It is only some score of discontented men, depending largely on the untrustworthy hearsay evidence of natives, who have raised an outcry against the Congo Administration, out of a great band of 500 or 600 missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, who are working on the Congo, and who give thanks to the Congo Administration for its support to the missions, and for its successful efforts to introduce Christianity and civilisation into Central Africa.
Overwhelming evidence in favour of the Congo Government has been given recently by missionaries and by travellers, and it is not only Catholic missionaries, like Monsignor Van Ronslé and Father Van Hencxthoven, who have spoken in praise of the State, but also the most distinguished Protestant missionaries, such as the Rev. Mr. Bentley and Dr. Grenfell.
As it is not likely that you will convert me, and as I see no probability of convincing you, I, for my part, think it best to consider the correspondence closed.
Very sincerely yours,
(Signed) James, Cardinal Gibbons.
Viscount Mountmorres
In the summer of 1904, an Irish peer, Lord Mountmorres, began a journey through the Congo Free State, whence his lordship is sending an admirable series of letters, descriptive of his experiences and impressions, to the London Globe. The dismal scenes of torture, desolation, and death, in which the missionary-agents of the Liverpool merchants assure us that unhappy country abounds, appear in some way to have escaped the observation of this traveller. “The further one goes into the interior the more civilised one finds it, the better organised, and the more developed,” says Lord Mountmorres at the opening of his second letter:
I was utterly unprepared [he continues] for what I found at Irebu and at Coquilhatville, buried away there on the equator in the very heart of the great forest. For what are these stations? Large haphazard jumbles of native dwellings and white men’s bungalows in an arid clearing, with ill-kempt roadways, such as one would find in the Western States? No; here we have great open towns of really artistic brick houses, with palm-thatched roofs and wide verandahs, each standing in its own little garden, bright with roses and hibiscus, Spanish iris and flamboyants, and set well back along straight, wide avenues shaded by bamboos, mangoes, papayes, acacias, bread-fruit trees, or one of a dozen other leafy and ornamental equatorial trees. In spacious grounds will be found the residence of the local governor, chef-de-poste, or commandant, as the case may be, with its twenty to thirty-foot verandah and its flagstaff in front, placed usually so as to command the full view of the river front. Round one or more spacious squares at the intersections of the principal avenues will be the various public offices—the Directorate of Transports, the Post Office, the Magasins de l’État, the headquarters of the Force Publique, the Office of Agriculture, and the rest. At Bikoro there are 2200 acres overlooking the lovely Lac Tumba, sometimes miscalled Man Tumba or M’Tumba, a corruption of Mai Na Tumba, water (or lake) of war. Round Coquilhatville there are little short of 4500 acres of these plantations, and round Irebu and Imesse something like 1200 acres in each case. Then near to each station will be the extensive market gardens, where every manner of vegetable, both European and tropical, is raised in profusion, and also the large, well-kept farm or farms, which supply the principal officials with beef and mutton, goat and pork, poultry and ducks, and in which a ceaseless series of experiments in breeding and raising stock adapted to the climate is carried on.
And this has been achieved not in one isolated spot near the coast, where material and transport were ready to hand, but at every “white post” up here in the very heart of the black continent, cut off until a few years ago from the capital and the seaboard by that deadly, costly barrier—the white man’s cemetery of the Cataract caravan road. How has it been done? Let us take Irebu as a typical case. Seven years ago a young Belgian lieutenant, Jeuniaux by name, was sent out to take charge of the military training camp at the junction of the Ubanghi, the Congo, and the Tumba Canal, on the site of a former larger and flourishing native village. He came, and he found an unhealthy and pestilential swamp covered with the ruins and the filth of the then almost deserted village of Irebu. Among these unpleasant surroundings was a large group of ill-kempt and badly constructed mud and thatch huts—the training camp; and here he was doomed to pass at least three years. But he was young and energetic, and had passed unscathed along the latter half of the caravan road in the cataract district, for the railway was then but half completed. He had seen brick houses in other stations, and clean, well-kept, well-arranged little townships. He would have the same. But his first difficulty was that this was a training camp, whither the raw, untutored savage was drafted in his naked ignorance to undergo six months’ tuition only; and, so soon as he had acquired a sufficient training to make him of use to the white man, he was hurried on elsewhere and a new batch of raw material took his place. Jeuniaux had but a hazy notion of architecture, but, unaided, he planned and designed his barracks, and acted as his own foreman, devising quaint methods to construct weather-proof walls and roofs from the materials at hand, and instructing his workers, man by man, in these methods, and that without even the medium of a common language.
At last his barracks were built, and the old huts destroyed; coffee, cocoa, maize, sweet potatoes, and bananas grew in well-ordered plantations, between parallel, palm-lined avenues, where formerly had been a wilderness of insanitary ruins. Then came the great feat of all—brick houses for the whites and for the Departmental offices. Bricks, bricks. He knew that bricks were made somehow from some sort of clay, and he had a hazy notion that straw was essential to their composition. So he started on a series of experiments. In the intervals of his work—with two sub-lieutenants to help him, he was responsible for training, feeding, and controlling from 1000 to 1500 soldiers, with their wives and families, for maintaining order in his district, and developing its commercial resources, and for ruling the natives in it; how well he had done this work I will show in a moment—but, in the intervals, he went on clay-hunting expeditions, and then sat up at night experimenting on what he had found, and at last he produced what he recognised as the real red brick—the philosopher’s stone of his research. And so the first brick house in Irebu was built in one year from when Jeuniaux first came. And he built other houses for his lieutenants and white non-coms., and a residency for himself, and a guest house large and comfortable, and post-office, state stores, guard-house, pharmacy, armoury, and houses for all the other whites. One by one they were built, and Jeuniaux, now Commandant Jeuniaux, and his ever-changing pupils built them all, until he had realised his ambition, and had constructed a model station, with its lovely avenues, its riverside promenade, its fine landing-stage, its parade ground, where 1200 men may, without crowding, manœuvre in companies at once, and its pretty public gardens. And when his first term of three years was over he left, with the sense of work accomplished, for his six months’ holiday. All the time in Europe he pictured the growth of his plantations and his palms, and told his friends he should be glad to get back “home” to Irebu, the town he built with his own hands. And the night before he reached it he could not sleep for excitement; and all day he strained his eyes to catch a glimpse of it, and at last it came in sight. But not the Irebu he knew. The plantations had reverted into jungle, the avenues had disappeared, lost in the quick, rank growth; the pleasure gardens were a wilderness; the finest of the palms had been cut down; and he went through the coarse, wild vegetation that clogged the entrance to his house, and into the damp hall-way that was become the home of bats, and of rats, and of lizards, and he sat down there, and he wept. For so, in six short months, had an idle officer left in charge during his absence undone the labour of three years.
But he is not a man to be easily daunted. To-day Irebu is as spick and span and as beautiful as he first conceived it. The benefit that accrues to the natives as well as to the whites from so well-built and arranged a station is shown by the change that has occurred in the health of Irebu. One of Jeuniaux’s first cares was to make the place sanitary. Now, since he built the station, i. e., in the five years since summer, 1899, there have been only two deaths among the whites,—although their number has been increased,—and of these one was a case of sunstroke, the other one probably of deliberate intent to die by disobeying orders during an illness on receipt of bad news. Since 1901 there has not been one death among Europeans. The mortality rate among the soldiers has decreased to 14 per 1000 average, and for the current year to 12 per 1000, or a fraction under. And this despite the fact that the sudden change in their mode of life when they enter military service must be a severe strain on the recruits, and also that Irebu, lying at the junction of waterways, is constantly having dumped down in it cases of infectious diseases, which are discovered on the river steamers, and which are put ashore at the nearest station.