The Anglo-Fanti
Kwesi Onyidzin is a healthy black boy – a Fanti. He is full of life, bubbling over with the energy of little boy-hood: he is fond of playing tricks which his infantile mind prompts him to regard as fun; he is absolutely incapable of sitting -till; he sulks when he is thwarted effectively, cries when he is slapped, and sleeps when he is tired; he likes to imitate everything he sees done; he asks startling and sometimes embarrassing questions; he says quaint things in his own manner; last, but not least, he is always capable of eating and digesting anything that is edible and palatable – in short, he is just an ordinary little boy.
But he is a Fanti, and therein he differs from the black boy of another nationality and from the white boy. He has by this time got used to the pepper in his nkwan: for there was a time when he would not take Nkwan at all is being forced to learn the art of making his portion of fish or meat keep pace with his portion of dokun; for he has been trying to get the grown-ups to accept as fixed his infantile inclination to want more fish or meat than dokun, and to eat up all the fish or meat long before he even touches the dokun. He has had to acquire the taste for sawii, with which to practise cleaning his pretty little teeth in the morning, and very likely he affects, in play, the iduaba with which the elders clean their teeth, especially after meals. Before he could crawl his skin had got adapted to the feel of esaw, with which he is washed; and the beauty of his dimpled skin is due perhaps to the krobow with which his daily toilet, when he was a baby, was completed. He has had to submit to certain peculiar modes of medical treatment, including the edursun, which would probably kill a white baby. He is used to being carried on the back, and he is so comfortable when thus carried that he sometimes falls asleep in that position. And his version of the vernacular – for instance, it takes him some time to pronounce certain soft consonants so as to distinguish them from their corresponding hard consonants – is so quaint that, if your heart is right, you wish, whenever you hear him speak, that you had a little boy of your own.
And he is black. Therefore he can play bareheaded in the sun at all hours with impunity. Further, he is frightened when he sees a white man for the first time, and he is puzzled when he sees him again; and if he is sufficiently bold to allow himself to be fondled or petted by the white man, he is sure to fill his more timorous playmates with a very great solicitude for his safety.
But his development is not all normal. Possibly he is not as strong as he might have been, because his people have become more or less Europeanised through their conversion to Christianity. So he is baptised, having, in the church, signified his protest in the irrepressible and infantile manner when he, decked in strange and flowing white garments, after the European fashion, was transferred from one pair of arms to another and sprinkled over with water. Consequently he knows that such things as European confectionery are delicious, although he has not yet got so far as to prefer the European sweets to the Native sweets and other delicacies which are more easily and more abundantly secured.
But he is not the only boy in the household. Perhaps he has elder or younger brothers, sisters and cousins, who, not confined like European children to a nursery, have the right at all times of wandering all over the house and the compound, unrestricted save where and when they are in the way or may come to some hurt. As regards the other little members of the household (the children of masters and of servants playing together, the difference being in the manner in which they are cared for by their respective parents), he is under no rules as to whom he should or should not play or speak with, except when, after the fashion of children, he falls out with one of them and keeps sulkily aloof from him on pain of submitting to a blow from him if he so much as touches the clothes or cloths of the other. As regards the children outside the compound, however (except where there are some children with some infectious complaint or other), whether he is allowed free intercourse with them or not will depend on whether the occupiers of the other compounds in the neighbourhood are also Christianised, or, at any rate Europeanised, and of sufficient respectability; because where the European mode of life is established wholly or partially, the social distinctions which separate class from class begin to appear. (From these must be distinguished the Native social institutions, which nevertheless do not separate class from class.)
From this you will see that at the outset of the little boy’s career he is made, directly or indirectly, to get into the habit of looking down on his unchristianised or at any rate, uneuropeanised fellow-children; and know yourself that at there is no prejudice so thorough as that which has been instilled into a little child. Herein is a possible basis for a snobbishness of a particularly odious sort, which, if not checked early in its growth or eradicated, later on, by reflection, will ultimately lead our little friend to wish to live in the European manner in Africa and to marry a European wife when he grows up, in these and other ways expressing his inculcated dislike for things African and mania for things European. Again, the little boy grows in a double environment: in his language, in his diet, in his garb, in his play, he includes elements of Europeanism, the degree of admixture depending, of course, on the intensity of the religious fervour that animates his people and on the extent to which they have abjured African ways and adopted European substitute. Besides these external influences, the little boy, with infantile illogicality, argues from the greater sweetness of European confectionery the greater attractiveness of European manufactures, and, above all, the greater consideration shown to those bearing the outward signs of Europeanisation and Christianisation, to the superiority, in every respect, of everything European over everything African. And if you know anything at all about West Africa you will agree that the conditions of white man’s rule in State, church and school do not conduce to the correction of this fallacious and babylike reasoning. But this is only by the way – a note, as it were.
To continue our account of the little Fanti boy’s infant days we will look now at the means employed by his parents and other elders to coerce him to follow what they consider the right path. Here the method is thoroughly African. The little boy is a little boy – to be guided and controlled at every turn of his life. As a matter of fact, even when he is grown up, if he has a parent, uncle or aunt, especially on the mother’s side, alive, he is still in many ways a ‘little boy,’ to be similarly guided and controlled. The little boy proper is not favoured by the sparing of the rod: the rod and the open palm are the instruments of the child’s correction; and not only the parents and other older relatives, but all sane adults who see the little boy violating some old or new established idea, have the right to rebuke him and, if necessary, slap him behind (the Fanti expression, literally translated, is ‘strike (or slap) him on the thighs‘). But there are other and more stringent methods of correction reserved for cases of exceptional naughtiness. Much, of course, depends on the family character, which, in the main, decides the quality of the training of the little boy. In conclusion, this is how our little friend usually spends his day. When he wakes up, or rather is aroused, in the morning, he has to attend family prayers, conducted in the Christian manner. After prayers he follows his younger relatives in greeting their older relatives. Then comes the washing of his face and the practice at chewing and using the sawii. At this stage he has no part to play in the tidying up of the house in the morning: so he thinks of nothing but his breakfast. In the evening either he listens to fairy-tales told by turns by his elder brothers, sisters, or cousins, or he is led by them in outdoor games (especially on moonlight nights), and it is really delightful to hear his voice taking part to the best of its ‘infantile ability either in the songs with which the tales are interspersed or in the verses and other expressions by which the games are conducted, or in the shouts of laughter that, coming from the hearts of happy children, are themselves a source of happiness to weary adults. Kwesi plays till he is tired, or till he is called up to sleep, some time before his elders seek their beds after evening prayers.
Perhaps the first of the joys arising from the civilising of our young friend, Kwesi Onyidzin, is what he calls his brofudzin (European name). That name, as a fact, is European in spirit and sometimes also in substance. In his case the European substance in his brofudzin was bestowed on him at the baptismal rail, or font, as the case may be, where, at the proper moment, that name was first announced to the public: Archibald Edward these being his Christian names. The surname, in his case, has an African basis, but in pronunciation and function it is European: Cudjoe; for his father had been registered at school as Cudjoe (with the accent on the first syllable) because his father’s name had been given as Kwodwo (with the accent on the second syllable), the Fanti praenomen of the boy born on a Monday. In this respect, of course, Kwesi Onyidzin is more fortunate than some of his friends who have surnames that are thoroughly European, such surnames having been substituted for the ‘unpronounceable’ names of the earliest of his ascendants, who had been sent to the schools of the earliest missionaries.
The name Archibald Edward Cudjoe is a source of much pleasure to Kwesi in his small-boy days. When asked his name he says that he is called Kwesi Onyidzin at home, but that his European name is Archibald Edward Cudjoe (with the accent on the first syllable). When he can spell this brofudzin his joy increases; but his greatest jubilee is celebrated when he can write his European name, by filling up every available bit of space on his latest unbroken slate with the adored words Archibald Edward Cudjoe. On the other hand, his playmates have begun to introduce a fly into the ointment of his joy, for, after the fashion of Fanti children, they have evolved a nickname out of his brofudzin with which to tease Kwesi into a state of extreme irascibility and tearfulness. The name Edward suggesting to their mind the Fanti word edua, which means a pea, they have got into the habit of calling Archibald Edward Cudjoe the new name of Archibald Edua Kwodwo; and, according to the law of teasing, the more Kwesi protests the more tenaciously does the hated nickname cling to him.
His other great source of pleasure is his European clothing, but here the pleasure is not unalloyed: he likes to wear clothes cut after European style; but he objects to woollen clothing. In the earlier days of greater helplessness, if he at any time signified his displeasure at being clothed with woollen garments, such signs were otherwise construed; for the crying of children is not an unequivocal mode of expression to all ears. In those days, therefore, he went about, especially on Sundays and other gala days, in the lates thing in baby-wear, not excluding the ruffled hood and knitted socks or boots, or whatever such things are called; and it was generally taken for granted that he liked such clothes, his howls, tears and violent movements with his limbs being regarded as signs of a fractious disposition, and treated accordingly, in the manner hallowed by custom.
However, he has emerged from the stage of inarticulate expression to the stage when he can give utterance to his wishes and dislikes; but civilising is an arduous undertaking, requiring much curbing of natural temper. Consequently, on Sundays and holidays boots or shoes have to be worn. Now, the wearing of boots and shoes, as everyone knows, involves the wearing of stockings; and it happens that Kwesi has a skin that cannot adapt itself to wool in the unmitigated form one comes across in certain types of thick-ribbed black stockings. The result is that on Sundays our friend wishes there were no such things as European clothes. His worst period of torture, perhaps, is when he has to put on a woollen coat, the sleeves of which are unlined; for to the harshness of the unlined sleeves he is exposed by his shirt, which is really a chemise with the merest hint of a sleeve in the shape of two or three inches of shoulder-strap. Then, again, he abhors the knicker-bockers which are gathered in at the end by a strong elastic band, whose uncompromising grip on his legs, just below the knees, leaves its trace for a while after he has divested himself of it. The thick-ribbed stockings also leave their trace on his legs and feet.
Moreover, even when the natural effect of wool on a sensitive skin in the tropics is modified by the device of lining it with cotton or some such stuff, the thickness of it renders it a veritable ordeal to wear it, walk through the 10 o’clock sun to chapel or church, sit still in the crowded edifice for the duration of the service and sermon, and walk back home through the noon-day sun in it. Yet all this must Kwesi do; and he has been told that unless he does this he will be sent to jive with a fisherman and be treated in every respect like the child of a fisherman. Therefore, since he has an idea that although fishermen’s children have fewer trials in the matter of clothing, they have none of the European dainties with which his meals are rounded off, especially on Sundays, he puts up with the discomfort of woollen clothes.
Nevertheless, with the inconsistency of the little boy, he envies the children of non-Fanti African professional men and other great men of his estimation, who go about all the week clad in the things against which his soul rebels. For, on weekdays, he is free indeed in his loose cotton print ‘gown’, in which, barefoot, he plays about all day.
It is not to be supposed that Kwesi does not like clothes: nothing will induce him to wear a cloth in the national manner. He believes only servants and children of servants should wear national costume. You cannot blame him, because he is a child, and a child’s ideas reflect those of his elders. He is fond of clothes especially if they are not too warm. He is glad when he receives clothes which were not made in the town, or even bought at the stores in the town, but 1 ordered direct from Europe. Often has he been rendered obedient by. the threat that, if he disobeys, the clothes ordered for him from Europe will never arrive.
But he is sometimes puzzled and acutely distressed, in body at least, by the results of certain of his actions. For example, if he wanders outside the compound of his home, and, coming upon some naked children playing in the street, he, too, divests himself of his ‘gown’ and joins them, he is punished if detected. He cannot understand why the children of fisherfolk may play unclothed while he must be clothed when he is at play. Similarly, if, after having observed the manner in which some grown-ups in frock-coats sometimes sweep the skirts of their long upper garment behind them, he too slits his ‘gown’ in front, sweeps its skirts behind him and struts about with the air of a frock-coated grown-up, he is soundly thrashed, he fails to see why. All this merely show that Kwesi is an ordinary boy, and sees in clothing nothing other than a mark of importance; so that where he forgets everything but that he is a boy, he behaves exactly like other boys, no matter of what degree. Whence the reflective would conclude that the unsophisticated child is oftentimes a truer judge of the intrinsic worth of things than the average grown-up.
Kwesi Onyidzin, whose European name is Archibald Edward Cudjoe, has at length been told that he is becoming a nuisance at home, and that, since he is now getting out of the baby stage, he must go to school. So far, all he knows about school is briefly summed up in a bit of verse which he has picked up from his elder brothers or cousins; for sometimes, for example, on Sundays, when they are all in their warm clothes and creaking boots waiting for ‘first bell’ for chapel, they stalk about to the rhythm of that bit of verse:
Ko! nwii! skur ye de,
Abei na owo m’!’
Ko! and nwii! are onomatopoeic words representing the contact of the heel of the boot with the ground and its creak respectively: skur is the Fanti adaptation of the English word school. The verse, then, freely translated, is: ‘Tap! creak! School would be altogether delightful if it were not for the caning!’ So, at any rate, Kwesi knows what to expect at school, and has a sinking feeling within him whenever he thinks of it.
The day comes on which our hero must go, for the first time, to school. He wakes up very early that morning and bombards his mother and elder brothers with questions about school. He is so excited that he submits without protest to the toilet preparations, and has little appetite for breakfast. The eventful moment arrives. He is taken to the school, outside which he passes through a number of school-hardened small boys playing happily, and he wonders whether he will ever become as used to school-life as they apparently are. He is very shy indeed when he is presented to the headmaster, and answers his questions in the faintest of voices. In due time he is passed on to the infants department and placed in the charge of the ABC teacher.
The ‘second bell’ rings. All the boys are ranged outside the school at an arm’s-length from one another and marched into the school. The head-teacher of the infant school raps disconcertingly on his table with his cane and there is silence everywhere. Following on the rapping comes the order, ‘Rise!’ Kwesi does not understand it, but he wisely does what he sees the others do in obedience to the order. The boys all stand up and join the teachers in singing from memory a hymn, the tune of which is correct, but the words are mangled beyond all recognition except by the teacher who taught them. After the last verse comes the second order, ‘Close your eyes!’ Kwesi observes that all the others cover up their faces with their hands, and he follows suit, peeping meanwhile in between his fingers to see what is going to happen. Nothing happens but a long and confused droning of some sounds with certain uniform gasps for breath at irregular intervals. The only sound he succeeds in imitating is the last one, ‘Amen?’ Of course, he has heard that same droning before in chapel, and knows that it is some form of prayer of which he can recite the Fanti translation, although as yet he does not understand it all. After ‘Amen!’ everybody takes off his hands from his face. On the third order, ‘Sit down!’ they all sit. School is opened for the day.
Kwesi and other new boys are questioned as to their names. They give European or Europeanised names, which are written down. Then comes the roll-call, during which several boys known to Kwesi only by their Native names respond to strange names by getting up, saying ‘Presen’, sah,’ and sitting down again, all in the twinkling of an eye.
After the opening of school, all the teaching is conducted in Fanti, for the boys understand no other language well enough to be taught in it. Work is soon brisk, boys and girls Haying their lessons, teachers wielding their weapons of correction the corrected crying. The medley of sounds would be distracting to the most collected adult; but the children do not mind it in the least. As a matter of fact, the A C B C class is the merriest and noisiest in the whole school, the next A X class, called ‘S-o so’, being only a little less noisy. Kwesi, who is hence-forward known to those of his schoolmates who are not related to him as Cudjoe, enters into the spirit of the lessons. Soon he is shouting with the loudest of his class-mates: ‘A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, Ame, Ane, 0, ?, Keeayw, Arr, S, T, U, Nfee, Dobbew, X, Y, Nsett.’ And when they come to learn the ‘Lord’s Prayer’, in English, Kwesi repeats with the others, after the teacher, what they think the teacher is saying: ‘Ahfallah, wee-chart, in heaven. Halla- way, be, thah name. Thahcheelankam,’ etc., the rest of the prayer being similarly adapted, after the Fanti boy’s fashion, in accordance with his idea of the sounds, because he does not understand a word of the prayer. The only lesson at which the A B C boy is given scope for the exercise of intelligence is what he calls ‘A-B-C-ntutum’,’ that is, naming the letters of the alphabet out of their proper order, according to which of them the teacher points out with his stick. Anyway, Cudjoe enjoys himself until he merits the application of the cane,, when he slaps or pinches someone who has called him Edua Kwodwo, or when his attention is attracted from his lesson by the sounds issuing from another class. The ‘S-o, so’ class goes on: ‘S-o, so; g-o, go; n-o, no,’ etc., always getting mixed up when it gets to ‘w- e, we,’ which it spells ‘dobwee, we.’ The ‘Part One’ class goes on: ‘C- a-t, cat; m-a-t, mat; r-a-t, rat; cat, mat, rat!’ The ‘Part Two’ class goes on: A fat cat sat on a mat. Is it a cat? It is a rat!’ ‘Part Three’ goes on: ‘Jane has a book. It is a new book,’ etc. Or perhaps it is arithmetic that is being done, and the lower classes are at multiplication tables. ABC sings: ‘Twice one are two; one and one are two! Twice two are four; two and two are four!’ Others are at ‘Four times one are four;’ four times two are eight,’ and so on. The higher classes are working sums or writing to dictation, and so are much quieter, their silence being occasionally broken by a cry of egya, which is what the Fanti boy says when he is suddenly conscious of pain. When the 11 o’clock gun goes, the ABC class give vent to a shrill cheer, and troop out in obedience to an order from their teacher. The other classes go out for their recess, coming back in 10 minutes. to work till noon. The ABC class do not come back till afternoon school begins. Afternoon school, too, is over for the ABC youngsters an hour before it is over for the other classes.
The ABC class do not therefore join either in the ‘grace before meals,’ which ends the morning school, nor in the closing hymn which ends school for the day. although they take full part in the ‘grace after meals’ which opens the afternoon school. After school, Kwesi loiters with some new friends waiting for his elder brothers to go home together with them, or else he goes home with other ABC scholars of his age. But when he loiters, he sometimes goes to the windows of the senior-school and watches with awe the exercises of the older boys, wondering especially at the endurance of the boys in the seventh standard, who are actually taught by the dreaded headmaster himself.
When he gets home he tells his people what happened at school: how he learnt ABC and ‘Ahfallah’; how he enjoyed himself with his playmates; but he carefully leaves out all mention of the whipping he received for slapping the boy who called him Edua Kwodwo; because he has been told that he must not strike others, and he has a more wholesome dread of a thrashing at the hands of his mother than of one at the hands of the teacher, with whose powers in that respect _ he is not yet fully acquainted.
The day passes. Next day the school programme is repeated. In time Kwesi becomes inured to school-life and has so far got used to his surname, Cudjoe, that he is annoyed at the stupidity of servants at home who always ask. ‘Do you mean Master Kwesi?’ whenever a schoolmate asks them whether Cudjoe is in. In fact he is one of the pests of the teacher’s existence. The only thing to which he does not get used is the cane and, since he is full of mischief, he is often in tears. Besides, his nickname is now known to a wider circle than that of his neighbours; and since he tries always to pinch or slap the boy who teases him with his nickname, he receives during the day more visitations of the teacher’s cane than conduces to his peace of mind. So, in the end, he learns to allow his tormentors to worry him during school hours, and goes for them when school is over.
Kwesi Onyidzin is not a stupid boy, but he is fond of play. So, for a long time he has avoided quitting the freedom and hilariousness of the A B C class for the constraint and sedateness of the higher classes. His method is simple: whenever, because he knows the letters of the alphabet by their names, he is promoted to the S-o, so’ class, which breaks off at noon and at four in the afternoon, he goes back to the A B C class, which breaks off an hour earlier. He continues this until the teacher gets tired of his tricks and reports him to the head of the infant department. He is punished; and thereafter he regularly passes through the classes. In time he leaves the infant school, and passes into the greater seriousness of the lower half of the senior school.
In the meantime he has learnt from his elder brothers that a new slate must be smeared with palm-oil. left for a day or two. and washed with soap; this takes off the grey appearance of the new slate and makes writing on it clearer. Further, he knows now that a kind of soft stone to be picked up a short way out of the town is good for smoothing the rough surface of the new slate. From experience he knows that sharpening pencils on the cement of the school steps has a tendency to abrade one’s knuckles, also, if the pencil is passed too quickly to and fro. From his schoolmates he has learnt all sorts of things, some good, some bad, some clear, some confused; for in many classes in the infant, as well as in the senior, school there are great big young men, mostly from the hinterland, who had suddenly decided to attend school. In all the classes, besides, the differences in age between the pupils are remarkable; for some were sent early, others late, to school.
Schoolmates, Kwesi finds, are very different from one another. In the first place there are girls, who always shut their eyes tightly and turn their heads the other way when they stretch their hands to receive the cane. He notices that they have a most objectionable way of looking, at times, at you as if you were a loathsome insect, especially if you are in the habit of teasing them. On the other hand he sometimes wishes he were a girl, so that he might take part in what he deems the easy lesson of sewing, at which the girls are engaged in the afternoons. He sometimes wonders why they are always playing at ampe just before school, during the recess, and after school; but since the boy who is always among the girls is laughed at and called mbesia-ajma4servant of women), he is content to consider girls strange creatures, very different from boys^ and so devotes his spare time to games with his male schoolmates. Of the latter he knows several: there is the boy in Native dress, and the boy in European clothes; the boy who comes to school long before everybody else, and the boy. who is always late; the boy with complete control over his facial muscles, who deliberately does the most amusing things and leaves you to bear the brunt of being caught laughing in class; the boy who stutters, and who startles you, if you happen to be standing next to him during the reading lesson, by beating a spasmodic tattoo with his hand on your back when he is in his worst fit of stuttering; the clever boy who does all his sums correctly and is invariably first in the class; the stupid boy who is often sent back to the lower class, and who has been so long at school that he has been given the title of skuu-busum (school-idol), the boy who is always quarrelling with you; the boy who is always bragging of the European meals he eats at home; the big boy, many varieties, aggressive or meek; the young man who shaves.
When he comes to consider his teachers, Kwesi remembers first of jail the lady-teacher in the infant school, who conducts the sewing class in addition to her ordinary class of boys and girls. He never knows how deceptive is the daintiness of the lady teacher (generally called ‘Missus,’ a contraction of Schoolmistress’ until he comes into the class taught by her. From her class he goes away with the experience that a schoolmistress can wield the cane as well as any male teacher, and may even hurt more, by knocking you on the head with her hand, than a male teacher can, because she may be wearing a thimble. Respecting teachers in general, what Kwesi bears most in mind is that each carries a cane and can apply it, to one’s great discomfort. As to the fact that the teacher sets home-work, he does not worry much: teachers, in his opinion, are a necessary evil. But he has reason to dislike certain teachers. There is, for example, the vindictive teacher, who is sometimes so brutal that, in spite of the fact that your complaining to your parents about your teachers invariably gets you a thrashing from the former, you complain one day; there is, thereupon, a communication with the headmaster, with the result that the teacher receives a reprimand, which makes him better or worse, so that, in the latter case, he is eventually dismissed. Then there is the teacher who sets too much home-work and keeps you in to do what is left over. Most to be dreaded is the cross-eyed teacher; because it is so difficult to tell when he is, or is not, looking; and many a time has one been caught and punished by reason of this doubtfulness. But the best-loved teacher is the teacher who tells the finest stories on rainy afternoons, when work is relaxed by the custom of the school. Of all his taskmasters, Kwesi likes best the teacher who conducts the singing-lessons.
The man who has the most disturbing effect on his nervous system is the headmaster. Generally the classes are noisy; but as soon as the headmaster appears in their midst, all the boys are as quiet and as well-behaved as all prudent boys should be. The headmaster’s manner of applying the cane is the most disconcerting of all the modes of punishment in force at school. Kwesi has often watched him caning a boy, and has no desire to be similarly held over the shoulders of a stalwart boy, or stretched over a table or bench by strong boys, and treated to strokes of the rod. Yet sooner or later he will, he knows, deserve the master’s cane, especially since he is now in the senior school. He likes the headmaster most when he addresses the school just before and after vacation, when he says funny things at which one may laugh without being paned. He feels queer when the master, attended by two strong boys or one stalwart boy, comes round the classes on Monday mornings and asks who was absent from chapel the previous day. If he was absent from chapel he would wish he would suddenly become a bird and fly away before it is his turn to be caned.
The one other person the schoolboy dreads is the inspector. Long before the inspector arrives it has been noised about that he is an implacable man, ‘failing’ boys right and left without consideration of what will happen to them when it is known at home that they have failed. Besides, the inspector is a white man. Consequently, when Kwesi, like every other Fanti boy, puts together the ideas of implacableness and white-manhood, he evolves such a terrifying complex as interferes with the steadiness of his nerves a long time before the examination commences.
However, the day arrives on which the inspector is to examine the school. There is all the excitement of putting on one’s Sunday clothes, in this case without the hateful stockings and boots; of bolting one’s breakfast; of rushing to the sea-shore to wash one’s slate and rinse it with fresh water carefully carried in a bottle; of the arrival at the school. The school-bell sounds altogether unnerving: it fills you with such tremors, especially as ‘second-bell nears its end. Then comes the lining up outside the school, the marching into the classes, and, above all, the deadly silence that falls on the whole school after prayers, a silence broken only by the tread of the boots of the reverend manager and the headmaster, or by the caustic comments of a sarcastic teacher on the fidgeting of certain boys. Suddenly every boy’s eyes turn towards the windows on one side of the school; a white man passes to the entrance to the higher department of the senior school; the first boy of the school shouts ‘Obeisance!’ and everybody gets up with palpitating heart: the inspector is in the school. The ordeal commences: one has to go through it. There is a strong mental tension while it lasts. Next day it is all over. The inspector listens to the singing of the assembled school; he smiles, says unintelligible things to the reverend manager and the headmaster, and departs. Kwesi breathes a sigh of relief, but wonders whether he has failed or passed.
Kwesi does not often play truant. Discipline at home is so strict, and punishment so sure, that he is very seldom indeed tempted to infringe the one and thereby deserve the other. He has sometimes formed one of the parties sent to bring absentee boys back to school. He has enjoyed chasing those truants, and has enthusiastically taken part in the melees that followed their capture; but he has never quite relished watching the fate of the boys thus captured when they are brought back to school, unless, of course, they are boys who delight in teasing him. In his own case, however, such a thing has never happened, simply because he is a regular attendant.
Yet sometimes he feels the inclination to run away from school in the afternoons. He has been forbidden by the powers at home to bathe in the sea and in the salt pond at one end of the town. Often has he longingly watched others less restricted enjoying themselves by riding on the surf or swimming about in the pond. He has often wished he could dive like the other boys, smear his face with mud from the bed of the pond as the others do, and come up to the surface to make faces at his companions. All these are forbidden ‘”‘joys, and therefore the desire for them is strong. Occasionally he partly succumbs to the temptation and with a party of refractory friends he goes to the beach; but he does no more than paddle. At other times he is persuaded to undress and dip himself in the pond; but he hangs back because he knows the water is saltish and he will want some fresh water to wash away the saltness and also a towel to dry himself properly. In the end he gives way to his own desires, made more uncontrollable by the invitation of his swimming playmates. So, one fine day, he decides to bathe in the pond. Wisely he plays about in shallow water, not venturing beyond a depth that brings the water to his waist. When he gets out he is able to beg a little fresh water from someone or other, and he dries himself in the sun, his teeth chattering the while. He takes care that he gets back at the time when he usually goes home from school; and, with the cunning of the small boy, he rubs his legs and feet with dust from the street to give them the normal appearance of the legs and feet of the boy who is washed in the morning. At length he becomes so bold that he ventures towards the rock that is not far away from the bank. When the pond is not full the rock is exposed, and one can easily get to it. When the pond is full the rock is submerged, and only those who can swim or are sure of its whereabouts can reach it in safety. Kwesi sets out for the rock one day when the pond is full, misses it, and finds himself out of his depth. He is rescued by a friend; but he has had such a fright that he does not bathe in the pond again.
At other times he is led astray by a party of uncontrollable schoolmates to join them in snaring the small crabs that live in holes in the sand on the sea-shore; but he is afraid of the big claws of these crabs, and his share in the enterprise is confined to watching. Or perhaps he befriends the boy who possesses an air-gun, and together they set out to shoot robins and sparrows. In neither of these expeditions, however, does he take a really active part. Even if he did, and secured a crab or a bird, he would be afraid to take it home, because he might have to invent an account of how he came by it, and he would be thrashed for playing traunt and lying about it.
On Saturdays he sometimes follows to the beach the older boys of the neighbourhood who are allowed to bathe in the sea from about three in the afternoon. He plays about in the sand with other boys of his age, or rambles with them on the rocks, at low tide, picking up cockles, trying to catch tiny little fishes left by the tide in pools in the rocks, or hunting for the flat crab and other crabs which inhabit the crevices in the rocks. At length he is allowed to bathe in the sea, and is entrusted to the care of the oldest of the boys in his home or neighbourhood. His joy is great. He begins by lying down on the shore just within reach of the waves. Gradually he takes to splashing about in some of the larger pools in the rocks. Eventually he enters the sea itself, but very cautiously, running out to the shore whenever a big wave rolls down. When he comes to learn to ride the surf he soon finds that it is not at all easy. He notices particularly that if he takes a wave at the wrong time, instead of being carried swiftly and smoothly on to the shore he receives a mighty thump on his back when the wave breaks upon him, and is dashed down to the disturbed sand under his feet into a confusion of sea-water and sand, out of which he emerges fuller of sea-water and with more sand in his mouth and ears than when he attempted the ill-timed ride. But invariably the reason why he swallows sea-water in such cases is that the whole experience is so amusing that he starts to laugh while he is being hurried about and about under the sea; perhaps, too, he laughs because he knows the fate of other luckless surf-riders caught at the same time by the same wave.
During the holidays Kwesi spends his mornings making kites to fly in the afternoons; or he divests barrels of hoops to trundle over the uneven roads, thereby rendering himself a nuisance to pedestrians and a terror to straying sheep or goats; or he plays at nte; or he explores the town; or he plays at a modified form of cricket, played with improvised balls and bats; or he makes his own tops and whips them about to the disturbance of some passers-by.
During the akotompo season he joins parties of boys, big and small, which set out to gather the akotompo and other berries that are ripe about that time. Although much has been told the boys about leopards that lurk in bushes where the akotompo is ripest and most tempting, neither he nor any of his companions worries his head about the leopard, since the akotompo is very delicious when it is fully ripe, and the operation of looking for and plucking them is very engrossing. Nobody troubles himself about snakes, either: one simply does not come across them. The only possible deterrents are hornets, bees and ants. The ants are practically everywhere and are not very much dreaded by those who go for the fruits, in spite of them. The hornets and the bees are seldom disturbed by old hands at akotompo gathering. Only occasionally does an unfortunate boy disturb a nest or a hive; and then he becomes a source of amusement to his friends later on. Anyway, after an absence of an hour or two, the boys come trooping back to town with suggestive bundles, wet in places with the juice of some very ripe akotompo that has been crushed.
Again, during the Christmas holidays, Kwesi goes date-gathering with his friends, walking long distances to bring home heavy bunches of the small dates that grow mostly by the sea-shore. But the spikes of the leaves are very sharp, and your hands swell so if one of them pierces your finger. So date-gathering requires a great deal of care. All in good time the bunches are cut. The boys come, home heavily laden with the dates, which they dip in the sea and put away for a few days till they become ripe. Then comes the pleasure of eating them. The dates are delightful: so thinks Kwesi; and every other ordinary boy thinks the same.
Chapel really implies choir-practice. As soon as he has managed to assimilate a fair proportion of English orthographical rules (with their inevitable and innumerable exceptions, of course) Kwesi Onyidzin is drafted into the choir. He feels highly honoured: to be in the choir has been an aspiration of his ever since he began to attend school. Now, he says to himself, the dream is realised; he is actually going to be among the envied boys and girls ranged on the two sides of the huge pipe-organ; perhaps he may be fortunate enough to be selected for the solo in the anthem which usually follows the prayer after the second hymn in the evening service! So Kwesi congratulates himself.
He is bidden to be in the chapel with the other choristers at certain times during each week. He appears, on the first day, long before everybody else, having been too excited when he arrived home from school that afternoon to worry his mother or his grandmother for the usual dole of dokun na ’nam. He looks, with a species of awe, upon the older boys who ‘sing bass,’ and who seem very inaccessible as companions. The other small choristers, as they come up, fraternise with him, and he begins to feel that choristers are just ordinary boys who merely happen to be in the choir: he feels he will be quite at his ease when he has attended choir-practice often enough.
The headmaster of the school, who is also organist, comes. Some of the teachers who are also in the choir, and who generally sing tenor or bass, also come. Soon all the boys are up in the gallery. Roll is called. Practice commences. Occasionally a new hymn-tune is learnt; but all the boys know the treble parts of most hymn-tunes long before they are capable of becoming choristers. Choir-practice mostly consists in the learning of new chants and anthems. Tonic sol-fa is vaguely comprehended by the smaller boys; but since the headmaster always sol-fa’s the notes in the different parts, little boys like Kwesi have only to remember what they hear the master sing. The older boys can sol-fa by themselves; but whenever the little boys, in their moments of respite from choir-practice and other exercises, essay to sol-fa on their own account the effect is very droll, since they give the sounds what names occur to them. For the little chorister in general and the new chorister in particular it is at first very difficult to cram the many words required in places in the chants to be sung to notes that are at first sight too few. Kwesi, for example, often and often drops out a word or a syllable so as to get to the last word for the note in time. Sometimes the master detects this mangling of words, and gets those particular words repeated first slowly, then quickly, till a semblance of correct articulation is secured; but it is a long time before our young friend can sing ‘as it was in the beginning,’ he, together with the other boys of his age, having found it easier to sing ‘as ’twas in t’ brin’!
Behold, then, Kwesi, on Sunday, marching in line with other boys of all ages and sizes, some ‘in cloth’ and others in European clothes, some barefoot, some shod, some with caps in addition to their ‘cloth,’ some without, boys in Eton collars and boys in American collars, boys with ties, and boys without ties, boys perspiring woollen clothing and boys cooler in white drill or khaki, slowly winding up one road, taking a turning to the right and then a turning to the left, marshalled by the teachers ‘in cloth’ and teachers ‘in clothes,’ to the chapel.
The boys separate at the main entrance and get to their respective parts of the chapel. Kwesi now goes with the boys in the choir, and sees the chapel with new eyes because of his new seat. His heart starts beating when the reverend occupant of the pulpit says ‘We shall begin the service by singing hymn number 12.’ He gets up with the other boys in the choir when the organ plays the tune over. Then they sing. Soon follow the chants, and there remain only two more hymns. Kwesi now feels very proud of himself, for is he not singing in the choir and thereby helping to lead the congregation in chants and hymns?
During the sermon Kwesi looks about him. He notices first of all the official perambulation on tiptoe of the well-known functionary known as ‘chapel-keeper.’ Kwesi feels quite glad that he is now outside chapel-keeper’s dreaded jurisdiction over boys, especially small boys. Very few indeed are the small boys who have not made the acquaintance of chapel-keeper’s cane or knuckles. Many is the time when some boyish, engrossing, and rather non-religious prank in chapel has been surprised and checked by the sudden apparition of chapel-keeper and the sudden sensation of pain caused by that efficient official. Next to the chapel-keeper, as a person to be dreaded, is the boy who is told off at school to write down the names of boys who fall asleep during the sermon – a piece of very hard luck, as boys very seldom take any interest in sermons, and can hardly hold out for any length of time against the influence of long-winded and very soporific sermons on matters unintelligible to boys. But the main point for Kwesi is that he is now in the choir, and although he knows that, in addition to his ordinary liability as a schoolboy to be caned how and then, he is now further liable to be punished for non-attendance at choir-practice and for irregular conduct not noticeable when on the part of boys not in the choir, he is very glad indeed that he is no longer amenable to the unpleasant surprises at the command of chapel-keeper.
Our friend is roused from his reflections by the appalling sound of ‘Amen’ uttered in a large chapel by hundreds of voices at the same time, a sound which is peculiarly disconcerting, when it occurs at the end of the sermon, to grown-ups who have been dozing. Boys wake up with a start. There is a general restlessness in the whole chapel. Collectors take out their collecting-boxes, and one can distinguish the sounds of the coins dropped into the boxes – a heavy clack which marks the dropping of a penny, a mild click, which announces the sixpenny-piece, and a dull tinkle which is caused by the three penny-bit. The ‘Singing Band’ now sing their translations of sacred songs of the Sankey and Moody type, led by a powerful singer much beloved by the congregation, young and old alike; but it is difficult to make out the words sung, because the vernacular depends very much on the modulation of the voice, which modulation is unavoidably altered by the tunes of these Sankey and Moody songs. The result is that when Kwesi and other boys of his age try to repeat what words they think they heard the Singing Band sing, they find they are repeating nonsense, until they learn the words of the translation at the Sunday-school.
Sunday-school, known to young and old as ‘Sanday,’ is where one is taught to read the vernacular; and since all the primers and readers are got up by reverend gentlemen, the piece de resistance being the translation of the New Testament, the rule as to the Sabbath is stretched in favour of ‘Sanday.’ Kwesi had to begin at ‘Ah-bay-day.’ which is the A B C class of the Sunday-school, and range through the Fanti spelling-book by very slow stages, till he tackled the translation of the Catechism and the redoubtable translated New Testament itself. The most noticeable thing about ‘Sanday,’ so Kwesi rightly thinks, is the fact that there are so many grown-ups. fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, who come there to learn to read the vernacular, but who apparently never get beyond the ‘Ah-bay-day’ stage, who are always repeating portions of the translated Catechism read out to them, and who delight in the short editions of Scripture-history given to them week after week. The boys and girls prefer ‘Sanday’ to ordinary school because of the less rigid discipline that prevails in the former institution, and further because they really enjoy the translated hymns and sacred songs taught them there.
But, just as every boy is glad when the last ‘Amen’ is said in chapel, because they can then troop out into the freer atmosphere of home, so do all the young people rejoice when the last ‘Amen’ is said at Sunday school, when they may troop out in boisterous groups and walk to the pond at the end of the town, or else call on relations and friends. Kwesi, now of the rank of chorister, comports himself with fitting dignity, and after ‘Sanday’ is over, is very much concerned to be punctual at evening service, whilst most of the other boys and girls of his age who are not choristers are not troubled much as to attendance at evening service in the chapel.
Of national festivals there is only one beside the Christian festivals of Easter and Christmas that Kwesi Qnyidzin is allowed to celebrate. That solitary exception is the Bakatue festival, celebrated at Edna. Of Ahuba he knew nothing at the time of which we write; and even if he had been in districts where the great Fanti festival was celebrated, he would probably have been told that it was heating, because it was part of the national life, and was therefore bad. At any rate, he has often seen fetish priests perform, but has always been told that sort of thing is all nonsense and not worthy of the attention of a young fellow in active process of being Christianised and Anglicised. Again, he has seen the annual observances kept by the companies during the Ahuba period, having taken much interest in the bonfires lit by the Asafu on successive nights; and he has been very much impressed by the many pretty customs that constitute the celebrations held during that period. But these, too he has been taught to regard as mere barbaric display, worthy only to be considered an amusing survival of savage times. Therefore, although Kwesi is now about 12 years old. and he knows at least as much of English history and geography as the average English boy, he knows nothing about the great Ahuba festival, and cannot say in what parts of the country the custom is still maintained.
Bakatue is also a mere spectacle to Kwesi. He could gather no more by way of impression on his first participation in the celebration than that it was a time when many people flocked to Edna when everybody wore his or her best clothing, when the river was gay with pleasure-boats, and its banks decorated by the festive garb of the celebrants. Everything else, all the ancient ceremonies connected with the festival are ‘mere heathenish nonsense’ and so Kwesi. in conformance with nis breeding, takes no notice of such things. If he asks any questions about such things, he gets the most confusing answers, simply because his immediate elders are as ignorant in these matters as he is himself, and for the same reasons as account for our ignorance. Next comes Queen’s birthday, when the fort is decorated with flags and a salute is fired. For Kwesi it means one day’s respite from school and its worries. Perhaps there is a concert to be given in the evening to which he will be taken; perhaps there is going to be some other entertainment at which he will be present. There are minor matters. How old the Queen is and who she is are also more or less unimportant. He has not reached the Hanoverian period in history; and so his information respecting the Queen is legendary and vague. He is told that the white men will celebrate the event with a dinner, and perhaps some enterprising barrister or other will give a ball. These are matters of interest only to grown-ups. For him and his friends the day is a day of freedom from lessons and possible qualifications for the teacher’s punitive attentions. So the day is spent in boyish pursuits till it is time to prepare for the concert or other entertainment.
Of the other Christian celebrations, which Kwesi has from his earliest childhood helped regularly to observe, the least to his liking is the gloomy Good Friday, when everybody has to put on black and the very pulpit is in mourning for the day. Since he has seen the pulpit draped in black on the occasion of the death of some reverend gentleman or other great supporter of the Church, he cannot help feeling, during the long-drawn-out minor hymns and melancholy sermon, that somebody is really dead; but since he sees no one weeping, that idea is soon dispelled. After the midday meal, however, all semblance of sorrow has left the demeanour of the boys of the town. In place of sorrow is now a mock-vindictiveness. Stuffed figures, with masks for faces, prepared before Good Friday, and t meant to represent Judas Iscariot, are carried by parties of highly- elated boys, who get some pious but not very brainy adult to act as judge, and, in each case, condemn the effigy to be burnt for the perpetuated misdeeds of its supposed prototype.
Easter is rather a tame festival to the thinking of our hero. He likes wearing white because he has no white woollen things, in fact he has not worn anything white which is woollen ever since he gave up wearing baby-clothing. And really, so he thinks, chapel looks less sombre when everybody is in white, and the ladies wear silver ornaments. Nothing spectacular occurs: for this reason Kwesi prefers Palm Sunday, when the singing band go through a species of one-handed Swedish drill with tender palm-leaves by way of dumb-bells.
Easter Monday, of course, is a holiday, but since it is part of the Easter holidays Kwesi, as all boys do, thinks it a waste of a good holiday. But if there happens to be a picnic fixed for that day the waste of holiday is forgotten in the excitement begotten by the idea of the nearness of Easter Monday. The picnic is usually organised by the authorities of the Sunday-school, especially after the Sunday- school anniversary, a time of much brave display in processions headed by bands and ending in a tremendous tea-fight. Picnic is far more exciting than either the procession or the tea-fight. The place for the picnic is oftengyme miles away; but a boy thinks not of the journey to and fro. Picnic as Kwesi and his companions know it, is a stupendous affair, involving much buying of legs of ham and bags of rice and boiling of such articles of food, much baking of cakes and bread, much buying of biscuits, much carrying of pots and pans, much walking, much playing, and much feeding. Not only these. At the end of it all. that is, when the return journey is accomplished, there comes a procession, headed by a band, which winds its slow course along the principal streets of the town.
But the of festivals for those situated as Our young friend is Christmas is dreamed of many weeks m advance. There are, first of all, new measurements to be taken for new clothes, new boots, new hats, etc., that are to come from England direct to the homes of the boys. Every boy and girl prefers to have things that thus come direct for Christmas, and the boys who have to be content with clothing bought at the local stores are more or less looked down upon by the others. Then there are the Christmas holidays to look forward to; because the period between the rainy-season holidays and Christmas is not broken by any lengthy vacation such as occurs at Easter to interrupt the course of school-life from the end of the Christmas holidays to the beginning of the rainy-season holidays. The Christmas holidays commence. The first few days are spent in expeditions after bunches of dates. For the remaining days before Christmas Kwesi and his friends are busy with the preparation of transparencies with the usual greetings cut out in them. There is a run on brown paper, some transparent gelatine-like material procurable in many colours, small wooden boxes, and candles. In time Christmas Eve arrives. The town is gay, giddy and unsafe for unhardened youths. Men are merry, and some roam the town in rowdy parties, singing songs and playing guitars, accordions, concertinas, tambourines, etc. Music and revelry and noise are abroad. Few of the boys of Kwesi’s description are allowed to be about the town in the evenings, even in normal times; the transparencies are therefore exhibited only outside their houses, although the rougher boys carry theirs about the town. Fire works are going off everywhere. The boys let off their own limited supply of fireworks, shout and cheer whenever there occurs any grand display in the sky, and are called to bed about their usual time for bed, feeling sorry that they are not grown-ups so as to be allowed to stay up all night if they choose. Christmas Day arrives. New clothes have to be worn for chapel. Then follows a week of merrymaking, of going to see the sports, of calling round on the relations of friends for Christmas boxes, of going every afternoon, in one’s best clothes, to the end of the town for romps. New Year’s Eve. is celebrated exactly as Christmas Eve. On the afternoon of New Year’s Day all the young people assemble by the pond at the end of the town to wish Christmas good-bye with shouts and the throwing about of anything that is handy. Kwesi helps to give Christmas a hearty send-off, shouting with the loudest and throwing with the farthest in reach.
Kwesi Onyidzin’s dreams grow as he grows. He has now long passed the stage when the most outstanding characteristic of the state of being grown up was, to his mind, freedom to eat what one liked when and as much as one chose. In those days his most important day-dreams consisted in fancying himself in the days when he would be grown up and be able to eat as much as he liked in the way of F sweets and other tasty things. In those days. too. when he was 1 thwarted in any project or compelled to do what he did not wish to do. he longed to be grown-up so as to be free from the annoying restrictions imposed by relatives and other adults. Later, when upset at school, he would long for the time when he would be a teacher, so as to wield the cane on those who would then occupy his present position, preferably the children of his present teachers. But now Kwesi’s dreams are seldom expressive of his resentment at parental or other control. Now he feels that manhood consists in doing some sort of work; but his ideal in the matter of work is not fixed. His dreams, therefore, express his longings rather than his resentment: they are positive rather than negative.
At one time. then, we find our young friend longing with all his soul to be a carpenter. His reason is characteristic of his training: Jesus Christ had been a carpenter. Probably he had been impressed by some perfervid address given at the Sunday School on the last Sunday by someone or other in authority, who had perhaps dwelt on the strangeness of the occupation of the Son of Mary, and on the humility thereby displayed. Whatever may be the cause of his present state of conation, our friend Kwesi has become obsessed for the time being with the idea that carpentry is the most desirable calling for a man At every opportunity, therefore, he expresses his intention to become a carpenter when he grows up. But perhaps a week or fortnight afterwards there occurs a grand wedding only Europeanised West Africans can organise Then the very material consideration that carpenters, no matter how honourable and even holy their company, guild, or brotherhood may be, cannot have such grand weddings, bids him ponder and reflect upon his 1 dreams. A wedding of this sort, so he argues, is the high-water mark of Europeanisation; he is being Europeanised as fast as Time will allow; ultimately, therefore, he will have to be a principal in such a concern; as a carpenter he cannot possibly afford to play the part; it cannot, then, be desirable to be a carpenter. And, perhaps that night, he prays to be forgiven for slighting such a sanctified trade: in any case the carpenter dream is over.
Or perhaps he is impressed by one of the Native ministers who tell such inspiring tales of the progress of Christianity in their respective s spheres of action. Perhaps he is aroused from dozing by a sudden and loud objurgation of the decadence of Christian fervour in the young men of these days. Somehow or other, throughout the rest of the missionary meeting, and for some time afterwards, Kwesi has absolutely made up his mind to become a minister of grace. Perhaps this new dream will be upheld by the consideration that he, for example, does not like high collars, and the collars of ministers are nice and low. He dreams of what he will do when he is a minister in shovel-hat and a clerical collar and clothes of a sombre hue and shapeless cut; of the tone of voice in which he will read the service; of the length of the sermons he will preach; and so on, till this dream fades away in its turn. Or again, perhaps a great friend of his father’s is a tailor. This is sufficient to recommend to him the occupation of cutting up cloth and sewing up the pieces into clothes. He then dreams of the clothes he will cut, how tight or loose will be the trousers, how short or long the lapel, what divers makes of cloth he will use, and so on. These are dreams that Kwesi dreams unassisted, that is, as a result of drawing his own boyish conclusions from certain facts he has observed. But there are other dreams which either alternate with or supersede those described above, and which are the result of parental and tutorial exhortations. Kwesi has perhaps been often told, by way of example, that some prominent man in the town started life as a clerk, was humble and honest and so forth, and grew up to become agent of a firm, or later conceived the idea of trading on his own account, thus becoming a magnate of great consequence and affluence, everywhere respected most highly. Or perhaps he has heard his elders discussing the relative merits of professions and mercantile pursuits. Or perhaps he has been made by the schoolmaster to understand that there is a great deal of honour attached to obtaining a post in the Civil Service as a result of passing an examination held under Government auspices. Putting together all he has heard and seen of things a boy cannot very well understand at first hand, he perhaps comes to the conclusion that certain things are worth having, for example, money and respect. Comparing further the different modes of employment suggested as means to securing money and respect, he very naturally comes to the conclusion that the professions provide the shortest path to the two desirables of money and respect; and so. though at first he does not entertain the idea of embracing some profession or other, because he has heard it often said that those who go to England for professions come back depraved in morals, yet. such matters being really beyond a boy’s unassisted comprehension, he in the end decides for some profession or other. On the professions, all he knows is that when a man comes back from qualifying in England for a profession, he always addresses people in English; seldom talks the vernacular; eats very highly seasoned food; seems to drink nothing that is not bottled; is always so smartly dressed that he can go to chapel in his ordinary clothing and yet be more resplendent than those who have dressed specially for chapel; goes about in go-carts; and is treated with the greatest respect by all. As to details he has very little knowledge. He knows that the engineer has something to do with mines; that the doctor cures those who are ailing; that the lawyer wins cases. But of these three professions he will lean towards the first if he has a mechanical bent. There is nothing in the others to appeal to a boy of his age unless he is vain by nature, when the lawyer’s general get-up and deportment will fill him with yearning to be a lawyer. Perhaps he is ill and is sent up to a doctor, who examines him. asks him all sorts of questions, and then mixes up some stuff and gives it to him with instructions to take it so many times, and in such quantities, a day. Perhaps he is impressed with the manner in which the doctor measures drugs and compounds them; perhaps he is impressed by the doctor’s manner of speaking English, or of calling his servant, or of walking. These little characteristics of the man will be elevated into characteristics of his profession by the impressionable boy, and perhaps he will tell his mother or his friends that he will be a doctor when he grows up, and mix up obnoxious compounds for people to take at stated times and in stated quantities. Or perhaps he is sent with a message to a lawyer, and finds the great man in an office full of obsequious clients who talk in whispers among themselves, and in very subdued and respectful tones when they address the lawyer. He is impressed by the books round the room, the papers on the table, the money in groups and in bags, the counting of which his arrival with the message has interrupted. He has from his earliest childhood been taught to say ‘1 am quite well, thank you,’ to professional men. He says it in response to the exclamation and question, ‘Hello, young Onyidzin, how are you?’ And he comes away dreaming dreams of the time when he will put on a smartly-cut suit of clothes, shining boots, the two white strips to his collar, get into a go-cart and be wheeled to Court to win cases, charge hundreds of pounds, and be thus able to keep a cook trained to prepare highly seasoned dishes.
The High School stands very high in the estimation of Kwesi and his companions. In the first place, boys from the High School, especially the older boys, often affect to be incapable of speaking any language other than English: this, to the boys of the Low School, is a characteristic very much to be desired. In the second place, no boys in the national costume are allowed to attend the High School unless they first adopt European clothing, and some of the older boys of that school attend school collared and booted. In the third place, the High School boys have a part of the chapel allotted solely to them, and are very imposing as they troop in their Sunday best into the honoured seats set apart for them. h these operate on Kwesi’s mind to create in him a strong desire to attend the High School He begins to worry his people about High School. He says in the Low School he is in Standard III, and can read even the Standard VI reading-book without making many mistakes. He says he knows much history and geography; at dictation he seldom has any words to write over and over again after correction by the teacher; at arithmetic he can do compound division with ease. He feels quite qualified to brave the legendary terrors of High School lessons.
One fine day, then, Kwesi is sent with a letter to the Headmaster of the Low School respecting his removal from the Low to the High School. In due course he is taken over to the High School by someone commissioned for the purpose, and placed in the charge of the Head of the High School. Kwesi’s previous first-hand impressions of the High School itself have been rather fragmentary, having been gathered during the eleven o’clock recess of the Low School, when parties of daring small boys would go to the great windows behind the High School and watch the awe-inspiring High School boys and their teachers at work. Such visits were always liable to be suddenly terminated by fright at the approach of some white merchant or missionary from the Mission House or a mercantile residence hard by: the sight-seeing parties were thereupon invariably broken up by incontinent flight to the safer premises of their own school. But now Kwesi is actually in the High School as one of the boys of that school henceforth to take part in the repeatedly difficult and advanced lessons given there; henceforth to attend school half-an-hour before the Low School boys begin their attendance, and to go home from school half-an-hour before the Low School boys, himself to inspire awe in the hearts of those who were recently his companions when the old feelings of familiarity and good-humoured contempt had died down^ Suddenly he is recalled from his dreams to reality The Head asks him questions in English, and he is too shy and frightened to do more than mumble ‘Quite well, thank you. sir.’ ‘Edward Cudjoe, sir. in respective reply. Soon he is handed over to the teacher of the lowest class, which, to his mystification, is called Quarter-Year.’ He is put through some tests and is pronounced sound enough to be admitted into ‘Quarter-Year.’ where he remains until sufficiently advanced in his exercises to be promoted to Half-Year.’ thence to ‘First Year.’ thence to ‘Second Year.’ thence to ‘Third Year,’ the Olympus of the school, where the worshipful senior boys are in immediate contact with the revered and semi-divine Headmaster.
After a time Kwesi, henceforth known as Edward Cudjoe, even by his most intimate friends, finds that High School is not at all different from Low School in the matter of punishment He is startled one day by canning of a boy who had been forcibly brought back to school He is quite scandalised by the deficient sense of dignity betrayed by the boy who had brought down such ignominy on himself and on the High School. At all events, he is glad he is not in that boy’s boots, or rather, on his soles, and vows to himself never to merit such treatment. The teachers, he has known all the time, have the same power of caning as those in the Low School; but he notices that only the Headmaster ever turns a boy over to cane him behind. Further, he notices that there is no necessity for caning boys who do not attend chapel, because the boys themselves would not willingly forgo the distinction of marching in the High School file to chapel and occupying the special seats, to which every young eye in the chapel turns when the High School boots begin to clatter, just before second bell ceases.
Slates are unknown in the High School: not even ‘Quarter-Year’ uses them. Soon our friend is able to write to dictation and work sums in exercise-books without making each page untidy with too many smears and blots, but before this degree of proficiency is reached many a reduction has taken place in the number of the pages of his exercise books. He finds it difficult at first to write with the pen between the thumb and the first finger, its tip pointing to the right shoulder; for a long time, therefore, he is often in trouble at calligraphy. High School sense of dignity seems altogether unequal to the task of preventing his tears from being started by the cane. At first he is ashamed of his tears, and keenly feels his disgrace when he is made to stand on the bench in class. Soon, however, all this wears off, and he takes his punishment and his tears as matters of course.
Algebra is rather a weird way of doing lessons, so he thinks. He can at first imagine no possible use for it except as a way of maintaining the High School prestige as to difficulty of lessons. His first stumbling-block is provided by the rules relating to bracket since he is always forgetting to take account of the vinculum. Plus and minus are signs easy enough for him to comprehend at arithmetic, but that sum of a and b is a + b and their difference a – b conveys nothing whatever to his mind. By the time, however, he has grasped the elementary rules of factors, and begun to understand the meanings of the definitions of such algebraic terms as ‘expression,’ ‘coefficient ‘index,’ the learning of which constituted his first step in algebra, he is reconciled to the subject as one of the thorns in the rose of High School life.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, for him. Greek is not compulsory for ‘boys in his class and in two classes above his. Latin, however, he enjoys, because it consists for him mostly in learning declensions and declining Latin words. He finds it easy to work the simple exercises on the cases. He thinks Latin is very easy indeed. Even the conjugations have no terrors for him But he soon begins to think that deponent and semi-deponent verbs are quite a nuisance, especially as regards the infinitive mood, and that irregularity and defectiveness in declensions are nowhere near such abnormalities in conjugations. The idea of the facility of Latin altogether disappears by the time he has gone beyond the stage of easy translations into and from Latin. Similarly, as soon as he understands the elemental? rules of pronunciation he thinks French is easy. The delusion is supported by the simple early chapters of the first French course in use at his school. He masters a few simple idioms, and launches upon the conquest of the irregular verbs. Then he pauses to re- examine his self-complacency with a mind that is slowly waking to a perception of the pitfalls of French composition.
But the subject of which Kwesi entertains no false hopes is Euclid Definitions, postulates, and axioms are passed without much trouble but the construction and proof of Euclid’s propositions constitute a veritable nest of sorrow and pain. Cane the back, cane in the hand, being made to stand on benches, being kept in, all these merely serve to distract the desperate pupil whose only chance of getting through the propositions, while yet he does not understand the English comprised in them, is by reciting them from memory. In time Proposition 4 is somehow got through. Then comes the greatest of the High School terrors of the first year, the great pons asinorum. In vain does the teacher repeatedly go over the construction and proof. The only part of the proposition that Kwesi and his conpanions can manage without expecting the cane to fall on their shoulders is the enunciation: every small boy is in tears; the older boys are sulking; the teacher himself is suffering from the strain of repetition and of keeping his temper. In the end all the boys are kept in till they can do the proposition properly. It need hardly be added that riders are completely out of the question.
Although the general impression is that in the High School the teaching is all conducted in English, Kwesi finds that this is true only of the highest class in the school. In the other classes, fortunately for our young friend and for those like him, all the necessary explanations during lessons are in the vernacular. On the whole, however, Kwesi finds that there is a strain on his English-speaking efforts. In the Low School such efforts had been voluntary, there being no 1 constraint in that regard except when occasionally a boy was sent with a message from one teacher to another, with special instructions to deliver the message in English. In such cases, the result was generally a literal translation, to the best of the boy’s ability, of the equivalent Fanti expression – passable as intelligible English, especially to a teacher, who knows more of the English language, and is, moreover, himself Fanti. But now, as a High School boy, he has to do exercises in English composition, and in certain other cases he has to give replies in English to questions put to him in English, for example, by visitors to the school.
At first this is very difficult He has learnt more rules of English grammar in the Low School than the average English boy of his age.
He can recite each rule accurately, without understanding what the rule means, except where it had been found necessary by the teacher to explain it when it was being learnt, or where such explanation was necessary for purposes application, as at analysis and 1 parsing Similarly, he can recite chapters out of the simple book of English history which he had used when in the Low School, and also portions of geography. The difficulty had been very pronounced at arithmetic, especially in the working of problems; for unless in such cases the teacher made the problem intelligible by translating it. the poor boys could only make guesses at its solution. Now Kwesi encounters the same difficulties every day. and very often, whereas formerly he had faced them only at certain times during each week He cannot understand why the teacher laughed when one of the boys in his class said, in answer to a question at geography, that Rugby was noted for the manufacture of public schools. Euclid the difficulty becomes peculiarly painful: the definitions, postulates, and axioms are easy, because one can always rattle off what one has learnt when a direct question is put in regard to it. Kwesi can tell you what is a parallelogram; he can state what is meant by hypothesis. construction, proof, conclusion, corollary, etc.; but when, after reciting the enunciation of a particular proposition, he is required to proceed with the proposition itself, he cannot make any progress without assistance given in the vernacular, his natural intelligence I is always beclouded whenever at such lessons as Euclid the whole lesson has to proceed in English, unless the whole lesson can be ‘-recited without intermission. He is in the High School for some time before he can realise that English composition is merely the application of the rules of English grammar which he has learnt. Grammar has always meant to him a book full of numbered rules in bold type, with innumerable others in smaller type, many of which latter are prefixed with the cryptic marks Obs. or Exc. Such words as orthography and etymology, polysyllable, monosyllable, always amuse him. just as at geography words such as promontory, archipelago, peninsula, amuse him. But exercises in English composition are very frequent. Soon our friend can manage simple sentences. In time he thoroughly understands the use of auxiliary verbs, after which he finds he can express himself fairly well in English. His idiom is unavoidably Fanti as yet. although his words are English: these remain so except where he is taught the proper English expression in each case. In good time he combines the simple sentences and makes an effort at continuous narrative; but he worries over the fact that he is always reprehensible on the score of using too often the conjunctions and’ and ‘so.’ He believes he has advanced considerably when he has learnt the rules of punctuation and attained a fair percentage of correctness in the working of punctuation exercises. He advances still further in the analysis of sentences, and learns that the best test of soundness in the application of the rules of grammar in composition is the analysis of the sentences which represent such application.
The next first stage in our hero’s struggle with the English language is marked by his discovery of sense in his reading-books. Hitherto the reading-books have been mere books of words, exercises in pronunciation. Now they have become vehicles of expression conveying meaning. School prizes of the moralising sort, under titles such as ‘Great Deeds,’ ‘Good Boys,’ ‘Perseverance,’ and ‘Industry,’ containing many platitudes expressed in language intelligible only to those who have attained some proficiency in English expression, are neglected. The Bible and such books as ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ ‘The Prince of the House of David.’ are read only under constraint in Bible-classes conducted on Sunday afternoons for boys who do not need to attend Sunday school. The ordinary reading-books often treat of matters that cannot interest Fanti boys, because they cannot understand them. Those boys who desire merely to learn off passages from books for the purpose of recitation at concerts and similar gatherings, are not particular as to what books they choose for their purposes. On the other hand, the boys whose sole object in reading is to understand what they read and thus gain in experience oi English, prefer books of interest to boys: books of adventure like Robinson Crusoe’, ‘The Swiss Family Robinson and even ‘Gulliver’s Travels in Lilliput.’ and books of stories like Grimms’ ‘Fairy Tales, Hans Andersen’s ‘Fairy Tales,’ and books containing simple narrative in verse are eagerly read, especially during the holidays. Kwesi enjoys this latter class of books, and is. through his delight in the stories told in them, early introduced to the dictionary. The dictionary is a very valuable help. In cases, however, where the dictionary gives no appreciable assistance, Kwesi appeals to older schoolmates, teachers and adult relatives who can read and write Sometimes some words are very like in sound to certain words in the vernacular, such similarity is taken to extend also to meaning; but this only occurs during tits of laziness. The more difficult examples of verse are the last modes of expression to be mastered The application of the rules of analysis and exercises in paraphrasing soon bring poetry within the range of Kwesi’s understanding; and after a time he acquires familiarity with the peculiarities of poetic diction.
The last stage in the conquest of the English language for Kwesi as a schoolboy is represented by essay and letter writing. Now he can translate his thoughts into English and express them, not quite accurately yet. both as regards grammar and faithful reproduction; but the charm in all this for him is that his essays and his letters are his own products. Letter-writing seems more difficult owing to lack of subject-matter; but soon he begins to regard letters more as expressions of feeling than as expressions of thought. When, however, he is requisitioned to write a letter for some female relation who does not understand English and cannot write, he finds that his own Fanti is very colloquial He has spent much time on the English language; but the form of his own dialect of the vernacular which he speaks is such that the dignified language in which the female relative couches her message taxes his powers of translation to the utmost. Sometimes he asks for simplification of a sentence or for elucidation of a phrase; at other times, even when the sentence or phrase is simple, he is very much at a loss as to how to express in English the thought it embodies. He therefore feels that although he can write essays and read books, his English is still far from being sound, since there are many modes of expression which he cannot translate into English, and he has been told that the English language is richer than the Fanti. Circumstances have required him to study expression in English; but no circumstances have required him to study expression in Fanti, As therefore he improves in his English he tends to reach a stage of training at which he finds that whereas he had started by translating Fanti idiom into English, whenever he has occasion to make a lengthy speech in Fanti he achieves his end only by translating English idiom into Fanti.
Since we last noticed him as a new boy in the High School, struggling manfully with the manifold duties incidental to High School life in a British sphere of influence, Kwesi Onyidzin, alias Anglice Edward Cudjoe, has altered considerably. In intellectual development he has secured all the assistance that the educational establishments in his country can render. In his course at the High School he has passed through many managements, beginning with that of the headmaster of the school at the time he joined, passing to that of another headmaster, then to that of a white headmaster with the title of principal, and ending under that of another white principal. His progress, however, has not been smooth, owing to the vicissitudes of High School life in his particular part of West Africa; for each new management has ended a period of interruption in the even tenor of the boy’s studies. With his first headmaster he seldom came into direct contact in class, except during examinations; but through to second headmaster he began, say. to grasp the principles of Euclid and commenced to work riders; under his first white principal he made an acquaintance, say. with mechanics and chemistry; under his second principal he started Latin and French composition on systematic lines thus he owes some definite part of his High School proficiency to some definite management, under which he received systematic instruction in some new subject, or entered upon a more advanced study of some subject he had already begun. Thus did he reach the stage at which we now find him – the finished product of the Low and High Schools, perhaps a teacher in the High School for the last year or two.
As regards religion, there has never been any necessity for Kwesi to receive specific instruction. Such special attention is not necessary in the case of a boy who has been born of a class of people with whom Christianity is no mere hebdomadal observance, but a regular everyday matter, inextricably woven into the fabric of their daily Kwesi could recite, both in English and in Fanti. whole portions of the catechism of the church into which he had been baptised before he could even see with his eyes, long before he could understand, even in the vernacular, what he was repeating. Lessons from the, Bible have been given both at school and at Sunday school every week of his life. Now between the ages of 17 and 20, he is a conscious member of the church, a member of some catechumen class, aspiring to membership of one of the classes for adults. He has. perhaps, even attained to the dignity of addressing the Sunday school on some devotional topic, and probably dreams of a time, not far distant, when he will be a sort of local preacher, commencing with Christian diatribes delivered against the national life in the proselytising campaigns conducted after Sunday school in parts of the town where non-Christians live, advancing to similar missions to the interior at camp meetings and other missionary picnics, thence to preaching sermons at the nightly services held during the week, and finally mounting the pulpit from which to hurl spirited and very righteous denunciations at non-Christians whose ungodliness consists in their being non-Christians.
Moreover, the influence of European ideas has not, in his time, succeeded in relaxing the discipline maintained in his home, namely, the African method of bringing up the young sanctioned by unsparing punishments for insubordination, based soundly on the principle that the young must respect their elders and show that respect in certain ways recognised as most fitting. In morals, therefore, Kwesi’s training has been rigid. Not only at home but also at school has the African standard of upbringing been upheld, with the result that Kwesi is genuinely sorry, in view of certain experiences of his as a teacher in the High School, concerning the new method of training boys by moral suasion established under the white principals. Fortunately for him, so he congratulates himself, his period of strict discipline at school is long past; therefore he acquiesces, as he must, in the new order of things, although he is often worried to the point of rage by the results of this new order.
As to his ideas of behaviour and appearance proper to the J condition of an Anglo-Fanti, the outstanding feature is the impression that everything that appertains to the national life of Fanti is bad because it is not upheld by Christians. It is true that in many cases certain necessary incidents of daily life cannot but be kept up in the Fanti manner; but the tendency for the last two generations has been to substitute European ways of doing certain things whenever the circumstances of the innovators would allow them to practise what they have observed in Europe, read in books concerning Europe, or gathered of the lives of white men in Africa. It is not surprising, therefore, that the boy, the constitution of whose skin caused him to be in a state of constant rebellion in his early childhood against the parental practice of putting him into over warm clothing should, when a young man. protest, for example against the wearing of the national costume by High School boys When boys in that attire were permitted to attend High School, Kwesi’s indignation, like that of all his contemporaries in the High School, knew no bounds The national costume, so they said, was for 1fie illiterate and boys in the Low School whose parents were illiterate: it was degrading to the High School to number among its members boys in the national costume.
Nevertheless, Kwesi and his companions have always had to treat adults in the national costume with respect. It could not be otherwise, because no Fanti is living who has no illiterate relative; and the national sense of respect for seniority in age which requires that even servants, if they are senior in age to their masters, should be treated with respect by such masters can never allow discourtesy to relatives merely because they are illiterate.
Yet there exists a sperm of snobbishness in the character of our young friend it is involved in Europeanisation as it exists in spheres of influence, and shows itself—if dry in the feeling of superiority exhibited by the boy in European clothes or the hoy whose parents are educated in the European sense. This feeling is supported by the meek acceptance of the situation which characterises the boy in the national costume, or the boy whose parents are illiterate.
The burden of bad precedent and illegitimate prestige established under the aegis of the early missionaries is too much for the boys on either side. Hence, our friend Kwesi. as a teacher in the High School and a ‘cadet of a house of which the members had been educated in the European sense for at least three generations, affects a knife and fork at his meals, boots, collars and ties for daily wear, and aspires to pyjamas for sleeping purposes; only he does not dare to adopt the latter affectation, which would perhaps be too much even for his much-Europeanised people. The noon day sun is too hot for him in his accoutrements; he therefore takes to carrying an umbrella over his head when going to and from school in the hottest hours of the sun.
The sperm of snobbishness develops. Strange conceptions of behaviour proper to Europeans and their satellites are gathered from the many books on European life put forth in Europe by European authors. Kwesi and his companions are convinced that the European life is ideal. Clubs are therefore formed with the avowed object of cultivating the accomplishments of the perfect European gentleman. The acquisition of fluency in speaking English is sought by means of debating societies and daily conversations in English. Boys who have passed through the Low School and are signalising their completed education by discarding the national costume give ‘breakfasts’ at which etiquette as prescribed in books such as ‘Don’t ‘Rules and Manners of Good Society,’ is de rigueur.
Lastly, as a consequence of reading badly selected and poor examples of fiction, our friend Kwesi begins to develop the habit of posing. The absurd super-emotional psychology of the characters in such stories is taken to be worthy of emulation.
In this condition, then, Kwesi Onyidzin, alias Anglice Edward Cudjoe, contemplates the prospect of professional training in England.
Kwesi Onyidzin has been informed that he will go to England by a boat leaving the port on a certain day. From the moment he receives the information his joy has known no bounds. People outside his circle of relatives, many of whom have held the belief that the boy will be sent to England, now know that their belief was well based Kwesi is an object of greater interest than he has been, especially among the younger people. Boss with no prospect of being sent to England, who have accordingly set their hearts on becoming clerks Civil Servants, ministers, dispensers, or surveyors, envy him. Some of the more imaginative boys construct his future when, having returned from England a fully qualified professional man. Kwesi will maintain the precedents of high life established by those who before him had returned from studying in England; the more reflective wonder what addition to that mass of precedent Kwesi will make as that which he himself introduces from Europe.
Until he leaves Kwesi is deluged with advice as to how he should take care of himself in England Those who have been there before warn him expressly against exposing himself, bidding him always, especially in the evenings, even in summer, either be in. or else carry, his overcoat He is told that he must on no account imitate the young people born to the rigours of the climate. He must be careful as to how he changes or attires himself for purposes of joining in games. Members of the profession which he is to take up advise him as to certain details, most of which advice is based on recollections of regulations in force when they were students. Those good people, too. who pay periodic visits to Europe of a duration too short to enable them to form any adequate idea of life in such parts, advise him. each emphasising what he considers important from original or derivative experience. His relatives, male and female, give him advice as to how he is to avoid dangers of which they have heard those speak who have sojourned in England and other parts of Europe The older teachers of his school and his companions urge him to maintain the standard of work he has established in his school career, and to make his white follow students respect the powers of black students in the field of study. The principal of his school advises him against certain evil associations that may be formed in England, especially in the great Metropolis Finally, the latter exhortation is amplified by that of the minister who has the immediate care of his soul, who warns him against the world, the flesh, and the devil, as they exist in the land of the white man: he must not let go his hold on the teachings of the Church in which he has been born; he must take the earliest opportunity to attach himself to the Church of which that established in his country is a branch.
Kwesi has gathered a most favourable impression of life in England, not only from books, but also from the highly-coloured accounts of life in England given by those who have been, whether they went as stokers or as students for the professions, whether they live in slummy parts or in the most irreproachable neighbourhoods, whether they associated with the lower orders or with the more refined classes. These differences mean nothing as yet to Kwesi; for all agree that life in England is one continuous round of pleasure. He has even been told that it is much easier to study in England than in Africa, because of the temperateness of the climate. To Kwesi then, England is a paradise on earth.
Preparations for departure on such a long journey have to be made. Woollen underwear, which Kwesi has consistently eschewed, even in his palmiest High School teacher days, have to be procured. Few new clothes are made, for obvious reasons. Trunks are purchased. Everything that can be thought of is thought of. Soon arrives the day before the date of departure. Much feverish excitement reigns throughout the day, not only over Kwesi himself, but over all his immediate relations. Those who are getting together some fruit and home-made confections to solace him on his voyage from home, those who are providing sawii, esaw and buredziba, so that our hero may not lack the means wherewith to perform his toilet in approved Fanti style, those who are waiting on goldsmiths for presents of gold ornaments ordered for the boy to wear in England all are busy. By night-time Kwesi must go round to say good-bye to relations and friends. He comes home with presents of moneyed of gold rings. Packing goes on till bed-time.
The eventful day of departure arrives. Kwesi has hardly slept during the fleeting hours of night. Neither, for that matter, have many of his relations; for the family feeling is so strong that all th relations who care for him. especially the women, feel that a part of them is about to be torn away, for his own good, no one denies that but to be exposed, perhaps, to what dangers and trials no one can foresee. At such times, as when the subject of the boys being sent to England was first broached, all the adult members of the family recall cases where boys have been sent to England never to be seen again. No one likes to imagine such a gloomy thing as death in connection with a step which everybody agrees is for the good of a member of the family. The women, therefore, control their feelings and fervently hope that the boy will not die in foreign parts and be injured by strangers. Kwesi’s mother keenly feels the parting; but she would not place obstacles in the way of her son’s advancement. The Joy. too. is not without his feelings; but in his case the feelings an overborne by his elation at the opportunity of going to England for a profession.
Kwesi’s things are taken to the beach. He follows. The final adieux are said The boatmen carry Kwesi to their boat and row him away to the ship Everything necessary is done for him. and he is placed under the care of the captain The steamer departs Kwesi begins to shed tears without knowing why the tears spring spontaneously to his eyes and assist the haze of distance to shut out his native town from his view.
It is time for one of the meals. There seems to him to be too much to eat. and his impressions of the white man’s food as prepared by white men suffers a rude shock. For a few days he feels unwell, y not because he is a bad sailor, for he does not suffer from sea- sickness, but because of the change of diet. He walks about, nevertheless, and is interested in the various parts of the ship. He has never before been among so many white people, and at first he is uncomfortable. His African sense of respect to his eiders, rather than any sense of inferiority in the presence of white men, prompts him to address even the stewards with respect. Before the end of the voyage he has got accustomed to the white men; but he has nothing to do with them except with the stewards and the captain. He sees new towns of which he has heard but which he has never seen before. When the Gold Coast is left behind he observes the different kinds of boats and boatmen as he passes from Liberia to Sierra Leone, from Sierra Leone to Bathurst, from Bathurst to the Canary Isles. The great river at Bathurst, being the first river of such a size he has seen, interests him considerably. The Canary Isles provide the first distinct experience of novelty in the appearance of towns, the towns look very pretty from the steamer. The scenery is magnificent: Teneriffe shows him his first high mountain. The diving-boys and the many pedlars of fruit in boats provide him with a constant fund of amusement.
After the Canary Isles there is no call till at last Plymouth is reached. The transition into the temperate zone has caused the skin of his face to peel, and he feels a sharp sensation when he washes his face: his lips also are parched. Otherwise he is well and in good mettle when, having tipped the stewards and said good-bye to the captain, he goes from the steamer to the tender which lands him in England.
With the assistance of a kindly disposed fellow passenger Kwesi gets over the necessary preliminary encounter with Customs officers, and he and the other passengers are in time entrained for London. This is Kwesi s first experience of travelling in trains, and he thorough enjoys the ride The view from the window keeps him entertained the scenery is delightful – all the country seems laid out in small well-marked plots. He passes some tame woods and sees some ancient farms. When occasionally he passes one of the pretty toy- house like structures, he wonders whether all the houses in the great London of which he has heard and read so much are as pretty. He takes lunch in the tram the restaurant-car is a new idea to him Soon the train comes to a standstill at a huge gloomy station. He looks out of the window at the crowds on the platforms, few standing still, and fewer sitting. He sees the busy porters, some carrying luggage on their shoulders, others pushing trucks of luggage, the vendors of luncheon-baskets, and the newsboys. There is novelty everywhere, but the gloom of the station depresses him: he is happy ‘ when the train moves out.
Follows a new view of fields, farms, canals, rivers, woods, villages and towns. Now and again the noise of the train is distinctly heard, at other times it is forgotten. He distinguishes the whizzing sound of the train as it passes through the arch of a bridge, the loud, roaring sound of the train in tunnels, which sound reduces in volume as the train reaches the other end of the tunnel; the speed with which the objects nearest the train pass out of his view, and the slower and less perceptible shifting of the more distant scenes, such as hills and towns. Station after station is whirled through. Sometimes the train slows down, at other times it seems to increase in speed. Sparks fly by The English Menu He takes tea in the train, and he begins to notice that the posts marking the distance from London register the distance in tens oi miles. Soon he passes through, or rather over, a busy town, in which the buildings are mostly of red brick. In the wide streets are many people, some walking, some riding in strange vehicles of differed kinds. He sees large advertisements put up on walls. The train passes through a long stretch of field and there is another town, like the one passed before in almost every respect. Towards the fifth hour of his journey he sees no more green fields, but dingy and forbidding- looking-houses, stiff, straight, and uniform. Women with straggling hair and large waists hold up children to at the train over dilapidated fences. Streets are passed in which ragged children are playing. There are back-gardens with clothes-lines displaying a variegation of drying clothing. Shrill cries reach Kwesi’s ears. The locality the train is passing through is unpleasant. At last, after passing through the worst neighbourhood he has yet seen, the train enters and stops at a tremendous, very black station, where there is more bustle than he has ever seen. By his time his ideas of England as are menaced.
Someone comes to meet him; his luggage is collected; he is conveyed to his lodgings. Everything is strange. He cannot always j understand the landlady when she talks, and it is a long time before it strikes him that the servant talks English: she seems so untidy that he does not like her to be near him. The food he cannot enjoy. He longs for ukwan and froi: he does not want the slices of cooked meat, in parts underdone, lying in a plate of some sort of gravy bordered with uninviting greens and potatoes. He got used to fish as cooked in the English manner on board the steamer that brought him to England; but he avoids the insipid sauce which is served with fish. Soup is only the shadow it. Tapioca or sago pudding he can swallow when there is some milk and sugar served with it. The boiled rice-and-milk-and-sugar which is called rice pudding and blanc-manges and jellies he does not dislike. The suet pudding, when well made, he enjoys; but the shop made cakes and other confections served with tea or by way of sweets at the k end of a meal he does not always relish. In time he begins to be f accustomed to the food; but his old dreams as to European food are over.
The next shock is imparted by the astounding information that he must pay each time he has a bath. He does not mind paying for what he has been brought up to consider an absolute necessity. He soon enough finds out that the bath is not customary, the substitute for it being what is called the wash ‘ But the wash’ does not satisfy him and he shrewdly reflects that there are cases whore it is folly to do in Rome what the Romans do. So he clings to his esaw and buredziba. and pays for his daily bath. But the esaw and buredziba are a source of much worry to the landlady: she thinks they will choke the pipes It takes Kwesi some time to convince the good lady that the esaw and buredziba do not wear away so quickly as she thinks. The next trouble is with the servant, who is always throwing the bathing materials away. In the end he has to talk to the landlady in order to ensure the required immunity for his precious esaw and buredziba. It does not take him long And out that he is regarded as a savage, even by the starving unemployable who asks him for alms. Amusing questions are often put to him as to whether he wore clothes before he came to England; whether it was safe for white men to go to his country since the climate was unsuitable to civilised people; whether wild animals wandered at largo in the streets of his native town. He concludes that the people of the class to which his landlady belongs are. to say the least, poorly informed as to the peoples of other countries, especially of those parts known as The Colonies
But that which most disturbs Kwesi s composure is the indescribable weather. It is spring, and he is much struck with the appearance of the bare branches of the trees just beginning to put forth buds. The buds are so fresh as contrasted with the blackened trunks and branches of the trees themselves. He is much depressed by the unceasing rain, the wonderfully muddy streets, and the cold. It seems to him surprising that there should be so much mud in paved streets; but he cannot blind his eyes to the fact that the mud is there. He hardly ever sees the sun. and the houses have all grimy exteriors. Only in the interiors of certain places of amusement and of some houses which he has visited is he impressed by any decorative ability possessed by the English and lacking in his own people. But the greatest surprise is that when the summer does come the heat is intolerable, even to him. who came from the tropics!
On the whole he is much disappointed with England as he has 1 seen it by the time he is six months in England |His countrymen resident in London hear of him. Those of his own age. or there- abouts, call on him and he calls on them. He complains of his disillusionment; but some laugh and say he is not the only one disappointed, and others tell him he has not yet seen anything of England. Those who hold the latter view tell him there is better food to be had in restaurants and better company at the educational institutions. They take him to the restaurants where he finds that, with the exception of the sweets and other delicacies, the food is just as disappointing as that given him by his landlady, but is better prepared and better served. At the educational establishments he notices that there is no better information possessed by his fellow- students respecting ‘Natives’ in ‘The Colonies’ than is possessed by those less educated. The only difference is that the better-educated people ask questions that are less rude.
For the next three years- at least. Kwesi is engaged in qualify^ himself for his professional career He possesses no mean ability fa study; therefore his professional course has no terrors for him: iif knows he will finish in time. But the professional is such a small of the more general training in all sorts of other pursuits and accomplishments which he receives during his sojourn in England. H* receives no direct instruction except as regards professional subjects the variegated experience he gains during his stay in England is mostly of his own garner! course he is self-taught – in these matters outside his profession le groundwork of these by-studies is tb r belief in the superiority of things European to things non-European a belief he brought with him to England. It is true that his old ideas0 European superiority have been much disturbed since he began see England with his own eyes; but if his friends, even those who been similarly disillusioned, have begun to accept certain disconcerting matters as incidental to civilisation, and. instead of arguing from the unpleasantness of such incidents to the inherent unwholesomeness of that to which they are incidental, they conclude somewhat perversely that whoever cannot explain away such unpleasantness not civilised. This view, moreover, is much strengthened by the remarks let fall by certain friends belonging to classes reckoned a5 high, who, speaking from their very insular standpoint, by reason of their pardonable and exclusive appreciation of things English as against things non-English. and of things European as against things European as against things non-European, have given Kwesi and his friends to understand that those incidents of civilised life, at first sight undesirable to those visiting Europe from Africa and Asia, are hallmarks of refinement.
Nevertheless there are certain things against which Kwesi’s soul rebels. He is convinced more or less that the only way of escaping the domination of aliens is by acquiring the refined tastes of the dominating aliens; yet he does not feel quite satisfied about these same tastes. In the first place, he soon begins to distinguish the various distinct grades of society in England. For example, it does not take him long to observe that teaching in Sunday-schools in the slums of London lays one open to all sorts of unwelcome attention amounting to patronage by civilised people very low in the social scale. He finds out, for example, that religious enthusiasm is a form of low-class emotion in England, and that the lowest orders are the most religious. The Cockney accent gets on his nerves, and he flies Irom class-meetings where he receives religious ministration in concert with housemaids and other domestics. He continues his active connection with the church of which he was baptised a member, even to the extent of going out with mission bands and preaching in doss-houses in degraded localities, till the unforgettably plebeian stamp of some of his religious associates drives him out of their company. In the second place, the Fanti ideal of womanhood which somehow has taken root in his soul makes it impossible for him to replace it with the English ideal of womanhood. Kwesi finds that in spite of the attractiveness of their get-up and their other allurements, white girls are to him no more than a part of the white man’s land, to be looked at, admired, talked with where necessary, and forgotten when the time comes for him to depart from the white s man’s land. Kwesi possesses that unique African pride which is seldom appreciable by non-Africans, often miscalled insolence by white men.
Lessons in the deportment proper to a refined man are taken by Kwesi’s friends wherever members of the elite are supposed to
For gather Those who have no access to the society of the highest content themselves with studying the manoeuvres of the nouveau riches Suburban respectability is accepted by some as a very high standard of refined respectability. They eke out their defective k information or observation as to the habits of the real aristocracy of England by studying fashionable periodicals and novels avowed! representative of life in the best circles. Those with a taste for billiards and racing know what haunts to frequent. Dances pronounced flounced to be attended by people of standing are attended. Suburban garden-parties and provincial gatherings of many sorts are v much enjoyed The fashionable ones among his friends amaze Kwesi by the ease with which they keep up the crease on their trousers, the equanimity with which they endure patent leather boots narrow in their toe and their partiality for morning coats and top-hats. Those athletically inclined are members of clubs and sport blazers and ribbons of many hues tennis, rowing, fencing, cricket and football each has its votaries There are some who are genuinely musical and who frequent the opera and attend musical recitals. The majority are attracted by the glitter and the clatter of music-halls of all grades Some even follow the high game of politics and are keen partisans, discussing party issues with the acumen of Members of Parliament The truly intellectual ones have no time to waste over trifles, and are accordingly unpopular, except when they win high distinctions a! examinations, on which occasions they are acclaimed credits to the race.
Kwesi is not completely swept along by the tide of what his compatriots are doing: he discriminates with great acuteness as to whom and what to copy. He feels that his reasoning is at fault because although he thinks he ought to copy what he deems desirable he leaves out a great deal which some influence within him, now active but long dormant, prevents him from accepting. He feels that those whose movements are in part approved by him lack certain qualities which he values, and yet he is constrained to admit that they are civilised, so that he reluctantly regards those qualities which he values as somehow to be kept in abeyance if he is to attain the standard of civilisation his training requires him to reach.
In due course he is enrolled a member of his profession. Soon afterwards he is busy preparing to go home. Books and other requisites of practice are bought. Suits are made, much other wearing apparel is bought. Certain specially favoured articles are sought out and secured. Presents for friends and relatives are procured. At length comes the day of departure from England. The day before and most of that day are spent in packing. Friends with letters and oral messages for home deliver them. The taxi or station- omnibus is at the door. Good-bye is said to the landlady. Kwesi and his friends are off to the station. They arrive. Luggage is weighed and a seat secured. Till the train moves off the time is spent in young men’s chaff. Hands are waved. The train commences its journey. After a few hours Liverpool is reached. Kwesi arrives at the landing- stage and embarks. The steamer gives him quite a different impression from that which he received when he was leaving for England. Now he no longer feels uncomfortable in the company of white men – he is quite blase. The boat leaves England for Africa and home, once more he sees the land recede from him till it vanishes from his sight; but this time there are no tears in his eyes: he is glad he has finished his work in England and can go home in peace.
During the perfect isolation which he has unintentionally secured by being the only black first-class passenger on the liner that Is taking him home, Kwesi reflects upon his life in England the civilised man he has observed, speaks of his life as if it had not a very seamy side otherwise he has little fault to find with the well-bred Englishman who very seldom thinks, or shows that he thinks, that courtesy from a black man means consciousness of inferiority on the part of such black man or that courtesy to a black man involves condescension on his own part. But many of the Englishmen who are his fellow passengers are such that he is quite glad they think themselves superior and show their superiority by keeping sway from him. He is grappling all along with a problem he cannot yet solve, and he wants all his time for that problem he wants to know why although he feels bound to aid any effort to establish civilised life among his own people, there are many aspects of such civilised that does not appeal to him. He has read much of the barbarous practices of heathens. Before he left home he had often been told that if the white man had not introduced his most beneficent rule into Africa, he and all his people would be suffering under the most barbaric political mismanagement. What has seen of order and government in England leads him to think that only under similar order and government can his people secure happiness and content does not feel in his heart of hearts that he can conscientiously support any scheme which designs to substitute in toto the civilised life for the ways of life traditional to his people.
At Bathurst, however, he observes for the first time in his life that there is more dignity and charm about the people In African garb than about those in European garb. Especially, he notices that the women in their native dress .ire far more attractive than their‘ European dress. He suddenly finds himself feeling uncomfortable to the attempt to imagine how much heat those in European clothes must be bearing. In fact, ever since the steamer left the Canaries has found that he cannot eat as much meat as he had schooled himself to eat when in England. He has reduced his clothing to the lightest he has m his trunks fortunately he was wise enough to order, suits in brown holland. At Freetown, Sierra Leone, his impressions at Bathurst are confirmed; for there the women in the modified European garb which is the customary mode of dress appeal more to him than those in more correct European clothes. The heat is intense; and he is much distressed in mind to see the young Sierra Leone gentlemen in European clothing which to him seems very warm.
At last he is on the Gold Coast once more, and he disembarks. His w heart overflows with good feeling when he hears himself addressed in his own language, after his long absence He is glad to see and be among his own countrymen again. He sits in the boat, as he is being rowed ashore, and dreamily enjoys the song of the boatmen, a song sung in a manner unknown in England, and awakening in one ‘ feelings and memories no English song can evoke. He recognises among the boatmen boys whom he had known and whose prowess at swimming and riding on the surf he had tried in vain to equal These boys have now grown into splendid, well-developed specimens of manhood with whom he cannot compare in physique. With the utmost ease they lift him on to the beach and carry his luggage out of the boat. But his joy is soon clouded He feels quite upset when certain of his schoolmates who are on the beach and have seen him appear to be keeping away from him He suddenly recollects that the prevailing notion is that everybody who returns from a visit to England, especially those who have been studying there, are unapproachable. proachable. He feels thoroughly ashamed of the snobbishness displayed on such occasions. He himself makes the first advance, addressing his old friends in Fanti. To his momentary surprise they reply in English. He notices that they are wearing European clothes of a better cut than was prevalent in his time, and that they are all wearing topees. His younger relations who come to meet him help to take his things home. He arrives home. His welcome is as hearty as can be imagined, everybody is well and thoroughly glad to see him; some of the women are even tearful in their joy; he himself is well, as everybody sees, and is free, now he has seen everybody, from anxiety about those he left behind him.
But here, too, he observes the same queerness about those in European clothes as he has been noticing all down the coast on his way home. Perhaps the queerness is even more marked among his own people; for those of his immediate relatives who are in European clothes look somehow strange, he has an inexplicable feeling that they are not looking as he expected to see them, although he admits he has always known them to be in European clothes. On the other hand, he has been absolutely captivated by the charm of those in the native clothes, especially the women. He is therefore more confirmed than ever that the native idea of clothing suits his people better than the foreign idea of clothing which they have chosen to adopt.
The younger ones among his relations wonder why he always speaks in the vernacular, although he has only just returned from England. In fact, they are very much disappointed in him- for example, they say he is wearing no more distinctive material than brown holland, which everybody can buy at the local stores. They receive a surprise when they hear him ask them about nte and about tatar and bodoo and esiato. Some of the women cannot help asking why he does not speak some English, but persists in speaking Fanti, even when he is addressed in English by the ‘scholars’ who have been to see him. He replies that he has not spoken much Fanti for many years, and therefore he desires to be permitted to speak Fanti Now. They are not. therefore, surprised when he asks for his favourite among the three principal kinds of nkwan he would like some guqur too and some dokun This is not very strange to them, because every Fanti man who grew up at home before he went to England always longs for the old dishes he used to enjoy, and likes to have them again as soon as possible after he comes home. He is asked by his younger relations about England He tells them that England is a great country, a busy country, with strongly built cities containing high buildings and paved streets He is asked whether it Is true that there is no dust in England and that everything there is always nice and clean He laughs and says that England is only a country on earth after all. and the earth is necessarily dusty. The older people grasp his meaning and are amused. He is asked what makes the streets in England shine as they seem to do in a picture of an English street hanging in the school. He says in reply ] that they are probably referring to a picture of a street wetted by I much rain, and that such a street looks better in a picture than when A actually seen The young people think he is Joking at their expense; they are quite convinced of this view of theirs when he tells them J that once he woke up at about half-past three in the morning, and when he looked out it was broad daylight ‘It was the moon.’ they I say. ’No.’ he replies, ‘it was absolute daylight.’ Therefore, in a spirit of fun he deliberately flabbergasts them with the further information that at certain times of the year, in England, it is not night till about’ half-past nine in the evening.
Since his return Kwesi has found himself constrained to sound the maxim, ‘The end justifies the means.’ He feels that if he is to live at peace with those most dear to him he must exercise a great deal of diplomacy. In his own family circle his undisguised partiality for the Fanti mode of doing everything is causing some uneasiness. For example, apparently he wears European clothes with reluctance: more than once he has received visitors whilst in the national clothes, to the politely veiled astonishment of the visitors themselves and to the discomfort of his relatives; he would even have gone in the Native dress to pay a visit if the womenfolk of his family had not succeeded in dissuading him from thus exposing himself and them to ridicule. On the point of the national mode of clothing therefore the family have had to intimate to him their views: that no one will take any serious objection to his wearing such garb within the privacy of the family circle itself, if he is so whimsical as to prefer that mode of clothing; that if he seeks to go out in the national costume such a thing may conceivably be permitted at night; that he ought not to forget that nobody before him has ever done such a thing as he evidently proposes to do, a course of conduct which, if he persists in it, will assuredly attach to himself the imputation of lunacy, and to them that of incapacity to control one of their children. At length they ask him if he is going to practise his profession garbed in the Native manner, implying by their tone that such an argument is unanswerable. He disconcerts them by retorting that if. owing to the precedents established by blind imitators, the members of his profession feel bound to clothe themselves as if they were practising in England, and it is deemed absolutely incumbent on every new practitioner to clothe himself In such a manner, he will consider such absurdly unsuitable clothing a sort of professional uniform; that if now it is proposed to keep him literally an Anglo-Fanti, Fanti as to his internals and English as to his externals, and such a conjunction pleases them, who are responsible for his having lived up to this time to become such a double person, then he will fall in with their wishes.
Distracted through his affection for his relatives and his respect for his elders, perplexed by the apparently eternal problem he has carried away with him from England, he decides to be an opportunist till he can work out the rationale for all the felt convictions that are pitting him against all that he holds dearest, but he determines, by way of safeguarding himself from drifting into more inconsistencies than are demanded by the exigencies of his position, that he will not be a thorough going opportunist he resolves that wherever he can follow his convictions without wounding too much the susceptibilities of those who genuinely care for him, then he will be true to himself.
Therefore he attends chapel, but will not betray any greater religious interest than is involved in such attendance at service, for, by attending chapel he silences the gossip of the malicious and idle tongues that circulate against him the charge of ungodliness which so distresses his family. People soon begin to say, Ah, but he is regularly at morning and evening service on Sundays, therefore it is certain he cannot be bad. The minister in charge, too. is hopeful, and quotes with unction a verse from the Book of Proverbs. It hurts Kwesi to notice that his people have been led to put their faith much in externals. Occasionally, he seeks to turn their minds from externals to internals He says to them. ‘Does it not satisfy you that in my private as well as in my professional life you have no fault to f find with me? Why not let me be as spontaneous in my outer as I am j in my inner life? Does the fact that I eat Fanti food and wear Fanti clothes nullify the intellectual development of which my inner organisation has rendered me capable? Had I been born a dunce would any adoption of European externals have availed to bring me anywhere near what I am to-day?’ ‘No,’ they frankly admit, ‘it is true that externals are less important than internals: sometimes, on our pillows, we see much reason in what you wish to do; but then you are alone in your endeavour, and the nation is not yours alone.’
With his older relations and their friends, since they are his elders, he cannot argue: custom forbids it; but with those more or less of his own age he argues. Generally he does not start the argument: some person privileged by reason of friendship, status, or a few years’ seniority will broach the subject of his difference from all who before him have returned from England as professional men. They do not understand why his appreciation of their efforts to entertain him and others in the supposed European manner is half-hearted. They go further, and ask him why he prefers the national costume, which exposes his right shoulder and his toes to the elements. Eventually they set him talking. He asks them whether he is supposed to be under any natural necessity, as white men are, to protect his skin from the sun; whether there are any climatic conditions in West Africa which make it imperative that the form of clothing should be such as allows the least escape of bodily warmth and permits the least access to the body of the elements. Apparently they do not see his drift. The argument tends to become personal and is stopped in good time. At other times would-be guides seek to support their position by saying that his wearing of Native dress makes him lose due respect from people who do not know him. such as white men and other people from distant towns or foreign parts. To this he replies that he does not miss the respect of those who are not bound to respect him, that those who are bound to respect him will respect him and not his clothes. Lastly, they say that the Native dress is unsuitable for work because it interferes with movement. He therefore asks them whether there are not two modes of wearing the Native dress, one for independent men and the other for dependents, whether the dependent has any right to adopt the clothing of the independent man whilst he is at the labours demanded by his dependence.
He seeks consolation in his professional work with his work his people have no fault to find, and so they leave him alone to do that in the way he thinks best But the double heat operating on his body b5 by reason of the European clothes he is compelled to wear and the natural heat of the sun make it impossible for him to work in comfort during the day. He therefore does his best work early in the morning, when, before he enters his office, he can work in the Native dress and in peace. After he enters his office, therefore, and through the, rest of the day, he works under conditions which must tax his energies more than is good for him; but he is young, healthy and vigorous, and he does not feel the immediate effects of such over- exertion.
One event of the future, inevitable, but allowing of being postponed by the exercise of a certain amount of strategy and by good fortune, Kwesi dreads with a wholesome fear. He knows that since he is now settled in life and is slowly building up a practice to support himself, there will come a day when a deputation of members of the family will ask him when he intends to marry He can amply justify his apparently unreasonable dread of a future certainty about which every other young man of his day has ecstatic dreams. Since he returned he has observed that the Fanti ideal of womanhood is not reflected in the young ladies of his age. In its place is a nondescript, ideal, naithgr, Fanti nor European, but supposed to be European, which gives him good cause for believing that no girl of his day will be likely to help him to make a stand against the mass of stupid precedent which every day threatens the happiness of his life. On the contrary, he is convinced that when he does marry, as he will have to, that mass of precedent will become heavier in weight as a burden on his life. Everybody, young and old, is of the opinion that he is a young man with a very perverted heart, this he knows well by now. Everybody who cares for him therefore feels it to be his or her duty to correct that perversion. It will be considered a sacred duty, conceived as such, if not by herself, at any rate with the assistance of the minister, for the girl he will select, or whom his family will select for him in the event of his not selecting one approved, to set to work to bring him back to the point at which everybody expected him to be when he returned from England. They remember that he used to be one of those who most ardently sought to Europeanise themselves. He himself remembers those days of misguidedness and folly, and is ashamed of what he then did under the impressions that ruled his conduct on those unreflective days. In a measure, then, he has himself contributed to the woes of his present position; in a measure he has helped to make the bed upon which he will in all probability have to lie: if he had not shown promise of becoming a leader of groundless Europeanism he would not be now held to his promise. The day comes on which the dreaded point is raised. He is approached on the question of his marriage. His people tell him that he is long past the marrying age of these modern times, and that he is in a position to marry. They want therefore to know why he delays. Is it because he cannot decide which of the many eligible frock ladies of his acquaintance to choose? If that is the difficulty they will assist him, they assure him. Why not marry such and such a young lady? Her people are quite respectable in every way. Or such and such another young lady? Or does he prefer one trained in England? Kwesi tells them that marriage is a more serious matter to him than they can imagine; therefore he will take time to consider the points they have raised They agree that it is a serious matter, and give him time in which to choose a young lady.
With the prospect of a disastrous marriage so immediate Kwesi is unfit for sustained work on that and many subsequent days. He passes in review all the frock girls he knows. They are all in appearance budding types of young womanhood, some beautiful, some pretty, some merely attractive, the rest passable, but all eligible. It occurs to him that although all these young ladies have acquired in some degree the modern accomplishments of reading, writing, playing the piano or the harmonium, etc., yet most of them have had little time in which, during vacations from boarding- schools, and. on leaving school, in the intervals between making new frocks and organising and attending parties, to make any practical acquaintance with the manifold problems of housekeeping and with their solution. It seems to him that from the point of view of housekeeping ability the cloth girls are preferable. But he reflects that in the first place the idea of his marrying a cloth girl will be treated with the utmost contempt when it is communicated to the family; that in the second place cloth girls are also beginning to aspire after the social display of their sisters in frocks, and are also in some cases just as unfit for the management of a home as those same sisters of theirs in frocks. A fleeting hope awakes in him when he thinks he may get engaged to a very young girl and attach her to some illiterate female relative to be brought up to suit his tastes; but he remembers soon after that, even if such a scheme were practicable. it would take more time than the family would care to approve of; whilst, as a matter of fact, there are no places now in the country where one can bring up a young person without danger of her 1 catching the infectious hankering after a gay life which is spreading everywhere. But that which most moves him against marriage is the fact that his children, if he has any. will be brought up in some such way as that in which he was brought up. The probability, it seems to him, is that they will be worse off, because the Fanti ideas of breeding which had held out against the influence of European ideas when he was a child have been displaced. Each succeeding generation. if seems to him, becomes less Fanti and more European in its habits. Further, whilst, on the one hand, the simpler ways of living that characterise each preceding generation give way to more elaborate and unnatural modes of life in the succeeding generation, on the other hand, the means of livelihood become harder to secure. Suppose he marries and has children. The children will be brought up as the new ways of living require them to be brought up, even if he, the father, disapproves of such upbringing. They will grow up to be more delicate children than children were in his time. They will have more expensive tastes in a world in which it will be difficult for all but the super-wealthy to live in comfort. What, then, is to happen to those children if by any chance he dies without leaving them enough to support them in the life they will have been taught to live? This consideration alone makes him decide that he will not marry.
He communicates his decision to the family. They ask for reasons. He tells them his reasons, but they do not accept them, they say he talks like a book, whilst they arc talking common sense. They try to help him out of what they think is the difficulty. They ask him whether he is reluctant to marry because he would much rather have a girl sent to England to be trained to become a suitable wife for him. He replies that if he marries at all he will not marry a girl trained in England. They say they will give him more time. In the meanwhile, it being noised about that he has refused to marry, it is rumoured all over the country that his real reason is that he has a white wife whom he secretly married in England. Even his family begin to accept the rumour as true, and they begin to regard him with suspicion. To allay their suspicion, which hurts him sorely, in f the end he decides to marry Esi Ansuadzi, alias Anglice, Elsie J Joshua, one of the frock ladies pointed out as most eligible. The family are glad The necessary preliminaries are completed. Kwesi is obliged to masquerade as a European bridegroom and lead a veiled and orange-blossomed bride from the altar – to a reception following on the farce in the chapel Refreshments are served round The guests wish the couple Awarso. shako them by the hand, and depart The families on both sides are happy; the people of the town are gratified henceforth Kwesi Onyidzin and Esi Ansuadzi are “known as Mr and Mrs Edward Cudjoe.
The novelty of their situation has worn off the bride and bridegroom. But whereas our friend Kwesi. before his marriage, had had comparative freedom from the trammels of Europeanistic precedent, now, as a married man his very private life is invaded by a new swarm of musts’. In a sense he is sorry for his wife, who really enjoys occupying the position of wife to a professional man; for against her he has felt some sort of anger ever since the masquerade in the chapel and al the reception He knows the girl is not much to blame, since it is of the essence of young femininity to be fond of display. Further, he knows that just as up to the time he really began to think he was not altogether responsible for his having grown up into a snob, so is this poor girl he has married blameless as regards the stupid convention that has intensified her prevailing characteristic as a girl. He feels that in justice the blame lies directly at the door of those who uphold the system that pronounces every non-Christian mode of life barbarous, and urges those who adopt it to discard their former mode of life and attempt the impossibility of assuming a new psychology. Therefore he decides that just as he has refrained from hurting too much the feelings of those whom he holds dearest, so now he must do his best not to wound the feelings of the unfortunate girl he has married. At the same time, he is certain he will be justified in remonstrating with his wife whenever she is giving way, against her better judgement, to the advice of mischief-makers.
Therefore he calmly points out to his wife that she must, for their mutual peace, give up the most flagrantly absurd of the views she has imbibed especially from her intercourse with the would-be- fashionable ladies who organise and keep up ladies’ clubs. He tells the girl that the circumstances of living are so changed that the number of servants one could count upon, in the old days, to lighten the duties of a young wife of position cannot be now secured, still less maintained; therefore it will behove her to attend as much as possible to the management of household affairs. If, however, after her most pressing duties are discharged each day she feels she has any ‘society’ functions to perform in concert with other members of ladies’ clubs, then she may please herself in that regard, provided she leaves the doing of the less important housework in competent hands, and provided these ‘society’ functions are not of the sort that requires the attendance of the husband upon the wife. On the latter point he insists, even to the point of bringing tears to the eyes of his wife: he has had enough of Europeanism in his effort to gratify the wishes of those whom he is bound to obey , but he is not going to please his wife in any but the most necessary matters: he is not to be expected to be present at ‘At Homes’ and concerts and balls and all the other contrivances by which the Europeanised ladies seek to worry serious-minded men who have no time to waste on unnecessary pantomime. He warns her that since in marrying her he has had to open his private life to invasion by idiotic convention, if she makes that marriage less tolerable by too many impositions on his good nature, she will simply have to go back to her people, European marriage or no European marriage. Kwesi provides his wife with all that is necessary in his opinion to enable them to live in comfort. But the wife Is often in tears, since her husband always places matters in such a position by his fairness that if she does anything out of the way she soon enough wishes she had not done it Her friends begin to laugh at her and say that she might as well have married a clerk Many of the frock ladies and their ‘scholar’ swains say that she is being treated as if she had been married under the Native law. and that in submitting to-such treatment such is helping to belie her education or, true to his word, Kwesi has always refused to accompany her to any of the ‘society affairs at which the pleasure of the company of Mr and Mrs Edward Cudjoe’ is requested on printed or written cards He tells his wife, on such occasions, that she can go if she likes, that he finds it easier to work in the evenings than in the day and therefore must be excused from attending. He will not attend garden-parties and similar after- noon shows because he is expected to appear in European clothes. t and he has decided never to wear European clothes except for r purposes of professional practice and attendance at chapel on Sundays
Kwesi’s wife is unhappy, but she will not give in. She says it is due to her breeding and position to influence her husband to lead the life for which, in the eyes of the Europeanised people, he is fitted. Acting upon some very bad advice, she begins to invite friends to parties at her husband’s house. She tells him the first time, and he says he will be present at the gathering if he has time to spare. When the time comes, and her husband is still in his study, she sends repeated messages, till at last he sends the final reply that he has no time to spare and will not have for some hours. He seldom uses the drawing- room. and so the invasion does not directly disturb him; but since that first party at his house he takes the trouble to lock himself in his study at the time appointed by his persevering wife for other parties.
On such occasions, however, he finds he is too disturbed in mind to work. After a time his wife begins to prepare nothing but European meals for her husband. He protests on the first day and sends for some dokun and fried fish. He protests a second and third time. Then, on the fourth day, he sends a message to his mother that he would like her to prepare his meals for him. His mother receives the news with misgiving, for she suspects the reason for it. She hurries to her son, who places the whole matter before her. Since she is the mother of the husband she does not want to appear to be taking her son’s part. She therefore communicates the state of affairs to the family. Delegates from both families meet and, going thoroughly into the matter, decide that there is strictly no fault to find with the husband, but that the girl is to blame in taking it upon herself to do what she knew her husband did not like. The wife appeals to the A minister, who himself is European only in his religious ideas, but £ otherwise is a Fanti at heart; he supports the decision of the two families. They require her to apologise and make amends to her husband in the customary manner, since she is the party at fault. She refuses, saying that they have all got their heads full of savage ideas. The older members of her family tell her that sheds, fortunate in having been married under the English law, under which, they have heard, divorce is allowed only in certain-very disgraceful cases: for, under the old Fanti law, by her refusal to abide by the decision of the two families, an equitable decision that will be upheld by any public tribunal, the Oman would be justified in declaring the marriage at an end. They therefore ask her to make amends for her faults or else return with them to their home. She says she is going to remain in her husband’s house; that she has a right under the English law to do so. They remind her that her husband’s house is not his house but belongs to his family, and since she has slighted that family by refusing to accept a decision in which they concurred, she cannot continue to remain there. Kwesi, who does not wish to distress anybody, is willing to forgive and forget if the girl will promise to behave an she should She will not promise. In the end the wife’s family, whilst exonerating the husband, tell him that the best thing to be done is for them to take the wife away. He accepts the position: and. so far as the native mind is concerned, the marriage of Kwesi Onyidzin and Esi Ansuadzi. alias Anglice Mr and Mrs Edward Cudjoe is at an end. or at any rate suspended.
Kwesi’s troubles an- beginning to toll on bin) outwardly During his seven or eight year of professional practice the perpetual ordeal of his inner life, the constant struggle between affection and respect for a few. on the one hand, and duty to all. on the other hand, has seldom been suspected by the complacent people surrounding him. He has often thought that he should do his part of the duty lying upon all who have in any way helped to raise the structure of Europeanism. which has absolutely destroyed his peace of mind, to help also to pull down that structure in order to save future generations from such a life as he has been leading, but his thought has not yet been deep enough to enable him to accept the wider duty as of greater importance for the future than the narrower duty he owes to his relatives and elders But now all that has taken place within him is beginning to show its effect on his health He looks ill: his haggard expression is that of a much-worried man. of a man harassed by spirits from whom he has been seeking in vain to escape; yet. in good or in bad health, he has to keep up his position in the sphere of professional work. His family are distressed. They ask him if he is suffering from some secret malady. He says he is not. They make all sorts of suggestions and prescribe all sorts of remedies. In the end he asks them not to worry about him: he will let them know whenever he feels really ill. But a fellow-student of his time in England, who is practising medicine, keeps telling him that he is over-working himself, that he is putting too great a strain on his nervous system. He urges him to take a sea-trip or else cease working for some time. Kwesi tells his doctor friend that he cannot follow his advice: he cannot leave his profession in these days, when every penny we can make is needed. In the old days, he says, people were able to afford long holidays because they had little to do and much to earn; now there is very much to do and very little to earn. No; he must keep at his work: he is afraid if he stops working he will go mad, so he tells himself.
He has not yet solved the problem he brought with him from England, namely, why, although he has found out that in many fundamental respects the European mode of life is lacking in sound- ness, yet. in certain other apparently as fundamental respects he feels constrained to copy that mode of life. In his spare time he has been tracing the European mode of life to its sources; but after groping about among obscure antecedents he has not yet discovered the key to the to sociology. He likes the subject, the study of which enables him to understand many difficult points about life in society. At length it dawns upon him that the key to the whole problem is the distinction between the essentials and accidents of social life. Following out the implications of this distinction, he discovers that those aspects of life in Europe which he has felt constrained to copy are not essentially European in character, that they partake of the nature of acquired characteristics, that they are later developments in the institutions of society, whilst, on the other hand, those aspects of European life which could not attract him when he was in England are essentially European and require a European psychology to appreciate and maintain them. He understands therefore why he felt ashamed of the snobbishness which had characterised him before he loft home for England; for whilst in matters essential to their life Europeans are natural and spontaneous, he and his friends, in copying such essentials, have been aping Europeans and have therefore been poseurs. He is satisfied with the position at which he has arrived in his thought, because it enables him to place on a rational basis the conviction he has felt, since his return to England, that the native customs of his people are not savage customs as white men claim, but. on the contrary, are perfectly rational and natural, and. in that respect, on a par with the essentials of European life. Only, then, in to far as the social organisation of his people lacks the accidents of European life can Europeans refuse to regard them as civilised, because the claim of Europe herself to civilisation stands upon these accidents which, being of comparatively recent development, and being hurriedly superimposed on the essentials, are often in violent opposition to such essentials.
It is at this juncture that his nerves break down. The family are in A state of consternation: their child. Kwesi. is beginning to behave like a madman He is in a delirium for days, recovering now and again for a short interval some semblance of mental quiet He raves of spirits that have persecuted him ever since he was born, of evil, disguised in the shape of good, that has dogged his footsteps all his life. He cannot recognise any of his people he says his mother is not his mother, because she wears European clothes, for he is a Fanti and cannot have been borne by a woman who wears European clothes, the woman representing his mother is therefore a white woman who has disguised herself. The rest of the family he calls by all sorts of queer names: they have all plotted to tie a heavy, excoriating stone round his bare neck, and they have taken away that stone, leaving sore the place it once occupied, on which their looks and their words have acted like pepper His womenfolk are in tears; they try to soothe him but never succeed. His mother is in despair and is really pitiable. The doctor does the best he can: he, too, is genuinely distressed at the condition of his friend. The delirium in time begins to abate. At last Kwesi grows calm. He sleeps. When he wakes up he is sane, but he looks the picture of death: his face is wan; his eyes are hollow; his cheeks are sunken. He says he wants to see everybody. The members of his family appear and begin to congratulate him on his recovery, but some of the women begin to weep. He tells them not to weep. He addresses them: he asks his mother and all his other older relatives to forgive him for any pain he has ever caused them by appearing to disregard their advice; he believes his life has been a mistake since he found out too late what he should have found out in the beginning, but he hopes his mistakes will warn future generations from being as selfish as he was in preferring the narrower to the wider duty that lay before him; he would ask them one favour, namely, that if at any time any other member of the family trained in England on coming back preferred to live as a Fanti man who had merely been trained in England, instead of living as a black Englishman who understood Fanti, they should leave such a one to live his own life, so long as he was not undutiful: they should not seek to constrain him to lead an artificial life; for the Fanti man’s life was at least as good as the Englishman’s life, and the mere accident of scientific development in the invention of machinery was not sufficient in itself to give any nation ground for calling itself civilised. He says he would like to see his wife. Messengers are sent for the wife, who apparently takes her time to come, since, after waiting for some time after the messengers have returned with the report that her people say they will get her to come, he tells those assembled round him that he would like to sleep. He closes his eyes and goes to sleep. They watch him breathing, and one by one they leave the room on tip-toe: only his mother and the others in immediate attendance on him remain. Soon after the doctor comes. He goes to the bed. His demeanour at the bedside brings the relatives in the room to his side: their heart misgives them, for Kwesi is not breathing. The doctor after a time tells them that he is dead. Kwesi is mother has fallen by the bed in a swoon: the doctor and the others see to her.
Kwesi Onyidzin troubled life is at an end.
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