Five Years With The Congo Cannibals

[Prince Aboubakar]

Wardleft Mill Hill School at the age of 15 and travelled to New Zealand, spending the next three years in New Zealand and Australia. He was "in turn kauri-gum digger, coal and gold miner, stock-rider, circus performer and sail-maker".[4] He spent a year as a cadet with the British North Borneo Company, but a bout of malaria forced him to return to England.

In 1884, Ward met Henry Morton Stanley in London, when he was interviewed for a post as an officer in the new Congo Free State, effectively a private colony of King Leopold of Belgium. Stanley recommended Ward for a position, and he worked for the next two years along the upper and lower Congo River, where he first met Roger Casement. The latter was working on construction of a railroad to bypass the cataracts of the lower river. After being replaced by a Belgian officer, Ward joined the Sanford Exploring Company.

In March 1887, having left the Sanford Company, Ward was returning to England when he again encountered Stanley, who was assembling the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Stanley appointed Ward as a lieutenant and placed him under the command of Major Edmund Barttelot in the expedition's rear column. Stanley left the rear column, consisting of 250 porters and five officers, in June 1887, saying "I shall find you here in October when I return." Because of Stanley's delays, the rear column remained at Yambuya by the Aruwimi River for the next fourteen months, rather than four. By that time, more than 100 of its porters had died, and two of its officers died soon after.[4]

When Ward was in the Congo, cannibalism was still widespread in some regions, and it is frequently mentioned in his works, including in the title of his first book, Five Years with the Congo Cannibals.[5]He reported that once, while he was camping, human flesh was being cooked all around his tent, and that he had seen it being roasted also on other occasions.[6][7]Like other observers, he states that both killed or captured enemies as well as purchased slaves were consumed.[8][9]More than once, Ward saw how slaves intended for consumption were being transported along or exposed on markets where they were slaughtered, in some cases, right after sale.[10][11]He also saw captives being prepared for consumption and, another time, how the flesh of a freshly butchered victim was distributed.[12][13][14]

He noticed that cannibalism was also a matter of prestige, since "a chief's position is esteemed according to the number of slaves he is able to kill" for regaling his followers.[22][23]Despite these customs, Ward liked the character of the people he met, noting that they were very cordial in their family relationships and towards friends[24] and "possess[ed] so much taste for form and decoration".[25] Though killing slaves and enemies without hesitation, they were "not mean". He found them to be "sympathetic" as well as "enlightened and enterprising" and concluded that "in direct opposition to all natural conjectures, they are among the best types of men".[25]

Ward first met Roger Casement in the Congo in 1884. They became close friends, a friendship which lasted 30 years, and he asked Casement to be the godfather of his youngest son. Writing in 1910, Ward says:

Imagine a tall, handsome man, of fine bearing; thin, mere muscle and bone, a sun-tanned face, blue eyes and black curly hair. A pure Irishman he is, with a captivating voice and singular charm of manner. A man of distinction and great refinement, high-minded and courteous, impulsive and poetical. Quixotic perhaps some would say, and with a certain truth, for few men have shown themselves so regardless of personal advancement.[28]

Ward helped finance Edmund Morel's pamphlet The Congo Slave State (1903) and introduced him to Casement.[4] Describing Casement to Morel, Ward wrote: "No man walks this earth at the moment who is more absolutely good and honest and noble-minded".[29] Ward subscribed as a supporter of the Congo Reform Association, which was founded by Casement and Morel.[27]

Ward fell out with Casement because of his activities at the start of World War I. Casement travelled to Berlin to solicit German help for an armed Irish uprising for independence, at a time when the British government would be immersed in war. Ward wrote "the enormity of his action is beyond exaggeration. He is a traitor pure and simple ... I have made up my mind to turn him down forever".[27] He fulfilled his threat, refusing to sign the petition for clemency that was organised in 1916 by writer Arthur Conan-Doyle after Casement was condemned to death for treason. Joseph Conrad, a fellow officer with Ward of the Sanford Exploring Company[30] and then a friend of Casement, also refused to sign. Ward arranged for the name of his youngest son (Casement's godson) to be changed by deed poll from Roger Casement Ward to Rodney Sanford Ward.[31]

His main ambition was to become an artist: he had already published many of the drawings and water-colours he made in Africa in Five Years with the Congo Cannibals.[5] He became a pupil successively of Jules Lefebvre and of Seymour Lucas RA. In the 1890s he exhibited six times at the Royal Academy summer exhibition.

In 1899, deciding that sculpture was where his real talents lay, he apprenticed to Goscombe John RA before moving permanently to work in France. He received a mention honourable in 1901 at the Salon des Artistes Franais for his first sculpture, An Aruwimi Type; in 1908 he won the salon's gold medal for Le Chef de Tribu.[32] He won another gold medal in 1910.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote of him: "There is in Paris no more interesting character than Herbert Ward ... All the mystery and the savagery and the suffering and the ugliness and the harsh beauty of the African forest come out in Mr Ward's works. Only an artist could have done what he has done, and no artist could have done it had there not lain within him the soul of a great man, a man both strong and pitiful."[33]

By the time World War I broke out, Ward was too old to enlist in the army. He converted his family home at Rolleboise, Seine-et-Oise, into a field hospital, with 20 beds. He served as a lieutenant with the No 3 convoy of the British Ambulance Committee, which operated under the French army at Grardmer in the Vosges. He was wounded at the front and mentioned in dispatches in 1915; he was awarded the Croix de Guerre by France for his work removing wounded soldiers whilst under bombardment. He died, partly as a result of his injuries, in August 1919.[4]

Ward also features as a character in Simon Gray's play The Rear Column (1978), and in a film version of the play directed by Harold Pinter in 1980.[40] Ward's character was played by Simon Ward in the stage and film versions.

like a chiming valedictory from a world we were leaving behind, the bells of Kisangani's cathedral came pealing out to us through the predawn darkness as we slipped away from the bank, the bow of our pirogue cutting a pale gray V in the indigo river. Sweat ran into my eyes, soaked through my shirt and blanched into expanding blotches on the thighs of my cotton trousers. The bells rang out a sixth time. Their peals lingered and died, leaving us with the swish of our paddles, with our bow silently parting the mists over the Congo's black currents.

Joseph Conrad called the Congo River "an immense snake uncoiled," but I found its outline on the map of Zaire more closely resembled an unfurled claw. Rapid-free from Kisangani, in the heart of the African continent, to Kinshasa, near the Atlantic, and flowing through some of the densest equatorial jungle on earth, the Congo is less a river than a crescent swath of rain forest cut and slashed by currents pouring in from dozens of tributaries. It is a labyrinth stretching 12 miles wide in places and composed of hundreds of islands.

A desire to confront and vanquish something primal impelled me to attempt to be perhaps the first Westerner since the British explorer Henry Stanley to successfully descend its entire navigable length -- 1,084 miles -- in a dugout canoe, or pirogue. Stanley, who launched his historic expedition from Zanzibar in 1876 (reaching the river at Nyangwe, above Kisangani, and proceeding downstream from there), lost over half his hundreds-strong African crew and all three of his European companions to disease, starvation and skirmishes with cannibals by the time he sailed into the Atlantic from the Congo's lower reaches. I searched for evidence that someone had completed the Kisangani-Kinshasa descent since then, but could find none. Apparently, all who had tried had failed. Violent storms had capsized a few, malaria had struck down some, others had disappeared without a trace. In 1989, two Belgians were hacked to death and eaten by the Engombe tribe in a stretch of river near Ile Sumba that Zairians called the abattoir (slaughterhouse).

I arrived in Kisangani, on the upper Congo, from Moscow, where I had worked the previous three years. Though I loved Russia, the bureaucracy and the seven-month winters of slush and gray skies got to me; I found myself craving an escape into hot climes. Beneath this craving lingered the realization that I had reached a crossroads in my life: a career or money or marriage would not be enough for me; I needed to prove myself to myself. When I flew to Central Africa, I left behind an incredulous Russian girlfriend, Tat'yana. My friends and parents in the States were convinced I was making a foolish, even fatal, mistake.

Once in Zaire I hired a guide, a lanky 28-year-old named Desi from the Lokele river tribe, and bought a pirogue. Together we turned the 30-foot wooden craft into a floating cornucopia outfitted for survival in extremis. Besides staple foods, we had a charcoal stove, pots, tents, machetes, jerrycans of drinking water, a first-aid kit and malaria medicine, maps and a gun. I carried a laissez-passer from a Zairian general, the purpose of which was to obviate problems with President Mobutu's unruly military, known for its propensity to pillage and harass rather than for its martial prowess. I spoke French, Zaire's former colonial tongue, and had learned the basics of Lingala, the Bantu dialect in use on the river. By our estimation, our descent would take 45 days. We had supplies for two months.

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