Not long after first stepping ashore at Glass’s Town, he wrote that from a social point of view, the Mpongwe were elevated far above any people he had yet encountered or heard about along the whole West Coast of Africa. They were, he said, decidedly civil and kind, and he thought them remarkably generous. “There is seldom a day,” he said, “when I do not receive a present of a basket of groundnuts, sugar cane, fufu or something of the kind.” For someone who had lived for years among the Grebo and who had sailed with sea captains trading along the coast, he was pleasantly surprised that the gifts were given without any expectation of a return. Not that the Grebo and others had been stingy, but when gifts were given by them, gifts were expected in return.21
Leighton was impressed as well by the linguistic abilities of the Mpongwe—some Mpongwe traders knew not only the languages of surrounding peoples but also several European languages. Leighton noted that one trader, named Cringy, “speaks English, French, Portuguese, and at least half a dozen native languages with wonderful ease. He is perfectly familiar with the peculiar habits, feelings, and customs of all these nations, and he can act the Frenchman, the Spaniard, or the Englishman, just as circumstances may demand, without any apparent effort.” William Walker and Benjamin Griswold expressed in their letters and journals similar positive perceptions of the people of the estuary.22
Leighton, Walker, and Griswold had good reasons to praise the Mpongwe—they wanted, after all, the decision to establish a new mission at Baraka to appear wise and prudent. But their perceptions and sentiments were widely shared by European and American ship captains and explorers. Indeed, Captain Lawlin’s enthusiasm for the Mpongwe was what had first encouraged Leighton to explore the idea of starting a mission among them.23
All the Americans at Baraka were perplexed by this level of Mpongwe sophistication and amiability. Why, they wondered, did the Mpongwe have such a character, when other peoples along the coast did not? It was true, they admitted, that the Mpongwe had had much contact with “civilized” Europeans and Americans, but no more than many others who still seemed to be as fierce and barbarous as ever. Moreover, the missionaries believed that contacts with white sailors and traders—especially slave traders—had been a deeply corrupting influence on coastal peoples. Whites almost always left behind more vices than virtues. “Many of the vices of heathenism,” William Walker reported to the American Board, “have not only been sanctioned and encouraged by the example of Europeans, but a great many peculiar to civilized countries have been grafted upon their character.” So how did the Mpongwe come by their virtues?24
The answer seemed to lie in the traditions of the people—however carefully the missionaries thought those traditions needed to be evaluated—and in the role of an extraordinary man, Râgombe, who had lived many generations earlier. He held, wrote William Walker, “the same rank in the estimation of this people that Confucius does in the regard of the Chinese.” His sayings had been handed down by oral tradition and “magnified by ten thousand rehearsals, until they are truly wonderful.” The Mpongwe, said Walker, gave Râgombe credit for making their language and their laws, and they ascribed to him superhuman wisdom and power. Walker concluded that some remarkable man had exerted a powerful influence upon the character of the people, and it was this influence that had guided the Mpongwe over the generations and that had created in the towns and villages of the estuary such a polished, hospitable, and sophisticated people.25
If the Mpongwe were polished, hospitable, and sophisticated, they were also, in the view of the missionaries and other Europeans and Americans, unmistakably heathen. They were, wrote Leighton shortly after his arrival, heathen in the full force of that word. He had quickly found that witchcraft and polygamy and a thousand other kindred vices were “as common and as inveterate as at Cape Palmas or any other place in the world.” William Walker wrote to the American Board that they never forgot they were in a land of heathenism, and he did not want the board to forget it. He wrote that among the Mpongwe, slavery, polygamy, and intemperance were universal and dreadful. But, he added, “a history of intemperance here would be precisely the history of the same vice in America. So also of slavery.” Nevertheless, the missionaries insisted that the Mpongwe’s universal belief in witchcraft, their participation in rituals that seemed particularly repulsive to the missionaries, their use of fetishes and charms, together with their ignorance of Christian faith and life, provided unequivocal proof of heathenism. European and American explorers, after praising the Mpongwe, also emphasized a shadow side—the Mpongwe drank far too much rum; the women, with the encouragement of their husbands, often acted as prostitutes for visiting sailors; and the men were dishonest and effete and were generally obsessed with trade and the wealth it brought.26
These competing perceptions of the Mpongwe helped to shape the work of Leighton and his colleagues. Their primary strategy for the mission—it was the grand strategy of the American Board—was to develop an indigenous Christian leadership as quickly as possible, to provide that leadership with translations of the Bible and religious tracts, and to nurture that leadership so that it would soon be producing its own literature for its own people. The intent was to prepare the way for an indigenous, self-sustaining, self-governing church to evangelize its own people. In order to carry out this grand strategy around the estuary, Leighton and the other missionaries knew they had to learn about the distinctive social structures of the Mpongwe and take these structures into account, especially their underlying assumptions about the world and the routine practices of their daily lives. Leighton later wrote that missionaries must study the “character of the people” and adapt “their instruction to their wants.” This meant that at Baraka and at the other outpost soon to be established, the mission’s grand strategy had to be adapted to the particular and apparently conflicting character of the Mpongwe.27
On the one hand, the missionaries had to acknowledge and honor the strength and winsome nature of many Mpongwe habits and deeply internalized traditions and to acknowledge Mpongwe familiarity with and participation in a broader Atlantic world. On the other hand, the missionaries were there, risking their lives, in order to challenge the heathenism of the people and to present them with a Christian message, an alternative to the ways in which they understood the world and lived their lives. The challenges the missionaries faced—both the Americans and their Grebo and Fanti coworkers—were real, and their work over the coming years was to be demanding, deeply challenging them all. Disappointment and depression, homesickness and loneliness—and on occasion hysteria—together with almost constant illness often threatened to overwhelm them, and sometimes did. Moreover, they were going to be contending not only with the strength of Mpongwe ways and traditions, as well as the attractions of a nascent capitalist economy built on Atlantic trade, but also with the difficulties of living and working closely together, where their own peculiarities, eccentricities, and pettiness could blossom and flourish.
And there were questions of authority—Who was to make what decisions and how were they to be made? Clearly, the Americans were going to be in charge, and among the Americans the men would have the commanding voices. And among the men, the white ministers would carry the most authority—although the nonordained African American B. V. R. James would have a respected voice, receive a larger salary than William Walker, and play a key role as printer and teacher. So tensions could and did simmer and sometimes come out into the open, revealing sensitivities and vanities, weariness and doubts, prejudices and power structures among “civilized” Christians. What kept this little disparate band going, what encouraged most of them to persevere, was their shared confidence in the providence of God, their belief that God was the Lord of history whose purposes were being worked out as year followed year, and their conviction that God’s purposes—seen most clearly in the Bible and in Jesus—were good and gracious and included a future Christian Africa. And not least in keeping them going was their hope that they had a part to play in t
hat future.28
AT BARAKA, JANE took primary responsibility for the development of a boarding school for boys and young girls. Working with her from the first were Miss Jane Cooper, the free African American woman from Savannah who had come out with Jane on her return from the United States, and a Mrs. Stocken, the widow of a Methodist missionary in Monrovia. Wasa and Maria were there as teachers, as was young Mary Clealand. They were soon joined by the James family, who finally arrived from Cape Palmas after their infant daughter had safely passed through the seasoning fever. James was to help set up the printing press, but his gifts for teaching meant he also had important responsibilities for the boys’ school. Margaret James was busy at first with their daughter, but the former seamstress from Savannah was soon teaching sewing in the afternoons to the schoolgirls, who were learning how to make Western-style clothes. Catherine Strobel was with them—she had apparently put behind her any resentment she had had about the way James had first courted her and then married her mother, and she had become an excellent teacher. As a single woman, she had a degree of freedom in her life, but she also was greatly dependent on her mother and stepfather. She lived with them—as a family they had their own cottage at Baraka—helped to look after Anna, and had her identity closely tied to the James household.29
Jane had learned much at Fair Hope about what was needed to run a mission school, and she and her coworkers therefore put schedules and pedagogical strategies they had developed among the Grebo into practice among the Mpongwe. The day began early with morning prayers; after this, students drew water from the mission well for use during the day and then swept and cleaned their bamboo dormitories. Breakfast was next around a long table—a simple affair of fufu and cassava and water from the well. A little before nine, the school bell rang. The bell, brought from Fair Hope, was the voice of a scheduled day. It marked off periods, assigned activities to each passing hour, and taught a new way of thinking about time. On its first ringing, the bell called the day-students who lived in Glass’s Town to come up the hill to Baraka. There they would join the boarding students in the bamboo schoolhouse. They came running and walking, alone and in groups, and entered the shade of the mission school. One of the teachers prayed, read a passage from the Bible, and led the singing of one of the hymns that Leighton had translated into Mpongwe. The lessons that followed were in English—precisely what the parents of the students wished for their children, since English was the language of trade at Glass’s Town. So the students learned the English alphabet and practiced English sentences—“Good morning teacher.” “Thank you.” “God is love.” And they memorized English vocabulary—a nk ma was a “monkey”; a mboni was a “goat”; mbe was “bad”; and kamba was “to speak.”30
In later years, when the missionaries were more fluent in Mpongwe, entering students first learned the Mpongwe alphabet developed by Leighton and then proceeded to learn to read one of the Mpongwe booklets prepared by Leighton—“Scripture Questions” or “Scripture Precepts”—or, later still, one of the books of the Bible translated into Mpongwe. Then students plunged into English, and as the students advanced, they were introduced, as at Fair Hope, to other books—including the English Bible—and to arithmetic, geography, astronomy, and natural history.
Again, as at Fair Hope, the more advanced students helped to teach the less advanced ones. This system allowed not only for more attention to be given to beginners but also encouraged in the older students a sense of responsibility and an ownership of what was being taught.31
What was taught in the classroom, of course, was only the most formal part of the education at Baraka. The school bell had its part to play, but so did other factors, perhaps especially the food that was served at the mission station and the ways in which it was served. Peter Edwards, a Fanti from Cape Coast, was with his wife the cook and the steward, the majordomo, at Baraka. A young Mpongwe man was employed to purchase local foods. Each morning he went into Glass’s Town and surrounding villages to meet women who were hawking sweet potatoes and pineapples, yams and groundnuts, sweet bananas and sugar cane, Indian corn and pumpkins, peas, beans, tomatoes, and eggs. These Peter and his wife prepared in the distinctive Fanti ways that they had brought with them from Cape Coast—they liked to fry the fish in palm oil, fix groundnut soup, use okra and tomatoes together, and when rice was available, they prepared rice balls. With these and other dishes they extended the students’ world through the tastes and textures of food.32
Plantains and cassava were, however, the staples for all the meals, and most likely Peter bought them already prepared. Mpongwe women took green plantains and either boiled or roasted them before a fire. When boiled, they had something of the look of a peeled Irish potato and were bland and starchy. When roasted, they became very white and had the flavor of breadfruit. Either way, when mashed and rolled out into a baton or a ball they became fufu to be eaten with some rich soup or sauce, as Leighton had done when he had first visited Toko’s plantation.33
The cassava required more work. The women who sold the prepared roots first soaked them for about a week until they became soft. Then, after drying the roots in the sun, they pounded them in a mortar, added a little water, and made a dough, which they molded into long loaves about the size of a man’s arm. After wrapping the dough in long, tough plantain leaves, they tied the loaves with vines and steamed them for an hour or two by suspending them over pots of boiling water. When the cassava loaves—which were now called “hanky”—were ready, the women took them, still wrapped in their leaves, to Baraka. And when the leaves were unwrapped, the hanky emitted a pungent, sour aroma that the Mpongwe loved but the missionaries found offensive. Leighton noted that when the cassava was prepared in this way it was preferred to almost any other food by those who had grown up eating it. But he thought that with its odor and its bland and starchy taste, the cassava was far from tempting to foreigners—himself included. He called it an “apparently indigestible mass.”34
Peter got fish from a young Mpongwe boy who was hired to catch or secure a daily supply. The estuary was a rich fishery, and fish—both fresh and smoked—was a regular item for the Mpongwe and for those who ate their meals at Baraka. Sometimes the fish was used in soups, and sometimes, when dried, its smoky flesh was mashed and made into a sauce to be eaten with fufu or hanky. Chickens—gaunt and tough from scratching around sandy yards—were also regularly available. Goats were as well. They seemed to wander everywhere around Glass’s Town and nearby villages and were also kept at Baraka, where an occasional leopard would snatch one. On special occasions, Peter would kill a goat, barbecue it, and chop it into many pieces, then serve it with fufu and fruit and vegetables grown in the mission garden or bought from the women who with baskets on their backs hawked squash, beans, okra, and greens.35
Supplementing these familiar foods were imported items from distant places. Rice was regularly ordered from Cape Palmas and brought down by ships in the West African trade. For the Grebo who had come from Fair Hope, rice was an essential part of their diet, and it was soon being planted at Baraka. Corned beef, hams, and sea biscuits came from the United States, and cows were imported from Cape Palmas, although they did not thrive in the tropical climate of Gabon. These imported foods, however, played only a minor role in the diets of the schoolchildren, not only because they were intended primarily for the Americans and newly arrived West Africans, but also because the students preferred fish, fufu, and hanky.36
Two meals were served at Baraka—breakfast and then dinner at three o’clock, in Lowcountry style and according to Mpongwe custom. Here the traditional foods, often prepared in Fanti style, together with Grebo rice and occasional European or American dishes, were served at long tables where the children sat in chairs. Jane and the other teachers taught and expected the children to use Western manners—to use a knife and fork with ease, to say “please” and “thank you,” and to sit up straight and not interrupt each other when talking. The hope was that such daily practices would help
the children to internalize European and American ideas of domestic order and hygiene and to develop an inner life that was receptive to a Christian message. But, of course, much of this way of sitting at a table was not new or strange to the children. Like the food that was served, the manners that were taught were a mixture of the familiar and the new. Unlike the Grebo, the Mpongwe had been using knives and forks for years—the missionaries knew this from the hospitality they received over and over again in Mpongwe homes. Leighton had written shortly after his first arrival at Gabon that he was “invited two or three times a week to breakfast, dinner or tea, and that not served upon a dusty old chest, but on a table and in good European or American style.” He later wrote that the Mpongwe “take their meals at table, and use knives and forks as gracefully and naturally as any other people in the world.” And William Walker found that in even more distant Mpongwe villages the people were accustomed to eating in this way. Such a way of eating, such polished table manners, reflected the Mpongwe’s long contact with Europeans and Americans and the degree of their adaptation to European and American styles as well as their traditional Mpongwe politeness and hospitality.37
IF THE FOOD that was eaten and the way it was eaten at the Baraka school indicated the sophistication of the Mpongwe and their long engagement with an Atlantic world, the food also embodied aspects of Mpongwe life that the missionaries found deeply troubling. Most of the food produced around the estuary was grown by the slaves of the Mpongwe who were living on the surrounding plantations. A few months after he arrived at the estuary, Leighton wrote that the Mpongwe character was more seriously stained by their participation in the slave trade than he had at first imagined. He and the other missionaries were dismayed by the size of the trade in the estuary—it was so much more than anything they had seen at Cape Palmas.38
By the Rivers of Water Page 34