Quotes for Congo Stations

Quote 1: A hospital for Europeans and an establishment designed as a native hospital are in the charge of a European doctor. When I visited the three mud huts which serve (as the native hospital), I saw that all of them were dilapidated. I found seventeen sleeping sickness patients, male and female, lying about in the utmost dirt. The structures I had visited had endured for many years as the only form of hospital accommodation for the numerous native staff of the district.

Quote 2: I visited two large villages in the interior wherein I found that fully half the population now consisted of refugees. I saw and questioned several groups of these people. They went on to declare, when asked why they had fled (their district), that they had endured such ill-treatment at the hands of the government soldiers in their own (district) that life had become intolerable; that nothing had remained for them at home but to be killed for failure to bring in a certain amount of rubber or to die from starvation or exposure in their attempts to satisfy the demands made upon them. I subsequently found other (members of the tribe) who confirmed the truth of the statements made to me.

Quote 3: Two cases of mutilation came to my actual notice while I was in the lake district. One, a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off with the butt ends of rifles against a tree; the other, a young lad of 11 or 12 years of age, whose right hand was cut off at the wrist. In both these cases the Government soldiers had been accompanied by white officers whose names were given to me. Of six natives (one a girl, three little boys, one youth, and one old woman) who had been mutilated in this way during the rubber regime, all except one were dead at the date of my visit.

Quote 4: A sentry in the employ of one of the private companies said he had caught and was detaining as prisoners eleven women to compel their husbands to bring in the right amount of rubber required of them on the next market day. When I asked what would become of these women if their husbands failed to bring in the right quantity of rubber, he said at once that then they would be kept there until their husbands had redeemed them—or be put to death.