“Our village got cloth and a little salt, but not the people who did the
work. Our Chiefs eat up the cloth; the workers got nothing. The pay was
a fathom of cloth and a little salt for every big basket full, but it
was given to the Chief, never to the men. It used to take ten days to
get the twenty baskets of rubber--we were always in the forest and then
when we were late we were killed. We had to go further and further into
the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women
had to give up cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved. Wild
beasts--the leopards--killed some of us when we were working away in the
forest, and others got lost or died from exposure and starvation, and we
begged the white man to leave us alone, saying we could get no more
rubber, but the white men and their soldiers said: ‘Go! You are only
beasts yourselves, you are nyama (meat).’ We tried, always going further
into the forest, and when we failed and our rubber was short, the
soldiers came to our towns and killed us. Many were shot, some had their
ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes around their necks and
bodies and taken away. The white men sometimes at the posts did not
know of the bad things the soldiers did to us, but it was the white men
who sent the soldiers to punish us for not bringing in enough rubber.”