Part 4

These are things that every one knows, but I will not dwell upon them yet or even count them as proved, for I have still far to go and much to see. Leaving the export trade in “contracted labor,” I will now speak of what I have actually seen and known of slavery on the mainland under the white people themselves. I have heard the slaves in Angola estimated at five-sixths of the population by an Englishman who has held various influential positions in the country for nearly twenty years. The estimate is only guesswork, for the Portuguese are not strong in statistics, especially in statistics of slavery. But including the very large number of natives who, by purchase or birth, are the family slaves of the village chiefs and other fairly prosperous natives, we might probably reckon at least half the population as living under some form of slavery--either in family slavery to natives, or general slavery to white men, or in plantation slavery (under which head I include the export trade). I have referred to the family slavery among the natives. Till lately it has been universal in Africa, and it still exists in nearly all parts. But though it is constantly pleaded as their excuse by white slave-owners, it is not so shameful a thing as the slavery organized by the whites, if only because whites do at least boast themselves to be a higher race than natives, with higher standards of life and manners. From what I have seen of African life, both in the south and west, I am not sure that the boast is justified, but at all events it is made, and for that reason white men are precluded from sheltering themselves behind the excuse of native customs.

On the same steamer by which I reached Benguela there were five little native boys, conspicuous in striped jerseys, and running about the ship like rats. I suppose they were about ten to twelve years old, perhaps less. I do not know where they came from, but it must have been from some fairly distant part of the interior, for, like all natives who see stairs for the first time, they went up and down them on their hands and knees. They were travelling with a Portuguese, and within a week of landing at Benguela he had sold them all to other white owners. Their price was fifty milreis apiece (nearly £10). Their owner did rather well, for the boys were small and thin--hardly bigger than another native slave boy who was at the same time given away by one Portuguese friend to another as a New-Year’s present. But all through this part of the country I have found the price of human beings ranging rather higher than I expected, and the man who told me the price of the boys had himself been offered one of them at that figure, and was simply passing on the offer to myself.

Perhaps I was led to underestimate prices a little by the statement of a friend in England that at Benguela one could buy a woman for £8 and a girl for £12. He had not been to that part of the coast himself, though for five years he had lived in the Katanga district of the Congo State, from which large numbers of the slaves are drawn. Perhaps he had forgotten to take into account the heavy cost of transport from the interior and the risk of loss by death upon the road. Or perhaps he reckoned by the exceptionally low prices prevailing after the dry season of 1903, when, owing to a prolonged drought, the famine was severe in a district near the Kunene in southeast Angola, and some Portuguese and Boer traders took advantage of the people’s hunger to purchase oxen and children cheap in exchange for mealies. Similarly, in 1904, women were being sold unusually cheap in a district by the Cuanza, owing to a local famine. Livingstone, in his _First Expedition to Africa_, said he had never known cases of parents selling children into slavery, but Mr. F. S. Arnot, in his edition of the book, has shown that such things occur (though as a rule a child is sold by his maternal uncle), and I have myself heard of several instances in the last few weeks, both for debt and hunger. Necessity is the slave-trader’s opportunity, and under such conditions the market quotations for human beings fall, in accordance with the universal economics.

The value of a slave, man or woman, when landed at San Thomé, is about £30, but, as nearly as I could estimate, the average price of a grown man in Benguela is £20 (one hundred dollars). At that price the traders there would be willing to supply a large number. An Englishman whom I met there had been offered a gang of slaves, consisting of forty men and women, at the rate of £18 a head. But the slaves were up in Bihé, and the cost of transport down to the coast goes for something; and perhaps there was “a reduction on taking a quantity.” However, when he was in Bihé, he had bought two of them from the Portuguese trader at that rate. They were both men. He had also bought two boys farther in the interior, but I do not know at what price. One of them had been with the Batatele cannibals, who form the chief part of the “Révoltés,” or rebels, against the atrocious government of the Belgians on the Upper Congo. Perhaps the boy himself really belonged to the race which had sold him to the Bihéan traders. At all events, the racial mark was cut in his ears, and the other “boys” in the Englishman’s service were never tired of chaffing him upon his past habits. Every night they would ask him how many men he had eaten that day. But a point was added to the laugh because the ex-cannibal was now acting as cook to the party. Under their new service all these slaves received their freedom.

The price of women on the mainland is more variable, for, as in civilized countries, it depends almost entirely on their beauty and reputation. Even on the Benguela coast I think plenty of women could be procured for agricultural, domestic, and other work at £15 a head or even less. But for the purposes for which women are often bought the price naturally rises, and it depends upon the ordinary causes which regulate such traffic. A full-grown and fairly nice-looking woman may be bought from a trader for £18, but for a mature girl a man must pay more. At least a stranger who is not connected with the trade has to pay more. While I was in the town a girl was sold to a prospector, who wanted her as his concubine during a journey into the interior. Her owner was an elderly Portuguese official of some standing. I do not know how he had obtained her, but she was not born in his household of slaves, for he had only recently come to the country. Most likely he had bought her as a speculation, or to serve as his concubine if he felt inclined to take her. The price finally arranged between him and the prospector for the possession of the girl was one hundred and twenty-five milreis, which was then nearly equal to £25. For the visit of the King of Portugal to England and the revival of the “old alliance” had just raised the value of the Portuguese coinage.

When the bargain was concluded, the girl was led to her new master’s room and became his possession. During his journey into the interior she rode upon his wagon. I saw them often on the way, and was told the story of the purchase by the prospector himself. He did not complain of the price, though men who were better acquainted with the uses of the woman-market considered it unnecessarily high. But it is really impossible to fix an average standard of value where such things as beauty and desire are concerned. The purchaser was satisfied, the seller was satisfied. So who was to complain? The girl was not consulted, nor did the question of her price concern her in the least.

I was glad to find that the Portuguese official who had parted with her on these satisfactory terms was no merely selfish speculator in the human market, as so many traders are, but had considered the question philosophically, and had come to the conclusion that slavery was much to a slave’s advantage. The slave, he said, had opportunities of coming into contact with a higher civilization than his own. He was much better off than in his native village. His food was regular, his work was not excessive, and, if he chose, he might become a Christian. Being an article of value, it was likely that he would be well treated. “Indeed,” he continued, in an outburst of philanthropic emotion, “both in our own service and at San Thomé, the slave enjoys a comfort and well-being which would have been forever beyond his reach if he had not become a slave!” In many cases, he asserted, the slave owed his very life to slavery, for some of the slaves brought from the interior were prisoners of war, and would have been executed but for the profitable market ready to receive them. As he spoke, the old gentleman’s face glowed with noble enthusiasm, and I could not but envy him his connection with an institution that was at the same time so salutary to mankind and so lucrative to himself.

As to the slave’s happiness on the islands, I cannot yet describe it, but according to the reports of residents, ships’ officers, and the natives themselves, it is brief, however great. What sort of happiness is enjoyed on the Portuguese plantations of Angola itself I have already described. As to the comfort and joy of ordinary slavery under white men, with all its advantages of civilization and religion, the beneficence of the institution is somewhat dimmed by a few such things as I have seen, or have heard from men whom I could trust as fully as my own eyes. At five o’clock one afternoon I saw two slaves carrying fish through an open square at Benguela, and enjoying their contact with civilization in the form of another native, who was driving them along like oxen with a sjambok. The same man who was offered the forty slaves at £18 a head had in sheer pity bought a little girl from a Portuguese lady last autumn, and he found her back scored all over with the cut of the _chicote_, just like the back of a trek-ox under training. An Englishman coming down from the interior last African winter, was roused at night by loud cries in a Portuguese trading-house at Mashiko. In the morning he found that a slave had been flogged, and tied to a tree in the cold all night. He was a man who had only lately lost his liberty, and was undergoing the process which the Portuguese call “taming,” as applied to new slaves who are sullen and show no pleasure in the advantages of their position. In another case, only a few weeks ago, an American saw a woman with a full load on her head and a baby on her back passing the house where he happened to be staying. A big native, the slave of a Portuguese trader in the neighborhood, was dragging her along with a rope, and beating her with a whip as she went. The American brought the woman into the house and kept her there. Next day the Portuguese owners came in fury with forty of his slaves, breathing out slaughters, but, as is usual with the Portuguese, he shrank up when he was faced with courage. The American refused to give the woman back, and ultimately she was restored to her own distant village, where she still is.

I would willingly give the names in the last case and in all others; but one of the chief difficulties of the whole subject is that it is impossible to give names without exposing people out here to the hostility and persecution of the Portuguese authorities and traders. In most instances, also, not only the people themselves, but all the natives associated with them, would suffer, and the various kinds of work in which they are engaged would come to an end. It is the same fear which keeps the missionaries silent. The Catholic missions are supported by the state. The other missions exist on sufferance. How can missionaries of either division risk the things they have most at heart by speaking out upon a dangerous question? They are silent, though their conscience is uneasy, unless custom puts it to sleep.

Custom puts us all to sleep. Every one in Angola is so accustomed to slavery as part of the country’s arrangements that hardly anybody considers it strange. It is regarded either as a wholesome necessity or as a necessary evil. When any question arises upon the subject, all the antiquated arguments in favor of slavery are trotted out again. We are told that but for slavery the country would remain savage and undeveloped; that some form of compulsion is needed for the native’s good; that in reality he enjoys more freedom and comfort as a slave than in his free village. Let us at once sweep away all the talk about the native’s good. It is on a level with the cant which said the British fought the Boers and brought the Chinese to the Transvaal in order to extend to both races a higher form of religion. The only motive for slavery is money-making, and the only argument in its favor is that it pays. That is the root of the matter, and as long as we stick to that we shall, at least, be saved from humbug.

As to the excuse that there is a difference between slavery and “contracted labor,” this is no more than legal cant, just as the other pleas are philanthropic or religious cant. Except in the eyes of the law, it makes no difference whether a man is a “serviçal” or a slave; it makes no difference whether a written contract exists or not. I do not know whether the girl I mentioned had signed a contract expressing her willingness to serve as the prospector’s concubine for five years, after which she was to be free unless the contract were renewed. But I do know that whether she signed the contract or not, her price and position would have been exactly the same, and that before the five years are up she will in all probability have been sold two or three times over, at diminishing prices. The “serviçal” system is only a dodge to delude the antislavery people, who were at one time strong in Great Britain, and have lately shown signs of life in Portugal. Except in the eyes of a law which is hardly ever enforced, slavery exists almost unchecked. Slaves work the plantations, slaves serve the traders, slaves do the housework of families. Ordinary free wage-earners exist in the towns and among the carriers, but, as a rule, throughout the country the system of labor is founded on slavery, and very few of the Portuguese or foreign residents in Angola would hesitate to admit it.

From Benguela I determined to strike into a district which has long had an evil reputation as the base of the slave-trade with the interior--a little known and almost uninhabited country.

IV

ON ROUTE TO THE SLAVE CENTRE

He who goes to Africa leaves time behind. Next week is the same as to-morrow, and it is indifferent whether a journey takes a fortnight or two months. That is why the ox-wagon suits the land so well. Mount an ox-wagon and you forget all time. Like the to-morrows of life, it creeps in its petty pace, and soon after its wheels have reached their extreme velocity of three miles an hour you learn how vain are all calculations of pace and years. Yet, except in the matter of speed, which does not count in Africa, the ox-wagon has most of the qualities of an express-train, besides others of greater value. Its course is at least equally adventurous, and it affords a variety of sensations and experiences quite unknown to the ordinary railway passenger.

Let me take an instance from the recent journey on which I have crossed some four hundred and fifty or five hundred miles of country in two months. A good train would have traversed the distance in a winter’s night, and have left only a tedious blank upon the mind. On a railway what should I have known of a certain steep descent which we approached one silent evening after rain? The red surface was just slippery with the wet. The oxen were going quietly along, when, all of a sudden, they were startled by the heavy thud of the wheels jolting over a tree stump on the track. Within a few yards of the brink they set off at a trot, the long and heavy chain hanging loose between them.

“Kouta! Kouta ninni!” (“Brake! Hard on!”) shouted the driver, and we felt the Ovampo boy behind the wagon whirl the screw round till the hind wheels were locked. But it was too late. We were over the edge already. Backing and slipping and pulling every way, striking with their horns, charging one another helplessly from behind, the oxen swept down the steep. Behind them, like a big gun got loose, came the wagon, swaying from side to side, leaping over the rocks, plunging into the holes, at every moment threatening to crush the hinder oxen of the span. Then it began to slide sideways. It was almost at right angles to the track. In another second it would turn clean over, with all four wheels in air, or would dash us into a great tree that stood only a few yards down.

“Kouta loula!” (“Loose the brake!”) yelled the driver, but nothing could stop the sliding now. We clung on and thought of nothing. Men on the edge of death think of nothing. Suddenly the near hind wheel was thrown against a high ridge of clay. The wagon swung straight, and we were plunged into a river among the struggling oxen, all huddled together and entangled in the chain.

“That was rather rapid,” I said, as the wagon came to a dead stop in the mud and we took to the water, but in no language could I translate the expression of the driver’s emotions.

Only last wet season the owner of a wagon started down a place like that with twenty-four fine oxen, and at the bottom he had eight oxen, and more beef than he could salt.

Beside another hill lies the fresh grave of a poor young Boer, who was thrown under his wagon wheels and never out-spanned again. Such are the interests of an ox-wagon when it takes to speed.

Or what traveller by train could have enjoyed such experiences as were mine in crossing the Kukema--a river that forms a boundary of Bihé? At that point it was hardly more than five feet deep and twenty yards wide. In a train one would have leaped over it without pause or notice. But in a wagon the passage gave us a whole long day crammed with varied labor and learning. Leading the oxen down to the brink at dawn, we out-spanned and emptied the wagon of all the loads. Then we lifted its “bed” bodily off the four wheels, and spreading the “sail,” or canvas hood, under it, we launched it with immense effort into the water as a raft. We anchored it firmly to both banks by the oxen’s “reems” (I do not know how the Boers spell those strips of hide, the one thing, except patience, necessary in African travel), and dragging it to and fro through the water, we got the loads over dry in about four journeys. Then the oxen were swum across, and tying some of them to the long chain on the farther side, we drew the wheels and the rest of the wagon under water into the shallows. Next came the task of taking off the “sail” in the water and floating the “bed” into its place upon the beam again--a lifelong lesson in applied hydraulics. When at last the sun set and white man and black emerged naked, muddy, and exhausted from the water, while the wagon itself wallowed triumphantly up the bank, I think all felt they had not lived in vain. Though, to be sure, it was wet sleeping that night, and the rain came sousing down as if poured out of one immeasurable slop-pail.

A railway bridge? What a dull and uninstructive substitute that would have been!

Or consider the ox, how full of personality he is compared to the locomotive! Outwardly he is far from emotional. You cannot coax him as you coax a horse or a dog. A fairly tame ox will allow you to clap his hind quarters, but the only real pleasure you can give him is a lick of salt. For salt even a wild ox will almost submit to be petted. The smell of the salt-bag is enough to keep the whole span sniffing and lowing round the wagon instead of going to feed, and, especially on the “sour veldt,” the Sunday treat of salt spread along a rock is a festival of luxury.

But unexpressive as oxen are, one soon learns the inner character of each. There is the wise and willing ox, who will stick to the track and always push his best. He is put at the head of the span. In the middle comes the wild ox, who wants to go any way but the right; the sullen ox, who needs the lash; and the well-behaved representative of gentility, who will do anything and suffer anything rather than work. Nearest the wagon, if possible for as many as four spans, you must put the strong and well-trained oxen, who answer quickly to their names. On them depends the steering and safety of the wagon. At the sound of his name each ox is trained to push his side of the yoke forward, and round trees or corners the wagon follows the curve of safety.

“Blaawberg! Shellback! Rachop! Blomveldt!” you cry. The oxen on the left of the four last spans push forward the ends of their yokes, and edging off to the right, the wagon moves round the segment of an arc. To drive a wagon is like coxing an eight without a rudder.

But on a long and hungry trek even the leaders will sometimes turn aside into the bush for tempting grass, or as a hint that it is time to stop. In a moment there is the wildest confusion. The oxen behind are dragged among the trees. The chain gets entangled; two oxen pull on different sides of a standing trunk; yoke-pegs crack; necks are throttled by the halters; the wagon is dashed against a solid stump, and trees and stump and all have to be hewn down with the axe before the span is free again. Sometimes the excited and confused animals drag at the chain while one ox is being helplessly crushed against a tree. Often a horn is broken off. I know nothing that suggests greater pain than the crack of a horn as it is torn from the skull. The ox falls silently on his knees. Blood streams down his face. The other oxen go on dragging at the chain. When released from the yoke, he rushes helplessly over the bush, trying to hide himself. But flinging him on his side and tying his legs together, the natives bind up the horn, if it has not actually dropped, with a plaster of a poisonous herb they call “moolecky,” to keep the blow-flies away. Sometimes it grows on again. Sometimes it remains loose and flops about. But, as a rule, it has to be cut off in the end.

To avoid such things most transport-riders set a boy to walk in front of the oxen as “toe-leader,” though it is a confession of weakness. Another difficulty in driving the ox is his peculiar horror of mud from the moment that he is in-spanned. By nature he loves mud next best to food and drink. He will wallow in mud all a tropical day, and the more slimy it is, the better he likes it. But put him in the yoke, and he becomes as cautious of mud as a cat, as dainty of his feet as a lady crossing Regent Street. It seems strange at first, but he has his reasons. When he comes to one of those ghastly mud-pits (“slaughter-holes” the Boers call them), which abound along the road in the wet season, his first instinct is to plunge into it; but reflection tells him that he has not time to explore its cool depths and delightful stickiness, and that if he falls or sticks the team behind and perhaps the wagon itself will be upon him. So he struggles all he can to skirt delicately round it, and if he is one of the steering oxen, the effort brings disaster either on the wagon or himself. No less terrible is his fate when for hour after hour the wagon has to plough its way through one of the upland bogs; when the wheels are sunk to the hubs, and the legs of all the oxen disappear, and the shrieking whips and yelling drivers are never for a moment still. Why the ox also very strongly objects to getting his tail wet I have not found out.