A Modern Slavery

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

But with slaves less trouble is taken. After a certain amount of beating and prodding, they are killed or left to die. Carriers are always buried by their comrades. You pass many of their graves, hung with strips of rag or decorated with a broken gourd. But slaves are never buried, and that is an evidence that the bones on the path are the bones of slaves. The Bihéans have a sentiment against burying slaves. They call it burying money. It is something like their strong objections to burying debtors. The man who buries a debtor becomes responsible for the debts; so the body is hung up on a bush outside the village, and the jackals consume it, being responsible for nothing.

Before the great change made by the “Bailundu war” of 1902, the horrors of the Hungry Country were undoubtedly worse than they are now. I have known Englishmen who passed through it four years ago and found slaves tied to the trees, with their veins cut so that they might die slowly, or laid beside the path with their hands and feet hewn off, or strung up on scaffolds with fires lighted beneath them. My carriers tell me that this last method of encouraging the others is still practised away from the pathway, but I never saw it done myself. I never saw distinct evidence of torture. The horrors of the road have certainly become less in the last three years, since the rebellion of 1902. Rebellion is always good. It always implies an unendurable wrong. It is the only shock that ever stirs the self-complacency of officials.

I have not seen torture in the Hungry Country. I have only seen murder. Every bone scattered along that terrible foot-path from Mashiko to the Cuanza is the bone of a murdered man. The man may not have been killed by violence, though in most cases the sharp-cut hole in the skull shows where the fatal stroke was given. But if he was not killed by violence, he was taken from his home and sold, either for the buyer’s use, or to sell again to a Bihéan, to a Portuguese trader, or to the agents who superintend the “contract labor” for San Thomé, and are so useful in supplying the cocoa-drinkers of England and America, as well as in enriching the plantation-owners and the government. The Portuguese and such English people as love to stand well with Portuguese authority tell us that most of the men now sold as slaves are criminals, and so it does not matter. Very well, then; let us make a lucrative clearance of our own prisons by selling the prisoners to our mill-owners as factory-hands. We might even go beyond our prisons. It is easy to prove a crime against a man when you can get £10 or £20 by selling him. And if each of us that has committed a crime may be sold, who shall escape the shackles?

The most recent case of murder that I saw was on my return through the Hungry Country, the sixth day out from Mashiko. The murdered man was lying about ten yards from the path hidden in deep grass and bracken. But for the smell I should have passed the place without noticing him as I have no doubt passed scores, and perhaps hundreds, of other skeletons that lie hidden in that forest. How long the man had been murdered I could not say, for decay in Africa varies with the weather, but the ants generally contrive that it shall be quick. I think the thing must have been done since I passed the place on my way into the country, about a month before. But possibly it was a few days earlier. My “headman” had heard of the event (a native hears everything), but it did not impress him or the other carriers in the least. It was far too common. Unhappily I do not understand enough Umbundu to make out the exact date or the details, except that the man was a slave who broke down with the usual shivering fever on the road and was killed with an axe because he could go no farther. As to the cause of death there was no doubt. When I tried to raise the head, the thick, woolly hair came off in my hand like a woven pad, leaving the skull bare, and revealing the deep gash made by the axe at the base of the skull just before it merges with the neck. As I set it down again, the skull broke off from the backbone and fell to one side. Having laid a little earth upon the body, I went on. It would take an army of sextons to bury all the poor bones which consecrate that path.

Yet, in spite of the shackles hanging on the trees, and in spite of the skeletons upon the path and the bodies of recently murdered men, I have not seen a slave caravan such as has been described to me by almost every traveller who has passed along that route into the interior. I mean, I have not seen a gang of slaves chained together, their hands shackled, and their necks held fast in forked sticks. I am not sure of the reason; there were probably many reasons combined. It is just the end of the wet season, just the time when the traders think of sending in for slaves, and not of bringing them out. Directly the natives in the Bihéan village near which I was staying heard I was going to Mashiko, though they knew nothing of my object, they said, “Now a messenger will be sent ahead to warn the slave-traders that an Englishman is coming.” The same was told me by two Englishmen who traversed the country last autumn for the mining concession, and in my case I have not the slightest doubt that messengers were sent. Again, a Portuguese trader, living on the farther side of the Hungry Country, upon the Mushi-Moshi (the Simoï, as the Portuguese classically call it), told me the drivers now bring the slaves through unknown bush-paths north of the old route. He kept a store which, being on the edge of the Hungry Country, was as frequented and lucrative as a wine-and-spirit house must be on the frontier of a prohibition State. And he was the only Portuguese I have met who recognized the natives as fellow-subjects, and even as fellow-men, with rights of their own. He also boasted, I think justly, of the good effects of the war in 1902.

All these reasons may have contributed. But still I think that the old caravan system has been reduced within the last three years. The shock to public feeling in Portugal owing to the Bailundu war and its revelations; the disgrace of certain officers at the forts, who were convicted of taking a percentage of slaves from the passing caravans as hush-money; the strong action of Captain Amorim in trying to suppress the whole traffic; the instructions to the forts to allow no chained gangs to pass—all these things have, I believe, acted as a check upon the old-fashioned methods. There is also an increased risk in obtaining slaves from the interior in large batches. The Belgians strongly oppose the entrance of the traders into their state, partly because guns and powder are the usual exchange for slaves, partly because they wish to retain their own natives under their own tender mercies. The line of Belgian forts along the frontier is quickly increasing. Some Bihéan traders have been shot. In one recent case, much talked of, a bullet from a Maxim gun struck the head of a gang of slaves, marching as usual in single file, and killed nine in succession. In any case, the traders seem to have discovered that the palmy days when they used to parade their chained gangs through the country, and burn, flog, torture, and cut throats as they pleased, are over for the present. For many months after the war even the traffic to San Thomé almost ceased. It has begun again now and is rapidly increasing. As I noted in a former letter, an order was issued in December, 1904, requiring the government agents to press on the supply. But at present, I think, the slaves are coming down in smaller gangs. They are not, as a rule, tortured; they are shackled only at night, and the traders take a certain amount of pains to conceal the whole traffic, or at least to make it look respectable.

As to secrecy, they are not entirely successful. A man whose word no one in Central Africa would think of doubting has just sent down notice from the interior that a gang of two hundred and fifty slaves passed through the Nanakandundu district, bound for the coast, in the end of February (1905), shackles and all. The man who brought the message had done his best to avoid the gang, fearing for his life. But there is no doubt they are coming through, and I ought to have met them near Mashiko if they had not taken a by-path or been broken up into small groups.

It was probably such a small group that I met within a day’s journey of Caiala, the largest trading-house in Bihé. I was walking at about half an hour’s distance from the road, when suddenly I came upon a party of eighteen or twenty boys and four men hidden in the bush. At sight of me they all ran away, the men driving the boys before them. But they left two long chicotes or sjamboks (hide whips) hanging on the trees, as well as the very few light loads they had with them. After a time I returned, and they ran away again. I then noticed that they posted a man on a tree-top to observe my movements, and he remained there till I trekked on with my own people. Of course the evidence is not conclusive, but it is suspicious. Men armed with chicotes do not hide a group of boys in the bush for nothing, and it is most probable that they formed part of a gang going into Bihé for sale.

I may have passed many such groups on my journey without knowing it, for it is a common trick of the traders now to get up the slaves as ordinary carriers. But among all of them, there was only one which was obviously a slave gang, almost without concealment. My carriers detected them at once, and I heard the word “apeka” (slaves)[3] passed down the line even before I came in sight of them. The caravan numbered seventy-eight in all. In front and rear were four men with guns, and there were six of them in the centre. The whole caravan was organized with a precision that one never finds among free carriers, and nearly the whole of it consisted of boys under fourteen. This in itself would be almost conclusive, for no trade caravan would contain anything like that proportion of boys, whereas boys are the most easily stolen from native villages in the interior, and, on the whole, they pay the cost of transport best. But more conclusive even than the appearance of the gang was the quiet evidence of my own carriers, who had no reason for lying, who never pointed out another caravan of slaves, and yet had not a moment’s doubt as to this.

The importation of slaves from the interior into Angola may not be what it was. It may not be conducted under the old methods. There is no longer that almost continuous procession of chained and tortured men and women which all travellers who crossed the Hungry Country before 1902 describe. For the moment rubber has become almost as lucrative as man. The traffic has been driven underground. There is now a feeling of shame and risk about it, and the military authorities dare not openly give it countenance as before. But I have never heard of any case in which they openly interfered to stop it, and the thing still goes on. It is, in fact, fast recovering from the shock of the rebellion of 1902, and is now increasing again every month.