They were heavily laden, for most of them had from ten to twenty Kwanga on their heads, and besides this burden—they were mostly women—several of them had babies slung on their backs.
These people belonged to a village which lay within Verhaeren’s district. The tax laid on this village was three hundred cakes of cassava to be delivered at Yandjali every eight days.
The people of this village were a lazy lot, and if you have ever collected taxes in England, you can fancy the trouble of making such people—savages living in a tropical forest, who have no count of time and scarcely an idea of numbers—pay up.
Especially when one takes into consideration the fact that to produce three hundred cakes of cassava every eight days, the whole village must work literally like a beehive, the men gathering and the women grinding the stuff from dawn till dark.
Only by the heaviest penalties could such a desirable state of things be brought about, and the heavier and sharper the punishments inflicted at any one time, the easier was it for Verhaeren to work these people.
Adams watched the cassava bearers as they passed at a trot. They went by like automatic figures, without raising their eyes from the ground. There were some old women amongst them who looked more like shrivelled monkeys than human beings; extraordinary anatomical specimens, whose muscles, working as they ran, were as visible as though no skin covered them. There were young women, young children, and women far advanced in pregnancy; and they all went by like automatic figures, clockwork marionettes.
It was a pitiable spectacle enough, these laden creatures, mute looking as dumb beasts; but there was nothing especially to shock the eye of the European, for it is the long-prepared treason against this people, devised and carried out by nature, that their black mask covers a multitude of other people’s sins and their own untold sufferings.
Had they been white, the despairing look, the sunken eyes, the hundred signs that tell of suffering and slavery would have been visible, would have appealed to the heart; but the black mass could not express these things fully. They were niggers, uglier looking and more depressed looking than other niggers—that was all.
And so Adams passed on, without knowing what he had seen and the only impression the sight made on his mind was one of disgust.
One fact his professional eye noticed as the crowd passed by. Four of the women had lost their left hands.