My Kalulu, Prince, King and Slave: A Story of Central Africa

by Henry M. Stanley

The morning rose and found them still tramping on in a direction considerably north of east, and showed the scene with all its horrors to the sympathising Selim and Abdullah, though to Kalulu, Simba, and Moto such scenes were not new.

On this and the following days, for nearly a fortnight, the two Arab boys had this accursed evil of Africa brought vividly before their minds, and they saw to its fullest extent the immeasurable vastness of the sin and crime of which the Wazavila freebooters were guilty. They had wantonly attacked an unoffending village, and reduced to servitude and misery the poor people, whose homes had been fired, the flames of which had made the sombre night lurid with the red glare, and had exhausted themselves among smoking embers and the scorched bodies of the men who had lost their lives in disputing the advance of the Wazavila assassins and midnight robbers, who had stealthily entered this village to make the night hideous and awful with their crimes.

Step by step, through that pathless jungle and forest, which seemed interminable, did the poor people moisten the ground with their bloody sweat; step by step did they vent their miseries in hot tears, in groans, which were answered by vicious blows on their backs from their relentless captors. Each day saw an infant, which had been until then full of promise of lusty life, laid down by the side of the path cold and dead; for the mother, under the load of her miseries and privation, could not sustain the young life with her emptied breasts, and too often for detailed recital, she herself resignedly knelt and died by her starved offspring. Too often, alas! did the wretched mother, lacking proper sustenance, first fall dead in her tracks, with her little baby vainly sucking at the chilled breast, while a blank look of hopelessness stole over his little face as he wonderingly looked after the departing caravan, and trembled with an unexplained horror at the dread silence and loneliness of the forest. No mourner was left behind to bewail the fate of these hapless ones; only the moaning winds sang their monotonous requiems until the voracious hyaena and the hungry jackal came to consume that which had become as a blight and ugly spot on nature.

Nothing was better calculated to cure Selim and Abdullah of the desire of ever making money by buying and selling slaves than these scenes, even if the unutterable wretchedness of their own condition had not taught them the full meaning of the term “slave” before this.

Day by day every good feeling within them was shocked; for day by day new victims to human lust of gain were left cold and stretched in death along the road—old and young seemed to perish alike from the same cause—starvation and fatigue. Neither the patriarch nor the child was absolved from the dire fate.

About the fifteenth day they came to a populated plain, where the Wazavila, by the sale of two slaves, obtained sufficient food to distribute a week’s rations to each man of the caravan; and in order that their human cattle might recuperate somewhat, they rested in the plain two days. The Wazavila had still nearly one hundred and seventy slaves, over eighty having perished since the night of the attack.

When they continued their march the direction which they took was nearly due north, as they were now about a hundred and forty miles due east of the Sea of Ujiji, the great lake in whose troubled waters Kalulu and his companions came so near to an untimely end. During nearly the whole march rain had fallen, and the plain through which they now traversed added by its marshy character to increase the fatigue of marching.

In two days the plain had sensibly declined to a lower level, and the water rushing from the higher ground had inundated the whole of that part of it they now traversed to the depth of about six inches; in some places it was still deeper. This portion of the plain the Wazavila told Moto was called Bikwa; and from general conversation that he heard, he knew that shortly they might expect to see a river called the Bungwa, which every year during the rainy season flooded its banks. It was for the purpose of giving their starved slaves strength to cross this terrible plain that the Wazavila had halted two days, as it required a long day’s march to traverse the inundated part and to cross the river, on the other side of which was higher ground; while, had they been compelled to travel to the eastward, three days would not have sufficed to get over the swampy plain.

Moto communicated his opinions to Simba, declaring that he thought the time to try to make their escape had arrived. It would probably be night, or nearly so, by the time they would reach the river, and, in order to save their slaves from drowning, the Wazavila would be compelled to free them. Simba coincided with Moto, and they passed the word to their friends to hold themselves ready for any contingency that might arise.

What little strength the wearied women and children had gained by their two days’ rest was soon exhausted in the passage of the Bikwa swamp. The quagmiry road, trodden into tenacious paste by the long file of human beings ahead, soon rendered travelling by those behind them a work of unconquerable difficulty, and some unfortunate woman or child was momentarily struggling for life in the muddy waste, never to rise again. And as the day rapidly passed away, and no signs of the river were yet seen, the anxiety of the Wazavila became evident. But a little after sunset, as the dying day was being rapidly exchanged for night, the head of the caravan arrived at the ford of the Bungwa, which river, as was expected, was emptying an immense volume of water to spread out and inundate the plain.