Q. “How do you know it was the white man who sent the soldiers? It might be only these savage soldiers themselves.”
A. “No, no. Sometimes we brought rubber into the white man’s stations. We took rubber to D E’s station, E E*, and to F F* and to ...’s station. When it was not enough rubber the white man would put some of us in lines, one behind the other, and would shoot through all our bodies. Sometimes he would shoot us like that with his own hand; sometimes his soldiers would do it.”
Q. “You mean to say you were killed in the Government posts themselves by the Government white men themselves, or under their eyes?”
A. (Emphatically.) “We were killed in the stations of the white men themselves. We were killed by the white man himself. We were shot before his eyes.”
The names D E, B C, and L M, were names I heard repeatedly uttered.
The Z** man said he, too, had fled; now he lived at peace with the K*.
The abnormal refugee population in this one K* town must equal the actual K* population itself. On every hand one finds these refugees. They seem, too, to pass busier lives than their K* hosts, for during all the hot hours of the afternoon, wherever I walked through the town—and I went all through N* until the sun set—I found L* weavers, or iron and brass workers, at work.
Slept at M M’s house. Many people coming to talk to us after dark.
Left N* about 8 to return to the Congo bank. On the way back left the main path and struck into one of the side towns, a village called A A*. This lies only some 4 or 5 miles from the river. Found here thirty-two L* houses with forty-three K*, so that the influx of fugitives here is almost equal to the original population. Saw many L*. All were frightened, and they and the K* were evidently so ill at ease that I did not care to pause. Spoke to one or two men only as we walked through the town. The L* drew away from us, but on looking back saw many heads popped out of doors of the houses we had passed.
Got back to steamer about noon.