And the dwellers in this earthly paradise? Knowing their pathetic and curious history I was anxious to see this people sprung from men and women gathered from all corners of Africa, unfortunate and unhappy.
Frankly, I share with the majority of Coasters a certain dislike to the educated negro. But many of the men I like best, the men whose opinion I have found well worth taking about things West-African, tell me I am wrong. You cannot expect to come up from savagery in a few decades, and the thing I dislike so in the negro clerk is but a phase that will pass. Here in Sierra Leone I met one man who made me feel that it would pass, that the time will come when the colour of the skin will make no difference, and that is the African known to all the world as Dr Blyden. He is an old man now and he was ill, so I went to see him; and as I sat and talked to him one still, hot evening, looking down the busy street where men and women in all stages of dress and undress were passing to and fro, carrying burdens on their heads, shrieking and shouting at one another in the unintelligible jargon they call English, had I not looked and seen for myself that his complexion was the shadowed livery of the burnished sun, I should have thought I was talking to some professor of one of the older Universities of England. His speech was measured and cultivated and there was no trace in it of that indescribable pompous intonation which seems peculiar to the educated black man. He gave me good advice, too.
“What shall I write about?” I asked, and halfexpected him to enter into a long dissertation upon the possibilities that lay latent in his race. But I might have known this man, who had conquered more difficulties on his way upwards than ever I had dreamed about, better than that.
“Write about what you see,” said he. “And if you do not understand what you see then ask until you do.”
So I have taken his advice and I write about what I have seen, and though afterwards I found reason to like much the peasant peoples of West Africa, I did not like the Creoles, as these descendants of freed slaves call themselves. Do I judge them hardly, I wonder? If so, I judge only as all the West Coast judges. They are a singularly arrogant people, blatant and self-satisfied, and much disliked along the Coast from the Gambia to San Paul de Loando. But they have taken advantage of the peace which England has ensured to them, and are prosperous. Traders and town-dwellers are they if they can manage it, and they pursue their avocations up and down the Coast. A curious thing about them is their language. If you ask them they would tell you it is English, and they would tell you they know no other; and English it is, as to the words, but such an extraordinary jargon it is quite as difficult to understand as any unknown tongue. Yet it is the peculiar bastard tongue that is spoken all over the Coast. Many who speak it as the only means of communication between them and their boys must have wondered how such a jargon ever came into existence, and it was not till Mr Migeod wrote his book on the languages of West Africa that anyone in fact ever thought of classing it as a separate language. But once pointed out, the fact is undoubted. Sierra Leonese is simply English spoken with a negro construction.