CHAPTER CLXX.
AFRICA—Concluded.
THE SLAVE-TRADE.
THE UNLIKENESS OF RACES — LIVINGSTONE’S PROTEST AGAINST MAN-SELLING — DISCUSSIONS WITH AFRICAN CHIEFS — THEIR EXCUSES FOR SLAVE-TRADE — HORRORS OF THE TRAFFIC — ARAB RAGE AND ATROCITIES — A STRANGE DISEASE — BROKEN-HEARTEDNESS — AN ENGLISH SAILOR’S OPINION — BARBARITIES OF SLAVE-TRADE NOT OVERSTATED — THE GELLAHBAS — THE PETTY SLAVE-TRADERS — WHOLESALE MERCHANTS — THE FAKIS — COST OF SLAVES — TERRITORIES AND TRIBES THAT SUPPLY THE SLAVE-MARKETS — PROFITS OF THE TRAFFIC — STANLEY’S TESTIMONY — LIVINGSTONE’S GREAT DESIRE — NO HOPE FOR AFRICA WHILE SLAVE TRADE EXISTS — WESTERN COAST EMANCIPATED — WORK TO BE DONE — GRAND FUTURE OF AFRICA — DUTY OF ENGLAND AND AMERICA — THE OPEN SORE OF THE WORLD — LIVINGSTONE’S LAST APPEAL — MEMORABLE WORDS ON HIS TABLET IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
The unlikeness of races that in many respects are similar, and the tenacity with which peculiar ideas and customs are maintained are facts abundantly verified in this work. The strange fantasy that one can have property in his fellow-man, which includes the right to control his thoughts, conduct, life, and sell him to another as a slave, is cherished by some tribes and wholly repudiated by others. The Arabs excluded, the Manganja and Waiyau are the only two families of slavers in that part of Central Africa which finds its outlet at the great slave-market of Zanzibar. No idea of slavery exists among the Kaffirs or Zulus and Bechuanas.
Livingstone, the heroic and world-renowned explorer, availed himself of every opportunity to protest against the selling of their people by the African chiefs. He sought to educate them by kindly counsels and arguments, so that they would be able to see the wrong and ruin they were bringing upon themselves and their subjects by wars with neighboring tribes, and the selling of captives to the mercenary Arabs.
When among the Waiyau he had long discussions with the chief, Mukatè. To counteract the effect of Livingstone’s influence the slave-drivers had represented to the natives that his object in capturing and releasing their slaves was to make them of his own religion; but the terrible evils of the slave trade, the ruined villages, the numerous bones and skulls bleaching in the sun along every path, the fearful sufferings of those who falter and perish on the journey to the coast, the rapine, plunder, and wholesale murder of neighboring tribes in order to secure captives for sale to Arab merchants, all these direful evidences of the terrible curse of the country Mukatè could not deny. He would often end the discussion by dismissing these facts with a laugh. A headman, who was Livingstone’s guide for a mile or two, whispered to him, “Speak to Mukatè to give his forays up.”
The chiefs and people were fertile in excuses for their participation in the slave traffic. One said that the Arabs, who come and tempt them with fine clothes, are the cause of their man-selling. Livingstone replied, “Very soon you will have none to sell. Your country is becoming a jungle, and all the people who do not die on the road will be making gardens for Arabs at Kilwa and elsewhere.” The common argument in defence of the business by African chiefs was, “What could we do without Arab cloth?” “Do what you did before the Arabs came into the country,” was Livingstone’s answer. But the greed for cloth, which the natives are too indolent to spin and weave, overmasters all the latent humanity and reason of the chiefs, and keeps up a chronic condition of war and spoliation, decimating the population of the country and transforming some of its fairest districts into deserts. In order to have the means to buy the coveted cloth, one village makes an incursion upon another, and thus there is almost perpetual pillage, kidnapping, and murder. The village whose chief is victorious at one time is, in its turn, sacked and burned by a stronger party. And so the traveller through the country often passes the ruins of what were once populous and pleasant villages of unoffending people.
From village to village the missionary traveller carried his lessons and appeals, sowing the good seed, with confidence that it would sometime bear fruit in the regeneration of his beloved Africa. “It is but little we can do,” is his sad reflection when among the Waiyau; “but we lodge a protest in the heart against a vile system, and time may ripen it.” His counsels to those unenlightened, tempted, and misguided people were not all lost, however impervious they seemed, generally, to moral considerations and appeals. Visiting Kimsuma, a chief on the Nyassa, he received this gratifying testimony. Kimsuma told him it was by following the advice given in his former visit, and not selling the people as slaves, that his village had grown to three times its former size.
Women faint, starving, dying by the roadside—the dead bodies of those of former gangs who could not march longer—were the frequent and painful sights that Livingstone beheld as he moved on toward Central Africa.
A slave-gang is usually composed of men and women, and children of a tender age. The adults are fastened into the heavy slave-sticks, weighing from thirty to forty pounds. From these there is no escape. The younger are secured by thongs that pass around the neck of each. Multitudes die on the journey to the coast, overpowered by the burden of the slave-stick. The following fact illustrates how thoroughly all sentiments of sympathy and humanity, and every idea of justice are destroyed by this traffic in human life. In reply to Livingstone’s inquiry why people were tied to trees and left to die, as he had seen on his way, there was the usual answer that this was the work of the Arabs, because they are enraged when their slaves can go no farther, and prefer they should die rather than have their freedom if they should, perchance, be succored and recover. The numerous empty slave-sticks scattered along the road led Livingstone to the conviction, though the natives denied the charge, that they make it a practice to follow the slave-caravans, and cut off the sticks from those who falter in the march, in order to steal and sell them over again, and so obtain an additional quantity of cloth. Another fact, revealing the atrocious wickedness of these Arab man-stealers, is also stated by Livingstone. Those who sink under the burden of the slave-stick, or from sickness fall by the way, are not unfrequently murdered. In vexation and rage at the loss of the money value of the slaves, the Arab drivers will shoot or stab them. It was no uncommon sight which met the eye of the philanthropic traveller, that of some dead or dying African, weltering, perhaps, in a pool of blood, or tied to a tree by the neck.
“The strangest disease,” says Livingstone, “I have seen in this country is broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been kidnapped and made slaves.” Of a large gang that had been captured by Syde bin Habib, many died three days after they crossed the Lualaba. Enduring their chains till then, when they saw the broad river rolling between them and their old homes, they lost all spirit and hope. They ascribed their only pain to the heart, and placed their hands on their breasts, exactly over that organ. Some slavers expressed surprise that they should die, seeing that they had plenty to eat and no work. “Children would keep up with remarkable endurance; but if, perchance, passing near a village, and hearing the sound of dancing and the merry tinkle of the small drums, the memories of home and happy days would prove too much for them; they cried and sobbed, the ‘broken heart’ came on, and they rapidly sank.”
The atrocity of the system was forcibly expressed by an English sailor, who had opportunity of seeing the slave-traders in their business. “Shiver my timbers, mate, if the devil don’t catch these fellows, we might as well have no devil at all!”
“The Ujiji slavers,” he says, “like the Kilwa and Portuguese, are the vilest of the vile. It is not a trade, but a system of consecutive murders. They go to plunder and kidnap, and every trading-trip is nothing but a foray.” His idea at first that there were degrees in the atrocities and sufferings inflicted upon the slaves, and that the barbarities perpetrated by the Portuguese of Tette are absent from the slave traffic, as conducted by the Arabs, was wholly corrected. The better he came to know the system, the more convinced was he that it is everywhere and by whomsoever pursued only a story of murder, horror, and destruction.
“While endeavoring to give some account of the slave-trade in East Africa,” says Livingstone, “it was necessary to keep far within the truth in order not to be thought guilty of exaggeration. To overdraw its evils is simply an impossibility. The sights I have seen, though common incidents of the traffic, are so nauseous that I always strive to drive them from memory. In the case of most disagreeable recollections, I can succeed in time in consigning them to oblivion; but the slaving scenes come back unbidden, and make me start up at dead of night horrified by their vividness.” After an assault upon a village, in which several were killed and women and children captured, he writes in his diary these words: “I am heart-sore and sick of human blood.”
The Gellahbas, as the slave-dealers of Equatorial Africa are called, are first the petty traders, who, with a small stock of goods, start forth each with his ass or bullock, on which he rides from village to village. His cloth will purchase two or three slaves, and exchanging the donkey for one or two more, the return is commenced on foot. His slaves are compelled to carry all the articles needed on the journey. His stock in trade, worth perhaps $25, has been exchanged for four or five slaves, that will bring in Khartoom $250. And yet the journeys of these speculative traders are not always lucrative to the peddler. If the donkey chance to die, the enterprise is a failure, as his goods have to be sold at a ruinous sacrifice. The slaves also frequently escape, and thus loss is entailed. Schweinfurth says of them, “Their powers of endurance are wonderful. I repeatedly asked them what induced them to leave their homes to suffer the greatest hardships in a strange land, for the sake of pursuing an occupation attended with so much pecuniary hazard. ‘We want groosh,’ they would reply. Too lazy to work at home, it is the irresistible propensity to traffic in human beings that impels them to this toilsome life.
Besides these travelling traders, there are also wholesale slave-merchants, who have their agents or partners permanently established in the large Scribas. These traverse the country protected by a large retinue of armed slaves, and with long trains of oxen and asses, loaded with goods for exchange, they are able to purchase large numbers of slaves. Generally these agents are priests or Fakis, though this name is usually applied to those who interpret the Scriptures. Strange as it may seem, and almost incredible, it is an incontrovertible fact that this slave business is included among the secondary occupations of these Fakis, and with very few exceptions they are more or less involved in the iniquitous traffic. To multiply facilities for securing slaves, they act as retail dealers, brokers, quacks, match-makers, and school-masters. The richer and more intelligent class act as directors of schools, or are proprietors of inns, where they have sub-agents to advance their interests. “The doctrines of the Prophet,” says Schweinfurth, “are taught in their schools, and the merissa-shops are dedicated in a large degree to the worship of Venus. But in spite of everything, these people are held in the greatest veneration.
“A few words will suffice to exhibit these holy men in their true colors. With the Suras of the Koran in hand, they rove all over the country, leading what might be termed a life of perpetual prayer. But the wide difference between faith and practice is exemplified in the unrighteous dealings of these Fakis. Never did I see slaves so mercilessly treated as by these fanatics, and yet they would confer upon the poor souls, whom they purchased, like stolen goods, for a mere bagatelle, the most religious of names, such as Allagabo (i. e., ‘given of God’).” Schweinfurth, who had witnessed their abominable cruelties, adds that their treatment of the sick and dying was “such as a common scavenger would not inflict upon a dying dog.”
He mentions another hideous atrocity connected with their business—the emasculation of boys so as to fit them for the position of the eunuch. It is perpetrated as soon after capture as convenient, and though attempted only upon children of a tender age, it is said that four fifths of those thus mutilated perish from the injuries they receive. This infernal crime,—which is committed principally by the Fakis, who traverse the country with the Koran in one hand and the operating-knife in the other, is peculiar to Moslem slavery alone, and specially entitles it to be called an accursed system, deserving to be swept from the earth in the fiery indignation of all civilized peoples.
There is another class who supply the slave-markets of the East. This consists of the colonized slave-dealers, who live on their own property. These are the only ones who penetrate beyond the Scribas into the negro countries with bands of armed men, and return with great caravans of slaves.
The price paid for slaves varies of course, according to the difficulty of obtaining them, and as cotton, the principal medium of exchange, fluctuates in value. In 1871 Schweinfurth found that sittahsi (literally six spans high), that is children eight or ten years of age, were bought for £1 10s., or about $7.00 in our currency. Women slaves, if specially attractive, cost double this price.
As an illustration of how cheap is human life among some tribes, Livingstone mentions the case of an elderly woman and her son, about three years old, who were bought for six yards of calico, the child being regarded twice as valuable as the mother. After the raids of slave-dealers, when the villages are pillaged and famine succeeds, boys and girls are often bought for a few handfuls of maize. Vigorous and healthy women who are ugly are cheaper than young girls, and old women have little value, and are bought for a trifle. Men are seldom purchased, because more difficult to manage or to transport. It will be remembered that the principal object for which slaves are held in the East is not their capability for labor.
Nationality, also, is an element affecting the price of slaves. Of those brought from the Bahr-el-Ghazal districts the Bongo are most in demand, because they are easily taught, faithful, good-looking, and industrious. The Niam-niam girls are more costly than the Bongo slaves, but they are so rarely in the market it is not easy to state their price. The Mittoo are of the least value, because so ugly, and the Babucker are so spirited and resolute that they are rarely sought. No kindness and no appeals avail to subdue their love of freedom or repress their struggles to escape. The Loobah and Abaka tribes are like them in this respect. The demand for slaves by the Mohammedan residents of the Western territories, as the Kredy Golo and Sehre, who greatly exceed the aboriginal population, is sufficient of itself to sustain a very considerable slave-trade. The number of the private slaves owned by the Moslems who have settled in various portions of Northern Africa Schweinfurth estimated to be about sixty thousand.
But this number is small compared with those who, along all the highways, are brought out of the interior to the great slave markets to supply the insatiable and licentious demands of Egypt, Arabia, Persia, and Asiatic Turkey. It is these, the prey of Arab rapacity or the pitiable and powerless victims of the selfishness and inhumanity of their fellow Africans, that form the numerous caravans moving toward the coast. It is these that drain and depopulate the tribes of Eastern and Central Africa. It is thus their very life blood is sacrificed to the luxurious caprices and sensuality of the Moslem race.
The territories that supply the slave-trade in northeastern Africa (Nile district) are the Galla countries to the south of Abyssinia, between latitude 3° and 8° north, the region between the white and blue Niles, Azoa, in the centre of Abyssinia, and its northwestern frontier, and the upper district of the Bahr-el-Ghazal. But the most fruitful sources of supply are the negro countries to the south of Darfoor. During the last forty years there has been an exodus from the numerous and unprotected Kredy tribes of 12,000 to 15,000 annually, to minister to the lust or laziness of the Mohammedans of the East. And the territories west of the Niam-niam tribe have been the principal supply in the northern part of Africa. This energetic race, under their king Mofio, has made constant raids upon their neighbors, thus furnishing vast numbers for exchange with Arab slave-merchants.
There is a portion of the country called Mrima or Sawahili, and formerly Zanguebar. The latter name will be recognized by older readers as that of a strip of sea coast from the mouth of Jub to Cape Delgado, or from the equator to S. lat. 10° 41´. This part of Eastern Africa now attracts the attention of the civilized world because of its connection with the slave-trade. By means of its ports three fourths of the slaves kidnapped or purchased in the interior are shipped abroad. Here is the famous port of Kilwa, “the hornets’ nest,” as Stanley names it, the great entrepot of slave-traders, who have received such scathing condemnation in Livingstone’s journals.
Zanzibar, an island near the east coast in lat. 6° S., is, however, the principal mart to which the ivory and slave merchants gather from the interior of Africa. The Banyans, who are among the more influential residents, are the principal traders in slaves, and have accumulated great wealth. Here tens of thousands of Africans are annually sold, some to be transported to the Spanish West Indies, but the great majority to Arabia.
The profits of this infamous traffic are so enormous as to offer a resistless temptation to the cupidity of the unscrupulous. The lucrative character of a business, though fraught with terrible evils and wrongs, has, not unfrequently, overcome the conscience, humanity, and even the religion of those acknowledged to be civilized if not Christian. The statements of the most trustworthy travellers in regard to the profitableness of the slave-trade tax the credulity of the most sceptical. The estimate that Mr. Stanley has given, as the result of a careful observation, must, we think, be accepted. “We will suppose,” says he, “for the sake of illustrating how trade with the interior is managed, that the Arab conveys by his caravan $5,000 worth of goods; at Unyanyembe, the goods are worth $10,000; at Ujiji they are worth $15,000, or have trebled in price. Seven dollars and fifty cents will purchase a slave in the markets of Ujiji, who will bring in Zanzibar thirty dollars. Ordinary men slaves may be purchased for six dollars who will sell for twenty-five dollars on the coast. We will say he purchases slaves to the full extent of his means; from these he will realize about $14,000, leaving a net profit of $9,000 from an investment of $5,000, in one trip from Zanzibar to Ujiji. It is from such a traffic that the Banyans have come to be ranked among the wealthiest of the 200,000 residents of Zanzibar.”
Livingstone was intensely absorbed with the passion for exploration, and longed to be the discoverer that should solve the great geographical problem which has enlisted the curiosity and toil of centuries, viz., the sources of the Nile. During eight years in his last expedition, he traversed Central Africa, enduring sufferings and sacrifices inexpressible, holding on with a fortitude and inflexibility never surpassed, till he sank down in death at Ilala, May 1, 1873. But this most illustrious of African explorers, when in weariness he was journeying toward Bangweolo for the last time, eager to learn some fact that would settle the great enigma with which Africa has baffled the nations and the ages, writes, “The discovery of the true source of the Nile is nothing to me except as it may be turned to the advantage of Christian missions.” So, too, in a letter that he sent by Stanley to Mr. Bennett, of New York, he writes, “If my disclosures regarding the terrible Ujijian slavery should lead to the suppression of the East Coast slave-trade, I shall regard that as a greater matter by far than the discovery of all the Nile sources together. This fine country is blighted as with a curse from above, in order that the slavery privileges of the Sultan of Zanzibar may not be infringed.”
It may safely be asserted that, had it not been for the slave-trade, this indomitable, sagacious, philanthropic traveller would have succeeded in laying the foundation for Christian missions in Central Africa, and also have given to the civilized world the discovery it has so laboriously sought. No progress can be made in the arts or commerce, no social and moral development among the African tribes can be secured so long as this system, the offspring of Moslem cupidity and lust, is permitted to desolate this fair land.
Stricken, suffering Africa! Despoiled and desolated by stronger and more civilized nations for centuries, her youth, her strength, her life-blood on the Western Coast, subsidized by force and barbarities unspeakable to minister to the comfort and affluence of England, Spain, and America! But the awful scourge that freighted the slave-ships of the Great Republic and caused the horrors of “the middle passage” has been, through the combined agency of England and America, inspired by the appeals of the philanthropic spirit of the last half-century, utterly suppressed. The Western Coast of that great continent has been emancipated, and is fast being regenerated. Instead of slave-ships in the lagoons and harbors waiting for the return of their armed crews from raids upon the villages along the coast and in the interior, thus stealing annually in the middle of the last century not less than 100,000 human beings, there are now populous villages springing up, the inhabitants of which are engaged in peaceful pursuits, and making rapid progress in all the arts and comforts of civilized life. The slave-ship is exchanged for the school-house, and with this most formidable barrier removed, the redemption of Western Africa has begun.
That “fine country,” as Livingstone calls it, is needed with its measureless riches for the world’s commerce and civilization. Its gigantic, wide-spreading curse is the slave-trade. Eastern and Central Africa still, over large portions of territory, is blighted with this “sum of all villanies.” Its history has darker shades than any human pencil can portray. Livingstone has told it, and startled the civilized world with the story of murders innumerable and horrors unutterable, of perpetual inter-tribal wars, instigated by the rapacious Arabs, so that captives, numerous and cheap, may be kidnapped or bought for the slave-markets of the coast.
This Mohammedan abomination is a standing, shameless affront to the civilization of the great Christian powers of the earth. Commerce, Humanity, Christianity, demand that it be blotted out. The progress that has been made but recently in this country and Great Britain, in respect to the doctrine of human rights and the claims of the African people, indicates the duty of these powerful nations to this long-benighted and sorely-stricken race. When this powerful barrier against commerce, industry, science, education, Christianity is removed, what will be the glory and grandeur of this great continent, with its numberless population “stretching out their hands unto God,” its uncivilized races transformed into Christian and prosperous peoples, ministering to the world’s advancement by the inexhaustible treasures with which the Creator has endowed their broad and beautiful land!
Exactly one year before the death of the most eminent explorer of the century, Dr. Livingstone, he finished, so his journal informs us, a letter to the New York Herald, in which he endeavors to enlist American enterprise and philanthropy in the suppression of the East Coast slave-trade of Africa. The last words of the letter are these: “All I can add in my loneliness is, may Heaven’s rich blessing come down on every one, American, English, or Turk, who will help to heal the open sore of the world.” No words could more perfectly represent the life and spirit of this missionary traveller; and these—his appeal to the American people—were chosen to be inscribed upon the tablet erected to his memory near his grave in Westminster Abbey.
Loving America, rejoicing in her triumph over slavery, grateful to her for rescuing him, when lost to the civilized world, by her brave and adventurous Stanley, he bequeathes his great life-work, the fervent aspiration of his heart, to her Christian zeal. And England, his own country, takes that memorable invocation and inscribes it as the most expressive memorial of the life and character of her noble son where he is laid to rest among the great and renowned ones of her history. Thus the devoted missionary, the world-known, world-honored explorer of the vast continent of Africa, to which he had given his long and laborious service, entrusts to Great Britain and America united, the accomplishment of the noble undertaking that absorbed and consecrated his life, viz.,
The Regeneration of Africa.