ABSTRACT
Alice Harris was at the Congo Balolo Mission station at Baringa, 1,200 miles inland from the west coast of Africa, in the territory of the Congo Free State. She and her husband, the Reverend John Harris, had established the station as a mission outpost on the Upper Congo in September 1900, and they had been recently joined by a medical missionary, the Reverend Edgar Stannard. John Harris was attending a missionary meeting downriver on this particular day, May 14, 1904, when two African boys arrived suddenly at the station and attempted to convey some pressing news. Alice Harris and Stannard surmised that a detail of African “sentries” of the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR) had attacked a village in the vicinity for failing to provide the company with rubber in accordance with its assigned tax. Shortly thereafter, Harris and Stannard encountered two men from the village who were proceeding to the local ABIR agent to protest against the attack, bearing the proof of their claims in a small bundle of leaves. At the missionaries' request, one of the men, who identified himself as Nsala, opened the bundle and displayed the freshly cut hand and foot of a small child. Harris gathered from Nsala's explanation that the sentries had killed his wife and daughter, then devoured them, leaving behind only the daughter's hand and foot. Appalled by this revelation, Harris persuaded the man to pose with the child's remains for a photograph. 1 Harris framed the photograph on the veranda of her home, with the child's hand and foot upon the floor and Nsala gazing at them in profile.
