TWENTY-THREE YEARS IN THE WILDS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1022, 23 March 1912, Page 4

TWENTY-THREE YEARS IN THE WILDS.

KEPT PRISONER BY A NEGRO NAPOEEON.

Alter 23 years’ peril in the heart of Africa, much of the time a prisoner in a great Black Babylon where nameless horrors were committed every day, where there were hills of skulls, and where batches of slaves were butchered for the mere joy at sight of blood, Mr Daniel Crawford, a missionary connected with the Plymouth Brethren, has returned to Britain on furlough, and has just been given an official reception at his native town ol Greenock.

To a Daily Chronicle representative who interviewed him at his host’s house at Padley Wood he recounted some of his thrilling experiences. When he went to Africa 23 years ago he was in peril of falling a victim to consumption. He is now strong, broad-shouldered and robust —“the result of Dr. Africa, M.D., specialist in consumption,” he said, with a smile. How he penetrated from the western coast to the great Katanga country, in the south east corner of the Congo country north of Rhodesia, forms a strange chapter in his life story. At first he was with two other missionaries—Mr Fred Auot and Mr Lane (brother of Mr W. R. Dane, the wellknown Free Churchman —and, says he, ‘‘we had to bore our way in. For hundreds of miles Africa is blocked by impudent chiefs ol the Rob Roy type, whose only motto is ‘Own up and pay up.’ You go 15, 17, 20 stupid little miles, perhaps you merely cross a river, and another ‘Rob Roy M’Gregor Africanus’ meets you with extortionate demands. He looks at your jacket, and he wants your jacket ; he looks at the shirt underneath, and be wants your shirt,” The two missionaries whom Mr Crawford accompanied soon penetrated as far as they desired, and to solve the difficulty of getting right into the heart of the interior Mr Crawford attached himself to a slaver’s caravan. “ Along the coast,” he says, ‘‘there are any number of these Portugese slavers. They don’t move themselves, but they employ a lot of black cutthroats, who load the caravans up with powder and flint-lock guns, and over the hills and far away they go on their ‘pacific penetration of Central Africa ! ’ “And it was then I saw the horrors of the slave trade. All along the path we saw the shackles and the yokes of slaves who had died on the way down to the coast. To prevent the slaves escaping at night the legs of each four of them are tightly bunched in wooden shackles. Dozens of shackles were found along the same route in 1909; not old shackles, but green shackles, sackles still wet with the sap of the tree. Though Britain prevents slaves being shipped to Jamaica or elsewhere in Africa there is always any amount of slavery up the back path. Africa lives on slave labour.

“It was the nightmare of my life in the interior. At all hours of the night natives came to me saying, ‘Sir, sir, we are all killed,’ and they would tell me of attacks by the slavers, of women dragged off, of old men killed. Often the slaves were led by white men, men sporting false names, and there lay the difficulty, I have got dates, name of town wiped out, names of all the victims, but I have not got the name of the Portuguese leader. These men put on the mask of a false name, and under the shield of it they do the devil’s work in Central Africa.’’ The caravan to which Mr Crawford attached himself to get Into the interior, however, was bound for a place where there were always slaves to be obtained cheap —the capital of the great Emperor Mushidi.