On The Ground In The Middle Stood A
Calabash, Into Which The Ends Of The Pieces Of Rubber Vine Were
Placed, The Other Ends Being Supported By The Bush Rope Ring.
Round
the outside of some of these rings was a slow fire, which just
singes the tops of the
Bits of rubber vine as they project over the
collar or ring, and causes the milky juice to run out of the lower
end into the calabash, giving out as it does so a strong ammoniacal
smell. When the fire was alight there would be a group of rubber
collectors sitting round it watching the cooking operations,
removing those pieces that had run dry and placing others, from a
pile at their side, in position. On either side of the path we
continually passed pieces of rubber vine cut into lengths of some
two feet or so, and on the top one or two leaves plaited together,
or a piece of bush rope tied into a knot, which indicated whose
property the pile was.
The method of collection employed by the Fan is exceedingly
wasteful, because this fool of a vegetable Landolphia florida
(Ovariensis) does not know how to send up suckers from its root, but
insists on starting elaborately from seeds only. I do not, however,
see any reasonable hope of getting them to adopt more economical
methods. The attempt made by the English houses, when the rubber
trade was opened up in 1883 on the Gold Coast, to get the more
tractable natives there to collect by incisions only, has failed;
for in the early days a man could get a load of rubber almost at his
own door on the Gold Coast, and now he has to go fifteen days'
journey inland for it. When a Fan town has exhausted the rubber in
its vicinity, it migrates, bag and baggage, to a new part of the
forest. The young unmarried men are the usual rubber hunters.
Parties of them go out into the forest, wandering about in it and
camping under shelters of boughs by night, for a month and more at a
time, during the dry seasons, until they have got a sufficient
quantity together; then they return to their town, and it is
manipulated by the women, and finally sold, either to the white
trader, in districts where he is within reach, or to the M'pongwe
trader who travels round buying it and the collected ivory and
ebony, like a Norfolk higgler. In districts like these I was in,
remote from the M'pongwe trader, the Fans carry the rubber to the
town nearest to them that is in contact with the black trader, and
sell it to the inhabitants, who in their turn resell it to their
next town, until it reaches him. This passing down of the rubber
and ivory gives rise between the various towns to a series of
commercial complications which rank with woman palaver for the
production of rows; it being the sweet habit of these Fans to
require a life for a life, and to regard one life as good as
another.
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