CHAPTER XIII.
THE SLAVE TRADE OF EAST AFRICA.
Dr. Livingstone’s Letter upon the Subject to Mr. Bennett -- Compares the Slave Trade with Piracy on the High Seas -- Natives of Interior Africa Average Specimens of Humanity -- Slave Trade Cruelties -- Deaths from Broken Hearts -- The Need of Christian Civilization -- British Culpability.
While waiting for supplies in Unyanyembe, Dr. Livingstone wrote a second letter to Mr. James Gordon Bennett, which was principally devoted to the slave trade of East Africa, to greatly aid in the abolition of which would be more gratifying to the explorer’s ambition than to discover all the sources of the Nile. This might well be supposed from what has already been quoted from Dr. Livingstone’s despatches to his government; but inasmuch as he here directly appeals to the American people, this volume would be incomplete without the remarkable and most thrillingly interesting statements of the letter in question. They were sent by cable telegram from London and appeared in the “Herald” newspaper of July 27, 1872:
“At present let me give a glimpse of the slave trade, to which the search and discovery of most of the Nile fountains have brought me face to face. The whole traffic, whether by land or ocean, is a gross outrage on the common law of mankind. It is carried on from age to age, and, in addition to the evils it inflicts, presents almost insurmountable obstacles to intercourse between different portions of the human family. This open sore in the world is partly owing to human cupidity, partly to the ignorance of the more civilized of mankind of the blight which lights chiefly on more degraded piracy on the high seas. (_sic._) It was once as common as slave trading is now, but as it became thoroughly known the whole civilized world rose against it.
“In now trying to make Eastern African slave trade better known to Americans, I indulge the hope I am aiding on, though in a small degree, the good time coming yet when slavery as well as piracy will be chased from the world. Many have but a faint idea of the evils that trading in slaves inflicts on the victims and authors of its atrocities. Most people imagine that negroes, after being brutalized by a long course of servitude, with but few of the ameliorating influences that elevate the more favored races, are fair average specimens of the African man. Our ideas are derived from slaves of the west coast, who have for ages been subject to domestic bondage and all the depressing agencies of a most unhealthy climate. These have told most injuriously on their physical frames, while fraud and the rum trade have ruined their moral natures so as not to discriminate the difference of the monstrous injustice.
“The main body of the population is living free in the interior, under their own chiefs and laws, cultivating their own farms, catching fish in their own rivers, or fighting bravely with the grand old denizens of the forest, which, in more recent continents, can only be reached in rocky strata or under perennial ice. Winwood Reade hit the truth when he said the ancient Egyptian, with his large, round, black eyes, full, luscious lips, and somewhat depressed nose, is far nearer the typical negro than the west coast African, who has been debased by the unhealthy land he lives in. The slaves generally, and especially those on the west coast, at Zanzibar and elsewhere are extremely ugly. I have no prejudice against their color; indeed, any one who lives long among them forgets they are black and feels they are just fellow-men; but the low, retreating forehead, prognathous jaws, lark-heels and other physical peculiarities common among slaves and West African negroes, always awaken some feelings of aversion akin to those with which we view specimens of the Bill Sykes and ‘Bruiser’ class in England. I would not utter a syllable calculated to press down either class more deeply in the mire in which it is already sunk, but I wish to point out that these are not typical Africans any more than typical Englishmen, and that the natives on nearly all the high lands of the interior Continent are, as a rule, fair average specimens of humanity.
“I happened to be present when all the head men of the great Chief Msama--who lives west of the south end of Tanganyika--had come together to make peace with certain Arabs who had burned their chief town, and I am certain one could not see more finely formed, intellectual heads in any assembly in London or Paris, and the faces and forms corresponded finely with the well-shaped heads. Msama himself had been a sort of Napoleon for fighting and conquering in his younger days. He was exactly like the Ancient Assyrians sculptured on the Nineveh marbles, as Nimrod and others, and he showed himself to be one of ourselves by habitually indulging in copious potations of beer, called pombe, and had become what Nathaniel Hawthorne called ‘bulbous below the ribs.’ I do not know where the phrase ‘bloated aristocracy’ arose. It must be American, for I have had glimpses of a good many English noblemen, and Msama was the only specimen of a ‘bloated aristocrat’ on whom I ever set eyes.
“Many of the women are very pretty, and, like all ladies, would have been much prettier if they had only let themselves alone. Fortunately the dears could not change charming black eyes, beautiful foreheads, nicely rounded limbs, well shaped forms and small hands and feet, but must adorn themselves, and this they do by filing splendid teeth to points like cats’ teeth. It was distressing, for it made their smile like that of crocodile ornaments, scarce. They are not black, but of light, warm brown color, and so very sisterish, if I may use the word, it feels an injury done one’s self to see a bit of grass stuck through the cartilage of the nose so as to bulge out the _alæ nasi_, or wing of the nose of the anatomists.
“Cazembe’s Queen, Moaria Nyombe by name, would be esteemed a real beauty either in London Paris, or New York, and yet she had a small hole through the cartilage, near the tip of her fine, slightly aquiline nose. But she had only filed one side of two of the front of her superb snow-white teeth, and then, what a laugh she had! Let those who wish to know go see her. She was carried to her farm in a pony phæton, which is a sort of throne, fastened on two very long poles and carried by twelve stalwart citizens. If they take the Punch motto of Cazembe--‘Niggers don’t require to be shot here’--as their own, they may show themselves to be men; but whether they do or not Cazembe will show himself a man of sterling good sense.
“Now, these people, so like ourselves externally, have brave, genuine human souls. Rua, large sections of country northwest of Cazembe, but still in same inland region, is peopled with men very like those of Wsama and Cazembe. An Arab, Syed Ben Habib, was sent to trade in Rua two years ago, and, as Arabs usually do where natives have no guns, Syed Ben Habib’s elder brother carried matters with a high hand. The Rua men observed the elder brother slept in a white tent, and, pitching spears into it by night, killed him. As Moslems never forgive blood, the younger brother forthwith ‘ran a muck’ on all indiscriminately in a large district.
“Let it not be supposed any of these people are, like American Indians, insatiable, blood-thirsty savages, who will not be reclaimed or entertain terms of lasting friendship with fair-dealing strangers. Had the actual murderers been demanded, and a little time granted, I feel morally certain, from many other instances among tribes who, like the Ba Rua, have not been spoiled by Arab traders, they would all have been given up.
“The chiefs of the country would, first of all, have specified the crime of which the elder brother was guilty, and who had been led to avenge it. It is very likely they would have stipulated no other should be punished but the actual perpetrator, the domestic slave acting under his orders being considered free of blame.
“I know nothing that distinguishes the uncontaminated African from other degraded peoples more than their entire reasonableness and good sense. It is different after they have had wives, children, and relatives kidnapped, but that is more than human nature, civilized or savage, can bear. In the chase in question indiscriminate slaughter, capture, and plunder took place. A very large number of very fine young men were captured and secured in chains and wooden yokes.
“I came near the party of Syed Ben Habib, close to a point where a huge rent in the Mountain of Rua allows the escape of the great river Lualaba out of Lake Moora, and here I had for the first time an opportunity of observing the difference between slaves and freemen made captive. When fairly across the Lualaba, Syed Ben Habib thought his captives safe, and got rid of the trouble of attending to and watching the chained gangs by taking off both chains and yokes. All declared joy and a perfect willingness to follow Syed to the end of the world or elsewhere, but next morning twenty-two made clear of two mountains.
“Many more, seeing the broad Lualaba roll between them and the homes of their infancy, lost all heart, and in three days eight of them died. They had no complaint but pain in the heart, and they pointed out its seat correctly, though many believe the heart situated underneath the top of the sternum, or breast bone. This to me was the most startling death I ever saw. They evidently die of broken-heartedness, and the Arabs wondered, seeing they had plenty to eat.
“I saw others perish, particularly a very fine boy ten or twelve years of age. When asked where he felt ill, he put his hand correctly and exactly over the heart. He was kindly carried, and, as he breathed out his soul, was laid gently on the side of the path. The captors are not unusually cruel. They were callous. Slaving hardened their hearts.
“When Syed, an old friend of mine, crossed Lualaba, he heard I was in the village, where a company of slave traders were furiously assaulted for three days by justly incensed Bobemba. I would not fight nor allow my people to fire if I saw them, because Bobemba had been especially kind to me. Syed sent a party of his own people to invite me to leave the village and come to him. He showed himself the opposite of hard-hearted; but slavery hardens within, petrifies the feelings, is bad for the victims and ill for the victimizers. Once, it is said, a party of twelve, who had been slaves in their own country--Cunda or Conda, of which Cazemba is chief or general--were loaded with large, heavy yokes, which were forked trees, about three inches in diameter and seven or eight feet long, the neck inserted in the fork and an iron bar driven across one end of the fork to the other and riveted to the other end, tied at night to the tree or ceiling of the hut, and the neck being firm in the fork and the slave held off from unloosing it, was excessively troublesome to the wearer, and, when marching, two yokes were tied together by tree ends and loads put on the slaves’ heads beside.
“A woman, having an additional yoke and load, and a child on her back, said to me on passing, ‘They are killing me. If they would take off the yoke I could manage the load and child; but I shall die with three loads.’ The one who spoke this did die; poor little girl! Her child perished of starvation.
“I interceded some, but when unyoked off they bounded into the long grass, and I was greatly blamed for not caring in presence of the owners of the property.
“After the day’s march under a broiling, vertical sun, with yokes and heavy loads, the strongest were exhausted. The party of twelve, above mentioned, were sitting down singing and laughing. ‘Hallo, said I, ‘these fellows take to it kindly. This must be the class for whom philosophers say slavery is the natural state;’ and I went and asked the cause of their mirth.
“I had asked aid of their owner as to the meaning of the word ‘Rukha,’ which usually means fly or leap. They were using it to express the idea of haunting, as a ghost, inflicting disease or death, and the song was: ‘Yes, we going away to Manga, abroad, or white man’s land, with yoke on our necks; but we shall have no yokes in death, and shall return and haunt and kill you.’ Chorus then struck in, which was the name of the man who had sold each of them, and then followed the general laugh, in which at first I saw no bitterness. Tarembee, an old man, at least one hundred and four years, being one of the sellers, in accordance with African belief, they had no doubt of being soon able, by ghost power, to kill even him.
“The refrain was as if:--‘Oh! oh! oh! bird of freedom, you sold me.’ ‘Oh! oh! oh! I shall haunt you! Oh! oh! oh!’ Laughter told not of mirth, but of tears, such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter. He that is higher than the highest regardeth.
“If I am permitted,” says Dr. Livingstone in concluding the subject of the slave trade, “in any way to promote its suppression, I shall not grudge the toil and time I have spent. It would be better to lessen this great human woe than to discover the sources of the Nile.”
The moral degradation of these people is only to be reached and cured, in the deliberate judgment of the explorer-missionary, through the means of Christian civilization. “The religion of Christ,” he says with emphasis, “is unquestionably the best for man. I refer to it not as the Protestant, the Catholic, the Greek, or any other, but to the comprehensive faith which has spread more widely over the world than most people imagine, and whose votaries, of whatever name, are better than any outside the pale.” The great end of placing the numerous tribes of East and Central Africa under the pure and elevating morality of the Christian religion cannot be successful until the suppression of the inhuman slave trade, which has its headquarters at Zanzibar, shall have been accomplished. It would be unjust to forget that Great Britain has done much, very much, for the suppression of this terrible traffic in other portions of the globe. It would be unjust to charge the government of Great Britain with intentional criminality in this case. But it stands proved, by the failure of English expeditions to find Dr. Livingstone, and by his own positive, earnest testimony, that it is the subjects of the British monarchy who are responsible for the existence of the slave trade of Zanzibar and all the nameless horrors of the interior resulting therefrom. The moral culpability, by reason of neglect--not to put the case too strongly--of the British government is therefore made manifest; and of this great national turpitude that government must stand convicted before the bar of Christendom.