A Modern Slavery

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

“No change, no pause, no hope.” That is the sum of plantation life. So the man or woman known as a “contract laborer” toils, till gradually or suddenly death comes, and the poor, worn-out body is put to rot. Out in the forest you come upon the little heap of red earth under which it lies. On the top of the heap is set the conical basket of woven grasses which was the symbol of its toil in life, and now forms its only monument. For a fortnight after death the comrades of the dead think that the spirit hovers uneasily about the familiar huts. They dance and drink rum to cheer themselves and it. When the fortnight is over, the spirit is dissolved into air, and all is just as though the slave had never been.

There is no need to be hypocritical or sentimental about it. The fate of the slave differs little from the fate of common humanity. Few men or women have opportunity for more than working, feeding, getting children, and death. If any one were to maintain that the plantation life is not in reality worse than the working-people’s life in most of our manufacturing towns, or in such districts as the Potteries, the Black Country, and the Isle of Dogs, he would have much to say. The same argument was the only one that counted in defence of the old slavery in the West Indies and the Southern States, and it will have to be seriously met again now that slavery is reappearing under other names. A man who has been bought for money is at least of value to his master. In return for work he gets his mud hut, his flour, his stinkfish, and his rum. The driver with his eight-foot stick is not so hideous a figure as the British overseer with his system of blackmail; and as for cultivation of the intellect and care of the soul, the less we talk about such things the better.

In this account I only mean to show that the difference between the “contract labor” of Angola, and the old-fashioned slavery of our grandfathers’ time is only a difference of legal terms. In life there is no difference at all. The men and women whom I have described as I saw them have all been bought from their enemies, their chiefs, or their parents; they have either been bought themselves or were the children of people who had been bought. The legal contract, if it had been made at all, had not been observed, either in its terms or its renewal. The so-called pay by the plantation tokens is not pay at all, but a form of the “truck” system at its very worst. So far from the children being free, they now form the chief labor supply of the plantation, for the demand for “serviçaes” in San Thomé has raised the price so high that the Angola plantations could not carry on at all without the little swarms of children that are continually growing up on the estates. Sometimes, as I have heard, two or three of the men escape, and hide in the crowd at Loanda or set up a little village far away in the forest. But the risk is great; they have no money and no friends. I have not heard of a runaway laborer being prosecuted for breach of contract. As a matter of fact, the fiction of the contract is hardly even considered. But when a large plantation was sold the other day, do you suppose the contract of each laborer was carefully examined, and the length of his future service taken into consideration? Not a bit of it. The laborers went in block with the estate. Men, women, and children, they were handed over to the new owners, and became their property just like the houses and trees.

Portuguese planters are not a bit worse than other men, but their position is perilous. The owner or agent lives in the big house with three or four white or whitey-brown overseers. They are remote from all equal society, and they live entirely free from any control or public opinion that they care about. Under their absolute and unquestioned power are men and women, boys and girls—let us say two hundred in all. We may even grant, if we will, that the Portuguese planters are far above the average of men. Still I say that if they were all Archbishops of Canterbury, it would not be safe for them to be intrusted with such powers as these over the bodies and souls of men and women.

III
DOMESTIC SLAVERY ON THE MAINLAND

Some two hundred miles south of St. Paul de Loanda, you come to a deep and quiet inlet, called Lobito Bay. Hitherto it has been desert and unknown—a spit of waterless sand shutting in a basin of the sea at the foot of barren and waterless hills. But in twenty years’ time Lobito Bay may have become famous as the central port of the whole west coast of Africa, and the starting-place for traffic with the interior. For it is the base of the railway scheme known as the “Robert Williams Concession,” which is intended to reach the ancient copper-mines of the Katanga district in the extreme south of the Congo State, and so to unite with the “Tanganyika Concession.” It would thus connect the west coast traffic with the great lakes and the east. A branch line might also turn off at some point along the high and flat watershed between the Congo and Zambesi basins, and join the Cape Town railway near Victoria Falls. Possibly before the Johannesburg gold is exhausted, passengers from London to the Transvaal will address their luggage “viâ Lobito Bay.”

FIRST MAIL-STEAMER AT LOBITO BAY

But this is only prophecy. What is certain is that on January 5, 1905, a mail-steamer was for the first time warped alongside a little landing-stage of lighters, in thirty-five feet of water, and I may go down to fame as the first man to land at the future port. What I found were a few laborers’ huts, a tent, a pile of sleepers, a tiny engine puffing over a mile or two of sand, and a large Portuguese custom-house with an eye to possibilities. I also found an indomitable English engineer, engaged in doing all the work with his own hands, to the entire satisfaction of the native laborers, who encouraged him with smiles.

At present the railway, which is to transform the conditions of Central Africa, runs as a little tram-line for about eight miles along the sand to Katumbella. There it has something to show in the shape of a great iron bridge, which crosses the river with a single span. The day I was there the engineers were terrifying the crocodiles by knocking away the wooden piles used in the construction, and both natives and Portuguese were awaiting the collapse of the bridge with the pleasurable excitement of people who await a catastrophe that does not concern themselves. But; to the general disappointment, the last prop was knocked away and the bridge still stood. It was amazing. It was contrary to the traditions of Africa and of Portugal.