Slave girl torture

Black `slave girl’ tortured and killed by church missionaries claim

`Newspapers published on the west coast of Africa contain full reports of the hearing of a shocking case against William F. John, Phoebe John, John Williams and Kezia Williams of flogging a girl so cruelly as to cause her death.
John and Williams were described as agents and school masters of the Church Missionary Society at Onitsha, on the Niger. The female prisoners were their wives, and the girls whose ill-treatment led to the accusation were both prisoners whom the prisoners (accused) had ransomed.

The alleged offence took place as far back as 1887, when both girls ran away from their employers, but were brought back. As a punishment for their escape they were taken to the prisoner Williams’ house, when the prisoner John having obtained a rope, they were stripped naked and securely tied back to back. The allegations are not only that the two prisoners brutally flogged the girls with their own hands, but that a number of natives were also ordered to keep up the punishment, which they did with guava whips, canes, ropes and other instruments. Not content with this, the male prisoners ordered some pepper to be brought, and rubbed it into the bleeding wounds of the girls as they lay upon the ground helpless and rolling with agony. 

This was in the morning, and the girls were left lying on the ground under the broiling sun without any shelter or aid of any kind. At midday a number of schoolboys came up from school and commenced to flog them again, by order, as is stated, of the prisoners, after which the negroes again rubbed pepper into their wounds.
During the whole of the afternoon, the two victims, still tied together in the way described, lay in the full glare of the sun, and one one occasion having succeeded in rolling towards a clump of bushes to seek for shade, it is said the prisoners dragged them back into the sun.
In the evening they were untied and the deceased girl was taken away and lashed to a guava tree in the yard of the prisoner John. She was then in a very weak and prostrate condition, the other girl having apparently suffered less severely.

Three days after this the deceased was seen in the yard of the prisoner John and bleeding from a fresh-cut wound on her head, while beside her was standing Mrs. John holding a stick about an inch in diameter.
The female prisoner said the deceased was shamming (faking), and that she had been trying to make her get up, but in vain. Several persons then came up, but it was evident that the deceased was quite unable to raise herself.
The next day she died.’

The above article was first published in a British newspaper in the 1880’s.