From the banks of the Congo to Kamerun is not a very far cry as distances go in Africa.  Kamerun is under the German flag, and a German writer, Hugo Zoeller, has described life in that colony with the eyes of a shrewd observer.  What he says about the negro’s capacity for love shows deep psychological insight (III., 68-70): 

“Europeans residing in Africa who have married a negro woman declare unanimously that there is no such thing there as love and fidelity in the European sense.  It happens with infinitely greater frequency that a European falls in love with his black companion than she with him; or rather the latter does not happen at all.  A hundred times I have listened to discussions of this topic in many different places, but I have never heard of a single case of a genuine full-blooded negress falling in love with a white man....  The stupidest European peasant girl is, in comparison with an African princess, still an ideally endowed being.”

Zoeller adds that in all his African experiences he never found a negress of whom he should have been willing to assume that she would sacrifice herself for a man she was attached to.  On another page he says: 

“A negro woman does not fall in love in the same sense as a European, not even as the least civilized peasant girl.  Love, in our sense of the word, is a product of our culture belonging to a higher stage in the development of latent faculties than the negro race has reached.  Not only is the negro a stranger to the diverse intellectual and sentimental qualities which we denote by the name of love:  nay, even in a purely bodily sense it may be asserted that his nervous system is not only less sensitive, but less well-developed.  The negro loves as he eats and drinks....  And just as little as a black epicure have I ever been able to discover a negro who could rise to the imaginative phases of amorous dalliance.  A negro ... may buy dozens upon dozens of wives without ever being drawn by an overpowering feeling to any one of them.  Love is, among the blacks, as much a matter of money as the palm oil or ivory trade.  The black man buys his wife when she is still a child; when she reaches the age at which our maidens go to their first ball, her nervous system, which never was particularly sensitive anyway, is completely blunted, so that she takes it as a matter of course to be sold again and again as a piece of property.  One hears often enough of a ‘woman palaver,’ which is regarded exactly like a ‘goat palaver,’ as a damage to property, but one never, positively never, hears of a love-affair.  The negress never has a sweetheart, either in her youngest days or after her so-called marriage.  She is regarded, and regards herself, as a piece of property and a beast of burden.”

A SLAVE COAST LOVE-STORY

Travelling a short distance northwest from Kamerun we reach the Slave Coast of West Africa, to which A.B.  Ellis has devoted two interesting books, including chapters in the folklore of the Yoruba and Ewe-speaking peoples of this region.  Among the tales recorded are two which illustrate African ideas regarding love.  I copy the first verbatim from Ellis’s book on the Yoruba (269-70):