The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-07-05
THC HOME, OF THE
 NEGRO QUESTION
BY SAMUEL PHILLIPS WERNER, ,n c,ontraI Africa The Cape to Cairo Railway. Afr

suiar agent at the Portuguese province of Angola in the darE continent. Through the courtesy of this gentleman. whose experience had made his hair as white as that of any octogenarian before he had reached his fifteenth year. I became well acquainted with the capital of South west Africa, and was shown over the naunts of the slave trade, then in the last gasps of It's death-agonies.
 San PaoIo de Loanda owes its once magnificent, but now crumbling grandeur to the fact that 1t was. for nearly three centuries, the headquarters for the ship ment of negroes from territory ot three million square miles to the West Indies and the two Americas. Here were the | man -kraaIs in which were penned the human chattels awaiting shipment to tho United States or Cuba. or Brazil: here were the arsenals of firearms and the deposits of fire-water by means of which the Kraals were kept full; here was the rendezvous of the half-breed yellow nigger'' slave-hunter, and the mongrel- pred British or Down. East Trader; here was gathered together the off-scouring of 1 the villainy, cupidity. and rapacity or three continents preying on the misery of a fourth; here, in a word. on the shores of the Atlantic, and on one Of the most beautiful spots on the globe was the most popular terrestial resi- dence of his Satanic Majesty for three hundred years.
 The city lies on high bluffs of crum- bling limestone where the vast plateau of Angola juts out into the Southern Atlantic, it's lower part on the beach of the bay below the bluffs. the citadel, government houses, and more preten- tious mansions standing out in bold re- lief upon the top of the yellow clins. The architecture is archaic and wonder fully heterogeneous, the Moorish edifces in soft gray stone. rising above the shapeless adobe dwellings of the number Portuguese, and these fianked on tho las' by the ugly and unsavory mud or straw huts of the aborigines and halt-breeds The streets are paved with stone rubble with occasional brick sidewalks, and adobe walls and curbings. Here and there rise the tops of evergreen trees palms, plantains, bananas, cocoanuts oi lines; and sometimes little garoer abuts on the narrow street. with pro
 fusion of the most beautiful and sweet
 scented flowers. vines, and shrubs. OVei 1t all is the shimmer of the dazzling sun light of the tropical cline varied at nigh
 with the peculiar silvery radiance or th'
 moonlight which Stanley says shines II
 Africa with a glory all it's own, or thu
 gentle day-darkness from the sub-equa torial stars grouped about the ler! l southern OGOSS. tHc piN NAN.
 stretched the wide plains of Lunda witl , ever and anon a lonely group of starl and helmeted palms of which Hein
 wrote in those exquisite lines:
 'In the Far North there stands Pin
 Tree.
 Lone. upon a wintry height,
 It sleeps; around 1t snows have throw
 a covering of white
 . It dreams forever of a Palm. that Fla
 in the morning Land
 Stands silent, midst heaps of burnin sand.''
 l Loanda boasts a library among il efforts at resembling It's prototype an mother city. ancient Lisbon on tf
 Tagus, and this little pioneer of cultul '' on the shores of the wilderness prove
 veritable gold mine of information
 when Colonel Weston duly introduce
 me to It's treasures. For besides Il poetry of their beloved Iobeira and ;. the Portuguese Horace, Ferreira. wei :. the works of all the most eminent e1 plorers and travellers. whose journeyint
 had wished particularly to examine. ,f the originals were the travels of SerI ul Pinto. Carvalho. Saturnino. Ferreira. u
 explorer wissmann. Pogge and Vol
 (the last three being Germans who e, '' plored Central Africa from Loanda {
 a base).