The Congo and Coasts of Africa Part 2

As published in the "State Bulletin," the money received in eight years for rubber and ivory gathered in the _Domaine Prive_ differs from the amount given for it in the market at Antwerp. The official estimates show a loss to the government. The actual sales show that the government, over and above its own estimate of its expenses, instead of losing, made from the _Domaine Prive_ alone $10,000,000.

We are left wondering to whom went that unaccounted-for $10,000,000.

Certainly the King would not take it, for, to reimburse himself for his efforts, he early in the game reserved for himself another tract of territory known as the _Domaine de la Couronne_. For years he denied that this existed. He knew nothing of Crown Lands. But, at last, in the Belgian Chamber, it was publicly charged that for years from this private source, which he had said did not exist, Leopold had been drawing an income of $15,000,000. Since then the truth of this statement has been denied, but at the time in the Chamber it was not contradicted.

To-day, grown insolent by the apathy of the Powers, Leopold finds disguising himself as a company, as a laborer worthy of his hire, irksome. He now decrees that as "Sovereign" over the Congo all of the Congo belongs to him. It is as much his property as is a pheasant drive, as is a staked-out mining claim, as your hat is your property. And the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are there only on his sufferance. They are his "tenants." He permits each the hut in which he lives, and the garden adjoining that hut, but his work must be for Leopold, and everything else, animal, mineral, or vegetable, belongs to Leopold. The natives not only may not sell ivory or rubber to independent traders, but if it is found in their possession it is seized; and if you and I bought a tusk of ivory here it would be taken from us and we could be prosecuted. This is the law. Other men rule over territories more vast even than the Congo. The King of England rules an empire upon which the sun never sets. But he makes no claim to own it. Against the wishes of even the humblest crofter, the King would not, because he knows he could not, enter his cottage. Nor can we imagine even Kaiser William going into the palm-leaf hut of a charcoal-burner in German East Africa and saying: "This is my palm-leaf hut. This is my charcoal. You must not sell it to the English, or the French, or the American. If they buy from you they are 'receivers of stolen goods.' To feed my soldiers you must drag my river for my fish. For me, in my swamp and in my jungle, you must toil twenty-four days of each month to gather my rubber. You must not hunt the elephants, for they are my elephants. Those tusks that fifty years ago your grandfather, with his naked spear, cut from an elephant, and which you have tried to hide from me under the floor of this hut, are my ivory. Because that elephant, running wild through the jungle fifty years ago, belonged to me. And you yourself are mine, your time is mine, your labor is mine, your wife, your children, all are mine. They belong to me."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Tenants" of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo Belongs to Him, and that These Native People Are There Only as His Tenants.]

This, then, is the "open door" as I find it to-day in the Congo. It is an incredible state of affairs, so insolent, so magnificent in its impertinence, that it would be humorous, were it not for its background of misery and suffering, for its hostage houses, its chain gangs, its _chicottes_, its nameless crimes against the human body, its baskets of dried hands held up in tribute to the Belgian blackguard.

III

THE CAPITAL OF THE CONGO

Leopold's "shop" has its front door at Banana. Its house flag is a golden star on a blue background. Banana is the port of entry to the Congo. You have, no doubt, seen many ports of Europe--Antwerp, Hamburg, Boulogne, Lisbon, Genoa, Ma.r.s.eilles. Banana is the port of entry to a country as large as Western Europe, and while the imports and exports of Europe trickle through all these cities, the commerce of the Congo enters and departs entirely at Banana. You can then picture the busy harbor, the jungle of masts, the white bridges and awnings of the steamers. By the fat funnels and the flags you can distinguish the English tramps, the German merchantmen, the French, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese traders, the smart "liners" from Liverpool, even the Arab dhows with bird-wing sails, even the steel, four-masted schooners out of Boston, U.S.A. You can imagine the toiling lighters, the slap-dash tenders, the launches with shrieking whistles.

Of course, you suspect it is not a bit like that. But were it for fourteen countries the "open door" to twenty millions of people, that is how it might look.

Instead, it is the private entrance to the preserves of a private individual. So what you really see is, on the one hand, islands of mangrove bushes, with their roots in the muddy water; on the other, Banana, a strip of sand and palm trees without a wharf, quay, landing stage, without a pier to which you could make fast anything larger than a rowboat.

In a canoe naked natives paddle alongside to sell fish; a peevish little man in a sun hat, who, in order to save Leopold three salaries, holds four port offices, is being rowed to the gangway; on sh.o.r.e the only other visible inhabitant of Banana, a man with no nerves, is disturbing the brooding, sweating silence by knocking the rust off the plates of a stranded mud-scow. Welcome to our city!

Welcome to busy, bustling Banana, the port of entry of the Congo Free State.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Facilities for Landing at Banana, the Port of Entry to the Congo, Are Limited.]

In a canoe we were paddled to the back yard of the cafe of Madame Samuel, and from that bower of warm beer and sardine tins trudged through the sun up one side of Banana and down the other. In between the two paths were the bungalows and gardens of forty white men and two white women. Many of the gardens, as was most of Banana, were neglected, untidy, littered with condensed-milk tins. Others, more carefully tended, were laid out in rigid lines. With all tropical nature to draw upon, nothing had been imagined. The most ambitious efforts were designs in whitewashed sh.e.l.ls and protruding beer bottles. We could not help remembering the gardens in j.a.pan, of the poorest and the most ignorant coolies. Do I seem to find fault with Banana out of all proportion to its importance? It is because Banana, the Congo's most advanced post of civilization, is typical of all that lies beyond.

From what I had read of the Congo I expected a broad sweep of muddy, malaria-breeding water, lined by low-lying swamp lands, gloomy, monotonous, depressing.

But on the way to Boma and, later, when I travelled on the Upper Congo, I thought the river more beautiful than any great river I had ever seen. It was full of wonderful surprises. Sometimes it ran between palm-covered banks of yellow sand as low as those of the Mississippi or the Nile; and again, in half an hour, the banks were rock and as heavily wooded as the mountains of Montana, or as white and bold as the cliffs of Dover, or we pa.s.sed between great hills, covered with what looked like giant oaks, and with their peaks hidden in the clouds. I found it like no other river, because in some one particular it was like them all. Between Banana and Boma the banks first screened us in with the tangled jungle of the tropics, and then opened up great wind-swept plateaux, leading to hills that suggested--of all places--England, and, at that, cultivated England. The contour of the hills, the shape of the trees, the shade of their green contrasted with the green of the gra.s.s, were like only the cliffs above Plymouth. One did not look for native kraals and the wild antelope, but for the square, ivy-topped tower of the village church, the loaf-shaped hayricks, slow-moving ma.s.ses of sheep. But this that looks like a pasture land is only coa.r.s.e limestone covered with bitter, unnutritious gra.s.s, which benefits neither beast nor man.

At sunset we anch.o.r.ed in the current three miles from Boma, and at daybreak we tied up to the iron wharf. As the capital of the government Boma contains the residence and gardens of the governor, who is the personal representative of Leopold, both as a shopkeeper and as a king by divine right. He is a figurehead. The real administrator is M. Vandamme, the Secretaire-General, the ubiquitous, the mysterious, whose name before you leave Southampton is in the air, of whom all men, whether they speak in French or English, speak well. It is from Boma that M. Vandamme sends collectors of rubber, politely labeled inspecteurs, directeurs, judges, capitaines, and sous-lieutenants to their posts, and distributes them over one million square miles.

Boma is the capital of a country which is as large as six nations of the European continent. For twenty-five years it has been the capital. Therefore, the reader already guesses that Boma has only one wharf, and at that wharf there is no custom-house, no warehouse, not even a canvas awning under which, during the six months of rainy season, one might seek shelter for himself and his baggage.

Our debarkation reminded me of a landing of filibusters. A wharf forty yards long led from the steamer to the bank. Down this marched the officers of the army, the clerks, the bookkeepers, and on the bank and in the street each dumped his boxes, his sword, his camp-bed, his full-dress helmet. It looked as though a huge eviction had taken place, as though a retreating army, having gained the river's edge, were waiting for a transport. It was not as though to the government the coming of these gentlemen was a complete surprise; regularly every three weeks at that exact spot a like number disembark. But in years the State has not found it worth while to erect for them even an open zinc shed. The cargo invoiced to the State is given equal consideration.

"Prisoners of the State," each wearing round his neck a steel ring from which a chain stretches to the ring of another "prisoner,"

carried the cargo to the open street, where lay the luggage of the officers, and there dropped it. Mingled with steamer chairs, tin bathtubs, gun-cases, were great crates of sheet iron, green boxes of gin, bags of Teneriffe potatoes, boilers of an engine. Upon the scene the sun beat with vicious, cruel persistence. Those officers who had already served in the Congo dropped their belongings under the shadow of a solitary tree. Those who for the first time were seeing the capital of the country they had sworn to serve sank upon their boxes and, with dismay in their eyes, mopped their red and dripping brows.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Prisoners" of the State in Chains at Matadi.]

Boma is built at the foot of a hill of red soil. It is a town of scattered buildings made of wood and sheet-iron plates, sent out in crates, and held together with screws. To Boma nature has been considerate. She has contributed many trees, two or three long avenues of palms, and in the many gardens caused flowers to blossom and flourish. In the report of the "Commission of Enquiry" which Leopold was forced to send out in 1904 to investigate the atrocities, and each member of which, for his four months' work, received $20,000, Boma is described as possessing "the daintiness and _chic_ of a European watering-place."

Boma really is like a seaport of one of the Central American republics.

It has a temporary sufficient-to-the-day-for-to-morrow-we-die air.

It looks like a military post that at any moment might be abandoned.

To remove this impression the State has certain exhibits which seem to point to a stable and good government. There is a well-conducted hospital and clean, well-built barracks; for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the black soldiers even a theatre, and for the higher officials attractive bungalows, a bandstand, where twice a week a negro band plays by ear, and plays exceedingly well. There is even a lawn-tennis court, where the infrequent visitor to the Congo is welcomed, and, by the courteous Mr. Vandamme, who plays tennis as well as he does every thing else, entertained. Boma is the shop window of Leopold's big store. The good features of Boma are like those attractive articles one sometimes sees in a shop window, but which in the shop one fails to find--at least, I did not find them in the shop. Outside of Boma I looked in vain for a school conducted by the State, like the one at Boma, such as those the United States Government gave by the hundred to the Philippines. I found not one. And I looked for such a hospital as the one I saw at Boma, such as our government has placed for its employes along, and at both ends of, the Isthmus of Panama, and, except for the one at Leopoldville, I saw none.

In spite of the fact that Boma is a "European watering-place," all the servants of the State with whom I talked wanted to get away from it, especially those who already had served in the interior. To appreciate what Boma lacks one has only to visit the neighboring seaports on the same coast; the English towns of Sierra Leone and Calabar, the French town of Libreville in the French Congo, the German seaport Duala in the Cameroons, but especially Calabar in Southern Nigeria. In actual existence the new Calabar is eight years younger than Boma, and in its munic.i.p.al government, its street-making, cleaning, and lighting, wharfs, barracks, prisons, hospitals, it is a hundred years in advance. Boma is not a capital; it is the distributing factory for a huge trading concern, and a particularly selfish one. There is, as I have said, only one wharf, and at that wharf, without paying the State, only State boats may discharge cargo, so the English, Dutch, and German boats are forced to "tie up" along the river front. There the gra.s.s is eight feet high and breeds mosquitoes and malaria, and conceals the wary crocodile. At night, from the deck of the steamer, all one can see of this capital is a fringe of this high gra.s.s in the light from the air ports, and on sh.o.r.e three gas-lamps. No cafes are open, no sailors carouse, no lighted window suggests that some one is giving a dinner, that some one is playing bridge. Darkness, gloom, silence mark this "European watering-place."

"You ask me," demanded a Belgian lieutenant one night as we stood together by the rail, "whether I like better the bush, where there is no white man in a hundred miles, or to be stationed at Boma?"

He threw out his hands at the gas-lamps, rapidly he pointed at each of them in turn.

"Voila, Boma!" he said.

From Boma we steamed six hours farther up the river to Matadi. On the way we stopped at Noqui, the home of Portuguese traders on the Portuguese bank, which, as one goes up-stream, lies to starboard.

Here the current runs at from four to five miles an hour, and has so sharply cut away the bank that we are able to run as near to it with the stern of our big ship as though she were a canoe. To one used more to ocean than to Congo traffic it was somewhat bewildering to see the five-thousand-ton steamer make fast to a tree, a sand-bank looming up three fathoms off her quarter, and the blades of her propeller, as though they were the knives of a lawn-mower, cutting the eel-gra.s.s.

At Matadi the Congo makes one of her lightning changes. Her banks, which have been low and woody, with, on the Portuguese side, glimpses of boundless plateaux, become towering hills of rock. At Matadi the cataracts and rapids begin, and for two hundred miles continue to Stanley Pool, which is the beginning of the Upper Congo.

Leopoldville is situated on Stanley Pool, just to the right of where the rapids start their race to the south. With Leopoldville above and Boma below, still nearer the mouth of the river, Matadi makes a centre link in the chain of the three important towns of the Lower Congo.

When Henry M. Stanley was halted by the cataracts and forced to leave the river he disembarked his expedition on the bank opposite Matadi, and a mile farther up-stream. It was from this point he dragged and hauled his boats, until he again reached smooth water at Stanley Pool. The wagons on which he carried the boats still can be seen lying on the bank, broken and rusty. Like the sight of old gun carriages and dismantled cannon, they give one a distinct thrill.

Now, on the bank opposite from where they lie, the railroad runs from Matadi to Leopoldville.

The Congo forces upon one a great admiration for Stanley. Unless civilization utterly alters it, it must always be a monument to his courage, and as you travel farther and see the difficulties placed in his way, your admiration increases. There are men here who make little of what Stanley accomplished; but they are men who seldom leave their own compound, and, who, when they do go up the river, travel at ease, not in a canoe, or on foot through the jungle, but in the smoking-room of the steamer and in a first-cla.s.s railroad carriage. That they are able so to travel is due to the man they would belittle. The nickname given to Stanley by the natives is to-day the nickname of the government. Matadi means rock. When Stanley reached the town of Matadi, which is surrounded entirely by rock, he began with dynamite to blast roads for his caravan. The natives called him Bula Matadi, the Breaker of Rocks, and, as in those days he was the Government, the Law, and the Prophets, Bula Matadi, who then was the white man who governed, now signifies the white man's government. But it is a very different government, and a very different white man. With the natives the word is universal.

They say "Bula Matadi wood post." "Not traders' chop, Bula Matadi's chop." "Him no missionary steamer, him Bula Matadi steamer."

The town of Matadi is of importance as the place where, owing to the rapids, pa.s.sengers and cargoes are reshipped on the railroad to the _haut Congo_. It is a railroad terminus only, and it looks it. The railroad station and store-houses are close to the river bank, and, spread over several acres of cinders, are the railroad yard and machine shops. Above those buildings of hot corrugated zinc and the black soil rises a great rock. It is not so large as Gibraltar, or so high as the Flatiron Building, but it is a little more steep than either. Three narrow streets lead to its top. They are of flat stones, with cement gutters. The stones radiate the heat of stove lids. They are worn to a mirror-like smoothness, and from their surface the sun strikes between your eyes, at the pit of your stomach, and the soles of your mosquito boots. The three streets lead to a parade ground no larger than and as bare as a brickyard.

It is surrounded by the buildings of Bula Matadi, the post-office, the custom-house, the barracks, and the Cafe Franco-Belge. It has a tableland fifty yards wide of yellow clay so beaten by thousands of naked feet, so baked by the heat, that it is as hard as a bra.s.s shield. Other tablelands may be higher, but this is the one nearest the sun. You cross it wearily, in short rushes, with your heart in your throat, and seeking shade, as a man crossing the zone of fire seeks cover from the bullets. When you reach the cool, dirty custom-house, with walls two feet thick, you congratulate yourself on your escape; you look back into the blaze of the flaming plaza and wonder if you have the courage to return.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Bush Boys in the Plaza at Matadi Seeking Shade.]

At the custom-house I paid duty on articles I could not possibly have bought anywhere in the Congo, as, for instance, a tent and a folding-bed, and for a license to carry arms. A young man with a hammer and tiny branding irons beat little stars and the number of my license to _porter d'armes_ on the stock of each weapon. Without permission of Bula Matadi on leaving the Congo, one can not sell his guns, or give them away. This is a precaution to prevent weapons falling into the hands of the native. For some reason a native with a gun alarms Bula Matadi. Just on the other bank of the river the French, who do not seem to fear the black brother, sell him flint-lock rifles, as many as his heart desires.

On the steamer there was a mild young missionary coming out, for the first time, to whom some un.o.bserving friend had given a fox-terrier.

The young man did not care for the dog. He had never owned a dog, and did not know what to do with this one. Her name was "f.a.n.n.y,"

and only by the efforts of all on board did she reach the Congo alive. There was no one, from the butcher to the captain, including the pa.s.sengers, who had not shielded f.a.n.n.y from the cold, and later from the sun, fed her, bathed her, forced medicine down her throat, and raced her up and down the spar deck. Consequently we all knew f.a.n.n.y, and it was a great shock when from the custom-house I saw her running around the blazing parade ground, her eyes filled with fear and "lost dog" written all over her, from her drooping tongue to her drooping tail. Captain Burton and I called "f.a.n.n.y," and, not seeking suicide for ourselves, sent half a dozen black boys to catch her.

But f.a.n.n.y never liked her black uncles; on the steamer the Kroo boys learned to give her the length of her chain, and so we were forced to plunge to her rescue into the valley of heat. Perhaps she thought we were again going to lock her up on the steamer, or perhaps that it was a friendly game, for she ran from us as fast as from the black boys. In Matadi no one ever had crossed the parade ground except at a funeral march, and the spectacle of two large white men playing tag with a small fox-terrier attracted an immense audience. The officials and clerks left work and peered between the iron-barred windows, the "prisoners" in chains ceased breaking rock and stared dumbly from the barracks, the black "sentries" shrieked and gesticulated, the naked bush boys, in from a long caravan journey, rose from the side of their burdens and commented upon our manoeuvres in gloomy, guttural tones. I suspect they thought we wanted f.a.n.n.y for "chop." Finally f.a.n.n.y ran into the legs of a German trader, who grabbed her by the neck and held her up to us.

"You want him? Hey?" he shouted.

"Ay, man," gasped Burton, now quite purple, "did you think we were trying to amuse the dog?"

I made a leash of my belt, and the captain returned to the ship dragging his prisoner after him. An hour later I met the youthful missionary leading f.a.n.n.y by a rope.

"I must tell you about f.a.n.n.y," he cried. "After I took her to the Mission I forgot to tie her up--as I suppose I should have done--and she ran away. But, would you believe it, she found her way straight back to the ship. Was it not intelligent of her?"

I was too far gone with apoplexy, heat prostration, and sunstroke to make any answer, at least one that I could make to a missionary.

The next morning f.a.n.n.y, the young missionary, and I left for Leopoldville on the railroad. It is a narrow-gauge railroad built near Matadi through the solid rock and later twisting and turning so often that at many places one can see the track on three different levels. It is not a State road, but was built and is owned by a Dutch company, and, except that it charges exorbitant rates and does not keep its carriages clean, it is well run, and the road-bed is excellent. But it runs a pa.s.senger train only three times a week, and though the distance is so short, and though the train starts at 6:30 in the morning, it does not get you to Leopoldville the same day. Instead, you must rest over night at Thysville and start at seven the next morning. That afternoon at three you reach Leopoldville. For the two hundred and fifty miles the fare is two hundred francs, and one is limited to sixty pounds of luggage. That was the weight allowed by the j.a.panese to each war correspondent, and as they gave us six months in Tokio in which to do nothing else but weigh our equipment, I left Matadi without a penalty. Had my luggage exceeded the limit, for each extra pound I would have had to pay the company ten cents. To the Belgian officers and agents who go for three years to serve the State in the bush the regulation is especially harsh, and in a company so rich, particularly mean. To many a poor officer, and on the pay they receive there are no rich ones, the tax is prohibitive. It forces them to leave behind medicines, clothing, photographic supplies, all ammunition, which means no chance of helping out with duck and pigeon the daily menu of goat and tinned sausages, and, what is the greatest hardship, all books. This regulation, which the State permitted to the concessionaires of the railroad, sends the agents of the State into the wilderness physically and mentally unequipped, and it is no wonder the weaker brothers go mad, and act accordingly.

My black boys travelled second-cla.s.s, which means an open car with narrow seats very close together and a wooden roof. On these cars pa.s.sengers are allowed twenty pounds of luggage and permitted to collect two hundred and fifty miles of heat and dust. To a black boy twenty pounds is little enough, for he travels with much more baggage than an average "blanc." I am not speaking of the Congo boy.

All the possessions the State leaves him he could carry in his pockets, and he has no pockets. But wherever he goes the Kroo boy, Mendi boy, or Sierra Leone boy carries all his belongings with him in a tin trunk painted pink, green, or yellow. He is never separated from his "box," and the recognized uniform of a Kroo boy at work, is his breechcloth, and hanging from a ribbon around his knee, the key to his box. If a boy has no box he generally carries three keys.