A Modern Slavery

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

Soon after leaving Bailundu the track divides, and one branch of it runs northwest, past the foot of that toothed mountain, or pike,[10] and so at length reaches the coast at Novo Redondo—a small place with a few sugar-cane plantations for rum and a government agency for slaves. I am told that on this road the slaves are worse treated and more frequently shackled than upon the path I followed, and certainly Novo Redondo is more secret and freer from the interference of foreigners than Benguela. But I think there cannot really be much difference. The majority of slaves are still brought down the old Benguela route, and scattered along it at intervals I have found quite new shackles, still used for pinning the slaves together, chiefly at night, though it is true the shackles near the coast are not nearly so numerous as in the interior.

I was myself determined to follow the old track and come down to the sea by that white path where I had seen the carriers ascending and descending the mountains above Katumbella many months before. Within two days from Bailundu I entered a notorious lion country. Lions are increasing rapidly all along the belt of mountains here, and they do not hesitate to eat mankind, making no prejudiced distinction between white and black. Their general method is to spring into a rest-hut at night and drag off a carrier, or sometimes two, while the camp is asleep. All the rest-camps in this district are strongly stockaded with logs, twelve or fourteen feet high, but carriers are frequently killed in spite of all the stockade. There is one old lion who has made quite a reputation as a man-hunter, and if he had an ancestral hall he could decorate it with the “trophies” of about fifty human heads. He has chosen for his hunting-lodge some cave near the next fort westward from Bailundu, and there at eve he may sometimes be seen at play upon the green. Two officers are stationed in the fort, but they do not care to interfere with the creature’s habits and pursuits. They do not even train their little toy gun on him. Perhaps they are humanitarians. So he devours mankind at leisure.

CARRIERS’ REST-HUTS

When we camped near that fort, my boys insisted I should sleep in a hut inside the stockade instead of half a mile away from them as usual. The huts are made of dry branches covered with dry leaves and grass. Inside that stockade I counted over forty huts, and each hut was crammed with carriers—men, women, and children—for the dry-season trade was beginning. There must have been five or six hundred natives in that camp at night. The stockade rose fourteen feet or more and was impenetrable. The one gate was sealed and barred with enormous logs to keep out the lion. I was myself given a hut in the very centre of the camp as an honor. And in every single hut around me a brilliant fire was lighted for cooking and to keep the carriers warm all night. One spark gone wrong would have burned up the whole five hundred of us without a chance of escape. So when we came to the stockaded camp of the next night I pitched my tent far outside it as usual, and listened to the deep sighing and purring of the lions with great indifference, while the boys marvelled at a rashness which was nothing to their own.

As one goes westward farther into the mountains, the path drops two or three times by sudden, steep descents, like flights of steps down terraces, and at each descent the air becomes closer and the plants and beasts more tropical, till one reaches the deep valleys of the palm, the metallic butterfly, and thousands of yellow monkeys. Beside the route great masses of granite rise, weathered into smooth and unclimbable surface, like the Matopo hills. The carriers from the high interior suffer a good deal at each descent. “We have lost our proper breathing,” they say, and they pine till they return to the clearer air. It is here that many of the slaves try to escape. If they got away, there would not be much chance for them among the shy and apelike natives of the mountain belt, who remain entirely savage and are reputed to be cannibal still. But the slaves try to escape, and are generally brought back to a fate worse than being killed and eaten. On May 17th, five days above Katumbella, I met one of them who had been caught. He was a big Luvale man, naked, his skin torn and bleeding from his wild rush through thorns and rocks. In front and behind him marched one of his owner’s slaves with drawn knives or matchets, two feet long, ready to cut him down if he tried to run again. I asked my boys what would happen to him, and they said he would be flogged to death before the others. I cannot say. I should have thought he was too valuable to kill. He must have been worth over £20 as he stood, and £30 when landed at San Thomé. But, of course, the trader may have thought it would pay better to flog him to death as an example. True, it is not always safe to kill a slave. Last April a man in Benguela flogged a slave to death with a hippo whip, and, no doubt to his great astonishment, he found himself arrested and banished for a time to Mozambique—“the other coast,” as it is called—a far from salubrious home. But five days’ inland along the caravan route the murderer of a slave would be absolutely secure, if he did not mind the loss of the money.

Two days later I met another of those vast caravans of natives, one of which I had seen just the other side of the Cuanza. This caravan numbered nearly seven hundred people, and, under the protection of an enormous Portuguese banner, they were marching up into the interior with bales and stores, wives and children, intending to be absent at least two years for trade. These large bodies of men are a great source of supply to the government slave-agents; for when they find two tribes at war, they hire themselves out to fight for one on condition of selling the captives from the other, and so they secure an immense profit for themselves, while pleasing their allies and bringing an abundance of slaves for the Portuguese government to “redeem” by sending them to labor at San Thomé till their lives end.

The next day’s march brought us to a straight piece of valley, where such a number of rest-huts have been gradually built that the place looks like a large native village. All the little paths from the interior meet here, because it stands at the mouth of a long and very deep valley, sometimes called the cañon, by which alone the next belt of dry and mountainous country can be crossed. The water is dirty and full of sulphur, but it has to be carried in gourds for the next day’s march, because for twenty-five miles there is no water at all.

Natives here come down from the nearest villages and sell sweet-potatoes and maize to the carriers in exchange for salt and chips of tobacco or sips of rum, so that at this season, when the carriers every night number a thousand or more, there is something like a fair. Mixed up with the carriers are the small gangs of slaves, who are collected here in larger parties before being sent on to the coast.

With the help of one of my boys I had some conversation that evening with a woman who was kept waiting for other gangs, just as I was kept waiting because fever made me too weak to move. She was a beautiful woman of about twenty or little more, with a deep-brown skin and a face of much intelligence, full of sorrow. She had come from a very long way off, she said—far beyond the Hungry Country. She thought four moons had gone since they started. She had a husband and three children at home, but was seized by the men of another tribe and sold to a white man for twenty cartridges. She did not know what kind of cartridges they were—they were “things for a gun.” Her last baby was very young, very young. She was still suckling him when they took her away. She did not know where she was going. She supposed it was to Okalunga—a name which the natives use equally for hell or the abyss of death, the abyss of the sea and for San Thomé. She was perfectly right. She was one of the slaves who had been purchased, probably on the Congo frontier, on purpose for the Portuguese government’s agent to “redeem” and send to the plantations. It is a lucrative business to supply such philanthropists with slaves. And it is equally lucrative for the philanthropists to redeem them.