THE CONGO.

Otago Witness, Issue 2818, 18 March 1908, Page 17

THE CONGO.

SOME APPALLING FACTS. CAPTAIN MCDONALD'S LECTURE. The Congo as a subject of public interest now loonia large before the whole world and an audience at the Hanover Street Baptist Church was on the 12th brought face to face with great river, the extraordinary dwellers on its banks, the Iniquitous rubber trade, the terrible mutilations, massacres, and oppressions, the tricks of the traders, and the works of the missionaries. The lecturer was Captain David K. M'Donald, of the Congo mission boat Livingstone, and his powerful and thrilling address was vividiy illustrated with a great number of remarkable lantern slides. Except for the*foeus on the sheet the ohureh was pitch dark, and the audience followed the fascinating? narrative with rapt, attention, the tense listening silence that enveloped Ihe speaker's : words being occasionally broken by exclama- ' tions of wonder, indignation, and horror. > MALARIAL MOSQUITOS. Introduced by the Rev. W. Hay, Captain McDonald showed the river mouth, the haunt of malaria and swarms of mesquitos, where the sirens of the big Home boat 6 sqjnetimep sounded, and tie little coaches ' came with coffee, salt, and cocoanut oil. ' Mosquitos were one of the minor curses of i the country. The white people at first, to., avoid them, built on the heights as far frofrn the river as possible, but found the ohftls were more conducive to the fever than the mosquitos; co now European residents dir<elt.ft6 olose v to .the, water as possible. From Boina, the capital, the journey was made to Leopoldvilie bj-,_rail in open trucks be- • hind » ric&etty little engine that blew dust all o^er the passengers till they resembled \ •blacks. Leopoldvilie is built at the angle of an immense cataract, and woe betide the steamer whose gear goes wrong. Captain M'Donald witnessed a mishap. A barge in tow .struck a rock and was cvi adrift, but meanwhile the steamer lost her way, and was swept into t-he irrip of the race. Head to stream she paddled full •peed ahead for two hours, but was gradually sucked further and further down towards 'the rapida. ( Lines were flung from shore, and from another steamer out of the current, and by degrees she was edged in, and escaped destruction by a hair's breadth. KING LEOPOLD. It is , at thie Leopoldvilie that you first hear of oppression. The v^opie are taxed to the verge of starvation and beyond it. So cruel are their burdens that over 5000 fled in one night, leaving the village standing un tenanted. They fled to the French Congo, and over 30,000 have from time to time followed suit. Here you have to take the steamer —ia this case the mission tbteamer Livingstone. ' Like most craft on the Congo she is a flat-bottomed stern wheeler of shallow draught, with a double tier of deck cabins. The average pace of the steamer <s one knot and a-half an hour sway from the cataracts, and it takes three {.imes as long to go up stream as it does Ix> come down. On board is a hospital, where fever patients are nursed. There are mision stages at long intervals, nearly as far up^as Stanley Falls, and before the Great Bend is reached there "s a mission station with a printing press. The natives have an intense thirst for knowledge, and as nothing is printed but.^the Scriptures, the deduction is obvious. One of These mission ■ stations is exactly on the equator. There are no seasons, nothing but a perpetual summer, and the grass is always green. Even one degree north or south makes a difference. _ BASKETS OF HANDS. i On entering the Big Bend you enter the i Congo Balolo Mission field and the Crown • Domain, wh eh is about as big as ' Germany. It is a vast rubber-bearing forest, veined ■with tributaries, great and small, 'Cowing north to the Congo. This is the property of Leopold, the King of the Belgians. This is the theatre of the most ghastly atrocities. Rubber is wanted. Rubber must be got at any price, and natives are shot down by hundreds l>ecause they or their tribe have failed to bring m a , sufficient quantity. Round the State posts '< the dead were sometimes too numerous .to count, much less to bury. The missionaries saw these things, but for long deemed it their duty to preach the Gcspel and not to make reports. Lately the massacres and ; anutilatione became co terrible that they' •were driven to report on them, and then the hand of the Belgian King was raised against them. They were discredited, thwarted, and threatened. Finally they were told to go, and the traders did as they liked. It was in this district that the sentries arrived at intervals with baskets full of right hands, to show that they had not wasted their cartridges. Tiese sentries are, though sombtimee cannibals, less bloodthirsty than their white masters. They do not wish .to kill the, hundreds they are sent to slaughter, so),

they often fire at animals m the fores*", but when the time approaches for them to render an account of their ghastly stewardship they are afraid. Hand.? — riffht J hands — must be got. and at once ; so a raid js made in any direct 'on. The luckless villagers are surprised, a few ragged volleys are tired into the midst of them, and the right handd are hacked from the dead, the wounded, and the unhurt : from men., from women, and from little children. So the baskets go in full to the brim, the cartridges are accounted for, and the white man is pacified. This is the reason why so many of the natives may be seen with their right arms terminating in stumps above the wrist. A chief, whose tribe had been backward with its toll of rubber, was seized, and worked to a skeleton with the chain gang. Again his tribe was , remiss, and h:s infuriated captors literally kicked him to death. MISSIONARIES. . The lecturer jwent on to speak of the i mission Houses.' The two-storey type had , been abandoned, as they became infested with inosquitos, and were damp. Wooden, buildings on brick piers were now the idea, with the floor as high from the ground as possible. The missionaries did their own building, carpentering, and blacksmithing ; made repairing slips for their steamer, and , the " barter" houses. They were taxed ' outrageously for everything. The State i would not help the missionaries, who were not wanted there. Some beautiful palm avenues were shown on the screen, forming long perspectives of cool green arches beneath a blinding sun. Churches were thatched roofs on four or six ■uprights, and missionaries went their "rounds" by canoe up the creeks and tributaries. Iron to the natives was as valuable as gold, and they , would steal the grate and fireirons. A ' phenomenon that puzzled the new arrival was "that on going out in the morning in grass drenched with dew he got his clothes covered with what seemed to be red paint. This was a mixture with which the natives smeared themselves, and which the wet grass retained as they passed through it. Another curiosity was the palms, which flourished 500 miles from the coast, which contradicted the accepted belief in the South Seas that coooanut palmg can only grow close to the sea. ' DOG-EATERS. Oranges, bananas, and mangoes flourished, but were usually eaten by goats, the natives not regarding them as articles of diet. The staple food of those who were not cannibals was the plantain, which grew out of the reach of animals. The plantains were ground to pulp in huge bowls made of leaves crushed together, and then baked or fried in* palm oil. No article of diet was so acceptable to a native as a dog. He would do any amount of work for a. good ■ fat one. Their own dogs had deteriorated till they had lost even their bark, and were more like skeleion pigs than anything eke, with little ratty tails curling over their backs. Appalling pictures of a warlike bush tribe were thrown with mutilated faces daubed with pipe-clay and pointed teeth. The<e, however, could neither Swim nor paddle, so all the river natives had to do in case of attack was to take to the canoes. They were- wonderful canoemakers, but the State officials had stolen nearly all of them, and the people were too disheartened to build more ; and, a 6 the art was handed down from father to son, it soon would be forgoiton. ' HIPPOS AND CROCODILES. The natives were mighty huntere, and piles of hippos' skulls were shown by the lantern, also a magnificent specimen shot by ; a missionary. The lecturer said the Cojigo | teemed with them, also with two varieties 'of crocodile — man-eating and fish-eating. ■ The former followed up canoes, as acci- ' dents were frequent. They also waited for the women, who came to the bank for water. Besides raising their flesh in ridges by means of lances till tbeir backs and chests resembled washing-boards, the women had extraordinary methods of doinsj their hair, which sometimes took them days to arrange. The various methods were depicted on the sheet, to the amazement of all ladies present. ' FEMALE, SLAVES "BEAUTIFIED." Husbands insisted on their wives (one chief had COO) having their eyelashes pulled out and their bodies carved, " because it made them more beautiful." 1 They frequently fainted during the operation. These awful facial and bodily disfigurements were rendered permanent by keeping the wounds open for a period of years. In addition to this, the women had to wear huge brass collars, which could not be taken off, and brass leggings. Bra«s, next to iron, was the most valuable metal, so the wives carried their husbands' ca.pital on their persons If a canoe capsized they sank like stones. Leopards, startled by the clank of metal, would awake ,and spring on the brassbound women and tear them in pieces. With the mest primitive appliances they were wonderful braesworkers, and turned

out shiekK symmetrical spears, axss, and implements. . Their anvils wore stones, their hammers iron pins, their bellows madeof leaves, and the fuel charcoal. Woodcarving was a frn-e art, stools and long lounge chairs being carved out from the tree. Weavers were to be seen plying their tra-cte in the forest "with a complicated contrivance of sticks that, being manipulated, formed the pattern. THE GRAVESThe death _of a man was made horrible by his wives "carrying round the corpse, with its personal effects, and yelling till the echoes rang again. The coffin of a chief was usually a canoe with a top, and ornamented with carvings. It was not unusual to see a horrible heathen orgie proceeding at one end of a village, and an open-air Christian meeting in progress at the other. Many missionaries in the early days laid down their lives for the Gospel's sake, and here and in the forest silences might be seen the quiet but eloquent graves. The natives invariably built little houses over their dead, sometimes better than their own dwellings, and in the3e a chair was placed for the convenience of the spirits of the departed. SLEEPING SICKNESS. Though in Uganda thousands of pounds were being spent to alleviate this dreadful scourge, King Beopold had done nothing to stamp it out. He had tried to " blind and bluff" the people of England by offering a cash prize to anyone who discovered a cure. Be knew very well that there was no positive cui'e, and thcpeople of Congo , knew him for a tyrant and a. ' deceiver, who did not care whether the ' natives lived or died as long as they • brought in rubber. Thousands were dying j everywhere, some three jears after con- j tracting the sickness, and some sooner. It commenced to show itself in inflamed eyes and swollen glands in the neck, and ' then more terribly and unmistakably. I Three European ladies had been cured with ' large doses of arsenic, which killed the germ : but this had no\;ffect whatever in : the caso of natives. ' The disease was carried from one to another by the tset3e j fly. The only way to combat the sickness was, the lecturer thought, by establishing isolation camps in the forests far from the villages. , WITCH DOCTORS. j It took at least three j-ears to get the ' confidence of the natives, and even then j they would prefer to consult the witch I doctors. These were old men with faces ! and chests mutilated abnormally, who posseted great power over the people. They claimed to be able to cast out 13 evil spirits from a man during the day. A name possessed with a demon would arrive, and the witch doctor would conceal • a grasshopper in the palm of his left hand, { and with the right make an incision in his patient's leg. Then he would gradually call the evil spirit up to the aperture, and at the critical moment release the grasshopper, saying, "Look! there it goes,"; and the man would depart comforted and j cured. The charms they sold were a few leaves, some parrot feathers, and some nail parings, which the bmers treasured more than life itself. One of these witch doctors was, a regular attendant at church. A RECANTATION { Ono of the pictures shown was that of the mela-ncholy old chief Hjoumlu, whose people worshipped him because his beard grew nearly to the ground. He caused his first child to be buried alive, as the people believe that this practice will bring the father wealth. Kis tribe grew backward in rubber tribute, and the Belgians s>ent a marauding band, head-ed by two whites, into his country. The orders were that the invaders were to be rationed on the bodies of the slain. Hundreds were killed, and Loutulu sent in his report for the King of Belgium with a tally of sticks for each murder — a long stick for each chief, a thin one for a woman, and a little one for a child. For this he was captured and kept in the chain gang till he recanted. His beard was cut off. and he was cent back to his tribe a beggar and disgraced. About thio time Mr and Mrs Harris, of the Congo Reform As'soeiation. were compelled to leave under threats of death by the traders. As for the natives, some missionaries laboured for 11 years without a convert. They were given over to demon worship and cannibalism. Though wonderful in , canoes, they regarded a sail as a large flag, ■' and had no idea it could propel a boat through the water. A bag of salt was worth 1000 brass rods, which was the price of a wife, and fathers dressed their daughters up for sale at the age of 13. ,' AN EXECUTION. j Captain M'Donald said human sacrifice was often practised, and a ghastly picture was focussed. showing an unfortunate tied with vines. Close by stood the executioner with the knife ready for the nameless horrors. Close by were th« drums and

rattlps to drown the shrieks of the victim. The lecturer said that there was a curious rule, which laid <l.ovvn that should a visiting chief arrive with his retinue he could "buy the neck"' of the victim. That meant that he could pay a price and take him away as a slave. If the man was ablebod ied this was often done. The missionaries had turned this to account, and impressed on the people that they were all in the place of the bound- victim before God, and" that Christ had come as a " buyer of the neck." AN INTERVIEW. Interviewed afier his lecture,. Captain M'Donald said that it was impossible to exaggerate the atrocities perpetrated -by the rubber traders. 'And many of the. crimes committed were too appalling to be thought about, much less\jspoken from a public platform. King Leopold was apparently going to hand over the country to- the Belgian Government for two millions, but there seeteied to be, no guarantee that the natives would be benefited by t'lie . -change. The only hope wjvs. the cuttijig loose of the-whoie system, and any alteration would mean a. heavy loss. The people had been so malzreated and 1 impoverished, and the country so squeezed and neglected, that nothing could be done in the Belgian Congo without a large expenditure of capital. Captain M'Donald left the Congo last April, after a three years' stay, during which he travelled 20,000 miles. He returns' next October. Meanwhile he is lecturing and doing his utmost to raise a little money to Detter equip the mission steamer Livingstone.