Chapter V: Part 5

As to the natives, it is much harder to judge their attitude. Their name for a missionary is “afoola,” and though, I believe, the word only means a man of learning, it naturally suggests an innocent simplicity--something “a bit soft,” as we say. At first that probably was the general idea, as was seen when M. Coillard, the great French missionary of Barotzeland, had a big wash in his yard one afternoon, and next Sunday preached to an enthusiastic congregation all dressed in scraps of his own linen. And to some extent the feeling still exists. There are natives who go to a mission village for what they can get, or simply for a sheltered existence and kindly treatment. There are probably a good many who experience religious convictions in order to please, like the followers of any popular preacher at home. But, as a rule, it is not comfort or gain, it is not persuasive eloquence or religious conviction that draws the native. It is the two charms of entire honesty and of inward peace. In a country where the natives are habitually regarded as fair game for every kind of swindle and deceit, where bargains with them are not binding, and where penalties are multiplied over and over again by legal or illegal trickery, we cannot overestimate the influence of men who do what they say, who pay what they agree, and who never go back on their word. From end to end of Africa common honesty is so rare that it gives its possessor a distinction beyond intellect, and far beyond gold. In Africa any honest man wins a conspicuous and isolated greatness. In twenty-five years the natives of Angola have learned that the honesty of the missionaries is above suspicion. It is a great achievement. It is worth all the teaching of the alphabet, addition, and Old Testament history, no matter how successful, and it is hardly necessary to search out any other cause for the influence which the missionaries possess.

So, as usual, it is the unconscious action that is the best. Being naturally and unconsciously honest, the missionaries have won the natives by honesty--have won, that is to say, the almost imperceptible percentage of natives who happen to live in the three or four villages near their stations; and it must be remembered that you might go through Angola from end to end without guessing that missionaries exist. But, apart from this unconscious influence, there are plenty of conscious efforts too. There is the kindergarten, where children puddle in clay and sing to movement and march to the tune of “John Brown.” There are schools for every stage, and you may see the chief of a village doing sums among the boys, and proudly declaring that for his part 3 + 0 + 1 shall equal five.[5] There are carpenters’ shops and forges and brick-kilns and building classes and sewing classes for men. There are Bible classes and prayer-meetings and church services where six hundred people will be jammed into the room for four hundred, and men sweat, and children reprove one another’s behavior, and babies yell and splutter and suck, and when service is over the congregation rush with their hymn-books to smack the mosquitoes on the walls and see the blood spurt out. There are singing classes where hymns are taught, and though the natives have nothing of their own that can be called a tune, there is something horrible in the ease with which they pick up the commonplace and inevitable English cadences. I once had a set of carriers containing two or three mission boys, and after the first day the whole lot “went Fantee” on “Home, Sweet Home,” just a little wrong. For more than two years I have journeyed over Africa in peace and war, but I have never suffered anything to compare to that fortnight of “Home, Sweet Home,” just a little wrong, morning, noon, and night.

All these methods of instruction and guidance are pursued in the permanent mission stations, to say nothing of the daily medical service of healing and surgery, which spreads the fame of the missions from village to village. Many out-stations, conducted by the natives themselves, have been formed, and they should be quickly increased, though it is naturally tempting to keep the sheep safe within the mission fold. If the missionaries were suddenly removed in a body, it is hard to say how long their teaching or influence would survive. My own opinion is that every trace of it would be gone in fifty or perhaps in twenty years. The Catholic forms would probably last longest, because greater use is made of a beautiful symbolism. But in half a century rum, slavery, and the oppression of the traders would have wiped all out, and the natives would sink into a far worse state than their original savagery. Whether the memory of the missions would last even fifty years would depend entirely upon the strength and number of the out-stations.

In practical life, the three great difficulties which the missions have to face are rum, polygamy, and slavery. From their own stations rum can be generally excluded, though sometimes a village is persecuted by a Portuguese trader because it will not buy his spirit. But the whole country is fast degenerating owing to rum. “You see no fine old men now,” is a constant saying. Rum kills them off. It is making the whole people bloated and stupid. Near the coast it is worst, but the enormous amount carried into the interior or manufactured in Bihé is telling rapidly, and I see no hope of any change as long as rum plantations of cane or sweet-potato pay better than any others, and both traders and government regard the natives only as profitable swine.

As a matter of argument, polygamy is a more difficult question still. It is universally practiced in Africa, and no native man or woman has ever had the smallest scruple of conscience or feeling of wrong about it. Where the natives can observe white men, they see that polygamy is in reality practiced among them too. If they came to Europe or America, they would find it practiced, not by every person, but by every nation under one guise or another. It seems an open question whether the native custom, with its freedom from concealment and its guarantees for woman’s protection and support, is not better than the secret and hypocritical devices of civilization, under which only one of the women concerned has any protection or guarantee at all, while a man’s relation to the others is nearly always stealthy, cruel, and casual. However, the missionaries, after long consideration, have decided to insist upon the rule of one man one wife for members of their Churches, and when I was at one station a famous Christian chief, Kanjumdu of Chiuka--by far the most advanced and intelligent native I have ever known--chose one wife out of his eight or ten, and married her with Christian rites, while the greater part of his twenty-four living children joined in the hymns. It was fine, but my sympathy was with one of the rejected wives, who would not come to the wedding-feast and refused to take a grain of meal or a foot of cloth from his hand ever again.

As to slavery, I have already spoken about the missionaries’ attitude. They dare not say anything openly against it, because if they published the truth they would probably be poisoned and certainly be driven out of the country, leaving their followers exposed to a terrible and exterminating persecution. So they help in what few special cases they can, and leave the rest to time and others. It is difficult to criticize men of such experience, devotion, and singleness of aim. One must take their judgment. But at the same time one cannot help remembering that a raging fire is often easier to deal with than a smouldering refuse-heap, and that in spite of all the blood and sorrow, the wildest revolution on behalf of justice has never really failed.

But, as I said, it is hard for me to criticize the missionaries out here. My opinion of them may be misguided by the extraordinary kindliness which only traders and officials can safely resist, and I suppose one ought to envy the reasonableness of such people when, after enjoying the full hospitality of the mission stations, they spend the rest of their time in sneering at the missionaries. Nothing can surpass mission hospitality. The stranger’s condition, poverty, or raggedness does not matter in the least, nor does the mission’s own scarcity or want. Whatever there is belongs to the strangers, even if nothing is left but a dish of black beans and a few tea-leaves, used already. In a long and wandering life I have nowhere found hospitality so complete and ungrudging and unconscious. Only those who have lived for months among the dirt and cursing of ox-wagons, or have tramped with savages far through deserts wet and dry, plunged in slime or burned with thirst, worn with fever and poisoned with starvation, could appreciate what it means to come at last into a mission station and see the trim thatched cottages, like an old English village, and to hear the quiet and pleasant voices, and feel again the sense of inward peace, which, I suppose, is the reward of holy living. How often when I have been getting into bed the night after I have thus arrived, I have thought to myself, “Here I am, free from hunger and thirst, in a silent room, with a bed and real sheets, while people at home probably picture me dying in the depths of a dismal forest where pygmies sharpen their poisoned arrows and make their saucepans ready, or a lion stands rampant on one side of me, and, on the other side, a unicorn.”

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Since this was written, the arbitration has been published (July, 1905), but by the new frontier I think none of the Chibokwe will be brought under British influence.

[5] It must be a little difficult to teach arithmetic to a race whose word for “seven” is “six and two” (_epandu-vali_), or “six over again.” Or to teach dates where the word for “to-morrow” (_hena_) is the same as the word for “yesterday.”

VIII

THE SLAVE ROUTE TO THE COAST

After coming out from the interior by passing again through the Hungry Country from the Zambesi basin to the Cuanza, I determined to continue following the old slave route down to Benguela and the sea. I have already spoken of this route as the main road of Central Africa, and the two hundred and seventy or three hundred miles of it which connect Bihé with the coast are crowded with trade, especially at the beginning of the dry season, which was the time of my journey. It is only a carrier’s track, though the Portuguese, as their habit is, have forced the natives to construct a few miles of useless road here and there, at intervals of several days’ march. But along that winding track, sometimes so steep and difficult that it is like a goat-path in the Alps, thousands of carriers pass every year, bearing down loads of rubber and beeswax, and bringing back cotton, salt, tinned foods, and, above all, rum. It is against the decree of the Brussels Conference of 1890 to introduce rum into Bihé at all, but who cares about decrees when rum pays and no one takes the trouble to shoot? And down this winding track the export slaves have been driven century after century. I suppose the ancestors of half the negroes in the United States and of nearly all in Cuba and Brazil came down it. And thousands of export slaves still come down it every year. Laws and conferences have prohibited the slave-trade for generations past, but who cares about laws and conferences as long as slavery pays and no one takes the trouble to shoot?

How the traffic is worked may be seen from some things which I observed upon my way. Being obliged to wait at various places to arrange carriers and recover from fevers, I spent about five weeks on the road from the crossing of the Cuanza to the sea, though it can be done in three weeks, or even in seventeen days. For the first few days I was back again in the northern part of the Bihé district, and I early passed the house of a Portuguese trader of whose reputation I had heard before. He is still claiming enormous damages for injury to his property in the war of 1902. The villagers have appealed to the fort at Belmonte against the amount, but are ordered to pay whatever he asks. To supply the necessary rubber and oxen they have now pawned their children into slavery without hope of redemption. Two days before I passed the house a villager, having pawned the last of his children and possessing nothing else, had shot himself in the bush close by. Things like that make no difference to the trader. It is the money he wants. The damage done to his property three years ago must be paid for twentyfold. Still, he is not simply the “economic man” of the old text-books. He has a decadent love of art, distinct from love of money, and just before I passed his house he had summoned the chiefs of the village as though for a conference, had locked them up in his compound, and every night he was making the old men dance for his pleasure. To the native mind such a thing is as shocking as it would be to Englishmen if Mr. Beit or Mr. Eckstein kept the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury to gambol naked before him on Sunday afternoons.

So the matter stands, and the villagers must go on selling more and more of their wives and children that the white man’s greed may be satisfied.

A day or two farther on I turned aside from the main track to visit one of the agents whom the government has specially appointed to conduct the purchase of slaves for the islands of San Thomé and Principe. There are two agents officially recognized in the Bihé district. On my way I met an old native notorious for a prosperous career of slave-trading. At the moment he was leading along a finely built man by a halter round his neck, but at sight of me he dropped the end of rope. A man who was with me charged him at once with having just sold two of his own slaves--a man and a woman--for San Thomé. He protested with righteous indignation. He would never think of doing such a thing! Sell for San Thomé! He would even give a long piece of cloth to rescue a native from such a fate! Yet, beyond question, he had sold the man and woman to the Agent that morning. They were at the Agent’s house when I arrived, and I was told he had only failed to sell the other slave because his price was too high.

The Agent himself was polite and hospitable. Business was pretty brisk. I knew he had sent off eight slaves to the coast only three days before, with orders that they should carry their own shackles and be carefully pinned together at night. But we talked only of the rumored division of the Congo, for on the other subject he was naturally a little shy, and I found out long afterwards that he knew the main object of my journey.[6] Next day, however, he was alone with the friend who had accompanied me, and he then attempted to defend his position as Agent by saying the object of the government was to buy up slaves through their special agents and “redeem” them from slavery by converting them into “contract laborers” for San Thomé. The argument was ingenious. The picture of a pitiful government willing to purchase the freedom of all slaves without thought of profit, and only driven to contract them for San Thomé because otherwise the expense would be unbearable--it is almost pathetic. But the Agent knew, as every one out here knows, that the people whom the government buys and “redeems” have been torn from their homes and families on purpose to be “redeemed”; that but for the purchases by the government agents for San Thomé the whole slave-traffic would fall to pieces; and that the actual condition of these “contracted laborers” upon the islands does not differ from slavery in any point of importance.

Leaving on the right the volcanic district of North Bihé, with its boiling springs and great deposits of magnesia, the path to the coast continues to run westward and a point or two south through country typical of Africa’s central plateau. There are the usual wind-swept spaces of bog and yellow grass, the usual rolling lines of scrubby forest, and the shallow valleys with narrow channels of water running through morass. The path skirts the northern edge of the high, wet plain of Bouru-Bouru, and on the same day, after passing this, I saw far away in the west a little blue point of mountain, hanging like an island upon the horizon. A few hours afterwards bare rock began to appear through the bog-earth and sand of the forest, and next morning new mountains came into sight from hour to hour as I advanced, till there was quite a cluster of little blue islands above the dark edges of the trees.

The day after, when I had been walking for about two hours through the monotonous woods, the upland suddenly broke. It was quick and unexpected as the snapping of a bowstring, and far below me was revealed a great expanse of country--broad valleys leading far away to the west and north, isolated groups of many-colored mountains, bare and shapely hills of granite and sandstone, and one big, jagged tooth or pike of purple rock, rising sheer from a white plain thinly sprinkled with trees and marked with watercourses. The whole scene, bare and glowing under the cloudless sky of an African winter, was like those delicate landscapes in nature’s most friendly wilderness which the Umbrians used to paint as backgrounds to the Baptist or St. Jerome or a Mother and Child. To one who has spent many months among the black forest, the marshes and sand-hills of Bihé and the Hungry Country, it gleams with a radiance of jewels, and is full of the inward stir and longing that the sudden vision of mountains always brings.[7]

At the top of the hill was a large sweet-potato plantation for rum. A gang of twenty-three slaves--chiefly women--was clearing a new patch from the bush for an extension of the fields. Over them, as usual, stood a Portuguese ganger, who encouraged their efforts with blows from a long black chicote, or hippo whip, which he rapidly tried to conceal down his trousers leg at sight of me.

At the foot of the hill, where a copious stream of water ran, a similar rum-factory had just been constructed. The hideous main building--gaunt as a Yorkshire mill--the whitewashed rows of slave-huts, the newly broken fields, the barrels just beginning to send out a loathsome stench of new spirit--all were as fresh and vile as civilization could make them. As we passed, the slaves were just enjoying a holiday for the burial of one of their number who had died that morning. They were gathered in a large crowd round the grave on the edge of the bush. Presently six of them brought out the body, wrapped in an old blanket, rolled it sideways into the shallow trench, and covered it up with earth and stones. As we climbed the next hill, my carriers, who were much interested, kept saying to one another: “Slaves! Poor slaves!” Then we heard a bell ring. The people began to crawl back to their work. The slaves’ holiday was over.

We had now passed from Bihé into the district of Bailundu, and the mountains stood around us as we descended, their summits rising little higher than the level of the Bihéan plateau--say five to six thousand feet above the sea. A detached hill in front of us was conspicuous for its fortified look. From the distance it was like one of the castellated rocks of southern France. It was the old Umbala, or king’s fortress, of Bailundu, and here the native kings used to live in savage magnificence before the curse of the white men fell. On the summit you still may see the king’s throne of three great rocks, the heading-stone where his enemies suffered, the stone of refuge to which a runaway might cling and gain mercy by declaring himself the king’s slave, the royal tombs with patterned walls hidden in a depth of trees, and the great flat rock where the women used to dance in welcome to their warriors returning from victory. One day I scrambled up and saw it all in company with a man who remembered the place in its high estate and had often sat beside the king in judgment. But all the glory is departed now. The palace was destroyed and burned in 1896. The rock of refuge and the royal throne are grown over with tall grasses. Leopards and snakes possess them merely, and it is difficult even to fight one’s way up the royal ascent through the tangle of the creepers and bush.[8]

At the foot of the hill, within a square of ditch and rampart, stands the Portuguese fort, the scene of the so-called “Bailundu war” of 1902. It was here that the native rising began, owing to a characteristic piece of Portuguese treachery, the Commandant having seized a party of native chiefs who were visiting him, at his own invitation, under promise of peace and safe-conduct. The whole affair was paltry and wretched. The natives displayed their usual inability to combine; the Portuguese displayed their usual cowardice. But, as I have shown before, the effect of the outbreak was undoubtedly to reduce the horrors of the slave-trade for a time. The overwhelming terror of the slave-traders and other Portuguese, who crept into hiding to shelter their precious lives, showed them they had gone too far. The atrocious history of Portuguese cruelty and official greed which reached Lisbon at last did certainly have some effect upon the national conscience. As I have mentioned in earlier letters, Captain Amorim of the artillery was sent out to mitigate the abominations of the trade, and for a time, at all events, he succeeded. Owing to terror, the export of slaves to San Thomé ceased altogether for about six months after the rising. It has gone back to its old proportions now--the numbers averaging about four thousand head a year (not including babies), and gradually rising.[9] But since then the traders have not dared to practise the same open cruelties as before, and the new regulations for slave-traffic--known as the Decree of January 29, 1903--do, at all events, aim at tempering the worst abuses, though their most important provisions are invariably evaded.

Only a mile or two from the fort, and quite visible from the rocks of the old Umbala, stands the American mission village of Bailundu--I believe the oldest mission in Angola except the early Jesuits’. It was founded in 1881, and for more than twenty years has been carried on by Mr. Stover and Mr. Fay, who are still conducting it. The Portuguese instigated the natives to drive them out once, and have wildly accused them of stirring up war, protecting the natives, and other crimes. But the mission has prospered in spite of all, and its village is now, I think, the prettiest in Angola. How long it may remain in its present beautiful situation one cannot say. Twenty years ago it was surrounded only by natives, but now the Portuguese have crept up to it with their rum and plantations and slavery, and where the Portuguese come neither natives nor missions can hope to stay long. It may be that in a year or two the village will be deserted, as the American mission village of Saccanjimba, a few days farther east, has lately been deserted, and the houses will be occupied by Portuguese convicts with a license to trade, while the church becomes a rum-store. In that case the missionaries will be wise to choose a place outside the fifty-kilometre radius from a fort, beyond which limit no Portuguese trader may settle. So true it is that in modern Africa an honest man has only the whites to fear. But unhappily new forts are now being constructed at two or three points along this very road.

Soon after leaving Bailundu the track divides, and one branch of it runs northwest, past the foot of that toothed mountain, or pike,[10] and so at length reaches the coast at Novo Redondo--a small place with a few sugar-cane plantations for rum and a government agency for slaves. I am told that on this road the slaves are worse treated and more frequently shackled than upon the path I followed, and certainly Novo Redondo is more secret and freer from the interference of foreigners than Benguela. But I think there cannot really be much difference. The majority of slaves are still brought down the old Benguela route, and scattered along it at intervals I have found quite new shackles, still used for pinning the slaves together, chiefly at night, though it is true the shackles near the coast are not nearly so numerous as in the interior.

I was myself determined to follow the old track and come down to the sea by that white path where I had seen the carriers ascending and descending the mountains above Katumbella many months before. Within two days from Bailundu I entered a notorious lion country. Lions are increasing rapidly all along the belt of mountains here, and they do not hesitate to eat mankind, making no prejudiced distinction between white and black. Their general method is to spring into a rest-hut at night and drag off a carrier, or sometimes two, while the camp is asleep. All the rest-camps in this district are strongly stockaded with logs, twelve or fourteen feet high, but carriers are frequently killed in spite of all the stockade. There is one old lion who has made quite a reputation as a man-hunter, and if he had an ancestral hall he could decorate it with the “trophies” of about fifty human heads. He has chosen for his hunting-lodge some cave near the next fort westward from Bailundu, and there at eve he may sometimes be seen at play upon the green. Two officers are stationed in the fort, but they do not care to interfere with the creature’s habits and pursuits. They do not even train their little toy gun on him. Perhaps they are humanitarians. So he devours mankind at leisure.

When we camped near that fort, my boys insisted I should sleep in a hut inside the stockade instead of half a mile away from them as usual. The huts are made of dry branches covered with dry leaves and grass. Inside that stockade I counted over forty huts, and each hut was crammed with carriers--men, women, and children--for the dry-season trade was beginning. There must have been five or six hundred natives in that camp at night. The stockade rose fourteen feet or more and was impenetrable. The one gate was sealed and barred with enormous logs to keep out the lion. I was myself given a hut in the very centre of the camp as an honor. And in every single hut around me a brilliant fire was lighted for cooking and to keep the carriers warm all night. One spark gone wrong would have burned up the whole five hundred of us without a chance of escape. So when we came to the stockaded camp of the next night I pitched my tent far outside it as usual, and listened to the deep sighing and purring of the lions with great indifference, while the boys marvelled at a rashness which was nothing to their own.

As one goes westward farther into the mountains, the path drops two or three times by sudden, steep descents, like flights of steps down terraces, and at each descent the air becomes closer and the plants and beasts more tropical, till one reaches the deep valleys of the palm, the metallic butterfly, and thousands of yellow monkeys. Beside the route great masses of granite rise, weathered into smooth and unclimbable surface, like the Matopo hills. The carriers from the high interior suffer a good deal at each descent. “We have lost our proper breathing,” they say, and they pine till they return to the clearer air. It is here that many of the slaves try to escape. If they got away, there would not be much chance for them among the shy and apelike natives of the mountain belt, who remain entirely savage and are reputed to be cannibal still. But the slaves try to escape, and are generally brought back to a fate worse than being killed and eaten. On May 17th, five days above Katumbella, I met one of them who had been caught. He was a big Luvale man, naked, his skin torn and bleeding from his wild rush through thorns and rocks. In front and behind him marched one of his owner’s slaves with drawn knives or matchets, two feet long, ready to cut him down if he tried to run again. I asked my boys what would happen to him, and they said he would be flogged to death before the others. I cannot say. I should have thought he was too valuable to kill. He must have been worth over £20 as he stood, and £30 when landed at San Thomé. But, of course, the trader may have thought it would pay better to flog him to death as an example. True, it is not always safe to kill a slave. Last April a man in Benguela flogged a slave to death with a hippo whip, and, no doubt to his great astonishment, he found himself arrested and banished for a time to Mozambique--“the other coast,” as it is called--a far from salubrious home. But five days’ inland along the caravan route the murderer of a slave would be absolutely secure, if he did not mind the loss of the money.

Two days later I met another of those vast caravans of natives, one of which I had seen just the other side of the Cuanza. This caravan numbered nearly seven hundred people, and, under the protection of an enormous Portuguese banner, they were marching up into the interior with bales and stores, wives and children, intending to be absent at least two years for trade. These large bodies of men are a great source of supply to the government slave-agents; for when they find two tribes at war, they hire themselves out to fight for one on condition of selling the captives from the other, and so they secure an immense profit for themselves, while pleasing their allies and bringing an abundance of slaves for the Portuguese government to “redeem” by sending them to labor at San Thomé till their lives end.

The next day’s march brought us to a straight piece of valley, where such a number of rest-huts have been gradually built that the place looks like a large native village. All the little paths from the interior meet here, because it stands at the mouth of a long and very deep valley, sometimes called the cañon, by which alone the next belt of dry and mountainous country can be crossed. The water is dirty and full of sulphur, but it has to be carried in gourds for the next day’s march, because for twenty-five miles there is no water at all.

Natives here come down from the nearest villages and sell sweet-potatoes and maize to the carriers in exchange for salt and chips of tobacco or sips of rum, so that at this season, when the carriers every night number a thousand or more, there is something like a fair. Mixed up with the carriers are the small gangs of slaves, who are collected here in larger parties before being sent on to the coast.

With the help of one of my boys I had some conversation that evening with a woman who was kept waiting for other gangs, just as I was kept waiting because fever made me too weak to move. She was a beautiful woman of about twenty or little more, with a deep-brown skin and a face of much intelligence, full of sorrow. She had come from a very long way off, she said--far beyond the Hungry Country. She thought four moons had gone since they started. She had a husband and three children at home, but was seized by the men of another tribe and sold to a white man for twenty cartridges. She did not know what kind of cartridges they were--they were “things for a gun.” Her last baby was very young, very young. She was still suckling him when they took her away. She did not know where she was going. She supposed it was to Okalunga--a name which the natives use equally for hell or the abyss of death, the abyss of the sea and for San Thomé. She was perfectly right. She was one of the slaves who had been purchased, probably on the Congo frontier, on purpose for the Portuguese government’s agent to “redeem” and send to the plantations. It is a lucrative business to supply such philanthropists with slaves. And it is equally lucrative for the philanthropists to redeem them.

The long, dry cañon, where the carriers have to climb like goats from rock to rock along the steep mountain-side, with fifty or sixty pounds on their heads, brought us at last to a brimming reach of the Katumbella River. It is dangerous both from hippos and crocodiles; though the largest crocodiles I have ever seen were lower down the river, on the sand-banks close to its mouth, where they devour women and cattle, and lie basking all their length of twenty to thirty feet, just like the dragons of old. From the river the path mounts again for the final day’s march through an utterly desert and waterless region of mountain ridges and stones and sand, sprinkled with cactus and aloes and a few gray thorns. But, like all this mountain region, the desert gives ample shelter to eland, koodoo, and other deer. Buffaloes live there, too, and in very dry seasons they come down at night to drink at the river pools close to the sea.

The sea itself is hidden from the path by successive ridges of mountain till the very last edge is reached. On the morning of my last day’s trek a heavy, wet mist lay over all the valleys, and it was only when we climbed that we could see the mountain-tops, rising clear above it in the sunshine. But before mid-day the mist had gone, and, looking back from a high pass, I had my last view over the road we had travelled, and far away towards the interior of the strange continent I was leaving. Then we went on westward, and climbed the steep and rocky track over the final range, till at last a great space of varied prospect lay stretched out below us--the little houses of Katumbella at our feet, the fertile plain beside its river green with trees and plantations; on our right the white ring of Lobito Bay, Angola’s future port; on our left a line of yellow beach like a road leading to the little white church and the houses of Benguela, fifteen miles away; and beyond them again to the desert promontory, with grotesque rocks. And there, far away in front, like a vast gulf of dim and misty blue, merging in the sky without a trace of horizon, stretched the sea itself; and to an Englishman the sea is always the way home.

So, as I had hoped, I came down at last from the mountains into Katumbella by that white path which has been consecrated by so much misery. And as I walked through the dimly lighted streets and beside the great court-yards of the town that night, I heard again the blows of the palmatoria and chicote and the cries of men and women who were being “tamed.”

“I do not trouble to beat my slaves much--I mean my contracted laborers,” said the trader who was with me. “If they try to run away or anything, I just give them one good flogging, and then sell them to the Agent for San Thomé. One can always get £16 per head from him.”

A few days afterwards, on the Benguela road, I passed a procession of forty-three men and women, marching in file like carriers, but with no loads on their heads. Four natives in white coats and armed with guns accompanied them, ready to shoot down any runaway. The forty-three were a certain company’s detachment of “voluntary laborers” on their way to the head “Emigration Agent” at Benguela and to the ship for San Thomé. Third among them marched that woman who had been taken from her husband and three children and sold for twenty cartridges.

Thus it is that the islands of San Thomé and Principe have been rendered about the most profitable bits of the earth’s surface, and England and America can get their chocolate and cocoa cheap.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] I am not quite sure how this was discovered--whether an indiscreet friend “gave me away,” or whether an indiscreet letter was opened in the post, or the traders were simply guided by conjecture and a guilty conscience. At all events, one of the principal slave-dealers in Bihé discovered it, and took the pains to publish reports against me, that reached as far as Mossamedes. The English and American missions were actually warned to have nothing to do with me because I was a Jesuit in disguise, and had come to destroy their work! Further on I may have to refer to the plots to assassinate me on the coast during the voyage home, but I mention these little personal matters only to show that the slave-traders had been put on their guard and would naturally try to conceal as much as they could of their traffic’s horror, and that is the chief reason why I met no gangs of slaves in chains.

[7] See Commander Cameron’s description of the same view in 1876: _Across Africa_, p. 459.

[8] Cameron visited King Congo there in 1876: _Across Africa_, p. 460.

[9] The official numbers of slaves exported to San Thomé for the first four months of 1905 are: January, 369; February, 349; March, 366; April, 302--a rate which would give a total of 4158 for the year. In June I travelled by a ship which took 273 slaves to San Thomé and Principe, and there are two slave-ships a month.

[10] Cameron called it “The Devil’s Finger”: _Across Africa_, p. 464.

IX

THE EXPORTATION OF SLAVES

When I was up in the interior, I had always intended to wait a while on the coast, if ever I should reach it again, in order to watch the process of the conversion of slaves into “contracted laborers” according to law. So it was fortunate that, owing to the delays of fevers and carriers, I succeeded in just missing a steamer bound for San Thomé and home. Fortunate, because the temptation to go straight on board would have been very strong, since I was worn with sickness, and within two days of reaching Katumbella I learned that special dangers surrounded me, owing to the discovery of my purpose by the Portuguese traders. As a matter of fact, I might have caught the ship by pushing my carriers on without a pause, but the promptings of conscience, supported by a prospect of the best crocodile-shooting that man can enjoy, induced me to run the risk of assassination and stay.

So I stayed on the coast for nearly three weeks, seeing what I could, hunting crocodiles, and devising schemes for getting my papers home even if I should never reach home myself. One of the first things I saw was a procession of slaves who had just been “redeemed” into “contracted laborers,” and were being marched off in the early morning sunlight from Katumbella to Lobito Bay, there to be embarked for San Thomé on the ship which I had missed.[11] It so happened that this ship put in at Lobito Bay, which lies only some eight miles north from Katumbella down a waterless spit of sand, as I have before described, and there can be no doubt that this practice will become more and more common as the railway from the new port progresses. Katumbella, united with the bay, will become the main depot for the exportation of slaves and other merchandise, while Benguela, having no natural harbor, will gradually fall to ruin. At present, I suppose, the government Agent for slaves at Benguela, together with the Curador, whose act converts them into contract laborers, comes over for the occasion whenever the slaves are to be shipped from Lobito Bay, just as in England a bishop travels from place to place for Confirmations as required.

Bemused with a parting dole of rum, bedecked in brilliantly striped jerseys, grotesque caps, and flashy loin-cloths to give them a moment’s pleasure, the unhappy throng were escorted to their doom, the tin tickets with their numbers and the tin cylinders with their form of contract glittering round their necks or at their sides. Men and women were about equal in number, and some of the women carried babes lashed to their backs; but there were no older children. The causes which had brought these men and women to their fate were probably as different as the lands from which they came. Some had broken native customs or Portuguese laws, some had been charged with witchcraft by the medicine-man because a relative died, some could not pay a fine, some were wiping out an ancestral debt, some had been sold by uncles in poverty, some were the indemnity for village wars; some had been raided on the frontier, others had been exchanged for a gun; some had been trapped by Portuguese, others by Bihéan thieves; some were but changing masters, because they were “only good for San Thomé,” just as we in London send an old cab-horse to Antwerp. I cannot give their history. I only know that about two hundred of them, muddled with rum and bedecked like clowns, passed along that May morning to a land of doom from which there was no return.

It was June 1st when, as I described in my last letter, I met that other procession of slaves on their way from Katumbella to Benguela, in readiness for embarkation in the next ship, which did not happen to stop at Lobito Bay. It was a smaller gang--only forty-three men and women--for it was the result of only one Agent’s activity, though, to be sure, he was the leading and most successful Agent in Angola. They marched under escort, but without loads and without chains, though the old custom of chaining them together along that piece of road is still commonly practised--I suppose because the fifteen miles of country through which the road leads, when once the small slave-plantations round Katumbella have been passed, is a thorny desert where a runaway might easily hide, hoping to escape by sea or find cover in the towns. I have myself seen the black soldiers or police searching the bush there for fugitives, and once I found a Portuguese dying of fever among the thorns, to which he had fled from what is roughly called justice.[12]

By the time I saw that second procession I was myself living in Benguela, and was able to follow the slave’s progress almost point by point, in spite of the uncomfortable suspicion with which I was naturally regarded. Writing of the town before, I mentioned the large court-yards with which nearly every house is surrounded--memorials of the old days when this was the central depot for the slave-trade with Brazil. In most cases these court-yards are now used as resting-places for the free carriers who have brought products from the interior and are waiting till the loads of cloth and rum are ready for the return journey. But the trading-houses that go in for business in “serviçaes” still put the court-yards to their old purpose, and confine the slaves there till it is time to get them on board.

A day or two before the steamer is due to depart a kind of ripple seems to pass over the stagnant town. Officials stir, clerks begin to crawl about with pens, the long, low building called the Tribunal opens a door or two, a window or two, and looks quite busy. Then, early one morning, the Curador arrives and takes his seat in the long, low room as representing the beneficent government of Portugal. Into his presence the slaves are herded in gangs by the official Agent. They are ranged up, and in accordance with the Decree of January 29, 1903, they are asked whether they go willingly as laborers to San Thomé. No attention of any kind is paid to their answer. In most cases no answer is given. Not the slightest notice would be taken of a refusal. The legal contract for five years’ labor on the island of San Thomé or Principe is then drawn out, and, also in accordance with the Decree, each slave receives a tin disk with his number, the initials of the Agent who secured him, and in some cases, though not usually at Benguela, the name of the island to which he is destined. He also receives in a tin cylinder a copy of his register, containing the year of contract, his number and name, his birthplace, his chief’s name, the Agent’s name, and “observations,” of which last I have never seen any. Exactly the same ritual is observed for the women as for the men. The disks are hung round their necks, the cylinders are slung at their sides, and the natives, believing them to be some kind of fetich or “white man’s Ju-ju,” are rather pleased. All are then ranged up and marched out again, either to the compounds, where they are shut in, or straight to the pier where the lighters, which are to take them to the ship, lie tossing upon the waves.

The climax of the farce has now been reached. The deed of pitiless hypocrisy has been consummated. The requirements of legalized slavery have been satisfied. The government has “redeemed” the slaves which its own Agents have so diligently and so profitably collected. They went into the Tribunal as slaves, they have come out as “contracted laborers.” No one in heaven or on earth can see the smallest difference, but by the change of name Portugal stifles the enfeebled protests of nations like the English, and by the excuse of law she smooths her conscience and whitens over one of the blackest crimes which even Africa can show.

Before I follow the slaves on board, I must raise one uncertain point about the Agents. I am not quite sure on what principle they are paid. According to the Decree of 1903, they are appointed by the local committee in San Thomé, consisting of four officials and three planters, chosen by the central government Committee of Emigration in Lisbon. The local committee has to fix the payment due to each Agent, and of course the payment is ultimately made by the planters, who requisition the local committee for as many slaves as they require, and pay in proportion to the number they receive. Now a planter in San Thomé gives from £26 to £30 for a slave delivered on his plantation in good condition. The Agent at Benguela will give £16 for any healthy man or woman brought to him, but he rarely goes up to £20. From this considerable profit balance of £10 to £14 per head there are, it is true, certain deductions to be made. By the Decree, each Agent has to pay the government £100 deposit before he sets up in the slave-dealing business, and most probably he recoups himself out of the profits. For his license he has to pay the government two shillings a slave (with a minimum payment of £10 a year). Also to the government he pays £1 per slave in stamp duty, and six shillings on the completion of each contract. He has further to pay a tax of six shillings per slave to the port of landing, and from the balance of profit we must also deduct the slave’s fare on the steamer from Benguela to San Thomé. This, I believe, is £2--a sum which goes to enrich the happy shareholders in the “Empreza Nacional,” who last year (1904) received twenty-two per cent. on their money as profit from the slave-ships. Then the captain of the steamer gets four shillings and the doctor two shillings for every slave landed alive, and, on an average, only four slaves per hundred die on the voyage, which takes about eight days. There are probably other deductions to be made. The Curador will get something for his important functions. There are stories that the commandants of certain forts still demand blackmail from the processions of slaves as they go by. I was definitely told that the commandant of a fort very near to Benguela always receives ten shillings a head, but I cannot say if that is true.

In any case, at the very lowest, there is £4 to be deducted for fare, taxes, etc., from the apparent balance of £10 to £14 per slave. But even then the profit on each man or woman sold is considerable, and the point that I am uncertain about is whether the Agent at Benguela and his deputies in Novo Redondo and Bihé pocket all the profit they can possibly make, or are paid a fixed proportion of the average profits by the local committee at San Thomé. The latter would be in accordance with the Decree; the other way more in accordance with Portuguese methods.

Unhappily I was not able to witness the embarkation of the slaves myself, as I had been poisoned the night before and was suffering all day from violent pain and frequent collapse, accompanied by extreme cold in the limbs.[13] So that when, late in the evening, I crawled on board at last, I found the slaves already in their place on the ship. We were taking only one hundred and fifty of them from Benguela, but we gathered up other batches as we went along, so that finally we reached a lucrative cargo of two hundred and seventy-two (not counting babies), and as only two of them died in the week, we landed two hundred and seventy safely on the islands. This was perhaps rather a larger number than usual, for the steamers, which play the part of mail-boats and slave-ships both, go twice a month, and the number of slaves exported by them yearly has lately averaged a little under four thousand, though the numbers are increasing, as I showed in my last letter.

The slaves are, of course, kept in the fore part of the ship. All day long they lie about the lower deck, among the horses, mules, cattle, sheep, monkeys, and other live-stock; or they climb up to the fo’c’s’le deck in hopes of getting a little breeze, and it is there that the mothers chiefly lie beside their tiny babies. There is nothing to do. Hardly any one speaks, and over the faces of nearly all broods the look of dumb bewilderment that one sees in cattle crowded into trucks for the slaughter-market. Twice a day rations of mealy pap or brown beans are issued in big pots. Each pot is supplied with ten wooden spoons and holds the food for ten slaves, who have to get as much of it as each can manage. The first-class passengers, leaning against the rail of the upper deck, look down upon the scene with interest and amusement. To them those slaves represent the secret of Portugal’s greatness--such greatness as Portugal has.