A Green Beret's True Story of His Jack Lawson with Sully de Fontaine

Behind the Wheel
Many slavers were killed or seriously wounded. Within a week
their nerves were frayed and they were afraid of stopping for sleep
for fear of being overrun and killed. Most of their allies, the rival
African tribesmen, had abandoned the Portuguese. Now without
sleep for days, the Portuguese feared for their lives.
They abandoned all the slaves from Inkisi hoping this would end
the devastating attacks. But the warriors from Inkisi continued to
pursue the Portuguese, their ranks now swollen with their freed and
angry comrades. The remainder of the Portuguese with their few
slaves from other villages finally reached the coast and immediately
began to load their ship. While hoisting one of the carts onto the
ship, suddenly one of the wheels fell off. In fear of being wiped out,
the Portuguese quickly raised sails and set out for sea, leaving the
wheel behind.
This slaver’s wheel was taken by the tribe and set in the center of
the tribal village of Inkisi in the area that eventually became the
Belgian Congo. They danced around it for centuries in a ritual that
represented the last loss of their people to Portuguese slavers. The
Portuguese had suffered so many casualties on this expedition that
they never again ventured into this part of the Congo to capture
slaves.
Slaver’s Wheel sits in mute testimony to the end of slavery for
this tribe, centuries before the British outlawed the business in 1807
and finally made the business punishable by death in 1833. The
Belgians and other countries soon followed suit, except Portugal
and the young country of the United States. Slaver’s Wheel represented
to this tribe that they would never submit to slavery. To them
this wheel represented their freedom.
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