“was most anxious I should become his son-in-law, ‘moyennant’ several ‘longs’ of cloth.  Seeing my hesitation, he mistook it for scorn and hastened to point out the manifold charms of his girls, whilst these damsels waxed hotly indignant at my coldness.  Then another inspiration seized their father—­perhaps I liked a maturer style of beauty, and his wife, by no means an uncomely person, was dragged forward while her husband explained with the most expressive gestures, putting his outspread hands before his eyes and affecting to look another way, that, again with the simple intermediary of a little cloth, he would remain perfectly unconscious of whatever amatory passages might occur between us.”

Evidently the poetry of love had not drifted down as far as the Pool.  Let us therefore see what Johnston has to say of the Upper Congo (423): 

“Husbands are fond of their own wives, as well as of those of other people.”  “Marriage is a mere question of purchase, and is attended by no rejoicings or special ceremony.  A man procures as many wives as possible, partly because they labor for him and also because soon after one wife becomes with child she leaves him for two or three years until her baby is weaned.”  Apart from these facts Johnston gives us no hint as to what he understands by affection except what the following sentence allows us to infer (429): 

“The attachment between these dogs and their African masters is deep and fully reciprocated.  They are considered very dainty eating by the natives, and are indeed such a luxury that by an unwritten law only the superior sex—­the men—­are allowed to partake of roasted dog.”

The amusing italics are mine.

If Johnston really found traces of poetic, ennobling love in this region, surely so startling a novelty in West Africa would have called for a full “bill of particulars,” which would have been of infinitely greater scientific value than the details he gives regarding unchastity, infidelity, commercialism, separation from wives and contempt for women, which are so common throughout the continent as to call for no special notice.  Evidently his ideas regarding “poetic love” were as hazy as those of some other writers quoted in this chapter, and we have once more been led on by the mirage of a “false fact."[146]

In 1891 the Swedish explorer Westermarck published a book describing his adventures among the cannibal tribes of the Upper Congo.  I have not seen the book, but the Rev. James Johnston, in summing up its contents, says (193): 

“A man can sell wife and children according to his own depraved pleasure.  Women are the slave drudges, the men spending their hours in eating, drinking, and sleeping.  Cannibalism in its worst features prevails.  Young women are prized as special delicacies, particularly girls’ ears prepared in palm oil, and, in order to make the flesh more palatable, the luckless victims are kept in water up to their necks for three or four days before they are slaughtered and served as food.”

BLACK LOVE IN KAMERUN