African Silences by Peter Matthiessen

Author:Peter Matthiessen [Matthiessen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307819673
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-01T14:00:00+00:00

Toward midmorning, Jonah and I head west across the Garamba River, on a four-hundred-mile flight to Bangassou, in the Central African Republic. We have left the rivers that flow toward the Nile; the Garamba is one of the many headwaters of the Congo (now the Zaire River). In the nineteenth century, when the Zanzibar slaver Tippu Tib sent his expeditions up the tributaries of the Congo, and Arab slavers came westward from the Nile, this savanna belt at the north edge of the rain forest was a great slaving region, and captured tribesmen carried ivory tusks back to the coast. Stanley’s journals from his 1887 expedition—part of which was spent traveling with Tippu Tib—draw early attention to the devastating cost of the ivory trade:

There is only one remedy for these wholesale devastations of African aborigines, and that is the solemn combination of England, Germany, France, Portugal, South and East Africa, and Congo [Free] State against the introduction of gunpowder into any part of the Continent … or seizing upon every tusk of ivory brought out, as there is not a single piece nowadays which has been gained lawfully. Every tusk, piece, and scrap in the possession of an Arab trader has been steeped and dyed in blood. Every pound weight has cost the life of a man, woman, or child, for every five pounds a hut has been burned, for every two tusks a whole village has been destroyed, every twenty tusks have been obtained at the price of a district with all its people, villages, and plantations. It is simply incredible that, because ivory is required for ornaments or billiard games, the rich heart of Africa should be laid waste … that populations, tribes, and nations should be utterly destroyed.

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