James Anthony Froude - "Caesar: A Sketch"

Ellis Wynne - "The Sleeping Bard"

Charles Louis Fontenay - "Rebels of the Red Planet"

Victor Hugo - "Napoleon the Little"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

To the Gold Coast for Gold

R >> Richard F. Burton >> To the Gold Coast for Gold




But how stand the facts at the white man's Red Grave? Mrs. Havelock and
the wife of the officer commanding the garrison are the only Europeans
in the colony, whereas a score of years ago I remember half a
dozen. Even the warmest apologisers for the climate will not expose
their wives to it, preferring to leave them at home or in
Madeira. During last March there were five deaths of white men--that is,
more than a third--out of a total of 163. What would the worst of
English colonies say to a mortality of 350 per thousand per annum? Of
course we are told that it is exceptional, and the case of the insurance
societies is quoted. But they forget to tell us the reason. A mail
steamer now calls at Freetown once a week, and the invalid is sent home
by the first opportunity. Similarly a silly East Indian statistician
proved, from the rare occurrence of fatal cases, Aden to be one of the
healthiest stations under 'the Company.' He ignored the fact that even a
scratch justified the surgeons in shipping a man off on sick leave.

I quite agree with the view of Mr. Frederick Evans: [Footnotes: _The
Colonies and India_, Dec. 24, 1881.] 'Let anyone anxious to test the
nature of the climate go to Kew Gardens and sit for a week or two in one
of the tropical houses there; he may be assured that he will by no means
feel in robust health when he leaves.' The simile is perfect. Europeans
living in Africa like Europeans as regards clothing and diet are, I
believe, quite right. We tried grass-cloth, instead of broadcloth, in
Western India, when general rheumatism was the result. In the matter of
meat and drink the Englishman cannot do better than adhere to his old
mode of life as much as possible, with a few small modifications. Let
him return to the meal-times of Queen Elizabeth's day--

Sunrise breakfast, sun high dinner,
Sundown sup, makes a saint of a sinner--

and especially shun the 9 A.M. breakfast, which leads to a heavy tiffin
at 1 P.M., the hottest and most trying section of the day. With respect
to diet, if he drinks a bottle of claret in England let him reduce
himself in Africa to a pint 'cut' with, water; if he eats a pound of
meat he should be contented with eight ounces and an extra quantity of
fruit and vegetables. In medicine let him halve his cathartics and
double his dose of tonics.

From its topographical as well as its geographical position the climate
of Freetown is oppressively hot, damp, and muggy. The annual mean is
79.5 deg. Fahr.; the usual temperature of the dwellings is from 78 deg. to 86 deg.
Fahr. Its year is divided into two seasons, the Dries and the Rains. The
wet season begins in May and ends with November; for the last five years
the average downfall has been 155 inches, five times greater than in
rainy England. These five months are times of extreme discomfort. The
damp heat, despite charcoal fires in the houses and offices, mildews
everything--clothes, weapons, books, man himself. It seems to exhaust
all the positive electricity of the nervous system, and it makes the
patient feel utterly miserable. It also fills the air with noxious
vapours during the short bursts of sunshine perpendicularly rained down,
and breeds a hateful brood of what the Portuguese call immundicies--a
foul 'insect-youth.' Only the oldest residents prefer the wet to the dry
months. The Rains end in the sickliest season of the year, when the sun,
now getting the upper hand, sucks the miasmatic vapours from the soil
and distributes them to mankind in the shape of ague and fever,
dysentery, and a host of diseases. The Dries last from November to
April, often beginning with tornadoes and ending with the Harmatan,
smokes or scirocco. The climate is then not unlike Bombay, except that
it lacks the mild East Indian attempt at a winter, and that barometric
pressure hardly varies.

During my last visit to Sa Leone I secured a boat, and, accompanied by
Dr. Lovegrove, of the A.S.S. _Armenian_, set out to inspect the
lower bed of the Rokel and the islands which it waters. Passing along
Fourah Bay, we remarked in the high background a fine brook, cold,
clear, and pure, affording a delicious bath; it is almost dry in the
Dries, and swells to a fiumara during the Rains. Its extent was then a
diminutive rivulet tumbling some hundreds of feet down a shelving bed
into Granville Bay, the break beyond Fourah. On the way we passed
several Timni boats, carrying a proportionately immense amount of
'muslin.' Of old the lords of the land, they still come down the river
with rice and cocoa-nuts from the Kwiah (Quiah) country, from Porto
Loko, from Waterloo, and other places up stream. They not unfrequently
console themselves for their losses by a little hard fighting; witness
their defence of the Moduka stockade in 1861, when four officers and
twenty-three of our men were wounded. [Footnote: _Wanderings in West
Africa_, vol. i pp. 246-47.] Some of the boats are heavy row-barges
with a framework of sticks for a stern-awning; an old Mandenga, with
cottony beard, sits at each helm. They row _simplices munditiis_.
At Sa Leone men are punished for not wearing overalls, and
thus the 'city' becomes a rag-fair. The Timni men are dark negroids
with the slightest infusion of Semitic blood; some had coated their
eyebrows and part of their faces with chalk for ophthalmia. They
appeared to be merry fellows enough; and they are certainly the only men
in the colony who ever pretend to work. A Government official harshly
says of them, 'I would willingly ascribe to the nearest of our
neighbours and their representatives in Freetown, of whom there are
many, some virtues if they possessed any; but, unfortunately, taken as a
people, they have been truly described by able and observant writers as
dishonest and depraved.' Mr. Secretary evidently forgets the
'civilising' and infectious example of Sa Leone, _versus_ the
culture of El-Islam.

Arrived at Bishopscourt, we disembarked and visited the place. Here in
old days 'satisfaction' was given and taken; and a satirical medico
declared that forty years of _rencontres_ had not produced a single
casualty. He was more witty than wise; I heard of one gentleman who had
been 'paraded' and 'winged.' Old Granville Town, which named the bay,
has completely disappeared; the ruins of the last house are gone from
the broad grassy shelf upon which the first colonists built their homes.

From Granville Bay the traveller may return by the 'Kissy Road.' Once it
was the pet promenade, the Corso, the show-walk of Freetown; now it has
become a Tottenham Court Road, to which Water, Oxford, and Westmoreland
Streets are preferred. The vegetation becomes splendid, running up to
the feet of the hills, which swell suddenly from the shelf-plain. The
approach to Sa Leone is heralded by a row of shops even smaller and
meaner than those near the market-place. There are whole streets of
these rabbit-hutches, whose contents 'mammy,' when day is done, carries
home in a 'bly'-basket upon her head, possibly leaving 'titty' to mount
guard upon the remnant. The stock in trade may represent a capital of
4_l_., and the profits 1_s_. a day. Yet 'daddy' styles himself
merchant, gets credit, and spends his evenings conversing and smoking
cigars--as a gentleman should--with his commercial friends.

Passing the easternmost end of the peninsula, and sailing along the
Bullom ('lowland') shores, we verified Dr. Blyden's assertion that this
'home of fevers' shows no outward and visible sign of exceeding
unhealthiness. The soil is sandy, the bush is comparatively thin, and
the tall trees give it the aspect of a high and dry land. We then turned
north-east and skirted Tasso Island, a strip of river-holm girt with a
wall of mangroves. It had an old English fort, founded in 1695; the
factors traded with the Pulo (Fulah) country for slaves, ivory, and
gold. It was abandoned after being taken by Van Ruyter, when he restored
to the Dutch West Indian Company the conquests of Commodore Holmes. The
rich soil in 1800 supported a fine cotton plantation, and here
Mr. Heddle kept a 'factory.' The villagers turned out to gaze, not
habited like the Wolofs of Albreda, but clad in shady hats and seedy
pantaloons.

After clearing Tasso we advanced merrily, and at the end of two hours'
and a half actual sailing and pulling we landed upon Bance, which some
call Bence's Island. A ruined jetty with two rusty guns, buried like
posts, projected from the sand-strip; and a battery, where nine cannon
still linger, defended the approach. There is a similar beach to the
north-east, with admirable bathing in the tepid, brackish waves and a
fine view of the long leonine Sierra. The outlying rocks, capped with
guano, look like moored boats and awnings. The sea-breeze was delicious;
the lapping, dazzling stream made sweet music, and the huge cotton-trees
with laminar buttresses gave most grateful shade.

The island resembles Gambian James multiplied by four or five. Behind
the battery are the ruins of a huge building, like the palaces of old
Goa, vast rooms, magazines, barracoons, underground vaults, and all
manner of contrivances for the good comfort and entertainment of the
slaver and the slave. A fine promenade of laterite, which everywhere
about Sa Leone builds the best of roads, and a strip of jungle rich in
the _Guilandina Bonduc_, whose medicinal properties are well known
to the people, leads to the long-deserted graveyard. We pass an old well
with water thirty-five feet deep, and enter the _enceinte_, that
contains four tombs; the marble tablets, which would soon disappear in
India for the benefit of curry-stuffs, here remain intact. One long home
was tenanted by 'Thomas Knight, Esquire, born in the county of Surrey,
who acted eighteen years as agent for the proprietors of this island,
and who died on August 27 of 1785,' beloved, of course, by
everybody. Second came the 'honourable sea-Captain Hiort, born in 1746,
married in 1771 to the virtuous lady Catherine Schive, and died in 1783,
leaving two good-natured daughters, which his soul is in the hands of
God.' The third was Mr. John Tittle, who departed life in 1776; and the
last was Captain Josiah Dory, a 'man of upright character,' who
migrated to the many in 1765.

Barbot (ii. 1) describes Bance's Island as defended by a small fort on a
steep rock of difficult access, ascended only by a sort of stairs cut in
the stone, and acting as the store-house of the Royal African
Company. The low walls of lime and ashlar had a round 'flanker' with
five guns, a curtain with embrasures for four large cannon, and a
platform just before it for six guns, all well mounted. The only good
buildings were the slave-booths. Winterbottom, who places it over
eighteen miles above St. George's Bay (_Baie de France_) and north
of Tasso Island, thus describes Bance: 'This is a small barren island
considerably elevated, with a dry, gravelly soil; but being placed as it
were in the midst of an archipelago of low marshy islands, the breeze,
from whatever quarter it blows, is impregnated with moisture and marsh
effluvia, which render it sickly. The air also is very much heated, and
the thermometer generally stands 4 deg. or 5 deg. higher on this island than it
does at Freetown.'

We regained the steamer shortly after dark, delighted with our picnic
and resolved always to take the same advantage of all halts. In those
days the interior was most interesting. The rivers Scarcies, Nunez, and
Ponga were unknown; the equestrian Susu tribe had never been visited;
and, the Timbo country, the great centre whence arise the Niger, the
Rokel, and the Senegal, awaited exploration.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

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