A cry of “Drivers!” will depopulate a village instantly, and a missionary who at one moment has been combing brown ants from his hair will in the next find himself standing safely in the creek or the water barrel, to stay until the drivers have taken their leave.  Among less spectacular things, mosquitoes fly in crowds and leave fevers in their wake, gnats and flies are always on hand, chigoes bore and breed under toe-nails, hook-worms hang themselves to the walls of the intestines, and other threadlike worms enter the eyeballs and the flesh of the body.  Endurance through generations has given the people large immunity from the effects of hook-worm and malaria, but not from the indigenous diseases, kraw-kraw, yaws and elephantiasis, nor of course from dysentery and smallpox which the Europeans introduced.  Yet robust health is fairly common, and where health prevails there is generally happiness, for the negroes have that within their nature.  They could not thrive in Guinea without their temperament.

It is probable that no people ever became resident on or near the west coast except under compulsion.  From the more favored easterly regions successive hordes have been driven after defeat in war.  The Fangs on the Ogowe are an example in the recent past.  Thus the inhabitants of Guinea, and of the coast lands especially, have survived by retreating and adapting themselves to conditions in which no others wished to dwell.  The requirements of adaptation were peculiar.  To live where nature supplies Turkish baths without the asking necessitates relaxation.  But since undue physical indolence would unfit people for resistance to parasites and hostile neighbors, the languid would perish.  Relaxation of mind, however, brought no penalties.  The climate in fact not only discourages but prohibits mental effort of severe or sustained character, and the negroes have submitted to that prohibition as to many others, through countless generations, with excellent grace.  So accustomed were they to interdicts of nature that they added many of their own through conventional taboo, some of them intended to prevent the eating of supposedly injurious food, others calculated to keep the commonalty from infringing upon the preserves of the dignitaries.[2]

[Footnote 2:  A convenient sketch of the primitive African regime is J.A.  Tillinghast’s The Negro in Africa and America, part I. A fuller survey is Jerome Dowd’s The Negro Races, which contains a bibliography of the sources.  Among the writings of travelers and sojourners particularly notable are Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa as a vivid picture of coast life, and her West African Studies for its elaborate and convincing discussion of fetish, and the works of Sir A.B.  Ellis on the Tshi-, Ewe-and Yoruba-speaking peoples for their analyses of institutions along the Gold Coast.]