The Congo and Coasts of Africa

by Richard Harding Davis

But at last the ship's whistle blew with raucous persistence. It was final and heartless. It rang down the curtain on the mirage which once a month comes to mock Chinde with memories of English villages, of well-kept lawns melting into the Thames, of London asphalt and flashing hansoms. With a jangling of bells in the engine-room the mirage disappeared, and in five minutes to the exiles of Chinde the Kanzlar became a gray tub with a pennant of smoke on the horizon line.

I have known some men for many years, smoked and talked with them until improper hours of the morning, known them well enough to borrow their money, even their razors, and parted from them with never a pang. But when our ship abandoned those boys to the unclean land behind them, I could see them only in a blurred and misty group. We raised our hats to them and tried to cheer, but it was more of a salute than a cheer. I had never seen them before, I shall never meet them again—we had just burned signals as our ships passed in the night—and yet, I must always consider among the friends I have lost, those white-clad youths who are making the ways straight for others through the dripping jungles of the Zambesi, "the only respectable members of Chinde Society."[ *]

[*] NOTE—I did not lose the white-clad youths. The lieutenant now is the commander of a cruiser, and the consul, a consul-general; and they write me that the editor of the Chinde newspaper, on his editorial page, has complained that he, also, should be included among the respectable members of Chinde Society. He claims his absence at Tete, at the time of the visit of the Kanzlar, alone prevented his social position being publicly recognized. That justice may be done, he, now, is officially, though tardily, created a member of Chinde's respectable society. R.H.D.

The profession of the slave-trader, unless it be that of his contemporary, the pirate preying under his black flag, is the one which holds you with the most grewsome and fascinating interest. Its inhumanity, its legends of predatory expeditions into unknown jungles of Africa, the long return marches to the Coast, the captured blacks who fall dead in the trail, the dead pulling down with their chains those who still live, the stifling holds of the slave-ships, the swift flights before pursuing ships-of-war, the casting away, when too closely chased, of the ship's cargo, and the sharks that followed, all of these come back to one as he walks the shore-wall of Mozambique. From there he sees the slave-dhows in the harbor, the jungles on the mainland through which the slaves came by the thousands, and still come one by one, and the ancient palaces of the Portuguese governors, dead now some hundreds of years, to whom this trade in human agony brought great wealth, and no loss of honor.

Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar.

Mozambique in the days of her glory was, with Zanzibar, the great slave-market of East Africa, and the Portuguese and the Arabs who fattened on this traffic built themselves great houses there, and a fortress capable, in the event of a siege, of holding the garrison and all the inhabitants as well. To-day the slave-trade brings to those who follow it more of adventure than of financial profit, but the houses and the official palaces and the fortress still remain, and they are, in color, indescribably beautiful. Blue and pink and red and light yellow are spread over their high walls, and have been so washed and chastened by the rain and sun, that the whole city has taken on the faint, soft tints of a once brilliant water-color. The streets themselves are unpeopled, empty and strangely silent. Their silence is as impressive as their beauty. In the heat of the day, which is from sunrise to past sunset, you see no one, you hear no footfall, no voices, no rumble of wheels or stamp of horses' hoofs. The bare feet of the native, who is the only human being who dares to move abroad, makes no sound, and in Mozambique there are no carriages and no horses. Two bullock-carts, which collect scraps and refuse from the white staring streets, are the only carts in the city, and with the exception of a dozen 'rikshas are the only wheeled vehicles the inhabitants have seen.

I have never visited a city which so impressed one with the fact that, in appearance, it had remained just as it was four hundred years before. There is no decay, no ruins, no sign of disuse; it is, on the contrary, clean and brilliantly beautiful in color, with dancing blue waters all about it, and with enormous palms moving above the towering white walls and red tiled roofs, but it is a city of the dead. The open-work iron doors, with locks as large as letter-boxes, are closed, the wooden window-shutters are barred, and the wares in the shops are hidden from the sidewalk by heavy curtains. There is a park filled with curious trees and with flowers of gorgeous color, but the park is as deserted as a cemetery; along the principal streets stretch mosaic pavements formed of great blocks of white and black stone, they look like elongated checker-boards, but no one walks upon them, and though there are palaces painted blue, and government buildings in Pompeiian red, and churches in chaste gray and white, there are no sentries to guard the palaces, nor no black-robed priests enter or leave the churches. They are like the palaces of a theatre, set on an empty stage, and waiting for the actors. It will be a long time before the actors come to Mozambique. It is, and will remain, a city of the fifteenth century. It is now only a relic of a cruel and barbarous period, when the Portuguese governors, the "gentlemen adventurers," and the Arab slave-dealers, under its blue skies, and hidden within its barred and painted walls, led lives of magnificent debauchery, when the tusks of ivory were piled high along its water-front, and the dhows at anchor reeked with slaves, and when in the market-place, where the natives now sit bargaining over a bunch of bananas or a basket of dried fish, their forefathers were themselves bought and sold.

In the five hundred years in which he has claimed the shore line of East Africa from south of Lorenço Marquez to north of Mozambique, and many hundreds of miles inland, the Portuguese has been the dog in the manger among nations. In all that time he has done nothing to help the land or the people whom he pretends to protect, and he keeps those who would improve both from gaining any hold or influence over either. It is doubtful if his occupation of the East Coast can endure much longer. The English and the Germans now surround him on every side. Even handicapped as they are by the lack of the seaports which he enjoys, they have forced their way into the country which lies beyond his and which bounds his on every side. They have opened up this country with little railroads, with lonely lengths of telegraph wires, and with their launches and gunboats they have joined, by means of the Zambesi and Chinde Rivers, new territories to the great Indian Ocean. His strip of land, which bars them from the sea, is still unsettled and unsafe, its wealth undeveloped, its people untamed. He sits at his café at the coast and collects custom-dues and sells stamped paper. For fear of the native he dares not march five miles beyond his sea-port town, and the white men who venture inland for purposes of trade or to cultivate plantations do so at their own risk, he can promise them no protection.