Part 13

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.

From her we can turn only to America. There the sense of freedom still seems to linger, and the people are still capable of greater actions than can ever be prompted by commercial interests and the search for a market. America’s record is still clean compared to England’s, and her impulses to compassion and justice will not be checked by family affection for the royalties of one out of the two most degraded, materialized, and unintellectual little states of Europe. America may still take the part that once was England’s by right of inheritance. She may stand as the bulwark of freedom against tyranny, and of justice and mercy--those almost extinct qualities--against the restless greed and blood-thirsty pleasure-seeking of the world. Let America declare that her will is set against slavery, and at her voice the abominable trade in human beings between Angola and the islands will collapse as the slave-trade to Brazil collapsed at the voice of England in the days of her greatness.

I am aware that, as I said in my first letter, the whole question of slavery is still before us. It has reappeared under the more pleasing names of “indentured labor,” “contract labor,” or the “compulsory labor” which Mr. Chamberlain has advocated in obedience to the Johannesburg mine-owners. The whole thing will have to be faced anew, for the solutions of our great-grandfathers no longer satisfy. While slavery is lucrative, as it is on the islands of San Thomé and Principe, it will be defended by those who identify greatness with wealth, and if their own wealth is involved, their arguments will gain considerably in vigor. They will point to the necessity of developing rich islands where no one would work without compulsion. They will point to what they call the comfort and good treatment of the slaves. They will protect themselves behind legal terms. But they forget that legal terms make no difference to the truth of things. They forget that slavery is not a matter of discomfort or ill treatment, but of loss of liberty. They forget that it might be better for mankind that the islands should go back to wilderness than that a single slave should toil there. I know the contest is still before us. It is but part of the great contest with capitalism, and in Africa it will be as long and difficult as it was a hundred years ago in other regions of the world. I have but tried to reveal one small glimpse in a greater battle-field, and to utter the cause of a few thousands out of the millions of men and women whose silence is heard only by God. And perhaps if the crying of their silence is not heard even by God, it will yet be heard in the souls of the just and the compassionate.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] An English resident at San Thomé estimates the serviçaes alone at forty thousand.

[15] London’s death-rate in 1903 was 15.7 per 1000 against Principe’s 206.7 per 1000. Liverpool had the highest death-rate of English cities. It was 20.5 per 1000, or almost exactly one-tenth of the death-rate among the serviçaes in Principe. The total death-rate for England and Wales in 1902 was 16.2 per 1000.

INDEX

Abeokuta, walled city of, 3; population of, 3.

Accra, town of, 3.

_A Defeza de Angola_, Loanda newspaper, 27.

“Afoola,” native name for missionary, 142.

“Agent,” the, 9, 29, 151-153, 163, 167, 169, 171-175, 181, 191, 196, 199.

Ambriz, 180, 181.

American mission, Congregationalist, 140; Wesleyan Episcopalian, 141.

Amorim, Captain, 45, 119, 157.

Angola, 26, 35, 37, 43, 51, 55, 67, 75, 83, 158.

Antelopes, 72, 74, 77, 110.

Ants, 6, 73, 112, 116.

“Apeka” (slaves), 121.

Arnot, F. S., missionary explorer, 51, 109, 141.

Ashanti, town of, 1.

Ashburton Treaty, 207.

Atundwa plant, the, 109.

Aureoles, 76.

Axim, settlement of, 2.

Bailundu, district of, 45, 156; mission village of, 158.

Bailundu war of 1902, 45, 82, 115, 118, 141, 150, 157.

Bananas, plantation of, 32.

Barotzeland, 68.

Barracoons, remains of, 13.

Batatele cannibals, 52.

Bees, 76, 107, 108.

Beeswax, 42, 86, 149.

Beit, Mr., 151.

Belmonte, fort at, 84, 150.

Benguela, town of, 43, 44, 46, 51, 69, 149, 169, 171, 173, 176, 178, 182; Boers at, 43.

Berlin General Act, 207.

Bihé, district of, 43, 45, 69, 77, 80, 83, 86, 104, 149-151, 152 _n_, 153, 156, 175.

Bihéans, the, born traders, 85, 86; language of, 86; villages of, 87; public club (onjango) of, 88; games of, 91; proverbs of, 92; folk-lore of, 94; dancing of, 95; musical instruments of, 96, 97; witchcraft of, 99; slavery among, 100, 115; objections to burying slaves, 114; eat those meeting with sudden death, 128; thieves, 170.

Birds, 7, 76, 110, 192.

Black-headed crane, 76, 110.

Bluebock, 77.

Boer transport-riders, 43, 64, 82.

Boers, long trek of, 67; knowledge of oxen, 68; trade in slaves, 68.

Bogs, 65, 80, 81, 153, 154.

Boiling springs, 153.

Bourru-Bourru bog, 81, 154.

“Boys,” native, 9, 16, 79.

Brussels Conference of 1890, 149.

Brussels General Act, 207.

Buffaloes, 72, 74, 166.

Burchell’s zebra (quagga), 74.

Burial of slaves, 36, 114, 155, 206.

Bush paths, 31, 85, 86, 115, 118.

Bustard, great, 76.

Cabinda, in Portuguese territory, 182.

Caconda, fort at, 68; turning-point of journey, 77, 80.

Caiala, town of, 84.

Calabar, missionaries at, 14.

Calei River, 81.

Cameron’s, Commander, _Across Africa_, 110 _n_, 155 _n_, 157 _n_, 159 _n_.

Camps, rest, 160.

Candombo, deserted village of, 82.

Cannibals, 52, 86, 162.

Cape Coast Castle settlement, 2.

Caravans, slave, 86, 117, 120, 121, 126, 163, 167.

Cassava, native food, 31.

Catholic mission, 56, 78, 79, 140.

Cats, civet, 192, 204.

“Central Committee of Labor and Emigration,” 46, 102.

Chain-gangs, 44, 119, 153 _n_, 171, 172.

Chibokwe tribe, the, 83, 107-110, 126; kill their slaves, 126; file their teeth, 127; eat those meeting with sudden death, 128; trade in rubber, 128; artistic, 129; dancing of, 129; religious rites of, 130; witchcraft of, 131; missionaries among, 132-148.

Chicotes (hide whips), 120, 155.

Children pawned into slavery, 29, 51, 150, 151.

Chinjamba, pioneers at, 140.

Chocolate from San Thomé and Principe islands, 167.

Civet-cats, 192, 204.

Cocoa, 26, 27, 32, 44, 46, 167, 188, 189, 192, 193.

Coffee, 26, 32, 188, 198; plantation, working a, 33.

Coillard, M., missionary, 142.

Coinage, real, in Central Africa, 42, 84, 85, 107.

Commercial Company of Angola, 84.

Committee of Emigration, 174.

Concubines, slaves as, 53.

Contract, form of, serviçaes, 28.

Contract labor, 23, 26, 34-38, 48, 57, 116, 153, 167, 169, 173, 196, 209; form of contract, 28; pay of, 38, 194-196, 208.

Contrahidos or serviçaes, 27, 44, 46-48, 58, 172, 187, 190, 196, 208.

Copper-mines, ancient, of Matanga, 86.

Cotton cloth, 9, 33, 35, 42, 84-86.

Cotton, trade in, 10.

Crane, black-headed, 76, 110; dancing, 76.

Crocodiles, 6, 41, 165, 168.

Cuando River, 75, 80.

Cuanza River, 75, 83, 104-106, 111, 112, 126.

Cunene River, 80.

Cunughamba River, 82.

Cunyama, the, 78.

Cunyami natives, 68.

Currency, recognized, in Central Africa, 42, 84, 85, 107.

Currie, Mr., missionary, 142.

Dancing cranes, 76.

Debtor, a, body left to jackals, 115.

Decree of January 29, 1903, 158, 172-174, 176, 177, 180, 190, 194.

Deer, 77, 110, 166.

Deposits of magnesia, 153.

Desert, Kalahari, 67.

De Silva, fate of, 185.

Ditch-canals, 32.

Domestic slavery, 14, 17, 40-58, 100, 193.

Doves, 76.

Dried fish, “stinkfish,” 35, 37, 193, 194.

Drum, native musical instrument, 96-99.

Duiker, antelope, 77, 110.

Eagles, 76.

Eckstein, Mr., 151.

Elands, 72, 166.

Elephants, 74, 75.

“Empreza Nacional,” profits of, 175.

English mission, Plymouth Brethren, 140.

Eucalyptus-trees of Benguela, 43.

Exportation of slaves, 23, 157, 158, 168-185.

Factories, 8-10, 12, 155.

Fay, Mr., missionary, 142, 158.

Fernando Po, island, 200.

Ferries over the Cuanza, 111.

Feudalism, 16.

Fevers, 8, 105, 117, 150, 164, 168, 171.

Flag-grasses, 31, 107.

Flamingoes, 76.

Fly, tsetse, 24.

Form of contract, serviçaes, 28.

Forts, 20, 21, 68, 70, 78, 84, 105, 111, 119, 124, 141, 150, 155, 156-159.

Francolins, 76.

Fruits, trade in, 10.

Fugitive slaves, 171, 179, 194, 199-201, 203, 205, 207.

Gangers, 34, 35, 155, 184, 193, 194, 199, 201, 206.

Gnu, 77.

Gold, 10.

Grasses, 31, 107, 108, 153.

Guinea-fowl, 76.

Gums, trade in, 10.

Hartebeest, 77.

Hawks, 7, 76.

Hide whips (chicotes or sjamboks), 120.

Hippopotamus, 83, 111, 165.

Honey-guide, 76.

Hornbill, 76.

Hugo, Victor, quoted, 17, 18.