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Black Sheep: Adventures in West Africa

BLACK SHEEP

ADVENTURES IN WEST AFRICA

NTUM WOMEN AND GIRLS

BLACK SHEEP

ADVENTURES IN WEST AFRICA

Jean Kenyon Mackenzie With Illustrations

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY <£&e fitoetfi&e $te$? Cambribge 1916

Published May iqib

PREFACE

For more than five decades the Board of For- eign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America has maintained a work on the West Coast of Africa. From its original occupancy along the coast of what be- came, with the partition of Africa, the French Congo, Spanish Guinea, and the German Col- ony of Kamerun, this mission has gone inland from the coast of southern Kamerun. The first inland station was opened in 1893; since then, at intervals of a few years, other settlements were made, always making east; until in the early days of 1914 there was a missionary sta- tioned among the Njem tribe in the Lomie dis- trict, about four hundred miles inland from the coast town of Kribi.

The station in Gaboon, of which mention is made in these letters, is now under the care of the French Protestant Society at work in the French Congo.

The ten years preceding the present war were a season of great activity and success in African missions. The Presbyterian mission in southern

Kamerun shared with its French neighbors to the south and its German neighbors to the north in the encouragements of this epoch. There was a tumult of development. The forest tribes and the tribes by the sea crowded into the tribe of God — and under black leaders; for in the past decade there had arisen to share with our corps of sixty white missionaries a com- pany of four hundred black assistants.

Under the thatched roofs of the churches gather, here and there in the forest, Sabbath congregations of six thousand, of eight thou- sand. Self-support is a major intention; and in the year before the war the thirty thousand adherents of this mission gave, out of their primitive circumstance, nearly fifteen thousand dollars to the treasury. There was a large indus- trial plant at Elat; there were more than ten thousand pupils in the schools; there was a beneficent medical work at four stations. The clamor of the drums at unnumbered villages called the young to school of a week day, and broke the dark before the dawn of a Sunday with the call to assemble.

So much for the days before the war in a neighborhood which has been, since the war began, a battlefield.

It was the good fortune of the writer of the

following letters to have been a member of the West Africa Mission from June of 1904 to Octo- ber of 191 3, and to have witnessed, in more than one neighborhood of southern Kamerun, the amazing developments of this happy epoch.

If there is in this book too little a sense of the larger aspects of this great experience, too little a sound of the innumerable feet that follow the New Way, — be sure that the lack is deplored by the writer. These letters, addressed in the main to a father amply informed of the circum- stance of his daughter's mission, had no other aim than that common effort of exiles — the daily renewing, by the expense of spirit in a letter, of the dearest companionships. To this end the letters were written, for this they smell of midnight oil — the oil in a lantern beside a cot in camps by the sea or by the trails of that equatorial forest; for this they smell of the salt fish put on the top of the load by the mail-car- rier — that angel of missionaries. For in those days the angel of the mail did indeed regularly pass upon the paths of southern Kamerun.

Some of these letters appeared in Woman's Work, the organ of the women's missionary societies of the Presbyterian Church. Some appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and to the stimulating appreciation of the editor of the

Atlantic is due that courage which offers such simple matter to the public in a book.

The writer acknowledges her indebtedness to her fellow-missionaries for the photographs in- cluded in this little book. And a manifold in- debtedness she acknowledges : for benefits never to be numbered, for companionships never to be forgotten, for ideals of conduct and character ever to be emulated. To them she says, in the words of the old Mpongwe song: —

" I never forget you a single year, I never forget you a single moon, I never forget you a single day! "