A Modern Slavery

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

That is one of the things that make us anarchists. Probably there was hardly any one on Fernando Po, though it is a slave island itself, who would not willingly have saved those men if he had been left to his own instincts. But directly the state authority came in, their cause was hopeless. So it is that wherever you touch government you seem to touch the devil.

The eighteen were taken back to Principe, flogged almost to death in the jail, returned to their owners, and any of them who survive are still at work on the plantations, with but the memory of that brief happiness and overwhelming defeat to think upon.

When escaping slaves have reached the Cameroons, the Germans resolutely refuse to give them back, and by that refusal they have done much to cover the errors and harshness of their own colonial system. What would happen now to slaves who reached Nigeria or the Gold Coast, one hardly dares to think. There was a time when we used to hear fine stories of slaves falling on the beach when they touched British territory and kissing the soil of freedom. But that was long ago, and since then England has grown rich and fallen from her high estate. Her hands are no longer clean, and when people think of Johannesburg and Queensland and western Australia, all she may say of freedom becomes an empty sound, impressing no one.

Last April (1905) another of the planters discovered a party of eight of his own slaves just launching a canoe in hopes of escaping with better success. They had crammed the canoe with provisions—slaughtered pigs, meal, and water-casks—so many things that the planter told me it would certainly have sunk and drowned them all. To prevent this lamentable catastrophe he took them to the jail, had them flogged almost to death by the jailer there, and brought them back to the huts which they had so rashly attempted to leave in spite of their legal contract and their supposed willingness to work on the plantations.

In the interior, the island of Principe rises into great peaks, not so high as the mountains of San Thomé, but very much more precipitous. There is one peak especially where the rock falls so sheer that I think it would be inaccessible to the best climber on that side. I have not discovered the exact height of the mountains, but I should estimate them as something between four and five thousand feet, and they, like the whole island, are covered with forest and tropical growth, except where the rock is too steep and smooth to give any hold for roots. But, as a rule, one sees the mountains only by glimpses, for when I have passed the island or landed there they have always been wrapped in slowly moving mist, and I believe they are seldom clear of it. The mist falls in a soaking drizzle, and it seems to rain heavily, besides, almost every day, even in the dry season. Perhaps the moisture is almost too great, for I noticed more rot upon the cocoa-pods here than at San Thomé.

Into these dripping forests and almost inaccessible mountains the slaves are constantly trying to escape. A planter told me that many of them do not realize what an island is. They hope to be able to make their way home on foot. When they discover that the terrible sea foams all round them, they turn into the forest and build little huts, from which they are continually moving away. Here and there they plant little patches of maize or other food with seed which they steal from the plantations or which is secretly conveyed to them by the other slaves. Some kind of communication is evidently kept up, for it is thought the plantation slaves always know where the runaways are, and sometimes betray them. I saw one man who had been living with them in the forest himself and had come back with his hand cut off and his head split open, probably for treachery. We asked him the reason; we asked him to tell us something of the life out there; but at once he assumed the native’s impenetrable look and would not speak another word.

Women as well as men escape from time to time and join these fine vindicators of freedom in the woods, but, chiefly owing to the deadly climate and the extreme hardship of their life, the people do not increase in numbers. About a thousand was the highest figure I heard given for them; about two hundred the lowest. The number most generally quoted was six hundred, but, in fact, it is quite impossible to count them at all, for they are always changing their camps and are rarely seen. The cotton cloths in which they escape go to pieces very soon, and they all live in entire nakedness, except when the women take the trouble to string together a few plantain leaves as aprons. Among them, however, they have some clever craftsmen. They make good bows and arrows for hunting the civet-cats and other animals that form their chief food, and I have seen a two-handled saw made out of a common knife or matchet—a very ingenious piece of work. It was found in the hands of one of them who had been shot.

For the most part they live a wandering and hard, but I hope not an entirely unhappy, existence in the dense forest around the base of that precipitous mountain of which I spoke. Every now and again the Portuguese organize man-hunts to recapture or kill them off. Forming a kind of cordon, they sweep over parts of the island, tying up or shooting all they may find. But the Portuguese are so cowardly and incapable in their undertakings that they are no match for alert natives filled with the recklessness of despair, and the massacre has never yet been complete. In fact, the hunting-parties are often broken up by dissensions among rival strategists, and sometimes they appear to degenerate into convivial meetings, at which drink is the object and murder the excuse.

Recently, however, there was a very successful shoot. The sportsmen had been led by guides to a place where the escaped slaves were known to be rather thick in the forest. They came upon huts evidently just abandoned. Beside them, hidden in the grass, they found an old man. “We took him,” said the planter who told me the story, with all a sportsman’s relish, “and we forced him to tell us where the others were. At first we could not squeeze a word or sign out of him. After a long time, without saying anything, he lifted a hand towards the highest trees, and there we saw the slaves, men and women, clinging like bats to the under side of the branches. It was not long, I can tell you, before we brought them crashing down through the leaves on to the ground. My word, we had grand sport that day!”

I can imagine no more noble existence than has fallen to those poor and naked blacks, who have dared all for freedom, and, scorning the stall-fed life of slavery, have chosen rather to throw themselves upon such mercy as nature has, to wander together in nakedness and hunger from forest to forest and hut to hut, to live in daily apprehension of murder, to lurk like apes under the high branches, and at last to fall to the bullets of the Christians, dead, but of no further service to the commercial gentlemen who bought them and lose £30 by every death.