Through unknown Nigeria

Burutu, like Forcados, five miles lower down the Niger, was a mere mangrove swamp, a forlorn no-man’s land. It has been reclaimed by the Niger Company for headquarters, and is now a bustling, thriving spot, large enough to be termed, by comparison, a small Glasgow in West Africa.

It has most of the characteristics of a port. On the 3,000 feet frontage two ocean liners can lie end-on—there is always one berthed—and seven of the eight hatches simultaneously discharging or loading; smaller craft—branch boats of 1,000 tons to stern-wheelers and launches for river traffic—are continuously bringing produce and passengers and taking up country small goods, among which bags of salt occupy an important place; whilst the coal wharf knows no rest. Awaiting shipment are 7,000 casks of palm-oil. Recently there were 10,000.

Besides, there are three hulks converted from two old sailing ships and a steamer. Two of the hulks are used to warehouse bulk produce of palm-kernels and shea-nuts; the third holds coal. But the Company are building a new coal wharf of two tiers to enable the coal ships to discharge cargo direct into trucks.

Fifteen corrugated iron sheds, 90 feet by 30 feet, give accommodation on the wharf for goods which should not be left in the open, and also for the extensive engineering and carpenters’ workshops, under a white Superintendent Engineer, who has with him three European fitters, a boiler-maker, two shipwrights and a large body of skilled natives from Coast towns. A couple of slipways take the river craft for repair, from launches to steamers up to 700 tons.

The coloured staff of fitters, blacksmiths, turners, moulders, and the rest of them are men from Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria. They serve apprenticeship in the Company’s engineering shops for five years. If their conduct has been satisfactory they will be graded as improvers. Next they may be drafted on a river boat as third engineers, rising to second or to chief engineer. Others may start on shore, either in the workshops or as house-boys. Should they wish it, and their behaviour be good, they go on the river steamers, commencing as stewards or deck hands and going through every stage, as quartermasters, boatswains, and mates, and rising to command the vessel, for, with the exception of three, all the stern-wheelers and small steamers are in the hands of black captains, and thoroughly capable they are. It was with such a “Cappy” I came from Baro to Lokoja.

Burutu does not consist of only a long line of reclaimed beach and workshops abutting. There is much more. Hundreds of labourers are employed—400 on the commercial beach alone—and for them and others model villages have been laid out and the forest cleared for some distance back; for, previous to the Niger Company making Burutu its principal centre, the trees crowded down to the water edge, as they do at the opposite side of the river and at the ends of the nearly two miles of beach.

These villages have districts. You must not expect, say, the native clerk from Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, or Lagos to have his residence cheek-by-jowl with the Yoruba labourer or the Ijaw river boys. Why should he not object? This is not said in an ironical tone. Do we not have a corresponding feeling? How shocked English suburbia would be, to be sure, if their neat promenades and well-laid-out boulevards were the resort of men who gained a living with pick and shovel! And who can say he enjoys huddling in train or tram against a navvy with the clay on his clothes, fresh from the exercise of his profession? The black man, too, has steps in his social ladder. He, too, has feelings, like all of us, whether he be the Coast person with elementary education and sometimes deservedly hated by the white; whether he be the Mohamedan of the hinterland; whether he be the Pagan of the uplands and the hills.

Therefore, the houses for colour men are in separate groups, according to the class occupying them. The labourers’ dwellings of bamboo walls and palm leaves are being gradually replaced by buildings bricked to about three feet at the sides and continued with corrugated iron, the same material for roof, and with cement floors. The ten senior coloured clerks are given two large bungalows divided into two rooms for each married couple, a portion of the verandah walled off from the adjoining family. The newer houses being erected will include bathrooms and kitchens.

An isolation hospital for natives holds any case of a contagious nature. To the hospital for Europeans a dispensary is attached, and to it come daily between 50 and 60 of the black dwellers in Burutu, including mammies and piccaninnies. Most of the male patients’ ailments are simple knocks or cuts received in the course of their work. The expenditure for all this is borne by the Niger Company, as well as the services of the Government doctor at Forcados, who is at Burutu every day except Sunday and attends to both Europeans and natives.

The European bungalows are made mosquito-proof. In each of the messrooms is a large overhead fan, electrically driven, and in the principal rooms portable table fans kept going from the same source. Even persons who live in a cold climate will realise what a boon these fans are in a quarter of the country where the heat is excessive and is always associated with a damp enervating atmosphere.

I suppose it is generally known that the Right Hon. John Burns, now a Cabinet Minister, in his younger years served a term, as an engineer, with the Niger Company. The statement is frequently made in West Africa that it took place at Burutu. That is incorrect. In Mr Burns’s time Burutu was a desolate mangrove swamp; the headquarters were at Akassa, at the mouth of the River Nun, about 50 miles further along the Coast from Forcados. Several renderings of a snake story have appeared in English papers. An old number of The Engineer’s Gazette, dated May 1893, has furnished me with what is evidently the correct account. The appended quotation is taken from a contribution by John Parkin, who in the text describes himself as “Superintendent of an engineering repairing shop.” I gather that the period of which he has written was 1880 or thereabouts.

The launch of my very good friend, Mr Price, of Burutu, took me from there the five miles to the sea, and once more I steamed away from the land of Nigeria, which, notwithstanding the privations and hardships undergone, and the bad name the climate is given, retains for me a continual attraction and fascination to revisit.