BY HENRY W. NEVINSON ILLUSTRATED Decorative image LONDON AND NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS MCMVI Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers . All rights reserved. Published May, 1906. DEDICATED TO MY SISTER MARIAN NEVINSON...

The following chapters describe my journey in the Portuguese province of Angola (West Central Africa), and in the Portuguese islands of San Thomé and Principe, during the years 1904, and 1905. The journey was undertaken at the suggestion of the editor of Harper’s Monthly Magazine , but in choosing this particular part of Africa for investigation I was guided by the advice of the Aborigines Protection Society and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London, and I wish to thank the secr

For miles on miles there is no break in the monotony of the scene. Even when the air is calmest the surf falls heavily upon the long, thin line of yellow beach, throwing its white foam far up the steep bank of sand. And beyond the yellow beach runs the long, thin line of purple forest—the beginning of that dark forest belt which stretches from Sierra Leone through West and Central Africa to the lakes of the Nile. Surf, beach, and forest—for two thousand miles that is all, except where some great

Loanda is much disquieted in mind. The town is really called St. Paul de Loanda, but it has dropped its Christian name, just as kings drop their surnames. Between Moorish Tangiers and Dutch Cape Town, it is the only place that looks like a town at all. It has about it what so few African places have—the feeling of history. We are aware of the centuries that lie behind its present form, and we feel in its ruinous quays the record of early Portuguese explorers and of the Dutch settlers. In the mou

Some two hundred miles south of St. Paul de Loanda, you come to a deep and quiet inlet, called Lobito Bay. Hitherto it has been desert and unknown—a spit of waterless sand shutting in a basin of the sea at the foot of barren and waterless hills. But in twenty years’ time Lobito Bay may have become famous as the central port of the whole west coast of Africa, and the starting-place for traffic with the interior. For it is the base of the railway scheme known as the “Robert Williams Concession,” w

He who goes to Africa leaves time behind. Next week is the same as to-morrow, and it is indifferent whether a journey takes a fortnight or two months. That is why the ox-wagon suits the land so well. Mount an ox-wagon and you forget all time. Like the to-morrows of life, it creeps in its petty pace, and soon after its wheels have reached their extreme velocity of three miles an hour you learn how vain are all calculations of pace and years. Yet, except in the matter of speed, which does not coun

The few English people who have ever heard of Bihé at all probably imagine it to themselves as a largish town in Angola famous for its slave-market. Nothing could be less like the reality. There is no town, and there is no slave-market. Bihé is a wide district of forest and marsh, part of the high plateau of interior Africa. It has no mountains and no big rivers, except the Cuanza, which separates it from the land of the Chibokwe on the east. So that the general character of the country is rathe