But new white men had come and new rules had been made since his departure from our land, and again it was not permissible for a man holding a rubber book to take service with any one. All my hopes were dashed to the ground; but still I pleaded with him with all the fluency of which I was capable—he had done it before, and if then, why not now? We can understand white men making rules for black, but how can they interfere with each other? I thought that, if I only kept at it long enough, I should surely win.
But at last I was convinced of the truth of the statement, and I wept. Yes, strong man as I was, I wept; for anger and sorrow were in my heart, and I turned to the white man as I stood there on the grass outside his house.
“White man,” said I, “if this is true, there is no hope for me. It will be nothing but rubber until I die, and rubber is death. Dig a grave here, and bury me now! I may as well be buried in my grave as go on working rubber.” And I meant it. [[93]]
But back to rubber I had to go, with no hope of ever doing anything else; back into a slavery which would last until death, and from which there is no escape. For if you run away from one district, you only reach another, and another white man as eager for rubber as the one you left. Then he will make you work for him, if he does nothing worse; he may send you back, and then—chicotte, prison, and more rubber!
So I and my people went on day after day, and month after month, with little pay (what we did receive was only a mockery of the word), no comfort, no home life, constant anxiety as to our wives and daughters in the villages, and nothing to look forward to for our sons but that they must follow in our steps, and of necessity become rubber workers as soon as, or even before, they were old enough to have sufficient strength for the work.
White men, do you wonder that the words, “Botofe bo lē iwa” (“Rubber is death”) passed into a proverb amongst us, and that we hated the very name of rubber with a deadly hatred? The only ones who were kind to us in those days were the white men of God. They visited our villages frequently to teach us and our [[94]]families, and sometimes on their journeys they would meet with us in the forest, and stop for awhile to talk to us.
“Come,” they said; “listen to the words of God, the news of salvation.”
We came, and they told us the same story of Jesus and salvation from sin; it is a good story, and we liked to hear it. But we would say, “White man, you bring us news of salvation from sin; when will you bring us news of salvation from rubber? If you brought that, then we should have time to listen to and think about your other news.”
Then came a time of awful pestilence, so terrible that we do not understand or even mention it, lest we ourselves be smitten like others. When we speak of it we call it the “sickness from above” or the “sickness of heaven”; but the white men, who are not afraid to mention it, call it smallpox.
It raged in all our villages, and spread from hut to hut like a fire. We took our sick ones into the forest, and a few people who had recovered from the disease many years before went to look after them. Crowds of people died, and though some recovered, they were very weak and ill after it. [[95]]