Slavery and the slave trade in Africa

by Henry M. Stanley

It may be true that the development of a country can only take place after a drastic purgation of some sort, but it is also true, fortunately, that there always is some cause to arrest total ruin. In this instance the Arabs themselves had aided the cause. The enslaving bands which escorted me from Nyangwé consisted of trained and educated boy slaves from Manyuema and Unyamuezi and Zanzibar. Many a trusted slave was in the ranks of the expedition which descended the Lualaba to the Atlantic, through whose means a watery highway into the heart of the continent was discovered, and by whom the course of the westward-rolling waves of fire and slaughter was destined to be arrested.

Seven years after we had parted from Tippu Tib in 1876 a small flotilla of steamers was advancing towards Stanley Falls, which was barely sixty miles off, and this is what we saw, as entered in a journal at the time:

“Surely there had been a great change. As we moved slowly up the stream, a singular scene attracted our gaze. This was two or three long canoes standing on their ends, like split hollow columns, upright on the verge of the bank. What freak was this, and what did it signify? To have tilted and raised such weights argued numbers and union. It could never have been the work of a herd of chattering savages. They are Arabs who have performed this feat of strength, and these upright columnar canoes betray the advent of the slave-traders in the region below the Falls. We learned later that on this now desolate spot once stood the town of Yomburri.

“A few miles higher on the same bank we came abreast of another scene of desolation, where a whole town had been burnt, the palm-trees cut down, the bananas scorched, and many acres of them laid level with the ground, and the freak of standing canoes on end repeated.

“We continued on our journey, advancing as rapidly as our steamers could breast the stream. Every three or four miles we came in view of the black traces of the destroyers. The charred stakes, poles of once populous settlements, scorched banana groves, and prostrate palms, all betokened ruthless ruin.

“On the morning of the 27th November (1883) we detected some object of a slaty color floating down stream. The man in the bow turned it over with a boat-hook. We were shocked to discover the bodies of two women bound together with cord.

“A little later we came in sight of the Arab camp, and discovered that this horde of banditti—for in reality they were nothing else—was under the leadership of several chiefs, but principally under Karema and Kiburuga. They had started sixteen months previously from Wané Kirundu, about thirty miles below Vinya Njara. For eleven months the band had been raiding successfully between the Congo and Lubiranzi. They had then undertaken to perform the same cruel work between the Aruwimi and the Falls. On looking at my map I find that the area of such a territory as described above would measure 16,200 square geographical miles on the left of the Lualaba, and 10,500 square geographical miles on the right of it, the total of which would be equal in statute mileage to 34,570 miles—an area a little larger than the whole of Ireland, and which, according to a rough estimate, was inhabited by about one million people.

“The slave-traders admit they have only 2300 captives in their fold. The banks of the river prove that 118 villages and 43 tribal districts have been devastated, out of which they have only this scant profit of 2300 females and children and about 2000 tusks of ivory. Given that these 118 villages contained only 118,000 people, we have only a profit of two per cent.; and by the time all these captives have been subjected to the accidents of the long river voyage before them, of camp life and its harsh miseries, to the havoc of small-pox, and the pests which misery breeds, there will only remain a scant one per cent. upon the bloody ventures.”

If the pitiless course of the slave-hunters were not soon checked, it was easy to perceive that the main Congo, with its 2000 miles of shores, would have soon become a prey to these marauders, that in a little while the scope and incentives to daring enterprise held out by the defenceless river-banks would have emptied Manyuema and Ujiji and Unyanyembé to extend devastation as far as Stanley Pool, and that the great tributaries, with their 14,000 miles of shores, would have been next visited, until the best portions of Africa would have been depopulated. The Arabs were not pursuing any fixed scheme, but pushed forward according to their means, and would continue to do so in increasing numbers until they met a barrier of some kind. The barrier fortunately had advanced to meet them, and was to be established at Stanley Falls, 1400 miles from the Atlantic. Along the course of the noble river were a series of military stations, which, with the aid of the steamers, could furnish in case of need a very strong defensive force. As, however, the stations were but newly planted, and the natives as yet were not familiar with their purposes, time was needed for their education and the consolidation of the infant state.