Captain Owen's expedition: in 1857 the survey was carried up to Matadi, and six years later the traveller, Richard Burton, advanced a few miles farther up stream and described the Yalala falls. Territorial expansion, however, did not enter into the contemplation of the British Government in 1868 an offer which had been made by France to exchange the Gaboon for the British possession of the Gambia was definitely rejected,1 though it is clear that the exchange would have been of high value as a preliminary to any designs on the Congo, and though the rejection of Portuguese pretensions had left the room open to such designs. British influence, however, spread steadily along the coast from the Cameroons to the north bank of the Congo, and a corrupt form of English became the language for trade in that area, meeting Portuguese on the south bank of the river. British activity in suppressing the slave trade made the flag a familiar feature on the coast, and, when the advent of European traders opened up to enterprising natives a profitable employment in piracy, it was by British ships that the evil was met.2 To British enterprise also was due the removal of the crass ignorance of the upper course of the Congo which persisted down to the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The earlier expeditions of David Livingstone led him from the Victoria Falls and the Upper Zambezi to the upper course of the Kasai river and to the Kwango, which he explored, reaching the Atlantic coast at Loanda, whence he retraced his steps to the Upper Zambezi and followed its course to the sea. In 1866 he set out on his last journey in the effort to find beyond Lake Nyasa the source of the Nile; and in the following year he discovered the Chambezi river, which he traced to its source in Lake Bangweolo. In 1868-71 he found that the river issued from Bangweolo under the name of Luapula, and pursued a northerly course to Lake Moero whence it emerged as the Lualaba. The 1 H. C. Paper 444 of 1870, pp. 8, 9. 2 By 1875 Admiral Sir William Hewett had suppressed this nuisance; Johnston, George. Grenfell, i. 83. farthest spot of the river attained by him was Nyangwe in the Manyema country, at a distance of some fifteen hundred miles from its sources. From Nyangwe he returned to Ujiji, where he met Stanley, dispatched by the New York Herald to effect his relief, but, after proceeding in his company part of the way to Zanzibar, he decided to return to Lake Bangweolo, near which, at Chitambo's, he died in 1873. Before it was known in Europe that Stanley had succeeded in his mission, two expeditions had been dispatched to aid Livingstone. The first under Lieutenant Grandy was sent by the Congo, but it miscarried, and the leader died near San Salvador in 1873. The other, organized by the Royal Geographical Society, had a more prosperous issue. Under the command of Lieutenant V. L. Cameron it proceeded, undeterred by the news of Livingstone's death, to explore Lake Tanganyika, and advanced thence to the Lualaba at Nyangwe. Cameron, however, recognized that this stream must be the upper course not of the Albertine Nile, as Livingstone believed, but of the Congo, but the difficulties of the task and the inadequacy of his equipment debarred him from verifying his conjecture by following the river to its mouth. He crossed instead the comparatively easy country in the southern basin of the Congo and reached Benguella in November, 1875. Cameron had not confined himself to exploration merely: he had concluded treaties with native chiefs which gave the United Kingdom the option of assuming a protectorate of the inner basin of the Congo. To this idea the opposition of Manchester and Liverpool to any policy deemed likely to interpose restrictions on trade profits was fatal, even if no other considerations had intervened, but Cameron's journey had raised, in a manner that rendered a decision inevitable, the 1 Cameron went so far as to issue a proclamation taking possession of the Congo basin (dispatch to the Earl of Derby, November 29, 1875), but his action was not supported by Lord Carnarvon, though Sir Robert Morier had urged a settlement of the Congo question on Lord Beaconsfield; Fitzmaurice, Lord Granville, ii. 343. question of the political future of the country which he had traversed and of the Congo. Portugal had old claims to the territory, which it was anxious to revive; France had begun an advance inland from the Gaboon. The most important trading firm on the Congo was Dutch, and as early as 1875 a German, Captain von Homeyer, had suggested annexation of the Congo by Germany.1 On the coast itself from the middle of the century European trade houses had established themselves,2 first a French firm in 1855, then in 1869 the Dutch Afrikaansche Handels-Vereeniging, which the English house of Hatton in some measure rivalled. Portuguese agents were numerous, but not rarely disreputable, for it must be remembered that Portugal did not forbid slave-trading by her subjects absolutely until 1878. Little or nothing could be expected from these agencies as contributions to the civilization of the Congo, and trade with the interior was rendered almost impracticable by the exactions of the innumerable tribal authorities through whose territories trade caravans must pass. It might have been expected that some political organization would have arisen spontaneously among the Bantu tribes of the Congo, but the lack of political genius of the Bantu, save when under foreign influence, displayed itself in the anarchy which prevailed. The country was divided up among thousands of petty tribes, constantly at war, and recognizing no more than a formal suzerainty at most of some more important chief. The tribal organization itself existed in all stages of development; on the lower river some chiefs, like the King of San Salvador, had acquired a considerable measure of power; in others, especially on the Upper Congo, the power of the headman was almost nominal, and the real power rested with the Council of village elders or the assembly of the free men of the village. The social structure rested upon slavery and polygamy; the freeman engaged in sports or the petty warfare which was ever being 1 Johnston, George Grenfell, i. 83. 3 2 Masoin, Histoire de l'État indépendant du Congo, i. 273-7. waged between village and village, while the labour of cultivation was performed by his wives or slaves. A primitive fetishism and a lively belief in the power of ghosts led to wholesale human sacrifices of wives and slaves on death, and cannibalism had been developed in the Congo basin to an extent which is probably without parallel in any other part of the world, save perhaps the Pacific Islands. Belief in witchcraft was universal: the power of the wizard or witch to destroy was only equalled by the danger of being accused of witchcraft; trial by the poison ordeal was universal, and progress was manifestly impossible unless and until the elements of civilization could be supplied by some higher race. Almost at the same moment as the interest of Europe began to be attracted to the Congo, a movement from the east coast was beginning to introduce a higher though native culture, but in conditions which deprived this action of all its value. Though the efforts of the United Kingdom and France, added to the action of the United States, had practically extinguished the sea-borne slave trade on the west coast, there was still a large demand for slaves for Morocco, Tripoli, Egypt, Arabia, and Persia, as well as for Zanzibar itself.1 The Arabs who devoted themselves to the trade had originally contented themselves with maintaining their head-quarters at Zanzibar, but about 1865-6 they discovered the Lualaba and the Lomami, and began active slave raiding in the territories watered by these rivers. Livingstone found their operations in full swing when he reached Nyangwe in 1871, and, if unopposed, it was clearly only a matter of time until they became masters of the whole of the Upper Congo down to Stanley Pool. A few of the leaders were of fairly pure Arab blood, but the vast majority of their followers were at most Arabized, and many of them were negroes who enthusiastically supported their masters in their raids. The cruelty and waste of life which these raids involved cannot be overestimated, but there is another side of the picture. The invaders brought with 1 Cf. Masoin, Histoire, ii. 1-60. 1 them a higher civilization, based on Mohammedanism; they built fine towns to replace the miserable huts which they burned, and they introduced systematic cultivation on a grand scale carried out by the slaves whom they gained by their razzias. Their rule was despotic and often extremely harsh, but it showed some tincture of Mohammedan legal conceptions, and the regular discipline and firearms of their forces rendered resistance by the scattered tribes whom they attacked out of the question. If the barbarism of the Congo tribes in their native condition demanded European intervention, the advance of the Arab slave traders afforded an even more convincing reason for the interposition of a higher civilization. 1 Masoin, Histoire, ii. 99-107. |