Congo Slavery. A Brief Survey of the Congo Question From the Humanitarian Point of View Guinness, H[enry] Grattan Africa,Congo Free State,Missionaries

9½" x 6". Stapled orange wrappers. Pp. 31. Very good: wrappers lightly creased with a few spots of sunning; contemporary news clipping adhered to title page, small chip affecting headline with no loss of meaning; several brief penciled notations to margins; light creasing throughout. This is a rare, illustrated and powerful treatise on the "heartrending and grievous" "spectacle" that was the Congo Free State under the control of Leopold II of Belgium at the turn of the 20th century. The book's author, Henry Grattan Guinness, was an Irish preacher and, from 1860 to 1872, itinerant evangelist in Britain, Europe and North America who published several works on world history and biblical prophecy. In London he and his wife founded Harley College, a training institute for over 1,300 missionaries of 30 denominations; it exists today as the Christian mission school Cliff College. In 1873 they founded the Regions Beyond Missionary Union (RBMU), a Protestant Christian missionary society, and four years later the Livingstone Inland Mission, working in the Congo, Argentina and Peru. Guinness was one of three founders of the Congo Reform Association, a political and humanitarian group formed in 1904 to address the atrocious human rights abuses rampant in the Congo Free State under King Leopold II's rule. In the present work, he discussed his first visit to "poor Congoland" in 1891, when he believed that "Oppression might exist but surely it was personal, local, and temporary." He went on to lament that: "No longer is it a local question no longer is it a matter for mere occasional observation . . . Congo officials may try in this year of our Lord 1904, to cover from European gaze the sufferings of mutilated humanity but they are attempting the impossible . . . Let the photograph we reproduce speak for itself it has a message that demands a hearing. It shews a Congo child who was mutilated in a rubber palaver, in which his mother was killed. Such are the results of the desperate rubber regime which has blighted the Congo . . . a system of forced labor . . . fundamentally iniquitous and inhuman." The book covered "the present condition" of the state in four districts, "what has been done" and "what ought to be done," excoriating the Belgians' severing of natives' hands, "a wanton act of cruelty used to intimidate the people, and secure the trembling obedience of the helpless villagers abandoned to their despotic sway." It includes 12 photographic images and illustrations showing Congo children "maimed for life," "a guard of the forest with two prisoners" and a woman seated in a dugout canoe among native boys, "starting for an evangelistic trip." There is a "sketch map of Africa," heart-wrenching poems and "declarations" of other missionaries, as well as "The Case in a Nutshell, as illustrated by a Set of Slides" Guinness used "in his Lecture entitled 'A Reign of Terror on the Congo.'" An attached clipping with a handwritten note denoting its source as the London Star of March 1904 announced a missionary conference on the subject held at the Shoreham hotel. A vivid condemnation of one of history's great atrocities, penned by a missionary active in the Congo. OCLC shows two entries for the work with three holdings total, only one of which is in the United States.