Boma is the shop
window of Leopold's big store. The good features of Boma are like
those attractive articles one sometimes sees in a shop window, but
which in the shop one fails to find--at least, I did not find them
in the shop. Outside of Boma I looked in vain for a school
conducted by the State, like the one at Boma, such as those the
United States Government gave by the hundred to the Philippines. I
found not one. And I looked for such a hospital as the one I saw at
Boma, such as our government has placed for its employes along, and
at both ends of, the Isthmus of Panama, and, except for the one at
Leopoldville, I saw none.
In spite of the fact that Boma is a "European watering-place," all
the servants of the State with whom I talked wanted to get away from
it, especially those who already had served in the interior. To
appreciate what Boma lacks one has only to visit the neighboring
seaports on the same coast; the English towns of Sierra Leone and
Calabar, the French town of Libreville in the French Congo, the
German seaport Duala in the Cameroons, but especially Calabar in
Southern Nigeria. In actual existence the new Calabar is eight years
younger than Boma, and in its municipal government, its
street-making, cleaning, and lighting, wharfs, barracks, prisons,
hospitals, it is a hundred years in advance. Boma is not a capital;
it is the distributing factory for a huge trading concern, and a
particularly selfish one.
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