Sleeping sickness has made the most terrible ravages wherever it has established a firm hold on the tribes, but this scourge would seem to be spending its force. Seven years ago Uganda recorded over 8000 deaths from sleeping sickness within twelve months, and the latest Government report shows that there has been a gradual reduction until in the year 1910 there were only 1546. Happily this encouraging feature is present on the West Coast also. The Congo suffered more than any other colony, due, probably to a large extent, to the systematic oppression under which the population groaned during the Leopoldian régime. Now, however, the absence of the scourge in many of the old districts is quite noticeable. Villages that we knew to be swept by this plague ten years ago are once more flourishing, and in some cases where the birth rate was almost nil the villages are again joyous with the laughter of little children.
The worst sleeping sickness areas remaining in West Africa appeared to me to be the Bangalla region of the Congo and the Portuguese island of Principe. In the latter it has reached such proportions that the whites are leaving the island. The Portuguese still keep a considerable number of slaves on the cocoa farms, all of them either infected or exposed to the disease. As one passes from roça to roça, these slaves, stricken with disease, with emaciated bodies and gaunt features, stare piteously at the passer-by from eyes that seem to stand out from their heads, mutely appealing for the freedom of their distant village homes on the mainland. Looking at the matter from the materialistic standpoint of labour-supply, but makes this ruinous conduct on the part of the Portuguese appear doubly reprehensible.
“Civilization,” too, has contributed to a decrease in the working population, but in a varying degree. All the Powers have sinned in this respect. I never read of punitive expeditions with “many natives killed” without inwardly fuming at the folly of the administration which should know how precious from an economic standpoint alone, is the life of every single native. Yet in some places the tribes are hustled, tormented and even butchered in a manner little realized as yet by the European public. Think of the loss of life by violent death in both Belgian and French Congo, and in German West Africa! Think of the countless thousands of bleaching bones scattered over the highways through Portuguese Angola!
Within the last twenty-five years well over 60,000 slaves have been shipped to San Thomé alone; add to this the thousands sold and still in slavery on the mainland, and you probably have a total of over 100,000 slaves passing into the possession of the whites in Portuguese West Africa. That stream of human merchandize involved a wastage of another 100,000 lives, for a Portuguese slave-trader once admitted that if he got half his total gang to the coast, he was lucky, but that generally he could not deliver more than three out of ten!
It is a haunting thought that since the “85” scramble for Africa, the civilized Powers who rearranged the map of the African continent, ostensibly in the interests and for the well-being of the natives, have passively allowed the premature destruction of not less than ten millions of people. Now these Powers complain bitterly that they are short of labour and jump at any expedient which presents itself to obtain labour for their hustling developments.
COCOA FARM, BELGIAN CONGO.
The sins of King Leopold are visiting themselves upon his successors in every part of the Congo basin. The prospective gold mines, the cocoa farms, the public departments, all of them are handicapped owing to lack of an adequate labour force. If only the Belgians could restore to life an odd million of the able-bodied men and women done to death under the régime of their late sovereign, what a different outlook their colony would possess!
The Belgians now propose bringing Chinese for the Katanga Mines, but seeing that their former experience of Chinese coolies was not a happy one, and considering other drawbacks, I very much doubt whether they will ultimately launch the experiment of bringing thousands of Chinese across Africa. The original idea of the Belgian Government was that of bringing the coolies into the Congo under a regulation which would secure their repatriation at the termination of the contracts, coupling that regulation with others similar to those adopted by Great Britain in South Africa. Mr. R. C. Hawkin,[8] whose knowledge of South African politics is not only wide, but intimate, at once pointed out that the Belgian Administration was restricted by the Berlin and Brussels Acts. This opened up a situation so obviously awkward that nothing more has been heard about the introduction of Chinese labour into the Congo, at least for the present.
WHAT GERMANY LACKS