THE ANGLO-SAXON IN AFRICA.

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 20 August 1901, Page 2

THE ANGLO-SAXON IN AFRICA.

The advent of British rule to any part of the world means the immediate stoppage of slavery. The information contained in a cable message the other day, stating that a powerful native chief had ceded his territory on the banks of the Gambia River to Britain, will involve the abolition of slavery in Western Africa, the newly-acquired British territory joining French possessions on the southern bank This country resembles in many respects that of Ashantee, which years ago occupied a good deal of attention. Of the slave trade in this part of the “Dark Continent” fcir James Willcocks, who relieved Kuraassi, announced recently in the London Times that, by the recent defeat of the Nigerian Emirs, a large tract of territory would be freed from slave trading. Mr. Tonkin, who was with a former British expeditions, in one of the magazines gives Jan account of the horrors of this trade, of which he was an eye-witness. The slave-traders are of two kinds—private dealers and the Emirs. Amongst the private dealers is the child-stealer, who goes about in the guise of a trader, hawking salt, needles, and cotton thread, visiting farms and lying hidden in the bush till she can pounce upon a group of fine children and drive them off to the slave-trader. The lady-killer uses still more diabolical means. He is an attractive young man, who woos the most desirable girl of the village, works upon her affection, persuades her to elope with him, and as soon as he himself is tired of her sells her for money and begins his game elsewhere. The village vampire is another agreeable young man, who having come in grief to his native home, returns as a reformed character and settles for a time among his friends, keeping in touch with his confederates who are lurking in the bush. While he stays children and cattle disappear, and the amiable young man himself joins in the search. Finally, on the eve of the annual festival a number of the young girls are lost, ami the misfortune is set down to enchantment. Trie young man persuades everyone in the village to give him offerings of salt, rubber, heifers and asses, that he may carry them to a neighbouring magician and get the enchantment removed. The whole lot thus becomes his property, and tnen ho too disappears. These tricks of the private trader are eclipsed by the devasting raids of the Emirs, made sometimes on pretext of a slight received or of a quarrel with a neighbouring Emir, Mr, Tonkin speaks of seeing the midnight sky red with flames, the smoke settling like a pall over ruined homesteads ; the morning sun rising over fettered slaves and dead bodies and smoking ruins, huge walled towns

entirely deserted, thousands of acres of farm land relapsing into jungle, and an entire population absorded; prisoners roped together and stuffed by crowds into barracoons. The effect of these raids is to turn the natives of Ilaussaland into scared, hunted wild beasts, living in villages either perched on inaccessible rocks or hidden in dank, dark hollows of the forest. Every day these raids go on somewhere or other, and there is no deliverance except through the conquering power of the British troops.