A FATEFUL SCENE

Gisborne Times, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 12646, 31 August 1935, Page 9

A FATEFUL SCENE

LIKE A GREEK 'DRAMA

SLAVE MARKETS OF TO-DAY

OPENED WITH PRAYER

It was not so long ago that this writer stood in the glaring mudwalled market plane in Morocco, and with his own eyes saw men, women, and children—both black and white (Moors) —auctioned off like cattle ! (writes Ignatius Phayre in “Current j History”). That fateful scene, like i a Greek drama, opened with prayer I chanted by seven dilals or salesmen. . Mounted on a stage above the throng ; and swaying joined hands, they called > down blessings on the day’s meals—j “in the name of God, the Most Mer- ! ciful and Compassionate !” Inside the wide market stood or squatted hundreds of gaily dressed men. As a dilal prances by, clutching with one arm a hefty young negro, and with the other a graceful Moorish girl—“ Great is God .. . O my lords, behold the strength and j beauty of the desert!”—one of the watchers beckons. Our salesman darts over to him. My lord examines the girl gently. Three hundred dollars is the hid. Away speeds the auctioneer, dragging his helpless couple and yelling the price. “Any advance !on that for my pearl?” At rough tables in the centre sit languid scribes I to receive the money and write out deeds of life and death and labor, i Slaves are sold to-day in 15 diflfer- ' ent- countries —several of them memi hers of the League of Nations • In the Empire of Abyssinia, a League 1 member, slavery and serfdom are : deeply rooted. Its ruler, Haile Sclas- | sie, is a “modern” and enlightened I man, yet his domain has at least 2,S 000,000 slaves taken by merciless raids on the. tribes of the interior. Rifle and spear men a thousand strong swoop down on a village in the dark, blowing shrill horns, yelling and shooting to induce a panic. Then huts aro set ablaze, and in the stampede old folks are slain. The sick and exhausted are left to die where (hey fall, nr to be devoured by wild beasts. Young men, women, and children are rounded up to be chained and yoked in caravans for the long trail.- As many as 8000 human beings havejmen taken at one time for the “domestic’ markets. RAIDS IN BRITISH TERRITORY. Much more serious politically are the organised Ethiopian man bunts ; in British territory. Nearly 200 have occurred m the last few years. Cattle are driven off : ivory, ns well as human beings is stolen. Similar raids have been made in Kenya and Somaliland. The Emperor’s edicts tend to make these crimes more furtive in the hot, unhealthy lowlands of Abyssinia itself, where - slave recruiting among the negro villages is a regular event. The King of Kings does all ho can to block it. He has set up an anti-slav-ery department in Addis Ababa, and a committee lias been formed to combat tlie traditional slave system. Slave labor, nevertheless, is still eagerly sought, whether in the form of absolute property as in Arabia, or in the guise of serfdom, peonage, and forced labor as in South America and the Portuguese colonies. In China, where human life is cheap, the buying and selling of slaves have never ceased. To-day there aro millions of them even in the more “advanced” provinces; one may guess what conditions exist in the lawless regions beyond the control of Nanking. Yet Africa remains the great emporium of “The Trade.” The Paris “Matin” has found that among the lowly tribes of Abyssinia, which provide human cattle for Addis Ababa and other local markets, slaves can bo got by ’’negotiation” as well as by violent means. “When a village is too poor,” one of the Arab dealers told the “Matin” reporter, “or if its chief is unwilling to pay his taxes, we settle the taxes and are then repaid in .slave levies. These we deposit for safety in otic of the high .rock villages, whose warriors will guard our stock if we pay them.” HUMAN CATTLE. The white men wore taken to see a slave haul. Through narrow alleys the investigators passed blind walls, then into mud courts, where armed guards stood watcli over mysterious cellars. One of them “raised the planks and we peered down. Here wo saw four sleeping women. Three more lay in another dungeon, four men in a third. Not one of them stirred an eyelid; they must have been half-dead.” “We start to-night,” the Arab told his French visitors. “We only travel by night; it is safer that way.” The Frenchmen followed him to an island off Italy’s Somali coast, where his captives were to be sold. For safety the dealer bought Ethiopian passports for the cattle packed in. bis fast-sailing sambouk. They now figure as Moslem pilgrims to the Holy City! This is the infamous commerce which European warships try to break up. The British Navy’s watch involves endless strain in the hottest waters on' earth. Sloops patrol the Persian Gulf to stop slave and gun running. British vessels, aided by Italian gunboats and French sloops, lie

in wait in the lied Sea, which is still the main route for black ivory cargoes. Yet they aro far from effective. "We do catch the slave dhows now and then,” a naval officer at Aden remarked to me.. ‘‘But they are very fast. They have their own spy system, too, and lots of hiding places in shallow reefs where we can’t follow them. Each skipper is a daring seaman. He sails, in -the• dark without any lights. Ho scuds close inshore, to thread his way through rocky shallows where no other craft could live. For one boat we capture, perhaps a dozen make tho Arabian shore and deliver their living goods to the two main markets of Mecca and T’aif,"