then narrates several specific cases of burning of villages and slaughter of natives, and continues): It is this sort of policy which explains why the native is abandoning these rich and admirable valleys…
These are typical observations selected from a great number, and common to all the regions Chevalier traversed. Every phase of the system in the Congo Free State, reported by innumerable witnesses, is seen by Chevalier's narrative to be reproduced in the French Congo. Thus Chevalier notes everywhere famine resulting from requisitions in rubber and in foodstuffs, which leaves the inhabitants no time to attend to the cultivation of foodstuffs for their own sustenance; utter exhaustion among the men leading to sexual incapacity; tribal women forced to feed great numbers of idle female camp followers attached to the administrative centres, themselves dying of hunger, seeing their children perishing for lack of nourishment, compelled to thrust water into their babies' mouths through narrow-necked gourds to stop their cries as they suck vainly at withered teats; children so reduced that they appear like walking skeletons; one or two powerful so-called Arab chiefs in the far interior raiding right and left for slaves, whom they sell to cattle-raising communities further north in order to procure bullocks demanded of them by the Administration as tribute, or employed as agents to collect rubber and ivory for Concessionaires, who give them guns in exchange, which facilitate their raiding operations. He sums up the whole position as he then found it thus:
Soon, if this policy is persisted in, if the incendiarism and devastation of villages does not stop … if the concessionaires are always to enjoy the right of imposing such and such a "corvée" upon the inhabitants, and to place an embargo upon all the latter possess, the banks of the Congo, the Ubanghi, and the Sangha will be completely deserted… If this policy be not changed, in half a century from now these hardworking races will have completely disappeared, and the desert will enter into possession of French Central Africa.
One may compare that passage with another from one of the most terrible books which have ever illustrated the systematic prostitution of civilisation in the Congo Basin, by a junior French Congo official, himself a participator in this welter of abomination, unable to alter it and presently sinking to its level:
