200 rations of kwanga.
120 rations of fish.
In addition, fifty women are required each morning to go to the factory
and work there all day. They complained that the remuneration given for
these services was most inadequate, and that they were continually
beaten. When I asked the Chief W why he had not gone to D F to complain
if the sentries beat him or his people, opening his mouth he pointed to
one of the teeth which was just dropping out, and said: “That is what I
got from the D F four days ago when I went to tell him what I now say to
you.” He added that he was frequently beaten, along with others of his
people, by the white man.
One of the men with him, who gave his name as H H, said that two weeks
ago the white man at Q** had ordered him to serve as one of the porters
of his hammock on a journey he proposed taking inland. H H was then just
completing the building of a new house, and excused himself on this
ground, but offered to fetch a friend as a substitute. The Director of
the Company had, in answer to this excuse, burnt down his house,
alleging that he was insolent. He had had a box of cloth and some ducks
in the house--in fact, all his goods, and they were destroyed in the
fire. The white man then caused him to be tied up, and took him with him
inland, and loosed him when he had to carry the hammock.
Other people were waiting, desirous of speaking with me, but so much
time was taken in noting the statements already made that I had to
leave, if I hoped to reach K** at a reasonable hour. I proceeded in a
canoe across the Lulongo and up a tributary to a landing-place which
seemed to be about ... miles from I**. Here, leaving the canoes, we
walked for a couple of miles through a flooded forest to reach the
village. I found here a sentry of the La Lulanga Company and a
considerable number of natives. After some little delay a boy of about
15 years of age appeared, whose left arm was wrapped up in a dirty rag.
Removing this, I found the left hand had been hacked off by the wrist,
and that a shot hole appeared in the fleshy part of the forearm. The
boy, who gave his name as I I, in answer to my inquiry, said that a
sentry of the La Lulanga Company now in the town had cut off his hand. I
proceeded to look for this man, who at first could not be found, the
natives to a considerable number gathering behind me as I walked through
the town. After some delay the sentry appeared, carrying a cap-gun. The
boy, whom I placed before him, then accused him to his face of having
mutilated him. The men of the town, who were questioned in succession,
corroborated the boy’s statement. The sentry, who gave his name as K K,
could make no answer to the charge. He met it by vaguely saying some
other sentry of the Company had mutilated I I; his predecessor, he said,
had cut off several hands, and probably this was one of the victims. The
natives around said that there were two other sentries at present in the
town, who were not so bad as K K, but that he was a villain. As the
evidence against him was perfectly clear, man after man standing out and
declaring he had seen the act committed, I informed him and the people
present that I should appeal to the local authorities for his immediate
arrest and trial. In the course of my interrogatory several other
charges transpired against him. These were of a minor nature, consisting
of the usual characteristic acts of blackmailing, only too commonly
reported on all sides. One man said that K K had tied up his wife and
only released her on payment of 1,000 rods. Another man said that K K
had robbed him of two ducks and a dog. These minor offences K K equally
demurred to, and again said that I I had been mutilated by some other
sentry, naming several. I took the boy back with me and later brought
him to Coquilhatville, where he formally charged K K with the crime,
alleging to the Commandant, who took his statement, through a special
Government interpreter, in my presence, that it had been done “on
account of rubber.” I have since been informed that, acting on my
request, the authorities at Coquilhatville had arrested K K, who
presumably will be tried in due course. A copy of my notes taken in K**,
where I I charged K K before me, is appended (Inclosure 6).[18]
It was obviously impossible that I should visit all the villages of the
natives who came to beg me to do so at J** or elsewhere during my
journey, or to verify on the spot, as in the case of the boy, the
statements they made. In that one case the truth of the charges
preferred was amply demonstrated, and their significance was not
diminished by the fact that, whereas this act of mutilation had been
committed within a few miles of Q**, the head-quarters of a European
civilizing agency, and the guilty man was still in their midst, armed
with the gun with which he had first shot his victim (for which he could
produce no licence when I asked for it, saying it was his employers’),
no one of the natives of the terrorized town had attempted to report
the occurrence. They had in the interval visited Mampoko each fortnight
with the india-rubber from their district. There was also in their midst
another mutilated boy X, whose hand had been cut off either by this or
another sentry. The main waterway of the Lulongo River lay at their
doors, and on it well nigh every fortnight a Government steamer had
passed up and down stream on its way to bring the india-rubber of the
A.B.I.R. Company to Coquilhatville. They possessed, too, some canoes;
and, if all other agencies of relief were closed, the territorial
tribunal at Coquilhatville lay open to them, and the journey to it down
stream from their village could have been accomplished in some twelve
hours. It was no greater journey, indeed, than many of the towns I had
elsewhere visited were forced to undertake each week or fortnight to
deliver supplies to their local tax collectors. The fact that no effort
had been made by these people to secure relief from their unhappy
situation impelled me to believe that a very real fear of reporting such
occurrences actually existed among them. That everything asserted by
such a people, under such circumstances, is strictly true I should in no
wise assert. That discrepancies must be found in much alleged by such
rude savages, to one whose sympathies they sought to awaken, must
equally be admitted. But the broad fact remained that their previous
silence said more than their present speech. In spite of contradictions,
and even seeming misstatements, it was clear that these men were stating
either what they had actually seen with their eyes or firmly believed in
their hearts. No one viewing their unhappy surroundings or hearing their
appeals, no one at all cognizant of African native life or character,
could doubt that they were speaking, in the main, truly; and the unhappy
conviction was forced upon me that in the many forest towns behind the
screen of trees, which I could not visit, these people were entitled to
expect that a civilized administration should be represented among them
by other agents than the savages euphemistically termed “forest guards.”
The number of these “forest guards” employed in the service of the
various Concession Companies on the Congo must be very considerable; but
it is not only the Concession Companies which employ “forest guards,”
for I found many of these men in the service of the La Lulanga Company,
which is neither a Concession Company nor endowed with any “rights of
police,” so far as I am aware. In the A.B.I.R. Concession there must be
at least twenty stations directed by one or more European agents.
Each one of these “factories” has, with the permission of the
Government, an armament of twenty-five rifles. According to this
estimate of the A.B.I.R. factories, and adding the armament of the two
steamers that Company possesses, it will be found that this one
Concession Company employs 550 rifles, with a supply of cartridges not,
I believe, as yet legally fixed. These rifles are supposed by law not to
be taken from the limits of the factories, whereas the “sentries” or
“forest guards” are quartered in well-nigh every rubber-producing
village of the entire Concession.
These men are each armed with a cap-gun, and the amount of ammunition
they may individually expend would seem to have no legal limits. These
cap-guns can be very effective weapons. On the Lower Lulongo I bought
the skin of a fine leopard from a native hunter who had shot the animal
the previous day. He produced a cap-gun and his ammunition for my
inspection, and I learned from all the men around him that he alone had
killed the beast with his own gun. This gun, he informed me, he had
purchased some years ago from a former Commissaire of the Government at
Coquilhatville, whose name he gave me.
It would be, I think, a moderate computation to put the number of
cap-guns issued by the A.B.I.R. Company to its “sentries” as being in
the proportion of six to one to the number of rifles allowed to each
factory. These figures could be easily verified, but whatever the
proportion may be of cap-guns to rifles, it is clear that the A.B.I.R.
Society alone controls a force of some 500 rifles and a very large stock
of cap-guns.
The other Concession Companies on the Congo have similar privileges, so
that it might not be an excessive estimate to say that these Companies
and the subsidiary ones (not enjoying rights of police) between them,
direct an armed force of not less than 10,000 men.
Their “rights of police,” by the Circular of Governor-General Wahis of
October 1900, were seemingly limited to the right to “requisition” the
Government forces in their neighbourhood to maintain order within the
limits of the Concession. That Circular, while it touched upon the
arming of “Kapitas” with cap-guns, did not clearly define the
jurisdiction of these men as a police force or their use of that weapon,
but it is evident that the Government has been cognizant of, and is
responsible for, the employment of these armed men. By a Royal Decree,
dated the 10th March, 1892, very clear enactments were promulgated
dealing with the use of all fire-arms other than flint-locks. By the
terms of this Decree all fire-arms and their munitions, other than
flint-lock guns, were required, immediately upon importation, to be
deposited in a depôt or private store placed under the control of the
Government. Each weapon imported had to be registered upon its entry
into the depôt and marked under the supervision of the Administration,
and could not be withdrawn thence save on the presentation of a permit
to carry arms. These permits to carry arms were liable each to a tax of
20 fr., and could be withdrawn in case of abuse. By an Ordinance of the
Governor-General of the Congo State, dated the 16th June, 1892, various
Regulations making locally effective the foregoing Decree were
published. It is clear that the responsibility for the extensive
employment of men armed with cap-guns by the various commercial
Companies on the Upper Congo rests with the governing authority, which
either by law permitted it or did not make effective its own laws.
The six natives brought before me at I** had all of them been wounded by
gun-fire, and the guns in question could only have come into the hands
of their assailants through the permission or the neglect of the
authorities. Two of these injured individuals were children--one of them
certainly not more than 7 years of age--and the other a child (a boy of
about the same age), whose arm was shattered by gun-fire at close
quarters. Whatever truth there might be in the direct assertions of
these people and their relatives, who attested that the attacks upon
them had been made by sentries of the La Lulanga Company, it was clear
that they had all been attacked by men using guns, which a law already
eleven years old had clearly prohibited from being issued, save in
special cases, and “to persons who could offer sufficient guarantee that
the arms and the munitions which should be delivered to them would not
be given, ceded, or sold to third parties”--and, moreover, under a
licence which could at any time be withdrawn.
Three of these injured individuals, subsequent to the initial attack
upon them, had had their hands cut off--in each case, as it was alleged
to me, by a sentry of the La Lulanga Company. In the one case I could
alone personally investigate--that of the boy I I--I found this
accusation proved on the spot, without seemingly a shadow of doubt
existing as to the guilt of the accused sentry. These six wounded and
mutilated individuals came from villages in the immediate vicinity of
I**, and both from their lips and from those of others who came to me
from a greater distance it was clear that these were not the only cases
in that neighbourhood. One man, coming from a village 20 miles away,
begged me to return with him to his home, where, he asserted, eight of
his fellow-villagers had recently been killed by sentries placed there
in connection with the fortnightly yield of india-rubber. But my stay at
I** was necessarily a brief one. I had not time to do more than visit
the one village of R** and in that village I had only time to
investigate the charge brought by I I. The country is, moreover, largely
swampy forest, and the difficulties of getting through it are very
great. A regularly equipped expedition would have been needed, and the
means of anything like an exhaustive inquiry were not at my disposal.
But it seemed painfully clear to me that the facts brought to my
knowledge in a three days’ stay at I** would amply justify the most
exhaustive inquiry being made into the employment of armed men in that
region, and the use to which they put the weapons intrusted to
them--ostensibly as the authorized dependants of commercial
undertakings. From what I had observed in the A.B.I.R. Concession it is
equally clear to me that no inquiry could be held to have been
exhaustive which did not embrace the territories of that Company also.
The system of quartering Government soldiers in the villages, once
universal, has to-day been widely abandoned; but the abuses once
prevalent under this head spring to life in this system of “forest
guards,” who, over a wide area, represent the only form of local
gendarmerie known. But that the practice of employing Government native
soldiers in isolated posts has not disappeared is admitted by the
highest authorities.
A Circular on this subject, animadverting on the disregard of the
reiterated instructions issued, which had forbidden the employment of
black troops unaccompanied by a European officer, was dispatched by the
Governor-General as recently as the 7th September, 1903, during the
period I was actually on the Upper Congo. In this Circular the
Commandants and officers of the Force Publique are required to
rigorously observe the oft-repeated instructions on this head, and it is
pointed out that, in spite of the most imperative orders forbidding the
employment of black soldiers by themselves on the public service--“on
continue en maints endroits à pratiquer ce déplorable usage.” Copy of
this Circular is appended (Inclosure 7).[19]
From my observation of the districts I travelled on in the Upper Congo,
it would seem well-nigh impossible for European officers to be always
with the soldiers who may be sent on minor expeditions. The number of
officers is limited; they have much to do in drilling their troops, and
in camp and station life, while the territory to be exploited is vast.
The ramifications of the system of taxation, outlined in the foregoing
sketch of it, show it to be of a wide-spread character, and since a more
or less constant pressure has to be exercised to keep the taxpayers up
to the mark, and over a very wide field, a certain amount of dependance
upon the uncontrolled actions of native soldiers (who are the only
regular police in the country) must be permitted those responsible for
the collection of the tax. The most important article of native taxation
in the Upper Congo is unquestionably rubber, and to illustrate the
importance attaching by their superiors to the collection and
augmentation of this tax, the Circular of Governor-General Wahis,
addressed to the Commissionaires de District and Chefs de Zône on the
29th March, 1901, was issued. A copy of that Circular is attached
(Inclosure 8).[20]
The instructions this Circular conveys would be excellent if coming from
the head of a trading house to his subordinates, but addressed, as they
are, by a Governor-General to the principal officers of his
administration, they reveal a somewhat limited conception of public
duty. Instead of their energies being directed to the government of
their districts, the officers therein addressed could not but feel
themselves bound to consider the profitable exploitation of india-rubber
as one of the principal functions of Government. Taken into account the
interpretation these officials must put upon the positive injunctions of
their chief, there can be little doubt that they would look upon the
profitable production of india-rubber as among the most important of
their duties. The praiseworthy official would be he whose district
yielded the best and biggest supply of that commodity; and, succeeding
in this, the means whereby he brought about the enhanced value of that
yield would not, it may be believed, be too closely scrutinized.
When it is remembered that the reprimanded officials are the embodiment
of all power in their districts, and that the agents they are authorized
to employ are an admittedly savage soldiery, the source whence spring
the unhappiness and unrest of the native communities I passed through on
the Upper Congo need not be sought far beyond the policy dictating this
Circular.
I decided, owing to pressure of other duties, to return from
Coquilhatville to Stanley Pool. The last incident of my stay in the
Upper Congo occurred on the night prior to my departure. Late that night
a man came with some natives of the S** district, represented as his
friends, who were fleeing from their homes, and whom he begged me to
carry with me to the French territory at Lukolela. These were L L of T**
and seven others. L L stated that, owing to his inability to meet the
impositions of the Commissaire of the S** district, he had, with his
family, abandoned his home, and was seeking to reach Lukolela. He had
already come 80 miles down stream by canoe, but was now hiding with
friends in one of the towns near Coquilhatville. Part of the imposition
laid upon his town consisted of two goats, which had to be supplied each
month for the white man’s table at S**. As all the goats in his
neighbourhood had long since disappeared in meeting these demands, he
could now only satisfy this imposition by buying in inland districts
such goats as were for sale. For these he had to pay 3,000 rods each
(150 fr.), and as the Government remuneration amounted to only 100 rods
(5 fr.) per goat, he had no further means of maintaining the supply.
Having appealed in vain for the remission of this burden, no other
course was left him but to fly. I told this man I regretted I could not
help him, that his proper course was to appeal for relief to the
authorities of the district; and this failing, to seek the higher
authorities at Boma. This, he said, was clearly impossible for him to
do. On the last occasion when he had sought the officials at S**, he had
been told that if his next tax were not forthcoming he should go into
the “chain gang.” He added that a neighbouring Chief who had failed in
this respect had just died in the prison gang, and that such would be
his fate if he were caught. He added that, if I disbelieved him, there
were those who could vouch for his character and the truth of his
statement; and I told him and his friend that I should inquire in that
quarter, but that it was impossible for me to assist a fugitive. I
added, however, that there was no law on the Congo Statute Book which
forbade him or any other man from travelling freely to any part of the
country, and his right to navigate in his canoe the Upper Congo was as
good as mine in my steamer or any one else’s. He and his people left me
at midnight, saying that unless they could get away with me they did not
think it possible they could succeed in gaining Lukolela. A person at
T**, to whom I referred this statement, informed me that L L’s statement
was true. He said: What L L told you, _re_ price of goats, was perfectly
true. At U** they are 3,000, and here they are 2,500 to 3,000 rods.
Ducks are from 200 to 300 rods. Fowls are from 60 to 100 rods. _Re_
“dying in the chains,” he had every reason to fear this, for recently
two Chiefs died in the chain, viz., the Chief of a little town above
U**; his crime: because he did not move his houses a few hundred yards
to join them to ... as quickly as the Commissaire thought he should do.
Second, the Chief of T**; crime: because he did not go up every
fortnight with the tax. These two men were chained together and made to
carry heavy loads of bricks and water, and were frequently beaten by the
soldiers in charge of them. There are witnesses to prove this.
Leaving the township of Coquilhatville on the 11th September, I reached
Stanley Pool on the 15th September.
I have, &c.
(Signed) R. CASEMENT.
Inclosure 1 in No. 3.
(See p. 29.)
_Notes on Refugee Tribes encountered in July 1903._
Hearing of the L* refugees from I*, I decided to visit the nearest
Settlement of these fugitives, some 20 miles away, to see them for
myself.
At N* found large town of K*, and scattered through it many small
settlements of L* refugees. The town of N* consists approximately of
seventy-one K* houses, and seventy-three occupied by L*. These latter
seemed industrious, simple folk, many weaving palm fibre into mats or
native cloth; others had smithies, working brass wire into bracelets,
chains, and anklets; some iron-workers making knives. Sitting down in
one of these blacksmith’s sheds, the five men at work ceased and came
over to talk to us. I counted ten women, six grown-up men, and eight
lads and women in this one shed of L*. I then asked them to tell me why
they had left their homes. Three of the men sat down in front of me, and
told a tale which I cannot think can be true, but it seemed to come
straight from their hearts. I repeatedly asked certain parts to be gone
over again while I wrote in my note-book. The fact of my writing down
and asking for names, &c., seemed to impress them, and they spoke with
what certainly impressed me as being great sincerity.
I asked, first, why they had left their homes, and had come to live in a
strange far-off country among the K*, where they owned nothing, and were
little better than servitors. All, when this question was put, women as
well, shouted out, “On account of the rubber tax levied by the
Government posts.”
I asked particularly the names of the places whence they had come. They
answered they were from V**. Other L* refugees here at N* were W**,
others again were X**, but all had fled from their homes for the same
reason--it was the “rubber tax.”
I asked then how this tax was imposed. One of them, who had been
hammering out an iron neck collar on my arrival, spoke first. He said:--
“I am N N. These other two beside me are O O and P P, all of us Y**.
From our country each village had to take twenty loads of rubber. These
loads were big: they were as big as this....” (Producing an empty basket
which came nearly up to the handle of my walking-stick.) “That was the
first size. We had to fill that up, but as rubber got scarcer the white
man reduced the amount. We had to take these loads in four times
a-month.”
_Q._ “How much pay did you get for this?”
_A._ (Entire audience.) “We got no pay! We got nothing!”