CH AP TER VI
LIBREVILLE AND GLASS
In which the voyager pauses to explain divers things and then gives
some account of the country round Libreville and Glass.
I MUST pause here to explain my reasons for giving extracts
from my diary, being informed on excellent authority that
publishing a diary is a form of literary crime. Such being
the case I have to urge in extenuation of my committing it
that— Firstly, I have not done - it before, for so far I have
given a sketchy rfcumS of many diaries kept by me while
visiting the regions I have attempted to describe. Secondly,
no one expects literature in a book of travel. Thirdly,
there are things to be said in favour of the diary form,
particularly when it is kept in a little known and wild region,
for the reader gets therein notice of things that, although unimportant
in themselves, yet go to make up the conditions of
life under which men and things exist. The worst of it is
these things are not often presented in their due and proper
proportion in diaries. Many pages in my journals that I will
spare you display this crime to perfection. For example:
“ Awful turn up with crocodile about ten— Paraffin good for
over-oiled boots— Evil spirits crawl on ground, hence high
lintel— Odeaka cheese is made thus :— ” Then comes half a
yard on Odeaka cheese making.
When a person is out travelling, intent mainly on geography,
it is necessary, if he publishes his journals, that he should publish
them in sequence. But I am not a geographer. I have
to learn the geography of a region I go into in great detail,
so as to get about; but my means of learning it are not the
scientific ones— Taking observations, Surveying, Fixing
points, &c., &c. These things I know not how to do. I
do not “ take lunars ” ; and I always sympathise with a young
friend of mine, who, on hearing that an official had got dreadfully
ill from taking them, said, “ What do those government
men do it for ? It kills them all off. I don’t hold with knocking
yourself to pieces with a lot of doctor’s stuff.” I certainly
have a dim idea that lunars are not a sort of p ill; but I quite
agree that they were unwholesome things for a man to take
in West Africa. This being my point of view regarding
geography, I have relegated it to a separate chapter and have
dealt similarly with trade and Fetish.
I have omitted all my bush journal. It is a journal of
researches in Fetish and of life in the forest and in native
villages, and I think I have a better chance of making this information
understood by collecting it together ; for the African
forest is not a place you can, within reasonable limits, give an
idea of by chronicling your own experience in it day by day.
As a psychological study the carefully kept journal of a white
man, from the first day he went away from his fellow whites
and lived in the Great Forest Belt of Africa, among natives,
who had not been in touch with white culture, would be an
exceedingly interesting thing, provided it covered a considerable
space- of time ; but to the general reader it would be
hopelessly wearisome, and as for myself, I am not bent on
discoursing on my psychological state, but on. the state of
things in general in West Africa.
On first entering the great grim twilight regions of the
forest you hardly see anything but the vast column-like grey
tree stems in their countless thousands around you, and the
sparsely vegetated ground beneath. But day by day, as you
get trained to your surroundings, you see more and more, and a
whole world grows up gradually out of the gloom before your
eyes. Snakes, beetles, bats and beasts, people the region
that at first seemed lifeless.
It is the same with the better lit regions, where vegetation
is many-formed and luxuriant. As you get used to it, what
seemed at first to be an inextricable tangle ceases to be so. The
separate sorts of plants stand out before your eyes with ever