[11] Soudan Gazette, published by authority of the Soudan Government, No. 47, Khartoum, 1st May, 1903: “It is notified for information that the following articles are governmental monopolies in the following districts: Rubber and gutta percha, in the whole of the Soudan, excepting Kordofan. Ivory, in the Bahr-el-Ghazal and Fashoda.... (Signed) Reginald Wingate, Governor-General.”
CHAPTER X
AN APPEAL TO BELGIUM TO SUPPRESS THE SLAVE TRADE
Slavery is as ancient as war, and war as old as human nature. Upon this premise Voltaire philosophised when his thought reverted to the early inequity of human life. Christian nations were deep in the slave trade in the sixteenth century. A black cloud of human flesh, aggregating sixteen million souls, was imported into America upon Western slave dhows in three centuries, exclusive of the twenty-odd million Negroes who perished in transit. More atrocious than the pestilential slave dhow was the slaughter of blacks by the slave-raider, that fiend incarnate who until a few years ago carried on his inhuman traffic under the very gaze of Christian Europe. Indeed, Europe herself was a slave-dealer for centuries. Some of her Governments sanctioned it in terms unspeakably callous. There was little pity and less mercy in officially lading “tons of niggers” for American ports.
Bridge Made of Cement, Boma.
Late in the eighteenth century, Great Britain had championed the cause of humanity and sought a remedy for the horrible conditions which slavery entailed. The movement which, assuming definite shape about the time of the Declaration of Independence, had found able and eloquent advocacy in such men as Granville Sharpe, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and William Pitt. These staunch humanitarians, after what seemed the hopeless labour of many years, finally triumphed so far as to impel the Vienna Congress of 1815 and the Verona Congress of 1822 to forbid any civilised nation to carry on the slave trade.
The next steps, also furthered by the British Government, sought to abolish the legal status of slavery and to suppress slave markets and slave dhows. The Western world began to awaken to a sense of duty. In all directions the noble initiative taken by Great Britain found earnest agency. The Christian nations, now thoroughly aroused to the iniquity of the slave trade, exchanged treaties in 1841, the operation of which was designed to clear the ocean of slave transports. When shut out of the American market, it was believed that the infamous slave traffic would subside. But the scourge continued almost unabated. Driven out of the West, it flourished the more in the East, where large markets still remained open. The northern and eastern coasts of Africa continued to supply the Oriental markets, the Soudan, Upper Nile, and Congo Basin being the slave-hunter’s Elysium. The Sultans of the Soudan, whose avarice knew no limit, strove in the cruellest manner to increase their spoil in this man-hunting chase. Khartoum slavers pressed into the Bhar-el-Ghazal, while the Arabs from Zanzibar devastated the Manyema and Tanganyika regions. West-coast raiders had even penetrated as far inland as the Upper Kassai, and created that wretched condition of native life in the interior of the Congo Basin which impressed Livingstone, Stanley, Kirk, Bartle Frere, Nachtigal, Wissmann, Serpa Pinto, Massaia, and that great exemplar of Christianising work, Cardinal Lavigerie.
In 1876, nearly ten years before the Berlin Conference, the King of the Belgians called upon Europe to join in a concerted movement to suppress the slave traffic in Central Africa. In the same year the British Government published its Report of the Royal Commission on Fugitive Slaves. The words of Prince Bismarck at the Berlin Conference of 1885 were an intimation of the legislation which was thereafter effected by clauses 6 and 9 of the General Act. By clause 6, the Powers agreed “to watch over the preservation of the native tribes and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being, and to help in suppressing slavery and especially the slave trade.” Baron Lambermont stated the distinction between slavery and the slave trade: “The slave trade,” said the Baron, “has another character; it is the very denial of every law, of all social order. Man-hunting constitutes a crime of high treason against humanity. It ought to be repressed wherever it can be reached, on land as well as by sea.”
It was with characteristic activity that the Sovereign of the Congo Free State had taken the initiative in making the suppression of the slave traffic an essential aim in the civilisation of an African State which had not only been the source of slave supply for many markets, but whose territory touched closely upon a number of slave-dealing countries. In the eighteenth century, the nations of Europe had partitioned the coast of Africa to the French between Senegal and Gambia, to the British on the Gold and Ivory coasts, and to the Portuguese in the Angola and Benguela regions. The object of this territorial apportionment was to facilitate the slave trade and render it more profitable! Now, in the nineteenth century, these same Governments were dividing African territory with the much loftier purpose of extirpating the slave trade. The march of a hundred years had raised European morality and justified the Christian influence of the age.
Undaunted by the material difficulty of realising the excellent theories which European nations were now offering to carry out in the very nest of the slave trade, the Congo Free State formally tackled the problem by promulgating three decrees in November, 1888. The first provided practical means for suppressing the slave trade, amongst which were measures prohibiting trade in firearms, gunpowder, and explosives; the second, seeking to protect and improve the natives, dealt with contracts of service between natives and foreigners, and enacted laws which guaranteed the former from imposition. The third decree established a body of volunteer police to suppress crimes and offences against public order and individual liberty. Then followed the organisation of the Belgian Anti-Slavery Society which, creating a special volunteer corps, operated against the slave-raiders in the Tanganyika district. Reference has elsewhere been made to the vigorous manner in which these and similar decrees were enforced, and how the slave-raider was driven from one lair to another, until, almost unaided and alone, the indomitable energy of Belgian officers succeeded in uprooting the institution of slave traffic and opening an immense river basin to the pursuits of civilisation.