The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1908-09-20

through quaggy swampS among fallen
trees and thorny creepers where a
sour steam rises day and night, has
already ~familiarized thousands of
English people with the real nature
of the West African problem. The
land is seen to be n in which there
existence; where orchids and para
sites suck the life blood from the
trees and thrive upon their ruin while
creepers strange them and tear them
down half rotten"
In this steamy bush Ormsgll, the
Englishman, out Of regard to a prom
Use made to a dying French trader
with the help of the daughter of a
Portuguese commandant,s rescued an
enslaved negro girl from the hands of
one of the slave drivers of the region
and was witness to one of the occas-
ionaI uprisings of the oppressed and
to the stern effectiveness with which
the Portuguese commandant suppress
ed it.
That the rebellions are not more
numerous is explained only by the
difficulty with which the natives get
together. The outrages justify resis-
lance. "The land" says the American
missionary Mares. who has a streak
of Puritanism, sis full of i%niquities
, and horrors, and I think some of them
can only be washed out in blood.
That law stands AS it has always
done. The great trade road to the
south of us is paved with the bones
of victims, and still they come to die,
worked out in a few years on the
plantations. 1t Is a thing that cannot
go on"
Mares tragic death before the stock
ade of San Rogue added one to the
long list of martyred missionaries.
RebeIIions Crushed.
The rebellion in the story was crush
ed, just as the English adventurer pre-
dicted it would be, and as revolts in
real life among the African tribes have
been successfully put down. Ormsgill,
in spite of his indignation at abuses
knew that revolt is useless and won
dered whether the old belief that there
was a ban Upon the negro and that he
was made to serve the white man was
not after all founded on more than SUI
perstition and self interested sophis-
try. Other primitive peoples had, he
knew, died off before the white man,
but the Africans hav thriven in their
bondage, filling Brazil and the West
Indies and the cotton growing states.
They are prolific, cheerful, adaptable
to all conditions, and yet even where
liberty had been offered, they remained
a subject people, and made no effort
to shake off the white mans yoke"
OF this work John Daniels, CORES
ponding secretary of the Congo Re-
form Association has said:
"Since in connection with my work
in the Congo Reform Association I
have learned something of the wretch
ed conditions of the natives of Portu-
guese Congo, l was particularly inter-
ested in the setting of the story, which
is these very conditions. The reader
gains without conscious effort, a vivid
impression of the atrocious actual
slavery which flourishes in the region,
and finds his interest quickened and
his sympathy enlisted in the current
widespread humanitarian movement
for Africa's purging."
Another English writer who has
helped to arouse the Anglo-Saxon
coutries to al appreciation of what is
going on under Portuguese dominion
is Henry w. Nivinson. Mr.. Nivinson
has personally, at great risk, traversed
the famous old slave trail that runs
up from Benguela on the west coast,
narrowly twisting around every tree
and bush where shackled slaves from
time immemorial have walked after
African fashion, putting one foot exact
ly in front of the other, through the
vast Hungry Country, across Angola to
Congo territory and to the great lakes
beyond. This route is not deserted
today. All along it Mr.. Nivinson
found discarded shackles, skulls and
roting bodies-the symbols of a traffic
that results in a great proportion of
deaths enroute.
The negroes who are now brought
down over the old trail are called
CONTRACTED laborers," but the fact of
slavery according to Nivinson and
Binloss and other first hand observers
is plain. The victims have been bought
on account of debt or captured in raids
led by Portuguese traders. Those that
survive the journeys are brought to
so-called Emigration Offices" ON the
coast. Here they are asked in a lam
guage which they do not understand
if they give their consent to working
for five years. No answer is construed
as assent.
Thereafter some are kept in Angola
to work in the rubber plantations.
Others to the number of about four
thousand a year are exported to the
Portuguese islands of San Thome and
Principe, where in a. atmosphere that
is perpetually steamy, hot and I'M
healthful, lying as the islands do right
under the equator, cocoa plantations
produce abundantly and human beings
perish with higher death rate than
almost anywhere else on the globe.
At the end of five years the contract
ed laborers who have survived are
brought before a curador and informed
that their contract has graciously
been renewed for another half decade.