Toko, a man deeply rooted in the traditions of his people, was part of a world that stretched far beyond the waters and shoreline of the Gabon estuary. English and American merchants knew him well—especially those in Bristol and New York. And Toko knew them—their ways of doing business and the character of the merchandise they sent out to be traded along the African coast. He spoke English with ease and could also conduct business in Spanish, Portuguese, and French. He knew that the American captains who sailed into the estuary were in competition with the English, and that both were in competition with the French, and he had become only too well aware that distant politics influenced trade—especially who could buy slaves and who could not. Perhaps, above all, he was deeply aware of the power of Western culture and how it was beginning to transform life around the estuary. On one occasion, not long after William Walker arrived at the new mission station, Toko found him hard at work on some blacksmithing project and said to Walker that the “white man is a Devil.” Walker told him “that was not a very good name.” “Well,” said Toko, “he is good Devil. He sabba [knows] everything.” Toko saw in the white man’s ability to “know everything” the root of the white man’s power and wealth—power and wealth that were demonstrated every time a great ship came proudly sailing into the estuary from some distant place loaded with exotic goods, and often with large cannons. So the white man with his knowledge, the white man who “sabba everything,” was a devil—he seemed a good devil who had come into the estuary with the tempting fruit of new knowledge that gave power and wealth. What Toko was beginning to realize, perhaps more than any other Mpongwe, was that there were fearsome costs to be paid for taking this fruit and eating this fruit and having this fruit of Western knowledge become a part of a Mpongwe man or woman and of Mpongwe society. But the temptation to take and eat was real, and Toko felt its attraction.17
It was not surprising, therefore, that Toko wanted his children educated by the missionaries so that they, too, might “sabba everything.” Like the Grebo William Davis before him, Toko brought his daughter to the mission school as soon as it was established to live there and to learn the ways of the whites. Leighton had written Jane in the United States saying that he had given the young girl the English name “Jane Bayard,” the name he said “I love so much, and with which she is not a little pleased.” She was, Leighton said, “a beautiful and remarkably sprightly child.” But the name did not stick, and even the missionaries soon came to call her by her Mpongwe name—Wâwâ—and they, along with her father, would learn in a few years just how “sprightly” she was. Toko also sent two sons to the school—Renjogo and Ntâkâ Truman. They were to be deeply immersed in the world and the Western knowledge of Baraka, but always as the children of the Mpongwe and of their father, Toko, who loved the traditions and ways of his people.18
WHEN A TRADE dispute broke out between the Mpongwe of Glass’s Town and the Shékiani (a “bush people” who lived along the tributary rivers of the estuary), Toko was given the task of trying to settle the matter. He invited Leighton to join him. They would travel, he said, in fine style on his Waterwitch, the largest Mpongwe boat in the estuary, and would visit numerous towns in the interior. The missionary readily agreed. He was eager to learn what he could of the area while he and Jane were separated by so many miles.19
The Waterwitch was a wonder to Leighton. Built out of one enormous log, it was fitted with bulwarks, painted, and propelled by neat sails with elaborate rigging. A small, comfortable cabin made of thatch and saplings provided some protection from the tropical sun and from any rain squall that might come suddenly upon those sailing it on open water. Leighton could see that its sleek lines and careful construction revealed a high level of craftsmanship and made it fully capable of sailing on the open ocean. He took his mattress on board—he had the little cabin pretty much to himself—along with provisions for five or six days and medicines he might need. Several Mpongwe went along to serve as the crew, carrying their guns with them. Leighton was anticipating a great adventure, and he was not to be disappointed.20
They left Glass’s Town around ten in the morning with sails set. A good breeze and strong tide turned the Waterwitch into a thing of life that raced over the waters. In the front of the boat the crew relaxed and huddled around a few smoldering embers to smoke their pipes. Later they stretched out to nap in the sun. The helmsman sailed the boat close to the north shore and Leighton saw thick tropical forests, grassy fields, and the wide streets of Mpongwe villages almost buried in plantain trees. He looked and he saw the water reflecting the forest and the sky, and he felt the steady movement of the boat and the breeze that carried them along, and he thought the whole scene one of transcendent beauty.
Late in the afternoon they approached the confluence of two rivers that poured their waters into the estuary. The smaller of the two—the Remboué—flowed from a southeasterly direction. At its mouth, it was about a mile across, and near its western bank stood an important Mpongwe town—Nghaga, or King George’s Town. The people there were much engaged in the slave trade, being well located to buy slaves brought down the river from the interior and to sell them to Spanish or Portuguese traders who made their way up the estuary. King George himself owned hundreds of slaves, who worked his plantations and lived in the slave settlements.21
Toko turned the Waterwitch up the larger river, the Como, which was about two miles across at its mouth. As night began to come on, the men slackened the ropes on the sails, loaded their guns, and placed them so that they could be seen by anyone who might be thinking of attacking the boat. They were entering the “bushmen’s country,” Toko told Leighton, the land of the Bakèlè and Shékiani peoples, and Toko laughed and teased Leighton saying that he wanted the “bushmen” to know that Mpongwe could shoot as well as they. Toko sailed the Waterwitch into a moonlit night as the river waters lapped at the bow of the boat and shadows crept across the river. At about 9 p.m., they approached an island, ran the boat close to its sandy shore, anchored, and got out to stretch and rest for a while before sailing again into the night.
Several hours later, as the first hints of dawn began to touch the eastern sky and shadows began their retreat through morning mists, the Waterwitch reached the village of King Passall—a miserable place on marshy land overrun with mangroves and their tangled roots. They anchored and came ashore. Passall was not there, but Leighton thought the surprised inhabitants looked diseased and wretched, just as one might expect any people to look who lived in such a swampy, miasma-rich location. He didn’t see a single healthy-looking person in the village, and he thought that it was “questionable whether another settlement could be found on this river, or anywhere else in the world, where there was a greater concentration in so small a compass of all sorts of diseases.” The travelers rested, visited with the people, and waited for the Big Man of the village.22
Just before dark, Passall arrived. A short, stocky man, he looked healthier than the other inhabitants of his village, and Leighton thought him to be a good-natured, jolly old man. Toko, however, told the missionary that the year before, a British man-of-war had sent a boat up the Como in pursuit of a slave vessel. The officer on the boat had failed to take the necessary precautions, and three of the sailors had been killed at Passall’s house. The others had been held until ransomed. Passall now invited those on the Waterwitch to stay in the same house—and they did so without fear, apparently because Toko was with them.
For the next several days they remained there while Toko engaged in preliminary negotiations. The dispute that Toko had come to settle had arisen between the Shékiani of a nearby village and the Mpongwe of Glass’s Town. The Mpongwe had failed to pay a debt they owed the Shékiani, and the Shékiani had retaliated by capturing several Mpongwe. They were threatening to sell them into slavery if the debt was not paid.23
After a few days, Toko and his companions went to the town that had the claim against the Mpongwe. The travelers arrived in the evening, and Leighton was impresse
d by the beauty of the place—he saw before him a neat village located above a flowing river and surrounded by enormous trees. Shortly after they entered the village, a full moon rose, spread a luminous light over the scene, and evoked a sense of wonder and mystery. Leighton stood by a fire and watched the negotiations proceed—Toko took a plantain leaf, cut it into strips, and used the strips to demonstrate what had been owed and what had been paid and what was still owed. Leighton was moved by what he saw before him. Here, he wrote in his journal, was “man, that active, restless being,” under the canopy of a tropical forest, by the banks of a flowing river, in the light of a full moon, in the midst of the wonders of God’s creation. Here in this place man, “though unknown to all the world besides,” was “nevertheless urging forward his little interests with the same earnestness and intensity of feeling, which are experienced in the most exalted stations.” Yet, however beautiful the scene, Leighton felt an encompassing melancholy for what he, a missionary from Pine Grove, saw as the circumscribed world of those who stood before him. As he looked at Toko and the others sitting and negotiating before a fire and in the light of the moon, he thought of them as the living representatives “of innumerable generations, who have lived on the same spot, engaged in the same pursuits, and gone down to the grave in the same moral midnight.” For the men and women before him were all “profoundly ignorant of Jesus Christ and the way of salvation!” Still, in the midst of his melancholy, Leighton was hopeful. In his imagination he saw a rapidly approaching time when such scenes would be redeemed. “Is there any extravagance,” he wrote, “in thinking that the voice of strife and discord, the song of the nocturnal dance, and the cry of war, which have resounded along the banks of this river from generation to generation, shall be turned into anthems of the most exalted praise to God and the Lamb?”24
A little after midnight, Toko signaled that they were to leave, although the negotiations were still incomplete. Back on board the Waterwitch, they sailed further up the river until, a little after dawn, they reached the town of King Kobangai. Leighton was once again delighted with what he found—the town was well situated, and the houses were new, commodious, and built with taste and skill. In contrast with the people of Passall’s village, Leighton thought, the people here appeared to be healthy, comfortable, and cheerful. Kobangai himself was impressive—six feet six inches tall, he was a man of great authority in all the towns along the river. He wore European clothes, including a marvelous beaver hat with an enormously broad brim whose edges were bound with gilt braid. The tall hat, sitting like a crown on the head of such a large man, must have made Kobangai appear almost like a giant to many. Because of the respect shown to him up and down the river, he was being asked to help with the unfinished negotiations. He welcomed the travelers with kindness and hospitality to his large house—sixty to seventy feet long and twenty feet wide. He gave Toko a goat and a small tusk, and to Leighton he gave a goat and, in response to the missionary’s curiosity, various articles made by the people. Leighton saw furniture—chairs, tables, settees—which he thought at first were European imports, but they had been made by skilled local craftsmen. Leighton saw as well a number of musical instruments, some of which were exceedingly sweet-toned—especially one brought from far in the interior that had been intricately made and was much like a guitar. But he also saw empty barrels of rum scattered around, and he knew that two worlds were intersecting even here by the banks of the Como.25
Of most interest to Leighton were visitors from the interior who had journeyed many days to reach Kobangai’s Town in order to trade for goods brought up the river from the coast. They were Fang, called Pangwe by Leighton and other missionaries. Leighton saw immediately that they were entirely different from the coastal tribes in their features and general appearance, and he thought them, both men and women, “vastly superior in their personal appearance.” Like the Pah, who lived far in the interior from Cape Palmas, and whom Leighton had sought to find on one of his explorations when at Fair Hope, they appeared uncorrupted and free from the vices that afflicted those in long contact with whites. “Their form,” he later wrote, “is indicative of strength and energy rather than grace or beauty. Their stature is of medium size, but compact and well-proportioned, and their gait is alike manly and independent.” They had, he wrote, soft hair usually plaited into four long braids, two of which they wore in front and two in the back. They smeared their bodies with a red ointment that quickly identified them as Fang, and Leighton noted that they wore “no clothing except a narrow strip of bark cloth between their legs.” Leighton was told that the Mpongwe had known of the Fang for only about twenty years. From what he learned, he thought the Fang were migrating in large numbers toward the coast, and from what he saw of their strength and vigor, he thought that the Shékiani, weakened as they were by the slave trade, would soon be overrun and largely supplanted by them. Leighton did not realize—nor apparently did Toko—that the missionary was anticipating what was to happen not only to the “bushmen,” but also to the Mpongwe.26
WITH THE NEGOTIATIONS dragging on, Toko laughed and dared Leighton—this white man from Pine Grove—if he wished to go with him to a nearby village and “see the devil raised.” Leighton, his curiosity stirred by Toko’s laughter and description, accepted the challenge, and soon he and Toko were walking a narrow path that wound its way into the jungle beneath the high canopy of a tropical forest on a moonlit night. Several Fang quietly accompanied them, carrying iron spears forged and sharpened by blacksmiths in their mountain homeland. After making their way along the path for a while, they heard the sound of drums, and then excited voices, and soon they saw light flickering ahead of them. Emerging from the shadows of the path, they walked into a village square illumined by nighttime fires. Anxious spectators stood around the edges of the light, and in the center, twelve or fifteen haggard old women were engaged in what seemed to Leighton “some conjurations.” In their midst, a young woman, clothed in green leaves, frantically dashed around in the grip of some frenzy. Startled by the sudden appearance of strangers with a ghostly white man, the old women ran with the young woman into a house. But the young woman could not be contained. She broke free, rushed from the house, ran across the square, and disappeared into the darkness of the surrounding forest. The drums continued to beat until suddenly she reemerged, a leafy phantom, carrying in each hand a long green vine. She began running around the square in what Leighton thought was a state of wild, uncontrolled delirium. Toko told Leighton that she had been given a powerful narcotic, the decoction of the bark of a tree, and it appeared she had been given too much. Finally her footsteps slowed, her frenzy eased, and she collapsed on the ground in a stupor.27
Now the time had come for “calling up the devil.” All became quiet—the drumming ceased and many ran into houses, including Toko and the drummers, to peer through the bamboo toward the shadows of the forest. Leighton and the Fang remained at the edge of the circle of light. Leighton described in his journal what he saw. From the darkness there appeared a giant figure—“his infernal majesty,” Leighton called him—a man on stilts, his body completely concealed except for what appeared to be black cloven feet. Wearing over his face an intricately carved but hideous mask, he began moving around the open square in a terrifying manner. Then, out of the shadows and into the light and the silence of the village, rushed another figure—he was, wrote Leighton, “another devil, a dwarf in size,” and he carried a glittering sword. Now in a furious and menacing manner he approached those who had dared to remain in the presence of the giant. But Leighton did not flee; nor did the Fang, who held their ground grasping their spears. The giant and the dwarf moved slowly away, fading back into the shadows of the forest, apparently to prepare for a second appearance. But it was enough for Toko. He came out of the house to which he had fled and indicated that they had seen enough. They all hurried back down the path through the shadows of a moonlit night to Kobangai’s Town.28
Leighton wrote that what they had se
en was precisely what whites “would suppose to be an African’s idea of the devil.” And of course it was that—what Leighton saw, he saw through white eyes that already had embedded in them powerful images, eyes that saw preconceived notions of “an African’s idea of the devil.” But what Leighton saw was also more. He saw with eyes that had been shaped by biblical stories; by images of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost and of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust; by folktales and ghost stories told on the piazza of Pine Grove; and by the enlightened, scientific world that was behind the ships that came sailing proudly into the Gabon estuary. The English word “devil” that Toko had learned and that Leighton used carried with it a world of memory and meaning for Leighton, a different world from the world of a young woman racing around a village square under a nighttime African sky, and different, too, from the world of the figures who emerged from the shadows to dance and threaten. By using the word “devil” to describe what he was seeing, Leighton was ushering into the village square a sinister resident of his own world—Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, the father of all lies, the great master of hell—to dance and to threaten all who dared to look upon him. What Leighton saw that night as he stood beside the Fang was nothing less than an “African devil” as seen and interpreted by a white man from Pine Grove, a “white devil” who was said to “sabba everything.”29
What Leighton didn’t sabba, however, what he didn’t know, was what the “devil raising” meant to the Shékiani gathered around nighttime fires. He knew that Toko had been amused at the prospect of showing the white man such a scene, but once they entered the circle of light in the village, even the wise and sophisticated Toko had been frightened by what he saw. Later, Leighton wrote about initiation rituals for young Mpongwe women and about the Shékiani having a Great Spirit whom they called Mwetyi. This Mwetyi lived in the “bowels of the earth” and came “to the surface of the ground at stated seasons, or when summoned on any special business.” Perhaps it was Mwetyi who had been raised and before whom the people had fled. But if so, Leighton didn’t recognize him or understand what the racing young woman was racing from, or racing toward, or racing for.30
By the Rivers of Water Page 32
