defaulting capitas. This wily official manages to get thirteen monthly ‘taxes’ in the year. At one village I bought a contrivance by which the natives reckon when the tax falls due. Pieces of wood are strung on a piece of cane. One piece is moved up every day. On counting them I found there were only twenty-eight. I asked why, and was told that originally there were thirty pieces, but the white man had so often sent on the twenty-eighth day to say the time was up, that at last they took off two.
“Individual acts of atrocity here have for the most part ceased. The State agents seem to have come to the conclusion that it is a waste of cartridges to shoot down these people. But the whole system is a vast atrocity involving the people in a state of unimaginable misery. One man said to me, ‘Slaves are happy compared with us. Slaves are protected by their masters, they are fed and clothed. As for us—the capitas do with us what they like. Our wives have to plant the cassava gardens and fish in the stream to feed us while we spend our days working for Bula Matadi. No, we are not even slaves.’ And he is right. It is not slavery as slavery was generally understood: it is not even the uncivilized African’s idea of slavery. There never was a slavery more absolute in its despotism or more fiendish in its tyranny.”
It will be seen that, so far as the people are concerned, the problem is largely solved, the bitterness of death is past. No European intervention can save them. In many places they have been utterly destroyed. But they were the wards of Europe, and surely Europe, if she is not utterly lost to shame, will have something to say to their fate!