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.
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