Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
To religious teaching the Kruboy seems for an African singularly impervious, but the two lessons he has learnt ship and shore work are the best that the white has so far taught the black, because unattended with the evil consequences that have followed the other lessons.
When they do, I hereby claim that real red trail as mine. I confess I like the African on the whole, a thing I never expected to do when I went to the Coast with the idea that he was a degraded, savage, cruel brute; but that is a trifling error you soon get rid of when you know him. The Kruboy is decidedly the most likeable of all Africans that I know.
We could not see either the west or east termination of it, for it lay like a rotten serpent twisted between the mangroves. It never entered into our heads to try to cross it, for when a swamp is too deep for mangroves to grow in it, "No bottom lib for them dam ting," as a Kruboy once said to me, anent a small specimen of this sort of ornament to a landscape.
Their next tutors were the traders, who have taught and still teach them beach work; how to handle cargo, try oil, and make themselves generally useful in a factory, "learn sense," as the Kruboy himself puts it.
The rule is, make them respect you, and make them like you, and then the thing is done; but first dealing with the Kruboy, with all his good points, is very trying work, and they give the new hand an awful time of it while they are experimenting on him to see how far they can do him.
He however controlled his feelings sufficiently to carefully arrange the due amount of each article to be paid, and the affair was settled. The somewhat cumbrous wage the Kruboy gets at the end of his term of service, minus those things he has had on account and plus those things he has "found," is certainly a source of great worry to our friend.
When this possibility becomes known I can foresee nothing for the Kruboy but nervous breakdown; for even now, with his mind at rest regarding the things in his box, he lives in a state of constant anxiety about those out of it, which have to lie on the deck during the return voyage to his home.
The pay of the Kruboy averages 1 pounds a month. There are modifications in the way in which this sum is reached; for example, some missionaries pay each man 20 pounds a year, but then he has to find his own chop. Some South-West Coast traders pay 8 pounds a year, but they find their boys entirely, and well, in food, and give them a cloth a week.
I myself rather doubt if this is the case, but expect there is a very heavy tax levied on them, for your Kruboy is very much a married man, and the Elders of his tribe have to support and protect his wives and families when he is away at work, and I should not wonder if the law was that these said wives and families "revert to the State" if the boy fails to return within something like his appointed time.
Needless to say, men-of-war are popular, although service on board them cuts our friend off from almost every chance of stealing chickens and other things of which I may not speak, as Herodotus would say. I do not know the manner in which men-of-war pay off the Kruboy, but I think in hard cash.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking