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A Modern Slavery

Chapter 3: PREFACE
By Henry Woodd Nevinson
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About This Book

A reporter’s travel investigation in the Portuguese province of Angola and the islands of San Thomé and Principe documents contemporary systems of forced labor and deportation. It details plantation and domestic slavery on the mainland, the overland marches and river crossings that compose the slave route, and the agents, carriers, and vessels involved in exportation. Photographs, maps, and eyewitness description convey conditions aboard ships and on island plantations, while chapters examine missions, European settlements encountered en route, and the human toll of hunger, disease, and routine brutality.

PREFACE

The following chapters describe my journey in the Portuguese province of Angola (West Central Africa), and in the Portuguese islands of San Thomé and Principe, during the years 1904, and 1905.

The journey was undertaken at the suggestion of the editor of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, but in choosing this particular part of Africa for investigation I was guided by the advice of the Aborigines Protection Society and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London, and I wish to thank the secretaries of both these societies for their great assistance.

I also wish to thank the British and American residents on the mainland and the islands—and especially the missionaries—for their unfailing hospitality and help. As far as possible, I kept the object of my journey from them, knowing that direct aid to my purpose might bring trouble on them afterwards. Yet even when they knew or suspected the truth, I found no difference in their kindliness, though I was often tiresome with sickness, and their own provisions were often very short.

The illustrations are from photographs taken by myself, but on the mail slave-ship from Benguela to San Thomé I had the advantage of borrowing a better camera than my own.

London, March, 1906.