gold-prospectors against the missions, let us pass them by. They are
only the weary old language of “the world.” They are like the sneers
of butchers and publicans at astronomy. They are the tribute of the
enemy, the assurance that all is not in vain. It would be unreasonable
to expect anything else, and dangerous to receive it. The only thing
that makes me hesitate about the work of the order is that many
traders and officials have said to me, “The Catholic missions are,
at all events, practical; they do teach the natives carpentering and
wagon-building and how to dig.” It is perfectly true and admirable,
and, as a matter of fact, the other missions do the same. But a mission
might teach its followers to make wagons enough for a Boer’s paradise
and doors enough for all the huts in Africa and still have failed of
its purpose.
Besides the order of the Holy Spirit, there are two other notable
orders at work in Angola--the American mission (Congregationalist)
under the “American Board,” and the English mission (Plymouth Brethren)
under divine direction only. Each mission has four stations, and each
is about to start a new one. Some members of the English mission are
Americans, like the pioneers at Chinjamba, and all are on terms of
singular friendship, helping one another in every possible way, almost
like the followers of Christ. Of all sects that I have ever known,
these are the only two that I have heard pray for each other, and that
without condemnation--I mean they pray in a different spirit from
the Anglican prayer for Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics. There
is another American order, called the Wesleyan Episcopalian, with
stations at Loanda and among the grotesque mountains of Pungo Ndongo.
English-speaking missionaries have now been at work in Loanda for
nearly twenty-five years, and some of the pioneers, such as Mr. Arnot,
Mr. Currie, Mr. Stover, Mr. Fay, and Mr. Sanders, are still directing
the endeavor, with a fine stock of experience to guide them. They
have outlived much abuse; they have almost outlived the common charge
of political aims and the incitement of natives to rebellion, as in
1902. The government now generally leaves them alone. The Portuguese
rob them, especially on the steamers and in the customs, but then
the Portuguese rob everybody. Lately the American mission village at
Kamundongo in Bihé has been set on fire at night three or four times,
and about half of it burned down. But this appears to be the work of
one particular Portuguese trader, who has a spite against the mission
and sends his slaves from time to time to destroy it. An appeal to
the neighboring fort at Belmonte would, of course, be useless. If the
Chefe were to see justice done, the neighboring Portuguese traders
would at once lodge a complaint at Benguela or Loanda, and he would be
removed, as all Chefes are removed who are convicted of justice. But,
as a rule, the missions are now left very much to themselves by the
Portuguese, partly because the traders have found out that some of the
missionaries--four at least--are by far the cleverest doctors in the
country, and nobody devotes his time to persecuting his doctor.
As to the natives, it is much harder to judge their attitude. Their
name for a missionary is “afoola,” and though, I believe, the word
only means a man of learning, it naturally suggests an innocent
simplicity--something “a bit soft,” as we say. At first that probably
was the general idea, as was seen when M. Coillard, the great French
missionary of Barotzeland, had a big wash in his yard one afternoon,
and next Sunday preached to an enthusiastic congregation all dressed in
scraps of his own linen. And to some extent the feeling still exists.
There are natives who go to a mission village for what they can get,
or simply for a sheltered existence and kindly treatment. There are
probably a good many who experience religious convictions in order to
please, like the followers of any popular preacher at home. But, as
a rule, it is not comfort or gain, it is not persuasive eloquence or
religious conviction that draws the native. It is the two charms of
entire honesty and of inward peace. In a country where the natives
are habitually regarded as fair game for every kind of swindle and
deceit, where bargains with them are not binding, and where penalties
are multiplied over and over again by legal or illegal trickery, we
cannot overestimate the influence of men who do what they say, who
pay what they agree, and who never go back on their word. From end to
end of Africa common honesty is so rare that it gives its possessor a
distinction beyond intellect, and far beyond gold. In Africa any honest
man wins a conspicuous and isolated greatness. In twenty-five years the
natives of Angola have learned that the honesty of the missionaries
is above suspicion. It is a great achievement. It is worth all the
teaching of the alphabet, addition, and Old Testament history, no
matter how successful, and it is hardly necessary to search out any
other cause for the influence which the missionaries possess.
So, as usual, it is the unconscious action that is the best. Being
naturally and unconsciously honest, the missionaries have won the
natives by honesty--have won, that is to say, the almost imperceptible
percentage of natives who happen to live in the three or four villages
near their stations; and it must be remembered that you might go
through Angola from end to end without guessing that missionaries
exist. But, apart from this unconscious influence, there are plenty
of conscious efforts too. There is the kindergarten, where children
puddle in clay and sing to movement and march to the tune of “John
Brown.” There are schools for every stage, and you may see the chief of
a village doing sums among the boys, and proudly declaring that for
his part 3 + 0 + 1 shall equal five.[5] There are carpenters’ shops
and forges and brick-kilns and building classes and sewing classes for
men. There are Bible classes and prayer-meetings and church services
where six hundred people will be jammed into the room for four hundred,
and men sweat, and children reprove one another’s behavior, and babies
yell and splutter and suck, and when service is over the congregation
rush with their hymn-books to smack the mosquitoes on the walls and see
the blood spurt out. There are singing classes where hymns are taught,
and though the natives have nothing of their own that can be called a
tune, there is something horrible in the ease with which they pick up
the commonplace and inevitable English cadences. I once had a set of
carriers containing two or three mission boys, and after the first day
the whole lot “went Fantee” on “Home, Sweet Home,” just a little wrong.
For more than two years I have journeyed over Africa in peace and war,
but I have never suffered anything to compare to that fortnight of
“Home, Sweet Home,” just a little wrong, morning, noon, and night.
All these methods of instruction and guidance are pursued in the
permanent mission stations, to say nothing of the daily medical
service of healing and surgery, which spreads the fame of the missions
from village to village. Many out-stations, conducted by the natives
themselves, have been formed, and they should be quickly increased,
though it is naturally tempting to keep the sheep safe within the
mission fold. If the missionaries were suddenly removed in a body, it
is hard to say how long their teaching or influence would survive. My
own opinion is that every trace of it would be gone in fifty or perhaps
in twenty years. The Catholic forms would probably last longest,
because greater use is made of a beautiful symbolism. But in half a
century rum, slavery, and the oppression of the traders would have
wiped all out, and the natives would sink into a far worse state than
their original savagery. Whether the memory of the missions would last
even fifty years would depend entirely upon the strength and number of
the out-stations.
In practical life, the three great difficulties which the missions have
to face are rum, polygamy, and slavery. From their own stations rum
can be generally excluded, though sometimes a village is persecuted
by a Portuguese trader because it will not buy his spirit. But the
whole country is fast degenerating owing to rum. “You see no fine old
men now,” is a constant saying. Rum kills them off. It is making the
whole people bloated and stupid. Near the coast it is worst, but the
enormous amount carried into the interior or manufactured in Bihé
is telling rapidly, and I see no hope of any change as long as rum
plantations of cane or sweet-potato pay better than any others, and
both traders and government regard the natives only as profitable swine.
As a matter of argument, polygamy is a more difficult question still.
It is universally practiced in Africa, and no native man or woman has
ever had the smallest scruple of conscience or feeling of wrong about
it. Where the natives can observe white men, they see that polygamy is
in reality practiced among them too. If they came to Europe or America,
they would find it practiced, not by every person, but by every nation
under one guise or another. It seems an open question whether the
native custom, with its freedom from concealment and its guarantees
for woman’s protection and support, is not better than the secret and
hypocritical devices of civilization, under which only one of the
women concerned has any protection or guarantee at all, while a man’s
relation to the others is nearly always stealthy, cruel, and casual.
However, the missionaries, after long consideration, have decided to
insist upon the rule of one man one wife for members of their Churches,
and when I was at one station a famous Christian chief, Kanjumdu of
Chiuka--by far the most advanced and intelligent native I have ever
known--chose one wife out of his eight or ten, and married her with
Christian rites, while the greater part of his twenty-four living
children joined in the hymns. It was fine, but my sympathy was with
one of the rejected wives, who would not come to the wedding-feast and
refused to take a grain of meal or a foot of cloth from his hand ever
again.
As to slavery, I have already spoken about the missionaries’ attitude.
They dare not say anything openly against it, because if they published
the truth they would probably be poisoned and certainly be driven out
of the country, leaving their followers exposed to a terrible and
exterminating persecution. So they help in what few special cases
they can, and leave the rest to time and others. It is difficult to
criticize men of such experience, devotion, and singleness of aim.
One must take their judgment. But at the same time one cannot help
remembering that a raging fire is often easier to deal with than a
smouldering refuse-heap, and that in spite of all the blood and sorrow,
the wildest revolution on behalf of justice has never really failed.
But, as I said, it is hard for me to criticize the missionaries
out here. My opinion of them may be misguided by the extraordinary
kindliness which only traders and officials can safely resist, and I
suppose one ought to envy the reasonableness of such people when, after
enjoying the full hospitality of the mission stations, they spend the
rest of their time in sneering at the missionaries. Nothing can surpass
mission hospitality. The stranger’s condition, poverty, or raggedness
does not matter in the least, nor does the mission’s own scarcity or
want. Whatever there is belongs to the strangers, even if nothing is
left but a dish of black beans and a few tea-leaves, used already. In
a long and wandering life I have nowhere found hospitality so complete
and ungrudging and unconscious. Only those who have lived for months
among the dirt and cursing of ox-wagons, or have tramped with savages
far through deserts wet and dry, plunged in slime or burned with
thirst, worn with fever and poisoned with starvation, could appreciate
what it means to come at last into a mission station and see the trim
thatched cottages, like an old English village, and to hear the quiet
and pleasant voices, and feel again the sense of inward peace, which,
I suppose, is the reward of holy living. How often when I have been
getting into bed the night after I have thus arrived, I have thought to
myself, “Here I am, free from hunger and thirst, in a silent room, with
a bed and real sheets, while people at home probably picture me dying
in the depths of a dismal forest where pygmies sharpen their poisoned
arrows and make their saucepans ready, or a lion stands rampant on one
side of me, and, on the other side, a unicorn.”
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Since this was written, the arbitration has been published (July,
1905), but by the new frontier I think none of the Chibokwe will be
brought under British influence.
[5] It must be a little difficult to teach arithmetic to a race whose
word for “seven” is “six and two” (_epandu-vali_), or “six over again.”
Or to teach dates where the word for “to-morrow” (_hena_) is the same
as the word for “yesterday.”
VIII
THE SLAVE ROUTE TO THE COAST
After coming out from the interior by passing again through the Hungry
Country from the Zambesi basin to the Cuanza, I determined to continue
following the old slave route down to Benguela and the sea. I have
already spoken of this route as the main road of Central Africa, and
the two hundred and seventy or three hundred miles of it which connect
Bihé with the coast are crowded with trade, especially at the beginning
of the dry season, which was the time of my journey. It is only a
carrier’s track, though the Portuguese, as their habit is, have forced
the natives to construct a few miles of useless road here and there,
at intervals of several days’ march. But along that winding track,
sometimes so steep and difficult that it is like a goat-path in the
Alps, thousands of carriers pass every year, bearing down loads of
rubber and beeswax, and bringing back cotton, salt, tinned foods, and,
above all, rum. It is against the decree of the Brussels Conference of
1890 to introduce rum into Bihé at all, but who cares about decrees
when rum pays and no one takes the trouble to shoot? And down this
winding track the export slaves have been driven century after century.
I suppose the ancestors of half the negroes in the United States
and of nearly all in Cuba and Brazil came down it. And thousands of
export slaves still come down it every year. Laws and conferences have
prohibited the slave-trade for generations past, but who cares about
laws and conferences as long as slavery pays and no one takes the
trouble to shoot?
How the traffic is worked may be seen from some things which I observed
upon my way. Being obliged to wait at various places to arrange
carriers and recover from fevers, I spent about five weeks on the road
from the crossing of the Cuanza to the sea, though it can be done in
three weeks, or even in seventeen days. For the first few days I was
back again in the northern part of the Bihé district, and I early
passed the house of a Portuguese trader of whose reputation I had
heard before. He is still claiming enormous damages for injury to his
property in the war of 1902. The villagers have appealed to the fort at
Belmonte against the amount, but are ordered to pay whatever he asks.
To supply the necessary rubber and oxen they have now pawned their
children into slavery without hope of redemption. Two days before I
passed the house a villager, having pawned the last of his children
and possessing nothing else, had shot himself in the bush close by.
Things like that make no difference to the trader. It is the money he
wants. The damage done to his property three years ago must be paid
for twentyfold. Still, he is not simply the “economic man” of the
old text-books. He has a decadent love of art, distinct from love of
money, and just before I passed his house he had summoned the chiefs
of the village as though for a conference, had locked them up in his
compound, and every night he was making the old men dance for his
pleasure. To the native mind such a thing is as shocking as it would
be to Englishmen if Mr. Beit or Mr. Eckstein kept the Lord Chancellor
and the Archbishop of Canterbury to gambol naked before him on Sunday
afternoons.
[Illustration: ON THE WAY TO THE COAST]
So the matter stands, and the villagers must go on selling more and
more of their wives and children that the white man’s greed may be
satisfied.
A day or two farther on I turned aside from the main track to visit one
of the agents whom the government has specially appointed to conduct
the purchase of slaves for the islands of San Thomé and Principe. There
are two agents officially recognized in the Bihé district. On my way I
met an old native notorious for a prosperous career of slave-trading.
At the moment he was leading along a finely built man by a halter round
his neck, but at sight of me he dropped the end of rope. A man who
was with me charged him at once with having just sold two of his own
slaves--a man and a woman--for San Thomé. He protested with righteous
indignation. He would never think of doing such a thing! Sell for San
Thomé! He would even give a long piece of cloth to rescue a native from
such a fate! Yet, beyond question, he had sold the man and woman to the
Agent that morning. They were at the Agent’s house when I arrived, and
I was told he had only failed to sell the other slave because his price
was too high.
The Agent himself was polite and hospitable. Business was pretty brisk.
I knew he had sent off eight slaves to the coast only three days
before, with orders that they should carry their own shackles and be
carefully pinned together at night. But we talked only of the rumored
division of the Congo, for on the other subject he was naturally a
little shy, and I found out long afterwards that he knew the main
object of my journey.[6] Next day, however, he was alone with the
friend who had accompanied me, and he then attempted to defend his
position as Agent by saying the object of the government was to buy up
slaves through their special agents and “redeem” them from slavery by
converting them into “contract laborers” for San Thomé. The argument
was ingenious. The picture of a pitiful government willing to purchase
the freedom of all slaves without thought of profit, and only driven
to contract them for San Thomé because otherwise the expense would be
unbearable--it is almost pathetic. But the Agent knew, as every one out
here knows, that the people whom the government buys and “redeems” have
been torn from their homes and families on purpose to be “redeemed”;
that but for the purchases by the government agents for San Thomé the
whole slave-traffic would fall to pieces; and that the actual condition
of these “contracted laborers” upon the islands does not differ from
slavery in any point of importance.
Leaving on the right the volcanic district of North Bihé, with its
boiling springs and great deposits of magnesia, the path to the coast
continues to run westward and a point or two south through country
typical of Africa’s central plateau. There are the usual wind-swept
spaces of bog and yellow grass, the usual rolling lines of scrubby
forest, and the shallow valleys with narrow channels of water running
through morass. The path skirts the northern edge of the high, wet
plain of Bouru-Bouru, and on the same day, after passing this, I saw
far away in the west a little blue point of mountain, hanging like an
island upon the horizon. A few hours afterwards bare rock began to
appear through the bog-earth and sand of the forest, and next morning
new mountains came into sight from hour to hour as I advanced, till
there was quite a cluster of little blue islands above the dark edges
of the trees.
The day after, when I had been walking for about two hours through
the monotonous woods, the upland suddenly broke. It was quick and
unexpected as the snapping of a bowstring, and far below me was
revealed a great expanse of country--broad valleys leading far away to
the west and north, isolated groups of many-colored mountains, bare and
shapely hills of granite and sandstone, and one big, jagged tooth or
pike of purple rock, rising sheer from a white plain thinly sprinkled
with trees and marked with watercourses. The whole scene, bare and
glowing under the cloudless sky of an African winter, was like those
delicate landscapes in nature’s most friendly wilderness which the
Umbrians used to paint as backgrounds to the Baptist or St. Jerome or
a Mother and Child. To one who has spent many months among the black
forest, the marshes and sand-hills of Bihé and the Hungry Country, it
gleams with a radiance of jewels, and is full of the inward stir and
longing that the sudden vision of mountains always brings.[7]
At the top of the hill was a large sweet-potato plantation for rum. A
gang of twenty-three slaves--chiefly women--was clearing a new patch
from the bush for an extension of the fields. Over them, as usual,
stood a Portuguese ganger, who encouraged their efforts with blows from
a long black chicote, or hippo whip, which he rapidly tried to conceal
down his trousers leg at sight of me.
At the foot of the hill, where a copious stream of water ran, a similar
rum-factory had just been constructed. The hideous main building--gaunt
as a Yorkshire mill--the whitewashed rows of slave-huts, the newly
broken fields, the barrels just beginning to send out a loathsome
stench of new spirit--all were as fresh and vile as civilization could
make them. As we passed, the slaves were just enjoying a holiday for
the burial of one of their number who had died that morning. They were
gathered in a large crowd round the grave on the edge of the bush.
Presently six of them brought out the body, wrapped in an old blanket,
rolled it sideways into the shallow trench, and covered it up with
earth and stones. As we climbed the next hill, my carriers, who were
much interested, kept saying to one another: “Slaves! Poor slaves!”
Then we heard a bell ring. The people began to crawl back to their
work. The slaves’ holiday was over.
We had now passed from Bihé into the district of Bailundu, and the
mountains stood around us as we descended, their summits rising little
higher than the level of the Bihéan plateau--say five to six thousand
feet above the sea. A detached hill in front of us was conspicuous
for its fortified look. From the distance it was like one of the
castellated rocks of southern France. It was the old Umbala, or king’s
fortress, of Bailundu, and here the native kings used to live in savage
magnificence before the curse of the white men fell. On the summit you
still may see the king’s throne of three great rocks, the heading-stone
where his enemies suffered, the stone of refuge to which a runaway
might cling and gain mercy by declaring himself the king’s slave, the
royal tombs with patterned walls hidden in a depth of trees, and the
great flat rock where the women used to dance in welcome to their
warriors returning from victory. One day I scrambled up and saw it
all in company with a man who remembered the place in its high estate
and had often sat beside the king in judgment. But all the glory is
departed now. The palace was destroyed and burned in 1896. The rock of
refuge and the royal throne are grown over with tall grasses. Leopards
and snakes possess them merely, and it is difficult even to fight one’s
way up the royal ascent through the tangle of the creepers and bush.[8]