CENTRAL AFRICAN PYGMIES
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Congo native suffers from ailments. Unlike the average small boy of civilization, he delights in taking medicine. I suppose that he regards it as just another form of food. You hear many amusing stories in connection with medicinal articles. When you give a savage a dozen effective pills, for example, and tell him to take one every night, he usually swallows them all at one time and then he wonders why the results are disastrous. A sorcerer in the Upper Congo region once obtained what was widely acclaimed as miraculous results from a red substance that he got out of a tin. It developed that he had stolen a can of potted beef and was using it as "medicine."
Stanleyville was called the center of the old Arab slave trade. While the odious traffic has long ceased to exist, you occasionally meet an old native who bears the scars of battle with the marauders and who can tell harrowing tales of the cruelties they inflicted.
The slave raiders began their operations in the Congo in 1877, the same year in which Stanley made his historic march across Africa from Zanzibar to the north of the Congo. It was the great explorer who unconsciously blazed the way for the man-hunters. They followed him down the Lualaba River as far as Stanley Falls and discovered what was to them a real human treasure-trove. For twenty years they blighted the country, carrying off tens of thousands of men, women and children and slaughtering thousands in addition. This region was a cannibal stronghold and one bait that lured local allies was the promise of the bodies of all natives slain, for consumption. Belgian pioneers in the Congo who co-operated with the late Baron Dhanis who finally put down the slave trade, have told me that it was no infrequent sight to behold native women going off to their villages with baskets of human flesh. They were part of the spoils of this hideous warfare.
Tippo Tib was lord of this slave-trading domain. This astounding rascal had a distinct personality. He was a master trader and drove the hardest bargain in all Africa. Livingstone, Cameron, Stanley, and Wissmann all did business with him, for he had a monopoly on porters and no one could proceed without his help. He invariably waited until the white man reached the limit of his resources and then exacted the highest price, in true Shylockian fashion.
According to Herbert Ward, the well-known African artist and explorer, who accompanied Stanley on the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, Tippo Tib was something of a philosopher. On one occasion Ward spent the evening with the old Arab. He occupied a wretched house. Rain dripped in through the roof, rats scuttled across the floor, and wind shook the walls. When the Englishman expressed his astonishment that so rich and powerful a chief should dwell in such a mean abode Tippo Tib said:
"It is better that I should live in a house like this because it makes me remember that I am only an ordinary man like others. If I lived in a fine house with comforts I should perhaps end by thinking too much of myself."
Ward also relates another typical story about this blood-thirsty bandit. A missionary once called him to account for the frightful barbarities he had perpetrated, whereupon he received the following reply:
"Ah, yes! You see I was then a young man. Now my hair is turning gray. I am an old man and shall have more consideration."