On the edge of the primeval forest; experiences and observations of a doctor in equatorial Africa

Dedication

To the friends — dead and living — ^who have helped me in the enterprise of which this book is a part, in deepest gratitude.

NOTE

With regard to the English Edition of this book I owe a debt of thanks to two friends. Mr. Ch. Th. Campion, M.A., now of Grahamstown, S. Africa, had the goodness to prepare and to put at my disposal his very excellent translation, and Mr. John Naish, of Oxford, was kind enough to revise the proofs and to undertake the final corrections.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

1. HOW I CAME TO BE A DOCTOR IN THE FOREST.

THE LAND AND PEOPLE OF THE OGOWE . I

Chapter I

HOW I CAME TO BE A DOCTOR IN THE FOREST. THE LAND AND PEOPLE OF THE OGOWE

I GAVE Up my position of professor in the University of Strasbourg, my literary work, and my organ-playing, in order to go as a doctor to Equatorial Africa. How did that come about ?

I had read about the physical miseries of the natives in the virgin forests ; I had heard about them from missionaries, and the more I .thought about it the stranger it seemed to me that we Europeans trouble ourselves so little about the great humanitarian task which offers itself to us in far-off lands. The parable I of Dives and Lazarus seemed to me to have been spoken directly of us ! We are Dives, for, through the j advances of medical science, we now know a great deal about disease and pain, and have innumerable means * of fighting them ; yet we take as a matter of course the i incalculable advantages which this new weahh gives ' us ! Out there in the colonies, however, sits wretched ! Lazarus, the coloured folk, who suffers from illness

2 I. HOW I CAME TO BE A DOCTOR IN THE FOREST

and pain just as much as we do, nay, much more, and has absolutely no means of fighting them. And just as Dives sinned against the poor man at his gate because for want of thought he never put himself in his place and let his heart and conscience tell him what he ought to do, so do we sin against the poor man at our gate.

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The two or three hundred doctors whom the European States maintain as medical officers in the colonial world could undertake only a very small part (so I argued to myself) of the huge task, even if the majority of them were not there for the benefit, first of all, of the white colonists and the troops. Society in general must recognise this work of humanity to be its task, and there must come a time when doctors go out into the world of their own free will, but sent and supported by society and in numbers corresponding to the need, to work for the benefit of the natives. Then only shall we be recognising and beginning to act upon the responsibility in respect of the coloured races which lies upon us as inheritors of the world’s civilisation.

Moved by these thoughts I resolved, when already thirty years old, to study medicine and to put my ideas to the test out there. At the beginning of 1913 I graduated as M.D. That same spring I started with my wife, who had qualified as a nurse, for the River Ogowe in Equatorial Africa, there to begin my active work.

I chose this locality because some Alsatian missionaries in the service of the Paris Evangelical Mission

THE DECISION had told me that a doctor was badly needed there on account of the constantly spreading sleeping sickness. The mission was prepared also to place at my disposal one of the houses at their station at Lambarene, and to allow me to build a hospital in their grounds, promising further to give me help with the work.

The actual expenses of the undertaking, however, I had to provide myself, and to that I devoted what I had earned by giving organ concerts, together with the profits from my book on Bach, which had appeared in German, French, and English. In this way the old Thomas Cantor of Leipsig, Johann Sebastian himself, helped me in the provision of a hospital for negroes in the virgin forest, and kind friends in Germany, France, and Switzerland contributed money. When we left Europe, the undertaking was securely financed for two years, the expenses — apart from the journey out and back — being, as I reckoned, about 15,000 francs* a year, and this calculation proved to be very nearly correct.

The keeping of the accounts and the ordering of all the things needed had been undertaken by self-sacrificing friends in Strasbourg, and the cases, when packed, were sent to Africa by the mission with their own.

My work then lived — to use a scientific term — in symbiosis with the Paris Evangelical Mission, but it was, in itself, undenominational and international. It was, and is still, my conviction that the humanitarian work to be done in the world should, for its accomplishment, call upon us as men, not as members of any particular nation or religious body.

• about l&oo p.a. at the then normal rate of exchange.

4 I. HOW I CAME TO BE A DOCTOR IN THE FOREST

Now for a word about the country which was the scene of our labours. The Ogowe district belongs to the Colony of Gaboon, and the Ogowe itself is a river, 700 to 800 miles long, north of, and roughly parallel to, the Congo. Although smaller than the latter, it is yet a magnificent river, and in the lower part of its course its width is from 1,200 to 2,200 yards. For the last 120 miles it divides into a number of arms which enter the Atlantic near Cape Lopez, but it is navigable for fairly large river steamers as far as N’Djole, about 250 miles up stream. At that point begins the region of hills and mountains which leads up to the great plateau of Central Africa. Here also begins a series of rapids which alternate with stretches of ordinary open river, and these rapids can only be surmounted by small screw steamers, built for the purpose, and by native canoes.

While along the middle and upper course of the Ogowe the country is a mixture of prairie and wood, there is along the lower part of the river, from N’Djole downwards, nothing but water and virgin forest. This damp, low-lying ground is admirably suited for the cultivation of coffee, pepper, cinnamon, vanilla, and cocoa ; the oil palm also grows well in it. But the chief business of Europeans is neither the cultivation of these things, nor the collection of rubber in the forest, but the timber trade. Now on the west coast of Africa, which is very poor in harbours, especially in such as have rivers discharging into them, conditions are very seldom favourable for the loading of timber cargoes. But the Ogowe has the great advantage of discharging into an excellent roadstead without any bar ; the huge rafts can lie alongside the steamers

THE OGOWE DISTRICT which are to take them away without danger of being broken up and scattered on a bar or by a heavy swell. The timber trade, therefore, is Hkely to be for an indefinite period the chief industry of the Ogowe district.

Cereals and potatoes it is, unfortunately, impossible to cultivate, since the warm, damp atmosphere makes them grow too fast. Cereals never produce the usual ear, and potato haulms shoot up without any tubers below. Rice, too, is for various reasons not cultivable. Cows cannot be kept along the lower Ogowe because they cannot eat the grass that grows there, though further inland, on the central plateau, they flourish splendidly. It is necessary, therefore, to import from Europe flour, rice, potatoes, and milk, a fact which makes living a complicated business and very expensive.

Lambarene lies a little south of the Equator, so that its seasons are those of the Southern hemisphere : winter when it is summer in Europe, and vice versa. Its winter is characterised by its including the dry season, which lasts from the end of May to the beginning of October, and summer is the rainy season, the rain falling from early in October to the middle of December, and from the middle of January to the end of May. About Christmas one gets three to four weeks of continuous summer weather, and it is then that the thermometer record is highest.

The average shade temperature in the rainy season is 82° — 86° F.,* in the dry season about 77° — 82° F., the nights being always nearly as hot as the days. This circumstance, and the excessive moisture of the

6 I. HOW I CAME TO BE A DOCTOR IN THE FOREST

atmosphere, are the chief things which make the climate of the Ogowe lowlands such a trial for a European. After a year’s residence fatigue and anaemia begin to make themselves disagreeably perceptible. At the end of two or three years he becomes incapable of real work, and does best to return to Europe for at least eight months in order to recruit.

The mortality among the whites at Libreville, the capital of Gaboon, was, in 1903, 14 per cent.

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Before the w’ar there lived in the Ogowe lowlands about two hundred whites : planters, timber merchants, storekeepers, officials, and missionaries. The number of the natives is hard to estimate, but, at any rate, the country is not thickly inhabited. We have at present merely the remains of eight once powerful tribes, so terribly has the population been thinned by three hundred years of alcohol and the slave trade. Of the Orungu tribe, which lived in the Ogowe delta, there are scarcely any left ; of the Galoas, who belonged to the Lambarene district, there remain still 80,000 at most. Into the void thus created there swarmed from inland the cannibal Fans, called by the French Pahouins, who have never yet come into contact with civilisation, and but for the opportune arrival of the Europeans this warrior folk would by this time have eaten up the old tribes of the Ogowe lowlands. Lambarene forms in the river valley the boundary between the Pahouins and the old tribes.

Gaboon was discovered by the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century, and by 1521 there was a Catholic mission settlement on the coast between the

THE COLONISATION OF OGOWE AND ITS MISSIONS 7

mouths of the Congo and the Ogowe. Cape Lopez is named after one of them, Odoardo Lopez, who came out there in 1578. , In the eighteenth century the Jesuits had extensive plantations on the coast, with thousands of slaves but they were as far from penetrating to the hinterland as were the white traders.

When, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the French and the English combined to fight the slave trade on the west coast, they chose, in 1849, which lies north of that of Cape Lopez for the headquarters of their fleet, establishing there also a settlement to which they could send the rescued slaves : hence the name Libreville. That the narrow channels which empty themselves here and there into Cape Lopez bay belonged to a great river, the whites did not yet know, for the natives inhabiting the coast had withheld the information in order to keep the inland trade in their own hands. It was not till 1862 that Lieut. Serval, while on an excursion to the south-east of Libreville, discovered the Ogowe in the neighbourhood of Lambarene. Then began the exploration, from Cape Lopez, of the lower course of the river, and the chiefs were gradually brought to acknowledge the French protectorate.

When in the eighties the need was felt of finding the most convenient route for trade from the coast up to the navigable parts of the Congo, de Brazza believed that it was to be found in the Ogowe, since this river rises only some- 125 miles north-west of Stanley Pool, and is separated from the Alima, a navigable tributary of the Congo, only by a narrow watershed. He even succeeded in getting to the Congo by this route a steamer which could be taken to pieces and transported by

8 I. HOW I CAME TO BE A DOCTOR IN THE FOREST

land, but the route proved to be impracticable for trade on account of the difficulties caused by the rapids in the upper part of the Ogowe. The construction of the Belgian-Congo railway between Matadi and Brazzaville was finished in 1898, and this put a final end to any idea of making the Ogowe a way to the Congo. To-day the Ogowe is used only by the traffic which goes up to its own still comparatively unexplored hinterland.

The first Protestant missionaries on the Ogowe were Americans, who came there about i860, but as they could not comply with the requirement of the French Government that they should give their school instruction in French, they resigned their work later on to the Paris Missionary Society.

To-day this society owns four stations ; N’Gomo, Lambarene, Samkita, and Talagouga. N’Gomo is about 140 miles from the coast, and the others follow one another in that order at intervals of about 35 miles. Talagouga is situated on a picturesque island just in front of N’Djole, which is the farthest point to which the river steamer goes.

At each Protestant mission station there are generally one unmarried and two married missionaries, and, as a rule, a woman teacher also, making five or six persons, without reckoning the children.

The Catholic mission has three stations in the same district : one in Lambarene, one in N’Djole, and one near Samba, on the N’Gounje, the largest tributary of the Ogowe, and on each station there live about ten whites : usually three priests, two lay brothers, and five sisters.

The administrative officials of the district are

THE COLONISATION OF OGOWE AND ITS MISSIONS g

Stationed at Cape Lopez, at Lambarene, at Samba, and at N’Djole, with about five hundred coloured soldiers distributed over it to act as a police force.

Such was the country, and such the people among whom for four and a half years I worked as the forest doctor. What I experienced during that time and the observations I made previous to the outbreak of the war, I shall now describe with the help of the reports which I wrote every six months in Lambarene and sent as printed letters to my friends and supporters. During the war such correspondence was, of course, impossible, and for that later period and for what is said about the rehgious and social problems treated of, I rely on memoranda which I made for my own use.

Chapter II The Journey

Lambarene, July, 1913.

The church bells in my native Alsatian village of Giinsbach, in the Vosges, had just ceased ringing for the afternoon service on Good Friday, 1913, when the train appeared round the corner of the wood, and the journey to Africa began. We waved our farewells from the platform of the last coach, and for the last time saw the fleche on the church tower peeping up among the trees. When should we see them again ? When next day Strasbourg Cathedral sank out of sight we seemed to be already in a foreign land.

On Easter Sunday we heard once more the dear old organ of S. Sulpice’s Church in Paris and the wonderful playing of our friend Widor. At two o’clock the Bordeaux train glided out of the underground station at the Quai d’Orsay, and we began a delightful journey. Everywhere we saw people in their holiday dress ; the sunshine was brilliant, and the warm spring breeze brought out of the distance the sound of the village church bells, which seemed to be greetings to the train that was hurrying past. It was an Easter Day which seemed a glorious dream.

The Congo steamers do not start from Bordeaux but from Pauillac, which is an hour and a half by train nearer the sea. But I had to get my big packing case, which had been sent in advance by goods train, out of

FROM THE VOSGES TO TENERIFFE

II the custom house at Bordeaux, and this was closed on Easter Monday. There would have been no time on Tuesday to manage it, but fortunately an official observed and was touched by our anxiety, and enabled me to get possession of my goods without all the prescribed formalities. But it was only at the last minute that two motor cars got us and our belongings to the harbour station, where the train was already waiting which was to convey the passengers for the Congo to their ship. The feeling of relief can hardly be described with which, after all the excitement and the payment of all those who had helped us off, we sank into our seats in the railway carriage. The guard blew his whistle ; the soldiers who were also going took their places ; we moved out into the open, and for a time had the enjoyment of blue sky and pleasant breeze, with the sight here and there of water, and yellow broom in flower, and cows quietly grazing. In an hour and a half we are at the quay among packing cases, bales, and barrels, ten yards from the ship, called the Europe, which is gently tossing on the somewhat restless waters of the Gironde. Then came a time of crushing, shouting, signalling to porters ; we push and are pushed till, over the narrow gangway, we get on board and, on giving our names, learn the number of the cabin which is to be our home for three whole weeks. It is a roomy one, well forward and away from the engines, which is a great advantage. . Then we had just time to wash before the beU rang for lunch.

We had at our table several officers, the ship’s doctor, an army doctor, and two wives of colonial officials who were returning to their husbands after a voyage home to recruit. All of them, as we soon discovered, had already been in Africa or in other colonies, so that we felt ourselves to be poor untravelled home birds. I could not help thinking of the fowls my mother used to buy every summer from Italian poultry dealers to add to her stock, and which for several days used to walk about among the old ones very shyly and humbly ! One thing that struck me as noticeable in the faces of our fellow travellers was a certain expression of energy and determination.

As there was still a great deal of cargo to come aboard we did not start till the following afternoon, when under a gloomy sky we drew slowly down the Gironde. As darkness gradually set in the long roll of the waves told us that we had reached the open sea, and about nine o’clock the last shimmering lights had disappeared.

Of the Bay of Biscay the passengers told each other horrid tales. “ How I wish it were behind us ! ” we heard at every meal-time, but we were to make full proof of its malice. On the second day after starting a regular storm set in, and the ship pitched and tossed like a great rocking-horse, and rolled from starboard to port, and back from port to starboard, with impartial delight. The Congo boats do this more than others in a heavy sea because, in order to be able to ascend the river as far as Matadi, whatever the state of the water, they are of a comparatively shallow build.

Being without experience of ocean travel, I had forgotten to make the two cabin trunks fast with cords, and in the night they began to chase each other about. The two hat cases also, which contained our sun helmets, took part in the game without reflecting how badly off they might come in it, and when I tried to catch the trunks, I nearly got one leg crushed between them and

FROM THE VOSGES TO TENERIFFE the wall of the cabin. So I left them to their fate and contented myself with lying quietly in my berth and counting how many seconds elapsed between each plunge made by the ship and the corresponding rush of our boxes. Soon there could be heard similar noises from other cabins and, added to them, the sound of crockery, etc., moving wildly about in the galley and the dining saloon. With morning came a steward, who showed me the scientific way of making the baggage fast.

For three days the storm lasted with undiminished force. Standing or even sitting in the cabins or the saloons was not to be thought of ; one was thrown about from one corner to the other, and several passengers received more or less serious injuries. On Sunday we had cold food only, because the cooks were unable to use the galley fire, and it was not till we were near Tenerifie that the storm abated.

I had been looking forward to the first sight of this island, which is always said to be so magnificent, but, alas ! I overslept myself and woke only as we were entering the harbour. Then, scarcely had the anchor been dropped, when we were hemmed in on both sides by coahng-hulks from which were hoisted sacks of food for the engines, to be emptied through the hatches into the ship’s hold.

iis

sf: m

Teneriffe lies on high ground which slopes rather steeply into the sea, and has all the appearance of a Spanish town. The island is carefully cultivated and produces potatoes enough to supply the whole coast of West Africa, besides bananas, early potatoes, and other vegetables for Europe.

We weighed anchor about three o’clock, and I stood in the bows and watched how the anchor slowly left the bottom and came up through the transparent water. I watched also, with admiration, what I took for a blue bird fljdng gracefully above the surface of the sea, till a sailor told me it was a flying fish.

Then, as we moved from the coast southwards, there rose slowly up behind the island the snow-capped summit of its highest mountain, till it lost itself in the clouds, while we steamed away over a gently heaving sea and admired the entrancing blue of the water.

It was during this portion of the voyage that we found it possible to become acquainted with one another. The other passengers were mostly army officers and doctors and civil service officials ; it surprised me to find so few traders on board. The officials, as a rule, are told only where they are to land, and not until on shore do they get to know their ultimate destination.

Among those whom we got to know best were a lieutenant and a Government official. The latter was going to the Middle Congo region and had to leave his wife and children for two years. The heutenant was in much the same position, and was expecting to go up to Abescher. He had already been in Tonquin, and in Madagascar, on the Senegal, the Niger, and the Congo, and he was interested in every department of colonial affairs. He held crushing views about Mahommedanism as it prevails among the natives, seeing in it the greatest danger there is for the future of Africa. “ The Mahommedan negro,” he said, " is no longer any

FROM TENERIFFE TO CAPE LOPEZ 15

good for anything. You may build him railways, dig him canals, spend hundreds of thousands of pounds to provide irrigation for the land he is to cultivate, but it all makes no impression on him ; he is absolutely and on principle opposed to everything European, however advantageous and profitable it may be. But let a marabout — a traveUing preacher of Islam — come into the village on his ambling horse with his yellow cloak over his shoulders, then things begin to wake up ! Everybody crowds round him, and brings his savings in order to buy with hard cash charms against sickness, wounds, and snake bite, against bad spirits and bad neighbours. Wherever the negro population has turned Mahommedan there is no progress, either socially or economically. When we built the first railway in Madagascar, the natives stood for days together round the locomotive and wondered at it ; they shouted for joy when it let off steam, and kept trying to explain to each other how the thing could move. In an African town inhabited by Mahommedan negroes, the local water power was used once for an installation of electric light, and it was expected that the people would be surprised at the novel brightness. But the evening that the lamps were first used the whole population remained inside their houses and huts and discussed the matter there, so as to show their indifference to the novelty.” *

Very valuable I found my acquaintance with a military doctor who had already had twelve years’ experience of Equatorial Africa, and was going to Grand Bassam as director of the Bacteriological Institute there.

* In some African colonies Mahommedan negroes are more open to progress.

At my request he spared me two hours every morning, during which he gave me an account of the general system of tropical medicine, illustrated by his own experiments and experiences. It was very necessary, he thought, that as many independent doctors as possible should devote themselves to the care of the native population ; only so could we hope to get the mastery of the sleeping sickness.

The day after we left Teneriffe the troops were ordered to wear their sun-helmets whenever they were outside the saloons and cabins. This precaution struck me as noticeable, because the weather was still cool and fresh, hardly warmer than it is with us in June, but on the same day I got a warning from an “ old African,” as I was enjojdng the sight of the sunset with nothing on my head. ” From to-day onwards,” he said, ” you must, even though the weather is not yet hot, regard the sun as your worst enemy, and that whether it is rising, or high in heaven, or setting, and whether the sky is cloudy or not. Why this is so, and on what the sun’s power depends, I cannot tell you, but you may take it from me that people get dangerous sunstrokes before they get close to the equator, and that the apparently mild heat of the rising or setting sun is even more treacherous than the full glow of that fiery body at mid-day.”

At Dakar, the great harbour of the Colony of Senegambia, my wife and I set foot for the first time on the soil of Africa to which we were to devote our lives, and we felt it as a somewhat solemn moment. Of Dakar itself I have no kindly remembrange, for I cannot forget the cruelty to animals which is universal there. The town hes on a steep slope, the streets are

FROM TENERIFFE TO CAPE LOPEZ 17

mostly in very bad condition, and the lot of the poor beasts of burden which are at the mercy of the negroes is terrible : I have never seen such overworked horses and mules as here. On one occasion when I came on two negroes who were perched on a cart heavily laden with wood which had stuck in the newly mended street, and with loud shouts were belabouring their poor beast, I simply could not pass by, but compelled them to dismount and to push behind till the three of us got the cart on the move. They were much disconcerted, but obeyed without replying. “ If you cannot endure to see animals ill-treated, don’t go to Africa ! ” said the lieutenant to me when I got back. “You will see plenty of that kind of horror here.”

At this port we took on board a number of Senegalese tirailleurs with their wives and children. They lay about the foredeck, and at night crept, head and all, into big sacks, as they had to sleep in the open. The wives and children were heavily loaded with charms, enclosed in little leather bags, even the babies at the ! breast not being exempt.

The shores of Africa I had pictured to myself as desert, and when, on the way to Konakri, the next place of call to Dakar, we put in towards the coast, I was surprised to see nothing but magnificently green woods coming down right to the water’s edge. With my telescope I could see the pointed huts of the negro villages, and rising between us and them,, like a cloud, the spray of the waves on the bar ; the sea, however, was fairly calm, and the coast, so far as I could see, was flat.

“ A shark ! A shark ! ” I rushed from the writing saloon, and was shown a black triangular object i8

projecting from the water and moving in the direction of the ship. It was a fin of that dreaded sea-monster, and whoever has once seen it never forgets it or confuses it with anything else. The West African harbours all swarm with sharks. In Kotonou I saw one, enticed by the kitchen refuse, come to about twelve yards from the ship. The light being good and the water very transparent, I could see for several minutes the whole length of its glistening grey and yellow body, and observe how the creature turned over nearly on to its back to get what it considered worth devouring into its mouth, which, as we all know, is placed on the underside of its head.