p. 11 | SLAVERY IN AFRICA

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 10, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 36.

SLAVERY IN AFRICA.

KHARTOUM, the headquarters of the slave merchants of the Nile, is situated on that river 1,100 miles from the Mediterranean, and has 50,000 inhabitants. Twelve large slave corporations here do a prosperous business, and this city alone clears $3,000,000 annually by the sale of young girls.

Armed parties are sent up the river from Khartoum to the “Slave and Ivory Lands,” where numerous stations are established. Each encampment contains 200 Nubian Arabs with their negro slaves or wives. From these centers they issue in the dead of night, armed to the teeth, and stealing down on a native village, surround it, concealing themselves in the long grass. Just as the day is breaking, torches are applied to the grass huts, which are dry as tinder. Instantly the doomed village is in flames, and as the unfortunate people rush out, volley after volley of musketry does its deadly work and all the men, women and boys are pitilessly murdered.

Then the girls from 4 to 15 years of age are taken away to the encampment, together with the ivory, the result of the year’s hunting. The horrible indignities and shameful lives these poor girls are now subjected to we will not attempt to describe; then they are marched overland to the shipping stations on the river and taken down to Khartoum in slave boats.

On landing, their stiffened limbs almost refuse to support them as they stagger across the city to the slave market, followed by scores of eager purchasers. Here thousands are exposed for sale at $5.00 to $200 apiece, just like cattle. A Mohammedan told our pioneer missionary he had seen 25,000 of these slaves in the city of Mecca, who had been smuggled across the Red Sea by night.

These massacres are going on all the time in Central Africa. Village after village is burned and whole districts depopulated by bands of armed Moslems, for the sake of the ivory and young girls, everybody else being killed and standing corps burned. Dr. Barth tells us that the sultan of a city south of Lake Tchad, in one of his annual expeditions, captured 10,000. H. M. Stanley, on ascending the Kongo, saw 118 villages laid waste and desolate, which had been flourishing and populous on his previous descent of that river.

These practices have come down from time immemorial, and are sanctioned by long custom; their very religion teaches them not only to do such things, but also that the negroes, because they are pagans, deserve such treatment.

If a stranger were dropped from a balloon into Central Africa, he would have little trouble in finding his way to the coast or nearest large river. He need only wander in

a circle till he sees a heap of bones, some poor slave girl’s skeleton, and then follow the trail of bones and skeletons across the country. Three-fourths of the girls captured die on the way, and every one brought to the markets represents 10 persons killed in the capture or starved or ill-treated to death on the long, wearisome march. These bleaching skeletons are crying out night and day to God for vengeance, not only against the Mohammedans but particularly against the Christians, for declining to put an end to this fearful state of things by sending missionaries to teach them the principles of Christianity.—Y. P. F. M. Journal.