primitive and savage tribes of the interior. But on both sides along
its banks and among its tributaries you find the relics of other races
of very different character from the Bihéans--the Luimbi, whose women
still wear the old coinage of white cowry-shells in their hair, and the
Luchazi, who support their loads with a strap round their foreheads,
like the Swiss, and whose women dress their hair with red mud, and
carry their babies straddled round the hip instead of round the back.
Going eastward along this pathway into the interior, I had reached the
banks of the Cuanza one evening towards the end of the wet season. It
had been raining hard, but at sunset there was a sullen clear which
left the country steaming with damp. On my left I could hear the roar
of the Cuanza rapids, where the river divides among rocky islands and
rushes down in breakers and foam. And far away, across the river’s
broad valley, I could see the country into which I was going--straight
line after line of black forest, with the mist rising in pallid lines
between. It was like a dreary skeleton of the earth.
[Illustration: CROSSING THE CUANZA]
Such was my first sight of “the Hungry Country”--that accursed stretch
of land which reaches from just beyond the Cuanza almost to the
Portuguese fort at Mashiko. How far that may be in miles I cannot say
exactly. A rapid messenger will cover the distance in seven days, but
it took me nine, and it takes most people ten or twelve. My carriers
had light loads, and in spite of almost continuous fevers and poisoned
feet we went fast, walking from six till two or even four o’clock
without food, so that, even allowing for delays at the deep morasses
and rivers and the long climbs up the forest hills, I think we cannot
have averaged less than twenty miles a day, and probably we often made
twenty-five. I should say that the distance from the Cuanza to Mashiko
must be somewhere about two hundred and fifty miles, and it is Hungry
Country nearly the whole way.
Still less is it certain how far the district extends in breadth
from north to south. I have often looked from the top of its highest
uplands, where a gap in the trees gave me a view, in the hope of seeing
something beyond. But, though the hill might be six thousand feet above
the sea, I could never get a sight of anything but forest, and still
more forest, till the waves of the land ended in a long, straight
line of blue--almost as straight and blue as the sea--and nothing but
forest all the way, with not a trace of man. Yet the whole country is
well watered. Deep and clear streams run down the middle of the open
marshes between the hills. For the first day or two of the journey they
flow back into the Cuanza basin, but when you have climbed the woody
heights beyond, you find them running north into the Kasai, that great
tributary of the Congo, and south into the Lungwebungu or the Luena,
the tributaries of the Zambesi. At some points you stand at a distance
of only two days’ journey from the Kasai and the Lungwebungu on either
side, and there is water flowing into them all the year round. In
Africa it is almost always the want of water that makes a Hungry
Country, but here the rule does not hold.
At first I thought the character of the soil was sufficient reason for
the desert. Except for the black morasses, it is a loose white sand
from end to end. The sand drifts down the hills like snow, and banks
itself up along any sheltered or level place, till as you plod through
it hour after hour, almost ankle-deep, while your shadow gradually
swallows itself up as the sun climbs the sky, your only thought becomes
a longing for water and a longing for one small yard of solid ground.
The trees are poor and barren, and I noticed that the farther I went
the soft joints of the grasses, which ought to be sweet, became more
and more bitter, till they tasted like quinine.
This may be the cause of another thing I noticed. All living creatures
in this region are crazy for salt, just like oxen on a “sour veldt.”
Salt is far the best coinage you can take among the Chibokwe. I do not
mean our white table-salt. They reject that with scorn, thinking it
is sugar or something equally useless; but for the coarse and dirty
“bay-salt” they will sell almost anything, and a pinch of it is a
greater treat to a child than a whole bride-cake would be in England.
I have tested it especially with the bees that swarm in these forests
and produce most of the beeswax that goes to Europe. I first noticed
their love of salt when I salted some water one afternoon in the
vain hope of curing the poisoned sores on my feet. In half an hour
the swarms of bees had driven me from my tent. I was stung ten times,
and had to wait about in the forest till the sun set, when the bees
vanished, as by signal.
Another afternoon I tested them by putting a heap of sugar, a paper
smeared with condensed milk, and a bag of salt tightly wrapped up in
tar-paper side by side on the ground. I gave them twenty minutes, and
then I found nothing on the sugar, five flies on the milk, and the
tar-paper so densely covered with bees that they overlapped one another
as when they swarm. For want of anything better, they will fight over
a sweaty shirt in the same way; and once, by the banks of a stream,
they sent all my carriers howling along the path by creeping up under
their loin-cloths. The butterflies seek salt also. If you spread out
a damp rag anywhere in tropical Africa, you will soon have brilliant
butterflies on it. But if you add a little salt in the Hungry Country,
the rag will be a blaze of colors, unless the bees come and drive the
butterflies off.
As I said, the natives feel the longing too. Among the Chibokwe, the
women burn a marsh-grass into a potash powder as a substitute; and if
a native squats down in front of you, puts out a long, pink tongue and
strokes it appealingly with his finger, you may know it is salt he
wants. The scarcity has become worse since the Belgians, following
their usual highwayman methods, have robbed the natives of the great
salt-pans in the south of the Congo State and made them a trade
monopoly.
[Illustration: NATIVES BURNING GRASS FOR SALT]
In the character of the soil, then, there seemed to be sufficient
reason for the name of the country, and I should have been satisfied
with it but for distinct evidences that a few spots along the path
have been inhabited not so very long ago. Here and there you come upon
plants which grow generally or only on the site of deserted villages or
fields; such as the atundwa--a plant with branching fronds that smell
like walnut leaves. It yields a fruit whose hard and crimson case just
projects from the ground and holds a gray bag of seeds, very sour, and
almost as good to eat or drink as lemons. But still more definite is
the evidence of travellers, like the missionary explorer Mr. Arnot, who
first traversed the country over twenty years ago, and has described
to me the villages he found there then. There was, for instance, the
large Chibokwe town of Peho, which was built round the head of a marsh
close upon the main path some two or three days west of Mashiko. You
will still find the place marked, about the size of London, on any map
of Angola or Africa, but I have looked everywhere for it along the
route in vain. A Portuguese once told me he thought it was a few days’
journey north of his house near Mashiko. But he was wrong. The whole
place has entirely disappeared, and has less right than Nineveh to a
name on a modern map.[1]
The Chibokwe have a custom of destroying their villages and abandoning
the site whenever a chief dies, and this in itself is naturally very
puzzling to all geographers. But I think it hardly explains the utter
abandonment of the Hungry Country. It is commonly supposed that no
wild animals will live in the region, but that is not true, either.
Many times, when I have wandered away from the foot-path, I have put
up various antelopes--lechwe and duikers--and beside the marshes in
the early morning I have seen the fresh spoor of larger deer, as well
as of porcupines and wart-hogs. Cranes are fairly common, and green
parrots very abundant. Almost every night one hears the leopards roar.
“Roar” is not the word: it is that deep note of pleasurable expectancy
that they sound a quarter of an hour before feeding-time at the Zoo,
and they would not make that noise if there was nothing in the country
to eat. All these reasons put together drive me unwillingly to think
there may be some truth in the native belief that the whole land has
been laid under a curse which will never be removed. As I write, the
rumor reaches us that the basin of the Zambesi and all its tributaries
have just been awarded to Great Britain, so that nearly the whole of
the Hungry Country will come under English rule. It is important for
England, therefore, that the curse should be forgotten, and in time it
may be. All I know for certain is that undoubtedly a curse lies upon
the country now.[2]
There are two ferries over the Cuanza, one close under the Portuguese
fort, the other a comfortable distance up-stream, well out of
observation. It is a typically Portuguese arrangement. The Commandant’s
duty is to stop the slave-trade, but how can he be expected to see what
is going on a mile or so away! Even as you come down to the river, you
find slave-shackles hanging on the bushes. You cross the stream in
dugout canoes, running the chance of being upset by one of the hippos
which snort and pant a little farther up. You enter the forest again,
and now the shackles are thick upon the trees. This is the place where
most of the slaves, being driven down from the interior, are untied. It
is safe to let them loose here. The Cuanza is just in front, and behind
them lies the long stretch of Hungry Country, which they could never
get through alive if they tried to run back to their homes. So it is
that the trees on the western edge of the Hungry Country bear shackles
in profusion--shackles for the hands, shackles for the feet, shackles
for three or four slaves who are clamped together at night. The drivers
hang them up with the idea of using them again when they return for the
next consignment of human merchandise; but, as a rule, I think, they
find it easier to make new shackles as they are wanted.
A shackle is easily made. A native hacks out an oblong hole in a log
of wood with an axe; it must be big enough for two hands or two feet
to pass through, and then a wooden pin is driven through the hole from
side to side, so that the hands or feet cannot stir until it is drawn
out again. The two hands or feet do not necessarily belong to the same
person. You find shackles of various ages--some quite new, with the
marks of the axe fresh upon them, some old and half eaten by ants. But
none can be very old, for in Africa all dead wood quickly disappears,
and this is a proof that the slave-trade did not really end after the
war of 1902, as easy-going officials are fond of assuring us.
When I speak of the shackles beside the Cuanza, I do not mean that
this is the only place where they are to be found. You will see them
scattered along the whole length of the Hungry Country; in fact,
I think they are thickest at about the fifth day’s journey. They
generally hang on low bushes of quite recent growth, and are most
frequent by the edge of the marshes. I cannot say why. There seems
to be no reason in their distribution. I have been assured that each
shackle represents the death of a slave, and, indeed, one often finds
the remains of a skeleton beside a shackle. But the shackles are so
numerous that if the slaves died at that rate even slave-trading would
hardly pay, in spite of the immense profit on every man or woman who
is brought safely through. It may often happen that a sick slave drags
himself to the water and dies there. It may be that some drivers think
they can do without the shackles after four or five days of the Hungry
Country. But at present I can find no satisfactory explanation of the
strange manner in which the shackles are scattered up and down the
path. I only know that between the Cuanza and Mashiko I saw several
hundreds of them, and yet I could not look about much, but had to watch
the narrow and winding foot-path close in front of me, as one always
must in Central Africa.
[Illustration: SKELETON OF SLAVE ON A PATH THROUGH THE HUNGRY COUNTRY]
That path is strewn with dead men’s bones. You see the white
thigh-bones lying in front of your feet, and at one side, among the
undergrowth, you find the skull. These are the skeletons of slaves who
have been unable to keep up with the march, and so were murdered or
left to die. Of course the ordinary carriers and travellers die too.
It is very horrible to see a man beginning to break down in the middle
of the Hungry Country. He must go on or die. The caravan cannot wait
for him, for it has food for only the limited number of days. I knew a
distressful Irishman who entered the route with hardly any provision,
broke down in the middle, and was driven along by his two carriers,
who threatened his neck with their axes whenever he stopped, and only
by that means succeeded in getting him through alive. Still worse was
a case among my own carriers--a little boy who had been brought to
carry his father’s food, as is the custom. He became crumpled up with
rheumatism, and I found he had bad heart-disease as well. He kept on
lying down in the path and refusing to go farther. Then he would creep
away into the bush and hide himself to die. We had to track him out,
and his father beat him along the march till the blood ran down his
back.
But with slaves less trouble is taken. After a certain amount of
beating and prodding, they are killed or left to die. Carriers are
always buried by their comrades. You pass many of their graves, hung
with strips of rag or decorated with a broken gourd. But slaves are
never buried, and that is an evidence that the bones on the path are
the bones of slaves. The Bihéans have a sentiment against burying
slaves. They call it burying money. It is something like their strong
objections to burying debtors. The man who buries a debtor becomes
responsible for the debts; so the body is hung up on a bush outside
the village, and the jackals consume it, being responsible for nothing.
Before the great change made by the “Bailundu war” of 1902, the horrors
of the Hungry Country were undoubtedly worse than they are now. I have
known Englishmen who passed through it four years ago and found slaves
tied to the trees, with their veins cut so that they might die slowly,
or laid beside the path with their hands and feet hewn off, or strung
up on scaffolds with fires lighted beneath them. My carriers tell me
that this last method of encouraging the others is still practised away
from the pathway, but I never saw it done myself. I never saw distinct
evidence of torture. The horrors of the road have certainly become
less in the last three years, since the rebellion of 1902. Rebellion
is always good. It always implies an unendurable wrong. It is the only
shock that ever stirs the self-complacency of officials.
I have not seen torture in the Hungry Country. I have only seen murder.
Every bone scattered along that terrible foot-path from Mashiko to the
Cuanza is the bone of a murdered man. The man may not have been killed
by violence, though in most cases the sharp-cut hole in the skull shows
where the fatal stroke was given. But if he was not killed by violence,
he was taken from his home and sold, either for the buyer’s use, or
to sell again to a Bihéan, to a Portuguese trader, or to the agents
who superintend the “contract labor” for San Thomé, and are so useful
in supplying the cocoa-drinkers of England and America, as well as in
enriching the plantation-owners and the government. The Portuguese and
such English people as love to stand well with Portuguese authority
tell us that most of the men now sold as slaves are criminals, and so
it does not matter. Very well, then; let us make a lucrative clearance
of our own prisons by selling the prisoners to our mill-owners as
factory-hands. We might even go beyond our prisons. It is easy to prove
a crime against a man when you can get £10 or £20 by selling him. And
if each of us that has committed a crime may be sold, who shall escape
the shackles?
The most recent case of murder that I saw was on my return through the
Hungry Country, the sixth day out from Mashiko. The murdered man was
lying about ten yards from the path hidden in deep grass and bracken.
But for the smell I should have passed the place without noticing
him as I have no doubt passed scores, and perhaps hundreds, of other
skeletons that lie hidden in that forest. How long the man had been
murdered I could not say, for decay in Africa varies with the weather,
but the ants generally contrive that it shall be quick. I think the
thing must have been done since I passed the place on my way into the
country, about a month before. But possibly it was a few days earlier.
My “headman” had heard of the event (a native hears everything), but it
did not impress him or the other carriers in the least. It was far too
common. Unhappily I do not understand enough Umbundu to make out the
exact date or the details, except that the man was a slave who broke
down with the usual shivering fever on the road and was killed with an
axe because he could go no farther. As to the cause of death there was
no doubt. When I tried to raise the head, the thick, woolly hair came
off in my hand like a woven pad, leaving the skull bare, and revealing
the deep gash made by the axe at the base of the skull just before it
merges with the neck. As I set it down again, the skull broke off from
the backbone and fell to one side. Having laid a little earth upon the
body, I went on. It would take an army of sextons to bury all the poor
bones which consecrate that path.
Yet, in spite of the shackles hanging on the trees, and in spite of the
skeletons upon the path and the bodies of recently murdered men, I have
not seen a slave caravan such as has been described to me by almost
every traveller who has passed along that route into the interior. I
mean, I have not seen a gang of slaves chained together, their hands
shackled, and their necks held fast in forked sticks. I am not sure
of the reason; there were probably many reasons combined. It is just
the end of the wet season, just the time when the traders think of
sending in for slaves, and not of bringing them out. Directly the
natives in the Bihéan village near which I was staying heard I was
going to Mashiko, though they knew nothing of my object, they said,
“Now a messenger will be sent ahead to warn the slave-traders that
an Englishman is coming.” The same was told me by two Englishmen who
traversed the country last autumn for the mining concession, and in
my case I have not the slightest doubt that messengers were sent.
Again, a Portuguese trader, living on the farther side of the Hungry
Country, upon the Mushi-Moshi (the Simoï, as the Portuguese classically
call it), told me the drivers now bring the slaves through unknown
bush-paths north of the old route. He kept a store which, being on
the edge of the Hungry Country, was as frequented and lucrative as a
wine-and-spirit house must be on the frontier of a prohibition State.
And he was the only Portuguese I have met who recognized the natives as
fellow-subjects, and even as fellow-men, with rights of their own. He
also boasted, I think justly, of the good effects of the war in 1902.
All these reasons may have contributed. But still I think that the
old caravan system has been reduced within the last three years. The
shock to public feeling in Portugal owing to the Bailundu war and its
revelations; the disgrace of certain officers at the forts, who were
convicted of taking a percentage of slaves from the passing caravans
as hush-money; the strong action of Captain Amorim in trying to
suppress the whole traffic; the instructions to the forts to allow no
chained gangs to pass--all these things have, I believe, acted as a
check upon the old-fashioned methods. There is also an increased risk
in obtaining slaves from the interior in large batches. The Belgians
strongly oppose the entrance of the traders into their state, partly
because guns and powder are the usual exchange for slaves, partly
because they wish to retain their own natives under their own tender
mercies. The line of Belgian forts along the frontier is quickly
increasing. Some Bihéan traders have been shot. In one recent case,
much talked of, a bullet from a Maxim gun struck the head of a gang
of slaves, marching as usual in single file, and killed nine in
succession. In any case, the traders seem to have discovered that the
palmy days when they used to parade their chained gangs through the
country, and burn, flog, torture, and cut throats as they pleased, are
over for the present. For many months after the war even the traffic
to San Thomé almost ceased. It has begun again now and is rapidly
increasing. As I noted in a former letter, an order was issued in
December, 1904, requiring the government agents to press on the supply.
But at present, I think, the slaves are coming down in smaller gangs.
They are not, as a rule, tortured; they are shackled only at night,
and the traders take a certain amount of pains to conceal the whole
traffic, or at least to make it look respectable.
As to secrecy, they are not entirely successful. A man whose word no
one in Central Africa would think of doubting has just sent down notice
from the interior that a gang of two hundred and fifty slaves passed
through the Nanakandundu district, bound for the coast, in the end of
February (1905), shackles and all. The man who brought the message had
done his best to avoid the gang, fearing for his life. But there is
no doubt they are coming through, and I ought to have met them near
Mashiko if they had not taken a by-path or been broken up into small
groups.
It was probably such a small group that I met within a day’s journey of
Caiala, the largest trading-house in Bihé. I was walking at about half
an hour’s distance from the road, when suddenly I came upon a party of
eighteen or twenty boys and four men hidden in the bush. At sight of
me they all ran away, the men driving the boys before them. But they
left two long chicotes or sjamboks (hide whips) hanging on the trees,
as well as the very few light loads they had with them. After a time
I returned, and they ran away again. I then noticed that they posted
a man on a tree-top to observe my movements, and he remained there
till I trekked on with my own people. Of course the evidence is not
conclusive, but it is suspicious. Men armed with chicotes do not hide
a group of boys in the bush for nothing, and it is most probable that
they formed part of a gang going into Bihé for sale.
I may have passed many such groups on my journey without knowing it,
for it is a common trick of the traders now to get up the slaves as
ordinary carriers. But among all of them, there was only one which
was obviously a slave gang, almost without concealment. My carriers
detected them at once, and I heard the word “apeka” (slaves)[3] passed
down the line even before I came in sight of them. The caravan numbered
seventy-eight in all. In front and rear were four men with guns, and
there were six of them in the centre. The whole caravan was organized
with a precision that one never finds among free carriers, and nearly
the whole of it consisted of boys under fourteen. This in itself would
be almost conclusive, for no trade caravan would contain anything like
that proportion of boys, whereas boys are the most easily stolen from
native villages in the interior, and, on the whole, they pay the cost
of transport best. But more conclusive even than the appearance of the
gang was the quiet evidence of my own carriers, who had no reason for
lying, who never pointed out another caravan of slaves, and yet had not
a moment’s doubt as to this.