A bonâ fide emigration, a free engagé system, would be a boon to Western and Inner Africa, where the tribes live in an almost continual state of petty warfare. The anti-slavers and the abolitionists, of course, represent this to be the effect of the European trade in man's flesh and blood; but it prevails, and has ever prevailed, and long will prevail, even amongst peoples which have never sent a head of negro to the coast. And there is a large class of men captured in battle, and a host of those condemned to death by savage superstition, whose lives can be saved only by their exportation, which, indeed, is the African form of transportation. "We believe," says the Abbé Proyart (1776), "that the father sells his son and the prince his subjects; he only who has lived among them can know that it is not even lawful for a man to sell his slave, if he be born in the country, unless he have incurred that penalty by certain crimes specified by law."
It will be objected that any scheme of the kind must be so involved in complicated difficulties that it cannot fail to degenerate into the old export slave-trade. This I deny. Admitting that such must at first be its tendency, I am persuaded that the details can so be controlled as to secure the use without the abuse. Women and children, for instance, should never be allowed on board ship, unless accompanying husbands and parents. Those who speak some words of a foreign tongue, English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese, and on the eastern coast Hindostani, might lead the way, to be followed in due time by the wilder races. Probably the best ground for the trial would be the Island of Zanzibar, where we can completely control its operations. And what should lend us patience and courage to meet and to beat down all difficulties is the consideration that success will be the sole possible means, independent of El Islam, of civilizing, or rather of humanizing, the Dark Continent. The excellent Abbé Proyart begins his "History of Loango" with the wise and memorable words: "Touching the Africans, these people have vices,—what people is exempt from vice? But, were they even more wicked and more vicious, they would be so much the more entitled to the commiseration and good offices of their fellow- men, and, should the missionary despair of making them Christians, men ought still to endeavour to make them men."
The "Free Emigration" schemes hitherto attempted have been mere snares and delusions; chiefly, I hold, because the age was not ripe for them. In 1844 three agencies were established at Sierra Leone for supplying hands to British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica. As wages they offered per diem $0.75 to $1, with leave to return at pleasure; the "liberated" preferred, however, to live upon sixpence at home, suspecting that the bait was intended as a lure to captivity. Nor were their fears lulled by the fact that the agents shipped amongst 250 "volunteers" some seventy-six wild slaves, fresh captives, who were not allowed to communicate with their fellow-countrymen ashore. In 1850 certain correspondents from Liverpool inquired of King "Eyo Honesty" if he could provide for service in the West Indies 10,000 men, women, and children, as the "quotum from the Old Calabar River," which would mean 100,000 from the West Coast. "He be all same ole slave-trade," very justly remarked that knowing potentate: he added, that he would respect the Suppression Treaty with England, and that he personally preferred palm-oil, but that all the "Calabar gentlemen" and the neighbouring kings would be glad to supply slaves at a fixed price, four boxes of brass and copper rods.
Followed, in 1852-3, the gigantic scheme of MM. Régis et Cie, which began operations upon the East as well as the West Coast of Africa. Having studied it on both sides of the continent, I could not help forming the worst opinion of the attempt. The agents never spoke of it except as a slave- trade; the facetiæ touching "achat" and "rachat" were highly suited to African taste, and I have often heard them declare before the people that "captives" are the only articles which can profitably be exported from the coasts—in fact, as old Caspar Barlé said, "precipuæ merces ipsi Ethiopes sunt." I subjoin to this chapter the form of French passport; it will serve, when a bonâ fide emigration shall be attempted, to show "how not to do it." Happily this "emigration" has come to an end": M. Régis, seeing no results, gave orders to sell off all the goods in his factories, and to retain only one clerk as housekeeper. The ouvriers libres deserted and fled in all directions, for fear of being "put in a cannibal pot" and being eaten by the white anthropophagi.
The history of missionary enterprise in the Congo regions is not less interesting than the slave-trade. The first missioners sailed in December, 1490, under Goncalo de Sousa; of the three one were killed by the heat, and another having made himself "Chaplain to the Congolan Army," by a "Giaghi" chief. The seed sown by these friars was cultivated by twelve Franciscans of the Order of Observants. The Right Reverend Fathers of the Company appeared in 1560 with the Conquistador Paulo Dias de Novaes. According to Lopez de Lima, who seems to endorse the saying, "Si cum Jesuitis, non cum Jesu itis," they worried one captain- general to death, and they attempted to found in Congo-land another Uruguay or Paraguay. But here they totally failed, and, as yet indeed, they have not carried out, either in East or West Africa, the celebrated boast popularly attributed to their general, Borgia (1572):
"We shall come in like the lambs;
We shall be driven out like the dogs,
We shall rush like the wolves;
We shall be icnewed like the eagles."
The baptism of D. Alvaro I. (1491), the founding of the cathedral at S. Salvador (1534), the appointment of the Bishop and Chapter, and their transfer to São Paulo de Loanda (1627), have already been alluded to.
According to Fathers Carli and Merolla, Pope Alexander VII. sent twelve to fifteen Capuchins and apostolic missioners, who baptized the King and Queen of Congo and the Count of Sonho. Between A.D. 1490 and 1690 were the palmy days of Christianity in Congo-land, and for two centuries it was more or less the state religion. After this great effort missionary zeal seems to have waxed cold, and disestablishment resulted, as happens in such cases, from unbelief within and violent assaults from without. Under the attacks of the Dutch and French the Church seems to have lost ground during the eighteenth century. In A.D. 1682 the number of propagandists in Sonho fell from a father superior and six missioners to two (Merolla). In A.D. 1700 James Barbot found at Sonho only two Portuguese friars of the Order of Bernardins. In A.D. 1768 the Loango Mission was established, and in A.D. 1777 the fathers were followed by four Italian priests sent by the Propaganda for the purpose of re-christianizing Sonho. Embarking at La Rochelle they entered the Nzadi, where one died of poison, and the survivors escaped only by stratagem. Christianity fell before the old heathenism, and in 1814 we find the King of Congo, D. Garcia V., complaining to His Most Faithful Majesty that missioners were sadly wanted. Captain Tuckey's "Expedition" (A.D. 1816) well sets forth the spiritual destitution of the land. He tells us that three years before his arrival some missionaries had been murdered by the Sohnese; the only specimen he met was an ignorant half-caste with a diploma from the Capuchins of Loanda, and a wife plus five concubines. In 1863 I found that all traces of Christianity had disappeared.
These reverends—who were allowed to dispense with any "irregularity" except bigamy or wilful murder, and "to read forbidden books except Machiavel,"—took the title of Nganga Mfumo—Lord Medicine-man. In the fulness of early zeal they built at S. Salvador the cathedral of Santa Cruz, a Jesuit College, a Capuchin convent, the residence of the father superior, maintained by the King of Portugal; a religious house for the Franciscans, an establishment for the Bishop and his Chapter, and half-a-dozen stone churches. All these edifices have long been in ruins.
Father Cavazzi da Monte Cuccoli, Denis de Carli, and Merolla, themselves missioners, have left us ample accounts of the ecclesiastical rule which, during its short tenure of office, bore a remarkable family resemblance to that of the Jesuit missions in South America. The religious despotism was complete, a tyranny grossly aggravated by the credulity, the bigotry, and the superstition,—I will not say of the age, because such things are of all ages, but of the imperfect education which the age afforded. There was no improvement, but rather a deterioration from the days of Pliny. One father tells the converts that comets forbode ill to the world. Another describes a bird not much unlike a sparrow, at first sight it seems wholly black, but upon a nearer view it looks blue; the excellency of its song is that it harmoniously and articulately pronounces the name of Jesus Christ. A third remarks, "they (the heathen) are excited by the heavens forming a cross under the zone; they are excited by the mountains which have the cross carved on them, without knowing by whom; they are excited by the earth which draws the crucifix in its fruit called Nicefo." Yet all these things are of little force to move the hearts of those Gentiles who scoffingly cry, "When we are sick, forsooth, the wood of this cross will cure us!" Another father, resolving to denounce certain heathen practices, placed on the Feast of Purification an image of the Virgin in relievo upon the altar, and "with a dagger struck through her breast on which the blood followed:" like Mark Antony, he "improved the occasion," and sent home the fathers of families to thrash their wives and daughters who were shut up in the "paint houses." It is gravely related how a hungry friar dines copiously on fish with an angel; how another was saved by the "father of miracles, the glorious Saint Anthony of Padua," whom another priest, taking as his patron, sees before his hammock. A woman, bearing a child in her arms and supposed to be the Virgin, attends the Portuguese army, and she again appears in the shape of a "beautiful beggar." The miraculous resurrection of a boiled cock is gravely chronicled. A certain man lived 380 years "at the intercession of Saint Francis d'Assise." Of course, the missioners saw water-monsters in the Congo River. A child "came from his mother's womb with a beard and all his teeth, perhaps to show he was born into the world grown old in vice." A certain scoffer "being one day to pass a river with two companions, was visibly taken up by an invisible hand into the air. One of his companions, going to take hold of him by the feet, had such a cuff given him that he fell down in the boat, and the offender was seen no more." Father Merolla talks of a breed in the Cabo Verde Islands "between bulls and she-asses, which they compassed by binding a cow's hide upon the latter:" it would be worth inquiring if this was ever attempted, and it might add to our traditions about the "Jumart." And the tale of the elephant-hunters deceiving the animals by anointing themselves with their droppings deserves investigation. Wounds of poisoned arrows are healed by that which produced them. A woman's milk cures the venomous foam which cobras spit into the eyes. A snake as big as a beam kills and consumes men with its look. An "ill liver," reprimanded by his father for vicious inclinations, fires a pistol at him; the rebound of the bullet from the paternal forehead, which remains whole, severely wounds the would-be parricide: the ablest surgeons cannot heal the hurt, and the flesh ever continues to be sore and raw upon the forehead, acting like the brand of Cain.