By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  The ships arriving in the estuary were bringing, however, not only diseases and rum and eager sailors from far places, but also challenges to the old traditions of the Mpongwe. Toko had felt this challenge deeply, saying that the white man was a devil who “sabba everything,” a devil who had come into the estuary with the tempting fruit of new knowledge that gave power and wealth. And, of course, among those who arrived on ships from far places with new ways of thinking, and new answers to old questions, were Toko’s friends at Baraka, with their schools and books and strange message about Christian faith and life. So Toko had to struggle against the political domination of the French as the strength of the Mpongwe population was eroding. And he had to struggle to maintain the old ways and traditions of the Mpongwe as they were being called into question, and often regarded with revulsion, by the whites who had taken up residence along the shores of the estuary.2

  A. John Leighton Wilson and Jane Bayard Wilson shortly after their return from Africa in 1852. Courtesy of the Presbyterian Heritage Center, Montreat, NC.

  B. Gullah women in the Georgia Lowcountry hulling rice with mortar and pestle. This effective African method removed the hull with little grain breakage. Compare the mortar in drawing 9. Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanish Georgia Collection, sap93.

  C. Gullah man driving ox cart on Sapelo Island, Georgia. The use of such ox carts continued into the twentieth century. Note the sandy road. Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanish Georgia Collection, sapo74.

  D. John H. B. Latrobe (1803–1891). Latrobe was president of the Maryland State Colonization Society and oversaw the establishment of Maryland in Liberia at Cape Palmas. Like most white supporters of colonization, he thought free blacks constituted a grave danger to white America and saw colonization as the only humane way to avoid a catastrophic collision of the races. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society.

  E. Dr. James Hall, first governor of Maryland in Liberia. He negotiated with the Grebo the right to establish the Maryland colony at Cape Palmas. While he and Leighton Wilson clashed when Wilson began to oppose colonization as a form of imperialism, Hall later said of the missionary “we know him to have possessed the confidence of the native Africans to a greater degree than any other white man we have ever met with on that coast.” Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society.

  F. John B. Russwurm (1799–1851). One of the first African Americans to graduate from college and co-founder of the first African American newspaper. He emigrated to Liberia and became governor of Maryland in Liberia. He and Leighton Wilson worked together to maintain peaceful relations between the colony and the Grebo, but came to regard each other with suspicion. Courtesy of the George J. Mitchell Dept. of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine.

  G. “Fetish Magician in Gabon.” The night following King Glass’s death, a low moan filled his town. Then Indâ, a mysterious spirit of the forest, emerged from the shadows wrapped in dried plantain leaves. This photograph shows a similar figure. From Robert Hamill Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa.

  H. Njembe. A secret society of women that involved rites of passage as young girls were initiated into its carefully guarded mysteries. Mpongwe women are shown here. They were said to discard any western dress and put on native cloth during the rite. Note the white paint on the face showing participation in a Njembe ceremony. From Robert Hamill Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa.

  I. Mpongwe Mother and Child. This handsome picture shows a traditional way for a Mpongwe mother to carry a child. From Robert Hamill Nassau, My Ogowe.

  J. Missionaries at Baraka around 1870. William Walker is the tall man, center back. His diaries provide a daily account of the early days of the Gabon mission. Cornelius DeHeer is seated in the front holding a hat. When his wife died, he sent his young daughter Cornelia to Leighton and Jane Wilson, then living in New York. With his permission, the Wilsons adopted her as their own child. Courtesy Presbyterian Heritage Center, Montreat, North Carolina.

  K. Baraka. This photograph from the late nineteenth century shows the first cottage built at Baraka. The house was built in 1842 by African American carpenters from Cape Palmas. Leighton and Jane Wilson lived here until their return to the US in 1852. This was also William Walker’s primary residence. Courtesy Presbyterian Heritage Center, Montreat, North Carolina.

  L. Fang Warrior. Beginning in the 1840s, the Fang began to move from the Gabon interior toward the coast. Leighton Wilson encountered Fang warriors in 1843 during a trip up the Como river with Toko. Wilson thought the Fang appeared free from the vices that afflicted those in long contact with whites. The Fang were soon to overwhelm other peoples living closer to the coast. From Robert Hamill Nassau, My Ogowe.

  M. Fang Woman. This woman by her stance and look shows the strength and energy of the Fang so much admired by Americans and Europeans. From Robert Hamill Nassau, My Ogowe.

  N. Village Preaching, around 1880. A missionary from the Baraka mission is addressing a gathering of men in an interior village. Note the varied expressions on the men’s faces. From Robert Hamill Nassau, My Ogowe.

  O. “Fetish Doctor.” This man is seated in the middle in the “Village Preaching” photograph. The triangular patch of hair is described by a missionary as “the professional tonsure” of a “Fetish Doctor.” From Robert Hamill Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa.

  P. Ruins of Columbia, SC, 1865. This photograph looks down Columbia’s Main Street. Shortly after the departure of Sherman’s troops, Leighton Wilson and the African American John Wilson each drove a wagon of supplies into the city from Wilson’s home some fifty miles away. They delivered them to refugees at Columbia Theological Seminary, which had not been burned. Courtesy of National Archives, photo no. 165-SC-53.

  BOTH TOKO AND Glass had continued to refuse the annual gift from the French in order to symbolize their independence, but people around the estuary began to complain that Toko was the real cause of tension with the French. The French commander visited William Walker at Baraka and offered him any assistance he needed if Walker “would only reconcile Toko to the French.” “Simple Man!” Walker wrote in his diary. “He probably did not know that he was asking impossibilities.” Once again the French offered Toko the annual gift in early 1848, but they found him, Walker proudly wrote, “incorruptible and no wise inclined to receive the price of his country’s freedom.”3

  But Glass was another matter. The king was old—very old, almost one hundred—and tired, and he was still traumatized by the French bombardment of his village. So a short while after Toko refused the annual gift, Glass went to the French blockhouse, had dinner with the French officials, and accepted their gift. The old king seemed resigned to the fate of his people and to his own approaching death. “From the day on which the gift was put into his hands,” Walker sadly noted, “he neither ate nor drank, but went down at once to his grave.”4

  On the day of his death Glass’s wives and other women sat around his body and wailed before his door the ancient Mpongwe laments. Then, as their voices grew hoarse and the shadows of night began to reach across the estuary, a drum began to beat and a peculiar moan filled the air and engulfed the old king’s town. Indâ, a mysterious spirit of the forest, emerged from the shadows, a man in disguise wrapped in dried plantain leaves. “No female must see him,” Walker wrote. So the women fled Glass’s house with fear and “ran as from death itself.” Indâ entered the town followed by young men, who danced to the plaintive melody flowing from a Mpongwe flute. The spirit moved slowly and in a threatening manner. Then, suddenly, his followers scattered throughout the town and seized all the goats, sheep, and fowl they could find, killing them and carrying them off into the forest for what was reported at Baraka to be a great feast. Walker noted in his diary that the ritual seemed to be performed by a kind of secret society, sarcastically adding that it was probably “quite as sensible and useful as the Odd Fellowship or Free Mason societies” in New England.5

  The next day, Walker arrived at th
e king’s house shortly before they closed the coffin. Beside the shriveled and stiff corpse the people had placed cloth, a looking glass, the old king’s pipe and some tobacco, and an uncorked bottle of rum and a tumbler. Walker saw around the coffin a number of jugs, pitchers, and pans to be deposited in the grave, together with some balls and a board so that Glass could play in death a Mpongwe game he had loved in life. Walker conducted a short funeral service. “In the presence of about one hundred people,” he wrote in his diary, “we sang a hymn and made a prayer in Mpongwe, then sang another hymn and pronounced the benediction. During this there was the most profound silence, and had I had perfect command of the Mpongwe language, I would have made some remarks, but I feared lest I should by a blunder destroy the impression already made, and so left.” Glass was carried out of his house, where he had welcomed so many and had drunk much rum. They did not take him to the cemetery at Baraka but buried him on another hillside a short distance from the waters of the estuary.6

  Toko was now alone in resisting the French. Then, in the summer of 1848, word reached the estuary that the French king, Louis Philippe, had abdicated. Hopes soared that the French would leave. Toko went to the grave of an ancestor—a former Big Man of a nearby town—and sacrificed a goat, calling on him and other ancestors to help in the struggle for independence. But it was to no avail. The French did not budge but rather began to consolidate their control of the estuary. Toko grew increasingly despondent. He was suffering greatly from asthma, and to make matters worse, his daughter Wâwâ had become stubborn and rebellious.7

  Shortly after Leighton had first arrived in the estuary, Toko had taken Wâwâ to Baraka and asked that she be educated in the mission school. A beautiful and remarkably sprightly child, she had been a good student. And yet the fact that she had become acculturated to Western ways made her more attractive to the traders who came and spent time in the estuary. She had been married as a young girl, according to Mpongwe custom, but Toko still had authority over her. Several months before Glass’s death, she had taken up with an unscrupulous Englishman, the captain of one of the trading ships then in the estuary. Toko, who was famous for not being able to control his children, sent word for her to return to shore, but she refused. He went to the ship to try to persuade her, but she still refused. The Englishman was paying her twelve dollars a day, she said, and her husband was glad for the income. “This is the example,” wrote Walker in disgust, “of most of the Captains who visit the coast. Better bring the small pox or any other plague than such vile plagues of body and soul as are left here by these dregs of civilization.” Wâwâ stayed with the Englishman and traveled with him as he traded along the coast until he sailed for home some months later.8

  Weakened by his asthma, Toko’s good humor was not able to keep at bay a deep discouragement that flowed from the French aggression, Glass’s death, and Wâwâ’s disobedience. Several months after Glass died, Toko took a gun, pointed it at himself, and pulled the trigger. It misfired. He tried again, and again it misfired. And “so he supposed,” he told Walker, “that God was not pleased to let him die so,” and that he should not try again.9

  A chastened Toko continued to come to Baraka. He attended church faithfully, listening carefully to what the missionaries had to say, but although his children became Christians—eventually even Wâwâ—he did not. He was a Mpongwe at the deepest level of his self-awareness in spite of his cosmopolitan ways and knowledge of distant lands. He would not leave the world of his ancestors and the land that they inhabited, nor would he try to silence their voices, which spoke deep within him and around him and through him. As a boy and young man he had learned the moods of the estuary, its currents and tides, its coming in and going out, and he had seen moon rise and star rise over its waters. He had listened by glowing fires as the old ones told stories of ancestors and recounted fables rich and refined with years of telling. He had watched his elders enact ancient traditions and teach the young ones how to go about their work according to long-established custom. Here, among his own people, as a young one himself, he had learned how to carry himself, how to think about himself, and how to live in the presence of his ancestors. Now, as an old man, being of this place, being one with the landscape of his home and the traditions of his people, he did not find the message of the missionaries convincing—even if he came to believe that some of the traditions of his people were foolish and embarrassing. And so, just as he resisted the imperialism of the French, he resisted the appeals of his friends at Baraka and their calls to him to change his heart and to adopt new ways of seeing the world and being in the world.

  LEIGHTON AND JANE returned to Baraka in late August 1848. With them were the twice-widowed Mrs. Griswold and the Bushnells—Albert Bushnell was returning despite continuing reservations about his mental health. But most encouraging was the presence of three new missionaries, or at least two of three new missionaries. Ira and Jane Preston were from Ohio and were a particularly gifted young couple. He would quickly prove himself the best linguist among all the missionaries, and she would be a lively and thoughtful teacher much loved by her students. Years later she would write Gaboon Stories, a little book intended for American children but full of careful observations about school life, the Mpongwe, and the “bush people.” In contrast, W. T. Wheeler, the third new missionary, was a disaster. From the first, Leighton and others wondered how the board in Boston could have sent to Gabon a man who found some dreadful disease in every ache and pain he felt.10

  On their arrival, however, they found, much to their distress, that Zeniah Walker had died. The young bride had become pregnant during the long voyage to Baraka. The preceding February, she had given birth to a son, who had gasped a few times and then closed his eyes in death. For two months afterward she had fought for her own life while bleeding internally. William Walker had tried desperately and lovingly to do what he could for his ailing wife with the aid of a French doctor. Zeniah died in late March, confessing her faith in a “precious Redeemer” and her love for her distraught husband. Walker buried her beside their son, and he built a fence and planted flowers around the grave. But he was devastated. “The reality and greatness of my loss,” he confided to his diary, “presses upon me with increasing force. I want to ask someone to wake me, so that I may escape from this dreadful suffocating feeling and look once more upon the face of my dear Zeniah.” He felt alone and surrounded by darkness: “If I sit in the house, all is desolate and if I go out double desolation meets me on the threshold as I return.” Later he wrote that he believed she was in a better world, “but I weep because I have a human heart. But I pray for reconciliation and try to school my heart into submission. I am not conscious of cherishing my grief, though I know there is great danger of it. I feel the obligations of duty to the living around me. I hardly know my own heart now. The violent repression of grief as well as pain, only makes it more intense. I desire to lie passive in God’s hands. The furnace is hot indeed. May God give strength according to my day.”11

  Walker was not alone in his agony. Jane Cooper, the free woman from Savannah who had come out with Jane Wilson in 1843, had become close to Zeniah and had helped to care for her as she battled for her life. Exhausted by the loving attention she had given Zeniah, she felt overwhelmed when her friend died. A profound loneliness pressed in upon her, and she became deeply depressed. She began to suffer from hysteria, beginning with faintness and ending in violent laughing and crying. Walker gave her an antispasmodic, but it seemed to do little good. Finally she was calm enough to take a sea voyage—she and all her friends at Baraka hoped it would help her recover. So she was not at Baraka when the returning and new missionaries arrived.12

  But there was encouraging news to greet Jane and Leighton as well. Upon their return they learned that some of the students at Baraka “had a new heart” and were seeking membership in the church. Several sons of prominent Mpongwe had announced that they wanted to be baptized, that they were rejecting the ancient ways and beliefs of
the people and were ready to assume a new identity as Mpongwe Christians. This news caused much excitement among the Mpongwe, and opposition was immediate. The parents of one boy sent for him and locked him in their house to keep him from being baptized. The parents of another beat him and shut him up in their house. The missionaries feared that Toko was at the bottom of all the opposition. He was certainly deeply troubled by the conversions. Walker concluded that “there are hearts that hate all these things and perhaps no one more than Toko, our first and firmest friend.”13