You May Now, I Fear, Be Falling Into The Other Adjacent Error - From
The Wonder Why Any Black Trader Survives, Namely, Into The Wonder
Why Any Black Trader Gets Killed; With All These Safeguards, And
Wives.
But there is yet another danger, which no quantity of wives,
nor local jealousies avail to guard him through.
This danger arises
from the nomadic habits of the bush tribes, notably the Fan. For
when a village has made up its mind to change its district, either
from having made the district too hot to hold it, with quarrels with
neighbouring villages; or because it has exhausted the trade stuff,
i.e. rubber and ivory in reach of its present situation; or because
some other village has raided it, and taken away all the stuff it
was saving to sell to the black trader; it resolves to give itself a
final treat in the old home, and make a commercial coup at one fell
swoop. Then when the black trader turns up with his boxes of goods,
it kills him, has some for supper, smokes the rest, and takes it and
the goods, and departs to found new homes in another district.
The bush trade I have above sketched is the bush trade with the
Fans. In those districts on the southern banks of the Ogowe the
main features of the trade, and the trader's life are the same, but
the details are more intricate, for the Igalwa trader from
Lembarene, Fernan Vaz, or Njole, deals with another set of trading
tribes, not first hand with the collectors. The Fan villages on the
trade routes may, however, be regarded as trade depots, for to them
filters the trade stuff of the more remote villages, so the
difference is really merely technical, and in all villages alike the
same sort of thing occurs.
The Igalwa or M'pongwe trader arrives with the goods he has received
from the white trader, and there are great rejoicing and much uproar
as his chests and bundles and demijohns are brought up from the
canoe. And presently, after a great deal of talk, the goods are
opened. The chiefs of the village have their pick, and divide this
among the principal men of the village, who pay for it in part with
their store of collected rubber or ivory, and take the rest on
trust, promising to collect enough rubber to pay the balance on the
next visit of the trader. Thereby the trader has a quantity of
debts outstanding in each village, liable to be bad debts, and
herein lies his chief loss. Each chief takes a certain understood
value in goods as a commission for himself - nyeno - giving the
trader, as a consideration for this, an understood bond to assist
him in getting in the trust granted to his village. This nyeno he
utilises in buying trade stuff from villages not on the trade route.
Among the Fans the men who have got the goods stand by with these to
trade for rubber with the general public and bachelors of the
village, in a way I will presently explain. In tribes like Ajumbas,
Adooma, etc., the men having the goods travel off, as traders, among
their various bush tribes, similarly paying their nyeno, and so by
the time the goods reach the final producing men, only a small
portion of them is left, but their price has necessarily risen.
Still it is quite absurd for a casual white traveller, who may have
dropped in on the terminus of a trade route, to cry out regarding
the small value the collector (who is often erroneously described as
the producer) gets for his stuff, compared to the price it fetches
in Europe. For before it even reaches the factory of the Coast
Settlement, that stuff has got to keep a whole series of traders.
It appears at first bad that this should be the case, but the case
it is along the west coast of the continent save in the districts
commanded by the Royal Niger company, who, with courage and
enterprise, have pushed far inland, and got in touch with the great
interior trade routes - a performance which has raised in the breasts
of the Coast trader tribes who have been supplanted, a keen
animosity, which like most animosity in Africa, is not regardful of
truth. The tribes that have had the trade of the Bight of Biafra
passing through their hands have been accustomed, according to the
German Government who are also pressing inland, to make seventy-five
per cent. profit on it, and they resent being deprived of this. A
good deal is to be said in favour of their views; among other things
that the greater part of the seaboard districts of West Africa, I
may say every part from Sierra Leone to Cameroon, is structurally
incapable of being self-supporting under existing conditions. Below
Cameroon, on my beloved South-west coast, which is infinitely richer
than the Bight of Benin, rich producing districts come down to the
sea in most places until you reach the Congo; but here again the
middleman is of great use to the interior tribes, and if they do
have to pay him seventy-five per cent, serve them right. They
should not go making wife palaver, and blood palaver all over the
place to such an extent that the inhabitants of no village, unless
they go en masse, dare take a ten mile walk, save at the risk of
their lives, in any direction, so no palaver live.
We will now enter into the reason that induces the bush man to
collect stuff to sell among the Fans, which is the expensiveness of
the ladies in the tribe. A bush Fan is bound to marry into his
tribe, because over a great part of the territory occupied by them
there is no other tribe handy to marry into; and a Fan residing in
villages in touch with other tribes, has but little chance of
getting a cheaper lady.
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