“I am N N. These other two beside me are O O and P P, all of us Y**. From our country each village had to take twenty loads of rubber. These loads were big: they were as big as this....” (Producing an empty basket which came nearly up to the handle of my walking-stick.) “That was the first size. We had to fill that up, but as rubber got scarcer the white man reduced the amount. We had to take these loads in four times a-month.”
Q. “How much pay did you get for this?”
A. (Entire audience.) “We got no pay! We got nothing!”
And then N N, whom I asked, again said:—
“Our village got cloth and a little salt, but not the people who did the work. Our Chiefs eat up the cloth; the workers got nothing. The pay was a fathom of cloth and a little salt for every big basket full, but it was given to the Chief, never to the men. It used to take ten days to get the twenty baskets of rubber—we were always in the forest and then when we were late we were killed. We had to go further and further into the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved. Wild beasts—the leopards—killed some of us when we were working away in the forest, and others got lost or died from exposure and starvation, and we begged the white man to leave us alone, saying we could get no more rubber, but the white men and their soldiers said: ‘Go! You are only beasts yourselves, you are nyama (meat).’ We tried, always going further into the forest, and when we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our towns and killed us. Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes around their necks and bodies and taken away. The white men sometimes at the posts did not know of the bad things the soldiers did to us, but it was the white men who sent the soldiers to punish us for not bringing in enough rubber.”
Here P P took up the tale from N N:—
“We said to the white men, ‘We are not enough people now to do what you want us. Our country has not many people in it and we are dying fast. We are killed by the work you make us do, by the stoppage of our plantations, and the breaking up of our homes.’ The white man looked at us and said: ‘There are lots of people in Mputu’ ” (Europe, the white man’s country). “ ‘If there are lots of people in the white man’s country there must be many people in the black man’s country.’ The white man who said this was the chief white man at F F*, his name was A B, he was a very bad man. Other white men of Bula Matadi who had been bad and wicked were B C, C D, and D E.” “These had killed us often, and killed us by their own hands as well as by their soldiers. Some white men were good. These were E F, F G, G H, H I, I K, K L.”
These ones told them to stay in their homes and did not hunt and chase them as the others had done, but after what they had suffered they did not trust more any one’s word, and they had fled from their country and were now going to stay here, far from their homes, in this country where there was no rubber.
Q. “How long is it since you left your homes, since the big trouble you speak of?”
A. “It lasted for three full seasons, and it is now four seasons since we fled and came into the K* country.”