yard, like a company of infantry going into action. They were clearing
a coffee-plantation. Bent double over the work, they advanced slowly
across the ground, hoeing it up as they went. To the back of nearly
every woman clung an infant, bound on by a breadth of cotton cloth,
after the African fashion, while its legs straddled round the mother’s
loins. Its head lay between her shoulders, and bumped helplessly
against her back as she struck the hoe into the ground. Most of the
infants were howling with discomfort and exhaustion, but there was no
pause in the work. The line advanced persistently and in silence. The
only interruption was when a loin-cloth had to be tightened up, or when
one of the little girls who spend the day in fetching water passed
along the line with her pitcher. When the people had drunk, they turned
to the work again, and the only sound to be heard was the deep grunt or
sigh as the hoe was brought heavily down into the mass of tangled grass
and undergrowth between the rows of the coffee-plants.
Five or six yards behind the slowly advancing line, like the officers
of a company under fire, stood the overseers, or gangers, or drivers of
the party. They were white men, or three parts white, and were dressed
in the traditional planter style of big hat, white shirt, and loose
trousers. Each carried an eight-foot stick of hard wood, whitewood,
pointed at the ends, and the look of those sticks quite explained the
thoroughness and persistency of the work, as well as the silence, so
unusual among the natives whether at work or play.
At six o’clock a big bell rang from the casa, and all stopped working
instantly. They gathered up their hoes and matchets (large, heavy
knives), put them into their baskets, balanced the baskets on their
heads, and walked silently back to their little gathering of mud
huts. The women unbarred the doors, put the tools away, kindled
the bits of firewood they had gathered on the path from work, and
made the family meal. Most of them had to go first to a large room in
the casa where provisions are issued. Here two of the gangers preside
over the two kinds of food which the plantation provides--flour and
dried fish (a great speciality of Angola, known to British sailors as
“stinkfish”). Each woman goes up in turn and presents a zinc disk to
a ganger. The disk has a hole through it so that it may be carried
on a string, and it is stamped with the words “Fazenda de Paciencia
30 Reis,” let us say, or “Paciencia Plantation 1½_d._” The number of
reis varies a little. It is sometimes forty-five, sometimes higher. In
return for her disks, the woman receives so much flour by weight, or
a slab of stinkfish, as the case may be. She puts them in her basket
and goes back to cook. The man, meantime, has very likely gone to the
shop next door and has exchanged his disk for a small glass of the
white sugar-cane rum, which, besides women and occasional tobacco, is
his only pleasure. But the shop, which is owned by the plantation and
worked by one of the overseers, can supply cotton cloth, a few tinned
meats, and other things if desired, also in exchange for the disks.
[Illustration: PLANTER’S HOUSE ON AN ANGOLA ESTATE]
The casa and the mud huts are soon asleep. At half-past four the big
bell clangs again. At five it clangs again. Men and women hurry out
and range themselves in line before the casa, coughing horribly and
shivering in the morning air. The head overseer calls the roll. They
answer their queer names. The women tie their babies on to their
backs again. They balance the hoe and matchet in the basket on their
heads, and pad away in silence to the spot where the work was left off
yesterday. At eleven the bell clangs again, and they come back to feed.
At twelve it clangs again, and they go back to work. So day follows day
without a break, except that on Sundays (“days sanctified by religion”)
the people are allowed, in some plantations, to work little plots of
ground which are nominally their own.
“No change, no pause, no hope.” That is the sum of plantation life. So
the man or woman known as a “contract laborer” toils, till gradually or
suddenly death comes, and the poor, worn-out body is put to rot. Out in
the forest you come upon the little heap of red earth under which it
lies. On the top of the heap is set the conical basket of woven grasses
which was the symbol of its toil in life, and now forms its only
monument. For a fortnight after death the comrades of the dead think
that the spirit hovers uneasily about the familiar huts. They dance and
drink rum to cheer themselves and it. When the fortnight is over, the
spirit is dissolved into air, and all is just as though the slave had
never been.
There is no need to be hypocritical or sentimental about it. The fate
of the slave differs little from the fate of common humanity. Few men
or women have opportunity for more than working, feeding, getting
children, and death. If any one were to maintain that the plantation
life is not in reality worse than the working-people’s life in most
of our manufacturing towns, or in such districts as the Potteries,
the Black Country, and the Isle of Dogs, he would have much to say.
The same argument was the only one that counted in defence of the old
slavery in the West Indies and the Southern States, and it will have
to be seriously met again now that slavery is reappearing under other
names. A man who has been bought for money is at least of value to
his master. In return for work he gets his mud hut, his flour, his
stinkfish, and his rum. The driver with his eight-foot stick is not so
hideous a figure as the British overseer with his system of blackmail;
and as for cultivation of the intellect and care of the soul, the less
we talk about such things the better.
In this account I only mean to show that the difference between the
“contract labor” of Angola, and the old-fashioned slavery of our
grandfathers’ time is only a difference of legal terms. In life there
is no difference at all. The men and women whom I have described as
I saw them have all been bought from their enemies, their chiefs, or
their parents; they have either been bought themselves or were the
children of people who had been bought. The legal contract, if it
had been made at all, had not been observed, either in its terms or
its renewal. The so-called pay by the plantation tokens is not pay
at all, but a form of the “truck” system at its very worst. So far
from the children being free, they now form the chief labor supply
of the plantation, for the demand for “serviçaes” in San Thomé has
raised the price so high that the Angola plantations could not carry
on at all without the little swarms of children that are continually
growing up on the estates. Sometimes, as I have heard, two or three
of the men escape, and hide in the crowd at Loanda or set up a little
village far away in the forest. But the risk is great; they have no
money and no friends. I have not heard of a runaway laborer being
prosecuted for breach of contract. As a matter of fact, the fiction of
the contract is hardly even considered. But when a large plantation
was sold the other day, do you suppose the contract of each laborer
was carefully examined, and the length of his future service taken
into consideration? Not a bit of it. The laborers went in block with
the estate. Men, women, and children, they were handed over to the new
owners, and became their property just like the houses and trees.
Portuguese planters are not a bit worse than other men, but their
position is perilous. The owner or agent lives in the big house with
three or four white or whitey-brown overseers. They are remote from all
equal society, and they live entirely free from any control or public
opinion that they care about. Under their absolute and unquestioned
power are men and women, boys and girls--let us say two hundred in all.
We may even grant, if we will, that the Portuguese planters are far
above the average of men. Still I say that if they were all Archbishops
of Canterbury, it would not be safe for them to be intrusted with such
powers as these over the bodies and souls of men and women.
III
DOMESTIC SLAVERY ON THE MAINLAND
Some two hundred miles south of St. Paul de Loanda, you come to a deep
and quiet inlet, called Lobito Bay. Hitherto it has been desert and
unknown--a spit of waterless sand shutting in a basin of the sea at the
foot of barren and waterless hills. But in twenty years’ time Lobito
Bay may have become famous as the central port of the whole west coast
of Africa, and the starting-place for traffic with the interior. For
it is the base of the railway scheme known as the “Robert Williams
Concession,” which is intended to reach the ancient copper-mines of the
Katanga district in the extreme south of the Congo State, and so to
unite with the “Tanganyika Concession.” It would thus connect the west
coast traffic with the great lakes and the east. A branch line might
also turn off at some point along the high and flat watershed between
the Congo and Zambesi basins, and join the Cape Town railway near
Victoria Falls. Possibly before the Johannesburg gold is exhausted,
passengers from London to the Transvaal will address their luggage
“viâ Lobito Bay.”
[Illustration: FIRST MAIL-STEAMER AT LOBITO BAY]
But this is only prophecy. What is certain is that on January 5,
1905, a mail-steamer was for the first time warped alongside a little
landing-stage of lighters, in thirty-five feet of water, and I may go
down to fame as the first man to land at the future port. What I found
were a few laborers’ huts, a tent, a pile of sleepers, a tiny engine
puffing over a mile or two of sand, and a large Portuguese custom-house
with an eye to possibilities. I also found an indomitable English
engineer, engaged in doing all the work with his own hands, to the
entire satisfaction of the native laborers, who encouraged him with
smiles.
At present the railway, which is to transform the conditions of Central
Africa, runs as a little tram-line for about eight miles along the
sand to Katumbella. There it has something to show in the shape of a
great iron bridge, which crosses the river with a single span. The day
I was there the engineers were terrifying the crocodiles by knocking
away the wooden piles used in the construction, and both natives
and Portuguese were awaiting the collapse of the bridge with the
pleasurable excitement of people who await a catastrophe that does not
concern themselves. But; to the general disappointment, the last prop
was knocked away and the bridge still stood. It was amazing. It was
contrary to the traditions of Africa and of Portugal.
Katumbella itself is an old town, with two old forts, a dozen
trading-houses, and a river of singular beauty, winding down between
mountains. It is important because it stands on the coast at the end
of the carriers’ foot-path, which has been for centuries the principal
trade route between the west and the interior. One sees that path
running in white lines far over the hills behind the town, and up and
down it black figures are continually passing with loads upon their
heads. They bring rubber, beeswax, and a few other products of lands
far away. They take back enamelled ware, rum, salt, and the bales of
cotton cloth from Portugal and Manchester which, together with rum,
form the real coinage and standard of value in Central Africa, salt
being used as the small change. The path ends, vulgarly enough, at an
oil-lamp in the chief street of Katumbella. Yet it is touched by the
tragedy of human suffering. For this is the end of that great slave
route which Livingstone had to cross on his first great journey,
but otherwise so carefully avoided. This is the path down which the
caravans of slaves from the basin of the Upper Congo have been brought
for generations, and down this path within the last three or four years
the slaves were openly driven to the coast, shackled, tied together,
and beaten along with whips, the trader considering himself fairly
fortunate if out of his drove of human beings he brought half alive to
the market. There is a notorious case in which a Portuguese trader,
who still follows his calling unchecked, lost six hundred out of nine
hundred on the way down. At Katumbella the slaves were rested, sorted
out, dressed, and then taken on over the fifteen miles to Benguela,
usually disguised as ordinary carriers. The traffic still goes on,
almost unchecked. But of that ancient route from Bihé to the coast I
shall write later on, for by this path I hope to come when I emerge
from the interior and catch sight of the sea again between the hills.
[Illustration: END OF THE GREAT SLAVE ROUTE AT KATUMBELLA]
As to the town of Benguela, there is something South African about it.
Perhaps it comes from the eucalyptus-trees, the broad and sandy roads
ending in scrubby waste, and the presence of Boer transport-riders
with their ox-wagons from southern Angola. But the place is, in fact,
peculiarly Portuguese. Next to Loanda, it is the most important town
in the colony, and for years it was celebrated as the very centre
of the slave-trade with Brazil. In the old days when Great Britain
was the enthusiastic opponent of slavery in every form, some of her
men-of-war were generally hanging about off Benguela on the watch.
They succeeded in making the trade difficult and unlucrative; but
we have all become tamer now and more ready to show consideration
for human failings, provided they pay. Call slaves by another name,
legalize their position by a few printed papers, and the traffic
becomes a commercial enterprise deserving of every encouragement. A
few years ago, while gangs were still being whipped down to the coast
in chains, one of the most famous of living African explorers informed
the captain of a British gun-boat what was the true state of things
upon a Portuguese steamer bound for San Thomé. The captain, full of
old-fashioned indignation, proposed to seize the ship. Whereupon the
British authorities, flustered at the notion of such impoliteness,
reminded him that we were now living in a civilized age. These men and
women, who had been driven like cattle over some eight hundred miles of
road to Benguela were not to be called slaves. They were “serviçaes,”
and had signed a contract for so many years, saying they went to San
Thomé of their own free will. It was the free will of sheep going to
the butcher’s. Every one knew that. But the decencies of law and order
must be observed.
Within the last two or three years the decencies of law and order have
been observed in Benguela with increasing care. There are many reasons
for the change. Possibly the polite representations of the British
Foreign Office may have had some effect; for England, besides being
Portugal’s “old ally,” is one of the best customers for San Thomé
cocoa, and it might upset commercial relations if the cocoa-drinkers
of England realized that they were enjoying their luxury, or exercising
their virtue, at the price of slave labor. Something may also be due to
the presence of the English engineers and mining prospectors connected
with the Robert Williams Concession. But I attribute the change chiefly
to the helpless little rising of the natives, known as the “Bailundu
war” of 1902. Bailundu is a district on the route between Benguela and
Bihé, and the rising, though attributed to many absurd causes by the
Portuguese--especially to the political intrigues of the half-dozen
American missionaries in the district--was undoubtedly due to the
injustice, violence, and lust of certain traders and administrators.
The rising itself was an absolute failure. Terrified as the Portuguese
were, the natives, were more terrified still. I have seen a place where
over four hundred native men, women, and children were massacred in
the rocks and holes where their bones still lie, while the Portuguese
lost only three men. But the disturbance may have served to draw
the attention of Portugal to the native grievances. At any rate, it
was about the same time that two of the officers at an important
fort were condemned to long terms of imprisonment and exile for open
slave-dealing, and Captain Amorim, a Portuguese gunner, was sent out as
a kind of special commissioner to make inquiries. He showed real zeal
in putting down the slave-trade, and set a large number of slaves at
liberty with special “letters of freedom,” signed by himself--most of
which have since been torn up by the owners. His stay was, unhappily,
short, but he returned home, honored by the hatred of the Portuguese
traders and officials in the country, who did their best to poison him,
as their custom is. His action and reports were, I think, the chief
cause of Portugal’s “uneasiness.”
So the horror of the thing has been driven under the surface; and what
is worse, it has been legalized. Whether it is diminished by secrecy
and the forms of law, I shall be able to judge better in a few months’
time. I found no open slave-market existing in Benguela, such as
reports in Europe would lead one to expect. The spacious court-yards
or compounds round the trading-houses are no longer crowded with gangs
of slaves in shackles, and though they are still used for housing the
slaves before their final export, the whole thing is done quietly, and
without open brutality, which is, after all, unprofitable as well as
inhuman.
In the main street there is a government office where the official
representative of the “Central Committee of Labor and Emigration for
the Islands” (having its headquarters in Lisbon) sits in state, and
under due forms of law receives the natives, who enter one door as
slaves and go out of another as “serviçaes.” Everything is correct. The
native, who has usually been torn from his home far in the interior,
perhaps as much as eight hundred miles away, and already sold twice,
is asked by an interpreter if it is his wish to go to San Thomé, or
to undertake some other form of service to a new master. Of course he
answers, “Yes.” It is quite unnecessary to suppose, as most people
suppose, that the interpreter always asks such questions as, “Do
you like fish?” or, “Will you have a drink?” though one of the best
scholars in the languages of the interior has himself heard those
questions asked at an official inspection of “serviçaes” on board ship.
It would be unnecessary for the interpreter to invent such questions.
If he asked, “Is it your wish to go to hell?” the “serviçal” would say
“yes” just the same. In fact, throughout this part of Africa, the name
of San Thomé is becoming identical with hell, and when a man has been
brought hundreds of miles from his home by an unknown road, and through
long tracts of “hungry country”--when also he knows that if he did get
back he would probably be sold again or killed--what else can he answer
but “yes”? Under similar circumstances the Archbishop of Canterbury
would answer the same.
The “serviçal” says “yes,” and so sanctions the contract for his
labor. The decencies of law and order are respected. The government
of the colony receives its export duty--one of the queerest methods
of “protecting home industries” ever invented. All is regular and
legalized. A series of new rules for the serviçal’s comfort and
happiness during his stay in the islands was issued in 1903, though its
stipulations have not been carried out. And off goes the man to his
death in San Thomé or Il Principe as surely as if he had signed his own
death-warrant. To be sure, there are regulations for his return. By
law, three-fifths of his so-called monthly wages are to be set aside
for a “Repatriation Fund,” and in consideration of this he is granted a
“free passage” back to the coast. A more ingenious trick for reducing
the price of labor has never been invented, but, for very shame, the
Repatriation Fund has ceased to exist, if it ever existed. Ask any
honest man who knows the country well. Ask any Scottish engineer upon
the Portuguese steamers that convey the “serviçaes” to the islands, and
he will tell you they never return. The islands are their grave.
These are things that every one knows, but I will not dwell upon them
yet or even count them as proved, for I have still far to go and
much to see. Leaving the export trade in “contracted labor,” I will
now speak of what I have actually seen and known of slavery on the
mainland under the white people themselves. I have heard the slaves
in Angola estimated at five-sixths of the population by an Englishman
who has held various influential positions in the country for nearly
twenty years. The estimate is only guesswork, for the Portuguese are
not strong in statistics, especially in statistics of slavery. But
including the very large number of natives who, by purchase or birth,
are the family slaves of the village chiefs and other fairly prosperous
natives, we might probably reckon at least half the population as
living under some form of slavery--either in family slavery to natives,
or general slavery to white men, or in plantation slavery (under
which head I include the export trade). I have referred to the family
slavery among the natives. Till lately it has been universal in Africa,
and it still exists in nearly all parts. But though it is constantly
pleaded as their excuse by white slave-owners, it is not so shameful a
thing as the slavery organized by the whites, if only because whites
do at least boast themselves to be a higher race than natives, with
higher standards of life and manners. From what I have seen of African
life, both in the south and west, I am not sure that the boast is
justified, but at all events it is made, and for that reason white men
are precluded from sheltering themselves behind the excuse of native
customs.
On the same steamer by which I reached Benguela there were five little
native boys, conspicuous in striped jerseys, and running about the ship
like rats. I suppose they were about ten to twelve years old, perhaps
less. I do not know where they came from, but it must have been from
some fairly distant part of the interior, for, like all natives who see
stairs for the first time, they went up and down them on their hands
and knees. They were travelling with a Portuguese, and within a week of
landing at Benguela he had sold them all to other white owners. Their
price was fifty milreis apiece (nearly £10). Their owner did rather
well, for the boys were small and thin--hardly bigger than another
native slave boy who was at the same time given away by one Portuguese
friend to another as a New-Year’s present. But all through this part
of the country I have found the price of human beings ranging rather
higher than I expected, and the man who told me the price of the boys
had himself been offered one of them at that figure, and was simply
passing on the offer to myself.
Perhaps I was led to underestimate prices a little by the statement
of a friend in England that at Benguela one could buy a woman for £8
and a girl for £12. He had not been to that part of the coast himself,
though for five years he had lived in the Katanga district of the Congo
State, from which large numbers of the slaves are drawn. Perhaps he
had forgotten to take into account the heavy cost of transport from
the interior and the risk of loss by death upon the road. Or perhaps
he reckoned by the exceptionally low prices prevailing after the dry
season of 1903, when, owing to a prolonged drought, the famine was
severe in a district near the Kunene in southeast Angola, and some
Portuguese and Boer traders took advantage of the people’s hunger to
purchase oxen and children cheap in exchange for mealies. Similarly,
in 1904, women were being sold unusually cheap in a district by the
Cuanza, owing to a local famine. Livingstone, in his _First Expedition
to Africa_, said he had never known cases of parents selling children
into slavery, but Mr. F. S. Arnot, in his edition of the book, has
shown that such things occur (though as a rule a child is sold by
his maternal uncle), and I have myself heard of several instances
in the last few weeks, both for debt and hunger. Necessity is the
slave-trader’s opportunity, and under such conditions the market
quotations for human beings fall, in accordance with the universal
economics.