By an irony too tragic to dwell on, a small black republic, itself founded in 1847 under anti-slavery auspices as an asylum from American slavery, has just been pilloried in the stocks of world opinion as an internationally indicted slave-holder and oppressor of labor. For such is the practical effect of the report of the International Commission on Forced Labor in Liberia, which has found evidences of extensive practices of domestic slavery, debt slavery, “pawning” and forced labor conscription in that country. The second and third generation of refugee slaves, so forgetful that as an overlord minority it exploits and oppresses a large native population under its care, is indeed a sorry spectacle. There is but one mitigating fact, and that is Liberia’s own share in the exposure and indictment.
The Commission was appointed to investigate charges brought to the attention of the League of Nations and the United States by public-spirited and courageous Liberian citizens under the leadership of Thomas J. Faulkner, and the Liberian representative on the commission has placed his signature beside those of his colleagues, Dr. Cuthbert Christy representing the League, and Dr. Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University representing the United States, to make a unanimous report. Fortunately within a few weeks of the filing of the report, a corrupt government regime has fallen and a new one pledged to the reform policy recommended by the Commission has taken charge of Africa’s only republic.
It is hard to credit as contemporary the conditions that are reported from Liberia; our imagination automatically dates them back to the days when the full-rigged “slaver” zigzagged a fetid trail across the “middle passage.” Only a few months ago, however, Spanish tramp freighters were slipping out of the Liberian harbors, crowded with labor gangs, conscripted at fifty dollars a head, and the proceeds split between government officials, labor agents, raiding labor collectors of the government constabulary, and venal or intimidated native chieftains who had delivered up a batch of their able-bodied men to the cocoa planters of Fernando Po. At the top was the unscrupulous Liberian politician, blinded by Christian bigotry and a sense of superiority because the “native” was trouserless and heathen. The middle-man was most often the professional labor agent, modern analogue of the slave-dealer; but sometimes, the very policeman of the frontier force whose business was the protection of the native, but who had been conscripting forced labor too often before for government porterage, road building, and public works, according to the Liberian law and practice. But at the bottom was the saddest and least responsible figure of all, the native chief stripped of his hereditary power and respect, commanded to furnish so and so many men or pay a fine of $50.
The Commission report puts its finger on the very quick of the situation, and exposes the root cause:
Intimidation has apparently been and is the keyword of the government’s policy. Not only have the native villages been intimidated and terrorized by a display of force, cruelty, and suppression, but the chiefs themselves, men whom the people looked up to not so many years ago, have been so systematically humiliated, degraded, and robbed of their power that they are now mere go-betweens, paid by the government to coerce and rob the people.
Another insidious evil is the prevalent system of “pawning.” There is no doubt that this is a deliberate substitute and camouflage for slavery. It is a system by which in return for money, a human being, usually a child relative, may be given for an indefinite period for indentured service without compensation other than maintenance. No person pawned can redeem himself—a third party has to do it. Since 1920 the average redemption price in Liberia has been $15 for men and $30 for women. Natives, and even chiefs in debt for goods or fines, discharge these obligations by pawning their children or wives or retainers. And so a system even less responsible than chattel slavery has grown up and flourished, with the open sanction of law. It is only the organized moral conscience of the world that can stamp out this new evil as previously it stamped out the more or less obsolete slavery that aroused the righteous indignation of our fathers and grandfathers.
But the Liberian report is only the climax to a series of unofficial exposures of slavery and forced labor in this and other parts of the world, and two arduous campaigns, one for the drafting and adoption of the World Convention of 1925 against Slavery, the other, the International Convention on Forced Labor, just completed by the International Labor Conference of 1930. Thus the significance of the Liberian report far transcends Liberia. It may, indeed, be the initial international volley in a crusade that will have for its objective not merely the cleaning up of economic plague-spots of the colonial world, but the recognition by formal international guarantees of the basic right of the freedom of labor. The question of forced labor, in fact, definitely links up the question of economic freedom with the principles and sanctions of personal freedom, and so raises the standard of a new crusade for the emancipation of labor on a world scale. The sentiment against the abridgment of human liberty has halted too long at the artificial line of legal slavery, and stood helpless before all those clandestine forms that are slavery just as well, for all that. We must realize that instead of a situation of occasional reversion or negligible survival, we have a modern situation which has actually created new forms of slavery, with different manifestations and causes and requiring a different technique of abolition and cure. Our soul-less, long-armed ducats and dollars, inherently without personal and moral responsibility, have actually multiplied the ways and means of economic exploitation and increased the possibilities for the abridgment of human liberty. It becomes more and more apparent that in the modern world freedom of body without freedom of labor is no guarantee whatsoever against conditions and practices of virtual slavery.
Domestic slavery may be rare and chattel bondage almost extinct, but there still remain appalling amounts of debt slavery, peonage, conscripted, and directly or indirectly coerced labor. And it is to these insidious and modernly rampant forms of slavery that the social intelligence of the modern world must give heed. The present situation in Liberia can thus be taken in itself or as an example of the worst possibilities of economic imperialism and exploitation the world over. Let us be careful that Liberia, looked at in the narrow and short-sighted way, does not become an easy scapegoat for these sins throughout the world. Let us look beyond the few thousand “domestic slaves” and “pawns” uncovered in Liberia to the four to six million conservatively estimated to be in the same or similar conditions in sixteen or seventeen other sections—China, the Hedjaz, Abyssinia, French, British, and Italian Somaliland, Morocco, Portuguese East and West Africa, Spanish West Africa, to mention the most important few. And let us see in the conscripted Kru boys of the government works in Liberia, and the few thousand natives shamefully exported through the collusion of corrupt Liberian government officials to the Spanish cocoa planters of Fernando Po at forty-five dollars a head, plus bonuses on each batch of 1500, only the symbols of a vast army of forcefully recruited human labor in the service of ruthless economic imperialism, or its holding partner, foreign invested capital in the tropics and the sub-tropics the world around.
One can then see the wisdom and practicality of attacking this situation internationally, and with a common yardstick of injustice and charter of minimal rights, such as is proposed and ready for world adoption in the International Convention against Forced Labor. This instrument links all the indirect and prevalent modern forms of slavery to the old outlawed slavery of chattel bondage, and proposes international agreement and action about it. The Liberian inquiry is really one of the first fruits of this modern international humanitarian campaign, creditably anticipating its working principles and main machinery, even before its formal ratification.
When the report came up recently for discussion before the Council of the League, the Liberian representative at Geneva very rightfully and pointedly asked if other nations would follow suit in this campaign of house cleaning by making similar investigations through internationally appointed commissions into conditions within their jurisdictions. Some of the most flagrant and well-documented of the Liberian cases involved the export of native labor to colonial enterprises and concessionaires of the French and Spanish West African colonies. Furthermore, the investigations of the International Labor Office preliminary to both the Slavery and the Forced Labor Conventions, have shown gravely suspicious and widespread practices and legislation restricting the freedom of Labor on the part of many colonial administrations in Africa and the Seven Seas. The only consistent attitude, therefore, will be the early adoption and enforcement of a pact by which forced labor, peonage, and similar abuses are uniformly outlawed, whether in an international mandate, an imperial colony or protectorate, or a home province; whether in a small, semi-bankrupt Negro republic or a flourishing European empire—so that in our own Mississippi and Georgia as well as in Fernando Po, the Cameroons, the Transvaal, Rhodesia, and the French and Belgian Congos, and Liberia, human liberty can be measurably guaranteed. With considerable warrant, an American Negro newspaper, currently reporting the sharp American representations to Liberia and the comments of Lord Cecil before the League on slavery and peonage, says: “European and American pots have small right to call Liberian and Abyssinian kettles black.” All of which but emphasizes the need and the promise of internationally standardized common action and cooperation in this important reform.
The crux of the situation, therefore, seems to rest on the speedy and worldwide ratification of the proposed Geneva pact regulating and eventually outlawing forced labor. Ratification by America, it is to be expected, will be prompt and without reservations. However, for two reasons, it cannot be an easy gesture of moral support or a pious alibi of non-imperialistic superiority. In the first place, the American Southland is not altogether free from conditions analogous to forced labor. Wherever peonage exists, forced labor exists. Morally and practically, we need to remove this domestic mote before paying exclusive attention to the beam in the world’s colonial eye. We have further the moral commitment of our share in the Liberian investigation.
But in the second place, and most importantly, we need to realize that American capital is penetrating in ever-increasing volume into the areas directly concerned in the campaign against forced labor. There is the direct penetration by American capital and corporations through concessions such as that of the Firestone Company in Liberia, or contracts such as that of the J. G. White Corporation in Abyssinia. Then, too, there is our tremendous participation through our investments in Belgian, British, and French colonial concessionary companies. So considerable this is that competent opinion estimates that American capital now holds or shortly will hold a preponderant position in the Belgian Congo, Guinea, and the Upper Volta, with a very considerable share in West African concerns generally. While we may rejoice that the Liberian report has given the Firestone Company a clean bill of health, there remains a constant danger and a continuous duty before American capital in this respect.
As an illustration of how necessary it is for American capital to make sure of clean hands, we need only think of how inevitable inquiry into other areas will be after the precedent of the Liberian report. The League of Nations will no doubt soon give similar attention to a grave situation in Abyssinia, both under the pact against slavery to which Abyssinia is a signatory, and the new pact on Forced Labor. Alarming emphasis has been put on the question of the extent of domestic or patriarchal slavery in Abyssinia and Arabia by such books as Lady Kathleen Simon’s Slavery, J. E. Baum’s Savage Abyssinia, and Joseph Kessel’s sensational exposures published a while back in Le Matin. Kessel claims to have found an extensive slave-trade into the Hedjaz from Abyssinia and adjacent parts of the Sudan, clandestinely disguised as pilgrim caravans, moving some of them through the British Port Sudan. In the case of Abyssinia, it is fortunate that for some years now she has had a decree making slave-trading punishable by death, and providing for the gradual abolition of household or patriarchal slavery by making such slaves or self-indentured servants automatically free on the death of their masters. Numbers running into several millions have thus been liberated. However, we have here a system backed by stubborn local tradition, as in the case of the similar “pawn” system in Liberia. Incidentally the border-line character of such practices of voluntary serfdom and indenture between formal and direct slavery, makes it obvious how necessary the Convention against Forced Labor is as a supplement and buttress to its predecessor, the Slavery Convention.
In spite of this important aspect, for America unfair labor contracts and coercion dictated by concessionary developments in backward countries will furnish our great pitfall on the subject. Had the Firestone concession not set up its own voluntary employment bureau rather than accept, as at first planned, the intermediary services of government labor recruiting, it would most surely have stood in the dock as particeps criminis with the King government. Again as another instance, rumors as to what might happen on the great irrigation project which the White Engineering Company have under concessions from the Emperor of Abyssinia, only recently compelled a declaration from Gano Dunn, its president, that “when the J. G. White Engineering Corporation undertakes any construction in Ethiopia, it will certainly treat as freemen all natives it employs and will by proper construction camps and sanitation introduce such conditions of working and well-being as will meet the approval of enlightened humanitarians in the United States and elsewhere.”
But what standard, and what agency of inspection, one may pertinently ask will guarantee this, without expert definition of what safe working conditions, fair contract and wage, open labor markets, and reasonable guarantees really are? And what assurance is there in leaving this matter for private or public conscience and self-inspection to check rather than resort to standardized, legally enacted agreements and non-partisan, expert adjudication? No country, perhaps, can be expected to hold itself to strict accountability or a disinterested judgment for satisfactory humanitarian treatment of large subject populations, especially those under non-native colonial administration. International agreement is the only safe guarantee, and the mutual guardianship of international opinion the most effective machinery of operation.
So it is most fortunate that Geneva has set such a standard in the expertly devised instrument available in the recent Convention against forced Labor. It was shocking to learn from the investigations of the Labor Convention’s committee, directed by the late Harold A. Grimshaw, the mass plight of unskilled labor in the colonial areas of the world. In areas far in excess of Europe and America combined, the conditions of an open labor market were being restricted or waived entirely, and populations actually subjected by the million to labor conscription and unfair contract labor. There were three principal ways of achieving this wholesale economic exploitation.
First, there was the wholesale drafting of labor from native communities to engage in “public work” projects, either as civilian labor required to work under labor law draft at arbitrarily fixed wages or forced to labor on public works as the equivalent of prescribed military service. French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial regimes, especially in Africa, were prone to this method. Then in the second place, there had grown up, especially in the African colonies and protectorates, the procedure of assessing poll or hut taxes in currency, which forced the male native population more or less wholesale into the fly-traps of concessionary companies and plantation owners, who usually gave arbitrary wages, unsanitary working conditions in many instances, and arbitrarily enforced work contracts. Finally, there was the wholesale recruitment of native labor by labor agents or indirectly through quota assessments on native chieftains, by which workers were drafted for short-or long-term service, the former generally without remuneration beyond upkeep, and the latter frequently on contracts which these workers signed under coercion after being drafted. In many cases, we must admit, the projects themselves were most worthy, either as schemes of economic or public-works development. But the procedures were in too many instances arbitrary, inhumane and unfair. The cloak of public works and public interest was too often used for cheap and easy promotion of military projects or those designed to benefit foreign investors and the export trade rather than the internal development of the country or the conservation of its natural resources. And even in cases where the direct responsibility was with private employers or employer companies, the pressure upon the worker was official and coercive.
Thus the policy of labor conscription and coercion became by gradual degrees the standard practice and the accepted working principle of most colonial regimes. There is now no effective remedy short of wholesale prohibition and legal restriction of all forms of forced labor, direct or indirect, public and private.
Nations ratifying the present convention pledge themselves to “suppress the use of forced or compulsory labor in all its forms within the shortest possible period,” and with a view to this complete suppression guarantee that “recourse to forced labor may be had during the transitional period for public purposes only and as an exceptional measure, in the conditions and subject to the guarantee hereinafter provided.” These guarantees, which are in substance the first world code of the rights of labor, are the heart of the document, and it was over their specification that so much controversy arose. They may be said to be the accumulative effect of all the humanitarian agitation and exposure of irresponsible exploitation in the tropics since the famous exposé of conditions in the Belgian Congo by Morel and Nevinson and the Congo Reform Association. Their immediate antecedents are the restrictions and guarantees of native labor as written into the charters of the B and C class Mandates, the Grey Report, the world questionnaire and 1929 conference of the International Labor Conference, and the Blue Report incorporating the draft convention, which is now offered to the world as amended by the 1930 conference.
So the specific credit goes jointly to the League of Nations and its section and commission on Mandates and to the International Labor Office with its machinery of the International Labor Conference and the standing Commission on Native Labor. As chief of the Native Labor Section of the I.L.O., secretary of the Native Labor Commission, secretary in charge of the drafting of the questionnaire and draft convention, and liaison officer representing the interests of native labor on the Permanent Mandates Commission, the late Harold A. Grimshaw was the key man, and often the moving genius in the recent phases of the campaign. Since his death some months ago is attributable to the strain and overwork of the position, to which he gave himself with unrelenting and effective zeal, the completed pact may be regarded as his moral monument.
The more progressive provisions of the draft convention prepared by Grimshaw where seriously threatened, however, by divisions of opinion and conflicting interests among the forty-five members of the 1930 Committee on Forced Labor. The questions of the employment of men under compulsory military service laws for the execution of public works, of the regulation of the practices of the labor-tax generally current in the French, Belgian, and Portuguese African colonies, compulsory porterage service and compulsory cultivation of crops in colonial development projects were among the crucial issues. After much compromise and manoeuvering, the final measure may be said to owe some of its most humane and exacting provisions to a coalition of liberal opinion between the workers group delegates and the British government delegates, who held essentially to the policies laid down in the declarations of the British Labor Party on the subject of colonial labor R. H. Vernon, who was alternate for Miss Bondfield, the British minister of labor, and who acted as reporter-general for the committee, deserves special credit for his generally successful championing of the strict limitations and guarantees of the original draft, especially on the issues of labor-taxes and labor service under compulsory military service laws. The attitude of the French, Belgian, and Portuguese government delegates was regrettably reactionary on these latter points and was only narrowly defeated; whereas on the questions of compulsory crop labor and contract service to concessionary companies, the Dutch and South African official delegations were also reactionary, under the plea, however, of special circumstances.
The final outcome, however, was a convention that puts some effective teeth into the general principles of the pact. It is provided that where there is state prescribed labor, it shall be for necessary public works only, executed under specific authority given by a law of the home country, for a maximum period of sixty days in a year, paid at the same standard with hours and conditions of work such as prevail for voluntary labor in the same area, and further that persons so called should receive formal certification of their service and be afterwards exempt from subsequent levy. The further restriction of such labor to able-bodied males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, the exemption of school teachers and pupils, the limitation of the total quota to no more than 25 per cent of the adult male population, and the requirement, especially revolutionary in the light of past colonial practice, that such labor shall not “involve the serious removal of workers from their habitual place of residence,” all cut at the roots of the worst abuses of past and recent bad practice.
Such a code would have made impossible the inhumane sacrifices of the French Congo-Ocean railway project and its still echoing scandal, or that of the conditions exposed in Portuguese Africa in the well-known Ross Report of 1925, or the circumstances now under international indictment in Liberia. Especially progressive is the stipulation with regard to what constitutes a “public works project” or “necessary public service,” that “members of the community or their direct representatives shall have the right to be consulted in regard to the need for such services.” This removes one of the favorite cloaks of the labor-tax levy, by taking away “the idea of tradition and custom as a criterion of the legitimacy of such communal services and substituting the idea of the consent of the community itself expressed directly or through their own representatives.” Progressive stipulations as to the gradual reduction of compulsory porterage—another of the great evils of the colonial labor situation—the regulation of labor for official crop cultivation programs and its restriction to the cultivation of lands “belonging to the communities or individuals concerned,” as well as stipulations of cash payments to the individual worker, pay for period of transportation to the site of labor, repatriation at the end of the labor service, and medical supervision and pay equivalent to that prevailing for voluntary workers in the same area, are among the outstanding details of this new charter of colonial labor. And if unskilled labor is thus safeguarded at its weakest points, and modern conditions and humane guarantees thrust down on a world scale under the bottom levels of our economic system, we can well see how the covenant becomes more than a limited reform of the abuses of colonial government. Indeed it becomes a sort of world Magna Charta for labor and an international declaration of certain fundamental and inalienable economic rights.
Liberal opinion, however, should not underestimate the reactionary forces aligned against such a program of reform. Everywhere special interests are silently but forcefully opposing measures so threatening to their long-uninterrupted career of ruthless exploitation. Special political ambitions link hands with economic monopolies to defeat in some way or other this impending emancipation of the colonial worker. The French, Belgian, and Portuguese government delegates to the 1930 labor convention voiced the likelihood of reservations by their respective governments, and the sessions saw the sad spectacle of a black French deputy, M. Blaise Diagné, in an excess of patriotism, accepting spokesmanship for the reactionary French official point of view.
One can have sympathy with the difficulties of France, Belgium, and Portugal, trying to speed up development in backward areas on war-impaired budgets. However, the plea of “necessary public works” has been too often in their policy a stalking-horse for military and other selfish imperialistic objectives; and especially with France, the conscription of labor keeps suspicious company with the program of an extensive black colonial army. Fortunately for the situation, several of the powers involved have international mandates to perform by which they are already obligated to carry out in those areas the essential policies of the Forced Labor Convention. And like a man trying to walk with one foot in a ditch and the other on the highroad, they cannot long maintain any great disparity of policy and practice between their colonies and their adjacent mandatories. Thus with the pressure of liberal opinion at home and the pull of a new policy already in force at some favorable points in the colonial scheme, the ultimate universalization of this humane code may be looked for with reasonable confidence.
Our own government seems committed in advance to the principles of the Slavery and the Forced Labor Pacts, and their international machinery of administration, at large as well as with respect to the special situation in Liberia. The official American note of November 17 last to Monrovia states that “International public opinion will no longer tolerate those twin scourges of slavery and forced labor.” The government correspondence seems definitely to suggest international assistance as the best possible procedure in the Liberian situation. It is true that some of the more flagrant abuses have been checked by the publicity of the investigation, and that the anticipated censure of the King regime by the report precipitated the immediate resignation of President King and Vice-president Yancey. However, any permanent improvement of the situation will involve two things far deeper than the political corruption which was the active agent of the evils: a thoroughgoing economic rehabilitation of Liberia, and a radically different policy for the education and treatment of the native population. This the Commission’s report clear-sightedly sees and recommends in a program so extensive as to be impossible without outside help, technical, financial, and perhaps administrative.
In a recent article Raymond Leslie Buell, of the Foreign Policy Association, himself one of the most informed and clear-visioned students of the problem, pointedly says:
What Liberia needs is some well-organized and responsibly executed scheme not only for financial reorganization but also for educational, health, public works, and native agricultural, development. [He further suggests:]
The United States and the League of Nations have cooperated in making an investigation into the affairs of Liberia. Why should not the United States and the League now cooperate in working out a plan for genuine reform?
The obligation of the League is certainly clear. The pact against slavery under which the investigation was technically sanctioned, and that against forced labor under which the bulk of the abuses actually found really fall, are instruments of the League and propose the use of its machinery for enforcement. The obligation of the United States ought to be equally clear. The United States is the traditional sponsor of Liberia and has always assumed the responsibility which that implies. Moreover, under a loan agreement made in 1927 we have appointed the financial advisor to the Liberian government, and granted supervisory and administrative assistance to the Liberian Frontier Force, under whose jurisdiction police control of considerable sections of the native population rests. Further, the largest actual and potential economic investment in Liberia, both from the point of view of local development and the export trade, is American and focuses in the Firestone concession of a million acres for rubber cultivation.
There is, as we have said before, continued responsibility on the part of American capital for a just and progressive labor policy in Liberia. The sudden depreciation of rubber prices just after the inception of the Firestone works has probably been a factor in saving us from exerting a pressure for labor that would have made the labor exploitation of the natives far worse even than the shocking report now before us. A revival of the rubber market or further developments in American capital investment will certainly bring up the old problems and dangers, unless definitely safeguarded. The commission rightly recommends the curtailment of all concession development likely to create exorbitant demands on native labor or produce a recurrence of labor conscription.
It is evident then, that we have a situation in which a constructive, cooperative interest must be worked out. Our policy and practice as financial receiver and chief investor in Liberia must square with our moral obligations and standards as international judge and moral guardian. This we must carry through, even if doing so involves the modification of the terms of the Firestone concession and the surrender of our present receivership in favor of some international plan of supervision and assistance. In this we might even maintain the main burden of the task, financially and educationally, especially since the Commission recommends the participation of American Negroes in the program for the reclamation of the country. But we must assist in some way that will assure Liberia of our disinterestedness, and in ways that will comport in the eyes of the world with our professed ideals of humanity and justice. This, it would seem, could be most effectively obtained by adherence to the League Pact on Forced Labor, and joint procedure through international channels.
Instead of beginning our contact with this world question with just a formal ratification of an international convention, the United States has before it in Liberia a practical situation involving its basic principles, pressing for more or less immediate action. The Commission in general, and our able representative, Dr. Charles S. Johnson, in particular, have presented us with a constructive, remedial program, which is a serious challenge and a great opportunity for a pioneer piece of scientific, humanitarian work. By participating in it wholeheartedly and capably, we have thus the opportunity of aligning ourselves with the most progressive front in the reforms necessary to correct the flagrant evils of economic exploitation in Africa. It is to be hoped that we shall not fail our duty.