The Bamberg herald. [volume] (Bamberg, S.C.) 1891-1972, 1912-09-12
PRISONER IN AFRICAN WILDS.
Missionary Held for Twenty.Three
Years by a Negro Napoleon.

of Africa, much of the time a prison.
er in a great black Babylon where
nameless horrors were committed
every day, where were hills of skulls
and where patches of slaves were
butchered for the mere JOY of the
sight of blood, Daniel Crawford, a
missionary connected with the Plym-
outh Brethren, has returned to Brit
ain on furlough and has just been
given an official reception at his ma
tive town of Greenook.
How he penetrated from the west
ern coast to the great Katanga coun-
try, in the southeast corner Of the
Congo country, north of Rhodesia,
forms strange chapter in his life
story. At first he was with two 9th
er missionaries Arnot and Mr..
Lane (brother of w. R. Lane, the
well-known Free Churchman)-and,
he said to representative of the
London Chronicle, "we had to bore
our way in. For hundreds of miles
Africa is blocked by impudent chiefs
of the Rob Roy type, whose only
motto is own up and pay up You
go Is, II, 20 stupid little miles, per-
haps you merely cross river, and
another Rob Roy McGregor Afri-
canus' meets you with extortionate
demands. He looks at your jacket
and he wants your jacket; he looks
at the shirt underneath and he wants
your shirt"
The two missionaries whom Mr..
Crawford accompanied soon pene-
trated as far as they desired, and to
solve the difficulty of getting right
into the heart of the interior, Mr..
Crawford attached himself to a
slaver's caravan. "Along the coast,
he says, "ther are number of these
Portuguese slavers, but they employ
toll of black cuthroats, who load the
caravans up with powder and flint
lock guns, and over the hills and far
away they go on their pacific pene-
tration of Central Africa.
And it was then I saw the hor-
rors of the slave trade. All along
the path we saw the shackles and the
yokes of slaves who had died on the
way down to the coast. To prevent
the slaves escaping at. night the legs
of each four of them are tightly
punched together in wooden shack
les. Dozen of shackles were found
along the same route in 1909; not
old shackles, but green shackles still
wet with the sap of the tre> Though
Britain prevents slaves being ship
ped to Jamaica or elsewhere in Al
RIGA, there is always any amount of
slavery up the back path. Africa
lives on slave labor.
1T was the nightmare of my life
in the interior. At all hours of the
night natives came to me saying Sir,
sir, we are all killed. and they would
tell me of the attacks by the slavers,
of women dragged off, of men killed!
Often the slavers were led by white
men, men sporting false names, and
there lay the difficulty. I have got
dates, name of town wiped out,
names of all the victims, but 1 have
not got the name of the Portuguese
leader. These men put on the mask
of false name, and under the shield
of it they do the devils work in Gen.
tral Africa
The caravan to which Mr.. CraW-
ford attached himself to get into the
interior, however, was bound for
place where there were always slaves
to be obtained cheap-the capital OF
the great Emperor Mushidi.
Years BEFORE" says Mr.. Craw-
ford, "Mushidi journeyed into the in
terror with his wife, Kapapa, and two
slaves, total of four, and this terrible
quartette smashed up all the tribes
of Central Africa. Mushidi was a
veritable black Napoleon of Central
Africa. His brain worked with the
precision of a machine. Tribe after
tribe fell under his sway, and thus
was evolved a great black Babylon,
where all the tribes formed seeth-
ing mob and where slaves poured in
by hundreds and thousands.
1T was a city of scores of thous-
ands of people, certainly over 1OO,-
600. And there for years 1 was kept
practically a prisoner, for Mushldl
refused to let me go. 1t was a case
of Will you walk in my parlor?' said
the spider to the fly. Partly, per-
haps, it was a case of pride, for Mu-
shidi wanted his enemies north,
north, south, east and west to know
that he had caught a white man.
"Iife there was awful and Mr..