The jungle folk of Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

The trading-houses of Benguela are surrounded by walled enclosures, or compounds, in former days used for the confinement of slaves awaiting shipment. This is not like the bush country further north, but is more open and its main slave-trail extends a thousand miles into the interior. This is the end of the trail that Livingstone followed in his first tragic journey across Africa.

But that which ought to be fully known to the civilized world is that slavery still exists in the whole territory of Angola and in the adjoining Portuguese islands, and with all its attendant horrors. Most of the house-servants and factory-servants of Benguela are slaves purchased with money and frequently resold. Young women are sold and resold by white men to white men as mistresses. Any white man in Benguela will tell one that the average price is twenty pounds. She may be resold from time to time at a decreasing price. The work on the large plantations is done by slaves who serve under the lash, and it is estimated that half the population of Angola are in slavery; some would say more than this. This includes domestic as well as foreign slavery. But the traffic by the Portuguese has made domestic slavery more severe. They were also being shipped from Benguela at that time, to the islands of San Thomé and Principe, at the rate of three or four thousand a year, and in all probability the number has since increased. I have visited Principe, and I know something of the actual conditions in that island.

The ways of Portugal have not changed in these four centuries of her African history. In the year 1509 a Portuguese officer landing in South Africa became embroiled with the Hottentots and he and twenty of his men were killed. Three years afterwards a Portuguese captain landed a cannon loaded with grapeshot as a pretended present to the Hottentots. Men, women and children gathered around in wonder. While they were admiring it the Portuguese captain fired it off and looked on with delight as the wretched people fell in heaps. And Portugal has not changed. The ally of England from time immemorial, and possessing a remarkable collection of souvenirs in the form of anti-slavery treaties, some of them recent and one of them as late as 1885, she still prosecutes her slave-trade with vigour, albeit with circumspection to her reputation as well as her profit.

The Bailundu rebellion, in the interior of Angola, in 1902, was still an occasional topic of conversation. The Portuguese claimed that it was caused by the few American missionaries of that interior district—as if their own rapacity and lust were not sufficient explanation. If that be true, and if it be true that the missionaries are responsible for all similar wars from Angola to China, as their detractors allege, it is surely evident that the missionary influence is not to be derided after all, but is a tremendous force to be reckoned with in national economy. The Bailundu rebellion was a complete failure. The unorganized native forces were unable to stand before an army disciplined by white officers, and it soon developed into a wholesale massacre of natives.

Shortly afterwards a missionary from that part spent a day with me at Gaboon and recounted many incidents of the war. Portuguese planters exacted enormous indemnity which reduced many to slavery. Such incidents as the following occurred: A certain man, in order to pay his portion of the indemnity exacted by a certain planter, at last was compelled to sell his two children as slaves. He returned to his village with desolate heart and tearless eyes, went into his house, came out again, and walked around it, went into it again and came out with his sword, uttered one heart-broken cry, and plunging the sword into his breast, killed himself.

As a consequence of the war, however, the Angola secret became known and there was considerable feeling aroused among the better class in Portugal. To their righteous remonstrance the government responded by abolishing the name of slavery and prosecuting the traffic as vigorously as ever under an ingenious and particularly diabolical form of law called “labour contract.” The only difference to the native is that while formerly his servitude was a direct violation of law it is now perfectly legal; but he is still seized and transported and labours under the lash until he dies.

In 1905, Mr. Henry W. Nevinson went to Angola for the express purpose of investigating the reported slavery. Mr. Nevinson upon a careful and intelligent investigation found the conditions such as I have stated, and he gave an accurate report in a series of articles in Harper’s Magazine.

The slave-merchant, or “labour-merchant,” as we must now call him, procures his labourers in the interior, sometimes six hundred or eight hundred miles from the coast. He pays for them in rifles and other goods. The price that he offers, while very small, considering the value of a slave to a planter, is yet sufficient to excite the cupidity of a class of natives beyond the possibility of control. They first sell their domestic slaves to the white men, then they sell anybody whom they can get into their power. In the old slave days it was not safe for three men to go together to the slave-market lest two of them should combine to sell the third, and such is always the brutalizing effect of the slave-trade on many of the natives. Those slaves that are not used on the plantations of Angola are marched in caravans to the coast. They march in shackles, or chained together, and under an armed guard. Many die on the way, sometimes half the caravan.

Arriving at the coast, they are sold, or contracted, to an employer, usually a planter of San Thomé or Principe, at a large advance on the interior price. They are then brought by the employer before a magistrate who draws up a contract in proper legal form. It makes not the slightest difference what the native answers to the questions asked him or whether he answers at all, a contract is drawn up in which he declares that he has come of his own free will to contract for his services at so much labour for so much pay, and that the contract holds good for five years. The contractor on his part agrees to pay a certain monthly wage and to provide food and clothing. The native is given a copy of the contract and a little tin cylinder in which to keep it, the sign and declaration of his freedom and protection by law. But hypocrisy can go even further; for these Portuguese, merchants and government officials, actually pose as Philanthropists. “See,” they say, “what we have done for these men and women. They were all slaves to black men, and we have redeemed them.” Philanthropy is usually unlucrative, but the genius of the Portuguese has made it pay.

Despite the expiration of the contract at the end of five years and the promise of a free passage home, the native thus transported is never known to return. Henceforth he is one of a long line of men and women that labour on the cocoa fields all the day long, some of the women carrying babies on their backs—that labour in stolid silence under the lash or the prod of a sharpened stick from early morning till the sound of the evening bell. That they become debased and immoral is only what we should expect; and therefore the traffic in men’s bodies is also a traffic in men’s souls. So they live and toil, each day like all the others until the last short journey, when, as Mr. Nevinson describes, “their dead bodies are lashed to poles to be carried out and flung away in the forest.”