“The strangest disease,” says Livingstone, “I have seen in this country is broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been kidnapped and made slaves.” Of a large gang that had been captured by Syde bin Habib, many died three days after they crossed the Lualaba. Enduring their chains till then, when they saw the broad river rolling between them and their old homes, they lost all spirit and hope. They ascribed their only pain to the heart, and placed their hands on their breasts, exactly over that organ. Some slavers expressed surprise that they should die, seeing that they had plenty to eat and no work. “Children would keep up with remarkable endurance; but if, perchance, passing near a village, and hearing the sound of dancing and the merry tinkle of the small drums, the memories of home and happy days would prove too much for them; they cried and sobbed, the ‘broken heart’ came on, and they rapidly sank.”
The atrocity of the system was forcibly expressed by an English sailor, who had opportunity of seeing the slave-traders in their business. “Shiver my timbers, mate, if the devil don’t catch these fellows, we might as well have no devil at all!”
“The Ujiji slavers,” he says, “like the Kilwa and Portuguese, are the vilest of the vile. It is not a trade, but a system of consecutive murders. They go to plunder and kidnap, and every trading-trip is nothing but a foray.” His idea at first that there were degrees in the atrocities and sufferings inflicted upon the slaves, and that the barbarities perpetrated by the Portuguese of Tette are absent from the slave traffic, as conducted by the Arabs, was wholly corrected. The better he came to know the system, the more convinced was he that it is everywhere and by whomsoever pursued only a story of murder, horror, and destruction.
“While endeavoring to give some account of the slave-trade in East Africa,” says Livingstone, “it was necessary to keep far within the truth in order not to be thought guilty of exaggeration. To overdraw its evils is simply an impossibility. The sights I have seen, though common incidents of the traffic, are so nauseous that I always strive to drive them from memory. In the case of most disagreeable recollections, I can succeed in time in consigning them to oblivion; but the slaving scenes come back unbidden, and make me start up at dead of night horrified by their vividness.” After an assault upon a village, in which several were killed and women and children captured, he writes in his diary these words: “I am heart-sore and sick of human blood.”
The Gellahbas, as the slave-dealers of Equatorial Africa are called, are first the petty traders, who, with a small stock of goods, start forth each with his ass or bullock, on which he rides from village to village. His cloth will purchase two or three slaves, and exchanging the donkey for one or two more, the return is commenced on foot. His slaves are compelled to carry all the articles needed on the journey. His stock in trade, worth perhaps $25, has been exchanged for four or five slaves, that will bring in Khartoom $250. And yet the journeys of these speculative traders are not always lucrative to the peddler. If the donkey chance to die, the enterprise is a failure, as his goods have to be sold at a ruinous sacrifice. The slaves also frequently escape, and thus loss is entailed. Schweinfurth says of them, “Their powers of endurance are wonderful. I repeatedly asked them what induced them to leave their homes to suffer the greatest hardships in a strange land, for the sake of pursuing an occupation attended with so much pecuniary hazard. ‘We want groosh,’ they would reply. Too lazy to work at home, it is the irresistible propensity to traffic in human beings that impels them to this toilsome life.
Besides these travelling traders, there are also wholesale slave-merchants, who have their agents or partners permanently established in the large Scribas. These traverse the country protected by a large retinue of armed slaves, and with long trains of oxen and asses, loaded with goods for exchange, they are able to purchase large numbers of slaves. Generally these agents are priests or Fakis, though this name is usually applied to those who interpret the Scriptures. Strange as it may seem, and almost incredible, it is an incontrovertible fact that this slave business is included among the secondary occupations of these Fakis, and with very few exceptions they are more or less involved in the iniquitous traffic. To multiply facilities for securing slaves, they act as retail dealers, brokers, quacks, match-makers, and school-masters. The richer and more intelligent class act as directors of schools, or are proprietors of inns, where they have sub-agents to advance their interests. “The doctrines of the Prophet,” says Schweinfurth, “are taught in their schools, and the merissa-shops are dedicated in a large degree to the worship of Venus. But in spite of everything, these people are held in the greatest veneration.
“A few words will suffice to exhibit these holy men in their true colors. With the Suras of the Koran in hand, they rove all over the country, leading what might be termed a life of perpetual prayer. But the wide difference between faith and practice is exemplified in the unrighteous dealings of these Fakis. Never did I see slaves so mercilessly treated as by these fanatics, and yet they would confer upon the poor souls, whom they purchased, like stolen goods, for a mere bagatelle, the most religious of names, such as Allagabo (i. e., ‘given of God’).” Schweinfurth, who had witnessed their abominable cruelties, adds that their treatment of the sick and dying was “such as a common scavenger would not inflict upon a dying dog.”
He mentions another hideous atrocity connected with their business—the emasculation of boys so as to fit them for the position of the eunuch. It is perpetrated as soon after capture as convenient, and though attempted only upon children of a tender age, it is said that four fifths of those thus mutilated perish from the injuries they receive. This infernal crime,—which is committed principally by the Fakis, who traverse the country with the Koran in one hand and the operating-knife in the other, is peculiar to Moslem slavery alone, and specially entitles it to be called an accursed system, deserving to be swept from the earth in the fiery indignation of all civilized peoples.
There is another class who supply the slave-markets of the East. This consists of the colonized slave-dealers, who live on their own property. These are the only ones who penetrate beyond the Scribas into the negro countries with bands of armed men, and return with great caravans of slaves.
The price paid for slaves varies of course, according to the difficulty of obtaining them, and as cotton, the principal medium of exchange, fluctuates in value. In 1871 Schweinfurth found that sittahsi (literally six spans high), that is children eight or ten years of age, were bought for £1 10s., or about $7.00 in our currency. Women slaves, if specially attractive, cost double this price.