The Casement Report 21

The Casement Report 21

Deaths even in the local prison are not, however, unknown. I heard of

several. The late Chief of H**, a town I visited with the agent of the

A.B.I.R. station had died some months before as the result, it was said,

of imprisonment. He had been arrested because another man of the town

had not brought in antelope meat when required. After one and a-half

months’ imprisonment the Chief was released. He was then so weak that he

could not walk the 2 miles home to H**, but collapsed on the way and

died early the following morning. This was on the 14th June last.

 

On the [blank space in text] September a man named T came to see me. He

had been very badly wounded in the thigh, and walked with difficulty. He

stated that a sentry of the A.B.I.R., a man named U, had shot him, as I

saw; and at the same time had killed V, a friend. The sentries had come

to arrest the Chief of H** on account of meat, which was short for the

white man--not the present white man, but another--and his people had

gathered around the Chief to protect him. An inquiry I gathered had been

held by a Law Officer into this and other outrages committed the

previous year, and as a result the sentry U had been removed from the

district. T went on to say to me that this sentry was now back in the

country at large, and a free man. When I asked him if he himself had not

been compensated for the injuries entailing partial disablement he had

received, he said: “Four months ago I was arrested for not having got

meat, and was kept one and a-half months in prison on that account. U,

who killed V, and shot me here in the thigh, is a free man, as all men

know; but I, who am wounded, have to hunt meat.”

 

This statement I found on fuller inquiry in other quarters was

confirmed; and it became apparent that while the murderer was at large,

one of those he had seriously injured, and almost incapacitated, was

still required to hunt game, and paid for his failure by imprisonment.

On further inquiry, I gathered that this occasion was the only one

locally known when a qualified Law Officer had ever visited the Lopori,

although charges from that region involving very grave accusations had,

on several occasions, been preferred. There being no Magistrate resident

in the whole of the A.B.I.R. Concession, inquiries, unless conducted by

the agents of the A.B.I.R. themselves, have to be investigated at

Coquilhatville--distant fully 270 miles from Bongandanga, and over 400

miles from some parts of the Concession.

 

It is true an officer of the Congo Executive is deputed to exercise a

qualified surveillance within this Concession; but he is not a qualified

Magistrate or legally empowered to act as such.

 

The occupant of this post is a military officer of inferior rank, who is

quartered, with a force of soldiers, near to Bassankusu, the chief

station of the A.B.I.R. Company.

 

This officer, when he enters the A.B.I.R. territory, is accompanied by

soldiers, and his actions would appear to be generally confined to

measures of a punitive kind, the necessity for such measures being that

which almost everywhere applies--namely, a refusal of or falling off in

the supplies of india-rubber.

 

At the date of my visit to the Lopori he was engaged in a journey, not

unconnected with fighting, to the Maringa River. His independence is not

complete, nor is his disassociation from the A.B.I.R. Company’s agencies

as marked as, in view of the circumstances attending the collection of

rubber, it should be.

 

His journeys up the two great rivers, the Maringa and Lopori, which

drain the A.B.I.R. territory, are made on the steamers of that Company,

and he is, to all intents, a guest of the Company’s agents.

 

The supervision of this officer extends also over the course of the

Lulongo river, outside the A.B.I.R. Concession, and he it was who had

occupied the town of Z* on an occasion some months before my visit, when

two native men had been killed.

 

The Commissaire-Général of the Equator District has also, at recent

periods, visited the A.B.I.R. Concession, but this officer, although the

Chief of the Executive and the President of the Territorial Court of the

entire district, came as a visitor to the A.B.I.R. stations and as guest

on the steamer of that Company.

 

No steamer belonging to the Congo Government regularly ascends either

the Lopori or Maringa rivers, and the conveyance of mails from the

A.B.I.R. territory depends, for steamer transport, on the two vessels of

that Company.

 

On the 15th June last, the Director of this Company by letter informed

the Missions of Bongandanga and Baringa that he had given orders to the

steamers of the Company to refuse the carriage of any letters or

correspondence coming from or intended for either of those Mission

stations, which are the only European establishments, not belonging to

the A.B.I.R. Company, existing within the limits of the Concession.

 

Resulting from this order the missionaries at these two isolated posts

are now compelled, save when, some three times a year, the Mission

steamer visits them, to dispatch all their correspondence by canoes to

their agent at Tkau, lying just outside the Concession.

 

This involves the engagement of paddlers and a canoe journey of 120 to

130 miles from each of these Missions down to Tkau.

 

But as the A.B.I.R. Company claims a right to interrogate all canoes

passing up or down stream, this mode of transport leaves some elements

of insecurity, apart from the delay and inconvenience otherwise

entailed.

 

At the date of my visit to the Concession, the Mission at Baringa,

situated 120 miles up the Maringa river, had despatched a canoe manned

by native dependents with mails intended for the outer world--the

nearest post office being at Coquilhatville, some 260 miles distant.

 

When seeking to pass the A.B.I.R. station at Waka, situated half-way

down the Maringa river, this canoe was required by the European agent

there to land and to deliver to him its correspondence.

 

The native canoe men reported that this agent had opened the packet and

questioned them, and that the letters intrusted to them for delivery to

the Mission representative at Tkau were not restored to them without

delay and much inconvenience.

 

It might not be too much to expect that, in return for the very

extensive privileges it enjoys of exploitation of public lands and a

large native population, the A.B.I.R. Company should be required, in the

entire absence of the public flotilla, to discharge the not onerous task

of conveying the public mails by its steamers which so frequently

navigate the waterways of the Concession in the collection of

india-rubber.

 

Were a qualified Magistrate appointed to reside within the limits of

this Concession--as within the other Upper Congo Concessions, some of

them territories as large as a European State, and still containing a

numerous native population--the public service could not but be the

gainer.

 

As it is to-day, no Court is open to the appeals of these people that

lies at all within their reach, and no European agency, save isolated

Mission stations, has any direct influence upon them except that

immediately interested in their profitable exploitation.

 

It is only right to say that the present agent of the A.B.I.R. Society I

met at Bongandanga seemed to me to try, in very difficult and

embarrassing circumstances, to minimize as far as possible, and within

the limits of his duties, the evils of the system I there observed at

work.

 

The requisitions of food-stuffs laid on the villages adjoining the

factories were said to be less onerous than those affecting the rubber

towns. They rested, I was informed, on the same legal basis as that

authorizing rubber working, and a failure to meet them involved the same

desultory modes of arrest and imprisonment. During my stay at

Bongandanga several instances of arrest in failures of this kind came to

my notice.

 

On a Sunday in August, I saw six of the local sentries going back with

cap-guns and ammunition pouches to E**, after the previous day’s market,

and later in the day, when in the factory grounds, two armed sentries

came up to the agent as we walked, guarding sixteen natives, five men

tied neck by neck, with five untied women and six young children. This

somewhat embarrassing situation, it was explained to me, was due to the

persistent failure of the people of the village these persons came from

to supply its proper quota of food. These people, I was told, had just

been captured “on the river” by one of the sentries placed there to

watch the waterway. They had been proceeding in their canoes to some

native fishing grounds, and were espied and brought in. I asked if the

children also were held responsible for food supplies, and they, along

with an elderly woman, were released, and told to run over to the

Mission, and go to school there. This they did not do, but doubtless

returned to their homes in the recalcitrant village. The remaining five

men and four women were led off to the “maison des otages” under guard

of the sentry.

 

An agent explained that he was forced to catch women in preference to

the men as then supplies were brought in quicker; but he did not explain

how the children deprived of their parents obtained their own food

supplies.

 

He deplored this hard necessity, but he said the vital needs of his own

station, as well as of the local missionaries, who, being guests of the

A.B.I.R. Society, had to be provided for, sternly imposed it upon him if

the peopled failed to keep up their proper supplies.While we thus talked an armed sentry came along guarding four

natives--men--who were carrying bunches of bananas, a part of another

food imposition. This sentry explained to his master that the village he

had just visited had failed to give antelope meat, alleging the very

heavy rain of the previous night as an excuse for not hunting.