Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
TALAGOUGA
Mme. Forget received me most kindly and hospitably, she, with her husband and her infant daughter, and M. and Mme. Gacon represent the Mission Évangélique and the white race at Talagouga. Mme. Gacon is the lady the planter took me for; and when I saw her, with her sweet young face and masses of pale gold-coloured hair, I felt highly flattered. Either that planter must be very short-sighted or the colour of my hair must have misled him, not that mine is pale gold, but hay-coloured. I don't know how he did it. Mme. Forget is a perfectly lovely French girl, with a pale transparent skin and the most perfect great dark eyes, with indescribable charm, grace of manner, and vivacity in conversation. It grieves me to think of her, wasted on this savage wilderness surrounded by its deadly fever air. Oranie Forget, otherwise the baby, although I am not a general admirer of babies of her age—a mere matter of months—is also charming; I am not saying this because she flattered me by taking to me—all babies and children do that—but she has great style, and I have no doubt she will grow up to be a beauty too, but she would have made a dead certainty of it, if she had taken after her mother.
The mission station at Talagouga is hitched on to the rocky hillside, which rises so abruptly from the river that there is hardly room for the narrow footpath which runs along the river frontage of it. And when you are on the Forgets' verandah it seems as if you could easily roll right off it into the
dark, deep, hurrying Ogowé. I suggest this to Mme. Forget as an awful future for Oranie, but she has thought of it and wired the verandah up. You go up a steep flight of steps into the house, which is raised on poles some fifteen feet above the ground in front, and you walk through it against the hillside, made up mostly of enormous boulders of quartz, for Talagouga mountains are the western termination of the side of the Sierra del Cristal range. When you get through the house you come to more stairs, cut out now in the hillside rock and leading to the
STATION OF THE MISSION ÉVANGÉLIQUE, TALAGOUGA. kitchen to the right, and to the store buildings; to the left they continue up to the church, which is still higher up the hill-face. That church is the prettiest I have seen in Africa. I do not say I should like to sit in it, because there seems to me no proper precautions taken to exclude snakes, lizards, or insects, and there would be great difficulty in concentrating one's mind on the higher life in the presence of these fearfully prevalent lower forms. Talagouga church commences as a strong wooden framework on which is hung the bell, and then to the right of this structure, is another which is a roof supported by bare poles. At its lower end there is a little daïs on which stands a table and a chair, the yellow clay floor slopes
abruptly up hill and the pews consist of round, none too thick, poles, neatly mounted on stumps, some ten inches from the ground. I should have thought those pews were quite perfection for an African congregation; but they tell me I am wrong and that even Elders go off sound asleep on them, quite comfortably, I suppose like bats; I don't mean upside down, you understand, but merely by an allied form of muscular action, the legs clinching on to the pole-pew during sleep. Beyond the church, the hillside is cut by a ravine, and out of the dense
forest that grows in it runs a beautiful, clear stream. It has been dammed back above, for it is harnessed to M. Gacon's saw-mill. The building of this dam, the erection of the two big water-wheels, the saw, and the shed that covers it, indeed
all the work connected with the affair, has been done by M. Gacon with his own hands, and not only has he dammed back the water, and put up his saw-mill, but he still works hard at it daily, cutting hundreds of fine red-wood planks for the service of the mission, shipping them by the Éclaireur,
in flighty little canoes in this risky bit of river, and keeping a big store of them under his house—a bamboo structure, once Talagouga church—and all this with no other assistance but unskilled native labour. What this means you might understand a little if I were to write details from June to January, and then you were to come out here and take a turn at some such job yourself, to finish off your education. Across the other side of the ravine and high up, is perched the house which Dr. Nassau built, when he first established mission work on the Upper Ogowé. The house is now in ruins; but in front of it, as an illustration of the transitory nature
of European life in West Africa, is the grave of Mrs. Nassau, among the great white blocks of quartz rock, its plain stone looking the one firm, permanent, human-made-thing about the place; below it, down the hill, are some houses inhabited by the
native employés on the station: and passing these, still going down towards the river, you come to a wooden bridge spanning the mill-stream, and crossing this, you find yourself back on the path which goes in front of M. Gacon's house; passing this you come to the house inhabited by the girls in the mission school, presided over by the comely Imgrimina, wife
of Isaac, the Jack-Wash, and a few steps more bring you to the foot of the Forgets' verandah staircase. The path runs on a little beyond this to the cast, on a slightly broader, level bit of ground, behind which rises the hillside, and it ends abruptly at another ravine with another, but smaller, stream;
beyond this the hills come down right into the river, and on the small, flat piece of ground there are a few more native houses, belonging to the Bible-readers, and so on; up on the hillside above them hangs a garden, apparently kept in position
by quantities of stout wooden pegs driven into the ground; these really are to keep the artificially levelled beds of mould, and the things in them, from being washed down into the river by the torrential wet season's rains. All sorts of things are supposed by the gardener to grow in those beds, but Mme. Forget declares there is nothing but a sort of salad. It is a very nice salad; I believe it to be dandelion, and there is plenty of it, and Mme. Forget might be more resigned about it; on the other hand, I agree with her, and quite fail to see why the gardener's salary should be continually raised, as he desires nor exactly what bearing his abdominal afflictions have on the non-productiveness of the tomato plants, nor why, again, he should be paid more because of them, for curious abdominal
symptoms are very common among the whole of the West
African tribes. My own opinion about that garden is that there are too many plantains in it, and too much shade. The whole station is surrounded by dense, dark-coloured, and forbidding-looking forest; in front of it runs the dark rapid river, profoundly deep, but not more than 400 yards wide here; on the opposite side of it there is another hillside similarly forested, and unbroken by clearing, save in one little spot higher up than the mission, where there is a little native town and a small sub-factory of Hatton and Cookson's.
Talagouga is grand, but its scenery is undoubtedly grim, and its name, signifying the gateway of misery, seems applicable.[1] It must be a melancholy place to live in, the very air lies heavy and silent. I never saw the trees stirred by a breeze the whole time I was there, even the broad plantain leaves seemed to stand sleeping day out and day in, motionless. This is because the mountains shelter it back and front; and on either side, promontories, running out from both banks, make a narrow winding gorge for the river channel. The only sign of motion you get is in the Ogowé; if you look at it you see, in spite of its dark quiet face, that it is sweeping past at a terrific pace. One great gray rock sticks up through it just below the mission beach, and from that lies ever a silver streak from the hindrance it gives the current. Every now and again you will notice a canoe full of wild, naked, or nearly naked savages, silent because they are Fans, and don't sing like Igalwas or M'pongwe when in canoes. They are either paddling very hard and creeping very slowly upwards, against one of the banks, or just keeping her head straight and going rapidly down. Now and again you will hear the laboured beat of the engines of either the Mové or Éclaireur, before you see the vessel and hear the warning shriek of their whistles; and you can watch her as she comes up fighting her way to Njole, or see her as she comes down, slipping past like a dream in a few seconds, and that is all. My first afternoon sufficed to allow of my seeing the station. M. Jacot reports it to have thirty-two buildings on it, but he is a slave to truth, and counts all the cook-houses, &c. Houses deserving of the name there are but three—the Gacons', the girls' and the Forgets'.
Mme. Forget took no end of care of me, and I look at my clean, tidy, comfortable room with terror, until I find a built out bath-room wherein I shall be able to make awful messes with fish, &c., without disgracing myself and country; and joy inexpressible! "no mosquitoes," yet still curtain. I told you before I had heard they ended at O Soamokita, but when I see people putting up mosquito-curtains over their beds I always have doubts; besides, along here you always find people deny having mosquitoes, if they can, without committing violent perjury; if they cannot deny it, as was the case with Mr. Cockshut at Lembarene, they try and turn the conversation or say other places are worse. Owing to this blissful absence of irritation I slept profoundly my first night at Talagouga, but roused by awful sounds in the morning—time, 5.30—sit straight up in bed "one time." Never noticed mission had donkey yesterday, but they have, and it's off in an epileptic fit. As the sound amplifies and continues a flash of reason succeeds this first impression. It's morning service in the church, and the natives are just singing hymns. In after days the sound always produces the same physical shock, but the mental one dies out crushed under the weight of knowledge of the sound's origin.
I spent my second day talking to Mme. Forget, whose English is perfectly good, although she tells me she resisted education most strenuously in this direction from patriotic motives. I must say I bow down and worship the spirit of patriotic fire in the French, not that I would imply for one moment that I, as an Englishwoman, suffered from it in Congo Français. They always gave me the greatest help in getting about their territory and every kindness of course there was no reason why they should not do so, for they have no reason to be anything but proud of the great things they have done here and the admirable way this noble province of theirs is administered. Congo Français is a very different thing to Congo Belge, a part of the world I shall not wander into again until it becomes Congo Français, and that won't be long. I now salve my pride as an Englishwoman with the knowledge that were a Frenchwoman to travel in any of our West Coast settlements, she would have as warm and helpful a welcome as I get here, and I will be femininely spiteful, and say she would do more harm in the English settlements than ever I did in the French. Think of Mme. Jacot, Mme. Forget, or Mme. Gacon going into Calabar, for example, why there wouldn't be a whole heart left in the place in twenty-four hours!
On the second day I spent at Talagouga I also made the acquaintance of Monsieur Pichon, a very stately, homing, Antwerp pigeon; his French feeling was a hopeless barrier to a mutual friendship arising between us. I admire him sincercly. His personal appearance, his grand manner, the regular way in which he orders his life, going down regularly on to one particular stone at the river's brink to make his toilet; attending every meal during the day; and going to roost on one particular door-top, commands admiration and respect. But to me he behaved cruelly. He bullied me out of food at meal times, always winding up with a fight, holding on to my finger with his beak like a vice. I know he regards me as a defeated slave and took as mere due service my many rescues of him from behind a mirror, which hung tilted from the wall and behind which he used constantly to fall, dazzled by the vision of his own beauty as he flew up in front of the glass. There is another low-down pigeon domesticated at Talagouga, but he was a nobody, and Monsieur let him know it, in spite of several rebellions on his part. And there were also two very small, very black kittens which were being carefully, but alas unavailingly nursed, for their mother had abandoned them.
M. Forget did not think I should have much chance of getting fish for specimens, because he said, although the Fans catch plenty, they do not care to sell them, as they are the main article of food in this foodless region, still he would try and persuade them to bring them to me, and so successful were his efforts that that afternoon several Fans turned up with specimens. For these I gave, as usual when opening a trade in a district, fancy prices, a ruse that proved so successful here that I was soon at my wits' end for bottles and spirit—trade gin I might have got, but there is not sufficient alcohol in trade gin to preserve specimens in. Again M. Forget came to the rescue and let me have a bottle of alcohol out of the dispensary.
I got a fearful fright during my second night at Talagouga. I went to bed quite lulled into a sense of security by the mosquitolessness of the previous night. I was aroused between 2 and 3 o'clock A.M. by acute pain from punctured wounds on the chest and the mosquito curtain completely down and smothering me. My first fear was that I had brought a mosquito or so of the Lembarene strain up to Talagouga with me, who had just recovered from the journey and were having their evening meal. I fought my way out of the mosquito-curtain and trod on a cold flabby thing which kindly said "Croak"—introducing itself as a harmless frog, and dispelling fear number two, namely that it was a snake. I then had a sporting hunt for matches in the inky dark—upset half the room before I found them, but when this was done, and I got the candle alight, I found a big black cat sitting smiling on my bed, and conjecturing she was the bereaved mother of those afflicted, deserted, kittens, I got her off, and tied up the mosquito-bar to the ceiling again, and then took her in with me under it to finish my night's rest; for I feared if I left her outside she would cause another tender awakening of memories of those Lembarene mosquitoes. The frog, having got his wind again, flip-flapped about the floor all night, croak, croaking to his outdoor relations about the unprovoked outrage that had been committed on him.
I spent the succeeding days in buying fish from the natives, who brought it in quantities, mostly of two sorts, and of course wanted enormous prices for it; but I confess I rather enjoy the give-and-take fun of bartering against their extortion, and my trading with them introduced us to each other so that when we met in the course of the long climbing walks I used to take beetle-hunting in the bush behind the mission station, we knew about each other, and did not get much shocked or frightened.
That forest round Talagouga was one of the most difficult bits of country to get about in I ever came across, for it was dense and there were no bush paths. No Fan village wants to walk to another Fan village for social civilities, and all their trade goes up and down the river in canoes. No doubt some miles inland there are bush paths, but I never struck one, so they must be pretty far away. Neither did I come across any villages in the forest, they seem all to be on the river bank round here.
The views from the summits of the abruptly shaped hills round Talagouga are exceedingly grand, and give one a good idea of the trend of the Sierra del Cristal range in this district; to the east, the higher portions of the ranges showed, just beyond Njole, a closely set series of strangely shaped summits beautifully purple-blue, running away indefinitely to the N.N.W. and S.E.; and when the day was clear, one could see the mountains of Achangoland away to the S.S.E., from their shape evidently the same formation, but not following the same direction as the range of the Sierra del Cristal. The hills I had personally to deal with were western flanking hills of the Sierra—all masses of hard black rock with veins and blocks of crystalline quartz. Between the interstices of the rocks, was the rich vegetable mould made by hundreds of thousands of years of falling leaves and timber. The undergrowth was very dense and tangled among the great gray-white columns of the high trees; the young shoots of this undergrowth were interesting, not so often rose-coloured as those round Lembarene, but usually in the denser parts a pale creamy-white, or a deep blue. I was fool enough to fancy that a soft, delicate-leaved, white-shoot-bearing plant had, on its own account, a most fragrant scent, but I soon found the scent came from the civet cats, which abound here, and seem to affect this shrub particularly. It is very quaint the intense aversion the Africans have to this scent, and the grimaces and spitting that goes on when they come across it; their aversion is shared by the elephants. I once saw an elephant put his trunk against one of these scented bushes, have it up in a second, and fly off into the forest with an Oh lor! burn-some-brown-paper! pocket-handkerchief-please expression all over him. The natives, knowing this, use civet in hunting elephants, as I will some day describe. The high trees were of various kinds—acacias, red-wood, African oak, a little ebony, and odeaka, and many other kinds I know not even the native names of to this day. One which I know well by sight gives, when cut, a vividly yellow wood of great beauty. Now and again on exposed parts of the hillside, one comes across great falls of timber which have been thrown down by tornadoes either flat on to the ground—in which case under and among them are snakes and scorpions, and getting over them is slippery work; or thrown sideways and hanging against their fellows, all covered with gorgeous drapery of climbing, flowering plants—in which case they present to the human atom a wall made up of strong tendrils and climbing grasses, through which the said atom has to cut its way with a matchette and push into the crack so made, getting, the while covered with red driver-ants, and such like, and having sensational meetings with blue-green snakes, dirty green snakes with triangular horned heads, black cobras, and boa constrictors. I never came back to the station without having been frightened half out of my wits, and with one or two of my smaller terrifiers in cleft sticks to bottle. When you get into the way, catching a snake in a cleft stick is perfectly simple. Only mind you have the proper kind of stick, split far enough up, and keep your attention on the snake's head, that's his business end, and the tail which is whisking and winding round your wrist does not matter: there was one snake, by the way, of which it was impossible to tell, in the forest, which was his head. The natives swear he has one at each end; so you had better "Lef 'em," even though you know the British Museum would love to have him, for he is very venomous, and one of the few cases of death from snake-bite I have seen, was from this species.
Several times, when further in the forest, I came across a trail of flattened undergrowth, for fifty or sixty yards, with a horrid musky smell that demonstrated it had been the path of a boa constrictor, and nothing more.
It gave me more trouble and terror to get to the top of those Talagouga hillsides than it gave me to go twenty miles in the forests of Old Calabar, and that is saying a good deal, but when you got to the summit there was the glorious view of the rest of the mountains, stretching away, interrupted only by Mount Talagouga to the S.E. by E. and the great, grim, dark forest, under the lowering gray sky common during the dry season on the Equator. No glimpse or hint did one have of the Ogowé up here, so deep down in its ravine does it flow. A person coming to the hill tops close to Talagouga from the N. or N.N.W. and turning back in his track from here might be utterly unconscious that one of the great rivers of the world was flowing, full and strong, within some 800 feet of him. There is a strange sense of secretiveness about all these West African forests; but I never saw it so marked as in these that shroud the Sierra del Cristal. I very rarely met any natives in this part; those that I did were hunters, big, lithe men with all their toilet attention concentrated on their hair. On two occasions I ran some risk from having been stalked in mistake for game by these hunters. "Hoots toots, mon, a verra pretty thing it would hae been for an Englishwoman to hae been shot in mistake for a gorilla by a cannibal Fan of all folks," was a Scotch friend's commentary. I escaped, however, because these men get as close as they can to their prey before firing; and when they found out their mistake they were not such cockney sportsmen as to kill me because I was something queer, and we stood and stared at each other, said a few words in our respective languages, and parted. One thing that struck me very much in these forests was the absence of signs of fetish worship which are so much in evidence in Calabar, where you constantly come across trees worshipped as the residences of spirits, and little huts put up over offerings to bush souls.
Thanks to the kindness of M. Forget, I had an opportunity of visiting Talagouga Island—a grant of which has been made by the French Government to the Mission Évangélique, who, owing to the inconveniences of being hitched precariously on a hillside, intend shortly removing from their present situation, and settling on the island.
Talagouga Island is situated in the middle of the river, about halfway between the present mission beach and Njole. It is a mile long and averages about a quarter of a mile wide; the up-river end of it is a rocky low hill, and it tapers down river from this, ending in a pretty little white sandbank. At the upper end there is a reef of black rocks against which the Ogowé strikes, its brown face turning white with agitation at being interrupted, when it is in such a tearing hurry to get to the South Atlantic. When going up river to it in a canoe, creeping up along by the bank, I had more chance of seeing details than when on the Éclaireur with her amusing distractions. The first object of interest was Talagouga rock; seen at close quarters, it rises a gray, rough, weathered head, much water-worn, some twenty feet above the dry season level of the water. Goodness knows how far it is down to its bed on the river bottom. Up to a few years ago it was regarded as the mark between the regions of Gaboon and Congo Français, but this division is now done away with, and there is no Gaboon, but the whole province is Congo Français. So Talagouga rock gets no official position, and is left to the veneration it is held in, as the dwelling-place of an Ombuiri. On the edge on the top of the bank, adjacent to Talagouga rock, is a small swamp, and by the side of it stands another gigantic monolith which, judging the height of Talagouga rock above water to be twenty feet, must be between fifty and sixty feet high. It does not get any veneration at all; but if that great Stonehenge-like thing were in the Rivers, it would be a great ju-ju, and be covered round its base with bits of white calico, and have bottles of gin set in front of it, and calabashes of hard-boiled eggs and goodness knows what. That rock is thrown away on these Bantu; that comes of being magnificent at the wrong time and place. Opposite to Talagouga rock, on the other bank, is perched on top of a dwarf clay cliff the village of Talagouga (Fan) with Hatton and Cookson's sub-factory in it, presided over by a Sierra Leonian. On the north bank, a little higher up, M. Forget pointed out to me a place in the forest where, a year or two ago, the strange dwarf people had a village; there are none of them there now, as they wander to and fro in the forest, never remaining many months in one spot. They are diffused, in small communities, all over the forest of Congo Français; but their chief haunt seems to be among the Bakele tribe in Achangoland. We crossed the river and then landed, clambering up a steep bank on to the lower end of the island. M. Forget stated that a path ran up to the upper end, which had been cut when the island was surveyed before being registered to the mission. I did not think much of it as a path, nor did M. Forget, I fancy, after ten minutes' experience of it, for it had considerably grown up: and although this island is not quite so densely timbered as the mainland, nor made in such acute angles, still it has these attributes to a considerable extent, as it is a real island of a rocky nature, and not a glorified sandbank that has grabbed its earth and vegetation from shipwrecked pieces of the main bank and dead trees, like those islands round and below Lembarene. However, scratched but safe we got to the upper end; and M. Forget went off to see after the orange, lime, banana, and plantain trees that had been planted on the upper end of the island where the mission houses are to be built. I wandered about seeing things, among others an encampment of Fans who are cutting down the timber to make room for the building, which is not yet commenced; and some wonderful tiny bays in the bank, along the southern side, where the current is less strong, or rather, I suppose, deflected against the mainland bank by the rock reef. These bays are filled in the dry season by banks of white sand in which sparkle fragments of mica, and when you walk on them they give out a musical, soft hum in a strange way. "Unfortunately," M. Forget says, so far no spring water has been found on the island. I say unfortunately in notes of quotation as I do not agree with him that the absence of spring water is a misfortune, but regard it as a blessing in disguise, for, to my way of thinking, the Ogowé water, exposed to the air, with its swift current, is safer stuff to drink than decoc terræ Africano—spring water, I mean.
While we are waiting for the return of the canoe which has gone to the mainland to deposit an Evangelist in a village, M. Forget has a palaver with the Fans, who are very slowly shaving the trees from the top of the hill. They agreed to do this thing for the wood, but it has since occurred to them that they would like to be paid wages as well. They are sweet unsophisticated children of nature, these West African tribes; little thoughts like these are constantly arising in their minds, and on all hands—missionary, governmental and trading—I am told these Fans are exceedingly treacherous and you can never trust them to hold to a bargain. I will say this is not the case with other African tribes I have come across. In the Rivers, for example, when a jam is made, it's made, and they will stick to it all, save the time clause, more honourably than twenty per cent. of white men would. Our canoe returns before "palaver done set"; and we go off home, the blue mists rising among the trees and reflecting in the Ogowé a deeper and more intense blue, adding another element to a wonderfully lovely scene that is well accompanied by the elaborate songs of the canoe crew and the sound of their paddles. We are down again at Talagouga beach in a far shorter time than it took us to come up.
All the balance of the time I was at Talagouga I spent in trying to find means to get up into the rapids above Njole, for my heart got more and more set on them now that I saw the strange forms of the Talagouga fishes, and the differences between them and the fishes at Lembarene. For some time no one whom I could get hold of regarded it as a feasible scheme, but, at last, M. Gacon thought it might be managed; I said I would give a reward of 100 francs to any one who would lend me a canoe and a crew, and would pay the working expenses, food, wages, &c. M. Gacon had a good canoe and could spare me two English-speaking Igalwas, one of whom had been part of the way with MM. Allégret and Teisserès, when they made their journey up to Franceville and then across to Brazzaville and down the Congo two years ago. He also thought we could get six Fans to complete the crew. I was delighted, packed my small portmanteau with a few things, got some trade goods, wound up my watch, ascertained the date of the day of the month, and borrowed three hairpins from Mme. Forget, then down came disappointment. On my return from the bush that evening, Mme. Forget said M. Gacon said "it was impossible," the Fans round Talagouga wouldn't go at any price above Njole, because they were certain they would be killed and eaten by the up-river Fans, Internally consigning the entire tribe to regions where they will get a rise in temperature, even on this climate, I went with Mme. Forget to M. Gacon, and we talked it over; finally, M. Gacon thought he could let me have two more Igalwas from Hatton and Cookson's beach across the river. Sending across there we found this could be done, so I now felt I was in for it, and screwed my courage to the sticking point—no easy matter after all the information I had got into my mind regarding the rapids of the River Ogowé.
- ↑ Mr. R. B. N. Walker, I believe, holds this name is Otal a ma gouga; A gouga hardship, privation.