a year or two the Arabs and their allies were subdued.

Humanity and commerce, however, did not replace the Arab slave traders.
Rather European greed and serfdom were substituted. The land was
confiscated by the state and farmed out to private Belgian corporations.
The wilder cannibal tribes were formed into a militia to prey on the
industrious, who were taxed with specific amounts of ivory and rubber, and
scourged and mutilated if they failed to pay. Harris declares that King
Leopold's regime meant the death of twelve million natives.

"Europe was staggered at the Leopoldian atrocities, and they were terrible
indeed; but what we, who were behind the scenes, felt most keenly was the
fact that the real catastrophe in the Congo was the desolation and murder
in the larger sense. The invasion of family life, the ruthless destruction
of every social barrier, the shattering of every tribal law, the
introduction of criminal practices which struck the chiefs of the people
dumb with horror--in a word, a veritable avalanche of filth and immorality
overwhelmed the Congo tribes."[29]

So notorious did the exploitation and misrule become that Leopold was
forced to take measures toward reform, and finally in 1909 the Free State
became a Belgian colony. Some reforms have been inaugurated and others may
follow, but the valley of the Congo will long stand as a monument of shame
to Christianity and European civilization.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] Quoted in Du Bois: _Timbuktu_.

[24] Von Luschan: _Verhandlungen der berliner Gesellschaft fuer
Anthropologie_, etc., 1898.

[25] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I.

[26] Cf. p. 58.

[27] Keane: _Africa_, II, 117-118.

[28] _The Congo_, I, Chap. III.

[29] Harris: _Dawn in Africa_.

VI THE GREAT LAKES AND ZYMBABWE

We have already seen how a branch of the conquering Bantus turned eastward
by the Great Lakes and thus reached the sea and eventually both the Nile
and South Africa.

This brought them into the ancient and mysterious land far up the Nile,
south of Ethiopia. Here lay the ancient Punt of the Egyptians (whether we
place it in Somaliland or, as seems far more likely, around the Great
Lakes) and here, as the Egyptians thought, their civilization began. The
earliest inhabitants of the land were apparently of the Bushman or
Hottentot type of Negro. These were gradually pushed southward and
westward by the intrusion of the Nilotic Negroes. Five thousand years
before Chri