Press Opinions on the "Curse of Central Africa "—<r^«/^. 



natives, telling them to eat him ; that, in another instance, he 

 caused one of his ' boys ' to be ' beaten with blows of a 

 bludgeon by the work-people till death ensued ' ; that, in other 

 instances, he caused the chief of a village and a dozen prisoners 

 taken from another village to be killed, and gave the corpses 

 to a rival chief as luxuries for one of his feasts. In other cases, 

 again, this official handed over to two neighbouring chiefs 

 several prisoners from various villages ' as payment.' ' He 

 gave me,' according to the testimony of one chief, ' six men 

 and two women in payment for rubber which I brought into 

 the station, telling me I could eat them, or kill them, or use 

 them as slaves — as I liked.' This Belgian, however, had gone 

 to Europe before the investigation took place, and we hear 

 nothing of any punishment being accorded either to him or 

 to any of the other offenders of whom Capt. Burrow's had to 

 complain. 



" Mr. Canisius's ' Campaign amongst Cannibals ' is a painful 

 story in seven chapters, dealing as it does with some of his 

 experiences under Major Lothaire during the Budja revolt of 

 some two years ago. The cruelties and atrocities here recorded 

 are, of course, none the less terrible because Mr. Canisius took 

 them all in his day's work. But somehow it is difficult to attach 

 all the importance that perhaps it deserves to the testimony of 

 so callous an authority. ' The cruel flogging of so many men 

 and boys would probably have had a peculiar effect upon a new- 

 comer, but I was in a measure case-hardened,' we read on one 

 page ; and on another, ' To be quite candid, I was, on the 

 whole, by no means disinclined to accompany the column, for 

 I much desired to witness the operations which were to be con- 

 ducted with a view of compelling the Budjas to accept the 

 benefit of our rubber regime.' A great many more Congo 

 atrocities than the body of the book reports are catalogued 

 by Mr. Leigh in seven pages of his introduction, but this 

 summary is too bald and unauthenticated to be of much 

 weight. Mr. Leigh is probably responsible for the chapters 

 in which some account is given of the history and general 

 arrangements of the Congo State, but in w^hich nothing new 

 is told, and there are numerous grave inaccuracies. On one 

 page we are told that the Congo State has an area of 1,000,000 

 square miles, and a population of 40,000,000 ; and in another 

 that the whole Congo Basin, of which the Congo State 

 occupies only about two-thirds, ' comprises some 800,000 

 square miles and a population variously estimated at from 

 8,000,000 to 27,000,000.' Of the Abir Company, again, we 

 read in one place that ' it is .only fair to say that, so far as 

 the present writer is aware, no allegations of ill-treatment of 



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