Joachim John Monteiro

“ I have never seen a negro put his arm round a woman’s waist, or give or receive any caress whatever that would indicate the slightest loving regard or affection on either side. They have no words or expressions in their language indicative of affection or love. Their passion is purely of an animal description, unaccompanied by the least sympathetic affections of love or endearment. It is not astonishing, therefore, that jealousy should hardly exist; the greatest breach of conduct on the part of a married woman is but little thought of. ”

“ I have seen the surface of a large pool of water thickly covered with a layer of purple pea-shaped flowers, fallen from the large Wistaria-like bunches of blossom of a creeper overgrowing a mass of trees standing at the edge: it seemed as if Nature, loth that so much beauty should fade quickly, had kept for some time longer the fallen flowers fresh and lovely on the cool still water of the shady lake. This abundance of creeping plants is more or less preserved till at about sixty miles farther inland we arrive at Bembe and the comparatively level country stretching away to the interior ”

“ It is a very strange feeling when travelling in a hammock, to be forced through grass so dense and so high that nothing but the sky above can be seen,—a wall of dry rustling leaves on each side shutting out all view sometimes for mile after mile, and so intensely hot and breathless as to be almost unbearable, causing the perspiration to run in drops off the wet, shining, varnished skins of the almost naked blacks. ”

“ The natives have not been spoilt as yet by contact with the evils of an ignorant and oppressive occupation, as in Portuguese Angola, or, as on the British West Coast on the other hand, by having been preached by a dozen opposed and rival sects into a muddled state of assumed and insolent equality with the white race, whom they hate in their inmost hearts, from the consciousness of their infinite inferiority. ”

“ In Angola, the attempt to take a white man’s life by his slaves, for ill treatment or cruelty to them, is extremely rare. If any amount of bad treatment is not resented, no benefit or good, however great, done to a negro, is appreciated or recognised by him: such a thing as gratitude is quite unknown to him; he will express the greatest delight at receiving a present or any benefit, but it is not from thankfulness; he only exhibits the pleasure he feels at having obtained it without an effort on his part. ”

“ If one man is killed or wounded it is considered a very great war indeed, although a great deal of powder may have been burnt in mutual defiance at a safe distance. The Portuguese were engaged in war on several occasions on the road to Bembe, and punished, by burning, a number of towns where robberies had been committed, and where, from the thickness of the bush and forest, the ridiculously small force at their command would have been quickly massacred, had not the natives been such craven cowards, and so incapable of using their firearms. ”

“ A grove of banana-trees thus growing luxuriantly in a forest clearing is one of the most beautiful sights in nature;—the vast leaves, reflecting the rays of the hot sun from their bright-green surface, contrast vividly with the dark-hued foliage of the trees around, and show off the whorls of flowers with their fleshy, metallic, purple-red envelopes and the great bunches of green and ripe yellow fruit. ”

“ In no part of Angola or among tribes to the interior have slave-hunts ever existed as in the north; there are no powerful or more civilized [Pg 57] nations making war on weaker tribes for the purpose of obtaining slaves, and devastating the country by fire and sword. There is very little cruelty attending the state of slavery among the natives of Angola, I believe I may say even in the greater part of the rest of tropical Africa, but I will restrict myself to the part of which I have an intimate knowledge. ”

“ It is not my intention to deprecate any efforts for the benefit of the negro race, but simply to show that the good seed in Africa will fall on bare and barren ground, and where weeds will rise and choke it; and I must warn philanthropy that its bounty is less productive of good results on the negro of tropical Africa than perhaps on any other race. ”

“ The little mites would take a grass flower in their beaks, and perform quite a hoppy dance on any little stick or bush, bobbing their feathery heads up and down, whilst their tiny throats swelled with the sweetest little song-notes and trills imaginable. ”

“ Very beautiful are the long lines of spoonbills, flamingoes, and herons of different species, standing peacefully in these shallow marshes, their snow-white plumage and tall graceful forms brightly reflected on the dark unruffled surface of the water.
The marshes on this coast are fortunately not extensive enough to influence much the health of the white residents; they are all perfectly salt, and free from mangrove or other vegetation, and generally dry up completely (with rare exceptions) [Pg 150] in the dry season, when sometimes the stench from them is very perceptible. ”

“ Creepers of all kinds, attaining a gigantic size, here almost monopolize the vegetation, clasping round the biggest trees, and covering them with a mass of foliage and flower, and forming most exquisite festoons and curtains as they web, as it were, one tree to another in their embrace. ”

“ Africa, as the number and variety of sounds to be heard at night. Every square foot of ground or marsh, every tree, bush, or plant, seems to give out a buzz, chirp, or louder noise of some sort. With the first streak of daylight these noises are suddenly hushed, to be quickly succeeded by the various glad notes of the awakened birds, and later on, when the sun’s rays are clear and hot, the air is filled with the powerful whirr of the cicads on every tree. ”

“ They all believe firmly in their fetishes and charms, and though generally treated with the utmost kindness and equality by the Portuguese, the negro race, and even the mulattoes, have never advanced further than to hold secondary appointments, as writers or clerks, in the public offices and shops, and to appear (in public) in the most starched and dandyfied condition. I can only recollect one black man who had at all distinguished himself in trade; keeping low and filthy grog-shops being about the extent of their business capacity. ”

“ In the daytime the line of fire is marked by a long cloud of beautiful white steam-like smoke curling slowly up, dense and high in the breathless air, in the most fantastic forms against the clear blue sky. ”

“ The negro knows not love, affection, or jealousy. Male animals and birds are tender and loving to their females; cats show their affection by delicious purring noises and by licking; horses by neighing and pawing; cocks by calling their hens to any food they may find; parroquets, pigeons, and other birds, by scratching one another’s polls and billing and cooing; monkeys by nestling together and hunting for inconvenient parasites on each other’s bodies; but in all the long years I have been in Africa I have never seen a negro manifest the least tenderness for or to a negress. ”

“ One great bar to their civilization in Angola, is that no tribe on the coast can be induced to work for wages, except as servants in houses and stores, and even these are mostly slaves of other natives, or work to pay off some fine or penalty incurred in their towns. For some years that I have been collecting the inner bark of the Adansonia digitata, or Baobab tree (the application of which to paper-making I discovered in 1858, and commenced working as a commercial speculation in 1865) , I have been unable to induce one single native to hire himself to work by day or piecework ”

“ In the first instance, it is not easy to dispossess oneself of the prejudices both against and in favour of the negro. It is so natural to judge him by our own standard, and as we should wish him to be;—so easy to think of him as agreeing with the preconceived idea that he is just like one of ourselves, but simply in a state of innocent darkness, and that we have only to show him the way for him to become civilized at once. ”

“ The papyrus grows most luxuriantly in all the pools, marshes, and wet places of Angola, and in many parts lines the banks of the rivers. I have seen it growing everywhere, from a few [Pg 303] hundred yards distance from the sea, to as far in the interior as I have been. It is always of the brightest bluish-grey green, and the long, graceful, smooth stalk surmounted by the large feathery head, waving in every breath of wind, makes it a beautiful object. ”

“ It can only have been by countless ages of battling with malaria, that they have been reduced physically and morally to their present wonderful state or condition of withstanding successfully the climatic influences, so fatal to the white and more highly organized race—the sun and fevers of their malignant and dismal mangrove swamps, or the mists and agues of their magnificent tropical forests, no more affecting them than they do the alligators and countless mosquitoes that swarm in the former, or the monkeys and snakes that inhabit the latter. ”

“ A black dearly loves his drop of drink; he will very often do for a bottle of rum, what he would not even think of stirring for, for three times the value in any other article, and yet they are not great drunkards, as we shall see, when describing their customs; they so divide any portion of spirits they can obtain, that it does them no harm whatever. The rum and gin, though of the very cheapest description, is pure and unsophisticated, the only adulteration being an innocent one practised by the traders, who generally mix a liberal proportion of water with it. ”

“ Repugnant and wicked as is the idea of slavery and dealing in human flesh, philanthropy must be debited with an amount of unknowing cruelty and wholesale sacrifice of life perfectly awful to contemplate, as a set-off against its well-intentioned and successful efforts to put a stop to slavery and the known horrors of the middle passage, and subsequent ill-treatment at the hands of the planters. ”

“ Before the trial the accused is confined in a hut, closely guarded, and the night before it is surrounded by all the women and children of the neighbouring towns, dancing and singing to the horrid din of their drums and rattles. On the occasion of the ordeal the men are all armed with knives, matchets, and sticks, and the moment the poor devil stumbles in going under one of the switches, he is instantly set upon by the howling multitude and beaten to death, and cut and hacked to pieces in a few minutes. ”

“ I have seen a number of blacks at Loanda, men, women, and children, stand round, roaring with laughter at seeing a poor mongrel dog that had been run over by a cart, twist and roll about in agony on the ground, where it was yelping piteously, till a white man put it out of its misery. ”

“ No amount of kindness or good done to a negro will have the slightest influence in preventing him from leaving his benefactor without as much as a “good-bye,” or a shadow of an excuse, and very often going from a pampered existence to the certainty of the hard fare and life of their free condition, and this, not from the slightest idea of love of freedom, or anything of the kind, but simply from an animal instinct to live a lazy and vegetative existence. ”

“ River Congo to Mossamedes no dense forest is seen from the sea, and from thence not a single tree, it is said, for hundreds of miles to the Orange River. A little mangrove, lining the insignificant rivers and low places in their vicinity, is all that varies the open scrub, of which the giant Adansonias and Euphorbias have taken, as it were, exclusive possession. Nowhere on the coast is seen more than an indication of the wonderful vegetation, or varied beauty and fertility, which generally begins at a distance of from thirty to sixty miles inland. ”

“ The small extent of coast comprised between Ambriz and the River Congo is a striking example of the wonderful increase of trade, and consequently industry, among the negroes, since the extinction of the slave trade, and evidences also the great fertility of a country that with the rudest appliances can produce such quantities of valuable produce; about a dozen years ago, a very few tons, with the exception of ivory, of ground-nuts, coffee, and gum copal only, were exported. ”

“ The women when at work on the plantations generally place them on a heap of grass or on the ground, and are not at all particular to put them in the shade, and I have often seen them naked and filthy, and covered with a thick mass of large buzzing flies over their faces and bodies, fast asleep, with the sun shining full on them. The women, in carrying them tied behind their backs, seldom include their little heads in the cloth that secures them, but leave them to swing and loll about helplessly in every direction with the movement of walking. ”

“ There are four weekly fairs or markets held near Bembe, the principal one being at Sona, about six miles off. To this market natives from many miles distant come with produce, &c., to barter for cloth, rum, and beads from the coast. To travel two or three days to attend a fair is thought nothing of by the blacks,—this is not to be wondered at when we consider the climate, and that a mat to sleep on is the most they need or carry with them on a journey. Their food being almost entirely vegetable and uncooked, they either take it with them, or buy it on the road. ”

“ Any one caught in the act of stealing, be the amount ever so small, becomes at once the property or slave of the person robbed. It is a common thing to see blacks working in chains at factories and houses where they have been caught stealing, the custom among the Europeans generally being to detain them until their relatives shall have paid a ransom for them. I must do the natives the justice to say that they are very observant of their own laws, even to a white man alone in their territory, who claims their protection against offenders. ”

“ A Brazilian slave-dealer, a man of great energy and enterprise, called Francisco Antonio Flores, who, after the abolition of the slave-trade, laboured incessantly to develop the resources of Angola, in which effort he sank the large fortune he had previously amassed, obtained the concession of the Bembe mines from the Portuguese Government, who sent an expedition to occupy the country, and succeeded without any opposition on the part of the natives. ”