Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa

Chapter Five: The Slave Route

 Five The Slave Route The 750-mile journey from Benguela to Kavungu on Angola’s eastern border took Joseph Burtt and his party along a path familiar to local African traders, soldiers, slaves, and slave dealers. Portuguese had joined the parade of travelers beginning in the late fifteenth century. When Burtt set out in mid-1906, he bought his provisions at an English store in Benguela and was accompanied by his English physician, his German servant, and fifty African porters. Managed by two “petty chiefs,” the carriers provided their own food and would be paid in cloth. Several spoke a bit of Portuguese, and two had a little English. As far as Burtt knew, they were all free. Burtt had purchased “food for 3 white men for 22 weeks, which with what we shoot and can (if necessary) buy on the road, should be ample.” With a mule and two donkeys at their disposal, the white men could, if they wished, travel in relative comfort . Along the way, they could enjoy the hospitality of Portuguese colonial officials and American, British, and Swiss missionaries. The road to Kavungu, for all the darkness associated with slave trading, was hardly unknown.1 On July 31, four days after leaving Benguela, Burtt, Horton, and George pitched their tents on a bluff overlooking the Catumbela River. While George baked bread in a large iron pot, Horton counted the provision boxes and trunks. A passing Portuguese trader on his way to Benguela marked all the best rest stops on Burtt’s map and promised to mail his letters. The end of July was the dry season in an arid country, and everyone went to sleep thirsty. Burtt shared a tent with Horton; they found the “brilliant moonlight nights so cold that we find it hard to keep warm.” The next morning, after a three-hour march, they reached the banks of the river and stopped again for tea and porridge. The road, Burtt wrote to William Cadbury, was good and wide. Better yet, “strolling along with camera and umbrella . . . at the rear” of his caravan, he managed to encourage his carriers to walk twenty miles a day under a hot sun. Horton, meanwhile, stepped off the road and with the help of a young African went hunting for antelope in the “strong stalks of grass” that had “not burnt away in the fires.”2 The Slave Route   The bucolic scene was disrupted just outside the town of Catumbela by Burtt’s discovery of an ankle shackle abandoned “down in the bushes by the steep path.” In the town, where slaves and rubber had once dominated the economy, serviçais were now funneled on their way to São Tomé and Príncipe, as Burtt had learned when he visited Catumbela the previous March. The shackle, designed for two captives, was “a rough piece of wood some 14 inches by 6 with an oblong hole in the centre, just large enough to admit the ankle of each man. A couple of pegs passed through it from the side to tighten it.” In a scene reminiscent of Henry Nevinson’s articles for Harper’s Magazine, Burtt also passed five skeletons. At the spot where his party stopped to eat, a strong odor led them to “a decomposing corpse, parts of the scalp & body were gone but the feet & limbs were intact.” The man “lay on his back with his limbs spread out, . . . a small basket, a large wooden spoon, a mat & a few filthy clothes” by his side. Whether the man was a slave freed from the shackle or a free carrier Burtt could not say, though he had been told that “when a free carrier dies on the road he is buried by his relatives , if in company with them.” He added, “We saw many such graves.”3 In his letters to Cadbury, Burtt did not identify the source of his admittedly narrow knowledge about local burial practices. In Ovimbundu villages, funerals were held for those who had died without kin, but whether that Fi g u r e 2 2 . Group of Africans and two Europeans at Benguela, c. 1905. (Editor: Colec ção Tavares, Benguela.) By permission of the João Loureiro Postcard Collection.   C h o c o l a t e I s l a n d s practice was extended to kinless slaves and consistently followed by caravans of traders and porters is less clear...