A Modern Slavery

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

So the matter stands, and the villagers must go on selling more and more of their wives and children that the white man’s greed may be satisfied.

A day or two farther on I turned aside from the main track to visit one of the agents whom the government has specially appointed to conduct the purchase of slaves for the islands of San Thomé and Principe. There are two agents officially recognized in the Bihé district. On my way I met an old native notorious for a prosperous career of slave-trading. At the moment he was leading along a finely built man by a halter round his neck, but at sight of me he dropped the end of rope. A man who was with me charged him at once with having just sold two of his own slaves—a man and a woman—for San Thomé. He protested with righteous indignation. He would never think of doing such a thing! Sell for San Thomé! He would even give a long piece of cloth to rescue a native from such a fate! Yet, beyond question, he had sold the man and woman to the Agent that morning. They were at the Agent’s house when I arrived, and I was told he had only failed to sell the other slave because his price was too high.

The Agent himself was polite and hospitable. Business was pretty brisk. I knew he had sent off eight slaves to the coast only three days before, with orders that they should carry their own shackles and be carefully pinned together at night. But we talked only of the rumored division of the Congo, for on the other subject he was naturally a little shy, and I found out long afterwards that he knew the main object of my journey.[6] Next day, however, he was alone with the friend who had accompanied me, and he then attempted to defend his position as Agent by saying the object of the government was to buy up slaves through their special agents and “redeem” them from slavery by converting them into “contract laborers” for San Thomé. The argument was ingenious. The picture of a pitiful government willing to purchase the freedom of all slaves without thought of profit, and only driven to contract them for San Thomé because otherwise the expense would be unbearable—it is almost pathetic. But the Agent knew, as every one out here knows, that the people whom the government buys and “redeems” have been torn from their homes and families on purpose to be “redeemed”; that but for the purchases by the government agents for San Thomé the whole slave-traffic would fall to pieces; and that the actual condition of these “contracted laborers” upon the islands does not differ from slavery in any point of importance.

Leaving on the right the volcanic district of North Bihé, with its boiling springs and great deposits of magnesia, the path to the coast continues to run westward and a point or two south through country typical of Africa’s central plateau. There are the usual wind-swept spaces of bog and yellow grass, the usual rolling lines of scrubby forest, and the shallow valleys with narrow channels of water running through morass. The path skirts the northern edge of the high, wet plain of Bouru-Bouru, and on the same day, after passing this, I saw far away in the west a little blue point of mountain, hanging like an island upon the horizon. A few hours afterwards bare rock began to appear through the bog-earth and sand of the forest, and next morning new mountains came into sight from hour to hour as I advanced, till there was quite a cluster of little blue islands above the dark edges of the trees.

The day after, when I had been walking for about two hours through the monotonous woods, the upland suddenly broke. It was quick and unexpected as the snapping of a bowstring, and far below me was revealed a great expanse of country—broad valleys leading far away to the west and north, isolated groups of many-colored mountains, bare and shapely hills of granite and sandstone, and one big, jagged tooth or pike of purple rock, rising sheer from a white plain thinly sprinkled with trees and marked with watercourses. The whole scene, bare and glowing under the cloudless sky of an African winter, was like those delicate landscapes in nature’s most friendly wilderness which the Umbrians used to paint as backgrounds to the Baptist or St. Jerome or a Mother and Child. To one who has spent many months among the black forest, the marshes and sand-hills of Bihé and the Hungry Country, it gleams with a radiance of jewels, and is full of the inward stir and longing that the sudden vision of mountains always brings.[7]

At the top of the hill was a large sweet-potato plantation for rum. A gang of twenty-three slaves—chiefly women—was clearing a new patch from the bush for an extension of the fields. Over them, as usual, stood a Portuguese ganger, who encouraged their efforts with blows from a long black chicote, or hippo whip, which he rapidly tried to conceal down his trousers leg at sight of me.

At the foot of the hill, where a copious stream of water ran, a similar rum-factory had just been constructed. The hideous main building—gaunt as a Yorkshire mill—the whitewashed rows of slave-huts, the newly broken fields, the barrels just beginning to send out a loathsome stench of new spirit—all were as fresh and vile as civilization could make them. As we passed, the slaves were just enjoying a holiday for the burial of one of their number who had died that morning. They were gathered in a large crowd round the grave on the edge of the bush. Presently six of them brought out the body, wrapped in an old blanket, rolled it sideways into the shallow trench, and covered it up with earth and stones. As we climbed the next hill, my carriers, who were much interested, kept saying to one another: “Slaves! Poor slaves!” Then we heard a bell ring. The people began to crawl back to their work. The slaves’ holiday was over.

We had now passed from Bihé into the district of Bailundu, and the mountains stood around us as we descended, their summits rising little higher than the level of the Bihéan plateau—say five to six thousand feet above the sea. A detached hill in front of us was conspicuous for its fortified look. From the distance it was like one of the castellated rocks of southern France. It was the old Umbala, or king’s fortress, of Bailundu, and here the native kings used to live in savage magnificence before the curse of the white men fell. On the summit you still may see the king’s throne of three great rocks, the heading-stone where his enemies suffered, the stone of refuge to which a runaway might cling and gain mercy by declaring himself the king’s slave, the royal tombs with patterned walls hidden in a depth of trees, and the great flat rock where the women used to dance in welcome to their warriors returning from victory. One day I scrambled up and saw it all in company with a man who remembered the place in its high estate and had often sat beside the king in judgment. But all the glory is departed now. The palace was destroyed and burned in 1896. The rock of refuge and the royal throne are grown over with tall grasses. Leopards and snakes possess them merely, and it is difficult even to fight one’s way up the royal ascent through the tangle of the creepers and bush.[8]

At the foot of the hill, within a square of ditch and rampart, stands the Portuguese fort, the scene of the so-called “Bailundu war” of 1902. It was here that the native rising began, owing to a characteristic piece of Portuguese treachery, the Commandant having seized a party of native chiefs who were visiting him, at his own invitation, under promise of peace and safe-conduct. The whole affair was paltry and wretched. The natives displayed their usual inability to combine; the Portuguese displayed their usual cowardice. But, as I have shown before, the effect of the outbreak was undoubtedly to reduce the horrors of the slave-trade for a time. The overwhelming terror of the slave-traders and other Portuguese, who crept into hiding to shelter their precious lives, showed them they had gone too far. The atrocious history of Portuguese cruelty and official greed which reached Lisbon at last did certainly have some effect upon the national conscience. As I have mentioned in earlier letters, Captain Amorim of the artillery was sent out to mitigate the abominations of the trade, and for a time, at all events, he succeeded. Owing to terror, the export of slaves to San Thomé ceased altogether for about six months after the rising. It has gone back to its old proportions now—the numbers averaging about four thousand head a year (not including babies), and gradually rising.[9] But since then the traders have not dared to practise the same open cruelties as before, and the new regulations for slave-traffic—known as the Decree of January 29, 1903—do, at all events, aim at tempering the worst abuses, though their most important provisions are invariably evaded.

Only a mile or two from the fort, and quite visible from the rocks of the old Umbala, stands the American mission village of Bailundu—I believe the oldest mission in Angola except the early Jesuits’. It was founded in 1881, and for more than twenty years has been carried on by Mr. Stover and Mr. Fay, who are still conducting it. The Portuguese instigated the natives to drive them out once, and have wildly accused them of stirring up war, protecting the natives, and other crimes. But the mission has prospered in spite of all, and its village is now, I think, the prettiest in Angola. How long it may remain in its present beautiful situation one cannot say. Twenty years ago it was surrounded only by natives, but now the Portuguese have crept up to it with their rum and plantations and slavery, and where the Portuguese come neither natives nor missions can hope to stay long. It may be that in a year or two the village will be deserted, as the American mission village of Saccanjimba, a few days farther east, has lately been deserted, and the houses will be occupied by Portuguese convicts with a license to trade, while the church becomes a rum-store. In that case the missionaries will be wise to choose a place outside the fifty-kilometre radius from a fort, beyond which limit no Portuguese trader may settle. So true it is that in modern Africa an honest man has only the whites to fear. But unhappily new forts are now being constructed at two or three points along this very road.