XWHITE AND BLACK
“Our only program, I am anxious to repeat, is the work of moral and material regeneration.”—King Leopold II.“The work of civilization, as you call it, is an enormous and continual butchery.”—M. Lorand, in the Belgian Parliament.
“Our only program, I am anxious to repeat, is the work of moral and material regeneration.”—King Leopold II.
“The work of civilization, as you call it, is an enormous and continual butchery.”—M. Lorand, in the Belgian Parliament.
St. Paul de Loanda, in the Portuguese colony of Angola, is the only place on the entire west coast of Africa that looks like a real city. It is several centuries old, and from the sea the appearance is not unlike the Mediterranean cities of North Africa. But as soon as one goes ashore this illusion is dissolved. What makes it unlike any other settlement on the west coast is chiefly its roofs of red tile instead of corrugated iron, with its superheated appearance, that is used in all places recently built. The city is also lighted by oil lamps. The harbour being one of the best, I went ashore with the captain and after a walk about the town we played a few games of billiards with the British consul. I had then been several years on the coast and this seemed like a brief return to civilization. The night coming on brought with it more civilization. A native band played, by ear, two or three tunes, and played them well—considering. It is said that they have played those same tunes since the band was organized, and no one now living remembers when that was.
A mouldering church,Our Lady of Salvation, which stands on the beach, is two and a half centuries old, and is a work of art, containing interesting and historicalscenes in blue and white tiles. From this place in the dark age of slavery thousands of slaves were shipped across the Atlantic; and the Roman Catholic bishop sat on the wharf and baptized them, not individually, but in shiploads. SurelyOur Lady of Salvationmight have been calledOur Lady of Sorrows.
There were very few passengers on board, but there were a number of dogs. The captain had a weakness for dogs. The breed of the dog made no difference. Whether they were useful or useless, whether sound and healthy or dreadfully diseased and scarcely able to walk, he loved them all without partiality or discrimination. Men further up the coast who had European dogs that were particularly mangy or threatened with rabies would give them into the captain’s care and he would take them for a health-change down the coast. At one time there were nine dogs living on board. He never seemed to realize that in this, as in all other things, tastes differ; and that a certain dog, an English mastiff, as ugly as the rest of its kind, might not be entirely welcome to share my soup at the table just because it was welcome to his.
There were two fox-terriers tied together with five or six feet of small rope between them. As their health improved these two terriers became animated beyond all control. They amused themselves by pulling down cages full of parrots for the delight of hearing them remonstrate in a prolonged concert of harsh squawking. But their chief exercise was straight running at breakneck speed from one end of the promenade deck to the other, with six feet of rope stretched taut between them, to the terror of the passengers, who were so few in number that they were regarded as a negligible quantity. There was a lady on board with whom I occasionally walked until the terriers made it impossible to do so without sacrificing either comfort or gallantry. At the sight of them coming towardsher, like a whirlwind sweeping down the deck and the rope threatening to trip her up, the lady’s energy all went to her hands instead of her feet; for she invariably lost her presence of mind and stood still wringing her hands instead of hastily retreating into some safe corner. But I could not understand why she should think that I also ought to lose my presence of mind and stand still and be tripped when I had youth and fleetness of limb to accomplish an escape.
We were three days at Benguela during which we witnessed the Mardi Gras celebration. Men, women, and children filled the streets with merrymaking and presented a spectacle of fantastic colours, grotesque costumes, and uncouth masks, such as I had never before seen. Our errand to Benguela was the delivery of a large consignment of supplies for the newly projected railway which, it is expected, shall ultimately extend far inland to the region of Lake Tanganyika, thus connecting with the traffic of the east coast. The bit of this railway already built represents what Portugal has done towards the development of Africa in the course of several centuries.
The trading-houses of Benguela are surrounded by walled enclosures, or compounds, in former days used for the confinement of slaves awaiting shipment. This is not like the bush country further north, but is more open and its main slave-trail extends a thousand miles into the interior. This is the end of the trail that Livingstone followed in his first tragic journey across Africa.
But that which ought to be fully known to the civilized world is that slavery still exists in the whole territory of Angola and in the adjoining Portuguese islands, and with all its attendant horrors. Most of the house-servants and factory-servants of Benguela are slaves purchased with money and frequently resold. Young women are sold and resold by white men to white men as mistresses. Anywhite man in Benguela will tell one that the average price is twenty pounds. She may be resold from time to time at a decreasing price. The work on the large plantations is done by slaves who serve under the lash, and it is estimated that half the population of Angola are in slavery; some would say more than this. This includes domestic as well as foreign slavery. But the traffic by the Portuguese has made domestic slavery more severe. They were also being shipped from Benguela at that time, to the islands of San Thomé and Principe, at the rate of three or four thousand a year, and in all probability the number has since increased. I have visited Principe, and I know something of the actual conditions in that island.
The ways of Portugal have not changed in these four centuries of her African history. In the year 1509 a Portuguese officer landing in South Africa became embroiled with the Hottentots and he and twenty of his men were killed. Three years afterwards a Portuguese captain landed a cannon loaded with grapeshot as a pretended present to the Hottentots. Men, women and children gathered around in wonder. While they were admiring it the Portuguese captain fired it off and looked on with delight as the wretched people fell in heaps. And Portugal has not changed. The ally of England from time immemorial, and possessing a remarkable collection of souvenirs in the form of anti-slavery treaties, some of them recent and one of them as late as 1885, she still prosecutes her slave-trade with vigour, albeit with circumspection to her reputation as well as her profit.
The Bailundu rebellion, in the interior of Angola, in 1902, was still an occasional topic of conversation. The Portuguese claimed that it was caused by the few American missionaries of that interior district—as if their own rapacity and lust were not sufficient explanation. If thatbe true, and if it be true that the missionaries are responsible for all similar wars from Angola to China, as their detractors allege, it is surely evident that the missionary influence is not to be derided after all, but is a tremendous force to be reckoned with in national economy. The Bailundu rebellion was a complete failure. The unorganized native forces were unable to stand before an army disciplined by white officers, and it soon developed into a wholesale massacre of natives.
Shortly afterwards a missionary from that part spent a day with me at Gaboon and recounted many incidents of the war. Portuguese planters exacted enormous indemnity which reduced many to slavery. Such incidents as the following occurred: A certain man, in order to pay his portion of the indemnity exacted by a certain planter, at last was compelled to sell his two children as slaves. He returned to his village with desolate heart and tearless eyes, went into his house, came out again, and walked around it, went into it again and came out with his sword, uttered one heart-broken cry, and plunging the sword into his breast, killed himself.
As a consequence of the war, however, the Angola secret became known and there was considerable feeling aroused among the better class in Portugal. To their righteous remonstrance the government responded by abolishing the name of slavery and prosecuting the traffic as vigorously as ever under an ingenious and particularly diabolical form of law called “labour contract.” The only difference to the native is that while formerly his servitude was a direct violation of law it is now perfectly legal; but he is still seized and transported and labours under the lash until he dies.
In 1905, Mr. Henry W. Nevinson went to Angola for the express purpose of investigating the reported slavery. Mr. Nevinson upon a careful and intelligent investigationfound the conditions such as I have stated, and he gave an accurate report in a series of articles inHarper’s Magazine.
The slave-merchant, or “labour-merchant,” as we must now call him, procures his labourers in the interior, sometimes six hundred or eight hundred miles from the coast. He pays for them in rifles and other goods. The price that he offers, while very small, considering the value of a slave to a planter, is yet sufficient to excite the cupidity of a class of natives beyond the possibility of control. They first sell their domestic slaves to the white men, then they sell anybody whom they can get into their power. In the old slave days it was not safe for three men to go together to the slave-market lest two of them should combine to sell the third, and such is always the brutalizing effect of the slave-trade on many of the natives. Those slaves that are not used on the plantations of Angola are marched in caravans to the coast. They march in shackles, or chained together, and under an armed guard. Many die on the way, sometimes half the caravan.
Arriving at the coast, they are sold, or contracted, to an employer, usually a planter of San Thomé or Principe, at a large advance on the interior price. They are then brought by the employer before a magistrate who draws up a contract in proper legal form. It makes not the slightest difference what the native answers to the questions asked him or whether he answers at all, a contract is drawn up in which he declares that he has come of his own free will to contract for his services at so much labour for so much pay, and that the contract holds good for five years. The contractor on his part agrees to pay a certain monthly wage and to provide food and clothing. The native is given a copy of the contract and a little tin cylinder in which to keep it, the sign and declaration of his freedom and protection by law. But hypocrisy cango even further; for these Portuguese, merchants and government officials, actually pose asPhilanthropists. “See,” they say, “what we have done for these men and women. They were all slaves to black men, and we have redeemed them.” Philanthropy is usually unlucrative, but the genius of the Portuguese has made it pay.
Despite the expiration of the contract at the end of five years and the promise of a free passage home, the native thus transported is never known to return. Henceforth he is one of a long line of men and women that labour on the cocoa fields all the day long, some of the women carrying babies on their backs—that labour in stolid silence under the lash or the prod of a sharpened stick from early morning till the sound of the evening bell. That they become debased and immoral is only what we should expect; and therefore the traffic in men’s bodies is also a traffic in men’s souls. So they live and toil, each day like all the others until the last short journey, when, as Mr. Nevinson describes, “their dead bodies are lashed to poles to be carried out and flung away in the forest.”
But is there no relief to the dark picture? No compensation? Yes, there is some compensation. We get cheaper cocoa and plenty of chocolate.
The people of the United States have a deep and practical interest in the question of the principles that ought to regulate the relations of the governing and the governed in those tropical countries that are under the dominion of the various civilized powers. Having come into possession of the Philippine Islands, with their vast and undeveloped resources, the problem is their own and waits for solution. Upon the people of the United States, because of the serious and responsible situation with which they are confronted, may devolve the task of devising and administering a form of government in accord with the higher modern standard of English-speaking people in regardto the national duty involved in the relation of a civilized power to a subject and savage people. No graver problem is likely to arise in the course of the entire century of which we are still on the threshold. And the United States is the better prepared for her task by the fact that she is uncontrolled by precedent and unbiased by tradition.
The Portuguese theory of tropical control is evident enough. The acquired possession is an estate to be worked for the benefit of those in control, whose right is simply “might.” Its native inhabitants, who have the moral right to its possession, are counted among the various resources of the acquired property, and may be exploited accordingly. The practical sequences of this theory are slavery and plunder.
The theory that surrounds the colony with high tariffs for the exclusive benefit of the governing power and which concedes foreign monopolies to the disregard of native interests, is not essentially different from that of Portugal. This latter is the theory that is being worked out in the Congo Français as a result of the example and influence of the Belgian trusts, and the intrigues of King Leopold’s agents in France. We believe that it cannot be permanent as a form of French colonial government because of the humane and generous instincts of the French people. And it is certain that such a policy could not long endure in any territory under the control of the United States. For a policy in order to be permanent must have the support of the moral sentiment of the nation, and such a policy traverses our basal doctrine of the native equality of men.
But there is in the United States a tendency to the other extreme, namely, to insist upon the native right of self-government, holding that the sum of our duty is to set up a civilized form of government and then withdraw fromcontrol, leaving the native nation to maintain it. The advocates of such a policy are guilty of a serious oversight in forgetting that “democracy is not simply a form of government, but a state of human evolution.” The native form of government cannot advance far beyond the social life of the people, for they are sustained by the same moral forces. As a matter of fact there is not in the world a single example of a successful native government of a tropical country. Failures are conspicuous on both sides of the Atlantic; for instance, Hayti in the West Indies and Liberia in Africa. The tropical governments of Central and South America are not in any sense native governments, but are administered by a permanently resident foreign community, in their own interest, whose moral standards tend to lower more and more as they mingle with the native populations. A form of native government that would compare with those of civilized nations is by no means possible until the moral forces that have contributed to the highest civilization are operative in their social life.
It is evident that the tropical nations if left to themselves will not develop the resources of their country. But it is equally evident that the civilized world will not, and ought not, to leave these resources undeveloped. For civilization depends upon the tropics for many trade products, including india-rubber, and the dependence increases at such a rate that it is predicted that the main lines of commerce in the future will run north and south instead of east and west, and the prediction is not fanciful.
It would seem therefore that the development of the resources of the tropics will be by the native under the supervision of the white man. The ideal government will be based upon the clear recognition of mutual need and mutual benefit; and the principle that will mould the form of government and be constantly operative inits administration will be the duty of the civilized nation to bring to the uncivilized its best benefits, to their mutual advantage. The interest of the native himself will be always the first consideration; for he has the first right to the resources of his country and to the reward of his labour; and the interest of the foreign nation second, in the greater sources of supply and the enlarged market for her merchandise.
To give actuality and force to such a government three things will be required in its administration, as suggested by Mr. Benjamin Kidd in his book, “The Control of the Tropics”: first, its officers must be only those who represent the highest moral ideals of civilization; second, the most intimate contact must be maintained with the home government; third, the policy and its administration must be constantly subject to the severe scrutiny of public opinion. Public apathy, inconsiderate confidence in our agents in the tropics—the conceit that they cannot go far wrong because they are Americans, will lead to shame and degradation.
Such a moral motive and the conscientious discharge of the duty involved constitute the white man’s right, and hisonlyright, to occupy the black man’s country.
It was with Captain Button of theVoltathat I went up the Congo to Boma and Matadi. I owe to several of the captains, and to Captain Harrison in particular, a debt of gratitude for many kindnesses; but I travelled most with Captain Button and from no other did I receive so many kind, and often costly favours. More than once, upon finding me in very bad health when his ship called at Gaboon, he fairly forced me to go for a health-change; and on the occasion of my visit to the Congo I was in such a miserable condition of health that a single attack of fever would probably have been my last, when Captain Button swooped down upon me and carried me off.
I had been troubled with abscesses, common enough on the coast, and when I went aboard I had a very severe one on my left forearm. One night, near the Congo, when I was suffering with the pain and had been awake several nights, the captain had a stretcher placed on deck for me and advised that I lay my arm in a basin of warm water which was placed beside me. He then told the ship’s surgeon to examine my arm and see whether it ought not to be lanced. But he told him not to mention the matter of lancing it to me. I was weak and nervous with loss of sleep and he wished to save me the additional pain of thinking about the lancing of it and consenting to it. The doctor examined the arm and then having consulted with the captain went below and got his lance. When he returned the captain was sitting beside me ready to assist. The doctor a second time bent over the arm as it was extended over the basin. Then I saw the gleam of a knife which was instantly plunged into my arm. Ten minutes of agony during which the captain poured on warm water,—and thenrest; the first I had had for many days, and a few minutes later I was asleep. That was the last of the abscesses and from that time I gained perceptibly each day.
At Boma, the capital of the Congo Free State, sixty miles from the mouth of the river, we lay in against the bank and moored the ship to the shore. Close beside us was a sight upon which I gazed with gruesome interest, the wreck of the steamshipMatadi. My first voyage to Africa was on theMatadi. I think it was on her next voyage that she was wrecked. Like all the ships of her class she was called a palm-oil tub. The steamers of the present service are incomparably better. TheMatadiwas blown up by a fearful explosion of gunpowder that had been carelessly stored. All the crew except one were drowned. There were also on board two American missionaries,Mr. and Mrs. Harvey, who went down with the ship. They were in their cabin when the explosion occurred. The door jammed and could never afterwards be opened, so that the bodies remain there to this day. A smoke-stack protruding out of the water, a part of a poop-deck, overgrown with grass, and an enormous side-piece flung upon the shore—such were the innuendo of the scene.
Boma is built on the side of a long, sloping hill. Its buildings, many of them made of sheets of corrugated iron, are scattered in disorder. Behind them on higher ground is the attractive, pale-coloured residence of the governor. There is a good road and several avenues of palms and a number of flower-gardens surrounding the residences. A well-ordered hospital, a state school, a palace of justice, a prison for white men, a fort and barracks are the more conspicuous buildings. Three street-lamps and a native band that plays twice a week, probably by ear, make life delightful and bring the city up to date. Boma looks well from the river—as looks go in Africa. But when one remembers that for more than twenty years it has been the capital of the Congo Free State, a territory four times the size of Germany, from which also vast wealth has been drawn and that Belgium’s civilizing agencies have been concentrated here, one is not greatly impressed. At least it does not compare with the other capitals of West Africa, the French Libreville, the German Dualla or the English Calabar.
In the hospital at Boma one may see cases of the strange “sleeping sickness,” that awful scourge that has in late years passed across Africa from the east to the west decimating the population and often in the farther east destroying entire towns. Until very recently there has been no recovery. The patient sleeps without waking, except for food—sleeps and wastes away for eight orten months until he dies. The germ is now supposed to be carried by the tsetse fly.
I of course witnessed no Belgian atrocities at Boma, and it would surely have been a matter of amazement if I had. But still more amazing is the report of certain casual travellers, who had no more opportunity than myself for direct observation, to the effect that there are no atrocities, because they did not witness them. If I had gone to King Leopold’s representative, the governor at Boma, and had told him, in the course of a neighbourly conversation, that I had heard about the Belgian atrocities and had come to witness them that I might exploit them to the horrified nations, and then had asked him to accommodate my purpose by having at least a few atrocities performed in the front yard, including the different varieties of murder, mutilation and torture, it would have been parallel to the methods pursued by certain persons, who actually heralded their arrival and their purpose all along the way, notified Leopold’s agents in particular, perfected their investigations by asking questions of these same agents, and then proclaimed that these cruel reports of atrocities and atrocities represent an unparalleled conspiracy on the part of several hundred men from half a score of nations, who having lived many long years in the Congo have become prejudiced and have accumulated a number of personal grievances against the Belgian officials and are now seeking by the invention of innumerable charges of unheard-of crimes to ruin the reputation of Good King Leopold and deprive him of his rights. The administration of the Congo government is not a melodrama; it is anything but that. Leopold’s atrocities are not placed on free exhibition at Boma for the entertainment of travellers, some of whom are immorally unconcerned in regard to the real suffering of the natives. They are performed only for money and plenty of it.The motive is money and the argument is that they pay. Though I was only a traveller, and not a resident, in the Congo Free State, yet I can speak with some authority on the question of the Belgian régime; for I lived several years in the adjoining territory, the Congo Français, a large part of which was farmed out in concessions to Belgian companies, whose policy and methods were precisely those of the Congo Free State. Such a system, however, is contrary to the spirit of the French, and one cannot think that it will long endure.
Consider for a moment the various sources of the evidence against Leopold and his agents. There are about two hundred Protestant missionaries in the Congo Free State, representing the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. These missionaries, men and women, have lived for years in the Congo, many of them twenty, and even twenty-five years, and are scattered over the entire territory. They speak the language of the people and therefore have the most intimate knowledge of conditions. Their motive is only the good of the native, and every influence that makes for the betterment of the native’s condition contributes to their success. That they should not know the truth in regard to the alleged atrocities of the Belgians is impossible; that they should unite to falsify the truth is unthinkable. But their testimony is all of one kind, and against Belgium, and constitutes probably the most terrible indictment of a civilized government in the last two thousand years, if not in the history of the world.
But there are other witnesses besides missionaries. In 1903 the British government, in response to the entreaty and remonstrance of missionaries and traders and English Chambers of Commerce, appointed Mr. Roger Casement, British Consul to the Congo, to make a thorough investigation of conditions in the Congo Free State. Mr. Casement,whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Matadi, was peculiarly fitted for the task assigned to him. He had spent twelve years in the consular service in Africa. He had the unqualified confidence of the British government and was held in the highest esteem and admiration by all classes of men in the Congo. Mr. Poultney Bigelow says of him: “Roger Casement is the sort of man depicted in Jules Verne’s novels, the man who is everlastingly exploring and extricating himself from every imaginable difficulty by superhuman tact, wit and strength.”
Mr. Casement’s report of the results of his investigation is a revealing document. It confirms the worst charges that had been made. It abounds in such incidents as the following: “This man himself, when I visited him in Boma gaol, in March, 1901, said that more than a hundred women and children had died of starvation at his hands, but that the responsibility was due to his superior’s orders and neglect.”
But even Belgians have been, and are to-day, among those who denounce the Belgian king. For instance, a Belgian agent, named Lecroix, confessed that he had been instructed by his chief to massacre all the natives of a certain village, including women and children, for not bringing in enough rubber. He also told how that on one occasion his chief had put sixty women in chains, all but five of whom died of starvation.
At last the feeling became so strong in Europe that in September, 1904, King Leopold appointed a Commission of Inquiry consisting of three persons, two of whom were his own subjects; the third was an eminent Swiss jurist. This was somewhat like King Leopold investigating himself. But the Commission seems to have listened impartially to the testimony. With the eyes of Europe upon them they proceeded to the Congo and spent four and a half months in taking the sworn testimony of “hundredsof witnesses.” The contrast between what the Commissionexpectedto find, and what they actually found, may be best expressed in the words that M. Janssens, president of the Commission, is reported to have spoken publicly before leaving Boma: “I came here with a feeling of confidence, expecting to find everything in order. I did not think I was about to come into contact with such putridity as I have found.”
In general the report of King Leopold’s Commission confirms all the charges, including the very worst, that had ever been made against the Congo government.
To such an extent is this true that those who are working against the continuance of King Leopold’s rule in the Congo would be willing to base their appeal on the report of the Commission alone. It is a lengthy and exhaustive document, but a few brief extracts will convey a fair idea of the whole; for instance the following:
“In the majority of cases the native must go one or two days’ march every fortnight, until he arrives at that part of the forest where the rubber vines can be met with in a certain degree of abundance. There the collector passes a number of days in a miserable existence. He has to build himself an improvised shelter which obviously cannot replace his hut. He has not the food to which he is accustomed. He is deprived of his wife, exposed to the inclemencies of the weather and the attacks of wild beasts. When once he has collected the rubber he must bring it to the State station, or to that of the Company, and only then can he return to his village, where he can sojourn for barely more than two or three days, because the next demand is upon him.
“They brought before the Commission a multitude of native witnesses, who revealed a great number of crimes and excesses alleged to have been committed by the sentries.... The truth of the charges is borne out bya mass of evidence and official reports.... The agents examined by the Commission did not even attempt to refute them.
“According to the witnesses, these auxiliaries convert themselves into despots, demanding women and food, not only for themselves, but for a retinue of parasites which a love of rapine causes to become associated with them. They kill without pity all those who attempt to resist.
“If we accept Stanley’s figures it is incontestable that a large part of the population must have disappeared; for, from Stanley Pool to Nouvelle Anvers, the banks of the river are almost deserted.”
Thus much from the report of King Leopold’s Commission. What is called the “sentry system” is the most atrocious factor in this policy. As a matter of course coercion must be used in the enforcement of a continuous labour-tax. An army of thirty thousand native soldiers is maintained for the suppression and exploitation of the people, who are unarmed and defenseless. Thus can a king do when he becomes a trader. This army is raised by conscription, and is practically an army of slaves. The conscripts are removed from their own people and are made to serve among strangers. Despair is never a sanctifying grace; and these desperate men are armed and compelled to a life of continual cruelty and shocking crime, whereby they are in course of time transformed into foulest fiends. To them is committed the oversight of those who collect rubber and the punishment of those who come short. This is the “sentry system.”
When I visited Boma and Matadi the commonest subject of conversation, both by traders and missionaries, was the Belgian atrocities.
Matadi is one hundred and ten miles from the sea. Between Boma and Matadi, at a bend in the river, there is a fearful whirlpool called the Devil’s Caldron, at leastit is “fearful” in the wet season when the river is highest and the current swiftest. This vortex is the shape of a funnel. As we left it on our right and passed across the outer rim, the big ocean steamer listed to starboard. A short time before, a lighter loaded with cargo and manned by Kruboys had been drawn into it. Several persons watched it as it swept around in a narrowing circle until at last near the centre it suddenly took a header and plunged into the abyss with its human freight.
Matadi is built on the side of a perpendicular rock, which Richard Harding Davis says is “not so large as Gibraltar, nor so high as the Flatiron Building, but it is a little more steep than either. Three narrow streets lead to its top. They are of flat stones, with cement gutters. The stones radiate the heat of stove-lids. They are worn to a mirror-like smoothness, and from their surface the sun strikes between your eyes, at the pit of your stomach, and blisters the soles of your mosquito boots.”
Matadi is not much more than a railroad terminus. Between the Lower and Upper Congo, that is, between Matadi and Leopoldville, on Stanley Pool, the river is not navigable, owing to the rapids. A railroad two hundred and fifty miles long unites these two places. It was built at a tremendous cost both of money and of life. Out of four hundred Chinese imported at one time, for work on the railroad, two hundred and fifty died within three years. Kruboys and others were brought from the north and engaged to work according to a certain definite contract; but in most cases the contract was disregarded and they were practically enslaved, working until they died. The railroad, theChemin de Fer du Congo, is exceedingly useful and has also proved a paying investment. The fare from Matadi to Leopoldville, two hundred and fifty miles, was fifty dollars, when I was at Matadi, that is,twenty cents a mile. But I imagine that those who had made the journey on foot over that rough country, did not begrudge the exorbitant fare.
Henry M. Stanley, starting from Matadi, blasted the rocks in order to make a road by which the sections of his boat could be dragged alongen routeto the Upper Congo. Until I visited Matadi I did not know the meaning of the name which the natives gave to Stanley,Bula Matadi. It meansBreaker of Rocks—a name to be proud of, surely; and one which Stanley deserved. His authority was superseded by that of the government of the Congo, which to this day is called by the nativesBula Matadi—Breaker of Rocksand incidentally ofmen. It happened that Consul Casement was at Matadi; and the captain and I were invited to a picnic which was given in his honour. It was a novel experience for Africa. We rowed down the river and landed for our lunch in a peculiar and pleasant place on piles of rock, of historic and even legendary interest.
During those days there was a representative missionary gathering at Matadi and I had the opportunity of meeting and conversing with missionaries from all over the Congo Free State. Some of them I had known before. All whom I met had but one story to tell in regard to the “Belgian atrocities,” a story that might have been a chapter from the history of Hell.
They told of seeing more than fifty severed hands at a time, including hands of children, which the soldiers were taking to the white men to prove that they had killed people according to their orders. The black soldiers had also eaten the flesh of their victims. Sometimes the agents demanded an amount of food from the natives for themselves and the entire post which the natives could only continue to furnish by buying from other natives; and they were expecting that when theycould buy no more they would be killed. In some villages when the impost of food was delivered the people had nothing left for themselves, and fed on leaves. When the rubber in certain districts was becoming exhausted and the tax was not reduced the people mixed the latex (juice of the rubber vine) with an inferior latex, and when they did so the agent, if it was discovered, made them eat it. The work about the posts was done by slaves, mostly women, and at night these women were obliged to be at the disposal of the native soldiers. Missionaries themselves had met soldiers driving to the post women tied together with ropes, to be held as hostages until their husbands could bring a certain amount of rubber. This was the usual means of compelling men to bring rubber. They often tortured the women in order to intimidate the men. But many of the hostages could not be redeemed and were starved to death. They told of the mutilations of the living, of hands and feet chopped off, and of men unsexed. They told of four or five men placed in a row one behind another and shot with one bullet, and of women and children crucified. They told of the population of certain districts reduced from thousands to hundreds, and in other districts wiped out entirely. It is estimated by some that since the ascendency of King Leopold in the Congo the total population has decreased from twenty-five millions to fifteen millions, there being ten million murders set down to the account of the king.
Returning from Matadi to the steamer in the sultry tropical night, it seemed as if the very atmosphere were drenched with blood, that we breathed its vapours, and that the great swift-rolling tide beneath us was the blood of the slain millions, hurrying out to incarnadine the sea that boats against the shores of all the civilized world.
The greed of Leopold and the apathy of the nations are together responsible for the existence of present conditionsin the Congo. It is irrelevant to answer that there are also atrocities in Portuguese and other possessions of Africa. There is more oppression and cruelty in the Congo Free State than in all the rest of Africa. Moreover, we have no authority over Portugal and can exercise only the right of appeal and its moral influence. But the Powers signatory to the Brussels Act, with the United States in the lead, created the Congo Free State, and are still the formal guardians of its people. A conference of those Powers would without doubt deal with other evils in Africa besides those of the Congo Free State. To the average man, unversed in the forms of international usage, it would seem within the competence of any one of the Powers which committed to King Leopold a sacred trust upon certain definite conditions, to urge upon the other responsible powers the duty of meeting again to inquire whether those conditions have been fulfilled and to adjudicate the issues relating to their non-fulfillment.
Meanwhile, the Congo State lies bleeding at every pore, and those who are hoping and praying in all the world for a people who have ceased to hope and have never learned to pray, have their eyes turned towards the United States.
A missionary writing from Baringa in the Congo said: “An old chief came up to where we were standing. ‘Oh, white man,’ he pleaded, ‘do have our work changed. We do not want to shirk it, but there is no longer any rubber in our district and my people are being killed for nothing. What am I to do?’ I suggested that the inspector appointed by the king would no doubt come to Baringa and he could appeal to him. He asked how long it would be before the inspector would come. I said perhaps two months; upon which he cried out, ‘Two months! It will be too late then. We shall all be killed before that time.’ And after we had left him wecould hear him crying after us, ‘We shall all be killed! We shall all be killed!’”
Four years have passed, and in all likelihood the chief with his family has been killed long ago, leaving not even a name behind him, but only this haunting cry, that keeps ringing in one’s heart.
So they all are crying to us with outstretched hands; a people who call the white man,Father, and trust him with pathetic confidence until he betrays their trust and smites them with the rod of tyranny. I think I can hear their piteous cry wafted on the winds that wander over the great forest: “We shall all be killed! We shall all be killed!”