CHAPTER XI.
The Story of Angola and the "Cocoa Islands."
The Portuguese Dependencies in West Africa comprise Angola, the islands of San Thomé and Principe, and the enclave of Kabinda north of the Congo. They cover some 480,000 square miles. They represent the crumbling relics of an ancient splendour identified with an inhuman traffic. The cancer of the slave trade gnawed at the vitals of this territory so long that it has never recovered. Indeed, until a few years ago, the slave trade persisted although appropriately garbed in the raiments of modern hypocrisy. The earliest Portuguese settlement in Angola dates back to the close of the 15th Century. In 1600 the Governor of Angola secured the "Assiento" contract (see Chapter III.) for the supply of slaves to the Spanish West Indies. About the middle of that century the Portuguese authorities began raiding for slaves in the interests of the sugar planters of Brazil. A more intensive demand for slaves arose in Brazil early in the 18th Century with the discovery of gold and diamonds. Slave hunts in Angola kept pace with this demand and led to great depopulation, the area of operations steadily increasing with the years. Although Portugal officially abolished the slave trade south of the Equator in 1830, enormous numbers of slaves continued to be transported to the Brazils by Portuguese slavers up to 1850–60, these "illegal" activities being connived at by the Portuguese officials in Angola and Brazil respectively. From that date onward the increasing energy of British and French cruiser squadrons put an end to the cross-Atlantic traffic. But it was fated that Angola should continue to be drained of its life-blood for many years to come. Slavery of the old-fashioned kind, the raiding, kidnapping and purchase of human beings for plantations under white overseers, did not die out with the legal abolition of the trade. It is very doubtful if it is wholly dead in Angola to-day. A few years before the Great War it would have been accurate to state of Angola that its native peoples were in the same hapless condition as they used to be in other parts of the western tropical Continent when the slave trade was looked upon by all nations as a legitimate form of human activity. Every man's hand was against his neighbour's. No individual was safe. The whole place was mined with slavery. No less a person than the Governor of Mossamedes (southern Angola) who, like several of his compatriots, deplored and denounced the situation obtaining, declared as recently as March, 1912, that he found it impossible to discover a free man in that town even to serve in his own household. National inertia, political troubles and powerful vested interests were jointly responsible for this state of affairs.
During the quarter of a century preceding the Great War, slavery in Angola received a fresh external incentive. Some two hundred miles from the coast-line, a couple of volcanic islands thrust themselves out of the ocean. They are called San Thomé and Principe, and their total area is about 4,000 square miles. They enjoy a heavy rainfall and are admirably suited for tropical cultivation. Originally discovered by the Portuguese, they attained great prosperity during the "golden age" of the slave trade, the slaves on the sugar plantations being, of course, transported from the mainland. Their prosperity declined with the abolition of the Slave trade. It revived somewhat in the middle of last century, coffee taking the place of the sugar cane. But the profits derived from the cultivation of coffee gradually sank, while the demand for another and more valuable crop increased. This was cocoa, first introduced into San Thomé from Brazil in 1822. San Thomé and Principe were destined to become for a time the most important cocoa-producing centres in the world, until the natives of the Gold Coast built up a free industry on their own land, which eclipsed the Portuguese slave industry despite the great care lavished upon it and large sums of money invested in it. But at what a price in human lives and in human misery did San Thomé and Principe acquire their importance! And what a price is still paid in adult mortality, although the conditions of "recruiting" have wholly changed!
The discovery that a slave traffic was still in full swing between Angola and the "Cocoa Islands" came about in this wise. In the opening years of the present century about one-third of the cocoa produced in San Thomé found its way to England. The bulk of the crop went to the United States, Germany and France. The cocoa was then, and continues to be, grown upon estates owned by Portuguese planters. The chocolate manufacturers of the world bought the raw material on the open market. They had no more to do with the methods of its production than the manufacturers of rubber tyres or toys, who bought Congo rubber on the open market had to do with the system under which rubber was produced in the Congo. In 1901 and 1902 sinister rumours reached Cadbury Brothers in regard to the manner in which labour was procured for these estates, and they took it upon themselves to make inquiries in Lisbon as to the truth of the allegations. Mr. William Cadbury saw the Portuguese Colonial Minister and Sir Martin Gosselin, then British Minister at Lisbon. The former admitted the existence of evils connected with the "recruiting," but undertook that a pending "Labour decree" would do away with them. Sir Martin Gosselin, who was keenly interested in native questions and a man of real human sympathies, advised that the Portuguese Government should be given twelve months within which to set its colonial house in order. At the end of that period—the end of 1903—Cadbury Brothers, continuing to receive similar reports to those which had inspired their original complaint, Mr. William Cadbury again visited Lisbon, interviewed the Government, the planters and Sir Martin Gosselin. The planters denied the charge, and challenged open investigation. The British Minister approved the idea. Cadbury Brothers were no more concerned in righting such wrongs as inquiry might prove to exist in the production of the raw material they turned into the finished article than were other firms in the same line of business. They rightly felt that collective action by the largest British, Continental and American manufacturers would have more weight than isolated steps of their own. They thereupon approached their colleagues and competitors in the industry, placing the facts as they then appeared before them, detailing what they themselves had already done, and what was proposed. Fry's of Bristol, Rowntree's of York, and Stollwerck's of Cologne, agreed to participate in a commission of inquiry: the Americans refused. The difficulty was to find an independent and wholly unbiased person, who possessed a knowledge of Portuguese, the latter qualification being a very vital necessity in the case. Failing in this they selected Mr. Joseph Burtt, who spent several months in Portugal studying the language and fitting himself for the task, a delicate one, rendered even more difficult than it would otherwise have been by the close diplomatic relations existing between the British and Portuguese Governments. Mr. Burtt set out on his mission in June, 1905. As the result of his disclosures the firms mentioned boycotted San Thomé cocoa and ceased entirely to purchase it.
I have placed these facts on record here in some detail because they appear to me to have a direct bearing upon one aspect of the whole comprehensive problem with which this volume is concerned: the problem of white responsibility towards the African races. The attitude adopted by Cadbury Brothers, and, subsequently, in co-operation with other firms engaged in the cocoa and chocolate manufacturing industry, typifies what ought to be the attitude of public opinion generally on these questions. Although merely purchasers of raw material on the open market, when they found reason to believe that a portion of that raw material represented the output of forced or slave labour, these firms felt their moral responsibility involved. The firms who did not join them took the view that it was not the business of the manufacturer to worry himself about the origin of the stuff he handled. Now the moral responsibility of all these firms was involved. But no more and no less than in the case of rubber manufacturers, soap or margarine manufacturers, or cotton spinners under like circumstances—in short, manufacturers of any article whatsoever of which the raw material is produced by coloured labour. But this is the only case I have ever heard of in which manufacturers in Europe have recognised that it would be wrong of them not to investigate reports as to the ill-treatment of the distant coloured peoples producing the raw material which they turned into the finished article; and not only to spend considerable sums in investigation, but to take action and refuse to buy the raw material so long as the conditions under which it was produced remained substantially unaltered. No such action was taken by rubber manufacturers in regard to Congo rubber, although the whole world rang with the iniquity of the methods by which that rubber was put on the market.
Nor is such moral responsibility confined to manufacturers. It is shared by Trade Unions, by Industrial Councils. It is shared to a lesser degree, but distinctly, by the consumer. We hear a great deal about "missionaries of Empire." A much-needed missionary work is that of interesting the labouring classes of Europe in the human associations connected with the raw material they handle. Those who might be disposed to deride the idea do not, in my humble opinion, know the working man—the British working man at any rate. The fact that the conditions he suffers from himself are often atrocious, would not deter him from becoming politically conscious, or politically active in the defence of the defenceless. I believe it is perfectly possible to arouse the interest and the sympathy of the British working man in the producers of the material he turns into candles, soap, rubber tyres, furniture, or clothing; or for that matter of what he eats and drinks in the guise of margarine, nut butter, tea, coffee, or cocoa—but there he is merely a consumer, not a unit in an organisation which can make itself politically felt. But as a fashioner of the raw material into the finished article, his professional intelligence should be easy to awaken, his sympathy would be certain to follow and, with its dawning, would come a great democratic drive for the honest, just, and humane treatment of the coloured races. Had I known then what I know now, I should not have limited myself during the decade of the Congo agitation to approaching the statesman, the administrator, the heads of the churches, and the man in the street. I should have gone direct to the leaders of the Labour movement. I received much unsolicited support from some of the latter, and from many an individual working man. But, unhappily, I was not in touch with the Labour movement in those days and neglected a powerful weapon in consequence.
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While the cocoa firms were thus engaged, that preux chevalier of modern journalism, Henry W, Nevinson, was travelling in Angola, and visiting San Thomé and Principe on behalf of Harper's Monthly Magazine. His terrible book, "A Modern Slavery," appeared in the spring of 1906, and revealed the slave-trade masquerading as contract labour, in full swing in Angola, and between Angola and the Cocoa Islands. His disclosures were subsequently confirmed by Mr. Joseph Burtt and Dr. Claude Horton, who accompanied the latter in his prolonged journey into the interior of Angola. Later on further revelations completed the picture, the most important being a series of British Consular reports, the Foreign Office having been induced by the growing agitation to increase its Consular staff and to set it at work on the business of investigation.
The circumstances under which San Thomé labour was "recruited" were briefly these: The interior of Angola was covered with a network of "agents"—Europeans, half-breeds, and natives in European pay—employed by, or connected with, the estate managers on the plantations on the mainland and in the islands, who bribed such officials as they could and intrigued against the others at Lisbon. The purpose of these "agents" was to secure labour by any means: upon that labour they received handsome commissions. The traffic was lucrative. Open raiding, bribery of native chiefs, encouraging litigation among the natives, stirring up inter-tribal warfare, and using as intermediaries the rebellious Congo Free State soldiery which held the frontier country for more than a decade—these were the chief methods employed. The slaves were convoyed along the old slave roads leading from the far interior to the coast, upon which millions of Africans had tramped, and stumbled, and died through the centuries on their way to the Brazils. Once the neighbourhood of "civilisation" was reached and escape became impossible, the shackles were knocked off, the "agent" handed on his captures to his employer, the employer proceeded with them to the nearest magistrate. In the presence of this high official the forms prescribed by "law" were duly enacted. The miserable crowd of broken, half-starved wretches were duly inscribed as having entered for five years upon a "voluntary contract." They bound themselves under this precious deed "to work nine hours on all days that are not sanctified by religion" [sic]. Legality having been thus complied with, the slaves departed with their masters to plantations on the mainland, or, furnished with a new cloth and a metal disc, to the steamer waiting to convey them to the Islands, whence they never returned. An additional cloak of respectability was given to the system after 1903 by the creation of a "Central Committee of Labour and Emigration," with a supervising Board in Africa. The Committee and its Board consisted of officials and planters, that is to say, of the two classes directly affected. Of course, the system went on as before. The truth was known to everyone concerned. Protests by individual Portuguese were never lacking, and were marked in certain instances by rare courage. It is true also that successive Portuguese Cabinets contained individuals who would have stopped the traffic if they could. But after a steady agitation had effected some reforms, nine years after the creation of the "Central Committee," the Minister for Foreign Affairs in the young Portuguese Republic was fain to confess to the British Minister at Lisbon that "the governors whom he had sent out to give effect to its (the Government's) instructions had been to a great extent paralysed by the power of the vested interests" arrayed against them.
The procuring of the slaves was marked by all the features of the old slave-trade. In their march, into the interior, Nevinson and Burtt found the sides of the roads littered with wooden shackles and bleaching bones. At that time the traffic was just recovering from a desperate and ineffectual attempt to throw off the Portuguese yoke on the part of a number of interior tribes.
It seems strange at first sight that public attention in Europe was not directed earlier to the scandal. But it is only within the last twenty years or so that the searchlight of modern inquiry has been able to penetrate the vastness of the African interior, and the individuals who, either by their direct discovery or by an accidental combination of circumstances have learned the truth and ventured to expose the more hideous of the tragedies perpetrated in these remote regions, have invariably found themselves opposed by powerful and unscrupulous vested interests, and by the blocking effects of European diplomacy. With the exception of the Amazonian forests, whose indigenous population—which Roger Casement tried to save as he helped to save the natives of the Congo—is now reduced to vanishing point, tropical Africa is the last stronghold of unfettered capitalism, the last resort of the man-hunter and slave-driver on a large scale. And the latter covers up Iris tracks and disguises his practices with a cunning which increases as the means of investigation become perfected. Even the methods of a Leopold II. are beginning to be out of date. More subtle means are now required. But the end in view has suffered no alteration. Carefully planned legislation, combining land expropriation with taxation, can bring about the desired results—a cheap and plentiful supply of black labour—if a little more slowly, as surely and far more scientifically than the old system.
The procuring of the Angolan slaves for the "Cocoa Islands" was one thing. Their treatment in the plantations was a distinct problem of its own. Owing to the circumstances already narrated, public opinion became concentrated almost entirely upon conditions in the Islands. Conditions in the mainland plantations have really never been investigated at all. These produce no cocoa.
It would be tedious to narrate the peripatetics of a long campaign to secure fundamental reforms in the recruiting of labour on the mainland, and the improvement in the treatment of the labourers on the Islands, which appears to vary a good deal according to whether the plantations are well or ill managed.
The position at present appears to be this. The labour which finds its way to the Islands is no longer slave labour. There can, I think, be no longer any real doubt on that point. One thing at least is certain: Repatriation, which never occurred before, is now regular, although whether efficient agencies exist on the mainland for seeing the repatriated labourers back to their homes is another matter. Anyway, the Angolan who goes to San Thomé returns to the mainland at the expiration of his contract, unless he dies on the Islands in the interval. Men from Angola are now returning as fast as they are going in. In the two years, 1914–15, 5,732 Angolans entered San Thomé, and 6,842 left it. In the first half of 1916, 2,703 entered, and 1,994 left. This implies, of course, a revolutionary change. Previously some 4,000 Angolans were drafted into San Thomé annually. They never left it. It swallowed them up. As M. Auguste Chevalier put it a few years ago: "There is a door by which to enter San Thomé; there is none by which to leave." Mr. Joseph Burtt now feels moved to write: "A great human drama has been acted, and it has ended happily." I do not altogether agree, for the reasons given further on. The Portuguese planters on the Islands are now directing their efforts to secure labour from Mozambique—Portuguese East Africa. I have never heard it alleged that the Mozambique labour is not free, as free as any contracted labour is. But in view of the particulars which follow, I am beginning to doubt whether it can be.
The blunt truth about the Islands to-day is that they are a palpable death-trap. There is nothing peculiar in the climatic conditions which should make them so. Sleeping sickness which used to prevail in Principe, but not in San Thomé, has been extirpated through the devoted labours of Portuguese medical men. There is nothing in the character of the cultivation itself which can account for the fact. It is, indeed, a healthy, out-of-door, not particularly strenuous occupation, which compares, in many, if not in most respects, very favourably with the growing of other tropical crops. Ill-treatment on the plantations is not the cause, although ill-treatment may, and probably does, occur on some plantations. But the individual Portuguese is not habitually inhuman in his treatment of coloured labour. He is probably in some ways less heavy-handed than the Anglo-Saxon. Nevertheless these Islands are a death-trap, and nothing else. The admitted mortality among the labourers remains what it was before the system of procuring labour on the mainland of Angola was changed. But to-day it is the Mozambique natives who suffer most. A mortality of 10 per cent, among adults in the prime of life is monstrous. Yet that is the admitted death-rate which continues to obtain, according to the official figures supplied by the British Consular staff. The total number of contracted labourers on the Islands, exclusive of the children, varies between 35,000 and 40,000. It is acknowledged that 4,000 deaths occurred among contracted labourers on the Islands in 1915, and even then there is a balance of 4,246 unaccounted for, on the basis of the Portuguese statistics of imported and exported labour for the year. Nor is the tale even then complete. The Portuguese statisticians make separate returns for the children born to contracted labourers. From these returns it appears that between August, 1915, and July, 1916, 519 children were born while the death rate amounted to 643. In other words, the mortality among the children of contracted labourers is 100 per cent., a staggering figure, exceeding the worst records of the estates in the old slavery days. The death rate of 10 per cent, among the Mozambique labourers is the minimum. The close analysis of the official figures which has been made by Mr. William Cadbury and by Mr. Joseph Burtt would seem to indicate an even higher proportion, the deaths being one in seven on the basis of a total of 40,000 contracted labourers. Labour drawn from precisely the same source for the South African mines, shows a mortality of one in twenty, and even that figure is officially regarded "with grave concern." The figures of 1919 are not yet available in a British consular report.
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What is the reason of this appalling mortality? A high death rate was to be expected in the case of the Angolan labourer under the circumstances narrated in this chapter, for the African dies from unhappiness more readily, perhaps, than any other human being. But those circumstances have now disappeared and, as has been pointed out, it is the free, or alleged free, Mozambique man who is stricken in such numbers.
I believe the cause to reside in unnatural conditions of life, operating in two main directions. The big estates house thousands of labourers in small walled-in compounds made of permanent buildings; the sanitary arrangements are bad; in a few years the whole area becomes contaminated with disease germs; the streams which flow down from the mountains are poisoned by the over-populated estates built along the water courses. The normal conditions of African life in the damp forest regions of the tropics are small villages of separate and often scattered huts which are frequently destroyed and rebuilt; sometimes the site of the villages is shifted; purging fires are started at regular intervals, usually for agricultural purposes. That is one point. The other is this: The tropical African cannot stand, in tropical Africa, the European labour system with its prolonged hours of work under constant supervision, its monotony, the absence of freedom, joy and sociability in life, the perpetual discipline. These things in conjunction depress the African. He loses hold on existence. His capacity to resist disease, weakens. His procreating powers decline. He becomes spiritless, unhappy, collapsible. It is a question primarily of psychology. The tropical African is essentially a creature of moods; a child of joy and a child of sorrow; a being of strong emotions which must find an outlet. He likes to dance, to linger chatting over camp fires, to vary his life according to the seasons. In his natural state the twin emotions of joy and sorrow merge into one another. The African woman will cry bitterly over her dead child, exclaim that the sorrow is sweet because it is not hopeless, mingle with her lamentations many loving messages of appeal to the dead. The African is an intensely sociable being. He droops under perpetual restraint. Solitary confinement kills him. European industrialism saps his vitality. Every race and every people has its peculiar psychology. That is why alien rulers, however just according to their own lights, never reach the hearts of the subject race. With some notable exceptions, the European knows little and cares probably less about the psychology of the African he governs as an administrator or as an employer of labour. But, put a Russian to rule over Englishmen, a German to rule over Spaniards, an Italian to rule over Swedes—what an unholy muddle they would make of the job. Yet the difference is trifling by comparison. Climate also steps in with its inexorable laws. As man's habitat advances nearer to the equator, his power for sustained and continuous labour decreases: his need for relaxation increases. The southern European is incapable of the prolonged labour, month in month out, which the northern European is able to endure: nor can the latter when transplanted to these warmer climes keep up the pace he was accustomed to. The tropical African has flourished exceedingly in North America and the West Indies, despite the abominable treatment to which he was so long subjected. But he passed from a tropical zone to a temperate or semi-tropical one. He has multiplied in the tropical parts of the southern American continent where men work less prolonged hours and at less high pressure. The climate of tropical Africa makes immense demands upon the human constitution, white and black. Europeans who can spend several years at a stretch in Burma, which is hotter than tropical Africa, can rarely stand more than eighteen months or two years continuous residence in tropical Africa. Few African women can bear more than three or four children, and they age rapidly, although, notwithstanding all that is said by casual observers who have no sense of analogies, they work no harder than the wives of the ordinary European working man. Wherever in tropical Africa the people are driven into the European system, both political and economic, they wilter. The Baganda of Uganda are one of the most intelligent of African peoples. Yet they are dying out under the influence of the European system, or nominal system, of monogamous unions. The Europeanised African of the West Coast towns who wears European clothes, and whose women don corsets, stockings and fashionable footgear, is far less long lived than his ancestors, and has far fewer children. As a class the educated West African is a perishing one: a class which, at heart, is profoundly unhappy. The whole notion and policy of Europeanising the inhabitant of the tropical belt of Africa is a profound error of psychology, totally unscientific. The tropical African is a bad labourer when he is working for the white man; an excellent labourer when he is working for himself, a free man. In the former case, although capable of great attachment, he will, if that attachment is lacking, which is usually the case et pour cause, desert at the first opportunity. And the lash, which is freely used all over tropical Africa where the system of European-managed plantations has been introduced, is a brutalising medium, alike for those who suffer from it and for those who have recourse to it: it is also the invariable precursor of bloodshed. Tropical Africa can produce, and does produce, abundantly as we shall see in the next chapter, under its own system of land tenure, co-operative labour and corporate social life.
A last reflection would seem to be called for in connection with the Portuguese Cocoa Islands. The reasons of the excessive death rate among the contracted labourers may have been accurately diagnosed in these pages, or it may not. But there it is. If it cannot be overcome, what right has an industry to continue, however great the trouble lavished upon it, however obvious the utilitarian argument militating against habitual and deliberate ill-treatment; which destroys one hundred out of every thousand men in the prime of life every year, so that in ten years the thousand men have vanished from the face of the earth?