The Frequent Kidnapping
From Outlying Hamlets Explains The Stockades We Saw Around Them;
The Parents Have No Redress, For Even Shinte Himself Seems Fond Of Working
In The Dark.
One night he sent for me, though I always stated
I liked all my dealings to be aboveboard.
When I came he presented me
with a slave girl about ten years old; he said he had always been
in the habit of presenting his visitors with a child. On my thanking him,
and saying that I thought it wrong to take away children from their parents,
that I wished him to give up this system altogether, and trade in cattle,
ivory, and bees'-wax, he urged that she was "to be a child" to bring me water,
and that a great man ought to have a child for the purpose, yet I had none.
As I replied that I had four children, and should be very sorry if my chief
were to take my little girl and give her away, and that I would prefer
this child to remain and carry water for her own mother,
he thought I was dissatisfied with her size, and sent for one a head taller;
after many explanations of our abhorrence of slavery, and how displeasing
it must be to God to see his children selling one another,
and giving each other so much grief as this child's mother must feel,
I declined her also. If I could have taken her into my family
for the purpose of instruction, and then returned her as a free woman,
according to a promise I should have made to the parents,
I might have done so; but to take her away, and probably never be able
to secure her return, would have produced no good effect
on the minds of the Balonda; they would not then have seen evidence
of our hatred to slavery, and the kind attentions of my friends would,
as it almost always does in similar cases, have turned the poor thing's head.
The difference in position between them and us is as great as between
the lowest and highest in England, and we know the effects of sudden elevation
on wiser heads than hers, whose owners had not been born to it.
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