Angola and the River Congo, vol. 1

by Joachim John Monteiro

The only way to put a stop to the awful bloodshed now going on in the interior would be to organize an emigration scheme, under the direct supervision of the several governments who have entered into treaties for the abolition of slavery, and transport the poor wretches, now being murdered in cold blood by thousands, to tropical climates where they might earn their living by the cultivation of those articles necessary for consumption in civilized countries; their constitution would enable them to resist the climate, and they would gradually become civilized.

One great bar to their civilization in Angola, is that no tribe on the coast can be induced to work for wages, except as servants in houses and stores, and even these are mostly slaves of other natives, or work to pay off some fine or penalty incurred in their towns. For some years that I have been collecting the inner bark of the Adansonia digitata, or Baobab tree (the application of which to paper-making I discovered in 1858, and commenced working as a commercial speculation in 1865), I have been unable to induce one single native to hire himself to work by day or piecework; they will cut, prepare, and dry it, and bring it for sale, but nothing will induce them to hire themselves, or their slaves, to a white man.

There are at present in Angola several sugar and cotton plantations worked by slaves, called at present “libertos,” who are meant by the Portuguese Government to work ten years, as a compensation to their owners for the capital expended in their purchase and for their clothing, education and medical treatment. At a near date, the total abolition of slavery in Angola has been decreed, and will come into force; with the inevitable result of the ruin of the plantations, or of its becoming a dead letter in the province.

By the native laws, a black once sold as a slave, and escaping back to his tribe, is considered a free man, so that a planter at present has no hold on his slaves; if they escape into the neighbouring towns, the natives will only deliver them up on the payment of a certain amount, very often more than he had cost in the first instance.

No amount of kindness or good done to a negro will have the slightest influence in preventing him from leaving his benefactor without as much as a “good-bye,” or a shadow of an excuse, and very often going from a pampered existence to the certainty of the hard fare and life of their free condition, and this, not from the slightest idea of love of freedom, or anything of the kind, but simply from an animal instinct to live a lazy and vegetative existence.

When I was at Cuio, working a copper deposit, a black called Firmino, the slave of a Portuguese there, attached himself very much to me, and was, seemingly, never so happy as when accompanying me in my trips and rambles, and not from any payment I gave him, beyond a small and occasional present. When his master was leaving the place, Firmino came crying to me, begging me to buy him, that he might remain in my service as my slave, promising that he would never leave me.

His master generally treating him with harshness, if not cruelty, I took pity on him, and gave 13l. 10s. for him, a high and fancy price there, but he was considered worth it from his great size and strength, his speaking Portuguese perfectly, and good qualities generally.

I explained to him that although I had bought him, he was a free man, and could go at once if he liked; but that as long as he remained in my service as my personal attendant, he should have clothes and pay. He went on his knees to thank me and to swear in negro fashion, by making a cross in the dust with his forefinger, that he would never leave me. A fortnight after, having to send him with a bundle of clothes from Benguella to Cuio, he delivered them to the person they were addressed to, but joined three slaves in stealing a boat and sailing to Loanda.

A month after I received a letter from the police there advising me that a nigger called Firmino had been caught with others in an extensive robbery, and claimed to be my slave. I answered that he was no slave of mine, detailing the circumstances of my freeing him, and asking that he should be dealt with as he deserved. He was punished and drafted as a soldier at Loanda, and on my meeting him there one day and asking him his reason for leaving me, and treating me so ungratefully, he said that “he did not know why he had done so;” and I do not believe he did, or ever tried to find out, or bothered his head any more about it.

It is no use disguising the fact that the negro race is, mentally, differently constituted from the white, however disagreeable and opposed this may be to the usual and prevailing ideas in this country. I do not believe, and I fearlessly assert, that there is hardly such a thing possible as the sincere conversion of a single negro to Christianity whilst in Africa, and under the powerful influence of their fellows. No progress will be made in the condition of the negro as long as the idea prevails that he can be reasoned out of his ignorance and prejudices, and his belief in fetish, or that he is the equal of the white man; in fact, he must remain the same as he is now, until we learn to know him properly, and what he really is.