impossible for the supply from Angola to keep pace with the demand,
though the government calls on its Agents to drive the trade as hard as
they can, and the Agents do their very utmost to encourage the natives
to raid, kidnap, accuse of witchcraft, press for debts, soak in rum,
and sell. A manager in Principe, who employs one hundred and fifty
slaves on his roça, told me that it is impossible for him fully to
develop the land without two hundred more, but he simply cannot afford
the £6000 needed for the purchase of that number.
The common saying that if you have seen one plantation you have seen
all is not exactly true. I found the plantations differed a good deal
according to the wealth of the proprietor and the superintendent’s
disposition. Still there is a general similarity in external things
from which one can easily build up a type. Let us take, for instance, a
roça which I visited one Sunday after driving some six or seven miles
into the interior from the port of San Thomé. The road led through
groves of the cocoa-tree, the gigantic “cotton-tree,” breadfruit,
palms, and many hard and useful woods which I did not know. For a
great part of the distance the wild and untouched forest stood thick
on both sides, and as we climbed into the mountains we looked down
into unpenetrated glades, where parrots, monkeys, and civet-cats are
the chief inhabitants. The sides of the road were thickly covered with
moss and fern, and the high rocks and tree-tops were from time to time
concealed by the soaking white mist which the people for some strange
reason call “flying-fish milk.” High up in the hills we came to a
filthy village, where a few slaves were drearily lying about, full of
the deadly rum that hardly even cheers. A few hundred yards farther
up was the roça which owns the village and runs the rum-shop there
for the benefit of the slaves and its own pocket. The buildings are
arranged in a great quadrangle, with high walls all round and big gates
that are locked at night. On one side stands the planter’s house,
and attached to it are the dwellings of the overseers, or gangers,
together with the quarters of such slaves as are employed for domestic
purposes, whether as concubines or servants. On the other side stand
the quarters of the ordinary slaves who labor on the plantation. They
are built in long sheds, and in a few cases these are two stories
high, but in most plantations only one. Some of the sheds are arranged
like the dormitories in our barracks; sometimes the homes are almost
or entirely isolated; sometimes, as in this roça, they are divided by
partitions, like the stalls in a stable. At one end of the quadrangle,
besides the magazines for the working and storage of the cocoa, there
is a huge barn, which the slaves use as a kitchen, each family making
its own little fire on the ground and cooking its rations separately,
as the unconquerable habit of all natives is. At the other end of the
quadrangle, sunk below the level of the fall of the hill, stands the
hospital, with its male and female wards duly divided according to law.
[Illustration: SLAVE QUARTERS ON A PLANTATION]
The centre of the quadrangle is occupied by great flat pans, paved with
cement or stones, for the drying of the cocoa-beans. Within the largest
of these enclosures the slaves are gathered two or three times a week
to receive their rations of meal and dried fish. At six o’clock on the
afternoon of my visit they all assembled to the clanging of the bell,
the grown-up slaves bringing large bundles of grass, which they had
gathered as part of their daily task, for the mules and cattle. They
stood round the edges of the square in perfect silence. In the centre
of the square at regular intervals stood the whity-brown gangers,
leaning on their long sticks or flicking their boots with whips. Beside
them lay the large and savage dogs which prowl round the buildings at
night to prevent the slaves escaping in the darkness. As it was Sunday
afternoon, the slaves were called upon to enjoy the Sunday treat. First
came the children one by one, and to each of them was given a little
sup of wine from a pitcher. Then the square began slowly to move round
in single file. Slabs of dried fish were given out as rations, and
for the special Sunday treat each man or woman received two leaves of
raw tobacco from one of the superintendent’s mistresses, or, if they
preferred it, one leaf of tobacco and a sup of wine in a mug. Nearly
all chose the two leaves of tobacco as the more lasting joy. When they
had received their dole, they passed round the square again in single
file, till all had made the circuit. From first to last not a single
word was spoken. It was more like a military execution than a festival.
About once a month the slaves receive their wages in a similar manner.
By the Decree of 1903, the minimum wage for a man is fixed at 2500 reis
(something under ten shillings) a month, and for a woman at 1800
reis. But, as a matter of fact, the planters tell me that the average
wage is 1200 reis a month, or about one and twopence a week. In some
cases the wages are higher, and one or two slaves were pointed out to
me whose wages came to fifteen shillings a month. I am told that in
the islands, unlike the custom on the mainland, these wages are really
paid in cash and not by tokens, but the planters always add that as the
money can only be spent in the plantation store, nearly all of it comes
back to them in the form of profit on rum or cloth or food.
[Illustration: SLAVES WAITING FOR RATIONS ON SUNDAY]
According to the law, only two-fifths of the wages are to be paid every
month, the remaining three-fifths going to a “Repatriation Fund” in
San Thomé. In the case of the slaves from Angola this is never done,
and it is much to the credit of the Portuguese that, as there is no
repatriation, they have dropped the institution of a Repatriation Fund.
They might easily have pocketed three-fifths of the slaves’ wages under
that excuse, but this advantage they have renounced. They never send
the slaves home, and they do not deduct the money for doing it. Neither
do they deduct a proportion of the wages which, according to the law,
might be sent to the mainland for the support of a man’s family till
the termination of his contract. They know a contract terminates only
at death, and from this easy method of swindling they also abstain. It
is, as I said, to their credit, the more because it is so unlike their
custom.
For some reason which I do not quite understand--perhaps because they
come under French government--the Cape Verde serviçaes receive a higher
wage (three thousand reis for a man and twenty-five hundred for a
woman); about a third is deducted every month for repatriation, and
in many cases, at all events, the people are actually sent back. So
the planters told me, though I have not seen them on a returning ship
myself.
According to the law, the wages of all slaves must be raised ten per
cent. if they agree to renew their contract for a second term of five
years. With the best will in the world, it would be almost impossible
to carry out this provision, for no slave ever does agree to renew his
contract. His wishes in the matter are no more consulted than a blind
horse’s in a coal-pit. The owner or Agent of the plantation waits till
the five years of about fifty of his slaves have expired. Then he sends
for the Curador from San Thomé, and lines up the fifty in front of him.
In the presence of two witnesses and his secretary the Curador solemnly
announces to the slaves that the term of their contract is up and the
contract is renewed for five years more. The slaves are then dismissed
and another scene in the cruel farce of contracted labor is over. One
of the planters told me that he thought some of his slaves counted the
years for the first five, but never afterwards.
Some planters do not even go through the form of bringing the Curador
and the time-expired slaves face to face. They simply send down the
papers for signature, and do not mention the matter to the slaves at
all. At the end of June, 1905, a planter told me he had sent down the
papers in April and had not yet received them back. He was getting a
little anxious. “Of course,” he said, “it makes no difference whatever
to the slaves. They know nothing about it. But I like to comply with
the law.”
In one respect, however, that well-intentioned citizen did not comply
with the law at all. The law lays it down that every owner of fifty
slaves must set up a hospital with separate wards for the sexes. This
man employed nearly two hundred slaves and had no hospital at all. The
official doctor came up and visited the sick in their crowded huts
twice a month.
The law lays it down that a crèche shall be kept on each plantation
for children under seven, and certainly I have seen the little black
infants herding about in the dust together among the empty huts while
their parents were at work. Children are not allowed to be driven to
work before they are eleven, and up to fourteen they may be compelled
to do only certain kinds of labor. From fourteen to sixteen two kinds
of labor are excluded--cutting timber and trenching the coffee. After
sixteen they become full-grown slaves, and may be forced to do any kind
of work. These provisions are only legal, but, as I noticed before,
the children born on a plantation, if only they can be kept alive
to maturity, ought to make the most valuable kind of slaves. Their
keep has cost very little, and otherwise they come to the planter for
nothing, like all good gifts of God. This is what makes me doubt the
truth of a story one often hears about San Thomé, that a woman who
is found to be with child after landing is flogged to death in the
presence of the others. It is not the cruelty that makes me question
it. Give a lonely white man absolute authority over blacks, and there
is no length to which his cruelty may not go. But the loss in cash
would be too considerable. At landing, a woman has cost the planter as
much as two cows, and no good business man would flog a cow to death
because she was in calf.
The same considerations tend, of course, to prevent all violent acts
of cruelty such as might bring death. The cost of slaves is so large,
the demand is so much greater than the supply, and the death-rate is
so terrible in any case that a good planter’s first thought is to do
all he can to keep his stock of slaves alive. It is true that in most
men passion easily overcomes interest, and for an outsider it is
impossible to judge of such things. When a stranger is coming, the word
goes round that everything must be made to look as smooth and pleasant
as possible. No one can realize the inner truth of the slave’s life
unless he has lived many years on the plantations. But I am inclined
to think that for business reasons the violent forms of cruelty are
unlikely and uncommon. Flogging, however, is common if not universal,
and so are certain forms of vice. The prettiest girls are chosen by
the Agents and gangers as their concubines--that is natural. But it
was worse when a planter pointed me out a little boy and girl of about
seven or eight, and boasted that like most of the children they were
already instructed in acts of bestiality, the contemplation of which
seemed to give him a pleasing amusement amid the brutalizing tedium of
a planter’s life.
In spite of all precautions and the boasted comfort of their lot, some
of the slaves succeed in escaping. On San Thomé they generally take to
highway robbery, and white men always go armed in consequence. The law
decrees that a recaptured runaway is to be restored to his owner, and
after the customary flogging he is then set to work again. Sometimes
the runaways are hunted and shot down. On one of the mountains of San
Thomé, I am told, you may still see a heap of bones where a party of
runaway slaves were shot, but I have not seen them myself. For some
reason, perhaps because of the greater wildness of the island, there
are many more runaways on Principe, small as it is. The place is like a
magic land, the dream of some wild painter. Points of cliff run sheer
up from the sea, and between them lie secret little bays where a boat
may be pushed off quietly over the sand. In one such bay, where the
dense forest comes right down to the beach, a long canoe was gradually
scooped out in January (1905) and filled with provisions for a voyage.
When all was ready, eighteen escaped slaves launched it by night and
paddled away into the darkness of the sea. For many days and nights
they toiled, ignorant of all direction. They only knew that somewhere
across the sea was their home. But before their provisions were quite
spent, the current and the powers of evil that watch over slaves bore
them to the coast of Fernando Po. Thinking they had reached freedom at
last, they crept out of the boat on to the welcome shore, and there
the authorities seized upon them, and, to the endless shame of Spain,
packed them all on a steamer and sent them back in a single day to the
place from which they came.
That is one of the things that make us anarchists. Probably there was
hardly any one on Fernando Po, though it is a slave island itself, who
would not willingly have saved those men if he had been left to his own
instincts. But directly the state authority came in, their cause was
hopeless. So it is that wherever you touch government you seem to touch
the devil.
The eighteen were taken back to Principe, flogged almost to death in
the jail, returned to their owners, and any of them who survive are
still at work on the plantations, with but the memory of that brief
happiness and overwhelming defeat to think upon.
When escaping slaves have reached the Cameroons, the Germans resolutely
refuse to give them back, and by that refusal they have done much to
cover the errors and harshness of their own colonial system. What would
happen now to slaves who reached Nigeria or the Gold Coast, one hardly
dares to think. There was a time when we used to hear fine stories of
slaves falling on the beach when they touched British territory and
kissing the soil of freedom. But that was long ago, and since then
England has grown rich and fallen from her high estate. Her hands are
no longer clean, and when people think of Johannesburg and Queensland
and western Australia, all she may say of freedom becomes an empty
sound, impressing no one.
Last April (1905) another of the planters discovered a party of eight
of his own slaves just launching a canoe in hopes of escaping with
better success. They had crammed the canoe with provisions--slaughtered
pigs, meal, and water-casks--so many things that the planter told me
it would certainly have sunk and drowned them all. To prevent this
lamentable catastrophe he took them to the jail, had them flogged
almost to death by the jailer there, and brought them back to the huts
which they had so rashly attempted to leave in spite of their legal
contract and their supposed willingness to work on the plantations.
In the interior, the island of Principe rises into great peaks, not so
high as the mountains of San Thomé, but very much more precipitous.
There is one peak especially where the rock falls so sheer that I think
it would be inaccessible to the best climber on that side. I have not
discovered the exact height of the mountains, but I should estimate
them as something between four and five thousand feet, and they, like
the whole island, are covered with forest and tropical growth, except
where the rock is too steep and smooth to give any hold for roots.
But, as a rule, one sees the mountains only by glimpses, for when I
have passed the island or landed there they have always been wrapped
in slowly moving mist, and I believe they are seldom clear of it. The
mist falls in a soaking drizzle, and it seems to rain heavily, besides,
almost every day, even in the dry season. Perhaps the moisture is
almost too great, for I noticed more rot upon the cocoa-pods here than
at San Thomé.
Into these dripping forests and almost inaccessible mountains the
slaves are constantly trying to escape. A planter told me that many
of them do not realize what an island is. They hope to be able to make
their way home on foot. When they discover that the terrible sea foams
all round them, they turn into the forest and build little huts, from
which they are continually moving away. Here and there they plant
little patches of maize or other food with seed which they steal from
the plantations or which is secretly conveyed to them by the other
slaves. Some kind of communication is evidently kept up, for it is
thought the plantation slaves always know where the runaways are, and
sometimes betray them. I saw one man who had been living with them in
the forest himself and had come back with his hand cut off and his head
split open, probably for treachery. We asked him the reason; we asked
him to tell us something of the life out there; but at once he assumed
the native’s impenetrable look and would not speak another word.
Women as well as men escape from time to time and join these fine
vindicators of freedom in the woods, but, chiefly owing to the deadly
climate and the extreme hardship of their life, the people do not
increase in numbers. About a thousand was the highest figure I heard
given for them; about two hundred the lowest. The number most generally
quoted was six hundred, but, in fact, it is quite impossible to count
them at all, for they are always changing their camps and are rarely
seen. The cotton cloths in which they escape go to pieces very soon,
and they all live in entire nakedness, except when the women take the
trouble to string together a few plantain leaves as aprons. Among them,
however, they have some clever craftsmen. They make good bows and
arrows for hunting the civet-cats and other animals that form their
chief food, and I have seen a two-handled saw made out of a common
knife or matchet--a very ingenious piece of work. It was found in the
hands of one of them who had been shot.
For the most part they live a wandering and hard, but I hope not an
entirely unhappy, existence in the dense forest around the base of
that precipitous mountain of which I spoke. Every now and again the
Portuguese organize man-hunts to recapture or kill them off. Forming
a kind of cordon, they sweep over parts of the island, tying up or
shooting all they may find. But the Portuguese are so cowardly and
incapable in their undertakings that they are no match for alert
natives filled with the recklessness of despair, and the massacre has
never yet been complete. In fact, the hunting-parties are often broken
up by dissensions among rival strategists, and sometimes they appear to
degenerate into convivial meetings, at which drink is the object and
murder the excuse.
Recently, however, there was a very successful shoot. The sportsmen
had been led by guides to a place where the escaped slaves were known
to be rather thick in the forest. They came upon huts evidently just
abandoned. Beside them, hidden in the grass, they found an old man.
“We took him,” said the planter who told me the story, with all a
sportsman’s relish, “and we forced him to tell us where the others
were. At first we could not squeeze a word or sign out of him. After
a long time, without saying anything, he lifted a hand towards the
highest trees, and there we saw the slaves, men and women, clinging
like bats to the under side of the branches. It was not long, I can
tell you, before we brought them crashing down through the leaves on to
the ground. My word, we had grand sport that day!”
I can imagine no more noble existence than has fallen to those poor
and naked blacks, who have dared all for freedom, and, scorning the
stall-fed life of slavery, have chosen rather to throw themselves upon
such mercy as nature has, to wander together in nakedness and hunger
from forest to forest and hut to hut, to live in daily apprehension of
murder, to lurk like apes under the high branches, and at last to fall
to the bullets of the Christians, dead, but of no further service to
the commercial gentlemen who bought them and lose £30 by every death.
Even to the slaves who remain on the plantations, not having the
courage or good-fortune to escape and die like wild beasts, death, as
a rule, is not much longer delayed in coming. Probably within the first
two or three years the slave’s strength begins to ebb away. With every
day his work becomes feebler, so that at last even the ganger’s whip
or pointed stick cannot urge him on. Then he is taken to the hospital
and laid upon the boarded floor till he dies. An hour or so afterwards
you may meet two of his fellow-slaves going into the forest. There is
perhaps a sudden smell of carbolic or other disinfectant upon the air,
and you take another look at the long pole the slaves are carrying
between them on their shoulders. Under the pole a body is lashed,
tightly wrapped up in the cotton cloth that was its dress while it
lived. The head is covered with another piece of cloth which passes
round the neck and is also fastened tightly to the pole. The feet and
legs are sometimes covered, sometimes left to dangle naked. In silence
the two slaves pass into some untrodden part of the forest, and the man
or woman who started on life’s journey in a far-off native village with
the average hope and delight of childhood, travels over the last brief
stage and is no more seen.
Laws and treaties do not count for much. A law is never of much effect
unless the mind of a people has passed beyond the need of it, and
treaties are binding only on those who wish to be bound. But still
there are certain laws and treaties that we may for a moment recall:
in 1830 England paid £300,000 to the Portuguese provided they forbade
all slave-trade--which they did and pocketed the money; in 1842 England
and the United States agreed under the Ashburton Treaty to maintain
joint squadrons on the west coast of Africa for the suppression of the
slave-trade; in 1858 Portugal enacted a law that every slave belonging
to a Portuguese subject should be free in twenty years; in 1885, by
the Berlin General Act, England, the United States, and thirteen other
powers, including Portugal and Belgium, pledged themselves to suppress
every kind of slave-trade, especially in the Congo and the interior
of Africa; in 1890, by the Brussels General Act, England, the United
States, and fifteen other powers, including Portugal and Belgium,
pledged themselves to suppress every kind of slave-trade, especially
in the Congo and the interior of Africa, to erect cities of refuge for
escaped slaves, to hold out protection to every fugitive slave, to stop
all convoys of slaves on the march, and to exercise strict supervision
at all ports so as to prevent the sale or shipment of slaves across the
sea.
If any one wanted a theme for satire, what more deadly theme could he
find?
To which of the powers can appeal now be made? Appeal to England is no
longer possible. Since the rejection of Ireland’s home-rule bill, the
abandonment of the Armenians to massacre, and the extinction of the
South-African republics, she can no longer be regarded as the champion
of liberty or of justice among mankind. She has flung away her only
noble heritage. She has closed her heart of compassion, and for ten
years past the oppressed have called to her in vain. A single British
cruiser, posted off the coast of Angola, with orders to arrest every
mail-boat or other ship having serviçaes on board, would so paralyze
the system that probably it would never recover. But one might as soon
expect Russia or Germany to do it as England in her recent mood. She
will make representations, perhaps; she will remind Portugal of “the
old alliance” and the friendship between the royal families; but she
will do no more. What she says can have no effect; her tongue, which
was the tongue of men, has become like sounding brass; and if she spoke
of freedom, the nations would listen with a polished smile.