GREATEST EXODUS IN WORLD’S HISTORY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18780, 8 June 1929, Page 19 (Supplement)

GREATEST EXODUS IN WORLD’S HISTORY.

Slaves of “Black Empire” Whose Only Wage is Death.

AUTHOR’S REVELATIONS.

A scathing indictment of France’s administration in her “Black Empire ” of Occidental and Equatorial Africa is made by M. Albert Londres, an eminent French special correspondent. He reveals that there has been a tremendous movement of natives from those two French Colonies to British territory —an exodus, unparalleled in history— to escape conscription and forced labour.

“WE ONLY SPENT NEGROES.”

SYSTEM OF ROADS THAT DID NOT COST A COWRY. TLT LOXDRES’S sensational story of * French colonial maladministration is contained in his book, “ Terre d’Ebene” (Ebony Lands), just published in Paris, in which he tells the grim story of his travels in the black Africa of France, writes the Paris correspondent of the “Daily Chronicle.” The most striking part of his indictment is that in which he reveals the wholesale flight of natives from French Occidental Africa and French Equatorial Africa, two vast colonies containing 20.000 000 negro inhabitants. During the past three years, he states:— 600,000 natives have gone to the Gold Coast, a British Colony; 2,000,000 natives have gone to Nigeria, a British Colony; 10,000 natives have left their villages to live in most savage conditions in the forests of the Ivory Coast. They have fled, he says, from recruitment for the army and from forced labour on the roads and railways and as wood-cutters in the forests. Endless Trek. No fewer than 2,000,000 natives, therefore, have gone from under the French flag in three years. That is just 13 per cent of the entire population of the two colonies. It means between 16,000 and 17,000 every week, or about 2400 a day. Such an exodus must be one of the most remarkable in history. “We no longer count the deserted villages,” comments M. Londres. At Mopti, on the way to Timbuctoo, he admires the excellent road. . “Ah, what bea'utiful routes!” he exclaims. “The roads are magnificent. They are all the more remarkable because they did not cost us a cowry. We only spent negroes. Reserve Fund of Millions. “Are we, then, so poor in Africa? Oh. no! The Governor-General has a reserve fund—part of the local taxation—of I don’t know how many millions. “Reserve fund! What a scandalous expression in a new country! Those hundreds of millions should be used to develop the country and not put away in our old national stocking. "A big reserve fund, but—no motorlorries, not a single steam-roller for the roads. Nothing but negroes and negresses carrying each a stone on their beads. “In our Sudan, the Haute Volta and Ivory Coast there are 30,000 miles it roads. All the material to make them was carried on the heads of natives. “There go 1000 negroes, marching in Indian file,” he says. “They are going to work on the railway at Tafire, in the Ivory Coast region. That is about 470 miles away. Food? Please God. that will be found en route. The caravan

will take a month to reach its destination. “Surely these labourers could be taken there on motor-lorries. That would save 20 days and certainly 20 lives. But buy lorries? Wear out tyres? Use petrol? Then the reserve fund would decrease. The negro is still sufficiently fat.” Describing the journey up country from Dakar, “the port of our Black Empire,” M. Londres speaks of the railway. “There are SOO miles of it,” he says. “That is the biggest work we have accomplished in Black Africa. If we are not ungrateful should do more than merely salute this accomplishment. “We should bring flowers and strew them on the way. Thus we would, at every sleeper, honour the memory of a negro fallen in the cause of civilisation.” He mentions one route where the distance between the quarries and the road in making was one-third of a mile, so that “every stone meant that a negro had to walk two-thirds of a mile.”

Slavery? he asks. Oh, yes, it has been abolished by ministerial declarations in Europe. Officially, it exists no longer: in fact it still remains Slaves go under another name, but “ they are still the property of their masters, like cows and other animals: they have remained just where they were—that is to say, with their ownAfrica Still Captive. “Black Africa,” says M. Londres, “is still captive. For every free man there are thirty slaves. “ From them the black army is recruited ; and, during the war, it was, as often as not, the owners who took the pay. “These slaves are labourers, too: they dig canals; they build railways and roads: the pay they should receive goes to their chiefs, who house them* feed them and give them a wife or two “ And after the old men and the children, the old, worn-out women are sent to work. Everything is used in Africa.”One of the most amazing parts of M. Londres’ book is that in which he describes the life of the wood cutters in the vast forests. “ The forest! The terrible kingdom of the cutters of wood! To be sent there is to be condemned to death. It is the work of convicts,” he says, and he goes on to describe what he saw of pav-day.

Roll-Call of Dead. “ Zie has earned 77 francs in a month. His taxes amount to 88 francs—4o francs head-tax and 48 for relief from forced labour. After a month of labour in the forest Zie is in debt to the extent of 11 francs. If the negroes are sent to work in the forests—which is also forced labour—how can he do forced labour elsewhere? Yet he has to pay 48 francs because he is forced to work in one place and not at another.” “Jeannot,” cries the foreman. No one presents himself. Jeannot is dead. Maoudi? Robert? They are dead, too. “ A month of suffering in the forest, and for wages only death and debt,” remarks M. Londres sarcastically. MYSTERY CITY OF THE DESERT. Of the many remarkable things in “ Terre d’Ebene,” I have only space to take a graphic account of that strange desert city Timbuctoo. “ A name,” he says, “ sounds in the desert’s immensity. Timbuctoo is about to appear. A people who have nothing, nothing, have yet something to offer—a city with a resounding and romantic name. “ Poor Ebony Land! The whites, vour adopted sons, do not want to leave you even the prestige of a legend, for if they learn that you are going to Timbuctoo they l, laugh in your face A pilgrim bound for Timbuctoo? He

passes for a poet, a big enough reproach in our epoch. “ There is no road into Timbuctoo. You ride through woods where the pointed leaves your face. These leaves are like tooth-picks. A country which offers you nothing to eat, offers your tooth-picks. . . . “ Then you leave the trees behind and e.nbark on a ' r reat sea of sand. . . “ Suddenly: Land! Land! “ Timbuctoo, spread before you in the midst of its defence, the desert sand, like an extravagant mo>le-hill, a mass of grey earth, badly built. Apart from our six or seven official buildings, round a vast bathing-pool of sand, the city consists of alleys, chiefly deserted, where the houses, earth in cubes, are more often crooked than straight, and where bandits could await you every hundred yards in a safe ambush. . . .No flowers, no fountains; nothing in stone, everything in mud. “ It is a city without race, where the whites have left their half-breeds and the Arabs their pure blacks. A melt-ing-pot. Even the mosque is crumbling, crumbling—what will Mahommed say to Allah? . . . And the silence of the place! From its tumbledown mud there rises the most eloquent silence of all Africa.” M. Londres’s severe criticisms have already had some effect. The French Colonial Minister has paid a visit to France’s Black Emprie, and the Government has arranged a “ caravan ” of deputies and journalists to visit the two neglected colonies.