SLAVERY IN PORTUGUESE WEST AFRICA.
WE print elsewhere a letter from the Portuguese Minister in London declaring that the statements of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society as to slavery in the Portuguese colonies of West Africa, have been " victoriously and absolutely refuted." He adds that if the workers of the whole world, whites or negroes, could have only " one half of the liberty, treatment, and care that the negro workers enjoy in the Portuguese islands of San Thome and Principe, the whole of humanity would have attained a degree of happiness from which it unfortunately is still far away." We fear that so long as any accredited representative of the Portuguese Government holds language of this kind in reference to the proved slavery and the cruel conditions of recruiting labour in the Portuguese colonies of West Africa, it is impossible to be sanguine that Portugal will firmly and systematically try to remove the abuses which are a, blot upon the fame of any civilized country. They are not only a deep discredit to Portugal but to our- selves, because, as we have more than once pointed out, Great Britain has made herself responsible by treaty for the security of the Portuguese colonies. If some Quixotic Power, intent upon the suppression of slavery, were to attack Portuguese West Africa, we should be bound by treaty to come to the support of Portugal. In other words, we should be fighting incidentally for the main- tenance of slavery. It would be enough to make our ancestors turn in their graves. No decent Englishman should be able to contemplate such a situation with patience. But it may be said : " Could the Portuguese Legation issue such a letter as you print without good evidence to support it ? Surely, if the Legation exag- gerates, you also must have exaggerated. The labour of the cocoa islands is probably not conducted under very bad conditions after all, and cannot fairly be called slavery." The answer to such a doubt is provided in the Parliamentary White Paper which was published last week. This Paper is the first official confirmation of the allegations as to slave-trading in Angola and slavery in the islands.
Once and for all this White Paper explodes the fiction that contract labour in the Portuguese colonies of West Africa is not slavery. Here are the facts which we and others have asserted over and over again set forth—of course in official language. More than we ourselves have ever assumed as necessarily true in framing our appeal to the British Foreign Office and the British public is admitted. On November 22nd, 1909, Sir Edward Grey, writing to Mr. Gaisford, said :- "M. Du Bocago, the Portuguese Foreign Minister, came to see me on the 22nd instant. I observed to him that I had been very much relieved to hear that the recruiting of labour in Angola had been suspended. The conditions of recruiting in the interior had been exceedingly bad, and the facts were known in this country. M. du Bocage said recruiting had been suspended till the end of January, when a new governor would arrive who was fully alive to the situation and would prevent abuses. I explained to him that the information I had received from private sources placed beyond doubt the fact that it had been the custom for natives to be captured in the interior by people who were really slave-dealers ; the captured natives were then brought down to the coast and sent to work in the Portuguese islands. This could easily be stopped if Portuguese officials would hold an inquiry into the case of each group of natives who came down to the coast, in order to make sure that the natives had come voluntarily and had been engaged voluntarily. If this inquiry was held in public anyone could attend it and be satisfied that abuses were not being allowed. I emphasized the strength of feeling in this country on the sub- ject, and the certainty that abuses in the interior had been very great."
It may be said : " That was two and a half years ago. The Portuguese promises no doubt have been fulfilled. The new Republican Government in Portugal is sensitive to charges affecting the humanity of its administration." Let us see.
A scheme of repatriation, which is not really repatria- tion at all, has been introduced, but substantially slavery goes on as before. This is admitted and apologized for by the Portuguese Government at Lisbon. Sir Arthur Hardinge as lately as March 19th, 1912, wrote to Sir Edward Grey—the italics are ours :— " I spoke to Senhor Vasconcellos on the 16th instant, as directed in your dispatch of the 7th, about the duration of contracts made with servicaes ' for San Thome, the affair of the Malang(); respecting which at his request I am drawing up a memorandum for him, and the necessity of carefully watching possible abuses of the rule respecting compulsory labour, of all of which his Excellency took note. He assured me, and I believe quite sin- cerely, of the desire felt by his Government to terminate all these abuses, and justify the claim of the Portuguese Republic to be a humane and progressive force in the civilization of Africa, but he said that the governors whom he had sent out to give effect to its instructions had been to a great extent paralysed by the power of the vested interests, European and native, which, in effecting the necessary reforms, they found arrayed against them."
As the governors have been " to a great extent paralysed " it is certain that the slavery which Sir Edward Grey stated to exist " beyond doubt " two and a half years ago still exists. If the Portuguese Minister in London does not dispute the authenticity of Sir Arthur Hardinge's dispatch containing the admission of the Portuguese Government he can no longer ask us to acknowledge that our charges have been " victoriously and absolutely refuted."
It follows that as "paralysis to a large extent" is admitted in those who have been sent out to end the system of capturing slaves on the mainland and to end the system under which their labour is exploited in the islands, the statements made by British Consuls any time during the past few years are substantially as true now as when they were written. On November 30th, 1909, Mr. Mackie, Consul, wrote from Loanda "The Angolan native, on the other hand, is contracted in wild state under circumstances of doubtful legality, and is so con- vinced that he is a slave that nothing short of repatriation, which should therefore be compulsory, would serve to persuade him that at least in the eyes of the law, he is a free agent. It would obviously be useless to argue that the service].' is not a slave merely because he is provided with a legal contract, renewable at the option of his employer, in which he is officially proclaimed to be free ; whereas compulsory repatriation would once and for all dispose of the constant misgivings and suspicions to which the present system must inevitably give rise, The difficulty is that the very prosperity of the thriving industries requiring cer- vical' labour would, from the Portuguese standpoint, be involved in such a measure, and this fact in itself only adds to the con- viction that the Angolan labourer is being kept in bondage by an adroit manipulation and evasion of the laws of the country."
Our readers will guess, if they do not remember, what terrible truths are covered by the phrase "contracted in a wild state." The slave-traders know that if a native is allowed to step out from a slave-gang marching to the coast, as a free man, merely because he is ill, all the captured slaves will be too ill to march before the coast is reached. A sick man must therefore be a dead man. As Mr. Nevinson and all other investigators of this ghastly subject discovered, a man who dropped by the wayside was always shot. In the course of the White Paper there is testimony to the excellence of the hospitals for the contract labourers, to the good houses, good food, and so forth. We do not dispute such testimony for a moment. The death-rate is terribly high among the slaves, and if it were only from the economic point of view it would be madness for the planters not to keep their human material in as fit a condition as possible. But if the labourers had the best of everything, slavery would still be slavery. On October 20th, 1910, Mr. Drummond Hay, Consul, wrote from Principe :— "I visited two cocoa plantations on the island, and found the same conditions prevailing as at San Thome, the only difference being the amount of sleeping sickness, which is very prevalent. I was infcr❑ied that in the month of June there were fifty-six deaths out of a population of 4,000 people, owing to the tsetse fiy, by which I was attacked personally, having the greatest diffi- culty in warding them off ; they attacked me in the post-office and in the house I was staying at."
After learning of that death-rate one turns with a grim amusement to the regulations for preventing the attacks of the tsetse fly. Animals when at work " must wear on their backs a black covering with a coating of special glue." Again:— "Contract labourers employed on agriculture or any other out- door labour most wear trousers to the heel, blouses with sleeves to the wrist, and high collars in the case of men. Dresses to the heel and blouses to the wrist in the case of women. These gar- ments must be of very bright colours. All must have their heads covered, men with hats and women with handkerchiefs of light colours."
Little more than a year ago Mr. Drummond Hay, whose dispatches might in several cases be taken to mean that the slaves are quite happy, wrote (June 17th, 1911) that eleven Portuguese had been expelled from Angola for " slave- dealing " as well as for other crimes. The Governor- General, we are told, "considering the difficulty of producing conclusive evidence in such cases, decided to use his administrative powers of expulsion as evidence of the goodwill of the Government to put down slave-dealing and to protect the native population." A similar admission as to the existence of slavery is contained in a statement made by Senhor Augusto de Vasconcellos to Sir Arthur Hardinge on October 23rd, 1911 :— " The Europeans who by the inquiry were found guilty of acts of slave traffic, and even those accused of minor offences of this nature, were immediately expelled from the region, and the Government, on confirming their expulsion, independently deter- mined, without prejudice to any proceedings which might have been instituted, that such Europeans should not be allowed to return to the colonies."
We might quote other passages to the same effect. It is unnecessary. It will be noticed that there is no hesitation about speaking of slavery ; the existence of it is assumed.
When attention was at first directed to slavery in Portu- guese West Africa it was not suspected how far afield the slaves were recruited. A large number of them have been brought from Belgian territory. Let us quote in evidence a dispatch from Sir Arthur Hardinge at Lisbon dated only ten months ago (October 29th, 1911) :— "I took the opportunity, however, of urging upon Senhor Vasconcellos the extreme importance of putting an end to the Angola scandals, which had for so long called forth protests from humanitarians throughout the civilized world, and which the Ministers of the Provisional Government, shortly after the revolution of last year, had themselves so unsparingly denounced. I had, I said, heard serious complaints in official circles at Brussels of the way in which slaves were kidnapped by Angola caravans from the Kasai district of the Congo, which showed that the charges made did not emanate solely from missionaries or philan- thropic sentimentalists. His Excellency assured me most earnestly of the determination of the present Portuguese Cabinet to deal drastically with these evils."
In a letter sent to Sir Edward Grey about a fortnight ago the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society suggested that if Portugal would liberate the Belgian slaves the Belgian Government would be willing to send ships to bring them to their homes and would feed them on the way free of charge. We notice that a telegram from Brussels has since proved that this suggestion was perfectly well founded. The Society also pointed out that some of the slaves both in Angola and on the islands are British subjects. A letter was quoted from Mr. Shindler, a missionary of over twenty years' experience, stating that he had himself seen British subjects being driven down to the coast among the slave gangs.
It would be unfair not to say another word about the scheme of repatriation which the Portuguese Government has introduced. It is being conducted in such a manner, however, as to make one suppose that it is intended that it should be a failure or else that it should act in such an oppressive way as to cause the slaves to re-enlist. The former would be a convenience for the planters ; the latter, a triumph. How satisfactory to be able to say : " Now look, the slaves' are re-enlisting of their own accord, because they were so happy in the cocoa islands " ! The truth is that repatriation is not repatriation unless the released slaves are given enough money to enable them to reach their homes and to feed themselves on the way. Merely to land them on the mainland is simply cruelty. If they do not fall into the hands of enemies they die of starvation. As a newspaper at Loanda wrote, " They [the planters on the islands] eat the flesh and give us the bones." There are only too many bones lying not very far from the place where the" repatriated" contract labourers were landed. In 1911 only 385 contract labourers were repatriated out of about 30,000 who were theoretically due to return to the mainland. In the past twenty-five years 60,000 persons have been shipped to the islands, and Sir Edward Grey has stated in the House of Commons that of these only 800 had regained their liberty. And we should like to know more about the repatriation fund. In 1907 the fund amounted to £100,000. Till then it had been in the hands of the planters. In 1908, when it was trans- ferred to the San Thome bank, £40,000 had somehow dis- appeared. Since 1907 there should have been a further accretion of £100,000 from the wages of the contract labourers. Thus there should now be £160,000 in the San Thome bank, irrespective of interest on the capital. Yet the latest information of the Anti-Slavery Society is to the effect that the bank has only a little over £100,000.
Now that this White Paper has been published a new epoch opens. Englishmen who are conscious of the tra- dition they have inherited of hatred for slavery cannot remain inert and at the same time keep their self-respect. In the autumn there will be an anti-slavery campaign.
Public opinion is already strong about Portuguese slavery and the Putumayo atrocities. It will be much stronger then. The Government should be forced to commit them- selves to some constructive policy. Promise and delay, succeeded by more promise and more delay, are becoming intolerable. We believe that the best plan, at least to deal with the islands, is that proposed by the Anti-Slavery Society. It suggests the appointment of an International Commission composed of representatives of the Portuguese, British, and Belgian Governments, assisted by men experi- enced in the tribal languages and cicatrices—i.e. tribal marks—of the Angola, Congo, and Rhodesian Hinter- lands. The Commission should be empowered to issue manumission papers to any slaves demanding liberty ; such freedom papers to mature from six to twelve months from the date of issue, according to circumstances. This period would give the planters ample time to replace the slave labour by servical labour in a legal sense, and also allow the responsible Powers to make arrangements for the return of the slaves. Unless a better plan can be proposed let those who detest slavery agree to concentrate upon this.
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