THE CONGO AND COASTS OF AFRICA
By
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS, F.R.G.S.
AUTHOR OF "SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE," "THE SCARLET CAR,"
"WITH BOTH ARMIES IN SOUTH AFRICA," "FARCES,"
"THE CUBAN AND PORTO RICAN CAMPAIGNS"
ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR
AND OTHERS
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK
1907
[Illustration (Frontispiece): Mr. Davis and "Wood Boys" of the
Congo.]
TO
CECIL CLARK DAVIS
MY FELLOW VOYAGER ALONG
THE COASTS OF AFRICA
CONTENTS
I
THE COASTERS 3
II
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 32
III
THE CAPITAL OF THE CONGO 55
IV
AMERICANS IN THE CONGO 93
V
HUNTING THE HIPPO 118
VI
OLD CALABAR 142
VII
ALONG THE EAST COAST 176
ILLUSTRATIONS
MR. DAVIS AND "WOOD BOYS" OF THE CONGO _Frontispiece_
MRS. DAVIS IN A BORROWED "HAMMOCK," THE LOCAL MEANS
OF TRANSPORT ON THE WEST COAST 10
A WHITE BUILDING, THAT BLAZED LIKE THE BASE OF A
WHITEWASHED STOVE AT WHITE HEAT 22
THE "MAMMY CHAIR" IS LIKE THOSE SWINGS YOU SEE
IN PUBLIC PLAYGROUNDS 28
A VILLAGE ON THE KASAI RIVER 42
"TENANTS" OF LEOPOLD, WHO CLAIMS THAT THE CONGO
BELONGS TO HIM, AND THAT THESE NATIVE PEOPLE
ARE THERE ONLY AS HIS TENANTS 52
THE FACILITIES FOR LANDING AT BANANA, THE PORT OF
ENTRY TO THE CONGO, ARE LIMITED 56
"PRISONERS" OF THE STATE IN CHAINS AT MATADI 60
BUSH BOYS IN THE PLAZA AT MATADI SEEKING SHADE 70
THE MONUMENT IN STANLEY PARK, ERECTED, NOT TO
STANLEY, BUT TO LEOPOLD 82
THE _Deliverance_. THE RIVER RACED OVER THE DECK
TO A DEPTH OF FOUR OR FIVE INCHES. BETWEEN
HER CABIN AND THE WOOD-PILE, WERE STORED FIFTY
HUMAN BEINGS 86
THE NATIVE WIFE OF A _Chef de Poste_ 90
ENGLISH MISSIONARIES, AND SOME OF THEIR CHARGES 98
THE LABORING MAN UPON WHOM THE AMERICAN CONCESSIONAIRES
MUST DEPEND 106
MR. DAVIS AND NATIVE "BOY," ON THE KASAI RIVER 128
THE HIPPOPOTAMUS THAT DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD 134
THE JESUIT BROTHERS AT THE WOMBALI MISSION 138
THERE, IN THE SURF, WE FOUND THESE TONS OF MAHOGANY,
POUNDING AGAINST EACH OTHER 152
A LOG OF MAHOGANY JAMMED IN THE ANCHOR CHAINS 156
THE PALACE OF THE KING OF THE CAMEROONS 160
THE HOME OF THE THIRTY QUEENS OF KING MANGO BELL 164
THE MOTHER SUPERIOR AND SISTERS OF ST. JOSEPH AND
THEIR CONVERTS AT OLD CALABAR 168
THE KROO BOYS SIT, NOT ON THE THWARTS, BUT ON THE
GUNWALES, AS A WOMAN RIDES A SIDE SADDLE 172
GOING VISITING IN HER PRIVATE TRAM-CAR AT BEIRA 182
ONE-HALF OF THE STREET CLEANING DEPARTMENT OF
MOZAMBIQUE 190
CUSTOM HOUSE, ZANZIBAR 194
CHAIN-GANGS OF PETTY OFFENDERS OUTSIDE OF ZANZIBAR 198
THE IVORY ON THE RIGHT, COVERED ONLY WITH SACKING,
IS READY FOR SHIPMENT TO BOSTON, U.S.A. 202
THE LATE SULTAN OF ZANZIBAR IN HIS STATE CARRIAGE 206
H.S.H. HAMUD BIN MUHAMAD BIN SAID, THE LATE
SULTAN OF ZANZIBAR 210
A GERMAN "FACTORY" AT TANGA, THE STORE BELOW, THE
LIVING APARTMENTS ABOVE 214
SOUDANESE SOLDIERS UNDER A GERMAN OFFICER OUTSIDE
OF TANGA 218
THE CONGO AND COASTS OF AFRICA
I
THE COASTERS
No matter how often one sets out, "for to admire, and for to see,
for to behold this world so wide," he never quite gets over being
surprised at the erratic manner in which "civilization" distributes
itself; at the way it ignores one spot upon the earth's surface, and
upon another, several thousand miles away, heaps its blessings and
its tyrannies. Having settled in a place one might suppose the
"influences of civilization" would first be felt by the people
nearest that place. Instead of which, a number of men go forth in a
ship and carry civilization as far away from that spot as the winds
will bear them.
When a stone falls in a pool each part of each ripple is equally
distant from the spot where the stone fell; but if the stone of
civilization were to have fallen, for instance, into New Orleans,
equally near to that spot we would find the people of New York City
and the naked Indians of Yucatan. Civilization does not radiate, or
diffuse. It leaps; and as to where it will next strike it is as
independent as forked lightning. During hundreds of years it passed
over the continent of Africa to settle only at its northern coast
line and its most southern cape; and, to-day, it has given Cuba all
of its benefits, and has left the equally beautiful island of Hayti,
only fourteen hours away, sunk in fetish worship and brutal
ignorance.
One of the places it has chosen to ignore is the West Coast of
Africa. We are familiar with the Northern Coast and South Africa. We
know all about Morocco and the picturesque Raisuli, Lord Cromer, and
Shepheard's Hotel. The Kimberley Diamond Mines, the Boer War,
Jameson's Raid, and Cecil Rhodes have made us know South Africa, and
on the East Coast we supply Durban with buggies and farm wagons,
furniture from Grand Rapids, and, although we have nothing against
Durban, breakfast food and canned meats. We know Victoria Falls,
because they have eclipsed our own Niagara Falls, and Zanzibar,
farther up the Coast, is familiar through comic operas and rag-time.
Of itself, the Cape to Cairo Railroad would make the East Coast
known to us. But the West Coast still means that distant shore from
whence the "first families" of Boston, Bristol and New Orleans
exported slaves. Now, for our soap and our salad, the West Coast
supplies palm oil and kernel oil, and for automobile tires, rubber.
But still to it there cling the mystery, the hazard, the cruelty of
those earlier times. It is not of palm oil and rubber one thinks
when he reads on the ship's itinerary, "the Gold Coast, the Ivory
Coast, the Bight of Benin, and Old Calabar."
One of the strange leaps made by civilization is from Southampton to
Cape Town, and one of its strangest ironies is in its ignoring all
the six thousand miles of coast line that lies between. Nowadays, in
winter time, the English, flying from the damp cold of London, go to
Cape Town as unconcernedly as to the Riviera. They travel in great
seagoing hotels, on which they play cricket, and dress for dinner.
Of the damp, fever-driven coast line past which, in splendid ease,
they are travelling, save for the tall peaks of Teneriffe and Cape
Verde, they know nothing.
When last Mrs. Davis and I made that voyage from Southampton, the
decks were crowded chiefly with those English whose faces are
familiar at the Savoy and the Ritz, and who, within an hour, had
settled down to seventeen days of uninterrupted bridge, with, before
them, the prospect on landing of the luxury of the Mount Nelson and
the hospitalities of Government House. When, the other day, we again
left Southampton, that former departure came back in strange
contrast. It emphasized that this time we are not accompanying
civilization on one of her flying leaps. Instead, now, we are going
down to the sea in ships with the vortrekkers of civilization, those
who are making the ways straight; who, in a few weeks, will be
leaving us to lose themselves in great forests, who clear the paths
of noisome jungles where the sun seldom penetrates, who sit in
sun-baked "factories," as they call their trading houses, measuring
life by steamer days, who preach the Gospel to the cannibals of the
Congo, whose voices are the voices of those calling in the
wilderness.
As our tender came alongside the _Bruxellesville_ at Southampton, we
saw at the winch Kroo boys of the Ivory Coast; leaning over the rail
the Soeurs Blanches of the Congo, robed, although the cold was
bitter and the decks black with soot-stained snow, all in white;
missionaries with long beards, a bishop in a purple biretta, and
innumerable Belgian officers shivering in their cloaks and wearing
the blue ribbon and silver star that tells of three years of service
along the Equator. This time our fellow passengers are no
pleasure-seekers, no Cook's tourists sailing south to avoid a
rigorous winter. They have squeezed the last minute out of their
leave, and they are going back to the station, to the factory, to
the mission, to the barracks. They call themselves "Coasters," and
they inhabit a world all to themselves. In square miles, it is a
very big world, but it is one of those places civilization has
skipped.
Nearly every one of our passengers from Antwerp or Southampton knows
that if he keeps his contract, and does not die, it will be three
years before he again sees his home. So our departure was not
enlivening, and, in the smoking-room, the exiles prepared us for
lonely ports of call, for sickening heat, for swarming multitudes of
blacks.
In consequence, when we passed Finisterre, Spain, which from New
York seems almost a foreign country, was a near neighbor, a dear
friend. And the Island of Teneriffe was an anticlimax. It was as
though by a trick of the compass we had been sailing southwest and
were entering the friendly harbor of Ponce or Havana.
Santa Cruz, the port town of Teneriffe, like La Guayra, rises at the
base of great hills. It is a smiling, bright-colored, red-roofed,
typical Spanish town. The hills about it mount in innumerable
terraces planted with fruits and vegetables, and from many of these
houses on the hills, should the owner step hurriedly out of his
front door, he would land upon the roof of his nearest neighbor.
Back of this first chain of hills are broad farming lands and
plateaus from which Barcelona and London are fed with the earliest
and the most tender of potatoes that appear in England at the same
time Bermuda potatoes are being printed in big letters on the bills
of fare along Broadway. Santa Cruz itself supplies passing steamers
with coal, and passengers with lace work and post cards; and to the
English in search of sunshine, with a rival to Madeira. It should be
a successful rival, for it is a charming place, and on the day we
were there the thermometer was at 72°, and every one was complaining
of the cruel severity of the winter. In Santa Cruz one who knows
Spanish America has but to shut his eyes and imagine himself back in
Santiago de Cuba or Caracas. There are the same charming plazas, the
yellow churches and towered cathedral, the long iron-barred windows,
glimpses through marble-paved halls of cool patios, the same open
shops one finds in Obispo and O'Reilly Streets, the idle officers
with smart uniforms and swinging swords in front of cafés killing
time and digestion with sweet drinks, and over the garden walls
great bunches of purple and scarlet flowers and sheltering palms.
The show place in Santa Cruz is the church in which are stored the
relics of the sea-fight in which, as a young man, Nelson lost his
arm and England also lost two battleflags. As she is not often
careless in that respect, it is a surprise to find, in this tiny
tucked-away little island, what you will not see in any of the show
places of the world. They tell in Santa Cruz that one night an
English middy, single-handed, recaptured the captured flags and
carried them triumphantly to his battleship. He expected at the
least a K.C.B., and when the flags, with a squad of British marines
as a guard of honor, were solemnly replaced in the church, and the
middy himself was sent upon a tour of apology to the bishop, the
governor, the commandant of the fortress, the alcalde, the collector
of customs, and the captain of the port, he declared that monarchies
were ungrateful. The other objects of interest in Teneriffe are
camels, which in the interior of the island are common beasts of
burden, and which appearing suddenly around a turn would frighten
any automobile; and the fact that in Teneriffe the fashion in
women's hats never changes. They are very funny, flat straw hats;
like children's sailor hats. They need only "_U.S.S. Iowa_" on the
band to be quite familiar. Their secret is that they are built to
support baskets and buckets of water, and that concealed in each is
a heavy pad.
[Illustration: Mrs. Davis in a Borrowed "Hammock," the Local Means
of Transport on the West Coast.]
After Teneriffe the destination of every one on board is as
irrevocably fixed as though the ship were a government transport. We
are all going to the West Coast or to the Congo. Should you wish to
continue on to Cape Town along the South Coast, as they call the
vast territory from Lagos to Cape Town, although there is an
irregular, a very irregular, service to the Cape, you could as
quickly reach it by going on to the Congo, returning all the way to
Southampton, and again starting on the direct line south.
It is as though a line of steamers running down our coast to Florida
would not continue on along the South Coast to New Orleans and
Galveston, and as though no line of steamers came from New Orleans
and Galveston to meet the steamers of the East Coast.
In consequence, the West Coast of Africa, cut off by lack of
communication from the south, divorced from the north by the Desert
of Sahara, lies in the steaming heat of the Equator to-day as it
did a thousand years ago, in inaccessible, inhospitable isolation.
Two elements have helped to preserve this isolation: the fever that
rises from its swamps and lagoons, and the surf that thunders upon
the shore. In considering the stunted development of the West Coast,
these two elements must be kept in mind--the sickness that strikes
at sunset and by sunrise leaves the victim dead, and the monster
waves that rush booming like cannon at the beach, churning the sandy
bottom beneath, and hurling aside the great canoes as a man tosses a
cigarette. The clerk who signs the three-year contract to work on
the West Coast enlists against a greater chance of death than the
soldier who enlists to fight only bullets; and every box, puncheon,
or barrel that the trader sends in a canoe through the surf is
insured against its never reaching, as the case may be, the shore or
the ship's side.
The surf and the fever are the Minotaurs of the West Coast, and in
the year there is not a day passes that they do not claim and
receive their tribute in merchandise and human life. Said an old
Coaster to me, pointing at the harbor of Grand Bassam: "I've seen
just as much cargo lost overboard in that surf as I've seen shipped
to Europe." One constantly wonders how the Coasters find it good
enough. How, since 1550, when the Portuguese began trading, it has
been possible to find men willing to fill the places of those who
died. But, in spite of the early massacres by the natives, in spite
of attacks by wild beasts, in spite of pirate raids, of desolating
plagues and epidemics, of wars with other white men, of damp heat
and sudden sickness, there were men who patiently rebuilt the forts
and factories, fought the surf with great breakwaters, cleared
breathing spaces in the jungle, and with the aid of quinine for
themselves, and bad gin for the natives, have held their own. Except
for the trade goods it never would be held. It is a country where
the pay is cruelly inadequate, where but few horses, sheep, or
cattle can exist, where the natives are unbelievably lazy and
insolent, and where, while there is no society of congenial spirits,
there is a superabundance of animal and insect pests. Still, so
great are gold, ivory, and rubber, and so many are the men who will
take big chances for little pay, that every foot of the West Coast
is preëmpted. As the ship rolls along, for hours from the rail you
see miles and miles of steaming yellow sand and misty swamp where as
yet no white man has set his foot. But in the real estate office of
Europe some Power claims the right to "protect" that swamp; some
treaty is filed as a title-deed.
As the Powers finally arranged it, the map of the West Coast is like
a mosaic, like the edge of a badly constructed patchwork quilt. In
trading along the West Coast a man can find use for five European
languages, and he can use a new one at each port of call.
To the north, the West Coast begins with Cape Verde, which is
Spanish. It is followed by Senegal, which is French; but into
Senegal is tucked "a thin red line" of British territory called
Gambia. Senegal closes in again around Gambia, and is at once
blocked to the south by the three-cornered patch which belongs to
Portugal. This is followed by French Guinea down to another British
red spot, Sierra Leone, which meets Liberia, the republic of negro
emigrants from the United States. South of Liberia is the French
Ivory Coast, then the English Gold Coast; Togo, which is German;
Dahomey, which is French; Lagos and Southern Nigeria, which again
are English; Fernando Po, which is Spanish, and the German
Cameroons.
The coast line of these protectorates and colonies gives no idea of
the extent of their hinterland, which spreads back into the Sahara,
the Niger basin, and the Soudan. Sierra Leone, one of the smallest
of them, is as large as Maine; Liberia, where the emigrants still
keep up the tradition of the United States by talking like end men,
is as large as the State of New York; two other colonies, Senegal
and Nigeria, together are 135,000 square miles larger than the
combined square miles of all of our Atlantic States from Maine to
Florida and including both. To partition finally among the Powers
this strip of death and disease, of uncountable wealth, of unnamed
horrors and cruelties, has taken many hundreds of years, has brought
to the black man every misery that can be inflicted upon a human
being, and to thousands of white men, death and degradation, or
great wealth.
The raids made upon the West Coast to obtain slaves began in the
fifteenth century with the discovery of the West Indies, and it was
to spare the natives of these islands, who were unused and unfitted
for manual labor and who in consequence were cruelly treated by the
Spaniards, that Las Casas, the Bishop of Chiapa, first imported
slaves from West Africa. He lived to see them suffer so much more
terribly than had the Indians who first obtained his sympathy, that
even to his eightieth year he pleaded with the Pope and the King of
Spain to undo the wrong he had begun. But the tide had set west, and
Las Casas might as well have tried to stop the Trades. In 1800
Wilberforce stated in the House of Commons that at that time British
vessels were carrying each year to the Indies and the American
colonies 38,000 slaves, and when he spoke the traffic had been going
on for two hundred and fifty years. After the Treaty of Utrecht,
Queen Anne congratulated her Peers on the terms of the treaty which
gave to England "the fortress of Gibraltar, the Island of Minorca,
and the monopoly in the slave trade for thirty years," or, as it was
called, the _asiento_ (contract). This was considered so good an
investment that Philip V of Spain took up one-quarter of the common
stock, and good Queen Anne reserved another quarter, which later she
divided among her ladies. But for a time she and her cousin of Spain
were the two largest slave merchants in the world. The point of view
of those then engaged in the slave trade is very interesting. When
Queen Elizabeth sent Admiral Hawkins slave-hunting, she presented
him with a ship, named, with startling lack of moral perception,
after the Man of Sorrows. In a book on the slave trade I picked up
at Sierra Leone there is the diary of an officer who accompanied
Hawkins. "After," he writes, "going every day on shore to take the
inhabitants by burning and despoiling of their towns," the ship was
becalmed. "But," he adds gratefully, "the Almighty God, who never
suffereth his elect to perish, sent us the breeze."
The slave book shows that as late as 1780 others of the "elect" of
our own South were publishing advertisements like this, which is one
of the shortest and mildest. It is from a Virginia newspaper: "The
said fellow is outlawed, and I will give ten pounds reward for his
head severed from his body, or forty shillings if brought alive."
At about this same time an English captain threw overboard, chained
together, one hundred and thirty sick slaves. He claimed that had he
not done so the ship's company would have also sickened and died,
and the ship would have been lost, and that, therefore, the
insurance companies should pay for the slaves. The jury agreed with
him, and the Solicitor-General said: "What is all this declamation
about human beings! This is a case of chattels or goods. It is
really so--it is the case of throwing over goods. For the
purpose--the purpose of the insurance, they are goods and property;
whether right or wrong, we have nothing to do with it." In 1807
England declared the slave trade illegal. A year later the United
States followed suit, but although on the seas her frigates chased
the slavers, on shore a part of our people continued to hold slaves,
until the Civil War rescued both them and the slaves.
As early as 1718 Raynal and Diderot estimated that up to that time
there had been exported from Africa to the North and South Americas
nine million slaves. Our own historian, Bancroft, calculated that in
the eighteenth century the English alone imported to the Americas
three million slaves, while another 2,500,000 purchased or kidnapped
on the West Coast were lost in the surf, or on the voyage thrown
into the sea. For that number Bancroft places the gross returns as
not far from four hundred millions of dollars.
All this is history, and to the reader familiar, but I do not
apologize for reviewing it here, as without the background of the
slave trade, the West Coast, as it is to-day, is difficult to
understand. As we have seen, to kings, to chartered "Merchant
Adventurers," to the cotton planters of the West Indies and of our
South, and to the men of the North who traded in black ivory, the
West Coast gave vast fortunes. The price was the lives of millions
of slaves. And to-day it almost seems as though the sins of the
fathers were being visited upon the children; as though the juju of
the African, under the spell of which his enemies languish and die,
has been cast upon the white man. We have to look only at home. In
the millions of dead, and in the misery of the Civil War, and
to-day in race hatred, in race riots, in monstrous crimes and as
monstrous lynchings, we seem to see the fetish of the West Coast,
the curse, falling upon the children to the third and fourth
generation of the million slaves that were thrown, shackled, into
the sea.
The first mention in history of Sierra Leone is when in 480 B.C.,
Hanno, the Carthaginian, anchored at night in its harbor, and then
owing to "fires in the forests, the beating of drums, and strange
cries that issued from the bushes," before daylight hastened away.
We now skip nineteen hundred years. This is something of a gap, but
except for the sketchy description given us by Hanno of the place,
and his one gaudy night there, Sierra Leone until the fifteenth
century utterly disappears from the knowledge of man. Happy is the
country without a history!
Nineteen hundred years having now supposed to elapse, the second act
begins with De Cintra, who came in search of slaves, and instead
gave the place its name. Because of the roaring of the wind around
the peak that rises over the harbor he called it the Lion Mountain.
After the fifteenth century, in a succession of failures, five
different companies of "Royal Adventurers" were chartered to trade
with her people, and, when convenient, to kidnap them; pirates in
turn kidnapped the British governor, the French and Dutch were
always at war with the settlement, and native raids, epidemics, and
fevers were continuous. The history of Sierra Leone is the history
of every other colony along the West Coast, with the difference that
it became a colony by purchase, and was not, as were the others, a
trading station gradually converted into a colony. During the war in
America, Great Britain offered freedom to all slaves that would
fight for her, and, after the war, these freed slaves were conveyed
on ships of war to London, where they were soon destitute. They
appealed to the great friend of the slave in those days, Granville
Sharp, and he with others shipped them to Sierra Leone, to
establish, with the aid of some white emigrants, an independent
colony, which was to be a refuge and sanctuary for others like
themselves. Liberia, which was the gift of philanthropists of
Baltimore to American freed slaves, was, no doubt, inspired by this
earlier effort. The colony became a refuge for slaves from every
part of the Coast, the West Indies and Nova Scotia, and to-day in
that one colony there are spoken sixty different coast dialects and
those of the hinterland.
Sierra Leone, as originally purchased in 1786, consisted of twenty
square miles, for which among other articles of equal value King
Naimbanna received a "crimson satin embroidered waistcoat, one
puncheon of rum, ten pounds of beads, two cheeses, one box of
smoking pipes, a mock diamond ring, and a tierce of pork."
What first impressed me about Sierra Leone was the heat. It does not
permit one to give his attention wholly to anything else. I always
have maintained that the hottest place on earth is New York, and I
have been in other places with more than a local reputation for
heat; some along the Equator, Lourenço Marquez, which is only
prevented from being an earthen oven because it is a swamp; the Red
Sea, with a following breeze, and from both shores the baked heat of
the desert, and Nagasaki, on a rainy day in midsummer.
But New York in August radiating stored-up heat from iron-framed
buildings, with the foul, dead air shut in by the skyscrapers, with
a humidity that makes you think you are breathing through a
steam-heated sponge, is as near the lower regions as I hope any of
us will go. And yet Sierra Leone is no mean competitor.
We climbed the moss-covered steps to the quay to face a great white
building that blazed like the base of a whitewashed stove at white
heat. Before it were some rusty cannon and a canoe cut out of a
single tree, and, seated upon it selling fruit and sun-dried fish,
some native women, naked to the waist, their bodies streaming with
palm oil and sweat. At the same moment something struck me a blow on
the top of the head, at the base of the spine and between the
shoulder blades, and the ebony ladies and the white "factory" were
burnt up in a scroll of flame.
[Illustration: A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
Whitewashed Stove at White Heat.]
I heard myself in a far-away voice asking where one could buy a sun
helmet and a white umbrella, and until I was under their protection,
Sierra Leone interested me no more.
One sees more different kinds of black people in Sierra Leone than
in any other port along the Coast; Senegalese and Senegambians,
Kroo boys, Liberians, naked bush boys bearing great burdens from the
forests, domestic slaves in fez and colored linen livery, carrying
hammocks swung from under a canopy, the local electric hansom,
soldiers of the W.A.F.F., the West African Frontier Force, in Zouave
uniform of scarlet and khaki, with bare legs; Arabs from as far in
the interior as Timbuctu, yellow in face and in long silken robes;
big fat "mammies" in well-washed linen like the washerwomen of
Jamaica, each balancing on her head her tightly rolled umbrella, and
in the gardens slim young girls, with only a strip of blue and white
linen from the waist to the knees, lithe, erect, with glistening
teeth and eyes, and their sisters, after two years in the mission
schools, demurely and correctly dressed like British school marms.
Sierra Leone has all the hall marks of the crown colony of the
tropics; good wharfs, clean streets, innumerable churches, public
schools operated by the government as well as many others run by
American and English missions, a club where the white "mammies," as
all women are called, and the white officers--for Sierra Leone is a
coaling station on the Cape route to India, and is garrisoned
accordingly--play croquet, and bowl into a net.
When the officers are not bowling they are tramping into the
hinterland after tribes on the warpath from Liberia, and coming
back, perhaps wounded or racked with fever, or perhaps they do not
come back. On the day we landed they had just buried one of the
officers. On Saturday afternoon he had been playing tennis, during
the night the fever claimed him, and Sunday night he was dead.
That night as we pulled out to the steamer there came toward us in
black silhouette against the sun, setting blood-red into the lagoon,
two great canoes. They were coming from up the river piled high with
fruit and bark, with the women and children lying huddled in the
high bow and stern, while amidships the twelve men at the oars
strained and struggled until we saw every muscle rise under the
black skin.
As their stroke slackened, the man in the bow with the tom-tom beat
more savagely upon it, and shouted to them in shrill sharp cries.
Their eyes shone, their teeth clenched, the sweat streamed from
their naked bodies. They might have been slaves chained to the
thwarts of a trireme.
Just ahead of them lay at anchor the only other ship beside our own
in port, a two-masted schooner, the _Gladys E. Wilden_, out of
Boston. Her captain leaned upon the rail smoking his cigar, his
shirt-sleeves held up with pink elastics, on the back of his head a
derby hat. As the rowers passed under his bows he looked critically
at the streaming black bodies and spat meditatively into the water.
His own father could have had them between decks as cargo. Now for
the petroleum and lumber he brings from Massachusetts to Sierra
Leone he returns in ballast.
Because her lines were so home-like and her captain came from Cape
Cod, we wanted to call on the _Gladys E. Wilden_, but our own
captain had different views, and the two ships passed in the night,
and the man from Boston never will know that two folks from home
were burning signals to him.
Because our next port of call, Grand Bassam, is the chief port of
the French Ivory Coast, which is 125,000 square miles in extent, we
expected quite a flourishing seaport. Instead, Grand Bassam was a
bank of yellow sand, a dozen bungalows in a line, a few wind-blown
cocoanut palms, an iron pier, and a French flag. Beyond the cocoanut
palms we could see a great lagoon, and each minute a wave leaped
roaring upon the yellow sand-bank and tried to hurl itself across
it, eating up the bungalows on its way, into the quiet waters of the
lake. Each time we were sure it would succeed, but the yellow bank
stood like rock, and, beaten back, the wave would rise in white
spray to the height of a three-story house, hang glistening in the
sun and then, with the crash of a falling wall, tumble at the feet
of the bungalows.
We stopped at Grand Bassam to put ashore a young English girl who
had come out to join her husband. His factory is a two days' launch
ride up the lagoon, and the only other white woman near it does not
speak English. Her husband had wished her, for her health's sake, to
stay in his home near London, but her first baby had just died, and
against his unselfish wishes, and the advice of his partner, she had
at once set out to join him. She was a very pretty, sad, unsmiling
young wife, and she spoke only to ask her husband's partner
questions about the new home. His answers, while they did not seem
to daunt her, made every one else at the table wish she had remained
safely in her London suburb.
Through our glasses we all watched her husband lowered from the iron
pier into a canoe and come riding the great waves to meet her.
The Kroo boys flashed their trident-shaped paddles and sang and
shouted wildly, but he sat with his sun helmet pulled over his eyes
staring down into the bottom of the boat; while at his elbow,
another sun helmet told him yes, that now he could make out the
partner, and that, judging by the photograph, that must be She in
white under the bridge.
The husband and the young wife were swung together over the side to
the lifting waves in a two-seated "mammy chair," like one of those
_vis-à-vis_ swings you see in public playgrounds and picnic groves,
and they carried with them, as a gift from Captain Burton, a fast
melting lump of ice, the last piece of fresh meat they will taste in
many a day, and the blessings of all the ship's company. And then,
with inhospitable haste there was a rattle of anchor chains, a quick
jangle of bells from the bridge to the engine-room, and the
_Bruxellesville_ swept out to sea, leaving the girl from the London
suburb to find her way into the heart of Africa. Next morning we
anchored in a dripping fog off Sekondi on the Gold Coast, to allow
an English doctor to find his way to a fever camp. For nine years he
had been a Coaster, and he had just gone home to fit himself, by a
winter's vacation in London, for more work along the Gold Coast. It
is said of him that he has "never lost a life." On arriving in
London he received a cable telling him three doctors had died, the
miners along the railroad to Ashanti were rotten with fever, and
that he was needed.
[Illustration: The "Mammy Chair" is Like Those Swings You See in
Public Playgrounds.]
So he and his wife, as cheery and bright as though she were setting
forth on her honeymoon, were going back to take up the white man's
burden. We swung them over the side as we had the other two, and
that night in the smoking-room the Coasters drank "Luck to him,"
which, in the vernacular of this unhealthy shore, means "Life to
him," and to the plucky, jolly woman who was going back to fight
death with the man who had never lost a life.
As the ship was getting under way, a young man in "whites" and a sun
helmet, an agent of a trading company, went down the sea ladder by
which I was leaning. He was smart, alert; his sleeves, rolled
recklessly to his shoulders, showed sinewy, sunburnt arms; his
helmet, I noted, was a military one. Perhaps I looked as I felt;
that it was a pity to see so good a man go back to such a land, for
he looked up at me from the swinging ladder and smiled understanding
as though we had been old acquaintances.
"You going far?" he asked. He spoke in the soft, detached voice of
the public-school Englishman.
"To the Congo," I answered.
He stood swaying with the ship, looking as though there were
something he wished to say, and then laughed, and added gravely,
giving me the greeting of the Coast: "Luck to you."
"Luck to YOU," I said.
That is the worst of these gaddings about, these meetings with men
you wish you could know, who pass like a face in the crowded street,
who hold out a hand, or give the password of the brotherhood, and
then drop down the sea ladder and out of your life forever.
II
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER
To me, the fact of greatest interest about the Congo is that it is
owned, and the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are owned by
one man. The land and its people are his private property. I am not
trying to say that he governs the Congo. He does govern it, but that
in itself would not be of interest. His claim is that he owns it.
Though backed by all the mailed fists in the German Empire, and all
the _Dreadnoughts_ of the seas, no other modern monarch would make
such a claim. It does not sound like anything we have heard since
the days and the ways of Pharaoh. And the most remarkable feature of
it is, that the man who makes this claim is the man who was placed
over the Congo as a guardian, to keep it open to the trade of the
world, to suppress slavery. That, in the Congo, he has killed trade
and made the products of the land his own, that of the natives he
did not kill he has made slaves, is what to-day gives the Congo its
chief interest. It is well to emphasize how this one man stole a
march on fourteen Powers, including the United States, and stole
also an empire of one million square miles.
Twenty-five years ago all of Africa was divided into many parts. The
part which still remained to be distributed among the Powers was
that which was watered by the Congo River and its tributaries.
Along the north bank of the Congo River ran the French Congo; the
Portuguese owned the lands to the south, and on the east it was shut
in by protectorates and colonies of Germany and England. It was, and
is, a territory as large, were Spain and Russia omitted, as Europe.
Were a map of the Congo laid upon a map of Europe, with the mouth of
the Congo River where France and Spain meet at Biarritz, the
boundaries of the Congo would reach south to the heel of Italy, to
Greece, to Smyrna; east to Constantinople and Odessa; northeast to
St. Petersburg and Finland, and northwest to the extreme limits of
Scotland. Distances in this country are so enormous, the means of
progress so primitive, that many of the Belgian officers with whom I
came south and who already had travelled nineteen days from Antwerp,
had still, before they reached their posts, to steam, paddle, and
walk for three months.
In 1844 to dispose amicably of this great territory, which was much
desired by several of the Powers, a conference was held at Berlin.
There it was decided to make of the Congo Basin an Independent
State, a "free-for-all" country, where every flag could trade with
equal right, and with no special tariff or restriction.
The General Act of this conference agreed: "The trade of ALL nations
shall enjoy complete freedom." "No Power which exercises or shall
exercise Sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions shall be
allowed to _grant therein a monopoly or favor of any kind in matters
of trade_." "ALL the Powers exercising Sovereign rights or influence
in the afore-said territories bind themselves to watch over the
preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement
of _the condition of their moral and material welfare_, and _to
help in suppressing slavery_." The italics are mine. These
quotations from the act are still binding upon the fourteen Powers,
including the United States.
For several years previous to the Conference of Berlin, Leopold of
Belgium, as a private individual, had shown much interest in the
development of the Congo. The opening up of that territory was
apparently his hobby. Out of his own pocket he paid for expeditions
into the Congo Basin, employed German and English explorers, and
protested against the then existing iniquities of the Arabs, who for
ivory and slaves raided the Upper Congo. Finally, assisted by many
geographical societies, he founded the International Association, to
promote "civilization and trade" in Central Africa; and enlisted
Henry M. Stanley in this service.
That, in the early years, Leopold's interest in the Congo was
unselfish may or may not be granted, but, knowing him, as we now
know him, as one of the shrewdest and, of speculators, the most
unscrupulous, at the time of the Berlin Conference, his self-seeking
may safely be accepted. Quietly, unostentatiously, he presented
himself to its individual members as a candidate for the post of
administrator of this new territory.
On the face of it he seemed an admirable choice. He was a sovereign
of a kingdom too unimportant to be feared; of the newly created
State he undoubtedly possessed an intimate knowledge. He promised to
give to the Dutch, English, and Portuguese traders, already for many
years established on the Congo, his heartiest aid, and, for those
traders still to come, to maintain the "open door." His professions
of a desire to help the natives were profuse. He became the
unanimous choice of the conference.
Later he announced to the Powers signing the act, that from Belgium
he had received the right to assume the title of King of the
Independent State of the Congo. The Powers recognized his new title.
The fact that Leopold, King of Belgium, was king also of the État
Indépendant du Congo confused many into thinking that the Free State
was a colony, or under the protection, of Belgium. As we have seen,
it is not. A Belgian may serve in the army of the Free State, or in
a civil capacity, as may a man of any nation, but, although with few
exceptions only Belgians are employed in the Free State, and
although to help the King in the Congo, the Belgian Government has
loaned him great sums of money, politically and constitutionally the
two governments are as independent of each other as France and
Spain.
And so, in 1885, Leopold, by the grace of fourteen governments, was
appointed their steward over a great estate in which each of the
governments still holds an equal right; a trustee and keeper over
twenty millions of "black brothers" whose "moral and material
welfare" each government had promised to protect.
There is only one thing more remarkable than the fact that Leopold
was able to turn this public market into a private park, and that
is, that he has been permitted to do so. It is true he is a man of
wonderful ability. For his own ends he is a magnificent organizer.
But in the fourteen governments that created him there have been,
and to-day there are, men, if less unscrupulous, of quite as great
ability; statesmen, jealous and quick to guard the rights of the
people they represent, people who since the twelfth century have
been traders, who since 1808 have declared slavery abolished.
And yet, for twenty-five years these statesmen have watched Leopold
disobey every provision in the act of the conference. Were they to
visit the Congo, they could see for themselves the jungle creeping
in and burying their trading posts, their great factories turned
into barracks. They know that the blacks they mutually agreed to
protect have been reduced to slavery worse than that they suffered
from the Arabs, that hundreds of thousands of them have fled from
the Congo, and that those that remain have been mutilated, maimed,
or, what was more merciful, murdered. And yet the fourteen
governments, including the United States, have done nothing.
Some tell you they do not interfere because they are jealous one of
the other; others say that it is because they believe the Congo will
soon be taken over by Belgium, and with Belgium in control, they
argue, they would be dealing with a responsible government, instead
of with a pirate. But so long as Leopold is King of Belgium one
doubts if Belgians in the Congo would rise above the level of their
King. The English, when asked why they do not assert their rights,
granted not only to them, but to thirteen other governments, reply
that if they did they would be accused of "ulterior motives." What
ulterior motives? If you pursue a pickpocket and recover your watch
from him, are your motives in doing so open to suspicion?
Personally, although this is looking some way ahead, I would like to
see the English take over and administrate the Congo. Wherever I
visit a colony governed by Englishmen I find under their
administration, in spite of opium in China and gin on the West
Coast, that three people are benefited: the Englishman, the native,
and the foreign trader from any other part of the world. Of the
colonies of what other country can one say the same?
As a rule our present governments are not loath to protect their
rights. But toward asserting them in the Congo they have been moved
neither by the protests of traders, chambers of commerce,
missionaries, the public press, nor by the cry of the black man to
"let my people go." By only those in high places can it be
explained. We will leave it as a curious fact, and return to the
"Unjust Steward."
His first act was to wage wars upon the Arabs. From the Soudan and
from the East Coast they were raiding the Congo for slaves and
ivory, and he drove them from it. By these wars he accomplished two
things. As the defender of the slave, he gained much public credit,
and he kept the ivory. But war is expensive, and soon he pointed out
to the Powers that to ask him out of his own pocket to maintain
armies in the field and to administer a great estate was unfair. He
humbly sought their permission to levy a few taxes. It seemed a
reasonable request. To clear roads, to keep boats upon the great
rivers, to mark it with buoys, to maintain wood stations for the
steamers, to improve the "moral and material welfare of the
natives," would cost money, and to allow Leopold to bring about
these improvements, which would be for the good of all, he was
permitted to levy the few taxes. That was twenty years ago; to-day I
saw none of these improvements, and the taxes have increased.
From the first they were so heavy that the great trade houses, which
for one hundred years in peace and mutual goodwill bartered with the
natives, found themselves ruined. It was not alone the export taxes,
lighterage dues, port dues, and personal taxes that drove them out
of the Congo; it was the King appearing against them as a rival
trader, the man appointed to maintain the "open door." And a trader
with methods they could not or would not imitate. Leopold, or the
"State," saw for the existence of the Congo only two reasons: Rubber
and Ivory. And the collecting of this rubber and ivory was, as he
saw it, the sole duty of the State and its officers. When he threw
over the part of trustee and became the Arab raider he could not
waste his time, which, he had good reason to fear, might be short,
upon products that, if fostered, would be of value only in later
years. Still less time had he to give to improvements that cost
money and that would be of benefit to his successors. He wanted only
rubber; he wanted it at once, and he cared not at all how he
obtained it. So he spun, and still spins, the greatest of all
"get-rich-quick" schemes; one of gigantic proportions, full of
tragic, monstrous, nauseous details.
The only possible way to obtain rubber is through the native; as
yet, in teeming forests, the white man can not work and live. Of
even Chinese coolies imported here to build a railroad ninety per
cent. died. So, with a stroke of the pen, Leopold declared all the
rubber in the country the property of the "State," and then, to make
sure that the natives would work it, ordered that taxes be paid in
rubber. If, once a month (in order to keep the natives steadily at
work the taxes were ordered to be paid each month instead of once a
year), each village did not bring in so many baskets of rubber the
King's cannibal soldiers raided it, carried off the women as
hostages, and made prisoners of the men, or killed and ate them. For
every kilo of rubber brought in in excess of the quota the King's
agent, who received the collected rubber and forwarded it down the
river, was paid a commission. Or was "paid by results." Another
bonus was given him based on the price at which he obtained the
rubber. If he paid the native only six cents for every two pounds,
he received a bonus of three cents, the cost to the State being but
nine cents per kilo, but, if he paid the natives twelve cents for
every two pounds, he received as a bonus less than one cent. In a
word, the more rubber the agent collected the more he personally
benefited, and if he obtained it "cheaply" or for nothing--that is,
by taking hostages, making prisoners, by the whip of hippopotamus
hide, by torture--so much greater his fortune, so much richer
Leopold.
[Illustration: A Village on the Kasai River.]
Few schemes devised have been more cynical, more devilish, more
cunningly designed to incite a man to cruelty and abuse. To
dishonesty it was an invitation and a reward. It was this system of
"payment by results," evolved by Leopold sooner than allow his
agents a fixed and sufficient wage, that led to the atrocities.
One result of this system was that in seven years the natives
condemned to slavery in the rubber forests brought in rubber to the
amount of fifty-five millions of dollars. But its chief results were
the destruction of entire villages, the flight from their homes in
the Congo of hundreds of thousands of natives, and for those that
remained misery, death, the most brutal tortures and degradations,
unprintable, unthinkable.