But of course the slave trade was not simply a matter of Mpongwe character. The Mpongwe needed trading partners, and they were a part of a great and complex transatlantic economic system. Leighton noted that the Mpongwe participation in the trade “should not occasion surprise so long as white men are concerned in it and place before them the strongest inducements to take part also.” Ironically, the Mpongwe’s increased participation in the transatlantic trade flowed in part from the good intentions of anti-slavery forces in Europe and the United States. After the British and Americans had outlawed the international slave trade in 1807, the British navy had begun vigorous and often successful patrols to capture slavers in areas north of the equator. Much of the trade had then moved south, and the estuary had gained in importance for slavers. Planters in Brazil and Cuba still had an insatiable appetite for imported slaves—the total number imported into Brazil alone during the long history of the trade exceeded by ten times the total number ever imported into the United States—and the sailing time from the estuary to Brazil was relatively short. This meant that most of the slavers were Portuguese or Spanish, although, to the missionaries’ continuing mortification, they knew that many of the slave ships had been built in New England or Baltimore for the trade.39
Although most of the slave trade was conducted across the estuary on its southern shore, slavers came regularly to Glass’s Town. The old king himself did not hesitate to sell slaves and was particularly glad to receive rum in exchange.40
The slavers occasionally came to Baraka to have a visit with the Americans as well. During their first year in the estuary, the missionaries were, wrote William Walker in his diary, “honored with a call” by one of the Spanish slavers. “He looked,” noted Walker, “just as I should suppose a man would who is engaged in such an infernal business”—he was thin, disheveled, and afflicted with some skin disease. The missionaries remonstrated and warned him about the wrath to come—the consequences of such an “infernal business”—but such lectures made little impression on him or on other slavers. They were glad to have a meal with the missionaries and to enjoy a little “civilized” company, even if it meant having to listen to a lecture by Walker or Leighton—or Griswold, with his intense hatred of slavery. The slavers responded by saying that slave trading was simply a business—and a very profitable one, too—as if this meant all judgments against it could be dismissed. Leighton was later to write vehemently against such claims by some very “civilized” white Christians in Savannah and Charleston.41
Mpongwe treatment of their own slaves seemed to Leighton and the other missionaries to reflect the dual character of the people. On the one hand, compared to working in a Brazilian sugar-cane field or on a Lowcountry rice or cotton plantation, the work of Mpongwe slaves did not appear to the missionaries particularly onerous. The slaves lived some distance from their owners, did not suffer the distinctions of race found in the Americas, and were able, over time, to become more fully integrated into their society than a Gullah slave in the Georgia or South Carolina Lowcountry could ever hope to be in theirs. On the other hand, slavery was still slavery, and among the Mpongwe it had its own cruelties that the missionaries thought penetrated and hardened the hearts of the Mpongwe. They saw signs of this almost from the beginning of their time at Baraka.42
Six months after his arrival in the estuary, Leighton was walking on the beach reviewing Mpongwe vocabulary words, which he had carefully written on notecards. As he walked along flipping the cards and memorizing words, he came to a small crowd of Mpongwe who were laughing. Looking to see what was amusing them, he saw a young child who was sick and emaciated. The child, a slave of a man who came regularly to Baraka to study English, was being dragged off by a boy to the bush to be left to die. Leighton rebuked the people for their cruelty and laughter and had the child carried to Baraka, where it was given medicine and nourishment. William Walker, on seeing the child and hearing the story, thought it a good thing to rebuke the inhumanity of the people. But, he said, “this barbarity to slaves has been induced by the white slave trader. He whips them to death, shoots them, and drags them off to die.” Such, he concluded, “is the brutalizing influence of slavery the world over.” Walker thought the spirit of God alone could soften their hearts and that the decision to bring the dying child to Baraka demonstrated a Christian alternative to what Leighton had seen on the beach.43
What became increasingly clear to the missionaries was what appeared to them to be the tangled relationship between slavery, the food the slaves produced, and the deep beliefs and ritual practices of the Mpongwe. Like the Grebo, the Mpongwe thought that illness and death were the result of someone’s malevolence, and, not surprisingly, the people thought to have the most enmity toward the Mpongwe were their slaves. Mpongwe slaves, like slaves in South Carolina and Georgia, were in a particularly good position to poison their owners. They were the ones who raised the food, and some of them cooked food for their owners. They had access to powerful toxins, secret herbs and poisonous roots that could be quietly mixed into fufu or hanky or slipped into a sauce or soup. The use of such poisons was regarded as a kind of sorcery—the Mpongwe word for a sorcerer was the same as the word for using a poison—and the act of eating was a dangerous, vulnerable moment, a way of opening oneself to malevolent forces. A missionary later wrote that the distinction between a fetish and a poison was vague among the people. “What I call a ‘poison’ is to them only another material form of a fetich power,” he wrote. Both poison and fetishes, he wrote, were thought to be made powerful by the presence of a spirit.44
So slaves came to be regarded as dangerous, and eating was dangerous, and slave owners—not unlike white Georgians and South Carolinians—were constantly suspicious about the intentions and activities of their slaves. For the slaves of the Mpongwe, this fear and suspicion were weapons of the weak, weapons that could be used to restrain abusive owners and make them think twice about angering a slave. Leighton thought that the way a Mpongwe master treated a slave was much modified by a dread of witchcraft. If a slave owner acted cruelly, the slave could retaliate with “all the machinations of witchcraft which that slave may be able to command.” But such weapons carried a fearful price for the slaves, as Leighton and the other missionaries soon learned.45
One day in November 1843, William Walker was returning to Baraka from a nearby village. As he approached the mission station, he saw three slaves dragging a young slave woman through the brush. She had been killed by her owner, and the slaves were being made to dispose of the body. They had a rope around her neck and were pulling her along as her warm blood laved the ground and as rough branches and brambles scratched and tore her body. The men were pulling her toward a little clearing, where they could leave her to decay in an open place. Walker asked why she had been killed and was told she had been accused of bewitching—of poisoning—a Mpongwe child that had died. Walker went to Baraka, got some Mpongwe boys at the school, and returned to bury the young woman in the sandy soil above the estuary.46
The next week, he was walking on the beach not far from Glass’s Town when he “smelt a horrible stench.” He left the beach and entered the bush to investigate. There he saw what he called a “slave wasting fire,” and in it, another slave woman, perhaps about twenty years old, who had been killed, “a human body half consumed, which appeared to have been recently in the full vigor of life.” He asked what had happened and learned that another Mpongwe child had died; the father had killed the slave woman on suspicion of her having poisoned the child. Once again Walker wrote in his journal: “Surely the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.” That evening he preached at Baraka, and the man who had killed the young woman and had her burned was in the congregation. Walker said nothing about what he had seen, as he had not yet learned all the circumstances. But he vowed in his diary: “If my life is spared I intend to speak at large on the subject.”47 He would have ample opportunities during the coming years.
Chapt
er Sixteen
Rainforest Lessons
As Leighton and the other missionaries began to learn more about the Mpongwe and their many scattered villages and towns, they quickly decided that they needed to move beyond Baraka and to establish schools at certain critical points around the estuary and the surrounding rainforest. By the end of 1843, they had another station and five day schools.
Benjamin Griswold and his young wife—the former Mrs. Dr. A. E. Wilson—moved three miles up the estuary near the town of Prince Glass, old King Glass’s nephew. The young couple called the station after the ancient name of the place, Ozyunga, which they were told meant “benevolent friend.” They had a comfortable bamboo house built in Mpongwe style on a hill about three hundred yards from the estuary and were charmed by its location, by the beauty of its surroundings, and by the wide vista that stretched out before them. The house was large enough for a small boarding school for girls, which Mrs. Griswold ran. She had caused a sensation when she first arrived at the estuary—she had come as a young widow from Cape Palmas—since she was the first white woman most Mpongwe had ever seen. Women had crowded around her and had been eager to touch her hair, and she had soon won the affection of many. At Ozyunga, the schoolgirls came to regard her as “Mama Griswold,” and, with her earlier experience at Fish Town, she showed herself to be a good and accomplished teacher. The Griswolds found that the Mpongwe had little concern for the education of girls, but the young missionaries were committed to the task—they hoped not only that the girls would convert to Christianity, but that, as educated young women, they would be suitable matches for the boys who were being educated and converted at other mission schools. In this way Christian couples could be raised up among the Mpongwe to become teachers and preachers for their people.1
In the late afternoons, when her teaching was done, the young bride visited surrounding villages to talk with the women. The talking itself must have been very limited, since at first she did not speak Mpongwe, and most of the women knew, at best, only a little English. But in her own limited fashion, she was doing the work of a pastor and evangelist, work that would have been forbidden her in her US home. She had a kind and gentle disposition and soon began to be trusted to help arbitrate disputes among village women. She therefore began to learn a little more about Mpongwe women with their hospitable ways, and they began to learn a little more about this kind but strange white woman who had come to live in a Mpongwe house on a hill above the estuary.2
WHILE THE GRISWOLDS were establishing the station at Ozyunga, two former students from Fair Hope were setting up day schools nearby. The Grebo George Coe was at Case’s Town about a mile from Baraka. B. B. Wisner, another Grebo, was at Prince Glass’s Town about two miles from Baraka and close to Ozyunga. Both men lived and taught in Mpongwe homes until a school could be built at each location that had a room in the back where they would live. Because they were young and inexperienced, it seemed wise to have them close to the mission stations at Baraka and Ozyunga.
Older and more experienced teachers went to more distant and demanding locations. At King George’s Town, where the Remboué River flowed into the estuary about twenty-five miles from Baraka, the Fanti John Edwards and his Grebo wife established a school. Some ten miles up the river, at the most distant location, the African American teacher Josiah Dorsey had a school at King Duka’s Town. At both of these places the Mpongwe built houses for their schools and their new teachers. Each house had one large room where the children gathered for their lessons and for scripture reading, prayer, and singing, and two rooms in back where the teacher lived. Meanwhile, across the estuary from Glass’s Town, the Grebo Francis Allison set up a temporary school at Tom Larsen’s Town, where he would teach until he could begin the printing and bookbinding he had been trained to do during his time in New York.3
WHILE THE SCHOOLS were being established, Leighton, Walker, and Griswold were hard at work studying the Mpongwe language. They each had a Mpongwe teacher—to be sure, they were teachers who carried less authority than Simleh Ballah or William Davis had among the Grebo, but they were nevertheless men who helped Leighton and his colleagues gather vocabulary and understand the grammar and some of the nuances of the language.
The missionaries were all amazed by the beauty of Mpongwe—a beauty that invited delight in the language and a relatively quick mastery of it. At Cape Palmas, Leighton had studied for four years before he had dared to preach in Grebo. But at Baraka, he started preaching in Mpongwe only nine months after arriving in the estuary. A year later, he wrote Charles Hodge at Princeton of his admiration for the language: “How a language so complicated in construction, so pliant in inflection, so perfect in the classification of its words and at the same time so invariably harmonious could have originated with an uncultivated people is truly inexplicable.” Later still he wrote that the language was soft, pliant, and flexible to an almost unlimited extent. He found the grammatical principles of the language to be systematic, the vocabulary to be large and easily expanded, and the nuances of the language to be subtle and able to express many shades of thought and feeling. And he thought that “perhaps there is no language in the world which is capable of more definiteness and precision of expression.” Through correspondence and through conversations with merchants and missionaries from eastern and southern Africa who stopped briefly in the estuary, Leighton began to sense that Mpongwe was part of a great language family that stretched across the southern part of the continent. The more he learned about the native tongue of his friend Toko and of King Glass and the children who came to Baraka to learn English, the more intensely he began to explore this possibility. 4
WILLIAM WALKER WAS Leighton’s closest colleague, and he was destined to be the longest-serving missionary in Gabon under the American Board. He was, in good Yankee style, a Jack-of-all-trades. He kept a diary—in the early years with almost daily entries—and he recorded in passing how he repaired rigging for a visiting American vessel, helped Toko with the construction of one of his boats, built a boathouse and then a henhouse, constructed a fence at Baraka, and used his blacksmith’s hammer and anvil to repair an iron stove and for innumerable other projects. But he was also a serious language student and a careful recorder of the ways of the Mpongwe—often with ironic observations about the supposed superiority of “civilized” Americans and Europeans. Above all, however, he was a missionary from New England, a man who committed his life to bringing the Christian gospel—a gospel he had first learned in a Vermont valley—to the people of Gabon.5
Tall and lanky, Walker was the most intrepid of all the missionaries. A colleague later called him “utterly fearless,” and it was true that he carried within him a kind of Yankee steel that had been nurtured on a valley farm. He was also utterly blunt—perhaps a part of his fearlessness—for he said and wrote just what he thought without the cushion of good manners. Leighton and Jane—who also said what they thought but in more oblique and diplomatic ways—loved the young Yankee, and he had a deep and abiding affection for them. Perhaps it was because they had been together when his Prudence had died, and because they had stood beside him when she had been buried in the little cemetery at Fair Hope as the wind had come strong off the ocean. Leighton and Jane certainly knew Walker’s continuing melancholy and loneliness, even as he tried to banish them with work and prayer and commitment to a mission vision that he and Prudence had shared.6
Walker shared the cottage at Baraka with Leighton and Jane, and his room there was his home base. But in the early years of the mission he was constantly on the move, often staying for months at a time at some distant village. At first, he began simply going out from Baraka to visit the “bush people,” the Shékiani, in inland villages that were within walking distance of Baraka. The Shékiani language was closely related to Mpongwe, and Walker managed to communicate with them enough to try preaching. But what he communicated apparently seemed extremely odd to the Shékiani, and the results were modest, at best. Walker, however, perseve
red, and during the coming years, even as the number of Shékiani began to shrink dramatically under pressure from the Fang, he continued his interest in and concern for them—especially those who were slaves of the Mpongwe.7
Walker also had special responsibility for visiting and encouraging the teachers who were located some distance from Baraka and Ozyunga. He had already begun visiting the key towns before the schools had been established and had done the primary work of making arrangements for them.8
Walker was glad for these trips to the distant towns—they got him away from Baraka where English was spoken and pushed him to be constantly using his Mpongwe. They also gave him time to be alone, even in the midst of the Mpongwe, and to reflect and to remember and to think about the future. But the trips were demanding and he was sick most of the time, suffering recurrent bouts of fever and all too often dysentery.
And yet, despite the illnesses that plagued him, Walker could not be bound to the relative comfort of Baraka. He continued his rigorous program of visits, particularly to King George’s Town, which was the most important of the interior towns. His habit was to leave Glass’s Town in the morning in a Mpongwe boat outfitted with sails and oarsmen. If wind and tide were favorable, they reached King George’s Town by late in the afternoon—although, all too often, night came on when they were on the water, and even the moon and stars had disappeared by the time they turned up the narrow Abaäga Creek that they needed to follow to get to the town. Then they had to push their way along—the mangroves were so thick and tangled that the oars were of no use except as poles to be shoved into the dark mud of the creek—and overhanging branches made for what Walker called an “Egyptian darkness.” Thick spider webs draped the narrow passage, often entangling those in the bow of the boat, and mosquitoes descended upon them in hungry battalions. When they reached the head of the creek, they scrambled up a slippery bank and walked for several miles through the rainforest along the narrowest of paths—it was barely visible by the light of their torches. But when they finally reached the town on its high hill, King George—Rassondji was his Mpongwe name—always gave them a warm welcome, and the people were affable and kind, as might be expected among the Mpongwe.9
By the Rivers of Water Page 35
