Slavery and the slave trade in Africa

by Henry M. Stanley

Having become experts in the science of tracking, ambuscades, and surprises, they became anxious to win fame and fortune after a manner never dreamed of by the earlier traders. The verb “to buy” was to be banished from the vernacular. All that was bestial and savage in the human heart was given fullest scope, unchecked and unreproved. Hence followed the most frightful barbarities and massacres, which spared no age and regarded no sex; fire, spear, arrow, and iron bullet preluded furious loot and pitiless seizure.

Among the earliest to put into practice the terrible knowledge they had gained during their tentative incursions into the forest were Abed-bin-Salim, Tippu Tib, Sayid-bin-Habib, Muini Muhala, Rashid (the nephew of Tippu), Nasur-bin-Suliman, and others. Abed-bin-Salim’s case is typical. Among the young Swahili who followed his fortunes were four youthful squires, or apprentices, named Karema, Kiburuga, Kilonga-Longa, and Kibongé. The last of these has given his name to an important Arab station just above Stanley Falls; the other three have since become famous among the Central African rapparees and slave-thieves. The names under which they have severally become notorious, and for which they exchanged those derived from their parents, are synonymes given by the bush natives for rapine, lust, murder, arson.

In 1878 Abed-bin-Salim despatched coastward a caravan consisting of Manyuema slaves bearing 350 tusks. At Zanzibar the ivory was sold, and the proceeds invested in double-barrelled guns, Minie rifles, and carbines, gunpowder, percussion-caps, buckshot, and bar lead. Within twenty months the new weapons and war munition reached Nyangwé. Kibongé soon after was sent by his master Abed down the Lualaba as supercargo and store-keeper at a station to be strategically chosen, and his three confederates became leaders of three divisions of booty-gatherers, and to draw all slaves, ivory, and flocks of goats into the slave-hold of Kibongé. A native village near the confluence of the Leopold with the Lualaba River was taken, and without loss of time was palisaded as a measure of security. Canoe after canoe was added to their flotilla, in order that detachments might make simultaneous attacks at various points along the Leopold, Lufu, Lowwa, Lira, and Ulindi rivers.

Ivory was the first object of the raiders, women the second, children the third. Ivory was now rapidly rising in value, for the slaughter of fifty thousand elephants in a year makes it scarce. In this region, hitherto unexploited, it was abundant. The natives frequently used it to chop wood upon, or to rest their idols while shaping them with the adze. Being so heavy, two tusks were used to keep their bedding of phrynia leaves from being scattered. They made ivory into pestles to pound their corn, or they stood the tusks on end round their idols, or employed them as seats for their elders in the council-house. Women were needed as wives and servants for the marauders; the little girls could be trained to house-work, and bide the growth of the little boys, with whom eventually they would wive, and who in the mean time would be useful as field hands or for domestic duties.

In a village there would probably be found, on an average, ten tusks, good, bad, and indifferent, thirty full-grown women, and fifty children above five years old, besides a few infants. At the first alarm, a scream from a child or a woman, the warriors and their families dash frantically and pell-mell out of their huts. Then from the ambuscade a volley is fired, and a score fall dead or wounded to the ground, whereat the unseen foes leap out of their coverts to despatch the struggling and groaning victims with knife and spear; and some make mad rushes at a group of terrified children; others dart for a likely-looking woman; a few leap in pursuit of a girl who is flying naked from the scene; some chase a lad who bounds like an antelope over the obstructions. Those not engaged in the fierce chase enter the village, and collect to argue over the rights to this or that child. When four or five hundred men rise upon a village whose inhabitants are numerically inferior to them, the event is followed by much fierce discussion of the kind which is not always amicably or easily settled, even when the matter is submitted to the arbitration of the leaders. The rest of the band scatter wildly through the village, and begin collecting the frightened fowls and the bleating goats, rummaging roofs, insides of gourds, and every imaginable place where a poor savage might be likely to hide his little stock of curios and valuables; others manacle the captives, and question them harshly about their neighbors, or indulge in barbarous fun with some decrepid whitehead. When the results of these pillaging expeditions became known in Nyangwé, and the laden canoes disembarked their ivory, slaves, and fat goats of the famous forest breed, it kindled the envy and cupidity of even Tippu Tib and Sayid-bin-Habib.

CAPTURING SLAVES

Up to 1876, Tippu Tib had been the acknowledged leader of the slavers, on account of his marvellous success. His career had been romantic. From a poor coast slaver, involved in debt to the usurers and money-lenders of Zanzibar, he had grown wealthy and famous. By the storming and capture of Nsama’s stronghold (May, 1867) he had become possessed of a fortune in ivory and slaves. He had relieved himself as soon as possible of his embarrassing store by sending his brother Mohammed in charge of his plunder to Unyanyembé, and, with five hundred guns, continued a triumphant and unchecked course from the south of Tanganika through the heart of Rua, to Nyangwé. As he marched, he ravaged to the right and left of his route, gathered ivory, and made slaves by hundreds. Not far from a district called Mtotila he learned from a captive that the king had disappeared mysteriously many years before, and that though frequent search had been made for him, nothing was known of his whereabouts. Tippu Tib artfully conceived the plan of representing himself as his son, and accordingly schooled himself in all the local knowledge necessary for the deception he intended to practise. By the time he approached Mtotila, Tippu Tib could rehearse the long line of the king’s ancestry, the names of his living relatives, and the elders of the land, and was familiar with the events, traditions, and customs of Mtotila. He despatched messengers into the country to announce his arrival, and to tell the wondering people the news of his father’s fate, and of his intention to assume his father’s rights. The people accepted the story without difficulty, as it harmonized so well with their own conceptions and expectations. The elders were deputed to go and meet their prince. They brought rich presents of ivory and abundance of food, and offered to escort him with honor to his father’s land, which Tippu Tib courteously accepted. At every stage of his journey he was welcomed and feasted. On reaching the town of Mtotila he received the chiefs and elders in a grand barzah, at which he told the story of his father’s disappearance, with a wealth of fictitious details of love and marriage with a king’s daughter, of honors showered upon his father, and of the reluctance to his departure which the natives manifested; of his own birth and life; of his recollections of his father’s conversations with him respecting Mtotila country, his relatives, and local events—until all were thoroughly persuaded that this able and affable stranger was no other than their lost king’s son. He was at once formally accepted and installed as their king, and to ingratiate himself still more, he distributed liberal largesses of showy beads and copper and brass trinkets. Before many days had passed the people of Mtotila understood that ivory was very acceptable to their king, and as the article was abundant, and of little value to them, the entire country was ransacked for it, and heaps of it were daily laid before him, until his store of ivory became prodigious. Breaches of the peace between his subjects were compounded by payment in ivory, his favors were sold for ivory; in every imaginable way he augmented his treasure. Finally, when he had depleted Mtotila of elephants’ teeth, he sought occasion to embroil Mtotila with the surrounding countries, and his myrmidons were despatched with the native forces to despoil them. Within fifteen months he had gathered nine hundred tusks. He proposed now to the Mtotilas that they should muster carriers to convey his treasure to Kasongo, another country which, according to his reports, he owned, where he had great houses and great estates. In this manner he succeeded in obtaining vast wealth, and the Arabs of the Manyuema settlements, when they viewed his vast store of ivory and innumerable retinue, hailed him as a genius, and recognized his superiority.

The general admiration which had been excited by his genius had greatly subsided by the time I reached Nyangwé in 1876. He was then induced to escort my trans-African expedition a few marches north of Nyangwé, and on his return he undertook the transport of his immense collections of ivory to Zanzibar, where it is said that he realized the large sum of £30,000 by its sale. Out of these lucrative returns he was able to pay the usurers of Zanzibar the advances of money he had received, with the heavy interest accruing, and with the residue he equipped his large force with the best weapons procurable. In 1881 he was back again in Manyuema, and witnessed with his own eyes the disembarkation of the ivory and slaves obtained by Abed-bin-Salim’s agents. Fired at the sight, he lost no time in making his preparations for a second great campaign, which should excel in results his own previous exploits and surpass Abed’s successes.

He divided his forces into two divisions. The land force he despatched under his nephew Rashid to the Lumami; the flotilla descending the Lualaba he led himself, assisted by his brother and son. The vessels were navigated by the Wenya fishermen, whom during his long residence in Manyuema he had protected and propitiated. These people numbered several thousands, and were scattered along the left bank of the river from the confluence of the Luama to Stanley Falls. The cataracts were therefore no interruption to Tippu Tib’s progress or his projects. On a large island just above the lowest of the Stanley Falls, called Wané Sironga (Sons of Sironga), Tippu halted and established his headquarters, whence he was to operate on the left bank as far as the Lumami in conjunction with his nephew Rashid. But for some months before his arrival Abed-bin-Salim’s agents had extended their depredations below the Falls along the right bank, leaving a broad desolate track as a witness of their crimes.