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Updated: July 25, 2025
As we take up our position a boat leaves the shore flying the Congo Flag, a blue ground with a golden star in the centre. Soon after we go ashore in a dug out. propelled by Kru boys to the town of Banana, which is built on this sandy peninsula and is thus guarded by sharks on one side and crocodiles on the other. We land at a wooden pier used chiefly for loading canoes.
The Kruboy much prefers being paid off in goods. I well remember an exquisite scene between Captain and King Koffee of the Kru Coast when the subject of engaging boys was being shouted over one voyage out. The Captain at that time thought I was a W.W.T.A.A. and ostentatiously wanted Koffee to let him pay off the boys he was engaging to work the ship in money, and not in gin and gunpowder.
"There are men in Attra who want him dead, and they have been doing their best to hurry him off. I caught a Kru boy bringing him gin this afternoon. Evidently it has been a regular thing." "I am very sorry indeed to hear this," the woman said, "and I am sure my husband will be too. He will feel that, in a certain measure, he has betrayed Captain Francis's trust.
On the banks and streams are sundry little villages, Kru Town and Port Robert, the American mission-ground. The Mount is an isolated rocky tongue rising suddenly like an island from the low levels, and trending north-west to south-east. The site is perfectly healthy; the ground is gravel, not clay, and the stone is basalt.
Also easily recognized are the Kpwessi, skillful in weaving and ironwork; the Kru, intelligent, sea-faring, and eager for learning; the Grebo, ambitious and aggressive, and in language connection close to the Kru; the Bassa, with characteristics somewhat similar to those of the Kru, but in general not quite so ambitious; the Buzi, wild and highly tattooed; and the cannibalistic Mano.
Day after day Kru boys, natives and Europeans down on their luck, came creeping in. Far away across the rolling plain the straight belt of flint-laid road-bed stretched to the horizon, one gang in advance cutting turf, another beating in the small stones. The boy grew thin and bronzed, Trent and he toiled as though their lives hung upon the work.
Then I rode away to Abu Kru battle-field and had a look at what remained of the zereba, the little detached fort I had asked might be built, and the graves of our dead. Some of these had been rifled. Heaps of dead animal bones lay about, for we lost many camels that 19th January 1885. The enemy had gathered up and buried all their own dead.
His reasons are shrewd, if not convincing; for instance, 'most languages, says the Right Reverend, 'have some term which we translate "love." But "love" in English is not equivalent to its representative in Kru or in Vái. Therefore by using their words I am expressing their ideas; I bring them over to mine by the reverse process.
In 1858 an incident that threatened complications with France but that was soon happily closed arose from the fact that a French vessel which sought to carry away some Kru laborers to the West Indies was attacked by these men when they had reason to fear that they might be sold into slavery and not have to work simply along the coast, as they at first supposed.
Omdurman had fallen on the 13th, but Khartoum would probably not have been assaulted so soon had not the mahdi suffered such severe defeats at Abou Klea and at Abou Kru, three days later; then he hurried back to Khartoum and again summoned Gordon to surrender.
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