We have very few statistics upon the subject, for the slavers were usually not the sort of men who took a scientific interest in their business; but those we have are appalling. The French Cardinal Lavigerie, archbishop of Carthage and founder of the famous Pères Blancs (the missionaries who have done so much good in northern Africa) and a man therefore thoroughly conversant with African affairs, estimated that at least 2,000,000 people per year had been lost to Africa on account of the slave trade, including those who were killed by the hardships of the march to the coast, the children who died because they were too young to be of any value and were therefore left to the mercies of the wild animals and those who were actually shipped away to foreign shores.
Dr. Livingstone, another highly competent judge, put the actual number of slaves taken away from their homes every twelve months (regardless of those who died because they were left behind without any protection) at 350,000, of whom only 70,000 ever reached the other side of the ocean.
Between 1700 and 1786 not less than 600,000 slaves were brought to Jamaica alive and during the same period more than 2,000,000 slaves were carried from Africa to the West Indies by two of the smaller English slave companies. By the end of the eighteenth century, Liverpool, London and Bristol maintained a fleet of 200 vessels with a total capacity of 47,000 Negroes, which plied regularly between the Gulf of Guinea and the New World. In 1791 when the Quakers and the enemies of slavery in general began their agitation against this outrage, a survey of the slave stations along the Bight of Benin showed 14 English, 15 Dutch, 4 Portuguese, 4 Danish and 3 French. But the British were better equipped and handled one-half of the whole trade, the rest being divided among the other four nations.
Of the horrible things that happened on the mainland we learned very little until much later, when the British, in order to stamp this business out by the roots, went on shore in search of further violators. It then appeared that native chieftains had been among the chief offenders, selling their own subjects as unceremoniously as those German rulers of the eighteenth century sold their regiments of recruits to the English for the purpose of quelling the rebellion in Virginia and Massachusetts. But the general organization of the business had always been in the hard of the Arabs. This is rather curious. The Koran highly disapproves of such pursuits and Mohammedan law in general is much more lenient towards the slaves than the Christian edicts used to be. According to the laws of the white man, the child of a slave by her master was in turn held to be a slave, whereas according to the Koran, such a child must follow the status of the father and must therefore be considered as free.
The opening up of the Congo by the unspeakable Leopold of Belgium and the demand for cheap labour to work His Majesty’s concessions started a temporary revival of the slave trade between the Portuguese colony of Angola and the interior of the Congo basin. But fortunately when that miserable old man (a medieval scoundrel on a constitutional throne in a modern democratic country – as strange a contradiction in terms as had been seen for a long time) died, the Congo Free State had already been taken over by the Belgian State and that meant the end of last attempts to make money out of buying and selling human beings.
The beginning of the relation between the white man and the black was therefore as unfortunate as it possibly could be. But what followed was just as bad. The reasons for this unfortunate state of affairs I will describe in as few words as possible.
In Asia the white man came face to face with races that were either as civilized as he was himself or more so. Which meant that they were able to fight back and that the white man must mind his p’s and qs or suffer the consequences.
The great Sepoy rebellion in India of the fifties of the last century, the terrible insurrection of Diepo Negoro, which twenty years before had almost deprived Holland of Java, the expulsion of all foreigners from Japan, the Boxer Rebellion of only a few years ago in China, the present unrest in India and the open defiance of Europe’s and America’s notes in regard to Manchuria by Japan are lessons which the white man cannot afford to ignore.
In Australia the white man came in contact with the poor, savage remnants of the early Stone Age, whom he killed at will and with as few pangs of conscience as he destroyed the wild dingoes that ate up his sheep.
The greater part of America was practically uninhabited when the white man arrived. The high and healthy plateaus of Central America and the north-western part of the Andes (Mexico and Peru) had a dense population, but the rest was almost empty. The few wandering nomads could be easily pushed aside and disease and degeneration then did the rest.
But in Africa conditions were different, for in Africa, regardless of slavery, regardless of sickness, regardless of bad gin, regardless of bad treatment, the population refused to die out. What the white man destroyed in the morning was replaced overnight. Yet the white man insisted upon taking the black man’s property. The result has been a holocaust of blood, the like of which the world has rarely seen; and the end is not yet. It is a struggle between the white man’s gunpowder and the black man’s tropical fertility.