The stone-built, white-washed market buildings of Free Town have a
creditably clean and tidy appearance considering the climate, and
the quantity and variety of things exposed for sale - things one
wants the pen of a Rabelais to catalogue. Here are all manner of
fruits, some which are familiar to you in England; others that soon
become so to you in Africa. You take them as a matter of course if
you are outward bound, but on your call homeward (if you make it)
you will look on them as a blessing and a curiosity. For lower
down, particularly in "the Rivers," these things are rarely to be
had, and never in such perfection as here; and to see again
lettuces, yellow oranges, and tomatoes bigger than marbles is a
sensation and a joy.
One of the chief features of Free Town are the jack crows. Some
writers say they are peculiar to Sierra Leone, others that they are
not, but both unite in calling them Picathartes gymnocephalus. To
the white people who live in daily contact with them they are turkey
buzzards; to the natives, Yubu. Anyhow they are evil-looking fowl,
and no ornament to the roof-ridges they choose to sit on. The
native Christians ought to put a row of spikes along the top of
their cathedral to keep them off; the beauty of that edifice is very
far from great, and it cannot carry off the effect produced by the
row of these noisome birds as they sit along its summit, with their
wings arranged at all manner of different angles in an "all gone"
way. One bird perhaps will have one straight out in front, and the
other casually disposed at right-angles, another both straight out
in front, and others again with both hanging hopelessly down, but
none with them neatly and tidily folded up, as decent birds' wings
should be. They all give the impression of having been extremely
drunk the previous evening, and of having subsequently fallen into
some sticky abomination - into blood for choice. Being the
scavengers of Free Town, however, they are respected by the local
authorities and preserved; and the natives tell me you never see
either a young or a dead one. The latter is a thing you would not
expect, for half of them look as if they could not live through the
afternoon. They also told me that when you got close to them, they
had a "'trong, 'trong 'niff; 'niff too much." I did not try, but I
am quite willing to believe this statement.
The other animals most in evidence in the streets are, first and
foremost, goats and sheep. I have to lump them together, for it is
exceedingly difficult to tell one from the other. All along the
Coast the empirical rule is that sheep carry their tails down, and
goats carry their tails up; fortunately you need not worry much
anyway, for they both "taste rather like the nothing that the world
was made of," as Frau Buchholtz says, and own in addition a fibrous
texture, and a certain twang. Small cinnamon-coloured cattle are to
be got here, but horses there are practically none. Now and again
some one who does not see why a horse should not live here as well
as at Accra or Lagos imports one, but it always shortly dies. Some
say it is because the natives who get their living by hammock-
carrying poison them, others say the tsetse fly finishes them off;
and others, and these I believe are right, say that entozoa are the
cause. Small, lean, lank yellow dogs with very erect ears lead an
awful existence, afflicted by many things, but beyond all others by
the goats, who, rearing their families in the grassy streets, choose
to think the dogs intend attacking them. Last, but not least, there
is the pig - a rich source of practice to the local lawyer.
Cape Coast Castle and then Accra were the next places of general
interest at which we stopped. The former looks well from the
roadstead, and as if it had very recently been white-washed. It is
surrounded by low, heavily-forested hills, which rise almost from
the seashore, and the fine mass of its old castle does not display
its dilapidation at a distance. Moreover, the three stone forts of
Victoria, William, and Macarthy, situated on separate hills
commanding the town, add to the general appearance of permanent
substantialness so different from the usual ramshackledom of West
Coast settlements. Even when you go ashore and have had time to
recover your senses, scattered by the surf experience, you find this
substantialness a true one, not a mere visual delusion produced by
painted wood as the seeming substantialness of Sierra Leone turns
out to be when you get to close quarters with it. It causes one
some mental effort to grasp the fact that Cape Coast has been in
European hands for centuries, but it requires a most unmodern power
of credence to realise this of any other settlement on the whole
western seaboard until you have the pleasure of seeing the beautiful
city of San Paul de Loanda, far away down south, past the Congo.
My experience of Cape Coast on this occasion was one of the hottest,
but one of the pleasantest I have ever been through on the Gold
Coast. The former attribute was due to the climate, the latter to
my kind friends, Mr. Batty, and Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Kemp. I was
taken round the grand stone-built houses with their high stone-
walled yards and sculpture-decorated gateways, built by the
merchants of the last century and of the century before, and through
the great rambling stone castle with its water-tanks cut in the
solid rock beneath it, and its commodious accommodation for slaves
awaiting shipment, now almost as obsolete as the guns it mounts, but
not quite so, for these cool and roomy chambers serve to house the
native constabulary and their extensive families.
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