Now it is a matter of history, quite outside the realms of argument, that punishment by bodily mutilation has been practised by natives of Central Africa from the earliest times of which we have any record. Here is a sentence taken from a book entitled The First Christian Mission on the Congo, published before the Congo State came into existence, written by Mrs. H. Grattan Guinness:
From half a million to a million of lives are annually sacrificed in the slave trade, and as many more in all probability in intertribal wars and contests. Physically a land of sunshine and beauty and redundant life, it is spiritually a land of darkness, deformity, and death.
This evidence, given by the wife of Dr. Grattan Guinness in 1882, is a strange foundation for Dr. Guinness to erect his 1904 statement upon. Let us hear what other people have to say upon this subject.
COMMANDER LOVETT CAMERON
(English)
In Ouroua only two punishments are known, mutilation and the penalty of death. Both are much in use, but especially the former. For the least offence the chief and his lieutenants cut off a finger, a lip, a portion of the ear or of the nose. For more serious offences, they cut off the hands, etc.
DR. WILLIAM JUNKER
(German)
Mazindeh wished to punish the man according to A-Zandeh law by cutting off a finger.... I saw a man who had been punished by the loss of his finger and of another important member. A Malingdeh told me he knew about twenty men who had been similarly punished.
SIR JOHN KIRK