02 Grappling With The Situation
Chapter 2 GRAPPLING WITH THE SITUATION November 21, 1882 — December 1883
FIFTY-FOUR days after leaving the pier at Philadelphia our traveler landed nine thousand miles away, at Gaboon, "West Coast, Africa, and opened his eyes on a new world. He had caught glimpses of tropical life on the voyage from Liverpool — off Sierra Leone, Lagos, the Gold Coast, Old Calabar, Fernando Po. Now he saw the indescribably dense jungle at close range: endogenous stemmed trees, gigantic vegetable forms with gayblooming parasites trailing over them, the lantana grown to a bush seven feet high, the oleander become a tree. He was only fifteen miles north of the equator. " Since I came I have not seen a tree, plant, leaf, blade of grass, an insect, a bird, fish, scarcely an animal, that was familiar to me in America, except the dog, cat, and rat." Centipedes and cockroaches hid in his closet, white ants in the backs of his commentaries, the python swung itself from branches overhanging the path of his boat. Back in the forest big game were found — elephant, antelope, wild boar, and the very ancestral seats of all the monkey family, from the gorilla and chimpanzee to " the little kilinga, whose waist you may clasp with thumb and finger; and every one has the same white spot on the end of his nose, and the tail is as long as the body."
He was "agreeably surprised" with Gaboon, the pleasantest place he had yet seen in Africa. It has a fine harbor, one of the few good ones on the whole Gulf of Guinea coast. A modern French town faces it, Libreville, where are the commandant’s house, customhouse, and other accessories of a colonial station. The American mission premises, Baraka, lie back from the beach two miles. In the name survives the memory of a Portuguese slave-barracoon which stood on its site early in the century. The first missionaries having arrived shortly after the foreign slave-trade had received its death-blow, they saw the last company of blacks destined to the slave-ship. Within distance of a block from their mission house they saw the ground, an acre in extent, white with the bones of slaves whose bodies had been thrown to beast and vulture. The eighth day after joining the mission Mr. Good was on his way up-country with one of his brethren. By open sail-boat, and again by canoe, they followed the course of the salty arm which the Atlantic Ocean here throws inland, and which goes by the name of "Gaboon River," and explored its upper waters to where they emerge in a series of rapids from the Sierra Del Crystal range. Most of the towns all the way up to Angom Station were those of the real Fang, cannibals with their teeth filed to a point, and a loaded gun at full cock nearly always in their hands — " on the whole, in the rough, materials for a high manhood." Mr. Good preached at several places through an interpreter, and through the week was taking a thorough measurement of the region as a field for missionary operations. Both on the up journey and returning he was all night in an open boat, drenched with rain, and with a face formidably swollen from sand-fly bites presented himself again at Baraka.
Five days after he was on a flying trip to the Ogowe, where he was at home among the missionaries, "as if I had always known them." He was struck with the rapid current of the river; its volume was " grand "; but he had no compliments for the brown color of its waters. Kangwe Station was well located to command hundreds of small towns by itineration. The Mpongwe-speaking inhabitants were fast being ruined by drink, and the Fang seemed rather inferior to those on the Upper Gaboon. A few weeks later he was away on the coast at Corisco Island, serving as clerk of presbytery, and preaching an installation sermon for the first African pastor in the field.
Having " a glorious day " on their hands, he and a brother delegate rowed over to Banya Island and picked up shells on the beach, wading under a hot sun into the water for the finest shells, just as they might have done at home. This was defiance of African climate. It proved a costly lesson. With his fresh, sound constitution, Mr. Good escaped with a light penalty; but his companion was prostrated with the fever of the country in its most dangerous form. It had been precipitated by standing in the water, although the cause lay far back; for he was an ardent missionary who had been doing the work of two men. Mr. Good helped to nurse his associate, and made a thorough study of African fever at this time. He did not inform his secretary about that day at Banya Island, but he appropriated the warning. Many. a time after, the path of stern duty required of him the same and worse exposure, but he never again took such a risk for amusement. In fact, a fine balance of fearlessness and prudence in enterprise became one of his marked missionary characteristics. His introduction to the most unfriendly element to human life on the West Coast was more personal still. "A subtle poison fills the air," he wrote to his family. " Sometimes for a year or more it does no serious mischief, but gradually it pulls down the strongest men. This does not make life here unpleasant, as you might suppose. One is not unwell, only feels a languor and disinclination to activity. But I have no reason to complain, for I have had only a little fever twice within the first three months.’
Another typical journey was taken to presbytery at Benito, one hundred miles north of Gaboon, and an account of it was sent to one of his brothers:
" Gaboon, April 10, 1883.
"... The trip had to be made by sea in an open boat. I went because somebody must go, and I was the only one able, Brother having been recently ill. My outfit was a boat about thirty feet by six, carrying a sail twelve by eighteen, with six men to pull when the wind was unfavorable. Started March 16th about 10 a.m., and did not reach Corisco Island until midnight. Just when we were passing the rocky point near Elongo a tornado struck us, and as the night was very threatening I was persuaded to try to land. Turning the point too close, we were caught in a rather ugly breaker. Coming up to the landing-place, we found it one mass of angry foam. The boys backed off and said we could not land. What then?’ said I. ’Lie at anchor here all night and take it,’ was the reply. No, not I; if we can’t land, we strike at once across the bay for Cape St. John.’ As they were too timid for this, they again tried the landing. We ran for a bank of sand which lay above the rocks and, when the tide is full, may be safely run into. We were carried ashore with a force that made the future of our boat doubtful. We went over the rocks and into the sand safely; but the boat must be gotten out again at once, or it would be broken. The boys went at this, and I had to get ashore up to the middle in water, in my shirt-sleeves. The boat was pushed out quickly into deep water, and over the roar of the breakers it was impossible to call for my clothes, even if it would have been proper to bring the boat ashore again. I was glad to get a bed with our native pastor. Next morning, everything wet, my food spoiled; and so we started again, in our wet clothes. It was very hot, with only a little wind till 2 p.m., when another tornado came up, and pouring rain till between eight and nine o’clock. Reached Benito about midnight almost starved, for I had retained no food for forty-eight hours. None of us seems able to eat on such a journey; consequently a square meal is acceptable when the chance comes.
" Now you will think such a trip is dangerous. Tornadoes, for instance. Not so; I have been at sea in four or five. The wind is terrific for a time, and sail must be taken down at once; then there is no danger. The worst thing is the rocks all along the coast, and the surf. The boat will not strike if she is in two feet of water, and the man who would drown in that case ought to; but let a boat, even if not running very fast, strike a rock, and you have a wreck. As such a boat costs from two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars, it is not wise to be reckless. On this trip my boat was in danger two or three times, and yet my men knew the coast very well. Once we were running probably at the rate of ten miles per hour when it was very dark, and suddenly, not more than thirty yards ahead, a reef was seen above the surface. A moment more and we might have rested there till morning. The return trip generally takes four or five days, but we covered it in thirty-four hours, the best time ever made on the route, as far as I can learn. But to do it we sailed all night, and made the crew work, one of the hardest things to accomplish with Africans. I stood it splendidly, but was so sunburnt when I got home that people did not know me at first sight."
Thus the battle was joined at once. For twelve years to come Mr. Good should have his full share of the Africa missionary’s lot — of open boats under glaring sun and tropical downpours, of stemming the ocean tide at river mouths and contending with frantic surf; contending also with a far more formidable enemy, one demanding courage equal to any foe on any field — the burning fever and the languor of reaction after fever. Could this enemy be conquered on the "West Coast, the white man’s life would be stripped of half its perils. The new missionary was not to be dazed by the new world into which he was plunged. Like William of Normandy on landing in England, he took hold of Africa " with both hands." In all the places where he went he was assimilating facts, in a level-headed way, on which to form conclusions for action. The Mpongwe people of Gaboon quickly sized him up: " He has come to stay." And the venerable senior missionary saw "a fair prospect of some evangelistic missionary work in this vicinity. He will soon be preaching in the vernacular." The mission, in Annual Meeting (January, 1883), located Mr. Good at Baraka. There the gospel had been preached forty years, against great odds of heathenism on shore and anti-christian trade at the river mouth. In 1845 a missionary found a whole town beastly drunk one day. Six of their men had been sold as slaves to the great Spanish " slave factory" on the south side of Gaboon River, and were paid for with six hogsheads of rum which the people, young and old, were consuming as common property. He saw a line of women, hand in hand, fall like a row of ninepins, stupefied with rum. In 1860 an Old Calabar missionary wrote: " The difficulties of our brethren there [at Gaboon] are like our own. The trade gets all the advantage of their labors among the young men; the demon of polygamy devours the fruit of their labors among the girls." In 1883 the conflict was still on. The problem to be grappled with at Gaboon was complex: Heathenism — not like virgin soil, but like the stubble twice burned over. Trade — not educative, industrious and innocent, but demoralizing, always associated with intoxicants. "Trade is our great enemy," wrote Mr. Good. "Men worth anything to work can get unheard-of wages." He saw the white trader’s net spread for the native woman, and the better educated the heavier the temptation. Liquor — almost universal among white and black. Roman Catholicism, The French priests were manufacturing brandy from the mango. By " treating " parents to rum they swooped scores of children into their schools, baptized them, hung a cross about the neck, and taught them never to listen to a Protestant.
How do you win victories for the gospel in the midst of such forces! "Do not feel so much for our privations and discomforts," Mr. Good wrote to his old pastor; " I have seen little of these; but we do need your sympathy and prayers in these tremendous spiritual difficulties."
There were unaccustomed duties to be grappled. First, mission assigned a training-class of candidates for the ministry. Concerning this he wrote to his secretary in New York: "All seemed to agree that no other person could be spared for it, so I have been appointed. It is a work I am utterly unfit to do, owing to want of experience and my very imperfect knowledge of the language. The difficulties and responsibilities are too great to be thought about. I can scarcely hope you will approve the appointment; yet I do hope, now that it is done, you will do all you can, by your advice and influence, to help me." This class was but temporary.
Care of the church at Baraka was added to that of the class. Its membership had become reduced to about forty, some of them aged, and some lifeless Christians.
Mr. Good was fast getting his bearings; improving the advantage of "Father Walker’s" presence, enjoyed for a few months; studying the people out in their towns on foot or by boat; especially studying the Mpongwe language with all his might. He had found on his arrival a mission force of twenty-three Americans. By one steamer after another, he saw ten missionaries depart for home within a year. At the end of six months he was the only man left at his station. As Baraka was general depot for the mission, the duties of treasurer were now laid upon his shoulders. These involved bookkeeping for the mission, receiving and shipping freight for all the stations, the complex, wearying business of African barter, relations with custom-house and other French officials, and acquaintance with French laws. To be competent for these last, he straightway began evening lessons in the French language. He confides to his mother (to whom the regular monthly letter never failed while she lived) that " the place is a tough one for a mere boy to hold. A great deal of business experience is needed, and I have none." His chief complaint, however, is that he cannot work as he used to at home — "cannot do more than half as much."
One of his public duties, conducting the funeral service of a white trader who had led a scandalous life, is referred to in his notebook: "My task was a difficult and delicate one — to keep from giving offense either to his friends or to my conscience. I took care to avoid the latter." A letter to the Board in May refers, as to a trifle, to the fact that, though a vessel has arrived direct from America, the furniture which was ordered before his own departure has not yet put in an appearance. "Fortunately there will soon be some for sale in the mission from which I can supply myself, so it does not matter much." He is intending marriage, or we should never hear of the furniture at all. The next month an American man-of-war was off Gaboon harbor; and as excessive red tape was essential to legalize a marriage under colonial laws, the wedding-party went out and boarded the Quinnebaug which was anchored in neutral water four miles from shore. There, June 21, under the stars and stripes, Adolphus C. Good was married to Miss Lydia B. Walker, who had been for several years a member of the mission. The incident is on the records of the Naval Department at Washington, D. C. All the circumstances suited Mr. Good, for he was a thorough American. The first Mpongwe sermon came off after only ten months in Africa. Inquiry meetings follow. " We expected two or three persons; ten came." Cases of religious interest in the towns are reported, and, " from visits among the same people, I know they are not overdrawn." In this summer of 1883 began to be operated those decrees of the republic of France, through their commandant in Gaboon, of which intimations had been heard before, and which would eventually cause the transfer of a part of the mission to French hands. All schools in what had become French territory were ordered closed unless they were taught in the French tongue. If the authorities had simply discriminated against the English language, and left to missionaries their instruction in the vernacular, Mr. Good would have been well content. He was inclined to believe that teaching in English at Gaboon had been " a curse." But American missionaries had not prepared themselves to teach French schools; they could not approve of them. They knew that a generation would have to pass away before Africans could be brought to Christ through the medium of a foreign language. Accordingly the schools were closed, but, with justifiable strategy, " we manage to keep with us all the boys of the inquiry class, and all who gave promise of entering the ministry or Bible-reading work. Were we to send them away to be lost — the boys to go into trade, the girls to the bad? " They were retained on the terms of a French law which defined a " school " as constituted of " four or more pupils." Each missionary was permitted to have as many as three Africans at a time attached to his or her premises; and thus a dozen girls and boys were employed in washing, cooking, weeding yards, and were taught the Bible as before, only on mission-house verandas instead of in a school-room. A Jesuit hand was inside the glove of authority. It was not the zeal of Paris, but of the Roman Catholic mission at Gaboon, which had closed the schools. Its force included a bishop, half a dozen priests, and as many nuns. There was one Protestant missionary to face their machinations. He was afraid of only one thing: that, in view of government threats, the Board at home would " decline to send out the reinforcements we ask for."
What were these Africans upon whom missionaries were expending their lives? To what stage had the problem of their elevation been worked out? Mr. Good was fitted to pass an unexaggerated judgment upon Gaboon people. He saw them with somewhat different eyes from what might be the first glance of a refined woman who had never visited the slums of a metropolis, and had passed her happy girlhood amid the proprieties and preponderating Christian influence of an American town. His conclusions were based, not upon the degree of their nakedness, but upon the inward qualities which they disclosed, and their powerful race institutions of polygamy, dowry, and tribal slavery. To his friends of Glade Run Church he wrote:
"If you were to come here and see the degradation, superstition, and wickedness of the people, you would feel, as I cannot help feeling, that the work of Christianizing them is just begun. But when I turn away from this picture, and ask of those who have been longest here how they found this people when the gospel was first brought, they paint a picture so much darker than we see now that I find a great deal to be thankful for. There is a decided advance.
" What sort of beings are they?’ do you ask? Without industry and energy. Do they not work? ’ Are they not great hunters and fishers? ’ Yes, when hungry and driven by the evil of empty stomachs to the lesser evil of work. When rain pours through the rotten roof, or the long-propped-up walls fall around them, then they build. Many of them are strong, athletic men with wonderful powers of endurance; but take away the necessity for work, and they sink into a normal condition of sleepy inactivity. Even courage, a quality which is usually thought to be part of the savage character, must be subtracted from it, at least in this part of Africa. They delight in bloodshed; almost every town of the great Fang race has a deadly feud with neighboring towns, and they are constantly killing and eating each other; but I never heard of a battle here. It is always an ambuscade — a stealing upon an unsuspecting enemy in the bush and murdering him. You could not induce them to stand up face to face in open fight. It is not cruelty and brutality that make a brave man, but culture, refinement, and the inculcation of noble sentiments and principles.
"Theft, dishonesty, lying, are fearfully prevalent; fidelity to promises the exception. How could it be otherwise! No God; only cruel, revengeful spirits, who inhabit the forest and are to be feared. Love is almost unknown here, for love is of God. The family? There is none, in our sense of the word. "Wives are slaves; they are bought by giving dowry, as it is called, but just about the price of a slave is given. A man’s rank is determined by what he owns, and his wealth is accumulated in the form of wives. They are beaten and abused unmercifully. They have only one escape; that is, to run away, back to their tribe, or get some man to take them and pay to their first husband what they cost him. In all Gaboon and vicinity there are not more than three or four women, outside of our mission, who have lived all their life with the same husband. These people see nothing immoral in such a course. There is some care for the children, but it mainly proceeds from the same base motives. Is it a son? He honors the parent and strengthens the family, an important consideration in their tribal feuds. Is it a daughter! She will in a few years be worth from fifty to two hundred dollars, enriching her family thereby. Most of the parental affection rests on strictly business principles. If you doubt it, you would be convinced by seeing how the father will sell his daughter to any man who will pay his price, no matter how many wives he may have, nor how wretched she may be with him. What a life! How dark it is! They do not realize the saddest features of their condition. As a people they are noted for freedom from care. They cannot be called unhappy, as a rule, but you will travel a long time among them before you see a genuinely happy face; and when old age comes and strength deserts the arm, leaving the man nothing to be proud of, and the woman useless and therefore neglected, the picture is sad indeed.
" Perhaps you will say, They are not like us; they are a lower order of beings.’ Nay; but what has made us to differ is the gospel with you, and the want of it here. You will find men in America who have practically no religion, and they show as little honor and truthfulness as men here. It is want of religion that has sunk this people. Climatic conditions have determined the direction of the descent. Here nature is too good to her children. Fish always swarm in the rivers, and you can have plantains and cassava every day in the year. A few days’ work provides a bamboo house with thatched roof. A few yards of cloth satisfy their very primitive ideas of propriety. Thank God for long, hard winters for a great part of the globe! But this people are waking up, and this sleeping giant must be constrained by the love of Christ, or he would better be asleep than waking.
" The gospel has made some real men out of this awfully poor material. Of course it is hard, slow work. At home, temptations like a great stream bear thousands away; here they are a mighty flood hurling multitudes on to eternal doom. Africa is opened. Those who have the gospel must determine whether it shall be her destruction or her salvation." In the fourteen years which have passed since this description was penned there have been hundreds more of " real men" developed through knowledge of their heavenly Father; but outside of narrow sections where Christianity has acquired a considerable foothold, this indictment is as true to-day as then, not only in Equatorial Africa, but over all the great Dark Continent.
During his first year our young missionary had grappled with a handful of problems pertaining to African life, and had reached several conclusions to which he held tenaciously through his whole career:
1. That Africans are to be won to Christ through the medium of their own vernacular, not through a foreign tongue.
2. That the gospel is to be given to the people to prepare them for education and civilization, not the reverse.
3. That Gaboon Mission was to grow and from time to time apply to the church at home for reinforcements.