III
A DYING TRIBE
This amiable and attractive people, the Mpongwe tribe, is now but a dying remnant, hurrying to extinction. It is not long since they were numbered by tens of thousands; now there are probably not more than five hundred pure Mpongwe. There are women among them for whom marriage is impossible. For, as I have already said, their social superiority makes it impossible for them to marry into other tribes; but, within their own tribe, many Mpongwe women are related, nearly or remotely, to every surviving family, and the very strict laws of consanguinity forbid the marriage of related persons. It is expected, therefore, that these women will make their alliances with white men; that is, that they will not marry at all.
The first exterminating factor was slavery. Sir Harry Johnston, in The Civilization of Africa, has this to say in regard to the fatal adaptability of the Negro to a condition of slavery:
“The Negro in general is a born slave. He is possessed of physical strength, docility, cheerfulness of disposition, a short memory for sorrows and cruelties, and an easily aroused gratitude for kindness and just dealing. He does not suffer from homesickness to the overbearing extent that afflicts other peoples torn from their homes, and, provided he is well fed, he is easily made happy. Above all, he can toil hard under the hot sun and in the unhealthy climates of the torrid zone. He has little or no race-fellowships—that is to say, he has no sympathy for other Negroes; he recognizes and follows his master independent of any race affinities, and as he is usually a strong man and a good fighter, he has come into request not only as a labourer but as a soldier.”
Sir Harry, speaking as an eye-witness of the capturing and the exportation of slaves, gives a lurid description of their sufferings, which, he says, “were so appalling that they almost transcend belief.” He makes a conservative estimate that in the modern period of the slave-traffic twenty million Africans must have been sold into slavery. The Mpongwe was one of the tribes that suffered most. A large portion of their country was depopulated. The slave-traffic was frightfully demoralizing to the Africans themselves. It excited fiendish passions, stifled every instinct of humanity and inspired craft and cruelty far surpassing anything hitherto known. It was said that three men of the same family dared not leave their town together lest two of them should combine to sell the third.
More than half a century has passed since the last slave ship sailed out of Gaboon harbour and disappeared over the western horizon with its cargo of grief and rage, many of them wailing vengeance in a mournful chant, improvising the words as they sang. For the African sings his bitterest grief as well as his joy. He sings where the white man would weep, or curse; but to the accustomed ear no cry could equal the pity of his song.
It was in this region that Du Chaillu hunted the gorilla and gathered much of the material for his famous books. An interior chief, in appreciation of Du Chaillu’s visit to his town, once presented him with a fat slave; and when Du Chaillu kindly declined the offer, protesting that he would not know what to do with him, the chief exclaimed in astonishment: “You must kill him and eat him, of course.”
Du Chaillu spat violently upon the ground—the African way of expressing disgust and abhorrence.
“Then,” said the bewildered chief, “what do you do with all our people who are sent down the river and far away to your country? We have believed that you fatten them and eat them.”
It is supposed that our present mission station was formerly the site of a slave pen, where slaves were kept until they were shipped—a barracoon; hence the name Baraka.