200 LIVES A MILE

Evening Star, Issue 20137, 30 March 1929, Page 16

200 LIVES A MILE

COSTLY TROPICAL RAILWAY 17.0U0 DEATHS IN THREE YEARS Seventeen thousand negro labourers have dieel from disease, privation, and exposure in the construction of the still uncompleted railway line which is being built through the tropical forest from Brazzaville, on the Congo, to .Points Xoire, on the coast of French Equatorial Africa. All those lives were lost in three years, and only eighty-seven f>ncl a-hali miles of single track railway built, according to M. Albert Londres, the special correspondent of tljc 1 Petit Parisien,’ who has investigated the conditions in “Black Africa. ’’ Tho workers on the railway, ho says, carry up every rail and sleeper, and every yard or two of the lino means tho loss of a human life. Tho. negroes die of beri-beri, sleeping .sickness, or nienin git is. Tho route .along which tho line is being built is from the Atlantic to Stanley Pool, which was followed by Marchand on his great African expedition. M. Londres asserts that in the adjoining Belgian Congo the Belgian authorities in three years have built 750 miles of lino with a loss of not more than 300 native lives.