I said, “It's a horrible place. I never saw a beautiful place more utterly spoiled.”
He looked at me with surprise, and his surprise was thoroughly genuine. “Why, what's the matter? It's nice and clean.”
I pointed to the beautiful hills all round.
“Mosquitoes,” said he, with a little snort for my ignorance.
“You can't have trees. The boys would leave pots under them. Breeding places for mosquitoes.”
He was my host, so I did not like to say all I felt.
“I'd rather die of fever than sunstroke any day,” was the way it finally came out.
“My dear lady,” he said judicially, as one who was correcting a long-standing error, “no one dies of fever in Africa.”
“Exactly what I always maintain,” said I; “you, with your ghastly hills are arranging for them to die of sunstroke.”
But he only reiterated that they could not have the trees, because the boys would leave pots and pans under them, and so turn them into mosquito traps. Personally, I didn't arrive at the logic of that, because it has never seemed to me to require trees for boys to leave pots about. The theory was, I suppose, that they would not walk out into the hot sun, while they might be tempted to do work and make litter under shade-trees. And again I did not wonder that there were no women save the nursing Sister in Prestea. To live on that hill and keep one's health would have been next door to impossible.
“It doesn't matter,” said the doctor, “we don't want women in West Africa. I keep my wife at home. It isn't a white man's country.”
But I'm bound to say that they very often arrange it shall not be a white man's and emphatically not a white woman's country. It suits somebody's plan that the country should have an evil reputation.
Goldfields, too, must never be judged in the same category as one judges the ordinary settlements in a country. When I was a tiny child I learned to discriminate, and to know that “diggers” must not be judged by the rules that guide the conduct of ordinary men. The population of a goldfield are a wild and reckless lot, and they lead wild and utterly reckless lives, and die in places where other people manage to live happily enough.
When the gold first “broke out” in Victoria, my father was Gold Commissioner on the Buckland River, among the mountains in the north-eastern district, and I have heard him tell how the men used to die like flies of “colonial” fever, and the theory was that there was some emanation from the dense vegetation that was all around them. Nowadays the Buckland is one of the healthiest spots in a very healthy country, and no one ever gets fever of any sort there. Now I do not wish to say that West Africa is one of the healthiest countries in the world, but I do say that men very very often work their own undoing.