CHAPTER IV.

CONTACT WITH SLAVERY.

By and by not only oppressed tribes but oppressed individuals looked to the Missions for succour. In the interior the English name had long been associated with opposition to slavery. The natives regarded Livingstone and the members of the Universities’ Mission as the special friends of the slave. Such of them as had visited the coast had picked up information about English ships of war which were the terror of the slave-drivers.

_The Free Church._—As early as February, 1877, we find Dr. Stewart saying: “Livingstonia seems to have taken a start and begun to grow in one of the directions we specially wish it to grow—as an anti-slavery centre”. When the Mission party arrived, there were hardly any natives settled at Livingstonia. Soon many came seeking protection, and were received by the missionaries. It was proclaimed that any one that ran away to escape being sold would be received. The great slaving chiefs, as might be expected, would be against the Mission in this policy, but they took no hostile steps. It was seldom that owners inquired after refugees, and when they did they had to go away very crestfallen. They were told that refugees proved guilty of any crime would be given up, but that innocent men and women crying for English protection should not cry in vain. Dr. Stewart had the Fugitive Slave Circular before his mind, and recognised that many complications might arise, and yet he expressed his conviction that the missionaries could not do otherwise than they were doing.

_Church of Scotland._—In the same manner the Directors of the Blantyre Mission proclaimed in their Reports: “No Arab gangs will come near an Englishman, if they can help it. With them the English name is synonymous with destroyer of slavery. When Livingstone was at Nyassa, they fled from his neighbourhood and took to distant and circuitous paths to avoid meeting him. This guilt and terror on their part is contrasted with the confidence and reverence inspired by Englishmen in the breasts of the natives. We are assured that a Mission once established, they will settle around it, receive our instructions and our help, place themselves under our authority, and rise by order and Christian observance into the state of civilised communities. What is done on the coast, and at a vast expense (yet most righteously), by vessels of war, will be done here by Christian missions—with this difference, that in delivering the orphan, the outcast, and the captive, they will introduce them to a home life of security and freedom, will take them out of the low prison, and show them ‘the glorious liberty of the children of God’.”

An extract from a letter of Dr. Macklin’s, of 7th Dec., 1877, which was published in March, 1878, in the _Missionary Record_, will show that neither the Blantyre missionaries nor the Directors at home hesitated to espouse the cause of the slave:—“Some time ago there were two boys here supposed to be brothers: after they had been here some months their father came and took them home because they got no calico. Well, not a long time afterwards, one of them came back and told us he had run away, and wanted to stay with us; said he was not the man’s son, but a slave, and had been bought some years ago. He asked our protection, and I said, ‘You shall now stay with us, and no man can touch you’. Two days afterwards his father, as he called himself, came for him. I brought Evangeli out and confronted him with the man, and asked him the same questions which I had previously, and he gave the same answers. I then said to the man, ‘He is not your son, but a slave, and he has my protection, and is now free’. All this took place in public before a great many Yao men. The man said he did not wish to be an enemy, but that the boy was his. I told him we gave him his freedom and English protection.”

_A Free Native Village._—Mr. Stewart, writing from Blantyre in November, 1877, says:—“I must mention another very interesting and promising circumstance. We have a native village growing up near us. The first-comers were three or four families from the neighbourhood of the Cataracts, who, on account of the insecurity of their village from Mangoni raids, but without having been actually hunted from their homes, came here, and spontaneously put themselves under our protection. Land has been given them, and a site for their houses. They are required to build substantial square houses; the size adopted is 20 feet by 14 feet. Four such are now being erected by their unassisted labours. They have been joined by one or two families from this district. The men are well built and athletic, with open, smiling countenances. They and the women frequently attend our meetings. They are, I think, a good beginning of our future tenantry.” Of the school he says:—“It fluctuates in numbers, and has not grown as fast as might be wished. Parents cannot be induced to leave their boys here for long at one time. The boys are docile, and willing to attend; the difficulty is with the parents.” Soon the children of these refugees became the main hope of the school: while their parents attended the religious meetings and formed a congregation. The state of progress by March, 1878, is summed up in these words, where special emphasis is given to the position on slavery:—“Our Mission at Blantyre continues to prosper in its various operations; the natives are friendly, and are impressed with a sense of its value; the school is well attended; the area of cultivation has much increased, and Blantyre has become an asylum for the slave.”

In Dr. Macklin’s letter we find the following:—“We have three more slave refugees here at present, two women (one has a child) and a boy. The first one came nearly two months ago, having run away from her master because he abused her; no inquiries were made after her by any one. The second one—the boy—came about three weeks ago, he having run away on his being taken to join a gang of slaves from the Cherasulo district. A man came after him next day and said he was his son; but this was an evident falsehood, for the boy was not Yao at all. I dismissed farther hearing of the case for four days, until Mr. Stewart should return with the interpreter. But it seems after the boy had left the house the man had attempted to seize him, but the boy eluded him and ran back to the house, and the man after him; but my servant Ropa prevented him from getting hold of the boy. I ordered the man off the place, but he would not go, and continued to talk to me; at this I ordered Ropa to catch hold of him, but the man resisted; whereupon both Mapas and myself rushed at the man and disarmed him and sent him from the place. I need hardly say he did not return again. The third—the woman with the child—came three days afterwards, having escaped from the large gang. We learned that the gang was going to Nyungwi on the Zambeze. Accordingly, we determined to try and stop them; and so we sent a present of two blankets to the Magololo chief, Chiputula, asking him not to allow them to cross the Shiré, by refusing them canoes, but on no account to fight with them. It is a fortnight nearly since the woman came, and no one has come after her. You thus see that, in a measure, we are succouring the oppressed and setting the captive free. Would that we could as easily set them free from the bondage of sin and the darkness of ignorance!”

All the white men in the country disliked the system of slavery, and struggled against it. In this they were applauded by the Directors at home. They had no clergyman regularly at the station, and, although evangelistic work was not neglected, the secular side of the Mission was by far the more prominent. The Church of Scotland did not expect so much at first from the religious side of the Mission, as from the Industrial. It was felt, as in the days of Gregory the Great, that Mission work would move by “steps and not by leaps”. The cultivation of the soil was eagerly looked to, as a means of rendering the Mission self-supporting, and the missionaries were urged to acquire land. By May, 1878, we find Dr. Macklin writing—“There are evidences or indications that we are beginning to influence the natives for good, by our conduct towards them and by our example. We have now got five women and one boy, escaped from slavery, under our protection. Concerning the acquisition of land as our own, I may here state that I have succeeded in getting from the chief a large grant, of which much of the land is excellent. In consideration of this grant we must make some annual present to the chief.”

Besides espousing the cause of weakest, the Mission also commended itself by acts of kindness. Dr. Macklin writes with reference to a famine—“During the height of the distress I sent some hundredweights of grain from our own store to Katunga, one of the Magololo chiefs, who is a great friend of ours, and has supplied us with most of the sugar-cane we have.”

We conclude this chapter by extracts from a letter of Dr. Macklin’s, written in the end of March, 1878, which throws much light on the various aspects of the work.

“The Mission in its civil and social aspects is making reasonable and satisfactory progress. As an asylum for the poor, persecuted slave, Blantyre is becoming known and prized. We have now six fellow-creatures rescued from the lash of the slave driver, and miseries worse than death. And this in turn, prepares them for giving a ready reception to the free offers of the greater emancipation, salvation by grace through Jesus Christ our Lord. My present circumstances give a new emphasis to the old law of the city of refuge. Just think of the poor, fainting woman bearing her child, fleeing for her life, but sustained by the hope that if only she can reach the British flag, which already she sees fluttering in the evening breeze, her child shall live and herself be free.

“I think I told you in my last, that we were annoyed with some pilfering, but had not been able to bring the petty thefts home to any one. Recently, however, we have found that the thieves do not belong to our Africans, but to another tribe, namely, to Makukani’s people. Had we the benefits of a good Glasgow reporter, your attention might be arrested by some such heading as, ‘Daring, Exciting Chase, and Clever Capture’. The story is as follows:—On the morning of the 13th February last, about four o’clock, both Mapas and William Koyi were awakened by attempts being made to pull the blankets off them. Mapas recognising at once the position of affairs, waited for the arm being put in again at the window—nor had he long to wait; but in the darkness he failed to secure the arm, and only alarmed the thieves, who made off with the booty already secured, and well packed in two large bundles. Mapas instantly roused the others in that house—there are now eight houses—and gave chase. Koyi who waited to put on some clothes, saw another man coming from the line of the stores, where our white men, Walker and Fenwick, sleep. The thieves, observing that some one was approaching, threw down the bundles and ran. Koyi, being armed, threatened to fire on them if they did not stop, but on hearing this the thieves plunged into the bush and were lost to sight. William Koyi, being a man who can endure a great deal of comfort, now gave up the pursuit; but brave Mapas and Kumlomba, the headman of the village, who had been roused by the noise, knowing the thieves would try to strike the road at another point, pushed on to anticipate them, and were just in time to meet them face to face. On being challenged they again plunged into the bush, whereupon Mapas fired. The report of the gun brought us all to that point, and I, having posted sentinels at several points, led a small party into the bush for the purpose of scouring it thoroughly, but we came upon no man. In the meantime, Mapas had come upon the trail of one man, and had pursued him for a space of eight miles, and that, too, in his shirt and bare feet, through tall, wet grass and stumps. It was, indeed an exciting chase, the thief ran for dear life, Mapas for the glory of victory, and the good of our Colony. You will say he deserved to win, and he did win, and bring back the thief a prisoner. We are Britons, and we are fond of British pluck, but in what is this man’s blood and spirit inferior to our own? And surely there is good hope of the race which can furnish such men. The thief, when brought back, was called into ‘Court,’ got a trial, in which, according to the phraseology of Scotch forms, he emitted, admitted former thefts, and implicated his chief in a charge of reset and participation. This, in all probability was a false charge, and made in order to throw the shield of his chief’s protection over himself. I hope this part of his story is not true. In the afternoon, however, he was sentenced to get nine dozen lashes, and before all the people he got five dozen that day, and was then led to the stocks. Three days after, he received the remaining four dozen, but the flogging was nothing like the flogging which used to be for British sailors and soldiers. Some skin only came off on the second day. We kept him in all about a month, and then the people being all assembled, we made proclamation that, if after two days the prisoner should be found on the Yao territory, or on this side the Kabula river, the people were at liberty to kill him. Of course, this proclamation was made by the Yao headman. After this proclamation was made, the prisoner was escorted out of the Yao country by armed men. The other thief was never seen, and did not return home; neither, indeed, need our prisoner go back, for his people would kill him—probably on the old Spartan principle, not because he stole, but because he was so inexpert as to allow himself to be caught. The chief denies all knowledge of the thefts, and declared that we ought to have shot the man. Mr. Stewart spoke to him on the subject, and that is his statement; but it is not right to shoot the poor creatures; and if they would let us, we could show them a more excellent way; and I hope the day is not far, at all events, very far distant, when the law of the eighth commandment will reach further in Africa than the commands of any chief.

“The people among whom we live were delighted at the capture of the thief, and they came up to me and said proudly, ‘Now, you see it is not Yao people who steal your things; we are friends, it is the Anyasa who steal. They are thieves.’ This affair has undoubtedly been of use in clearing away those clouds of suspicion which had settled down, impairing our confidence and making all our intercourse less happy and enjoyable. Horses, I think, would give a great impulse to civilisation in this part of Africa, and, of course, would more than double man’s ability in every question of time and space. Will anybody bestow even one horse on the Mission, and make a fair trial of the horse in Eastern Africa? The cows we got are doing well. Senhor Nunes, of Quilimane, says a good horse could be brought from Port Elizabeth for £50 or £60—that includes all charges of conveyances. Do not some of your merchant princes spend that sum on a single party?

“I had almost omitted to state that the brave Mapas belongs to the Livingstonia Mission and Dr. Laws, and that we made him a present of £10 in all. What I may call the subscription sheet bore the following heading:—‘Testimonial to Mr. Mapas Ntintili, as a mark of personal respect and recognition of his perseverance and bravery on the morning of February 13th, 1878.’ His feet were so cut and torn with the long race, rough ground, and tree stumps concealed among the tall grass, that he was lame for several days. Hitherto we have had to carry our goods from the river to this place, but we expect the time will soon come when we will have a bullock waggon ‘trecking’ our goods from the rivers. Convey my thanks to the kind friends who, through Mr. Mackeith, have sent some things very valuable for working the Mission and attracting the natives; and assure them that Dr. Laws, of the Livingstonia Mission, shall have the free use of everything alternately with myself. Just now, he is here writing beside me, and the co-operation of the two Missions, as only different branches of one, is very pleasant, and I think very useful. Christianity ought to be presented as one thing—not many—as our Lord’s outer garment without seam, woven from the top throughout, all one piece. Our water course is now completed, and we have water flowing throughout our station, and channels are cut in several directions, enabling us to run water to our wheat, corn, rice, and maize fields, and to our terraces where our garden produce is raised. This supply of water is an unspeakable advantage. Our Cape gooseberries have done well, we have now an abundant supply of them, and also of French beans, lettuce, beetroot, tomatoes.

“Of all these and others we expect to have a supply all the year round, now that we can water the beds. Let me add one thing more. We have got upwards of fifty orange, lemon, and lime trees—young, of course, but all doing well, so that in three years we may be eating our own oranges. As for bananas, we have three or four hundred of them, many of which are already bearing fruit.”