Page:Morel-The Black Mans Burden.djvu/175

 the children of contracted labourers is 100 per cent., a staggering figure, exceeding the worst records of the estates in the old slavery days. The death rate of 10 per cent, among the Mozambique labourers is the minimum. The close analysis of the official figures which has been made by Mr. William Cadbury and by Mr. Joseph Burtt would seem to indicate an even higher proportion, the deaths being one in seven on the basis of a total of 40,000 contracted labourers. Labour drawn from precisely the same source for the South African mines, shows a mortality of one in twenty, and even that figure is officially regarded "with grave concern." The figures of 1919 are not yet available in a British consular report.

What is the reason of this appalling mortality? A high death rate was to be expected in the case of the Angolan labourer under the circumstances narrated in this chapter, for the African dies from unhappiness more readily, perhaps, than any other human being. But those circumstances have now disappeared and, as has been pointed out, it is the free, or alleged free, Mozambique man who is stricken in such numbers.

I believe the cause to reside in unnatural conditions of life, operating in two main directions. The big estates house thousands of labourers in small walled-in compounds made of permanent buildings; the sanitary arrangements are bad; in a few years the whole area becomes contaminated with disease germs; the streams which flow down from the mountains are poisoned by the over-populated estates built along the water courses. The normal conditions of African life in the damp forest regions of the tropics are small villages of separate and often scattered huts which are frequently destroyed and rebuilt; sometimes the site of the villages is shifted; purging fires are started at regular intervals, usually for agricultural purposes. That is one point. The other is this: The tropical African cannot stand, in tropical Africa, the European labour system with its prolonged hours of work under constant supervision, its monotony, the absence of freedom, joy and sociability in life, the perpetual discipline. These things in conjunction depress the African. He loses hold on existence. His capacity to resist disease, weakens. His procreating powers decline. He becomes spiritless, unhappy, collapsible.