The Casement Report 22

The Casement Report 22

The agent apologized to me for his inability to give me meat during my

stay, pointing out the obvious necessity he now was under of catching

some persons without delay. He should certainly, he said, have to send

out and catch women that very night.

 

On leaving the A.B.I.R. grounds, still accompanied by this gentleman,

another batch of men carrying food supplies were marched in by three

armed guards, and were conducted towards the “maison des otages,” which

two other sentries apparently guarded.

 

At 8 P.M. that evening, just after the Sunday service, a number of women

were taken through the Mission grounds past the church by the A.B.I.R.

sentries, and in the morning I was told that three such seizures had

been effected during the night. On the 2nd September I met, when

walking in the A.B.I.R. grounds with the subordinate agent of the

factory, a file of fifteen women, under the guard of three unarmed

sentries, who were being brought in from the adjoining villages, and

were led past me. These women, who were evidently wives and mothers, it

was explained in answer to my inquiry, had been seized in order to

compel their husbands to bring in antelope or other meat which was

overdue, and some of which it was very kindly promised should be sent on

board my steamer when leaving. As a matter of fact, half an antelope was

so sent on board by the good offices of this gentleman.

 

As I was leaving Bongandanga, on the 3rd September, several elderly

Headmen of the neighbouring villages were putting off in their canoes to

the opposite forest, to get meat wherewith to redeem their wives, whom I

had seen arrested the previous day. I learned later that the husband of

one of these women brought in, two days afterwards, to the

Mission-station, his infant daughter, who, being deprived of her mother,

had fallen seriously ill, and whom he could not feed. At the request of

the missionary this woman was released on the 5th September. I took

occasion to say to the agent of the A.B.I.R. Company, before leaving,

that the practice of imprisoning women for impositions said to be due by

their husbands was to my mind unquestionably illegal, and that I should

not fail to draw the attention of the Governor-General of the Congo

State to what I had seen. The excuse offered, both on this occasion as

on others when I had ventured to allude to the condition of the natives

around Bongandanga, was that the station compared most favourably with

all others within the A.B.I.R. Concession, which were run, I was

assured, on much sterner lines than those which caused me pain at

Bongandanga. I later made official communication to the local Government

at Boma on these points, in so far as the system I had seen at work

affected the English missionaries within the A.B.I.R. Concession, and in

that letter I sought to show that neither the local agent nor his

subordinate were responsible for a state of affairs which greatly

wounded the feelings of my countrymen at Bongandanga, and which had

filled me with a pained surprise. My attention, it was true, had been

drawn to the systematic imprisonment of women in parts of the Upper

Congo some two years previously, in a case wherein a British coloured

subject--a native of Lagos--along with three Europeans, all of them in

the service of the Compagnie Anversoise du Commerce au Congo--a

Concession Company--had been charged with various acts of cruelty and

oppression which had caused much loss of life to the natives in the

Mongala region. These men had been arrested by the authorities in the

summer of 1900, and had been sentenced to long terms of imprisonment,

against which they had made appeal. The facts charged against the

British coloured subject (who sought my help) were, among others, that

he had illegally arrested women and kept them in illegal detention at

his trading station, and it was alleged that many of these women had

died of starvation while thus confined. This man himself, when I had

visited him in Boma gaol in March 1901, said that more than 100 women

and children had died of starvation at his hands, but that the

responsibility for both their arrest and his own lack of food to give

them was due to his superiors’ orders and neglect. The Court of Appeal

at Boma gave final Judgment in the case on the 13th February, 1901; and

in connection with the Lagos man’s degree of guilt, a copy of this

Judgment, in so far as it affected him, at my request had been

communicated to me by the Governor-General. From this Judgment I learned

that the case against the accused had been clearly proved. Among other

extenuating circumstances, which secured, however, a marked reduction of

the first sentence imposed on the coloured man, the Court of Appeal

cited the following:--

 

“That it is just to take into account that, by the correspondence

produced in the case, the chiefs of the Concession Company have, if not

by formal orders, at least by their example and their tolerance, induced

their agents to take no account whatever of the rights, property, and

lives of the natives; to use the arms and the soldiers which should have

served for their defence and the maintenance of order to force the

natives to furnish them with produce and to work for the Company, as

also to pursue as rebels and outlaws those who sought to escape from the

requisitions imposed upon them.... That, above all, the fact that the

arrest of women and their detention, to compel the villages to furnish

both produce and workmen, was tolerated and admitted even by certain of

the administrative authorities of the region.”

 

I had gathered at the time of this finding of the Boma High Court that

steps had then been taken to make it everywhere effective and to insure

obedience to the law in this respect, and that a recurrence of the

illegalities brought to light in the Mongala region had been rendered

impossible in any part of the Congo State. From what I saw during the

few days spent in the A.B.I.R. Concession, and again outside its limits

in the Lower Lulongo, it seemed to be clear that the action taken by

the authorities nearly three years ago could not have produced the

results undoubtedly then desired.

 

On my leaving Bongandanga on the 3rd September I returned down the

Lopori and Lulongo Rivers, arriving at J**. The following day, about 9

at night, some natives of the neighbourhood came to see me, bringing

with them a lad of about 16 years of age whose right hand was missing.

His name was X and his relatives said they came from K**, a village on

the opposite side of the river some few miles away. As it was late at

night there was some difficulty in obtaining a translation of their

statements, but I gathered that X’s hand had been cut off in K** by a

sentry of the La Lulanga Company, who was, or had been, quartered there.

They said that this sentry, at the time that he had mutilated X, had

also shot dead one of the chief men of the town. X, in addition to this

mutilation, had been shot in the shoulder blade, and, as a consequence,

was deformed. On being shot it was said he had fallen down insensible,

and the sentry had then cut off his hand, alleging that he would take it

to the Director of the Company at Mampoko. When I asked if this had been

done the natives replied that they believed that the hand had only been

carried part of the way to Mampoko and then thrown away. They did not

think the white man had seen it. They went on to say that they had not

hitherto made any complaint of this. They declared they had seen no good

object in complaining of a case of this kind since they did not hope any

good would result to them. They then went on to say that a younger boy

than X, at the beginning of this year (as near as they could fix the

date at either the end of January or the beginning of February), had

been mutilated in a similar way by a sentry of the same trading Company,

who was still quartered in their town, and that when they had wished to

bring this latter victim with them the sentry had threatened to kill him

and that the boy was now in hiding. They begged that I would myself go

back with them to their village and ascertain that they were speaking

the truth. I thought it my duty to listen to this appeal, and decided to

return with them on the morrow to their town. In the morning, when about

to start for K**, many people from the surrounding country came in to

see me. They brought with them three individuals who had been shockingly

wounded by gun fire, two men and a very small boy, not more than 6 years

of age, and a fourth--a boy child of 6 or 7--whose right hand was cut

off at the wrist. One of the men, who had been shot through the arm,

declared that he was Y of L**, a village situated some miles away. He

declared that he had been shot as I saw under the following

circumstances: the soldiers had entered his town, he alleged, to enforce

the due fulfilment of the rubber tax due by the community. These men had

tied him up and said that unless he paid 1,000 brass rods to them they

would shoot him. Having no rods to give them they had shot him through

the arm and had left him. The soldiers implicated he said were four

whose names were given me. They were, he believed, all employés of the

La Lulanga Company and had come from Mampoko. At the time when he, Y,

was shot through the arm the Chief of his town came up and begged the

soldiers not to hurt him, but one of them, a man called Z, shot the

Chief dead. No white man was with these sentries, or soldiers, at the

time. Two of them, Y said, he believed had been sent or taken to

Coquilhatville. Two of them--whom he named--he said were still at

Mampoko. The people of L** had sent to tell the white man at Mampoko of

what his soldiers had done. He did not know what punishment, if any, the

soldiers had received, for no inquiry had since been made in L**, nor

had any persons in that town been required to testify against their

aggressors. This man was accompanied by four other men of his town.

These four men all corroborated Y’s statement.

 

These people were at once followed by two men of M**, situated, they

said, close to K**, and only a few miles distant. They brought with them

a full-grown man named A A, whose arm was shattered and greatly swollen

through the discharge of a gun, and a small boy named B B, whose left

arm was broken in two places from two separate gun shots--the wrist

being shattered and the hand wobbling about loose and quite useless. The

two men made the following statement: That their town, like all the

others in the neighbourhood, was required to furnish a certain quantity

of india-rubber fortnightly to the head-quarters of the La Lulanga

Company at Mampoko; that at the time these outrages were committed,

which they put at less than a year previously, a man named C C was a

sentry of that Company quartered in their village; that they two now

before me had taken the usual fortnight’s rubber to Mampoko. On

returning to M** they found that C C, the sentry, had shot dead two men

of the town named D D and E E, and had tied up this man A A and the boy

B B, now before me, to two trees. The sentry said that this was to

punish the two men for having taken the rubber to Mampoko without having

first shown it to him and paid him a commission on it. The two men

asserted that they had at once returned to Mampoko, and had begged the

Director of the Company to return with them to M** and see what his

servants had done. But, they alleged, he had refused to comply with

their request. On getting back to their town they then found that the

man A A and the child B B were still tied to the trees, and had been

shot in the arms as I now saw. On pleading with the sentry to release

these two wounded individuals, he had required a payment of 2,000 brass

rods (100 fr.). One of the two men stayed to collect this money, and

another returned to Mampoko to again inform the Director of what had

been done. The two men declared that nothing was done to the sentry C C,

but that the white man said that if the people behaved badly again he

was to punish them. The sentry C C, they declared, remained some time

longer in M**, and they do not now know where he is.

 

These people were immediately followed by a number of natives who came

before me bringing a small boy of not more than 7 years of age, whose

right hand was gone at the wrist. This child, whose name was F F, they

had brought from the village of N**. They stated that some years ago

(they could not even approximately fix the date save by indicating that

F F was only just able to run) N** had been attacked by several sentries

of the La Lulanga Company. This was owing to their failure in supplying

a sufficiency of india-rubber. They did not know whether these sentries

had been sent by any European, but they knew all their names, and the

Chief of them was one called G G. G G had shot dead the Chief of their

town, and the people had run into the forest. The sentries pursued them,

and G G had knocked down the child F F with the butt of his gun and had

then cut off his hand. They declared that the hand of the dead man and

of this boy F F had then been carried away by the sentries. The sentries

who did this belonged to the La Lulanga Company’s factory at O**. The

man who appeared with F F went on to say that they had never complained

about it, save to the white man who had then been that Company’s agent

at O**. They had not thought of complaining to the Commissaire of the

district. Not only was he far away, but they were afraid they would not

be believed, and they thought the white men only wished for rubber, and that no good could come of pleading with them.