The Warwickshire Herald. — 1888-09-27 (Birmingham, West Midlands, England)

CANNIBAL ATROCITIES.  Lieutenant-Colonel Wilmot Brooke sends to the Times a letter received from his son (who interviewed four white men from the Aruwimi camp) by the last West African mail. Mr. Wilmot had just returned from an unsuccessful journey unto the Central Soudan with a view of commencing missionary work. Mr. Wilmot says: The Zanzibari traders settled about Stanley Falls have in their pay large bodies of Manyema cannibals. To these men the Arabs issue firearms and send them off to catch the human beings with whom the ivory must be bought, for buying ivory with cloth is a slow and needlessly expensive process, and Tippoo Tib has discovered a system far superior, by which every tusk of ivory can be wrung out of a dienict, and that for a few kegs of powder and the loan of a few old flintlocks. Off go the maneaters with shouting and yelling and great jubilation. What follows is now too well known. The Manyema men who came under the patronage of the expedition to the hitherto untouched Aruwimi region have carried on their work absolutely unchecked in the immediate neighbourhood of the camp, and Englishmen have stood and watched while their Manyema allies fired at the heads of unhappy men and women who bad leaped into the river and were trying to swim across, and have gathered round the Manyema camp fires at igght to hear them relate their prowess. The raid is over, the first unexpected volley usually rendering further opposition hopeless. The dead are cooked and eaten, the village is nothing but smouldering embers, the women and children are hurried off as prisoners to the Zanzibari camps, with rich stores of plunder, goats, and fowls, and plantains, and native canoes, and native furniture, far more than covering the cost of the raid. And now " trade " begins. In a few days, the unfortunate husbands and parents of the prisoners come out of the bush ; they know what is wanted; they have to ransom their relatives with ivory, and the price having been agreed upon the poor creatures go off and collect. When at last they have scraped it all togethtr the prisoners are returned, and the remnants of a once populous town go off to find a new refuge. The Zanzibaris have an object in giving back the prisoners when the ransom is paid; they will do duty again. Hardly have the wretched fugitives settled down again, built some huts, and begun to plant, than the lklanyemas sweep down on them afresh, and the whole process is gone through again,as the residents at Aruwimi camp can testify. The 400 Manyemas who have at last consented to go with Major Barttelot have only done so after expressly stipulating that they are not to be interfered with, so that pillage, murder, and maneating will, no doubt, lay waste the country along the line of march as they have already the country round the camp. The column will thus throw open still more virgin country to the Manyemas. Dead men will tell no tales, and the midnight volley and shrieks of dying men will never be heard from far back in the gloomy forest by the passing Congo steamers. All these things, the letter concludes, are known to all who know the Upper Congo: they are undisputed, and they furnish an example of doing evil that good may come of it on the part of the Aruwimi camp force which has hardly ever been surpassed. But there are worse things yet which will have to be thoroughly investigated— tales of raids, murder, even cannibalism, in which it will be a relief to hear that the Englishmen present confined themselves to beim, e spectators.  kTROCIOUS