SLAVERY IN CENTRAL AFRICA.
It was in the western part of this district that Lieutenant Wissmann in 1882 visited a Bene Ki town, whose single street extended for ten miles, whose huts were twenty feet high, and surrounded by neat court-yards, whose men toiled in the fields behind the houses, while all the inhabitants bade the stranger welcome, and about five thousand of them visited his camp that evening. Two years ago Wissmann passed again through that place. There was nothing left of the happy homesteads. In the tall grass that choked the long street were found many charred poles and blackened skulls. The hordes of Tippu Tib within six months had paid three murderous visits to this large settlement. Many women were carried off, all who offered resistance were killed, and the fields, gardens, and banana groves were laid waste. Small-pox, introduced by the Arabs, and famine, completed the tragedy. The powerful tribe of Bene Ki had ceased to exist, and only a few individuals had escaped south to Zappu Zapp, a chief who was himself a refugee from Arab aggression. Along three hundred miles of the Congo, between Nyangwe and Stanley Falls, the Arabs, according to Gleerup and Lenz, have depopulated about fifteen thousand square miles of territory. The numerous tribes whom Stanley first saw have become slaves, or in greatly depleted numbers wander through the forests far from the river. About two thousand square miles of the rolling prairie west of Tippu Tib's home at Kasongo have been utterly drained of their people. About twenty thousand square miles on the western headwaters of the Congo are no longer a profitable field for slave hunting. In the very region where Livingstone died, and where his heart was buried, extending southeast from Lake Banweolo and embracing about fifteen thousand square miles, the Arabs, we are told by Giraud, have completely ravaged the country. And from all these centers of devastation the paths of the destroyers leading to slave marts and shipping-points may be traced by the bones of the victims who fall by the way. It cannot be possible that the civilized world will much longer permit this colossal crime of the century to add its murderous results, without taking earnest measures to put a stop to it.—The American.