The jungle folk of Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

I had been troubled with abscesses, common enough on the coast, and when I went aboard I had a very severe one on my left forearm. One night, near the Congo, when I was suffering with the pain and had been awake several nights, the captain had a stretcher placed on deck for me and advised that I lay my arm in a basin of warm water which was placed beside me. He then told the ship’s surgeon to examine my arm and see whether it ought not to be lanced. But he told him not to mention the matter of lancing it to me. I was weak and nervous with loss of sleep and he wished to save me the additional pain of thinking about the lancing of it and consenting to it. The doctor examined the arm and then having consulted with the captain went below and got his lance. When he returned the captain was sitting beside me ready to assist. The doctor a second time bent over the arm as it was extended over the basin. Then I saw the gleam of a knife which was instantly plunged into my arm. Ten minutes of agony during which the captain poured on warm water,—and then rest; the first I had had for many days, and a few minutes later I was asleep. That was the last of the abscesses and from that time I gained perceptibly each day.

At Boma, the capital of the Congo Free State, sixty miles from the mouth of the river, we lay in against the bank and moored the ship to the shore. Close beside us was a sight upon which I gazed with gruesome interest, the wreck of the steamship Matadi. My first voyage to Africa was on the Matadi. I think it was on her next voyage that she was wrecked. Like all the ships of her class she was called a palm-oil tub. The steamers of the present service are incomparably better. The Matadi was blown up by a fearful explosion of gunpowder that had been carelessly stored. All the crew except one were drowned. There were also on board two American missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Harvey, who went down with the ship. They were in their cabin when the explosion occurred. The door jammed and could never afterwards be opened, so that the bodies remain there to this day. A smoke-stack protruding out of the water, a part of a poop-deck, overgrown with grass, and an enormous side-piece flung upon the shore—such were the innuendo of the scene.

Boma is built on the side of a long, sloping hill. Its buildings, many of them made of sheets of corrugated iron, are scattered in disorder. Behind them on higher ground is the attractive, pale-coloured residence of the governor. There is a good road and several avenues of palms and a number of flower-gardens surrounding the residences. A well-ordered hospital, a state school, a palace of justice, a prison for white men, a fort and barracks are the more conspicuous buildings. Three street-lamps and a native band that plays twice a week, probably by ear, make life delightful and bring the city up to date. Boma looks well from the river—as looks go in Africa. But when one remembers that for more than twenty years it has been the capital of the Congo Free State, a territory four times the size of Germany, from which also vast wealth has been drawn and that Belgium’s civilizing agencies have been concentrated here, one is not greatly impressed. At least it does not compare with the other capitals of West Africa, the French Libreville, the German Dualla or the English Calabar.

In the hospital at Boma one may see cases of the strange “sleeping sickness,” that awful scourge that has in late years passed across Africa from the east to the west decimating the population and often in the farther east destroying entire towns. Until very recently there has been no recovery. The patient sleeps without waking, except for food—sleeps and wastes away for eight or ten months until he dies. The germ is now supposed to be carried by the tsetse fly.

I of course witnessed no Belgian atrocities at Boma, and it would surely have been a matter of amazement if I had. But still more amazing is the report of certain casual travellers, who had no more opportunity than myself for direct observation, to the effect that there are no atrocities, because they did not witness them. If I had gone to King Leopold’s representative, the governor at Boma, and had told him, in the course of a neighbourly conversation, that I had heard about the Belgian atrocities and had come to witness them that I might exploit them to the horrified nations, and then had asked him to accommodate my purpose by having at least a few atrocities performed in the front yard, including the different varieties of murder, mutilation and torture, it would have been parallel to the methods pursued by certain persons, who actually heralded their arrival and their purpose all along the way, notified Leopold’s agents in particular, perfected their investigations by asking questions of these same agents, and then proclaimed that these cruel reports of atrocities and atrocities represent an unparalleled conspiracy on the part of several hundred men from half a score of nations, who having lived many long years in the Congo have become prejudiced and have accumulated a number of personal grievances against the Belgian officials and are now seeking by the invention of innumerable charges of unheard-of crimes to ruin the reputation of Good King Leopold and deprive him of his rights. The administration of the Congo government is not a melodrama; it is anything but that. Leopold’s atrocities are not placed on free exhibition at Boma for the entertainment of travellers, some of whom are immorally unconcerned in regard to the real suffering of the natives. They are performed only for money and plenty of it. The motive is money and the argument is that they pay. Though I was only a traveller, and not a resident, in the Congo Free State, yet I can speak with some authority on the question of the Belgian régime; for I lived several years in the adjoining territory, the Congo Français, a large part of which was farmed out in concessions to Belgian companies, whose policy and methods were precisely those of the Congo Free State. Such a system, however, is contrary to the spirit of the French, and one cannot think that it will long endure.

Consider for a moment the various sources of the evidence against Leopold and his agents. There are about two hundred Protestant missionaries in the Congo Free State, representing the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. These missionaries, men and women, have lived for years in the Congo, many of them twenty, and even twenty-five years, and are scattered over the entire territory. They speak the language of the people and therefore have the most intimate knowledge of conditions. Their motive is only the good of the native, and every influence that makes for the betterment of the native’s condition contributes to their success. That they should not know the truth in regard to the alleged atrocities of the Belgians is impossible; that they should unite to falsify the truth is unthinkable. But their testimony is all of one kind, and against Belgium, and constitutes probably the most terrible indictment of a civilized government in the last two thousand years, if not in the history of the world.

But there are other witnesses besides missionaries. In 1903 the British government, in response to the entreaty and remonstrance of missionaries and traders and English Chambers of Commerce, appointed Mr. Roger Casement, British Consul to the Congo, to make a thorough investigation of conditions in the Congo Free State. Mr. Casement, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Matadi, was peculiarly fitted for the task assigned to him. He had spent twelve years in the consular service in Africa. He had the unqualified confidence of the British government and was held in the highest esteem and admiration by all classes of men in the Congo. Mr. Poultney Bigelow says of him: “Roger Casement is the sort of man depicted in Jules Verne’s novels, the man who is everlastingly exploring and extricating himself from every imaginable difficulty by superhuman tact, wit and strength.”

Mr. Casement’s report of the results of his investigation is a revealing document. It confirms the worst charges that had been made. It abounds in such incidents as the following: “This man himself, when I visited him in Boma gaol, in March, 1901, said that more than a hundred women and children had died of starvation at his hands, but that the responsibility was due to his superior’s orders and neglect.”

But even Belgians have been, and are to-day, among those who denounce the Belgian king. For instance, a Belgian agent, named Lecroix, confessed that he had been instructed by his chief to massacre all the natives of a certain village, including women and children, for not bringing in enough rubber. He also told how that on one occasion his chief had put sixty women in chains, all but five of whom died of starvation.