PORTUGUESE SLAVERY.* Wu had occasion last week to draw attention
to the extra- ordinary remarks made by Mr. Acland on the subject of the Portuguese !colonies during the Foreign Office debate a fortnight ago. The publication of Mr. Harris's book is an effective reply to the half-hearted attempts which are now being made by the Foreign Office at whitewashing the Portu- guese Government. In these pages will be found an admirable summary of the whole question of the treatment of the natives in the West African colonies of Portugal. Mr.
Harris is content for the most part with quoting the evidence of eyewitnesses, which is in itself an overwhelming indict- ment of the Portuguese colonial administration. Much of this evidence is familiar to our readers ; but for the benefit of any who may feel shaken by the recent attitude of the British Foreign Office we will quote some of it, particularly
with a view to showing that the scandals are by no means, to use Mr. Acland's phrase, "for ever over and done with." M. Teixeira de Mottos, for instance, made a long journey through Central Africa last year. Although there is no longer at the present time any open shipment of slaves from the mainland to the islands of San Thome and Principe, yet M. de Mottos reports that on the mainland slavery still flourishes. "I wish to state," Mr. Harris quotes him as writing on June 19th last, " that slavery near the Congolese frontiers is carried on as freely and openly as the selling of
goats and sheep." He proceeds as follows :-
" For the last eight years there has been a great belief amongst responsible authorities that slavery is diminishing, and that 'slave caravans are now very seldom seen. . . . I wish to point out that slavery and the forwarding of slaves is carried out in such a refined form that only the expert will recognize a batch of well- dressed free-going natives as slaves."
We will now quote a few passages from a report by Mr. F. Schindler, a man with twenty-five years' experience of the colony, of a journey through Angola made last autumn. His words throw light upon the system of " repatriation " which is put forward by the Portuguese Government as evidence of their serious intention of putting a stop to the evils com- plained of in the islands. Landing at Benguella, in Angola, last October, he met some of the slaves who had been brought across from the islands and "liberated" on the mainland, to find their way unassisted to homes perhaps thousands of miles distant, or perhaps non-existent :—
"On the Monday following our arrival at Catumbella I went over to Benguella by the early morning train and spent the day .there. After attending to some business matters, I went in search • Portuguese Slavery : Britain's Mamma By John E. Harris, F.E.G.fi, London Methuen and Co. [1s, net.] of the repatriated San Thone5 slaves. It took me but little time to find them. In an open place on the outskirts of the town I saw an elderly man lying in the shade of a tree. At first I passed him by, thinking that he was drunk, but I turned back and sought to rouse him, and inquired of him who he was and where he came from. It was with difficulty that I elicited the information that he had been sold many years ago and sent by steamer to a certain place which he mentioned—the name of which I never heard—and that a few months ago he was sent back to Benguella, that he was sick and hungry, and had neither money nor food."
Still more horrible is another portion of Mr. Schindler's report :— " Close to these men were three women, all middle-aged, who were in a most pitiable condition. One said that she had been ill for some time, and looked very anaemic ; another had both her feet, her knees, and her elbows literally full of jiggers. Each foot was one huge sore filled with these insects, and the knees and elbows were the same, and she was quits helpless. The third este was lying in a stupor and was difficult to rouse. Then a fourth woman came along limping who suffered from elephantiasis in her left foot. All of these presented real pictures of misery, quite incapable of travelling or of earning their living. All I could do for them was to give them some small silver to buy some food. I inquired of a young man whether many had died, and he told me that several had died, two of them just ,outside the camp, and that they were left where they died. I asked him to show me the place and he led me a few steps outside the camp. ' Here,' he said, died one and remained unburied.' But,' I said, there are no bones left at all ; how is this ? ' He replied that the hyaenas had carried off every bit of the corpse. . . .
Similar accounts of the horrors of "repatriation," as worked by the Portuguese, come from other sources. For instance, a passenger on board a Portuguese ship writes as follows in A Capital of June 8th last:— "Last trip we took from San Thom6 to Benguella 269 repatriated servicaes, of whom sixty-odd were Tongas, that is to say negroes born in the islands. Only one of them, the only one entitled to the benefits of the repatriation fund, had any money with him, and all he had was some twenty-seven mitreis in paper. On arrival at the latter port, the men disembarked, and the rules were con- sidered complied with. Here begins the Odyssey of these poor people. The twenty-seven dollars had to be changed into money. The man who had them was promptly swindled by some unscru• pulous scoundrel out of three-fourths of their value, receiving only a quarter of what the notes were worth. The other negroes in vain sought for work, but as a crisis or glut of labour had already declared itself as the result of previous repatriations, none was to be had, and, a few days later, there /ay, in the outskirts of Bengualla, out in the open, no less than fifty corpses ; those who did not or could, not resort to theft in order to lime had simply died of starvation / " These quotations are enough (though many more will be found in Mr. Harris's pages) to show that slavery in fact still persists in the Portuguese colonies. We need not refer here to the absurd contentions put forward that because the servicaes are not slaves in name they are not slaves in fact. The whole case is admirably summed up by Mr. Harris as follows:— " We say that to be 'legally free' is of no avail to the wretched slave who is kept in complete ignorance of the fact. We say that manumission, or, in plain English, freedom, has been through long years of agitation and sacrifice obtained and recorded for every livino. African man, woman, and child—that the denial of free, doe to these people is to-day not only a national, but an inter, national crime. We say that good treatment and housing, oven if it existed in the absolute sense, which we deny, is no sub- stitute for freedom. Finally we assert that to dump down on thei coast of Africa the sick, afflicted, and aged, without sustenance and in the main robbed of the monetary pittance to which they; are entitled, is not repatriation at all, but a phase of the question deliberately organized to confuse the issues and bluff civilization."
We may conclude by urging once more that it is the duty of Great Britain, in virtue of the treaty by which she has for sa many centuries acted as Portugal's ally, to insist that het friendship and help shall not be used for perpetuating slaveti in West Africa.
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