Angola by L. Brooking

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 24, 1907

Angola

By L. Brooking

L. BROOKING

ANGOLA, or Portuguese West Africa, having a population estimated at from five to nineteen millions, is a country of which Portugal has had control for four centuries, and is one of the darkest portions of the Dark Continent. The first Protestant missionary to that country was Matthew Stober, who left England and landed in Loanda, the capital, in 1899. As he walked about the town, and saw the slave sheds where the slaves were stored previous to shipment, and heard the flogging of them, he did not fully sleep much that first night. He wrote about the horrors of that traffic, making an effort to get the Portuguese government to put a stop to it, also endeavoring to arouse public opinion in Great Britain and other European countries to ask that it be stopped. He described how the slaves (called contracted laborers) live only a short time—the women two years, and the men five at most—on the islands of Santo Thome and Principe, under appalling drudgery on the cocoa plantations, and the terrible climatic and other conditions which make the islands a death-trap. Seven thousand slaves were taken over annually from the mainland, to fill up the gaps caused by death—and this goes on at present.

His first hymn translated into the native language was, “Wombaka Kwa Yesu,” and this is the name by which he is known; “Steal away to Jesus.” He has seen how the Spirit of God has gone before him among the heathen, especially so on one occasion, when, on reaching a district to which he had been told by the Portuguese it was death to go, he found an old chieftain who listened

attentively, and who had the peculiar name “Petto Dingalala Kwa Nzambi,” which means “Peter Waiting for God.” On asking him how he got such a name, the old chief replied: “My name was not always so, but years ago I had a dream, in which I was told that I was no more to be called by my usual name, but ‘Peter Waiting for God.’” The missionary inquired among the old people privately if they remembered any such change, and they said, Yes; that years ago, one morning the chief had come very excitedly to them, telling them of the dream and the instruction.

The old chief asked him to stay with him. But Mr. Stober told him that he must go farther on and tell the gospel to others also. So he went on, finding many times a hostile reception at first; but when he left, he would often be accompanied by hundreds of the natives, listening as he went. He never has had an opportunity to go over the same ground again. There are other missionaries of his and other societies now; but they are few, in the midst of such darkness.

Mr. Stober told me that if the natives could be said to keep any day at all, it is the seventh, as on that day, he has noticed, they generally refrain from cultivating the crops, which work is done mostly by the women. So amid darkest Africa the remembrance of God’s true Sabbath is recognized to some extent, through all the ages of the darkest heathenism.

This gentleman gladly took some of our doctrinal tracts to study, and three copies of our Portuguese paper.

*Caterham Sanitarium, England.**