THE END OF THE SLAVE. TWO SLAVES CARRYING DEAD COMRADE IN SACK TO BURIAL.
To many managers definite acts of cruelty would be highly repulsive. It is furthermore very obvious that not a few owners and planters do everything which science and money can provide to make the lot of the slave a happy one. The planters argue with much warmth and sincerity of conviction that the labourers are better housed, fed, and clothed on the plantations than they would be in their mainland villages. Their melancholy demeanour and their insistent desire for liberty, the low birth rate and frightful mortality amongst the slaves is put down very largely to the gross obstinacy and stupidity of the enslaved negroes.
If the planters are questioned upon the desire of the slaves to regain their liberty they reply that this would be an act of injustice because many of the labourers have forgotten the districts from which they were originally “recruited” and that even if complete repatriation were carried through the men and women repatriated would probably fall a prey to evil influences on the mainland.
The attitude assumed by the Portuguese authorities towards the question of slavery in their West African colonies has hitherto been first of all one of inferential denial that slavery exists, and secondly they call attention to the elaborate regulations framed for protecting the natives from any infringement of their liberties.
On paper, the labourers are contracted for short periods of service in Angola and the cocoa islands; are said to have a happier lot than any other contract labourers in the world; and that any who so desire are free to return to their homes at the termination of their contracts. A great deal more is on paper which, if practices only accorded with the minimum of professions, would assure the cessation of slavery in Portuguese West Africa.
Perhaps nothing written in the earlier days upon this question has brought out so forcibly the “ownership” feature of labour conditions as the disclosures made in the Cadbury—Standard libel action. In that trial Sir Edward Carson called attention to a circular forwarded to Messrs. Cadbury referring to the sale of an estate in San Thomé. The stock enumerated included one item, “Two hundred black labourers ... £3555.” This gives the average price of the slaves as £18 per capita, taking the sick with the healthy and the young with the old. Various prices are quoted as the value of the slaves, but this depends, of course, upon physique, sex and age. Mr. Joseph Burtt, the Commissioner of the cocoa firms, gives £25 to £40, whilst Mr. Consul Nightingale stated £50 as the average price. When in Portuguese West Africa several of the slaves were even able to tell us the prices at which they were purchased by the different middlemen, and occasionally even by Portuguese themselves.
The evidence now to hand of the existence of both the slave-trade and slavery is overwhelming.
SIR EDWARD GREY’S “BEYOND DOUBT”
On November 22nd, 1909, the Portuguese Foreign Minister called upon Sir Edward Grey, apparently with the object of discussing this question, and in conversation the Foreign Minister informed M. Du Bocage that the information he “had received from private sources placed beyond doubt[10] the fact that it had been the custom for natives to be captured in the interior by people who were really slave-dealers; the captured natives were then brought down to the coast and went to work in the Portuguese islands.”
On the 26th of October last, Sir Arthur Hardinge, whose intimate knowledge of slavery questions is probably unequalled, informed the Portuguese Minister for Foreign Affairs that when he was in Brussels, he “had heard serious complaints in official circles at Brussels of the way in which slaves were kidnapped by Angola caravans from the Kasai district of the Congo, which shewed that the charges made did not emanate solely from missionaries or philanthropic sentimentalists.”