the Portuguese fort, the scene of the so-called “Bailundu war” of 1902.
It was here that the native rising began, owing to a characteristic
piece of Portuguese treachery, the Commandant having seized a party
of native chiefs who were visiting him, at his own invitation, under
promise of peace and safe-conduct. The whole affair was paltry and
wretched. The natives displayed their usual inability to combine;
the Portuguese displayed their usual cowardice. But, as I have shown
before, the effect of the outbreak was undoubtedly to reduce the
horrors of the slave-trade for a time. The overwhelming terror of the
slave-traders and other Portuguese, who crept into hiding to shelter
their precious lives, showed them they had gone too far. The atrocious
history of Portuguese cruelty and official greed which reached Lisbon
at last did certainly have some effect upon the national conscience. As
I have mentioned in earlier letters, Captain Amorim of the artillery
was sent out to mitigate the abominations of the trade, and for a
time, at all events, he succeeded. Owing to terror, the export of
slaves to San Thomé ceased altogether for about six months after
the rising. It has gone back to its old proportions now--the numbers
averaging about four thousand head a year (not including babies), and
gradually rising.[9] But since then the traders have not dared to
practise the same open cruelties as before, and the new regulations
for slave-traffic--known as the Decree of January 29, 1903--do, at all
events, aim at tempering the worst abuses, though their most important
provisions are invariably evaded.
Only a mile or two from the fort, and quite visible from the rocks of
the old Umbala, stands the American mission village of Bailundu--I
believe the oldest mission in Angola except the early Jesuits’. It was
founded in 1881, and for more than twenty years has been carried on by
Mr. Stover and Mr. Fay, who are still conducting it. The Portuguese
instigated the natives to drive them out once, and have wildly accused
them of stirring up war, protecting the natives, and other crimes. But
the mission has prospered in spite of all, and its village is now, I
think, the prettiest in Angola. How long it may remain in its present
beautiful situation one cannot say. Twenty years ago it was surrounded
only by natives, but now the Portuguese have crept up to it with their
rum and plantations and slavery, and where the Portuguese come neither
natives nor missions can hope to stay long. It may be that in a year or
two the village will be deserted, as the American mission village of
Saccanjimba, a few days farther east, has lately been deserted, and the
houses will be occupied by Portuguese convicts with a license to trade,
while the church becomes a rum-store. In that case the missionaries
will be wise to choose a place outside the fifty-kilometre radius from
a fort, beyond which limit no Portuguese trader may settle. So true it
is that in modern Africa an honest man has only the whites to fear. But
unhappily new forts are now being constructed at two or three points
along this very road.
Soon after leaving Bailundu the track divides, and one branch of it
runs northwest, past the foot of that toothed mountain, or pike,[10]
and so at length reaches the coast at Novo Redondo--a small place
with a few sugar-cane plantations for rum and a government agency
for slaves. I am told that on this road the slaves are worse treated
and more frequently shackled than upon the path I followed, and
certainly Novo Redondo is more secret and freer from the interference
of foreigners than Benguela. But I think there cannot really be much
difference. The majority of slaves are still brought down the old
Benguela route, and scattered along it at intervals I have found quite
new shackles, still used for pinning the slaves together, chiefly at
night, though it is true the shackles near the coast are not nearly so
numerous as in the interior.
I was myself determined to follow the old track and come down to the
sea by that white path where I had seen the carriers ascending and
descending the mountains above Katumbella many months before. Within
two days from Bailundu I entered a notorious lion country. Lions are
increasing rapidly all along the belt of mountains here, and they do
not hesitate to eat mankind, making no prejudiced distinction between
white and black. Their general method is to spring into a rest-hut
at night and drag off a carrier, or sometimes two, while the camp is
asleep. All the rest-camps in this district are strongly stockaded with
logs, twelve or fourteen feet high, but carriers are frequently killed
in spite of all the stockade. There is one old lion who has made quite
a reputation as a man-hunter, and if he had an ancestral hall he could
decorate it with the “trophies” of about fifty human heads. He has
chosen for his hunting-lodge some cave near the next fort westward from
Bailundu, and there at eve he may sometimes be seen at play upon the
green. Two officers are stationed in the fort, but they do not care
to interfere with the creature’s habits and pursuits. They do not even
train their little toy gun on him. Perhaps they are humanitarians. So
he devours mankind at leisure.
[Illustration: CARRIERS’ REST-HUTS]
When we camped near that fort, my boys insisted I should sleep in
a hut inside the stockade instead of half a mile away from them as
usual. The huts are made of dry branches covered with dry leaves and
grass. Inside that stockade I counted over forty huts, and each hut was
crammed with carriers--men, women, and children--for the dry-season
trade was beginning. There must have been five or six hundred natives
in that camp at night. The stockade rose fourteen feet or more and was
impenetrable. The one gate was sealed and barred with enormous logs
to keep out the lion. I was myself given a hut in the very centre of
the camp as an honor. And in every single hut around me a brilliant
fire was lighted for cooking and to keep the carriers warm all night.
One spark gone wrong would have burned up the whole five hundred of us
without a chance of escape. So when we came to the stockaded camp of
the next night I pitched my tent far outside it as usual, and listened
to the deep sighing and purring of the lions with great indifference,
while the boys marvelled at a rashness which was nothing to their own.
As one goes westward farther into the mountains, the path drops two
or three times by sudden, steep descents, like flights of steps down
terraces, and at each descent the air becomes closer and the plants
and beasts more tropical, till one reaches the deep valleys of the
palm, the metallic butterfly, and thousands of yellow monkeys. Beside
the route great masses of granite rise, weathered into smooth and
unclimbable surface, like the Matopo hills. The carriers from the
high interior suffer a good deal at each descent. “We have lost our
proper breathing,” they say, and they pine till they return to the
clearer air. It is here that many of the slaves try to escape. If they
got away, there would not be much chance for them among the shy and
apelike natives of the mountain belt, who remain entirely savage and
are reputed to be cannibal still. But the slaves try to escape, and are
generally brought back to a fate worse than being killed and eaten. On
May 17th, five days above Katumbella, I met one of them who had been
caught. He was a big Luvale man, naked, his skin torn and bleeding from
his wild rush through thorns and rocks. In front and behind him marched
one of his owner’s slaves with drawn knives or matchets, two feet long,
ready to cut him down if he tried to run again. I asked my boys what
would happen to him, and they said he would be flogged to death before
the others. I cannot say. I should have thought he was too valuable to
kill. He must have been worth over £20 as he stood, and £30 when landed
at San Thomé. But, of course, the trader may have thought it would
pay better to flog him to death as an example. True, it is not always
safe to kill a slave. Last April a man in Benguela flogged a slave to
death with a hippo whip, and, no doubt to his great astonishment, he
found himself arrested and banished for a time to Mozambique--“the
other coast,” as it is called--a far from salubrious home. But five
days’ inland along the caravan route the murderer of a slave would be
absolutely secure, if he did not mind the loss of the money.
Two days later I met another of those vast caravans of natives, one
of which I had seen just the other side of the Cuanza. This caravan
numbered nearly seven hundred people, and, under the protection of an
enormous Portuguese banner, they were marching up into the interior
with bales and stores, wives and children, intending to be absent
at least two years for trade. These large bodies of men are a great
source of supply to the government slave-agents; for when they find two
tribes at war, they hire themselves out to fight for one on condition
of selling the captives from the other, and so they secure an immense
profit for themselves, while pleasing their allies and bringing an
abundance of slaves for the Portuguese government to “redeem” by
sending them to labor at San Thomé till their lives end.
The next day’s march brought us to a straight piece of valley, where
such a number of rest-huts have been gradually built that the place
looks like a large native village. All the little paths from the
interior meet here, because it stands at the mouth of a long and very
deep valley, sometimes called the cañon, by which alone the next belt
of dry and mountainous country can be crossed. The water is dirty and
full of sulphur, but it has to be carried in gourds for the next day’s
march, because for twenty-five miles there is no water at all.
Natives here come down from the nearest villages and sell
sweet-potatoes and maize to the carriers in exchange for salt and chips
of tobacco or sips of rum, so that at this season, when the carriers
every night number a thousand or more, there is something like a fair.
Mixed up with the carriers are the small gangs of slaves, who are
collected here in larger parties before being sent on to the coast.
With the help of one of my boys I had some conversation that evening
with a woman who was kept waiting for other gangs, just as I was kept
waiting because fever made me too weak to move. She was a beautiful
woman of about twenty or little more, with a deep-brown skin and a face
of much intelligence, full of sorrow. She had come from a very long way
off, she said--far beyond the Hungry Country. She thought four moons
had gone since they started. She had a husband and three children at
home, but was seized by the men of another tribe and sold to a white
man for twenty cartridges. She did not know what kind of cartridges
they were--they were “things for a gun.” Her last baby was very young,
very young. She was still suckling him when they took her away. She
did not know where she was going. She supposed it was to Okalunga--a
name which the natives use equally for hell or the abyss of death,
the abyss of the sea and for San Thomé. She was perfectly right. She
was one of the slaves who had been purchased, probably on the Congo
frontier, on purpose for the Portuguese government’s agent to “redeem”
and send to the plantations. It is a lucrative business to supply
such philanthropists with slaves. And it is equally lucrative for the
philanthropists to redeem them.
The long, dry cañon, where the carriers have to climb like goats
from rock to rock along the steep mountain-side, with fifty or sixty
pounds on their heads, brought us at last to a brimming reach of the
Katumbella River. It is dangerous both from hippos and crocodiles;
though the largest crocodiles I have ever seen were lower down the
river, on the sand-banks close to its mouth, where they devour women
and cattle, and lie basking all their length of twenty to thirty feet,
just like the dragons of old. From the river the path mounts again for
the final day’s march through an utterly desert and waterless region of
mountain ridges and stones and sand, sprinkled with cactus and aloes
and a few gray thorns. But, like all this mountain region, the desert
gives ample shelter to eland, koodoo, and other deer. Buffaloes live
there, too, and in very dry seasons they come down at night to drink at
the river pools close to the sea.
The sea itself is hidden from the path by successive ridges of mountain
till the very last edge is reached. On the morning of my last day’s
trek a heavy, wet mist lay over all the valleys, and it was only
when we climbed that we could see the mountain-tops, rising clear
above it in the sunshine. But before mid-day the mist had gone, and,
looking back from a high pass, I had my last view over the road we had
travelled, and far away towards the interior of the strange continent
I was leaving. Then we went on westward, and climbed the steep and
rocky track over the final range, till at last a great space of varied
prospect lay stretched out below us--the little houses of Katumbella
at our feet, the fertile plain beside its river green with trees and
plantations; on our right the white ring of Lobito Bay, Angola’s
future port; on our left a line of yellow beach like a road leading
to the little white church and the houses of Benguela, fifteen miles
away; and beyond them again to the desert promontory, with grotesque
rocks. And there, far away in front, like a vast gulf of dim and misty
blue, merging in the sky without a trace of horizon, stretched the sea
itself; and to an Englishman the sea is always the way home.
So, as I had hoped, I came down at last from the mountains into
Katumbella by that white path which has been consecrated by so much
misery. And as I walked through the dimly lighted streets and beside
the great court-yards of the town that night, I heard again the blows
of the palmatoria and chicote and the cries of men and women who were
being “tamed.”
“I do not trouble to beat my slaves much--I mean my contracted
laborers,” said the trader who was with me. “If they try to run away or
anything, I just give them one good flogging, and then sell them to the
Agent for San Thomé. One can always get £16 per head from him.”
A few days afterwards, on the Benguela road, I passed a procession of
forty-three men and women, marching in file like carriers, but with no
loads on their heads. Four natives in white coats and armed with guns
accompanied them, ready to shoot down any runaway. The forty-three were
a certain company’s detachment of “voluntary laborers” on their way to
the head “Emigration Agent” at Benguela and to the ship for San Thomé.
Third among them marched that woman who had been taken from her husband
and three children and sold for twenty cartridges.
Thus it is that the islands of San Thomé and Principe have been
rendered about the most profitable bits of the earth’s surface, and
England and America can get their chocolate and cocoa cheap.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] I am not quite sure how this was discovered--whether an indiscreet
friend “gave me away,” or whether an indiscreet letter was opened in
the post, or the traders were simply guided by conjecture and a guilty
conscience. At all events, one of the principal slave-dealers in Bihé
discovered it, and took the pains to publish reports against me, that
reached as far as Mossamedes. The English and American missions were
actually warned to have nothing to do with me because I was a Jesuit
in disguise, and had come to destroy their work! Further on I may have
to refer to the plots to assassinate me on the coast during the voyage
home, but I mention these little personal matters only to show that the
slave-traders had been put on their guard and would naturally try to
conceal as much as they could of their traffic’s horror, and that is
the chief reason why I met no gangs of slaves in chains.
[7] See Commander Cameron’s description of the same view in 1876:
_Across Africa_, p. 459.
[8] Cameron visited King Congo there in 1876: _Across Africa_, p. 460.
[9] The official numbers of slaves exported to San Thomé for the first
four months of 1905 are: January, 369; February, 349; March, 366;
April, 302--a rate which would give a total of 4158 for the year. In
June I travelled by a ship which took 273 slaves to San Thomé and
Principe, and there are two slave-ships a month.
[10] Cameron called it “The Devil’s Finger”: _Across Africa_, p. 464.
IX
THE EXPORTATION OF SLAVES
When I was up in the interior, I had always intended to wait a while
on the coast, if ever I should reach it again, in order to watch
the process of the conversion of slaves into “contracted laborers”
according to law. So it was fortunate that, owing to the delays of
fevers and carriers, I succeeded in just missing a steamer bound for
San Thomé and home. Fortunate, because the temptation to go straight on
board would have been very strong, since I was worn with sickness, and
within two days of reaching Katumbella I learned that special dangers
surrounded me, owing to the discovery of my purpose by the Portuguese
traders. As a matter of fact, I might have caught the ship by pushing
my carriers on without a pause, but the promptings of conscience,
supported by a prospect of the best crocodile-shooting that man can
enjoy, induced me to run the risk of assassination and stay.
So I stayed on the coast for nearly three weeks, seeing what I could,
hunting crocodiles, and devising schemes for getting my papers home
even if I should never reach home myself. One of the first things
I saw was a procession of slaves who had just been “redeemed” into
“contracted laborers,” and were being marched off in the early morning
sunlight from Katumbella to Lobito Bay, there to be embarked for San
Thomé on the ship which I had missed.[11] It so happened that this
ship put in at Lobito Bay, which lies only some eight miles north from
Katumbella down a waterless spit of sand, as I have before described,
and there can be no doubt that this practice will become more and more
common as the railway from the new port progresses. Katumbella, united
with the bay, will become the main depot for the exportation of slaves
and other merchandise, while Benguela, having no natural harbor, will
gradually fall to ruin. At present, I suppose, the government Agent for
slaves at Benguela, together with the Curador, whose act converts them
into contract laborers, comes over for the occasion whenever the slaves
are to be shipped from Lobito Bay, just as in England a bishop travels
from place to place for Confirmations as required.
Bemused with a parting dole of rum, bedecked in brilliantly striped
jerseys, grotesque caps, and flashy loin-cloths to give them a moment’s
pleasure, the unhappy throng were escorted to their doom, the tin
tickets with their numbers and the tin cylinders with their form of
contract glittering round their necks or at their sides. Men and
women were about equal in number, and some of the women carried babes
lashed to their backs; but there were no older children. The causes
which had brought these men and women to their fate were probably as
different as the lands from which they came. Some had broken native
customs or Portuguese laws, some had been charged with witchcraft by
the medicine-man because a relative died, some could not pay a fine,
some were wiping out an ancestral debt, some had been sold by uncles in
poverty, some were the indemnity for village wars; some had been raided
on the frontier, others had been exchanged for a gun; some had been
trapped by Portuguese, others by Bihéan thieves; some were but changing
masters, because they were “only good for San Thomé,” just as we in
London send an old cab-horse to Antwerp. I cannot give their history. I
only know that about two hundred of them, muddled with rum and bedecked
like clowns, passed along that May morning to a land of doom from
which there was no return.
It was June 1st when, as I described in my last letter, I met that
other procession of slaves on their way from Katumbella to Benguela,
in readiness for embarkation in the next ship, which did not happen to
stop at Lobito Bay. It was a smaller gang--only forty-three men and
women--for it was the result of only one Agent’s activity, though, to
be sure, he was the leading and most successful Agent in Angola. They
marched under escort, but without loads and without chains, though the
old custom of chaining them together along that piece of road is still
commonly practised--I suppose because the fifteen miles of country
through which the road leads, when once the small slave-plantations
round Katumbella have been passed, is a thorny desert where a runaway
might easily hide, hoping to escape by sea or find cover in the towns.
I have myself seen the black soldiers or police searching the bush
there for fugitives, and once I found a Portuguese dying of fever
among the thorns, to which he had fled from what is roughly called
justice.[12]
By the time I saw that second procession I was myself living in
Benguela, and was able to follow the slave’s progress almost point
by point, in spite of the uncomfortable suspicion with which I was
naturally regarded. Writing of the town before, I mentioned the large
court-yards with which nearly every house is surrounded--memorials of
the old days when this was the central depot for the slave-trade with
Brazil. In most cases these court-yards are now used as resting-places
for the free carriers who have brought products from the interior and
are waiting till the loads of cloth and rum are ready for the return
journey. But the trading-houses that go in for business in “serviçaes”
still put the court-yards to their old purpose, and confine the slaves
there till it is time to get them on board.
A day or two before the steamer is due to depart a kind of ripple
seems to pass over the stagnant town. Officials stir, clerks begin
to crawl about with pens, the long, low building called the Tribunal
opens a door or two, a window or two, and looks quite busy. Then,
early one morning, the Curador arrives and takes his seat in the long,
low room as representing the beneficent government of Portugal. Into
his presence the slaves are herded in gangs by the official Agent.
They are ranged up, and in accordance with the Decree of January 29,
1903, they are asked whether they go willingly as laborers to San
Thomé. No attention of any kind is paid to their answer. In most
cases no answer is given. Not the slightest notice would be taken of
a refusal. The legal contract for five years’ labor on the island
of San Thomé or Principe is then drawn out, and, also in accordance
with the Decree, each slave receives a tin disk with his number, the
initials of the Agent who secured him, and in some cases, though not
usually at Benguela, the name of the island to which he is destined.
He also receives in a tin cylinder a copy of his register, containing
the year of contract, his number and name, his birthplace, his chief’s
name, the Agent’s name, and “observations,” of which last I have never
seen any. Exactly the same ritual is observed for the women as for the
men. The disks are hung round their necks, the cylinders are slung at
their sides, and the natives, believing them to be some kind of fetich
or “white man’s Ju-ju,” are rather pleased. All are then ranged up and
marched out again, either to the compounds, where they are shut in, or
straight to the pier where the lighters, which are to take them to the
ship, lie tossing upon the waves.
The climax of the farce has now been reached. The deed of pitiless
hypocrisy has been consummated. The requirements of legalized slavery
have been satisfied. The government has “redeemed” the slaves which
its own Agents have so diligently and so profitably collected. They
went into the Tribunal as slaves, they have come out as “contracted
laborers.” No one in heaven or on earth can see the smallest
difference, but by the change of name Portugal stifles the enfeebled
protests of nations like the English, and by the excuse of law she
smooths her conscience and whitens over one of the blackest crimes
which even Africa can show.