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
The Sa Leonite has ever distinguished himself by kicking down, as the
phrase is, the ladder which raised him. No man maltreats his wild brother
so much as the so-called 'civilised' negro: he never addresses his
congener except by 'You jackass!' and tells him ten times a day that he
considers such trash like the dirt beneath his feet. Consequently he is
hated and despised withal, being of the same colour as, while assuming
such excessive superiority over, his former equals. No one also is more
hopeless about the civilisation of Africa than the semi-civilised African
returning to the 'home of his fathers.' He feels how hard has been his
struggle to emerge from savagery; he acknowledges, in his own case, a
selection of species; and he foresees no end to the centuries before there
can be a nation equal even to himself. Yet in England and in books he will
cry up the majesty of African kings,--see, for a specimen, Bishop
Crowther's 'Niger Diary.' He will give his fellow-countrymen, whom he
thoroughly despises, a thousand grand gifts of morals and industry. I have
heard a negro assert, with the unblushing effrontery which animates the
Exeter Hall speechifier, that at some African den of thieves men leave
their money with impunity in the storehouse or on the highway. I read the
assertion of a mulatto, who well knew the contrary, 'A white man who
supposes himself respected in Africa, because he is white, is grievously
mistaken.' The 'aristocracy of colour' is a notable and salient fact in
Africa, where the chiefs are lighter hued and better grown than their
subjects; and the reason is patent--they marry the handsomest women.
Finally, the Sa Leonite is the horror of Europeans on the West Coast. He
has been formally expelled by his neighbours, the Liberians. At Lagos and
Abeokuta he lost no time in returning to his original fetishism, which the
'recaptive' apparently can never throw off. Moreover, he became an
inveterate slave-dealer, impudently placing himself under native
protection, and renegading the flag that saved the crime-serf from
lifelong servitude. These 'insolent, vagabond loafers' were the only men
who gave me much trouble in the so-called 'Oil rivers,' where one of them
accused a highly respected Scotch missionary of theft. Finally, the Gaboon
merchants long preferred forfeiting the benefits of the mail-steamers to
seeing themselves invaded by a locust tribe, whose loveliest view is,
apparently, that which leads out of Sa Leone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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