To The Gold Coast for Gold: A Personal Narrative. Vol. II — John Shaqi
To The Gold Coast for Gold: A Personal Narrative. Vol. IIBurton, Richard Francis, Sir
History
To The Gold Coast for Gold: A Personal Narrative. Vol. II
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Ghana -- Description and travel; Gold mines and mining -- Ghana
According to the last census-returns, Sa Leone contains 18,660
Episcopalians; 17,093 Wesleyans and Methodists of the New Connection;
2,717 Lady Huntingdonians; 388 Baptists, and 369 Catholics. These native
Christians keep the Sundays and Church festivals with peculiar zest, and
delight in discordant hymns and preaching of the most ferocious kind. The
Dissenting chapel combines the Christy minstrel with Messieurs Moody and
Sankey; and the well-peppered palaver-sauce of home cookery reappears in
hotly spiced, bitterly pious sermons and 'experiences;' in shouts of
'Amen!' 'Glory!' and 'Hallelujah!' and in promiscuous orders to 'Hol' de
fort.' Right well do I remember while the rival pilots, Messieurs Elliot
and Johnson, were shamelessly perjuring themselves in the police-court,
[Footnote: _Wanderings in West Africa_, i. pp. 256-58.] the junior
generation on the other side of the building, separated by the thinnest of
party-walls, was refreshing itself with psalms and spiritual songs.
We went to hear the psalmody. Ascending the staircase in the gable
opposite the court-house, we passed down the hall, and saw through the
open door the young idea at its mental drill in the hands of a pedagogue,
apparently one of the [Greek: _anaimosarka_], who, ghastly white and
thatched with Paganini hair, sat at the head of the room, the ruling body
of the unruly rout. Down the long length, whose whitewashed walls were
garnished with inscriptions, legal, moral, and religious, all sublime as
far as size went, were ranged parallel rows of _negrillons_ in the vast
costumal variety of a ragged school. They stood bolt upright, square to
the fore, in the position of ' 'tention,' their naked toes disposed at an
angle of 60º, with fingers close to the seams of their breeches (when not
breekless), heads up and eyes front. Face and body were motionless, as if
cast in ebony: nothing moved but the saucer-like white eyes and the
ivory-lined mouths, from whose ample lips and gape issued a prodigious
volume of sound. Native assistants, in sable skins and yellowish white
chokers, carrying music-scores and armed with canes, sloped through the
avenues, occasionally halting to frown down some delinquent, whose body
was not perfectly motionless, and whose soul was not wholly fixed upon the
development of sacred time and tune. I have no doubt that they sang--
The sun, the moon, and all the stars, &c.
precisely in the same spirit as if they had been intoning--
Peter Hill! poor soul!
Flog 'um wife, oh no! oh no!
and that famous anthropological assertion--
Eve ate de appel,
Gib one to daddy Adam;
And so came mi-se-ry
Up-on dis worl'.
_Chorus (bis)_ Oh sor-row, oh sor-row!
Tri-bu-la-tion
Until sal-va-tion day.
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