The king was old, wrinkled, and gray and showed the signs of his age by his slow and stiffed-legged movements and by the way his skin hung loosely from his once-muscular arms. But he was, like Toko, a great storyteller and could tell the history of the Mpongwe. The Ndiwa were, he said, the first people on the estuary. The Mpongwe had then lived far in the interior and had been taught to believe that if a Mpongwe man saw the salt water, he would soon die. But the Ndiwa people had slowly dwindled in number, and the Mpongwe had moved town by town and village by village down from the headwaters of the rivers that emptied into the estuary until they had finally settled in their present locations.10
The old king, for all the difficulty of reaching his town, obviously knew of a wider world. George said he remembered when he was a boy how English and American ships, as well as Spanish and Portuguese, had come up the estuary and anchored off the Remboué to trade with his father for slaves, who had been brought down from the interior. He had also traveled much in the interior when young; he had then followed in his father’s footsteps, doing business with the white traders for many years. He knew their ways of bargaining, and he was familiar with the varying quality of the products they offered in exchange for ivory and slaves, dyewood and beeswax. He knew as well how time was on his side in dealing with Europeans, how anxious they were to complete their transactions and get away from the sickly climate that left so many of them dead.
George, however, was not the only one in the town who knew of a world beyond their rainforest home. Years earlier, two young men in his town had been sent to France, where they had spent eight years. They came back speaking and writing fluent French, telling of their adventures, and describing the wonders they had seen. But having seen Paris and Bordeaux, they found that life in a Mpongwe town had little appeal. They had been anxious to return to France—and perhaps they did. (Walker gave no indication in his diary whether he ever met them, or whether their stories of European cities and marvels had excited much curiosity in their hometown.) Because of such contacts, those who lived in George’s Town knew of a world far beyond Abaäga Creek and the Remboué River and its broad estuary. They consequently possessed, as did their Mpongwe relatives around the estuary, polished manners and sophisticated ways. They ate with knives and forks and dressed in stylish fashions, and some spoke several European languages.11
George’s Town had been, earlier in the century, the most prosperous of the Mpongwe towns because of its key role in the slave trade, but signs of decay and decline were clear by the time Walker began visiting. George, for all of his hospitality, had become a drunkard—a wily drunkard, to be sure, but still a drunkard—and the people seemed to be slipping into a deep morass from all the rum that had been pouring in on them with the slave trade. On one of his early visits, Walker found George “and nearly all the people drunk. In such circumstances the king, of course, was very glad to see me, and told me of his delight a dozen times at least.” After observing the people drinking and fighting throughout the day, Walker noted in his diary that “rum kills in Africa as well as America.” What was particularly galling for him was that most of the rum in this and the other Mpongwe towns came from Walker’s own New England, where its use as a currency in the slave trade was adding to the wealth of many.12
George’s Town, despite its many signs of decay, was nevertheless an important town, and the people had been eager for a school and had soon built one. There, the Fanti John Edwards lived with his wife and taught Mpongwe children. The work was demanding, was far from the friendships and support available at Baraka, and required great commitment. Such isolation made Walker’s visits important occasions for the Edwardses that were much welcome.13
By spending time at George’s Town and at Duka’s Town further up the Remboué where Josiah Dorsey had a school, Walker was able to study more intensely not only the Mpongwe language but also the social structures and the religious and cultural traditions of the people. He learned about the different clans of the Mpongwe—the Agoulamba, the Assiga, and the Agekaza—but he and the other missionaries didn’t make too much of them. People were moving about from one location to another—especially toward Glass’s Town, with its profitable trade with the English and Americans—and the missionaries usually lumped all the clans together and simply called everyone Mpongwe.14
In a similar way, the missionaries had adopted the convenient use of the word “king” that had long been used by European and American traders. Walker and Leighton and the other missionaries had quickly learned that Glass and William and George and the other “kings” were not kings like Louis Philippe of France, or the powerful Gezu, who was king and absolute monarch of Dahomey. They were, rather, aga—Big Men or Head Men, as the missionaries called them—men who exercised leadership not only over their own towns but also over clusters of surrounding villages. They had, wrote Walker, “but very limited authority, and no power to exact money or inflict punishment, unless in accordance with the expressed opinion of the principal men—that is, all the old men.” Nevertheless, the missionaries—following the example of the traders—referred to them as “kings,” implying more power and authority than George or any of the others ever possessed.15
Walker often stayed for extended periods at George’s Town and paid shorter visits to Duka’s Town and to Tom Larsen’s. He worked hard on his study of the language, which for all of its beauty nevertheless required intense effort to master. His diary recorded the hard work involved: “Began writing at the imperative mood, negative and affirmative of the verbs in my vocabulary,” he wrote one day. And the next: “Writing still on the verb and find great irregularity in the formation of the imperative mood, but shall soon be able to reduce it to order and deduce the principles of its formation and I hope that by the time that is accomplished I shall have most of them fixed in my mind.”16
While he sat at the door of the school poring over his notebooks and vocabulary cards, he observed the comings and goings of the people around him. Coffles of slaves frequently passed before him chained together by their necks, and Portuguese slavers were often there making purchases. When he remonstrated with them, they simply repeated their familiar storyline—“It is our living.” And a profitable living it was. According to their account, they could expect a shipload of slaves to bring $350,000 in a Brazilian market—and $300,000 of that would be their profit.17
Nights at George’s Town were often interminable for Walker. Mosquitoes kept him awake with their infernal buzzing, and the noise of the town was often loud and raucous—especially when the slavers brought fresh supplies of rum. And when someone was sick—had a “devil in the belly” or in the head—drums were beat all through the night. Drummers, said the New Englander, placed one end of the drum on the ground, took the other between their knees, and with little sticks eight or ten inches long they pelted away with might and main. “With half a dozen of these drums, and 50 or 100 women screaming at the top of their voices, they manage to scare up quite a noise.” If they did not manage to drive away the troubling devil, they did come close to driving the missionary crazy.18
Women were often called from different towns to help drive out a devil. On one occasion when Walker was staying at King George’s, a man came down with a devil in his belly. Women were called to come from Glass’s Town to make fetishes for him and to drink his rum—for the rum was the price of their help. All through the night they wailed—they seemed to Walker to be themselves possessed of the demon rum. In his diary he quoted an expression among the Mpongwe—“The women are Devils for drinking rum”—and indeed, Walker and Leighton and the others in the mission were discovering that Mpongwe women had a much more complex role in Mpongwe society than they had at first imagined.19
The missionaries had sensed conflicting images of Mpongwe women from the first—sometimes they appeared to be treated with great respect, but at other times they seemed little more than chattel. Leighton had written Jane shortly after his arrival at Glass’s Town that the women were t
reated with a great deal of kindness and attention. He noted that the head wife was seated by her husband in all important palavers and took part in the deliberations. A few months later, however, Benjamin Griswold watched as old Glass gave a troublesome young wife to a man for a jug of rum. Griswold concluded, “Wives are exchanged here as horses and oxen are in America.” Some years later, Leighton wrote Rufus Anderson that a husband did not have “even the right of property in his wife.” She was regarded only as a sort of loan from her father, a loan that could be withdrawn at will. And what was worse, wives thought that they had fulfilled their destiny only if they enriched their husbands with a few children. In this way, Leighton thought, “the entire female population of the country is fully engrossed and no man can get a wife except so far as he may succeed in enticing her away from someone else.”20
The missionaries were clearly struggling in their attempt to understand the relationship between husbands and wives among the Mpongwe. And the relationship was made more complex and confusing to the missionaries by the differences between Mpongwe husbands and their Mpongwe wives, on the one hand, and between Mpongwe husbands and their non-Mpongwe wives, especially slaves, on the other. Elaborately constructed laws regulated who could be married to whom and the different roles of children of the different types of marriages—the child of a Mpongwe father and a free non-Mpongwe mother, the missionaries found, was considered a Mpongwe, but the child of a Mpongwe father and a non-Mpongwe mother who was a slave was considered an outsider.21
One thing, however, became increasing clear to Walker and Leighton and the others in the mission—women had an independence and authority in Mpongwe society that exceeded anything they had at first imagined. An unhappy woman often simply ran away from her husband or took up with a man from another town or village. To be sure, such independence was not without its dangers. On one occasion, when Walker was staying at George’s Town, a woman who had run off with another man was caught and brought back by her furious husband. Throughout the night, Walker listened to her screams as her husband beat her. The next morning, the man put a chain around her neck and was in the process of staking her before his door in order to continue the flogging when Walker was finally able to secure her release, presumably through his authority as a visiting white man. She was badly bruised, and Walker wondered how she and other women could survive the outrageous fury of a husband’s wrath.22
Still, many women were successful in escaping their husbands and over a period of time might move from husband to husband. Following such escapes, the abandoned husband might seek revenge not on the wife but on the new husband. If he could not be found, then several kin of the new husband could be killed in his stead. And that killing often resulted in the revenge killing of the first husband, or some of his kin, until a palaver finally settled the matter. Walker wrote to a friend in New England that when a Mpongwe man ran away with another’s wife, his action would typically set off a process of retaliation and revenge. Here, he said, were both the causes of war among the Mpongwe and their manner of carrying them on. He thought it all seemed very stupid and unreasonable, but he added: “If you could strip the wars of Christian nations of their sophistry and pomp, and great swelling words of vanity, where is the mighty difference?” He could see none, he said, except that in Gabon, only three or four people perished, whereas with the refinements of civilization and the impulsive energy of Christianity, many thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands perished.
“Is there after all,” he asked, “any difference in the hearts of men, unless grace has made it? Or will Downing Street or the White House sanctify deeds that are utterly detestable coming from an African hut?” And then, remembering what the State of Georgia had done to the Cherokees, he concluded that the people around him in Gabon were no more enlightened or Christian than the governor and legislature of Georgia. Both the Georgians and the revenge-seeking Mpongwe were barbarians. The lanky New Englander tried to restrain himself as he recoiled from the evil he saw in the world. He did not wish to moralize, he wrote his friend. He knew that he would be accused of not understanding the circumstances, of not taking into account the particular ways of the Mpongwe or the complexity of the situation in Georgia. He said he had been told that many times, but he insisted that he understood “enough of one to see its stupidity and of the other to see its unmitigated wickedness and barbarity.”23
AS WALKER LIVED among the people of George’s Town and as he walked narrow trails to nearby villages and slave settlements, he began to have a growing awareness of the great depths of the rainforest and the ways in which its massive trees and lush vegetation shaped the life of the Mpongwe. The surrounding rainforest apparently did not carry for the Mpongwe the dark and hostile jungle images it had for many whites, but it did have poisonous snakes that frequently slipped into town looking for a rat; herds of elephants that sometimes destroyed a grove of plantains overnight, along with much of the people’s food supply; and driver ants that moved in long columns, consuming any living thing that could not get out of their way. But perhaps most of all for the Mpongwe, the rainforest was home to leopards—solitary hunters, symbols of power and authority. Traditionally closely associated with village leaders, leopards were also animals of deep mystery, embodiments of evil intent.24
On one of Walker’s earliest visits to George’s Town, word came that a leopard had carried off a slave on one of the plantations. But everyone thought a man had changed into the leopard and had made the attack, and George, wrote Walker, “did not seem disposed to do anything about it, unless it was to try the people with poison and see who it was.” Three days later, news came that a leopard had carried off a woman from a house on the plantation during the night. Her young son was with her in the house when the leopard entered, but apparently he had been frozen in terror, and in the morning the people found him crying. Walker urged George to send men with him to the plantation to try to find either leopard tracks or the bodies of the man and woman. But the king was fearful and would not consent to Walker’s going. “I find the king,” wrote Walker, “with all his amiability and hospitality, very superstitious.” This people, wrote Walker in his diary, “suffer almost incredibly from fear. They fear witches, and poison, and leopards, and each other. O blessed day when they shall be delivered from this bondage. Satan now rules them with a rod of iron.”25
So Walker found that King George and the people of his town possessed both an admirable hospitality and brutal, superstitious ways that left the missionary dismayed. Over and over again he found George “as pleasant as ever, and just as heathenish. Sometimes drunk, sometimes sober.” Yet, when sober, George impressed Walker and the other missionaries with his thoughtfulness and with his ability to engage them in the most serious theological conversations. George said that he believed “God made the world and all things and all people and now had left them not regarding their actions nor caring for the characters of men.” Like the ancient Hebrew poets, George said he often saw bad men prosper and live to be old, while just as often good men were poor and soon died. How is this, the old king asked, “if God is good and just and cares for the actions of men?” And George utterly rejected the missionaries’ assertions about heaven and hell, about “the future state,” and insisted—like some Gullah storyteller—that he did not believe that at death the soul went to another world. Instead, he believed that one remained nearby, able to wander about from place to place, and with the power to inflict evil upon the sons and daughters of the earth.26
The king’s thoughts on these matters seemed to reflect not only the religious traditions of the Mpongwe but also the wisdom that flowed from his own experience—and perhaps also from the disillusionments of advancing age and from what he saw going on around him. Even he, perhaps especially he, could see that his town was losing its former strength and self-confidence and was clearly in decline. George thought the suppression of the slave trade by the British was the cause of the growing poverty of the people. But Walke
r reached a different conclusion: “Nothing can be plainer than the fact that the slave trade has made them drunkards, almost obliterated their sense of right and wrong, and now the people are reaping a terrible harvest of sorrow, and no one can tell where it will end.” Nevertheless, the New Englander felt a growing affection and commitment to the people and their amiable, hospitable, and often thoughtful ways: “Still there is no place in the world where we are more cordially received and better entertained, as far as they have the means of doing anything for us.”27
WALKER OFTEN MADE the trip back to Baraka at night in order to catch the tide and a favorable wind and to avoid getting stuck on the large sandbar where the Remboué emptied its waters into the estuary. He and his Mpongwe companions would walk the narrow trail through the rainforest that led to Abaäga Creek, each carrying an ojo—a torch made of impure beeswax and other inflammable materials rolled together and wrapped in plantain leaves. They walked quietly in a single file as they listened to the disparate sounds of the night—the wind in the trees, the buzz of insects, the call of some bird or the cry of some forest creature. The travelers peered into the darkness that surrounded them and that gave way only briefly to the light of their passing torches before quickly closing in behind them. And the darkness listened to them and peered back at them as they moved along their path—occasionally some startled creature stirred the brush in flight, and sometimes rainforest eyes caught the light of an ojo and glowed within the engulfing night.28
By the Rivers of Water Page 36