Q. “How many days is it from N* to your own country?”
A. “Six days of quick marching. We fled because we could not endure the things done to us. Our Chiefs were hanged, and we were killed and starved and worked beyond endurance to get rubber.”
Q. “How do you know it was the white men themselves who ordered these cruel things to be done to you? These things must have been done without the white man’s knowledge by the black soldiers.”
A. (P P): “The white men told their soldiers: ‘You kill only women; you cannot kill men. You must prove that you kill men.’ So then the soldiers when they killed us” (here he stopped and hesitated, and then pointing to the private parts of my bulldog—it was lying asleep at my feet), he said: “then they cut off those things and took them to the white men, who said: ‘It is true, you have killed men.’ ”
Q. “You mean to tell me that any white man ordered your bodies to be mutilated like that, and those parts of you carried to him?”
P P, O O, and all (shouting): “Yes! many white men. D E did it.”
Q. “You say this is true? Were many of you so treated after being shot?”
All (shouting out): “Nkoto! Nkoto!” (Very many! Very many!)
There was no doubt that these people were not inventing. Their vehemence, their flashing eyes, their excitement, was not simulated. Doubtless they exaggerated the numbers, but they were clearly telling what they knew and loathed. I was told that they often became so furious at the recollection of what had been done to them that they lost control over themselves. One of the men before me was getting into this state now.
I asked whether L* tribes were still running from their country, or whether they now stayed at home and worked voluntarily.