ANGOLA, THE LAST FOOTHOLD OF SLA\ ERY 



625 



ANGOLA, THE LAST FOOTHOLD OF 



SLAVERY 



A NGOLA, the Portuguese colony on 

 ZA the West Coast of Africa, is a 

 X ^ country about as large as France, 

 Switzerland, and Italy combined. Its 

 coast-line on the Atlantic is nearly i.ooo 

 miles in length and has many good har- 

 bors. For every thousand people who 

 have heard of the Congo Free State, 

 which borders on the east and north, it is 

 possible that two have heard of Angola, 

 and perhaps one of those knows that 

 from a time some score of years before 

 the inauguration of the Congo State to 

 the present day there has existed in that 

 country a systeni of slavery which is only 

 comparable with that of the Spaniards in 

 the West Indies. Slaves are brought 

 down froni the far interior, often as far 

 as 800 miles, by agents who think they 



have done well if one-half of their drove 

 survive the journey. At the coast, know- 

 ing that it is impossible for them to re- 

 turn home, the slaves bind themselves to 

 a term of service — "indentured labor," it 

 is called — which never ends, and are 

 shi])ped to the cocoa plantations of the 

 islands of Saint Thome and Principe. 



Angola is classed as a country ])0()r in 

 natural products of the soil and in min- 

 erals, but still moderately rich in men, in 

 spite of having been squeezed for gen- 

 erations by the Portuguese. The ])rin- 

 cipal agricultural products are manico, 

 coffee, bananas, sugar-cane, and tobacco. 

 The trade is mostly with Portugal, the 

 chief exports being coffee, rubber, ivorv, 

 wax, fish, and palm oil. 



The capital of Angola is Loanda, or 



