“ ‘Oh! sometimes we were ordered to go, and the sentry would find us preparing food to eat while in the forest, and he would shoot two or three to hurry us along. Sometimes we would try and do a little work on our plantations, so that when the harvest time came we should have something to eat, and the sentry would shoot some of us to teach us that our business was not to plant but to get rubber. Sometimes we were driven off to live for a fortnight in the forest without any food and without anything to make a fire with, and many died of cold and hunger. Sometimes the quantity brought was not sufficient, and then several would be killed to frighten us to bring more. Some tried to run away, and died of hunger and privation in the forest in trying to avoid the State posts.’
“ ‘But,’ said I, ‘if the sentries killed you like that, what was the use? You could not bring more rubber when there were fewer people.’
“ ‘Oh! as to that, we do not understand it. These are the facts.’
“And looking around on the scene of desolation, on the untended farms and neglected palms, one could not but believe that in the main the story was true. From State sentries came confirmation and particulars even more horrifying, and the evidence of a white man as to the state of the country—the unspeakable condition of the prisons at the State posts—all combined to convince me over and over again that, during the last seven years, this ‘domaine privé’ of King Leopold has been a veritable ‘hell on earth.’
“The present régime seems to be more tolerable. A small payment is made for the rubber now brought in. A little salt—say a pennyworth—for 2 kilogrammes of rubber, worth in Europe from 6 to 8 fr. The collection is still compulsory, but, compared with what has gone before, the natives consider themselves fairly treated. There is a coming together of families and communities and the re-establishment of villages; but oh! in what sadly diminished numbers, and with what terrible gaps in the families.... Near a large State post we saw the only large and apparently normal village we came across in all the three weeks we spent in the district. One was able to form here some estimate of what the population was before the advent of the white man and the search for rubber....”
It will be observed that the devastated region whence had come the refugees I saw at N*, comprises a part of the “Domaine de la Couronne.”
Inclosure 2 in No. 3.
(See p. 29.)
(A.)
The Rev. J. Whitehead to Governor-General of Congo State.