It had a ditch round it, and walls of mud, and these were further strengthened by pointed stakes, bound together with barbed wire. An unpleasant place for a naked man to rush would be the little fort at Sunyani. Close against its wall so as to shelter the office, and yet outside so as not to embarrass the people, is the post and telegraph office, and so fast is civilisation coming to that outpost, that they take there for stamps, telegrams, and postal orders something like fourteen pounds a week.
I wandered round seeing everything, from the company of Waffs, exercising in the morning, to the hospital compound where the wives of the dresser and the wives of the patients were busily engaged in making fu-fu. For this is a primitive place, and here are no nursing Sisters and European comforts, and I must say the patients seem to do very well without them.
And only ten years ago, here and behind at Odumase, was the centre of the great rebellion against the white man\'s power; but things are moving, moving quickly. Only a week before I went up Messrs Swanzy had opened, with a black agent in charge, a store in the native town, and the day I arrived the agent brought his takings to the Commissioner for safe keeping in the treasury within the fort. It was such a tiny place, that store, simply a corrugated-iron shack, wherein were sold cotton cloths, odds and ends of cheap fancy goods, such as might be supposed to take the eye of the native, and possibly a little gin. Everything had to come on men\'s heads, so the wares were restricted, but the agent was well pleased with his enterprise, for that first week he had taken over ￡150, and this from a people who were utterly unaccustomed to buying.
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“Things are changing, things are changing fast,” said the Commissioner, and then he laughed and said that what bothered him most was the advance the suffrage movement was making. It wasn\'t yet militant, but he didn\'t know how it was going to end. The women had actually arrived at some idea of their own value to the community, and refused to marry the men their fathers had provided, if they did not happen to meet with their approval. Again and again a Chief would come to the Commissioner—a girl had declined to marry the man chosen for her, her father had appealed to the Chief, and the young lady, relying on the support of the British Government, had defied them both.
“If this woman do not marry the man I tell her to, then am I as mud in the sight of my people!” the Chief would say, flinging out protesting hands, and the Commissioner was very often as puzzled as he was.
On one occasion he came down to his court to find sitting there a good-looking girl of about seventeen, with a baby on her back. She waited patiently all through the sitting of the court, and then, when he had time to give attention to her, explained herself. She had a complaint to make. The King, or head Chief, had married her. Now the Commissioner was puzzled to know why this already much-married man had burdened himself with a wife who manifestly did not want him, and why the lady objected to a regal alliance. The King was brief and to the point. He considered himself a much injured man. The girl\'s parents had betrothed her to a man in her childhood, and when she grew up she did not like him, and preferring someone else, had declined to marry him. The King had been appealed to, but still she defied them, so, willy-nilly, to prevent further trouble, he had married her himself.
How that case ended I do not know. But I asked one question: “Whose is the baby?” And the baby it appeared was child to the man whom her parents and the King had rejected, so that Nature had settled the matter for them all. Whoever had her there was no getting over that baby.
Sunyani is one of the great halting places for the Hausas and Wangaras who come down from Wenchi, so on the French border and here I was introduced into great compounds, where the men who bring down cattle and horses and other goods from the north take up their abode, and rest before they start on their wearisome journey through the forest to Kumasi. I had come through in five days, but these men generally take very much longer. The Hausa carries tremendously heavy loads, so heavy that he cannot by himself lift it to his head, and therefore he always carries a forked stick, and resting his load on this, rests it also in the fork of a tree, and so slips out from underneath it. Again and again on our way up had we come across men thus resting their heavy loads. He must walk warily too, for they say so heavy is the load that the Hausa who stubs his toe breaks his neck. Slowly he goes, for time as yet is of no consequence in West Africa. A certain sum he expects to make, and whether he takes three months or six months to make it is as yet a matter of small moment to the black man, apparently, whatever his race.
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After I had been all round Sunyani, and dined at the mess, and inspected the fort and the hospital, they arranged for me to go to Odumase, five miles away.
Odumase is on the extreme northern border of Ashanti, and in fact the inhabitants are not Ashanti at all, calling themselves after their own town, but it was here that the rising that overwhelmed Kumasi in 1900-1 was engineered and had its birth. Here, as a beginning, they took sixty unfortunate Krepi traders, bound them to a tree, and did them slowly to death with all manner of tortures, cutting a finger off one day, a toe the next, an arm perhaps the next, and leaving the unfortunate victims to suffer by the insects and the sun. And here, when they had taken him, they brought back the instigator of that rebellion, and showed him captive to his own people. He was no coward, whatever his sins, and he stood forth and exhorted his people to rescue him, reviling the white men, and spitting upon them. But his people were awed by the white man\'s troops, and they let him be taken down to Kumasi, where he was tried, and hanged, not for fighting against the British raj, but for cold-blooded murder.
So to Odumase Mr Fell took me, explaining that because I was the first white woman to go there, the people would greet me in Ashanti fashion, and I was not to be afraid.
It was well he explained. Long before we could see the town, running along the forest path came the Ashanti warriors to meet me, and they came with yells and shouts, firing off their long Danes, so that presently I could see nothing but grey smoke, and I could hear nothing much either for the yells and shouts, and blowing of horns, and beating of tom-toms. It is just as well to explain an Ashanti welcome, else it is apt to be terrifying, for had I not been told I certainly should never have realised that a lot of guns pointing at me from every conceivable angle and spouting fire and smoke, were emblems of goodwill. But they were; and then I was introduced to the chiefs, and took their photographs. And now I have an awful confession to make. I have taken so many Ashanti chiefs that I do not know t\'other from which. They were all clad in the most gorgeous silken robes, woven in the country, in them all the colours of the rainbow, and they were all profusely decorated with golden ornaments. They had great rings like stars and catfish on their fingers, they had all manner of gold ornaments on their heads, round their necks, round their arms, and on their legs, and they had many symbolical staffs with gold heads carried round them. Always, of course, they sat under a great umbrella, and their attendants too wore gold ornaments. Some of the latter were known as their souls, and the Chiefs soul wore on his breast a great plate of gold. What his duties are now I do not know, I think he is King\'s messenger, but in the old times, which are about ten years back, his duties were more onerous. He was beloved of the Chief, and lived a luxurious life, but he could not survive his ............