Part 8
I have not seen torture in the Hungry Country. I have only seen murder. Every bone scattered along that terrible foot-path from Mashiko to the Cuanza is the bone of a murdered man. The man may not have been killed by violence, though in most cases the sharp-cut hole in the skull shows where the fatal stroke was given. But if he was not killed by violence, he was taken from his home and sold, either for the buyer’s use, or to sell again to a Bihéan, to a Portuguese trader, or to the agents who superintend the “contract labor” for San Thomé, and are so useful in supplying the cocoa-drinkers of England and America, as well as in enriching the plantation-owners and the government. The Portuguese and such English people as love to stand well with Portuguese authority tell us that most of the men now sold as slaves are criminals, and so it does not matter. Very well, then; let us make a lucrative clearance of our own prisons by selling the prisoners to our mill-owners as factory-hands. We might even go beyond our prisons. It is easy to prove a crime against a man when you can get £10 or £20 by selling him. And if each of us that has committed a crime may be sold, who shall escape the shackles?
The most recent case of murder that I saw was on my return through the Hungry Country, the sixth day out from Mashiko. The murdered man was lying about ten yards from the path hidden in deep grass and bracken. But for the smell I should have passed the place without noticing him as I have no doubt passed scores, and perhaps hundreds, of other skeletons that lie hidden in that forest. How long the man had been murdered I could not say, for decay in Africa varies with the weather, but the ants generally contrive that it shall be quick. I think the thing must have been done since I passed the place on my way into the country, about a month before. But possibly it was a few days earlier. My “headman” had heard of the event (a native hears everything), but it did not impress him or the other carriers in the least. It was far too common. Unhappily I do not understand enough Umbundu to make out the exact date or the details, except that the man was a slave who broke down with the usual shivering fever on the road and was killed with an axe because he could go no farther. As to the cause of death there was no doubt. When I tried to raise the head, the thick, woolly hair came off in my hand like a woven pad, leaving the skull bare, and revealing the deep gash made by the axe at the base of the skull just before it merges with the neck. As I set it down again, the skull broke off from the backbone and fell to one side. Having laid a little earth upon the body, I went on. It would take an army of sextons to bury all the poor bones which consecrate that path.
Yet, in spite of the shackles hanging on the trees, and in spite of the skeletons upon the path and the bodies of recently murdered men, I have not seen a slave caravan such as has been described to me by almost every traveller who has passed along that route into the interior. I mean, I have not seen a gang of slaves chained together, their hands shackled, and their necks held fast in forked sticks. I am not sure of the reason; there were probably many reasons combined. It is just the end of the wet season, just the time when the traders think of sending in for slaves, and not of bringing them out. Directly the natives in the Bihéan village near which I was staying heard I was going to Mashiko, though they knew nothing of my object, they said, “Now a messenger will be sent ahead to warn the slave-traders that an Englishman is coming.” The same was told me by two Englishmen who traversed the country last autumn for the mining concession, and in my case I have not the slightest doubt that messengers were sent. Again, a Portuguese trader, living on the farther side of the Hungry Country, upon the Mushi-Moshi (the Simoï, as the Portuguese classically call it), told me the drivers now bring the slaves through unknown bush-paths north of the old route. He kept a store which, being on the edge of the Hungry Country, was as frequented and lucrative as a wine-and-spirit house must be on the frontier of a prohibition State. And he was the only Portuguese I have met who recognized the natives as fellow-subjects, and even as fellow-men, with rights of their own. He also boasted, I think justly, of the good effects of the war in 1902.
All these reasons may have contributed. But still I think that the old caravan system has been reduced within the last three years. The shock to public feeling in Portugal owing to the Bailundu war and its revelations; the disgrace of certain officers at the forts, who were convicted of taking a percentage of slaves from the passing caravans as hush-money; the strong action of Captain Amorim in trying to suppress the whole traffic; the instructions to the forts to allow no chained gangs to pass--all these things have, I believe, acted as a check upon the old-fashioned methods. There is also an increased risk in obtaining slaves from the interior in large batches. The Belgians strongly oppose the entrance of the traders into their state, partly because guns and powder are the usual exchange for slaves, partly because they wish to retain their own natives under their own tender mercies. The line of Belgian forts along the frontier is quickly increasing. Some Bihéan traders have been shot. In one recent case, much talked of, a bullet from a Maxim gun struck the head of a gang of slaves, marching as usual in single file, and killed nine in succession. In any case, the traders seem to have discovered that the palmy days when they used to parade their chained gangs through the country, and burn, flog, torture, and cut throats as they pleased, are over for the present. For many months after the war even the traffic to San Thomé almost ceased. It has begun again now and is rapidly increasing. As I noted in a former letter, an order was issued in December, 1904, requiring the government agents to press on the supply. But at present, I think, the slaves are coming down in smaller gangs. They are not, as a rule, tortured; they are shackled only at night, and the traders take a certain amount of pains to conceal the whole traffic, or at least to make it look respectable.
As to secrecy, they are not entirely successful. A man whose word no one in Central Africa would think of doubting has just sent down notice from the interior that a gang of two hundred and fifty slaves passed through the Nanakandundu district, bound for the coast, in the end of February (1905), shackles and all. The man who brought the message had done his best to avoid the gang, fearing for his life. But there is no doubt they are coming through, and I ought to have met them near Mashiko if they had not taken a by-path or been broken up into small groups.
It was probably such a small group that I met within a day’s journey of Caiala, the largest trading-house in Bihé. I was walking at about half an hour’s distance from the road, when suddenly I came upon a party of eighteen or twenty boys and four men hidden in the bush. At sight of me they all ran away, the men driving the boys before them. But they left two long chicotes or sjamboks (hide whips) hanging on the trees, as well as the very few light loads they had with them. After a time I returned, and they ran away again. I then noticed that they posted a man on a tree-top to observe my movements, and he remained there till I trekked on with my own people. Of course the evidence is not conclusive, but it is suspicious. Men armed with chicotes do not hide a group of boys in the bush for nothing, and it is most probable that they formed part of a gang going into Bihé for sale.
I may have passed many such groups on my journey without knowing it, for it is a common trick of the traders now to get up the slaves as ordinary carriers. But among all of them, there was only one which was obviously a slave gang, almost without concealment. My carriers detected them at once, and I heard the word “apeka” (slaves)[3] passed down the line even before I came in sight of them. The caravan numbered seventy-eight in all. In front and rear were four men with guns, and there were six of them in the centre. The whole caravan was organized with a precision that one never finds among free carriers, and nearly the whole of it consisted of boys under fourteen. This in itself would be almost conclusive, for no trade caravan would contain anything like that proportion of boys, whereas boys are the most easily stolen from native villages in the interior, and, on the whole, they pay the cost of transport best. But more conclusive even than the appearance of the gang was the quiet evidence of my own carriers, who had no reason for lying, who never pointed out another caravan of slaves, and yet had not a moment’s doubt as to this.
The importation of slaves from the interior into Angola may not be what it was. It may not be conducted under the old methods. There is no longer that almost continuous procession of chained and tortured men and women which all travellers who crossed the Hungry Country before 1902 describe. For the moment rubber has become almost as lucrative as man. The traffic has been driven underground. There is now a feeling of shame and risk about it, and the military authorities dare not openly give it countenance as before. But I have never heard of any case in which they openly interfered to stop it, and the thing still goes on. It is, in fact, fast recovering from the shock of the rebellion of 1902, and is now increasing again every month.
It will go on and it will increase as long as the authorities and traders habitually speak of the natives as “dogs,” and allow the men under their command to misuse them at pleasure. To-day a negro soldier in the white Portuguese uniform seized a little boy at the head of my carriers, pounded his naked feet with the butt of his rifle, and was beating him unmercifully with the barrel, when I sprang upon him with two javelins which I happened to be carrying because my rifle was jammed. At sight of me the emblem of Portuguese justice crawled on the earth and swore he did not know it was a white man’s caravan. That was sufficient excuse.
Three days ago word came to me on the march that one of my carriers had been shot at and wounded. We were in a district where three Chibokwe natives actually with shields and bows as well as guns had hung upon our line as we went in. I had that morning warned the carriers for the twentieth time that they must keep together, and had set an advanced and rear guard, knowing that stray carriers were being shot down. But natives are as incapable of organization as of seeing a straight line, and my people were straggled out helplessly over a length of five or six miles. Hurrying forward, I found that the bullet--a cube of copper--had just missed my carrier’s head, had taken a chip out of his hand, and gone through my box. The carrier behind had caught the would-be murderer, and there he stood--a big Luvale man, with filed teeth, and head shaved but for a little tuft or pad at the top. I supposed he ought to be shot, but my rifle was jammed, and I am not a born executioner. However, I cleared a half-circle and set the man in the middle. A great terror came into his face as I went through the loading motions. I had determined, having blindfolded him, to catch him a full drive between the eyes. This would give him as great a shock as death. He would think it was death, and yet would have time to realize the horror of it afterwards, which in the case of death he would not have. But when all was ready, my carriers, including the wounded man, set up a great disturbance, and seized the muzzle of my rifle and turned it aside. They kept shouting some reason which I did not then understand. So I gave the punishment over to them, and they took the man’s gun--a trade-gun or “Lazarino,” studded with brass nails--stripped him of his powder-gourd, cloth, and all he had, beat him with the backs of their axes, and drove him naked into the forest, where he disappeared like a deer.
I found out afterwards that their reason for clemency was the fear of Portuguese vengeance upon their villages, because the man was employed by the fort at Mashiko, and therefore claimed the right of shooting any other native at sight, even over a minute’s dispute about yielding the foot-path.
Such small incidents are merely typical of the attitude which the Portuguese take towards the natives and allow their own black soldiers and slaves to take. As long as this attitude is maintained, the immensely profitable slave-traffic which has filled with its horrors this route for centuries past will continue to fill it with horrors, no matter how secret or how legalized the traffic may become.
I have pitched my tent to-night on a hill-side not far from the fort of Matota, where a black sergeant and a few men are posted to police the middle of the Hungry Country. In front of me a deep stream is flowing down to the Zambesi with strong but silent current in the middle of a marsh. The air is full of the cricket’s call and the other quiet sounds of night. Now and then a dove wakes to the brilliant moonlight, and coos, and sleeps again. Sometimes an owl cries, but no leopards are abroad, and it would be hard to imagine a scene of greater peace or of more profound solitude. And yet, along this path, there is no solitude, for the dead are here; neither is there any peace, but a cry.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Commander Cameron describes the town and its chief, Mona Peho, in _Across Africa_, p. 426 (1876).
[2] The King of Italy’s award on the disputed frontier between British Barotzeland and Portuguese Angola was not published, in fact, till July, 1905. Great Britain received only part of her claim, and the Hungry Country, together with the whole of the slave route, remains under Portuguese misgovernment.
[3] Properly speaking, vapeka is the plural of upeka, a slave, but in Bihé apeka is used.
VII
SAVAGES AND MISSIONS
The Chibokwe do not sell their slaves; they kill them; and this distinction between them and the Bihéans is characteristic. The Bihéans are carriers and traders. They always have an eye fixed on the margin of profit. They will sell anything, including their own children, and it is waste to kill a man who may be sold to advantage. But the Chibokwe are savages of a wilder race, and no Bihéan would dare buy a Chibokwe slave, even if they had the chance. They know that the next Bihéan caravan would be cut to pieces on its way.
It is impossible to fix the limits of the Chibokwe country. The people are always on the move. It is partly the poverty of the land that drives them about, partly their habit of burning the village whenever the chief dies; and as villages go by the chief’s name, they are the despair of geographers. But in entering the interior you may begin to be on your guard against the Chibokwe two days after crossing the Cuanza. They have a way of cutting off stray carriers, and, as I mentioned in my last letter, my own little caravan was dogged by three of them with shields and spears, who might have been troublesome had they known that the Winchester with which I covered the rear was only useful as a club. It was in the Chibokwe country, too, that the one attempt was made to rob my tent at night, and again I only beat off the thieves by making a great display with a jammed rifle. On one side their villages are mixed up with the Luimbi, on the other with the Luena people and the Luvale, who are scattered over the great, wet flats between Mashiko and Nanakandundu. But they are a distinct people in themselves, and they appear to be increasing and slowly spreading south. If the King of Italy’s arbitration gives the Zambesi tributaries to England, the Chibokwe will form the chief part of our new fellow-subjects, and will share the legal advantages of Whitehall.[4]
They file or break their teeth into sharp points, whereas the Bihéans compromise by only making a blunt angle between the two in front. It used to be said that pointed teeth were the mark of cannibalism, but I think it more likely that these tribes at one time had the crocodile or some sharp-toothed fish as their totem, and certainly when they laugh their resemblance to pikes, sharks, or crocodiles is very remarkable. Anyhow, the Chibokwe are not cannibals now, except for medicine, or in the hope of acquiring the moral qualities of the deceased. But I believe they eat the bodies of people killed by lightning or other sudden death, and the Bihéans do the same.
Though not so desert as the Hungry Country, the soil of their whole district is poor, and the people live in great simplicity. Hardly any maize is grown, and the chief food is the black bean, a meal pounded from yellow millet, and a beetle about four inches long. In all villages there are professional hunters and fishers, but game is scarce, and the fish in such rivers as the Mushi-Moshi (Simoï) are not allowed to grow much above the size of whitebait. Honey is to be found in plenty, but for salt, which is their chief desire, they have to put up with the ashes of a burned grass, unless they can buy real salt from the Bihéans in exchange for millet or rubber. Just at present rubber is their wealth, and they are doing rather a large trade in it. All over the forests they are grubbing up the plant by the roots, and in the villages you may hear the women pounding and tearing at it all the afternoon. But rubber thus extirpated gives a brief prosperity, and in two years, or five at the most, the rubber will be exhausted and the Chibokwe thrown back on their natural poverty.
In the arts they far surpass all their neighbors on the west side. They are so artistic that the women wear little else but ornament. Their houses are square or oblong, with clean angles and straight sides, and the roofs, instead of being conical, are oblong too, having a straight beam along the top, like an English cottage. The tribe is specially famous for its javelins, spears, knives, hatchets, and other iron-work, which they forge in the open spaces round the village club-house, working up their little furnaces with wooden tubes and bellows of goat-skin, like loose drum-heads, pulled up and down with bits of stick to make a draught. A simple pattern is hammered on some of the axes, and on the side of one hut I saw an attempt at fresco--a white figure on a red ground under a white moon--the figure being quite sufficiently like an ox.
In dancing, the Chibokwe excel, like the Luvale people, who are their neighbors on the eastern side, farther in the interior, and their dances are much the same. It is curious that their favorite form is almost exactly like the well-known Albanian dance of the Greeks. Standing in a broken circle, they move round and round to a repeated song, while the leader sets the pace, and now and again springs out into the centre to display his steps. The Chibokwe introduce a few varieties, the man in the centre beckoning with his hand to any one in the ring to perform the next solo, and he in turn calling on another. There is also much more movement of the body than in the Albanian dance, the chief object of the art being to work the shoulders up and down, and wriggle the backbone as much like a snake as possible. But the general idea of the dance is the same, and neither the movement nor the singing nor the beat of the drum alters much throughout a moonlit night.
It is natural that the Chibokwe should have retained much of the religious feeling and rites which the commercial spirit has destroyed in the Bihéans. They are far more alive to the spiritual side of nature, and the fetich shrines are more frequent in all their villages. The gate of every village, and, indeed, of almost every house, has its little cluster of sticks, with antelope skulls stuck on the tops, or old rags fluttering, or a tiny thatched roof covering a patch of strewn meal. The people have a way of painting the sticks in red and black stripes, and so the fisher paints the rough model of a canoe that he hangs by his door to please the fishing spirit. Or sometimes he hangs a little net, and the hunter, besides his cluster of horned skulls, almost always hangs up a miniature turtle three or four inches long. I cannot say for what reason, but all these charms are not to avert evil so much as to win the favor of a benign spirit who loves to fish or hunt. So far the rites are above the usual African religion of terror or devil-worship. But when a woman with child carves a wooden bird to hang over her door, and gives it meal every evening and sprinkles meal in front of her door, I think her object is to ward off the spirits of evil from herself and her unborn baby.
In a Chibokwe village, one burning afternoon, I found a native woman being treated for sickness in the usual way. She was stretched on her back in the dust and dirt of the public place, where she had lain for four days. The sun beat upon her; the flies were thick upon her body. Over her bent the village doctor, assiduous in his care. He knew, of course, that the girl was suffering from witchcraft. Some enemy had put an evil spirit upon her, for in Africa natural death is unknown, and but for witchcraft and spirits man would be immortal. But still the doctor was trying the best human means he knew of as well. He had plastered the girl’s body over with a compound of leaves, which he had first chewed into a pulp. He had then painted her forehead with red ochre, and was now spitting some white preparation of meal into her nose and mouth. The girl was in high fever--some sort of bilious fever. You could watch the beating of her heart. The half-closed eyes showed deep yellow, and the skin was yellow too. Evidently she was suffering the greatest misery, and would probably die next day.
It happened that two Americans were with me, for I had just reached the pioneer mission station at Chinjamba, beyond Mashiko. One of them was a doctor, with ten years’ experience in a great American city, and after commending the exertions of the native physician, he asked to be allowed to assist in the case himself. The native agreed at once, for the white man’s fame as an exorcist had spread far through the country. Four or five days later I saw the same girl, no longer stretched on hot dust, no longer smeared with spittle, leaves, and paint, but smiling cheerfully at me as she pounded her meal among the other women.