It is in the interior of Africa, in the prosecution of those bloody wars, waged by the African chiefs among themselves for this man-hunt, that entire tribes are reduced to slavery.
Two opposite directions are then given to the caravans: one to the west, toward the Portuguese colony of Angola; the other to the east, on the Mozambique.
Of these unfortunate beings, of whom only a small portion arrive at their destination, some are exported, it may be to Cuba, it may be to Madagascar; others to the Arab or Turkish provinces of Asia, to Mecca, or to Muscat.
The English and French cruisers can only prevent this traffic to a small extent, as it is so difficult to obtain an effective surveillance over such far-extended coasts.
But the figures of these odious exportations, are they still considerable?
Yes!
The number of slaves who arrive at the coast is estimated at not less than eighty thousand; and this number, it appears, only represents the tenth of natives massacred.
After these dreadful butcheries the devastated fields are deserted, the burnt villages are without inhabitants, the rivers carry down dead bodies, deer occupy the country.
Livingstone, the day after one of these men-hunts, no longer recognized the provinces he had visited a few months before.
All the other travelers—Grant, Speke, Burton, Cameron, and Stanley—do not speak otherwise of this wooded plateau of Central Africa, the principal theater of the wars between the chiefs.
In the region of the great lakes, over all that vast country which feeds the market of Zanzibar, in Bornou and Fezzan, farther south, on the banks of the Nyassa and the Zambesi, farther west, in the districts of the upper Zaire, which the daring Stanley has just crossed, is seen the same spectacle—ruins, massacres, depopulation.
Then will slavery in Africa only end with the disappearance of the black race; and will it be with this race as it is with the Australian race, or the race in New Holland?
But the market of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies will close some day. That outlet will be wanting. Civilized nations can no longer tolerate the slave trade!
Yes, without doubt; and this year even, 1878, ought to see the enfranchisement of all the slaves still possessed by Christian States.
However, for long years to come the Mussulman nations will maintain this traffic, which depopulates the African continent.
It is for them, in fact, that the most important emigration of the blacks is made, as the number of natives snatched from their provinces and brought to the eastern coast annually exceeds forty thousand.
Long before the expedition to Egypt the negroes of the Seunaar were sold by thousands to the negroes of the Darfour, and reciprocally.
General Bonaparte was able to buy a pretty large number of these blacks, of whom he made organized soldiers, like the Mamelukes.
Since then, during this century, of which four-fifths have now passed away, commerce in slaves has not diminished in Africa.
On the contrary.
And, in fact, Islamism is favorable to the slave trade.
The black slave must replace the white slave of former times, in Turkish provinces.
So contractors of every origin pursue this execrable traffic on a large scale.
They thus carry a supplement of population to those races, which are dying out and will disappear some day, because they do not regenerate themselves by labor.
These slaves, as in the time of Bonaparte, often become soldiers.
With certain nations of the upper Niger, they compose the half of the armies of the African chiefs.
Under these circumstances, their fate is not sensibly inferior to that of free men.
Besides, when the slave is not a soldier, he is money which has circulation; even in Egypt and at Bornou, officers and functionaries are paid in that money.
William Lejean has seen it and has told of it.
Such is, then, the actual state of the trade.
Must it be added that a number of agents of the great European powers are not ashamed to show a deplorable indulgence for this commerce.
Nevertheless, nothing is truer; while the cruisers watch the coasts of the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, the traffic goes on regularly in the interior, the caravans walk on under the eyes of certain functionaries, and massacres, where ten blacks perish to furnish one slave, take place at stated periods!
So it will now be understood how terrible were those words just pronounced by Dick Sand.
"Africa!
Equatorial Africa!
Africa of slave-traders and slaves!"
And he was not deceived; it was Africa with all its dangers, for his companions and for himself.
But on what part of the African continent had an inexplicable fatality landed him?
Evidently on the western coast, and as an aggravating circumstance, the young novice was forced to think that the "Pilgrim" was thrown on precisely that part of the coast of Angola where the caravans, which clear all that part of Africa, arrive.
In fact it was there. It was that country which Cameron on the south and Stanley on the north were going to cross a few years later, and at the price of what efforts!
Of this vast territory, which is composed of three provinces, Benguela, Congo, and Angola, there was but little known then except the coast. It extends from the Nourse, in the south, as far as the Zaire in the north, and the two principal towns form two ports, Benguela and St. Paul' de Loanda, the capital of the colony which set off from the kingdom of Portugal.
In the interior this country was then almost unknown.
Few travelers had dared to venture there.
A pernicious climate, warm and damp lands, which engender fevers, barbarous natives, some of whom are still cannibals, a permanent state of war between tribes, the slave-traders' suspicion of every stranger who seeks to discover the secrets of their infamous commerce; such are the difficulties to surmount, the dangers to overcome in this province of Angola, one of the most dangerous of equatorial Africa.
Tuckey, in 1816, had ascended the Congo beyond the Yellala Falls; but over an extent of two hundred miles at the most.
This simple halting-place could not give a definite knowledge of the country, and nevertheless, it had caused the death of the greater part of the savants and officers who composed the expedition.
Thirty-seven years later, Dr. Livingstone had advanced from the Cape of Good Hope as far as the upper Zambesi.
Thence, in the month of November, with a hardihood which has never been surpassed, he traversed Africa from the south to the northwest, cleared the Coango, one of the branches of the Congo, and on the 31st of May, 1854, arrived at St. Paul de Loanda.
It was the first view in the unknown of the great Portuguese Colony.
Eighteen years after, two daring discoverers crossed Africa from the east to the west, and arrived, one south, the other north, of Angola, after unheard-of difficulties.