A Modern Slavery

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

From Caconda it took me only three weeks with the wagon to reach the Bihé district, which, I believe, was a record for the wet season. There are five rivers to cross, all of them difficult, and the first and last—the Cuando and the Kukema—dangerous as well. The track also skirts round the marshy source of other great watercourses, and it was with delight that I found myself at the morass which begins the great river Cunene, and, better still, at a little “fairy glen” of ferns and reeds where the Okavango drips into a tiny basin, and dribbles down till it becomes the great river which fills Lake Ngami—Livingstone’s Lake Ngami, so far away, on the edge of Khama’s country!

The wagon had, besides, to struggle across many of those high, upland bogs which are the terror of the transport-rider in summer-time. The worst and biggest of these is a wide expanse something like an Irish bog or a wet Salisbury Plain, which the Portuguese call Bourru-Bourru, from the native Vulu-Vulu. It is over five thousand feet above the sea, and so bare and dreary that when the natives see a white man with a great bald head they call it his Vulu-Vulu. It was almost exactly midsummer there when I crossed it, and I threw no shadow at noon, but at night I was glad to cower over a fire, with all the coats and blankets I had got, while the mosquitoes howled round me as if for warmth.

Two points of history I must mention as connected with this part of my journey. The day after I crossed the Calei I came, while hunting, to a rocky hill with a splendid view over the valley, only about a mile from the track. On the top of the hill I found the remains of ancient stone walls and fortifications—a big circuit wall of piled stones, an inner circle, or keep, at the highest point, and many cross-walls for streets or houses. The whole was just like the remains of some rude mediæval fortress, and it may possibly have been very early Portuguese. More likely, it was a native chief’s kraal, though they build nothing of the kind now. Among the natives themselves there is a vague tradition of a splendid ancient city in this region, which they remember as “The Mountain of Money.” Possibly this was the site, and it is strange that no Boers or other transport-riders I met had ever seen the place.

The other point comes a little farther on—about three days after one crosses the Cunughamba. It is the place by the roadside where, three years ago, the natives burned a Portuguese trader alive and made fetich-medicine of his remains. It happened during the so-called “Bailundu war” of 1902, to which I have referred before. On the spot I still found enough of the poor fellow’s bones to make any amount of magic. But if bones were all, I could have gathered far more in the deserted village of Candombo close by. Here a great chief had his kraal, surrounded by ancient trees, and clustered round one of the mightiest natural fortresses I have ever seen. It rises above the trees in great masses and spires of rock, three or four hundred feet high, and in the caves and crevasses of those rocks, now silent and deserted, I found the pitiful skeletons of the men, women, and children of all the little tribe, massacred in the white man’s vengeance. Whether the vengeance was just or unjust I cannot now say. I only know that it was exacted to the full.

V
THE AGENTS OF THE SLAVE-TRADE

The few English people who have ever heard of Bihé at all probably imagine it to themselves as a largish town in Angola famous for its slave-market. Nothing could be less like the reality. There is no town, and there is no slave-market. Bihé is a wide district of forest and marsh, part of the high plateau of interior Africa. It has no mountains and no big rivers, except the Cuanza, which separates it from the land of the Chibokwe on the east. So that the general character of the country is rather indistinctive, and you might as well be in one part of it as another. In whatever place you are, you will see nothing but the broad upland, covered with rather insignificant trees, and worn into quiet slopes by the action of the water, which gathers in morasses of long grass, hidden in the midst of which runs a deep-set stream. Except that it is well watered, fairly cool, and fairly healthy, there is no great attraction in the region. There are a good many leopards and a few wandering lions in the north. Hippos come up the larger streams to breed, and occasionally you may see a buck or two. But it is a poor country for beasts and game, and poor for produce too, though the orange orchards and strawberry-beds at the mission stations show it is capable of better things. On the whole, the impression of the country is a certain want of character. Often while I have been plodding through woods looking over a grassy valley I could have imagined myself in Essex, except that here there are no white roads and no ancient villages. The whole scene is so unlike the popular idea of tropical Africa that it is startling to meet a naked savage carrying a javelin, and almost shocking to meet a lady with only nine inches of dress.

There is no town and no public slave-market. The Portuguese fort at Belmonte, once the home of that remarkable man and redoubtable slave-trader, Silva Porto, and the scene of his rather splendid suicide in 1890, may be taken as the centre of the district. But there are only two or three Portuguese stores gathered round it, and scattered over the whole country there are only a very limited number of other trading-houses, the largest being the headquarters of the Commercial Company of Angola, established at Caiala, one day’s journey from the fort. The trading-houses are, I think, without exception, worked by slave labor, as are the few plantations of sweet-potato for the manufacture of rum, which, next to cotton cloth, is the chief coinage in all dealings with the natives. The exchange from the native side consists chiefly of rubber, oxen, and slaves, a load of rubber (say fifty to sixty pounds), an ox, and a young slave counting as about equal in the recognized currency. In English money we might put the value at £9.

CARRIERS ON THE MARCH

It is through these trading-houses that the slave-trade has hitherto been chiefly conducted, and if you want slaves you can buy them readily from any of the larger houses still. But the Bihéans have themselves partly to blame for the ill repute of their country. They are born traders, and will trade in anything. For generations past, probably long before the Portuguese established their present feeble hold upon the country, the Ovimbundu, as they are called, have been sending their caravans of traders far into the interior—far among the tributaries of the Congo, and even up to Tanganyika and the great lakes. Like all traders in Central Africa, they tramp in single file along the narrow and winding foot-paths which are the roads and trade routes of the country. They carry their goods on their heads or shoulders, clamped with shreds of bark between two long sticks, which act as levers. The regulation load is about sixty pounds, but for his own interest a man will sometimes carry double as much. As a rule, they march five or six hours a day, and it takes them about two months to reach the villages of Nanakandundu, which may be taken as the centre of African trade, as it is the central point of the long and marshy watershed which divides the Zambesi from the Congo. For merchandise, they carry with them cotton cloth, beads, and salt, and at present they are bringing out rubber for the most part and a little beeswax. As to slaves, guns, gunpowder, and cartridges are the best exchange for them, owing to the demand for such things among the “Révoltés”—the cannibal and slave-dealing tribes who are holding out against the Belgians among the rivers west of the Katanga district. But the conditions of this caravan slave-trade have been a good deal changed in the last three years, and I shall be able to say more about it after my farther journey into the interior.