There Are Many Things To Be Had Here
And In Lagos Which Tend To Make Life More Tolerable, That You Cannot
Have Elsewhere Until You Are South Of The Congo.
Horses, for
example, do fairly well at Accra, though some twelve miles or so
behind the town there is
A belt of tsetse fly, specimens of which I
have procured and had identified at the British Museum, and it is
certain death to a horse, I am told, to take it to Aburi.
The food-supply, although bad and dear, is superior to that you get
down south. Goats and sheep are fairly plentiful. In addition to
fresh meat and tinned you are able to get a quantity of good sea
fish, for the great West African Bank, which fringes the coast in
the Bight of Benin, abounds in fish, although the native cook very
rarely knows how to cook them. Then, too, you can get more fruit
and vegetables on the Gold Coast than at most places lower down:
the plantain, {28} not least among them and very good when allowed
to become ripe, and then cut into longitudinal strips, and properly
fried; the banana, which surpasses it when served in the same
manner, or beaten up and mixed with rice, butter, and eggs, and
baked. Eggs, by the way, according to the great mass of native
testimony, are laid in this country in a state that makes them more
fit for electioneering than culinary purposes, and I shall never
forget one tribe I was once among, who, whenever I sat down on one
of their benches, used to smash eggs round me for ju-ju. They meant
well. But I will nobly resist the temptation to tell egg stories
and industriously catalogue the sour-sop, guava, grenadilla,
aubergine or garden-egg, yam, and sweet potato.
The sweet potato should be boiled, and then buttered and browned in
an oven, or fried. When cooked in either way I am devoted to them,
but in the way I most frequently come across them I abominate them,
for they jeopardise my existence both in this world and the next.
It is this way: you are coming home from a long and dangerous
beetle-hunt in the forest; you have battled with mighty beetles the
size of pie dishes, they have flown at your head, got into your hair
and then nipped you smartly. You have been also considerably stung
and bitten by flies, ants, etc., and are most likely sopping wet
with rain, or with the wading of streams, and you are tired and your
feet go low along the ground, and it is getting, or has got, dark
with that ever-deluding tropical rapidity, and then you for your
sins get into a piece of ground which last year was a native's farm,
and, placing one foot under the tough vine of a surviving sweet
potato, concealed by rank herbage, you plant your other foot on
another portion of the same vine.
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