A Modern Slavery

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

Slavery exists quite openly throughout Bihé in the three forms of family slavery among the natives themselves, domestic slavery to the Portuguese traders, and slavery on the plantations. The purchase of slaves is rendered easier by certain native customs, especially by the peculiar law which gives the possession of the children to the wife’s brother, even during the lifetime of both parents. The law has many advantages in a polygamous country, and the parents can redeem their children and make them their own property by various payments, but, unless the children are redeemed, the wife’s brother can claim them for the payment of his own debts or the debts of his village. I think this is chiefly done in the payment of family debts for witchcraft, and I have seen a case in which, for a debt of that kind, a mother has been driven to pawn her own child herself. Her brother had murdered her eldest boy, and, going into the interior to trade, had died there. Of course his wives and other relations charged her with witchcraft through her murdered boy’s spirit, and she was condemned to pay a fine. She had nothing to pay but her two remaining children, and as the girl was married and with child, she was unwilling to take her. So she pawned her little boy to a native for the sum required, though she knew he would almost certainly be sold as a slave to the Portuguese long before she could redeem him, and she would have no chance of redress.

In that particular case, which happened recently, a missionary, who knew the boy, advanced an ox in his place; but the missionary’s intervention was, of course, entirely accidental, and the facts are only typical of the kind of thing that is repeatedly happening in places where there is no one to help or to know.

In a village in the northwest of Bihé I have seen a man—the headman of the place—who has been gradually tempted on by a Portuguese trader till he has sold all his children and all the other relations in his power for rum. Last of all, one morning at the beginning of this winter (1905), he told his wife to smarten herself up and come with him to the trader’s house. She appears to have been a particularly excellent woman, of whom he was very fond. Yet when they arrived at the store he received a keg of rum and went home with it, leaving his wife as the trader’s property.

In the same district I met a boy who told me how his father was sold in the middle of last January. They were slaves to a native named Onbungululu in the village of Chariwewa, and his father, in company with twenty other of the slaves, was sold to a certain Portuguese trader, who acts on behalf of the “Central Committee of Labor and Emigration,” and was draughted quietly away through the bush for the plantations in San Thomé.

To show how low the price of human beings will run, I may mention a case that happened in January, 1905, on the Cuanza, just over the northeast frontier of Bihé. I think I noticed in an earlier chapter that there was much famine there last winter, and so it came about that a woman was sold for forty yards of cloth and a pig (cloth being worth about fourpence a yard), and was brought into Bihé by the triumphant purchaser.

But that was an exception, and the following instance of the slave-trader’s ways is more typical. Last summer a Portuguese, who is perhaps the most notorious and reckless slave-trader now living in Bihé, and whose name is familiar far in the interior of Africa, sent a Bihéan into the southern Congo with orders to bring out so many slaves and with chains to bind them. As the Bihéan was returning with the slaves, one of them escaped, and the trader demanded another slave and three loads of rubber as compensation. This the Bihéan has now paid, but in the mean time the trader’s personal slaves have attacked and plundered his village. The trader himself is at present away on his usual business in the remote region of the Congo basin called Lunda, and it is thought his return is rather doubtful; for the “Révoltés” and other native tribes in those parts accuse him of selling cartridges that will not fit their rifles. But he appears to have been flourishing till quite lately, for the natives in the village where I am staying say that he has sent out a little gang of seven slaves, which passed down the road only the day before yesterday, on their way to San Thomé.

But about that road, which has been for centuries the main slave route from the interior to the Portuguese coast, I shall say more in my next letter, when I have myself passed up and down it for some hundreds of miles and had an opportunity of seeing its present condition.

VI
THE WORST PART OF THE SLAVE ROUTE

I was going east along the main trade route—the main slave route—by which the Bihéans pass to and fro in their traffic with the interior. It is but a continuation of the track from Benguela, on the coast, through the district of Bihé, and it follows the long watershed of Central Africa in the same way. The only place where that watershed is broken is at the passage of the Cuanza, which rises far south of the bank of high ground, but has made its way northward through it at a point some three days’ journey east of the Bihéan fort at Belmonte, and so reaches the sea on the west coast, not very far below Loanda.

It forms the frontier of Bihé, dividing that race of traders from the primitive and savage tribes of the interior. But on both sides along its banks and among its tributaries you find the relics of other races of very different character from the Bihéans—the Luimbi, whose women still wear the old coinage of white cowry-shells in their hair, and the Luchazi, who support their loads with a strap round their foreheads, like the Swiss, and whose women dress their hair with red mud, and carry their babies straddled round the hip instead of round the back.