AN AFRICAN TRAIL, JEAN KENYON MACKENZIE BV 3630 .B8 M3 1917 ^ Mackenzie, Jean Kenyon, 187 -1936. An African trail I WOMAN GRINDING CdKN Rhodesia, Region of Mt. Silinda A APR 8 1918 JEAN KENYON MACKENZIE Mpongwe greeting: "What is the news?" Conventional answer : "Good news, but for the hunger!" Published by The Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions West Medford, Mass. COPYRIGHT 1917 The Central Committee on the United Study or Foreign Missions THE VERMONT PRINTING COMPANY BRATTLEBORO, VT. FOREWORD It is with peculiar pleasure that The Central Com- mittee on the United Study of Foreign Missions presents this, its seventeenth, volume. Four years ago the Committee secured Miss Mackenzie's consent to write a text-book on the approach of the Gospel to primitive peoples — An African Trail is the result. The editors of The Atlantic Monthly, who in 1915 published Miss Mackenzie's letters under the title Black Sheep, requested the privilege of printing two chapters of this text-book in their magazine. These appeared in the issues of November and December, 1916, by permission of The Central Committee. Miss Mackenzie; experienced missionary, dis- tinguished author, penetrating student of divine and human nature, is exceptionally fitted for her task, and has given a unique and valuable contribution to the literature of missions. Central Committee on the United Study OF Foreign Missions. Mrs. Henry W. Peabody, Chairman. Miss E. Harriet Stanwood. Mrs. Decatur M. Sawyer. Mrs. Frank Mason North. Mrs. James A. Webb, Jr. Mrs. a. V. Pohlman. Miss Olivia H. Lawrence. Miss Grace T. Colburn, Secretary. CONTENTS Page Preface 9 Plans of Chapters lo Chapter I. The White Man in Africa . 15 Chapter II. The Bulu 49 Chapter III. The Bulu and God ... 79 Chapter IV. The Ten Tyings .... 107 Chapter V. The New Tribe 137 Chapter VI. The New Custom .... 173 A Brief Reading List 209 Index 217 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Facdjo Page Woman grinding Corn, Rhodesia, Region of Mt. Silinda Frontispiece An African Trail 9 Home from the Hunt 9 The Girl on the Path 24 BuLU Women carrying Firewood, Elat .... 32 Man sitting on a Call Drum and Man lacing up a Dance Drum 41 Village School in Kamerun Interior 56 Pastor of a Beach Church and his Family, Kamerun. This church was built by the congregation and is in part of cement 56 Some of the District School Teachers, Efulen, W. Africa 66 A Chxtrch Congregation 73 Native Kraal 88 A Bantu Chief 96 The Wife of a Christian Minister 105 These Men are hunting a Runaway Girl: A common event in Bantu 120 A Zulu Trained Nurse, from the American Board's Hospital at Durban 137 The Nursery Exhibit 152 Bible Women of THE Umtasa Circuit, Africa . . 169 BuLU Woman 104 SOME SUGGESTIONS TO TEACHERS / would suggest, in using this book: 1. That the teacher famiharize herself with the lives of a few of the better known African mission- aries, and that she require members of the class to do the same. This work might result in papers written by students, or in oral reports of such reading. 2. That she emphasize, if the class is denomina- tional, the lives of the more conspicuous African missionaries of her denomination. If the class is interdenominational, such specific biography might be drawn from students. 3. That in the case of a denominational class, the teacher familiarize herself with the reports of the African Mission of her denomination to the Board. That she note the growth of the last ten years as emphasized by such reports. That she seek to understand that specific field, the strength and the weakness of its equipment, its signal needs and its signal successes. However isolated the class may be from recondite sources of information, the Mission Boards will supply informing literature and for a nominal sum. The pastor of the local church will be glad to lend the Mission's reports to the Boards. And there is, in every village, at least one copy of the Encyclope- dia Britannica or other reliable encyclopedia. Such sources, with a few of the conspicuous biographies of African missionaries, will amplify every sugges- tion made in this book and answer every question. F ' ,. ,>^:; -■ ^^ ' *'»»L -'fmr^w^ialf •" JHMbdd ^ £i;r- -35^1 ',>.'• ^M r ij^'- 7 ■<^- > '/^'■'l^^^^l AN AFRICAN TRAIL HOME FROM THE HLM PREFACE THERE is no mention in this little book of the Mohammedan influence in Africa, of the slave trade, of the traffic in rum. These tragic matters have seemed to lie outside the sim- plicities of this effort. Here is a fireside study — a study of the Divine visitation to humble huts, of that old Bulu rite of hospitality — the sweeping of clay floors, of fare spread to honor the Great Guest. Yet I must be saying of the little green cases of rum — that I have seen boys and girls carry these upon their backs along the forest ways. The govern- ment of our Colony fought this traffic with the weapon of high license, and had an ever-widening area of prohibition. Of slavery, other than domestic slavery and the enslavement of those taken in local and inter-tribal wars, there is no tradition among the Bulu, who have thrived remote from the influence of that major slaver — the Arab, and that minor slaver — the white man, until the last quarter of the nineteenth cen- tury. Now it is true of Islam, as of Christ, that the hand is on the latch of this forest home. 12 AN AFRICAN TRAIL Pace The schooling of the Bulu in the ten commandment* — The master Christians as teachers The commandment as discipliae As mental discipline As physical discipline As moral discipline The power of God as present voith the Bulu in keeping the command- ments The inner vision that sustains the Bulu PLAN OF CHAPTER V. The New Tribe 137 The Tribe of God among the Bulu The Creator of the new tribe The entrance into the new tribe The "turning of the heart" The bargainers The dreamers The advent of the leaders The adjustments of the new convert — The initial confessions The social adjustments The acknowledgment and payment of debts The break with fetish The regeneration of the convert — Probation and instruction before baptism Those who backslide Those who repent Those who are restored The growth in grace of the convert — He is a man of faith He is a man of prayer He is a man of works He is a giver of gifts AN AFRICAN TRAIL 13 Page PLAN OF CHAPTER VI. The New Custom 173 New customs among the Bulu Secular influences for change Government control makes for — New attitudes toward violence New attitudes toward labor New customs of commerce following the introduction of money as currency The presence of the white man makes for — New aspects in dress New need and new supply New opportunities New dangers God's law the new restraint The native Christian as — The headman of the new town The new man with new thoughts The new woman The maker of the new marriage The new marriage and — The Christian school The Christian service The Christian family Old marriages made new The uneven yoke The new child The new schooling The new neighborhood The Christian as neighbor — The neighbor mother The neighbor father The neighbor brother The new hospitahty The new consolation The neighbor evangelist BIBLE READING AND PRAYER FOR CHAPTER I. Psalm 91 Prayer OLORD, who didst come to seek and to save the lost and to whom all power is given in heaven and in earth; hear the prayers of Thy Church for those who, at Thy command, go forth to preach the Gospel to every creature. Pre- serve them from all dangers; from perils by land and perils by water; from the deadly pestilence; from the violence of the persecutor; from doubt and im- patience; from discouragement and discord; and from all the devices of the powers of darkness. While they plant and water, O Lord, send Thou the increase; gather in the multitude of the heathen; and convert in Christian lands such as neglect Thy great salvation; that Thy Name may be glorified, and Thy kingdom come, O Saviour of the world; to whom, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, be honour and glory, world without end. Amen." — Book of Common Worship. AN AFRICAN TRAIL CHAPTER I. THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA This is a book about a neighborhood — a neighbor- hood like many others in the forests of equatorial Africa. It is a book about a tribe, one like many others of the tribes of the Bantu people of Africa. It is a book about an adventure — an African adven- ture which repeats itself wherever the Word of God makes entrance into a neighborhood of those forests and addresses itself to those tribes. This is not a book of ethnology or anthropology or zoology or geog- raphy, though in our neighborhood and in our tribe there is rich quarry for such effort. Neither is it a book of missionary history or biography, though we have been not without honor in our corps and history. This book is an account of the impact of the Word of God, in a Bantu dialect, upon the hearts of some of the tribes of the Bantu. His approach The tribes of the Bantu have loved by the sea. ^q jjyg behind stockades, and about their home of Central and Southern Africa is the ultimate stockade of the surf. Along the African coasts there is a natural barrier in the wall of surf upon a shore where there are few harbors, inadequate harbors, or none. Here are leagues of open sea beach broken at intervals by the brown flood of rivers that 10 AN AFRICAN TRAIL are navigable no more than a few miles inland, whei'e, among the hills of the coast ranges, they are torn into rapids. Between the Delta of the Niger on the west coast of Africa and the mouth of the Congo there is a stretch of a thousand miles of sea- board where there is at best, for a liner, no more than a few hours' journey up a river's mouth to the dimin- ishing count of fathoms from the quartermaster. Along this west coast none of the South African steamers call; there is here a particularly local trade. Steamers of three thousand tons — of five thousand tons — lie off shore and put passengers over the side into surf boats. These passengers will be govern- ment officials, military and civil; traders, who come more and more to be called "merchants"; planters, some of whom venture latterly to bring their wives; explorers, and scientists who are explorers; nurses for the hospitals in the settlements, and mission- aries; not often, indeed never in my own experience, a globe trotter. Thus — along the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast, into French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, and German colonies — go the white men and their cargoes. This book is three words, as the Bantu of our neighborhood say, from a missionary of the Presby- terian Church in the United States of America, whose West Africa Mission is in Southern Kamerun. _ There is little space in these three words for the adventures of the white man, and yet, because he is your tribal brother, give a thought to him as he goes over the ship's side. THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 17 In the main he is young. His helmet is new against the sun, his baggage is all of zinc or tin or japanned steel against the rains and the roaches and the white ants. He sits in the surf boat between the brown bodies of the rowers who line the gimwales. They sing the songs of rowing — they rise and fall to the paddle with the impeccable rhythm of their race; the new man marks the incredible white of their teeth and the whites of their brilliant eyes. His unused attention is wine to them — they shout and swing in an accelerated and a measured frenzy as one man. They are the sinews of the hand that Africa has put out to pluck the white man from the deck — where he stood among his brothers, those that speak his tongue and follow his customs. By that hand he will be led along what lonely paths to what foreign experiences! That black hand may become to him hateful, or dear; it may crush him or it may, after rainy seasons and dry, replace him on the deck of a steamer making north. But be sure of this — the print of those fingers is upon him — the spirit and the body of him — to the end of his days. That im- print is upon him like the scar of the lion's paw on the arm of Livingstone. His fevers — for it is a malarial country, his languors — for it is a tropical country, his lonelinesses — for it is an unsettled country, his depressions and repulsions — for it is an evil country, these experiences, partly physical and partly spirit- ual, delicately and permanently mar him. And his long marches in the forest, his bed and his bread beside the trail, the smell of age-old mold and of 18 AN AFRICAN TRAIL rotting mud and of wood fires, his contact with the mind and with the bodies of the tribes of the wilder- ness, his acquisition, however hmited, of a primitive tongue that opens the door, however httle, into the world of primitive thought — these things build mem- ories and wake desires that are to become ineradi- cable parts of his being. This much is true of every white man who goes through the tiers of surf between the lines of rowers — he is launched upon adventures of the body and of the spirit foreign to his tribe and modifying to his mental attitude, however fixed. There is, between Cape Palmas and Kamerun, twelve hundred miles of a lee coast making east along the line of the fifth degree north. Kamerun Colony has its two hundred miles of beach on the Bight of Biafra in the Gulf of Guinea. Here the coast makes a little east of south. Kamerun forms the northwest corner of the great Central African plateau. His settlement Back of the surf and the sand on this on the beach. equatorial coast is the forest, and back of that, again, is the grass country. The forest belt in southern Kamerun is from three to five hun- dred miles wide. Here the country is a surge of hills, the last effort of the Crystal Range from the south. Noble portals stand north of the entrance to south- ern Kamerun, the nearly f ourteen-thousand foot rise of the volcanic Kamerun Mountain at the mouth of the Duala river, and thirty miles out to sea the rise from its island base of the mountain of Fernando Po, nine thousand feet, blue as a plum, against the west. THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 19 All down the west coast of Africa, between the wall of the forest and the wall of surf, lies the long line of beach towns. On the thin ribbon of the shore there are the settlements of the white man, single file, threading their long way down the path of least re- sistance, — little white settlements, from the amazing castles that were built by the Portuguese in the seventeenth century, captured by the Dutch in the eighteenth century, purchased by the English in the nineteenth century, — from these great fortresses white-washed and brilliant against the forest wall, to the more modern settlements of the Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Slave Coast. The white man has whitewashed his town and roofed it with zinc or with tile. There it blinks, a high light in the per- petual haze that hangs upon the coast line. But these considerable settlements, these metropolises of the west coast, with their population of from one hundred to four hundred white men, are spaced at intervals of many miles down that long ribbon of sand, and the intervals are filled with lesser settle- ments, little groups of two and three houses, always white-washed, roofed with zinc, piercing at night with a little huddle of lighted windows a universal darkness. For generations the white man has busied himself on the coasts of Africa with ivory, with gold, with spices, with the heart- broken bodies of black men, with the oil of the palm nut, and latterly with rubber and cocoa. For genera- tions ships have lain off shore waiting upon cargo. to AN AFRICAN TRAIL and for generations long caravans of black men have brought treasure out of the mterior and have carried back articles of barter. Your young trader under his new helmet — does he guess of how long a caravan he is a follower?* Or how, three thousand years before the Ethiopian met Philip on the way that went south through the desert, there were Egyptian traders going south into a land called "Punt," where the women were tattooed, and where they sold dwarfs? Does the lonely young chap from Manchester who has gone to some little inland clearing of East or West or South Africa, who trades in his bark hut behind his brush fence with the tribes of the Bantu, does he know that in the sixth century, three months' journey south of Abyssinia, other young traders were living behind brush fences, trading in salt and iron for gold and ivory? Yes, they too, they traded in salt. And they, too — with their gain of ivory and gold on the backs of black men — they made forced marches to be quit of the country before the miseries of the rainy season. Perhaps they, too, had their little smattering of that form of native speech which was then current among tribes which may have been Bantu. But your young trader haggling in the warm dusk of his "factory" over the purchase of ivory and rubber, over the selling of salt fish and salt and scent and gin and beads and iron kettles and bright calicoes and matches — what does he know of those * These notes were made from the series of articles by W. Ham- mond Tooke, The Bantu in the Tenth Century. Published in the African Monthly, vol. I, 1906-1907. THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 21 other young men who bought ivory and gold for iron and salt in the sixth century, from other such black people tattooed like these, leaning upon their spears like these, and clamoring like these in a barbarous tongue and with urgent gesture? *Hanno with his "fifty oared galleys" did not sail so far south, on his west-coast expedition in the sixth century, B. C, as our Kamerun country; there was no Carthaginian trading post here, nor other white man his mark, until at the close of the fif- teenth century the Portuguese sailed between the Kamerun and Fernando Po. As early as the seven- teenth century European traders were settled on the coast, about the mouth of the Kamerun river. „. . , , Not until, in the eighties, the coimtry His way inland. ' ^ j. j • • .. x- came under iiermani admmistration did the white trader go inland. The white man's invasion of Africa has been in the main by the water- ways, and none of the rivers of Southern Kamerun is an open door. George Grenfell, the English Bap- tist missionary, explored the lower reaches of the Sanaga river in the late seventies; but it remained for Dr. Adolphus Good of the Presbyterian Mission to enter the country south of the Sanaga and north of the Campo. This he did in the early nineties. Up to that very recent date, the inland tribes of this * The Opening up of Africa, by Sir H. H. Johnston, p. 80. t While this little book was in hand the white man's war raged in the Kamerun. In the spring of 1916 the colony passed from the hands of the Germans into the hands of the Allies. Southern Kamerun, in particular, is now administered by the French. 22 AN AFRICAN TRAIL region lived unmodified by the presence of the white man. There were no other clearings in that forest than the black man's clearings, and no other roads than those little trails sunk in the deep sea of green where black men, single file, journeyed from clearing to clearing. It is otherwise now, for the government has opened up several great highways upon which under the amazing and intolerable sunlight the black men travel in long caravans, ahvays single file. Rubber, cocoa, ivory, ebony, are the treasures that come out of the east over the white man's highway on the backs of men, women and children. „. . „ And back by way of the highroad His influence. „ i i i i • • i irom the beach to the interior go the things of the white man. A tide of change is every- where coming in upon the black man, as I have seen the white tides of the ides of March sweep up the west-coast beaches and into the green gloom of the forest. Now, old things are being swept away and new things are being driven into the black man's country. Those roads that cleave the forest are like breaches in an age-old stockade, and through every breach rushes the master of change — the white man, the modifier of thought, of aspect, of manners, of custom — exacting by his very presence new attitudes toward life, toward murder, toward women, toward labor. The path of the white man is marked by change, be he trader, governor, or missionary. The missionary: The trail of the missionary — ^j'^ou His trail. know those trails. You have seen them cast like a net upon the map of Africa. Say — THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 23 a web spun out of the vitals of enduring men — little red filaments upon the map of Africa that mark the trails of the Moffats and the Livingstones, of the Casalis and the PelHsiers and the Coillards, of Krapf and Rebmann, of Mackay and Hannington, of Grenfell, of Louw, of many other major heroes who are remembered, of faithful and forgotten souls whose supreme efforts were humbly and obscurely main- tained. There upon the map you may follow the web of their wanderings, and from the more articu- late of these devoted vagabonds you may learn some- thing of the fashion of those trails that run so fair upon the map. Livingstone's trail was twenty -nine thousand miles long. *Writing of an April journey in 1851 he says that his caravan crossed the driest desert he had ever seen "with not an insect or a bird to break the stillness. On the third day a bird chirped in a bush, when a dog began to bark!" He and his family were thirsty, the water had been wasted by a servant, and of his children he says, "The less there was of water, the more thirsty the little rogues became." On the fifth day their need was supplied. Of another day and a swamp trail he writes, "With our hands all raw, and knees through our trousers, we at length emerged." And again of a rainy season day, "We got soaked by going on and sodden if we stood still"; and on this journey he carried his watch under his arm pit to keep it dry, fArnot's long trail ran like Livingstone's, sodden * Personal Life of David Livingstone, W. Gorden Blaikie, p. 125. t Garenganze, by Fred S. Arnot, p. 48. 24 AN AFRICAN TRAIL and parched. He journeyed short of food, short of water, of carriers. He once walked sixty miles in one day and two nights, and that upon a crutch. Hannington, Bishop of Uganda, in three days and a half -hour, covered one hundred and twenty miles. *There was a donkey in that caravan to which Hannington, for the hardships of the way, "tenderly apologized." "As a sign how tired one can be," he writes, "on Friday last, when going to bed, I took a bite from a biscuit and fell asleep with the first mouthful still in my mouth and the rest in my hand." In what forest shade or under what unkind sun or beaten upon by what killing rains these and other men spun out their filaments of effort that Africa might be netted with trails for the feet of the messen- gers, let the records of the pioneers tell you; and if we would emphasize their perilous adventures, be sure that they would not put the emphasis there. ^ ., . These "things of the road" are not all The trail today. . » things of the past. There are, accord- ing to Kumni,t fifteen hundred missionaries in Africa, and many of these at this hour are spinnmg out of their vitals the day's journey. Tonight they will drink from a village spring, they will eat out of a native pot, they will talk long under the stars to headmen, to lesser men, to women and children. They will sleep upon the slats of a native bed, or upon the ground. About them in the dark the forest will sigh, dropping its heavy dews. Tomorrow they * James Hannington, by E. C. Dawson, pp. 383-386. t KontrHon-Nofer, by H. K. W. Kumm, p. 192. THE GIRL ON THE PATH THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 25 will be astir when the guinea fowl calls the hour before the dawn. Under the sun or the rain of to- morrow they will be urging their bicycles or their motor cycles over the open roads, or taking on foot or in a hammock or in a "bush car" — with its one wheel and its men in the shafts behind and before — the little paths of the forest. Canoes and motor boats and little coughing river steamers will bear under the sun or the rain of today and tomorrow the vagabonds of Christ, making little trails upon the map of His African Kingdom. The missionary: So much lor those ways on African His settlement, maps that are the missionary his mark. What of the missionary his town? There are nearly one hundred Protestant societies at work in Africa; of these twenty-four are American, The church at home, concerned for the missionaries of these twenty-four societies, follows them with faithful eyes upon the map, making their way to destinations with names, habitations having a name, and so established in the mind of the white man. Those little caravans of our own tribe, making their way to one or another of those habitations with a name, most of us have followed such upon the map of Africa. Our imaginations have laid hold upon those printed names — to be printed so large by such reputable publishers — this has reassured us of the reality, the stability, the habitability of those places where our missionaries live. The greater For myself I tell you of those settle- settlements, ments with names upon the map of 26 AN AFRICAN TRAIL Equatorial Africa — I know them. To you who read the grandest of them would look mean and small when the sun "is in the middle," but to a missionary coming upon them after long journeys by bush or grass country, by river or the sea, to him that settlement of his tribal brothers, built of brick or plank and roofed with tile or zinc, is a kind of mira- cle. Here will be a church and a schoolhouse, work- shops, the clatter of a sawmill. Here will be a hospital. From the houses of white people, with their curtained windows, the faces of white women greet him, and in some places and in some golden hours, little white children run to meet him. Such a settlement, so inhabited, and set about with thrifty plantations, and suddenly agitated with a welcome to himself from the brown hundreds of school boys and school girls, and the apprentices from the shops, and the convalescing sick from the hospitals, and the Christians of the neighborhood who have had news of him — such a settlement is marvelous in his eyes, in the eyes of man or woman. The eyes of new young women, saddened by "the war both of the journey and the pity," how they have run over with good tears of comfort and of hope when first they fed upon the huddled roofs of the "missionary town" and the welcoming faces, black and white. The lesser And of the meanest of such settle- settlements, ments I would say to you who might pass it and not know the solitary white-man's house for the house of a white man — to him it is a home. THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 27 The day he and his little gang of school boys set about the clearing, he rejoiced, and so he did when the posts went up, when with the song of the roof- tree the men brought the ridgepole in from the forest, when the bark walls were laid to the up- rights, when he beheld men as trees walking with the palm leaves for the thatch upon their backs and the song of the roof thatch in their mouths; every day of all these days of effort the white man rejoiced. A man who has built a lodge for himself m the wilder- ness will never forget the day he took possession, or his first night under the shelter of that rustling roof. Read the letter he wrote home about his beautiful new house and you will never be guessing its dimensions, or that the white man is still waiting, after six months, for the window glass to "come up from the beach." To speak with men who travel by such trails and who settle under such roofs,you write your letters — oryou do not write them. We are speaking now of the white man's adventure in Africa, and so I must be speaking of the mail-man — that black carrier with the mail, who, when he leaves the white man's town for the beach, is charged never to linger. No sore feet are permitted him, nor deaths of relatives in towns by the way, nor rivers in flood to hinder him. Noah's dove was doubtless so charged. The return of that carrier to the settlement is calculated to a day; the dawn of the day he should return has the face of a "mail day"; and if he delaj'^s the white man watches the path in 28 AN AFRICAN TRAIL the moonlight. This is the hungry country, and it is not a small matter that when he returns the carrier has sometimes no more than half a load — or none. ♦Livingstone was at one time several years without letters, and on a day — a memorable day to him be sure — he received one letter and the word that forty had been lost. fAt another time after long joumey- ings he came to the west coast, to St. Paul de Loando, whera he thought to receive many letters. He received none. Take note in the biographies of almost any African missionary of the mention of the post. Hear in Uganda the runners with the mail who cry as they run "A letter! A letter! It is burning in my hand! A letter!" And remember how long, in the boot of a dead Belgian, there moldered that letter from Stanley which was to summon the church to the conversion of Uganda. And if you say these are tales of "Old, unhappy, far-off things. And battles long ago," I tell you. No. I received a letter the other day from a missionary mother in Africa, who had news after a six months' silence, from her little ones at home, "and her heart was like to burst with joy." That night in that little brown bark hut in that hungry country, there was feasting. „. , Dreams there were, too. The white His dreams. man s dreams of home m a strange land. Arnot feverish, alternately chilled and burning, * Personal Life of David Livingstone, W. Gorden Blaikie, p. 426. t Ibid, p. 179. THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 29 dreaming in his lonely hut at Garenganze, "I was always at home in a sunny snow-white bed, with a big fire blazing in the room, and my mother bringing in a tray." Livingstone lying on the ground in the midst of his caravan, dreaming that he had apartments in a hotel at home, where they fed him roast beef. Home- sick men and women sleeping under alien stars and to the throbbing of African drums, comforted by dreams. Do you think that they so dreamed in the nineteenth century, and that now, in the twentieth, they sleep without dreams? „. „ . This is not a moment in human ex- His suffenngs. . i .i «• • v - ^ perience when the sunermg, physical and emotional, of the missionary can be emphasized. His endurance is everywhere matched today by a common human endurance of a superhuman anguish. To lack bread, to lack water, to lie upon the ground, to bear the sun and rain, to be wounded and without care, to be in fever and without shelter, even to die without friend or solace and to bury without leisure the dead — what are these but the daily fare of so many of the sons of the white man? And in the days "before the war" — days of a common comfort and prosperity among white men in which the mission- ary had resigned his part — he was not one to count the cost dear. "These people must have ten lives, they are so fearless of death/' said a hostile chief of Moffat. The abandoned vagabond nature of mis- sionaries is written in every biography. It must be remembered of him that he is a shepherd — that he 80 AN AFRICAN TRAIL is a fisherman — vocations of gaiety and optimism. And he is that — he is an optimist, without proper regard for his circumstance, laughing where he should weep, sleeping where he should have a care, leaning like a child upon an arm which is — to all but himself — invisible. There he leans; and when the hour of terror strikes, or the afternoon of effort darkens to a quick night, when the things of this world fall away from the feet of this child of God — underneath him are the everlasting arms. *0n the eve of the 16th of March, in 1561, in the Zambesi country. Father Silveira, well knowing he is about to die — throws himself upon his bed of reeds and sleeps. fHannington, the optimist — mark him at last in that unspeakable hut in Uganda, the howl of hyenas in his ears, drunken guards about him, fever stealing upon him — ^he writes in that little diary which must be as precious to the people of the tribe of God as Scott's diary is precious to the English, "Was held up by Psalm 30, which came with great power." Was he not "held up"? Listen to him on that same day, the 29th of October, 1885, when he was led out to be shot with his own rifle — listen to him make his ultimate calculations, count the cost and sum it up. "Go tell Mwanga that I die for the Baganda and that I have purchased the road to Uganda with my life." Listen to f Adolphus Good, * A History of Christian Missions in South Africa, by J. du Plessis, p. 10. t James Hannington, by E. C. Dawson, pp. 460-462. i A Life for Africa, by Ellen Parsons, pp. 285, 288. THE WHITE aiAN IN AFRICA 31 at his last reckoning in the little bark house at Efulen — counting the cost, subtracting himself from the sum, and borrowing of God for the future expenses of the work among the Bulu. "May good men," beseeches this good man about to die, "may good men never be lacking for the Interior." „. , . , This white man in Africa is so often His mends. i • /-. i • ^ • lonely, and lor this (jod gives mm a friend. These friends of the white man, they make such humble appearance in books, in letters written home. The friend will be a cook, often a cook or a lad that carries a lantern, or some "poor body" that has been picked up by the way. Truly there are for every white man who ventures — and for every woman — such friends; and be sure that if such friendship seems at long range to be inadequate, it will not, in its day, so seem. *Poor Mrs. Helmore on the way to Linyanti, thirsty all day, dreading for her children the morrow's thirst and seeing in the moonlight a tall young girl carrying a calabash of water — had she not a friend .f* This girl had been a servant of the Helmores, and for her friends she walked four hours alone at night in a strange coun- try infested with lions. fRobert Moffat of a certain evening long ago on the banks of the Orange river, among an unfriendly people who would not sell him milk, no, not even for the buttons on his coat, which he offered — ^had he not a friend.'' In the twilight * Ten Years Iforth of the Orange River, by John Mackenzie, p. 125. t Labors and Scenes in South Africa, by Robert Moffat, p. 405. 32 AN AFRICAN TRAIL she comes stealing up and he does not know her — he does not know yet that God has given him a friend. She has a bundle of wood on her head. She has a calabash of milk, she has meat. She lays the fire. She dresses the meat. She is very silent, very busy, until at last she says — "I love Him whose servants ye are, and surely it is my duty to give you a cup of cold water in His name. My heart is full, therefore, I cannot speak the joy I feel to see you in this out-of- the- world place." Every African missionary who reads of this evening meal matches that old woman with some friend of his own, who came creeping up in the dusk with a dinner of herbs and a gift of love. We know them, these old women. Some friends — Moffat had such, too — are grander. Moffat, who left for the Orange-river country against the advice of his friends — they thought he would perish — came back with a grand friend — Africaner.* Africaner was to have killed him, and now they two come back to Capetown hand in hand. Khama was such a princely friend to many missionaries — read how he served Coillard for one. And in speaking of friends I am not meaning the givers of goats, of hens, of women if the missionary would take them, we know these, too. I am thinking of those black maternal bands upon the hair of lonely white women, of kind voices at the end of weary journeys that ask, "What will my child eat tonight?" Of old Nana who went down into the valley of the shadow with the * Labors and Scenes in South Africa, by Robert Moffat, pp. 72. 126. THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 33 white mother of the Bulu, who prayed for her re- covery all night and in the morning said, "I think the Lord will let you stay." I think of the young lad, Aloni,* servant to George Pilkington of Uganda, who was with his master that day he was shot down by the rebel Sudanese. "My master — ^you are dying. Death has come." "Yes, my child, it is as you say." "Sebo, he that believeth in Christ, although he die, yet shall he live." "Yes, my child — as you say, shall never die." And weary Livingstone, dead at last, how was he served by his two faithful friends, Susi and Chumat For such love as these friends give the missionary there is no adequate return but love. Of another black friend of his Pilkington wrote, "I loved him with all my soul." And of f James Sutherland it is written that when his enemies among the Ngoni were planning to drive him from his service of the Ngoni, he thought he would sell himself as slave to them and chose for owner a friend of his, "an old and much-respected woman." So they love and are loved, these missionaries. They love each other, too. Sara has followed Abra- ham on so many of the trails of Africa, you will find her in so many biographies, you will find her name in your annual reports. Beautiful marriages have not failed in Africa, nor friendships. It is hard for a missionary to speak without emotion of the devo- * Pilkington of Uganda, by C. F. Harford-Battersby, p. 337. t Among the Wild Ngoni, by W. A. Elmslie, p. 220. S4 AN AFRICAN TRAIL tion between missionaries bound to common tasks in lonely places. Ruth follows Naomi, David is joined to Jonathan, in a tenderness that passes kinship. And if there is record of teams that did not pull together, why so there is record — and infinitely more abundant — of those who were lovely and pleasant in their lives. Think on these things. His hour of About the hour of disillusion. There disniusion. is that bitter m the cup. To drink that cup alone — in Africa — how endure? In Africa there comes an hour when the distrust and the in- gratitude of men — black men, sometimes white men — turn the tropic air to winter. This is especially, pathetically, true of the young missionary who first encounters the defection of the black Christian, who first sees the lad he trained for evangelist turn trader, who first sees the girl who was to be the mother of new Africa, go wild. Young missionaries suffer then, according to their temperament, their hour of disillusion. And those senior missionaries — those single souls chosen of God to bear the solitude of the third watch — they have, while the world sleeps, their crushing hours of disillusion. Mackay, Coillard, Livingstone — these men of many dis- illusions — how did they endure — who was then their friend? *"Lo, I am with you alway," says Livingstone to himself in such an hour. And of this promise he writes in his diary — for a man must talk to himself when he is in the hungry country — "It * Personal Life of David Livingstone, by W. Gorden Blaikie, p. 197. THE ^SHITE MAN IN AFRICA 35 is the word of a gentleman of the most sacred and strictest honor, and there's an end on't." And out of the accumulated disillusions of his years Coillard writes the wonderful letter* dated January 25, 1893. His functions at In the old days it was so that a mis- the outposts. sionary must play every part — he must preach, teach school, heal the sick, carpenter, cobble, and tinker. He had need of such a kit of tools as should make a little world, and mend it. fTucker, coming upon the dead Mackay's tools rusting in his deserted workshop and the embers gray in the forge, seemed to see the very sign and mark of that in- defatigable man. How many missionaries of his generation — and how pitifully less skilled than he — were looked to in their solitary persons to make and mend their black world. I will not be saying just, that in the past a mis- sionary must be Jack of all trades, and master, too, for that exaction survives. It survives wherever the white man is one or two at lonely outposts. Search the reports of your missionary to your Board — of whatever denomination you may be — and you will find him — on the out-stations in the forest or in the grass country of Africa. Be sure of him that he is all things to all needs. He is all the doctor, all the teacher, all the preacher, the tribes about him know. He is all the industrial training they will get, and all the agricultural. His wife is all the saviour of babies, all the mothers' meeting, all the shepherdess of girls, * On the Threshold of Central Africa, by Francois Coillard, p. 502. t Eighteen Years in Uganda, by Alfred R. Tucker, vol. I, p. 71. 86 AN AFRICAN TRAIL all the protector and consoler of mourning women, all the machinery of God's maternal intention that is set to light that dark world. You need not read the marvelous biographies of the nineteenth-century missionaries to find white men and white women of works in Africa, read your mission's reports with imagination. And of this lonely man, this lonely woman, these who are so driven, so constrained, so broken like the loaves and the fishes, be sure that when they are not too busy to count, they count. Not the cost, mind you. They count it "all joy," and their one excite- ment is statistics. His functions at And as you read, give thanks for central stations, t^ig^ tj^^t there has been an evolution. Not alone at Lovedale, at Blantyre, at Livingstonia, at Amanzimtote, at E!at, but at the heart of every great African mission of every denomination, there is the fact, or the intention, of adequate modern equipment. There exist central stations that are the factories where are produced the staples that are to save Africa. At these stations a white man trained as a teacher is placed in a school, he is not put to mending broken legs, as I have seen the school teacher at lesser stations do. Here are hospitals with equipment, and here a doctor may practise his divine art and a nurse may follow hers; preachers here need not oversee the farm work, they preach — they shepherd the black sheep. At these stations, as you know, there are great industrial plants, great clearings for the encouragement of agriculture, wise THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 37 white men who are mechanics, who are farmers, over large companies of eager apprentices. Here are printing presses. These churches, these schools, these hospitals, these workshops and fields, and these presses, from these are being poured continually into the backwoods — the back waters of Africa — that bread of life which is to feed the hungry country. A man or a woman, of whatever degree of skill or training in any one of the essential human crafts, who is at work in one of these modern stations need not lose himself or his craft. He will find both him- sel and his craft put to usury. „ It is at this point that your mission- His adventure. • i i i • ary so violently put to usury, begms to count. He begins to deal in statistics. There is this in common between the man at the outpost and the man at the station, they run to statistics. They seem to you who grew up with them, perhaps, who went to college with them, who knew their training and equipment, who saw them off on the steamer, who know their destination on the map — they seem to you to have been somehow lost. As if in place of your man or woman, you have nothing at all famil- iar, or at best you have statistics. That is because in statistics are embodied bis ad- venture. When that white man who is plucked off the deck of a steamer by the hand of Africa is a missionary, he is launched upon adventures, spiritual adventures, too big for him. In that forest behind that shifting wall of surf he is to witness the vital content of — how shall I say — certain spiritual aphor- 88 AN AFRICAN TRAIL isms let loose. From his youth up he has heard that the Word is life, and now he is to hear that Word thunder in strange tongues, and to find it dynamic to the point of violence. He holds the doctrine of the new birth, and he is to witness this amazing fact multitudinously reproducing itself, the new man, everywhere chained to the dead body of his sin, turning his new face away from the earth to the shining of a morning star. This white man who has been praying that the Lord's Kingdom may come is to find himself beat upon and bruised by the violence of the coming of the Kingdom, deafened by the shouting and the tumult, hunted by innumerable feet in every path, and plucked at by the outstretched hands of Ethiopia. This white man has been caught in the cosmic whirl of the coming of the Kingdom of God, and his only mode of expression, his only cry out of his wonder and his terror and his new knowl- edge of the presence and the power of God is — statistics. No more than that. A little thin crying of statistics, a kind of wireless coming out of the forest, in the night, across the line of sand and the line of surf and the sea to the gilt side of the world where the sun still shines, a little thin crying of a code word — statistics. *The stunning statistics of the Berlin Missionary Society in South Africa, of the Livingstonia Mission, * In the statistics prepared for the World Missionary Con- ference, Edinburgh, 1910, the Berlin Missionary Society was shown as having in South Africa 48,360 native Christians; the Hermannsburg Missionary Society, 66,138; the Rhenish Society THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 39 of the Moravians and the Dutch Reformed Church and the Church of England in South Africa, of the French in Basutoland and Barotseland, of the Wesleyans and the American Methodists in South, East and West Africa, and the supreme statistics of Uganda — these major miracles of redemption, and the miracles of the American missions in Egypt and on the west coast, in the Congo and on the east coast, all these and all the other miracles of God's blessing of African missions under the British and the Germans and the Scandanavians and the French and the Swiss — these are all comprised in the word, statistics. 19,278; the Moravians, 19,338; the Dutch Reformed Church, 31,270; the Church of England, 156,059; the Paris Evangelical Society (communicants only), 17,160; the English Wesleyans (communicants only), 21,233. The United Free Church of Scotland for its Livingstonia Mission reported 7,513 and the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (Anglican) 11,668 Christians respectively. The Church, Missionary Society had in East Africa, mostly in Uganda, 68,251 Christians. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions reported 5,374 commimicants in South Africa; the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 4,772 communicants in the Congo; the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2,622 communicants for Southern Central Africa and Portuguese East Africa; the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., 1,825 communicants in Kamerun; and the Executive Committee of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (Southern Pres- byterian), 6,638 communicants in the Congo. Excepting where commimicants only are given, the numbers reported represent the total of baptized Christians, a more inclusive term than 40 AN AFRICAN TRAIL A code word. Be sure that the white man has packed this code word with ultimate and vital meanings. He thought, poor soul, when he pressed it full of treasure, how the treasure would be re- leased in the hearts and minds of his tribal brothers, how the code word would let loose the thousands of men and women compressed into the statistics, to live in the imaginations of the established people of God, to speak their simple faith in our Lord Jesus. Their new thought of Him is different from our thought as the fruit of one tree is different from another, their new obedience to Him is broken and mended and riveted with a passion of inexpert effort, their love of Him is curiously unsullied by "communicants," but not including large numbers of unbaptized adherents, many of whom are under regular instruction. The total of native Christian adherents, including baptized and un- baptized of all ages, for all Societies at work in Africa (exclusive of the Mediterranean and Red Sea littorals) was given at Edin- burgh as follows: Western Africa (Senegal to Nigeria), 248,702; Southwest Africa (Kamerun to German Southwest Africa), 103,201; South Africa (the British Union with Basutoland and Swaziland), 1,145,326; Southern Central Africa (five British protectorates), 92,583; East Africa (Portuguese, German, British), 118,107. The statistics of baptized Christians for 1915 of the particular societies mentioned above and for the same areas there specific- ally designated in each case, are as follows: Berlin, 60,131; Her- mannsburg, 102,610; Rhenish, 21,394; Mora\dans, 21,955; Dutch Reformed, no data available; Church of England, no data available; Paris Evangelical (communicants only), 22,233; Wesleyans (communicants only), 18,017; United Free Church of Scotland, 19,042; Universities' Mission, 23,072; Church Mission- ary Society, 101,688; American Board (communicants only). MAN SITTING ON A CALL DRUM AND MAN LACING UP A DANCE DRUM THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 41 the moral slime of their past and their present, and apprehends Him as person and altogether lovely. Some such e£Pect of the code word the white man expects, and this little book is an effort to release the meaning of his pregnant statistics. For this has been written the following account of a tribe and a neighborhood under the impact of the Word of God. "The Christians of Kungulu," said a Bulu woman to me once, "are as many as water." And another said, "You do not know this neighborhood yet; in your eyes the people are as grass, but you will certainly know them in the times to come — each by name!" These were Bulu statistics, and here, too, was the formula by which they might be transmuted into terms of human understanding and love. 6,840; American Baptists (communicants only), 4,801; Methodist Episcopal (communicants only), 2,335; Northern Presbyterians (conmiunicants only), 8,334; Southern Presbyterians (communi- cants only), 13,216. No attempt has been made in this connection to list all societies at work in pagan Africa, nor to summarize for any one society all the work done by it in all of Africa. The eflFort has been made only to give statistics by areas of the work of the major agencies, and in connection with the Edinbiu-gh statistics the totals for all societies by areas. In the preparation of this note, the resources of the Missionary Research Library, 25 Madison Avenue, New York City, have been drawn upon. 42 AN AFRICAN TRAIL A MISSION STATION IN 1798 (Extract from a letter of the above date) Our object this morning was to see those humble missionaries who, sent by the Moravian Church about seven years ago, have made so great a progress in converting the Hottentots to Chris- tianity. I had heard much of them, and I desired with my own eyes to see what sort of people Hottentots are when collected together in such an extensive Kraal as that which surrounds the settlement of the fathers. Hitherto I had only seen the servants of the farmers kept to hard work and humiliatiiig subjection. We travelled on over rough ground, and after about four hours arrived at the base of the Baviaan and Boscheman's Kloofs, where the settlement was. Each step we now took we found a bit of grass or a few cattle, a Kraal or a hut, a cornfield, a little garden — a general look of peace and prosperity, which seemed to me the tacit manna of the Almighty showered down upon His children. The fathers, of whom there were three, came out to meet us in their working jackets, each man being employed in following the business of his original profession — miller, smith, carpenter and tailor in one. They told us that they were sent by the Moravian Church in Germany; that their object was to convert the Hotten- tots, render them industrious, religious and happy; that they had spent some time in looking out for a proper situation, shel- tered, of a good soil and near the water; that they found it here and procured some Hottentots to assist them in the beginning of the work, and by their treatment of them had gradually en- couraged more to creep around them. "This gate," said one of the fathers, "and all the iron work is my broeder's making. The other two had raised the walls, which were of clay mixed with stone. The tailor had taught the Hottentot women to make rush mats of a sort of reed, with which the floor of the church was covered. They asked us to step in and see the church; we found it about forty feet long and twenty broad; the pulpit was a platform raised only a few steps above the ground, and matted with some rushes, on which were three chairs and a small table on which was the Bible. THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 48 I regretted very much that it was not Sunday — then I should have found the whole community, about three hundred Hotten- tots, assembled to Divine worship. The father said I should still see them, as at sunset every day, when business was over, there were prayers. Presently the church bell was a-ringing, and we begged leave to make part of the con- gregation. I doubt much whether I should have entered St. Peter's at Rome, with the triple crown, with a more devout impression of the Deity and His presence than I felt in this little church of a few feet square, where the simple disciples of Christianity, dressed in the skins of animals, knew no purple or fine linen, no pride or hypocrisy. I felt as if I was creeping back seventeen hundred years and heard from the rude and inspired lips of Evangelists the simple sacred words of wisdom and purity. The service began with a Presbyterian form of psalm; about one hundred and fifty Hottentots joined in the twenty-third psalm in a tone so sweet and loud, so chaste and true, that it was im- possible to hear it without being surprised. The fathers, who were the sole music-masters, sang in their deep-toned bass along with them, and the harmony was excellent. This over, the miller took a portion of the Scripture, and expounded it as he went along. The father's discourse was short, and the tone of his voice even and natural, and when he used the words, as he often did, Myne lieve vriende, my beloved friends, I felt that he thought they were all his children. We made a most excellent supper, and the fathers ate with us, I must say they had excellent appetites — they urged one another on, "Broeder eat this" and "Broeder take another slice," and "Ledi, ask him, he likes it." This was apropos of one of our cold hams, for they had not tasted one since they left Germany, they said. So, of course, we left what remained of it for them. Our cask of Madeira and our gin were next produced, and they gladly partook of it, as it was a day of fete. They had accustomed themselves to do quite without wine, and even without meat, living on the simplest fare. Their posi- tion, they told us, was one of great danger, for the Boers disliked them for having taken the Hottentots away from the necessity 44 AN AFRICAN TRAIL of laborious servitude and over and over again, they told us, the farmers had made plots to murder them, the last plot, which was to shoot them with poisoned arrows they discovered and were able to prevent. Mr. Barnard was very much interested in this, and promised to speak to the Governor to see what was best to be done for their security. We spent the night in a small sitting-room on a couple of cane sofas very comfortably. —Lady Anne Barnard, South Africa a Century Ago, p. 167, Smith Elder & Co. THE WHITE MAN'S TOWN The place will never be picturesque; our immense bare plain, the bed of a dried-up lake, with its miry swamps, will never be a Swiss canton, nor even a Basuto-land. We must just make the best'of it. But SefiJa may become habitable, and one may live happily there. While drainage works are being actively carried on in the dale, we have begimi to clear away the thickets, and already on the plateau, where formerly sorcerers were burnt alive, four little European buildings are rising, which are the great wonder of the country. They are very modest, just temporary cabins of stakes and reeds, which the termites are already eating out. But they have little windows, light and air. You would not believe the interest we have taken in setting them up, plastering them, and making the most of what we have to furnish them cosily. Is it not an emblem of life, which we know to be so short, and which we strive to make so fair? — F. Coilkrd, On Uie Threshold of Central Africa, p. 290. American Tract Society, 1903. THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA 45 AFRICAN TRAVEL In the hot season if you are wise, you will do most of your travelling in the night or the very early morning. Even without a moon you can find your way along the path. And then you have the finest moments of the day, and of the year, when the dawn begins to break. You will hear the first cock-crow in the villages that lie around, but are invisible in the dark, and you will know it will not be long before the land you travel through becomes defined. Then comes the second cock-crow, and you are conscious of an almost imperceptible brightening. The trees are full of the singing of birds. A grey light is slowly revealing the outlines of the hills, then bright red splashes outline the faint clouds and the whole world bursts into life. How the men shout and sing in the joy of the morning. For hours they have been marching silently, doggedly, but now their bodies are quivering with energy. You pass near the Kraal gate of a village where some men are sitting over a very little fire with sleepy, unwashed faces, and with their backs bared to the first rays of the sun. But the women are already vigorously pounding their maize, and boys are lifting the logs which close the Kraa! gate, that they may milk the cows into the wooden pails before driving them out to pasture. And, unless thoroughly unwell, you will smile to yourself and declare this is the best life that any man can live, and the morning atmos- phere of Africa is more sparkling than champagne. But, of course, you are not always travelling in the delicious morning. You must take the bitter with the sweet, and there are days when touring is a disagreeable enough duty. Especially is this so in the rains. You will now try to place your work so that all travel is over before midday and you are safely in camp before the tropical showers burst, for if you are caught in these downpours no waterproof yet invented will keep you dry. And it is not pleasant to find not only your clothes wringing wet, but the bedding also and all your belongings. — Donald Fraser, Winning a Primitive PMple, p. 63, E. P. Button & Co., 1914. 46 AN AFRICAN TRAIL QUESTIONS TO ACCOMPANY CHAPTER I. 1. "SMiere is Africa? 2. WTiere is the African field of your own denomination? 3. When was it established? 4. \Miat is the nature of the climate? 5. When was the seaboard of your African field discovered and by whom? 6. ^Mien was the interior of your African field first visited and by whom? 7. Under what government is it now held? 8. How many stations have you now? 9. Where are they? 10. \Mien were these stations established? 11. How did your missionary reach his field in the past? And now? 12. How did you house your missionary in the past? And now? 13. What is the health record of your mission as compared with the early days? 14. What is the population of the largest white man's settle- ment (not missionary) in the neighborhood of your mission? (See encyclopaedia.) 15. How are you equipped for Ministers? Doctors? Teachers? 16. Have you an industrial or agricultural work? 17. What is the part of the single woman in your mission? 18. How often do your missionaries receive mail? 19. Do you in your local church write to or receive letters from any African missionary? 20. How long may the children of your missionaries remain on the field and what dispMisition is made of them at home? BIBLE READING AND PRAYER FOR CHAPTER II. Isaiah 29:8-12 inclusive Romans 10: 11-15 inclusive Prayer ALMIGHTY God, who hast taught us to make intercession for all men: We pray not only for ourselves here present, but we be- seech Thee also to bring all such as are yet ignorant, from the miserable captivity of error to the pure understanding of Thy heavenly truth: that we all, with one consent and unity of mind, may worship Thee, our only God and Saviour: that all Thy minis- ters and people may both in their life and doctrine be found faithful: and that, by them, all poor sheep which wander and go astray, may be gathered and brought home to Thy fold." — John Knox's Liturgy {abbreviated). CHAPTER n. THE BULU A tribe of The tribes of our neighborhood belong the Bantu. ^q h^q Bantu race. If, as is supposed at this writing to be the case, the Bantu-speaking tribes occupy the southern half of Africa from the 7th degree north of the equator, our neighborhood is in the northern limit of their present occupancy. They are migratory; their drift has been south and west from the heart of Central Africa. *Sir Harry Johnston fixes the approximate date at which the Bantu negro left his primal home as not more than two thousand years ago, and notes that he has overrun in his migrations the forest negro, the Nilotic negro, the Hottentot and the Bushman. A Bantu The Bantu is betrayed entirely by speech. j^jg speech. He has no history except as traced and exhibited in his speech; he has no physical distinction or type — only a typical lan- guage, and no cohesion except the cohesion of Ian-, guage. He has wandered spear in hand and the spotted skin of a leopard on his shoulder, not in a horde but in broken companies — through the forests and in the * Article on Bantu Languages, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition. ■ 50 AN AFRICAN TRAIL grass countries of Africa — these two thousand years. At the crossings of rivers tribes have divided, clans have divided, even families have divided as the bolder members have dared to make a crossing which the weaker ones have evaded; until today there are unnumbered tribes, speaking unnumbered dialects, differentiated by local customs, and governed in minor matters by dissimilar traditions. They see each other as through a glass, darkly. But the white man is a mighty hunter and has tracked them to many a secret lair by his instinct for the spoken word. By him they, who have no care beyond the tribe, are discerned as a race and are endowed with a history; and this constructive work is based not upon a written word, or a system of hieroglyphics, but upon a spoken word. None of them but carried in those long wanderings a word — a construction — an idiom — ^that should betray them, the root of them, to the wise white man. For example. Sir Harry Johnston identifies them by their word for hen — as any of you may read in his article upon Bantu languages in the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is quite true that the tribes of our neighborhood use a modified form of this password — myself, I have used in common speech this clue to long wanderings, this symbol of a blood-bond, this key to a long-forgotten door. Bulu The Bantu in Western Africa have migrations. been less exposed to the Arab in- fluence which has from time immemorial modified the Bantu tribes to the east. Sir Harry Johnston THE BULU 51 says that the culture most characteristically African must be sought on the other (the west) side. "It is therefore in the forests of the Congo and among the lagoons and estuaries of the Guinea Coast that this earlier culture will most probably be found." In this book, which is one about a neighborhood and a tribe, there cannot be more of such high racial matters. In our neighborhood or within our sphere of influence there are more than ten tribes, but we will be speaking specifically of the Bulu, one of the Fang divisions of the Bantu-speaking people. This is a tribe whose migration nears the coast. Other Fang tribes have reached the coast — and the ulti- mate barrier of the sea. You must not think of our migrations as an agita- tion or a definite campaign. There is no sense of en- campment in the little brown villages strung on the thread of the forest paths. Only this: ask my aged Bulu where "his father bore him"; and he will say that he was born in a town toward the rising sun, beyond a river so many days' journey inland, deserted now, he will tell you. Ask him where he, himself lived when he married his first wife, and he will tell you of a clearing deserted now, or oc- cupied by another tribe — a lesser number of days' journey to the east. Ask of the whereabouts of the young of his clan, and you will find them making clearings along the path toward the sea. Westward and a little south of west drift the Bulu, the tribe of our neighborhood. 52 AN AFRICAN TRAIL The Bulu people are not among the Bulu speech. r- i- o flower of the Bantu. Sir Harry John- ston will tell you of the Fang that they speak a de- based form of their racial language. But that lan- guage — with its idiom, its irony, its aptness at self- defense, its richness in the expression of sense per- ception, — fits the Bulu like their skin. The staccato music of the Bulu tongue is an adequate expression of the Bulu mind. And the man of this neighbor- hood and of this dialect has a pride in his colloquial- isms. Bulu friends of mine have grieved to hear my Bulu corrupted by a journey among the tribes to the north — where the letter g fills the pause of our local elision, and have corrected my accent after a journey among tribes to the south — where the letter h is articulate in the elision decreed by the Bulu. "We Bulu," they have reproached me, "speak the real talk, — don't spoil it!" and those who have seen the Word of God re-dress itself in the Bulu, or — I am thinking — in any dialect of the Bantu, have agreed that it is indeed a "real talk," not to be lightly spoiled. It is not for nothing that the Bantu negro has conserved in long wanderings the treasure of his unique speech. Three And if this negro has been linguis- racial ideas. tically consistent along so many paths of the grass country and the forest country and the beach, he has been consistent, too, in his subjection to three great racial ideas: he has every- where been dominated by the lust of gain, the lust of women, and the yoke of fetish. Gain and women THE BULU 53 and fetish — it is the old trilogy of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Naked and unashamed this trio has walked in all the caravans of all the wan- derers of these age-old migrations until this day, when the supreme religious adventures of the Bantu have to do with the impact of the things of God upon the "things of goods," the "things of women" and the "things of fetish." The Bulu Our Bulu, the man, is first and always a master. ^ master. The white man does not think of him so, but so does the Bulu and so per- haps does the Bantu in general think of himself. In every tribal relation he is, or he purposes to be, a master. He dresses to the part, beach or bush, and the details of his attire (that vary with time and place) have an intentional and recognized signifi- cance. That passer-by, netted in tattoo, braceleted with ivory or with brass, armed with a spear, and followed by a retinue of arrogant young bucks, is in his degree a master. As such he moves, he adver- tises his function in his posture. Whether he be young and beautiful, or old and fat as headmen often are; whether he be hung with the traditional leopard- skin or coated in a white man's cast-off uniform; whether he be a lesser headman over an obscure village, or a personage of intertribal fame and great possessions, he speaks and moves as master. And this he is by merit — the merit of wisdom in the things of women, the things of goods, and the things of fetish. I think of major headmen known to me, and some inherited from their fathers, and some 54 AN AJ'RICAN TRAIL crept up as parvenus do, but not one could hold his own among the true Bulu if he were not versed in the triple lore of women and goods and fetish, _. ^ And if he dresses the part, so does he His town. r- ' build his town to the part. The two parallel rows of huts with the clearing between: these are the houses of the women — the many women owned by the headman, the lesser — how shall I say — flocks or herds, owned by his town-brothers, and the ewe lambs owned by the younger men, or the less successful, or the man whose wives always run away. And at either end of the clearing, across the one and the other opening of the commons, the palaver houses — the great houses where the men of the village sit, where they eat, where they buy and sell women and ivory — the one with the other. Big towns and little towns, villages of ten houses and great settlements of two hundred, the huts of the Bulu are so disposed; the little bark huts, eight by twenty, or ten by thirty, thatched with leaves, are built in rows with the commons between; and at the entrance of the town the palaver house rises higher, longer, wider, but built of bark like the little huts, and thatched with leaves. Be sure that the masters sit in the cool brown shade of the palaver houses, with their eyes upon their own. It is for this that the palaver house is so placed in the village. _. , And if they dress the part of masters, His custom. 1 , . , , 1 and build to the part, they express the part. Our Bulu is ruthless and cruel, he is dignified and courteous and hospitable, and this because he is THE BCLU 55 a master. The town is his as Jdeadman, or he has, as town-brother of the headman, his portion in authority. An authorized guest will be welcomed, fed, and detained, courteously and with dignity. "Before we knew the white man," said old Minkoe Ntem to me, "we knew friendship and the things of friendship." And in years of contsict with many tribes of the beach and the bush I have met with how many of the things of friendship; and with discourtesy I have met but once and that from a negligible source. I see in my heart old Mbite'e Kumbale, master of one hundred and eighty women and for unnumbered years headman of his village, sitting of a morning in the brown gloom of his great old palaver house, stripping long ribbons from green reeds, and looking curiously wise, curiously maternal — and like the great god Pan. To the little Bulu pipings of the white woman he lent a courteous ear, speaking of his past, when that seemed to please her, and polite to whatever idiosyncrasy of his guest. His long village slept in the morning sun; his able-bodied women were away in their gardens; their old and wise and cruel master was at leisure for the a.menities. _. , . For he is a cruel old man. The Bantu His cruelties. men are cruel because they are masters. I will not be speaking of cannibalism, though it exists among the Bantu of our neighbor- hood, in some tribes not at all, in some tribes hardly at all, in other tribes to an appreciable degree — as among the Yebekolo, of whose headmen five were 66 AN AFRICAN TRAIL executed by the German government in one year on the ground that they had fostered cannibalism. Of this vice I will not be speaking at length because, however interesting it is to the white man (and it seems to possess a peculiar fascination), or how- ever dark a shade it has cast upon the Bantu past, — and does still cast upon the Bantu present, — that shadow is in the main upon the past; the vice is a hidden and a vanishing shame.* It is a thing quick to disappear among those tribes which come under the observation of the white man. Of all the vices of the negro this most hideous vice least resists its doom, and is a thing remembered with shame long before lesser vices, lesser cruelties, lesser obscenities give way. The cruelties, the vices, the obscenities of the Bantu — there might be a book about these, and there have been books. If this book fails to do justice to these terrible realities there are others which may be consulted. These horrors bulk large in the history of every mission. Read in the archives of the American Mission to the Zulu of the horrors witnessed by the pioneers of that mission on a day of February, 1838. f Read of the happenings wit- nessed by Livingstone among the Barotse in the summer days of 1853. Read in the accounts of Grenfell, of Bentley, of Elmslie, of Nassau, of * There has been a marked increase in cannibalism among the tribes addicted to it, since the beginning of the war. t Noted in A History of Christian Missions in South Africa, by J. du Plessis, p. 226. VILLAGE SCHOOL IN KA.MERUN INTERIOR PASTOR OF A BEACH CHURCH AND HIS FAMILY, KAMERUN This church was built by the congregation and is in part of cement THE BULU 57 Crawford, of any African pioneer — the terrible records of horror and shame. This book is an attempt to depict among the Bulu the "new things." The Bulu ^^ ^^ ^^^ custom to think of the Bantu master's as childlike: he so speaks of himself abnegation. ^^ ^^^ white man and to the white man he so seems. His limitations are more obvious than the secret trend of his nature. But the Spirit of God takes account of this element of his power and of his weakness — that he is a master. I think that this is so. In how many palaver houses where the masters sit, their eyes upon the sunstruck street of the village, supreme abnegations are taking place. How many men, great in their tribe, rich in the sleek bodies of women, wise in the dark secrets of their race, have stripped themselves of the things of this world, and an exceedingly precious weight of glory — have bent their necks to the yoke of the ten commandments, and by the Spirit call Jesus, Lord! I have seen a Bulu headman, a leopard skin hanging from his shoulders, go to do obeisance to a white man who was his governor. And arrogance walked with him upon that enforced journey until timidity — that emanation from the presence of the white man — should strike it down. And I have seen three brothers of this headman, any one of whom might have been his successor, pass the broken bread at the com- munion service — the servants "with one heart" of a common Lord. The mark of His yoke was upon each of these young men, as upon how many others of 8S AN AFRICAN TRAIL their race, who become for His sake poor, and have laid aside their beautiful and terrible arrogance for the garments of humility. Our racial prejudices and the standards of civilization may blind us in this present life to the coming of many masters to the brightness of our Lord's rising. These poor bodies laced in tattoo, these poor black hands that num- ber the things of the world on their ten fingers, — these bring a kingly oil in the broken boxes of their abnegation. "I am Nkolenden," says an old headman to me, "once the owner of many women, a glorious person, now a servant of God. I will beat the drum for the service." And so, on that Sabbath morning he did; a fantastic figure, not ignoble, in a loin cloth and a brass-buttoned coat cast ojff by an army officer. Himself he beat the great call drum, his coat tails flying, hard at work in the familiar frenzy — a figure for the common herd to gape upon. The head- men in our neighborhood have no great possessions; they are among the lesser fry of African headmen, with no more than a local fame. To such an one as Mackay's Mtesa, or the glorious Khama, or Chaka of the Ngoni, to whose activities in the early part of the nineteenth century over a milUon enemies owed their death — to such as these the greatest of our headmen is "as the little finger to the thumb." But our neighborhood is all their world, and the heart of a headman is a headman's heart. Nkolenden saw himself a king, and his menial act was between him and God, a symbol and a surrender. THE BULU 69 Bulu womaa And if tbie Bantu is master his woman » slave. is slave. She is slave to the Bantu triple obsession of goods and sex and fetish. "A girl," says the Bulu proverb at her birth, "is goods." She may be, among certain tribes, the subject of a tentative bargain before she is born. "A girl is not knov/n," says another proverb, "till the day of her dowry." The things Ask of that little nine-year-old, who of marriage. jg not yet tattooed, whose young head is shaved in designs — the head-dress of the little girl — whose sleek body is belted with beads, tailed with dried grasses and aproned with leaves, ask of that childish creature, "Who is giving goods on you?" and she will know. How many goats have been given, how many dogs and dog-bells, how many sheets of brass, and whether an ivory. Or if she is to be given in exchange for another woman, — a wife for her father, or a little girl for her brother who must be set up in the world, — she will know that. The name of her tentative master she will know, who comes to consider his bargain from time to time. There he will sit in the palaver house with her father. There will be long talk of dowry, arguments for more or less. The little girl comes in out of the sun-smitten street with food that her mother has cooked for her father and his guest, — a peanut porridge steamed in a great leaf, a roll of cassava bread, mashed plantains. She will put her wooden tray at the feet of her masters. She is a precocious child, born to the language of sex. If the buyer is old she will hate him. 60 AN AFRICAN TRAIL She need make no secret of this, she may tell whom she pleases that, having "come to her eyes," she hates the man who buys her. All but her mother will laugh at the venom of the little tongue, the heavings of the little chest. And the day when her master brings the ivory, or the woman, or the last articles of barter, that day there will be a feast in her father's town and the songs of marriage. If the little girl weeps — why, so they always do, the hearts of children are thus. And in the evening when the sun goes down the path to its setting and she moves away in the caravan of her husband's people, you will not ask which of the children in that caravan is the little bride; you will know because she weeps. In her husband's town they will be dancing the marriage dances, they will be singing the songs of marriage. Her husband's kin will be singing little songs of mocking: "There is a little goat capering in the clearing — A neglect of cooking, A neglect of work! There is a little kid capering in the clearing!" "O little bride, hurry in the house and grind the meal — hurry ! Hurry and get your hoe, hurry! O little bride, hurry!" "While the boiled greens are still quaking she hides the kettle behind the bed! H6y6-6! While the hot greens are still quaking." "You come to steal — 116 y^! You come to grudge — H6y6-6! You come to deceive — H6 y6-^ ! ' ' THE BULU 61 "There is a weed in this town, there is a little weed — H6! There is a child with sharp eyes in this town — H6!" So sing the husband's kin. And the bride's mother sings too, little conventional petitions that the child be adequately fed, that the tender child be spared, little phrases of maternal solicitude: "Don't send my child to fish in the stream There are little snakes — O! Don't send my child to fish in the stream!" "They count the bananas they feed my child — They count them! One, two bananas as they feed my child They count them!" So sings the mother, and the child's kinfolk before they leave her in the care of strange women; and the little girl stands bewildered at the heart of the circling dances. Or if it be her father's pleasure to delay the de- livery of the goods, do not think that the girl is bred in innocence under her mother's roof. She v/as not born to the possession of her body; this is hired out to her father's material advantage among young bucks — prospective purchasers, men who bring wealth to the town. Not her father only, and her elder brother, may thus make profit of her person, but her husband will do so, in the times of the great clearings when a new town is to be built, or a great garden planted — she will then serve as hire to strong young men. Through her use a successful hunter may be attached to her husband's service, and she, if she is desirable, may be a token of hospitality to an honored guest. ^ AN AFRICAN TRAIL By way of being security she may be lodged with her husband's creditors. How many women wear out weary years in this friendless bondage! Or, not having borne children to her husband, she may be sent on a visit to the town of his tribal brother. jjj j,gj. But her children, born of whatever maternal connection, belong not to herself, nor "^°*^®* necessarily to their father, but to the man who owns her. To her own father, or other male guardian, if born before marriage, and to her husband if born after marriage. As she is not born to the possession of her body, so she is not born to the possession of her children. Women who have been sold from marriage to marriage may leave little children at every station of that aimless wandering. Thus the slave is branded on the heart. The things And it is by way of the heart that the of fetish. woman is slave to fetish. By her body she is slave to goods, and alas, by the consent of her body, to sex. But by her heart — the pangs of it, its maternal pangs, its hunger for permanent affections, its need to cast anchor in some certain good — by that she is slave to fetish. To keep her husband's love, what love-potions! To ease her jealousies, what evil charms! To safeguard her little one, what plaitings of grass anklets and bracelets, what desperate hopes tied up in little amulets, in little things of magic! And if she die — this slave to fetish — they will tie a belt of bells about her baby's middle, and the sound of these bells will contmually drive away that maternal spirit — still a slave. THE BULU 6S The slave's To such as these in a very definite liberation. sense Christ is a liberator. It is not for nothing that, of the women who have come under my hand, many have fastened with a pecuhar ten- acity on the verses that say for them, "He has made the captives free;" "The truth has made you free." This African woman has a bald knowledge of her enslaved state. She is violent, undisciplined; her tongue is a fire and a sword, she is unmoral, un- reliable; but she is humble-minded. In the Biblical sense this violent creature, caught in a net of tattoo, bridled and belted with beads, collared and brace- leted with brass, this woman — so harnessed in bar- barous ornament — is meek and poor in spirit. She is poor in the most conscious and the most pitiable sense. Christ's act of redemption has a tangible and obvious application to herself. I have seen the first words of the Gospel arrest a young Ntum woman so abruptly that you would have said a hand had been laid upon her, and back of her harness of tattoo and of beads her woman face, so soft and mutable, was stricken to the most profound, the most personal attention. That being, enslaved to goods and sex and fetish received, with what astonishment in that word of the Word of God, her first intimation that there is any escape from the prison of material cir- cumstance! Until she heard that word she was never at any time conscious of a self which could not be bought and sold. Until then she had never con- ceived of a personal possession of any sort, however humble, and how far she had been from any 'self- (?4 AN AFRICAN TRAIL possession! Never before had her self been ad- dressed. And in the moment of that Divine address there was a pause in her universe; the things of the body were smitten to a perceptible arrest. She had been grinding meal; her hand, with the upper stone, lay idle on the nether stone; her eyes were fixed; in all her hut nothing stirred while that Ntum woman experienced the obscure shock of her first spiritual summons. Solidarity To an extraordinary degree there is °* ^"- among the Bulu a solidarity of sex. "God created all people of two tribes," the women tell me, "the tribe of man and the tribe of woman." The things of one tribe are hidden from the other tribe. There is "a wisdom of men and a wisdom of women," though the wisdom of women is a small matter, a matter to laugh at among men. And women, for all they have a housewifely and maternal contempt for men, yet are humble before them, ashamed before them of their age-old accumulation of wisdom, not displaying before them their little treasure of verity garnered from their labors and their loves and their sorrows, "since the birth of men." "I am as stupid as a hen," is the common feminine self-analysis. In the things A peculiar shame attaches to the of labor. performance of a woman's work by a man; the division of labor is determined by the most rigid custom. None but women grind meal, none but men sew the strips of beaten bark cloth into squares. And about every handicraft of the THE BULU 65 tribes there is the law of sex, and the understood element of nobility or ignobility. "Am I a woman that I should bring in food from the garden? I will starve first." And if in the things of labor the customs of sex are "very strong," much stronger are they in the matter of fetish. Woe to those who are ignorant in these matters — who confuse the food, the acts, the liberties, which are the privileges of men, with the food and the acts and the liberties w^hich are the forbidden things for women. It is a very literal instance of the one man's meat and the other's poison. I have seen a young Christian woman almost faint away when she came to this crucial question: "Do you believe that God created men and women equal.'*" Back of her stood her Christian husband. She turned her face until she met his eyes; there she received the grave command of his gaze; her arm went up slowly in sign of assent. It was with great timidity that she stepped off into that nobler thought of herself as woman. "All people are of two tribes," I am Common bonds. ,1 i . • t ^ u told; and yet agam 1 am told, "every man a son of man." This is the proverbial expression of an understood common humanity. Man and woman, master and slave — every person is a son of man, born to a common lot. Over human foible and error is cast the cloak of this proverb. Sorrow is commiserated in these words. And most this is true in the things of custom and in the things of fear. 66 AN AFRICAN' TRAIL The things To the things of custom the man as of custom. ^,gU ^g t^jjg woman is slave. "We Bulu, we do so." "It is our custom," "Who would question the things to which we are born?" "From the birth of men we have done thus, not otherv/ise." So much and more later, of the iron bond of the things of custom. The things There is a common enslavement to of fear. ^Yie things of fear; "Every man a son of man" is true in "the things of fear." In these dim forests every son of man is born to fear. Temporal and material fears he does indeed suffer, but these minor fears are as "the little finger to the thumb" in comparison with the major fears that are not material fears. Here is the sum of his terrors: fear of other-worldly things as they impinge upon the sunny open of this life, and fear of the unknown adventure "beyond death." The white man cannot see how thick they gather about his haunted broth- er, these "millions of strange shadows" that tend upon him. We who are born to a singular freedom in the natural world — what can we know of the relentless pressure upon the human heart of the crowded world of the animist? To him the rocks of this world, its rivers, its forests, all the structure of it and all its ornament, are not sufficient to afford lodging for the spirit tenants. These inhabit and overflow all material accommodation. These pack the world; and there is a Bulu proverb which says, "A shadow never falls but a spirit stands." There are housed spirits and nomad spirits; spirits that THE BULU 67 are content with their lodging in a fallen tree, in a rock, easy to be propitiated with little oflPerings of leaves, of shells, of seeds; and there are spirits of an untiring malevolence: wanderers, going to and fro seeking whom they may devour in subtle spirit fashion, open to suggestion from evil men, servants of your enemy, fathers to inhuman cruelties im- planted in the human mind, princes in the realms of fear. "Go," say these spirits; and alas, the son of man — ^he goeth! "Come!" and he cometh! How can the white man know of these things; and knowing in part how can he tell other white men? I will tell you of Ndongo Mbe's father and his exile. Ndongo Mbe's father, says Ndongo Mbe, was named Mabale. And when Ndongo Mbe was little, no bigger than your wrist, Mabale was caught by a strange sickness, so that he was near death. In those days there was a wise man, a "witch doctor," in our neighborhood — himself, he is dead now, but in those days he still breathed, — and the brothers of Mabale sent for him to come and heal Mabale. This thing he certainly did, he healed him. And he healed him by a taboo, a very strong taboo. Mabale re- covered from his sickness, but he was "tied" by the medicine man to this thing: that he must never see a grandchild of his. That he must certainly never do. And so it was that, when Ndongo Mbe began to be a yoiuig man, the heart of Mabale was hung up; he feared very much lest he see a grand- child — who knew.? And that thing would be death. So he took leave of the people of his own house, and fi8 AN AFRICAN TRAIL of the village where he was headman, — yes, and even of his tribe, — and alone he went away by the paths that go toward the rising of the sun. Alone he went away to the unfriendly tribes that build their towns far back that way. And in one of those strange towns he built a house for himself. Sometimes one of the men of our neighborhood, going that way to hunt an ivory, they have seen Mabale. He has asked , the news of his tow^n and of his family; he has asked news of his grandchildren. All night he and his tribesmen have talked, and in the morning they have parted. But this thing always happened — that Mabale was quick after such a visit, to go away from that town. He said in his heart, "Lest my town's people, knowing this path, show the way to a grand- child of mine." Until at last he died in a town far away on the paths to the rising of the sun. And when a passer-by from that strange country told Ndongo of that death in exile, there was a peculiar sorrow in the hearts of that family. The wife of Mabale turned to the wall and wept. The children and the grandchildren greatly desired to look upon the grave of their father, but they might not for the many days' journey. So much for a life wrecked by fear. This story is one of a thousand and is chosen for its lack of gross detail — its freedom from the element of physical torture so common to the Bantu dramas of fear, and so degrading to the ears of a white man. And of fear of things beyond death I will tell you that here, too, every man is a son of man. "Death," THE BULU 69 say the Bulu, "does not pity beauty," "You till the ground," they say, "that will cover you." "There is no limit to death," they say. "And many black men have told me, "My father died, and when he was near death he said, 'Put my spear in my hand, for the path before me is unknown, and it is a bad path.' " Look, I pray you, with compassion upon this black man who must venture upon such ad- ventures so equipped! And when you come upon the dead man's little clay pipe and the rusting head of his spear laid out under the sun and the rain at the limit of the village, understand a little why it is that his exiled spirit, so unequipped for the hard- ships of the way, must return to familiar places and to serviceable things. The spirit For he has a spirit. In his world — of man. overpopulated with spirits — the son of man has his portion. He is conscious of his dual life. There are for him "the things of the body," and "the things of the spirit." Pain is a thing of the body; grief is a thing of the spirit. The body dies and the spirit survives. There is a thrilling Bulu word, the word "Enying." It is the word for life, and dn the lips of the natural Bulu there is an immemorial thrilling phrase, "I desire life." For our Bulu conceives himself as a vessel for the fluid manifestations of life. He is filled, or he is emptied, of life; as the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth our Bulu after "life." This is his problem — ^how to acquire "Enying," or life; how to appropriate a share, or 70 AN AFRICAN TRAIL if may be, a double share, in that precious commod- ity which he conceives as an element, immanent and manageable if one but knew the secret! For his little vessel — the vessel of his body, with its con- tent of life — is without protection, w'ithout, let us say, a lid. His treasure is in a violable vessel. There is more life and there is less; there are thieves of life and acts of theft; spirit thieves and mortal thieves. There is a flux of the precious essence. Mabale on his wanderings was doing all that man could do against a threatened division, to "hold body and soul together." This soul, — this ultimate human portion of the element of life,— what is its substance.'* These things are obscure. Elmsie says that among the Ngoni they say, "His shadow is still present," meaning that, though on the point of death, the man's spirit is still with him. The wisest Bulu woman I ever knew told me that she was born in the town of Moonda, v/here they certainly said that this thing on the wall that followed a man's body — the shadow of him — was the ma?i. For certainly his Jlesh was not the man. And in their ignorance they thought — who knew — ^why not the shadow.'' All students of the Bantu people are familiar with this solution of the ultimate human problem. Many other Bulu have offered me, timidly, the theory that the spirit of man and his shadov/ were — perhaps, who knew — one substance. And I was once in a house of mourning where one of the young widows sitting among the ashes took courage from despera- THE BULU 71 tion to show me the root of a consuming fear: she had three shadows! The cross lights in that little hut cast a shadow of that terror-stricken child of man upon three walls. What were her thoughts of that possession? I cannot say. "The heart," says the Bulu, "goes to hide in the dark." Only of Christ it is said, "He did not hunt a man to give Him news of men, because Himself He knew the things that are in the heart of man." And to that thrilling Bulu cry, — "I desire life," — Christ alone answers, "I have come to give you life and to give it more abund- antly!" 72 AN AFRICAN TRAIL A NOTE ON THE BANTU There is but one indigenous language-family over the whole of Central and South Africa, the only exceptions to this universality of tj-pe being a few patches of Sudanian tongues on the Northern Congo, Nilotic dialects in East Africa, a click language south of the Victoria Nyanza, and the nearly extinct Hottentot and Bushman languages of South-west Africa. To the south of a zigzag boundary, which stretches from Fernando Po on the west to Mombasa on the east, lies the sphere of the Bantu speech. Within this sphere lie the most bar- barous, the least developed and the latest explored parts of Africa, a third portion of the Dark Continent which was only seriously tackled by the intelligent white man at the commencement of the Nineteenth Century. No sooner was any attempt made, a hundred and more years ago, by scientific men to compass the natives of East, South-west and South Africa, than they realized they were dealing with a single-language family; whether they surveyed Zanzibar, the Kamerun, Angola, Mozambique, Eastern Cape Colony or Natal. And when at a later date, Portuguese and British explorers began to cross Africa from one side to the other, it was evident that the similarity of speech extended right across this Southern third of the continent. — Sir H. H. Johnston, The Opening-up of Africa, p. 131. Henry Holt. A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY COMMENT ON THE SOUTH AFRICAN Others will say that the natives are savages and cannibals, and that no good is to be expected from them, but that we must be always on our guard; this, however, is only a popular error as the contrary shall be fully shown. We, of the said Ship "Haarlem," testify wholly to the contrary, for the natives, after we had lain these five months (still) came daily with perfect amity to the fort which we had thrown up for our defence, in order to trade, and brought cattle and sheep in quantities. THE BULU 73 By maintaining a good correspondence with them, we shall be able to employ some of their children as boys and servants, and educate them in the Christian Religion, by which means if it pleases God Almighty to bless this good cause, as at Tayouan and Formosa, many souls will be brought to God and to the Christian Reformed Religion, so that the formation of the said fort and garden will not only tend to the gain and profit of the Honorable Company, but to the preservation and the saving of many men's lives, and what is more, to the magnifying of God's Holy Name, and to the propagation of His Gospel. — Quoted from a document of the Dutch East India Com- pany, by J. du Plessis, A History of Christian Missions in South Africa, p. 20, Longmans & Co. POLYGAMY AMONG THE NGONI One of the greatest social and moral evils among the tribe is polygamy. The evils are seen among all classes, for, as the tribe existed by raiding other tribes, all who could bear arms might possess themselves of captive wives. Among the upper classes the rich held the power to secm-e all the marriageable girls in the tribe, by purchasing them from the parents for so many cattle. The practice of paying cattle was not in all cases wholly bad, but the tendency was to outrage the higher motives and feelings, especially in the women who often were bargained for by their parents long before they entered their teens. The cattle paid to the father of the bride formed a portion which she could claim and have as a possession, in the event of her being driven away by the cruelty of her husband, and, in the absence of a nobler sentiment, it was in some degree a safeguard of the interests of the wife. But upon no grounds, social or moral, couJd such a practice be defended. It is inimical to the true morality of marriage, and consequently to the progress of the race. It is no uncommon thing to find grey-headed old men, with half-a-score of wives already, choosing, bidding for, and securing without the woman's consent, the young girls of the tribe. Disparity of age, emotions and associations, make such unions 74 AN AFRICAN TRAIL anything but happy, and nowhere do quarrels and witchcraft foment more surely than in a polygamous household. A man's wives are not all located in one village. He may have several villages, and from neglect young ^4ves are subject to many grievances and temptations, so that it is no wonder they age in appearance so rapidly. They are often maltreated by the senior wives, who, jealous of them, bring charges against them, and in the hour when they should have the joy of expectant motherhood, they are cast aside under some foul charge without human aid or sympathetic care. On more than one occasion I have been called by a weeping mother to give aid to her daughter in such circumstances, where if a fatal issue resulted, she and her family would have been taken into slavery and their possessions confiscated. Flippant writers on such customs, especially some travelers who had not the oppor- tunity of becoming acquainted with the people, state that poly- gamy is, in the savage state, where there is an absence of higher motives, a safeguard of morality. It is, however, far from being so. Men with several wives, and many of the wives of polygamists, have assignations with members of other families. I Lave been told by serious old men that such is the state of family life in the village that any man could raise a case against his neighbor at any time, and that is one reason why friendliness appears so marked among them — each has to bow to the other in fear of offending him and leading to revelations that would rob him of all. — W. A. Elmslie, Among the Wild Ngoni, p. 57. THINGS OF DARKNESS It is the gloaming. You hear the ringing laughter of little children who are playing before their mothers. They are such little tots you want to smile with them, and you draw near them, but you quickly turn aside, shivering with horror. These little girls are making a game of obscenity, and their mothers are laughing. THE BULU 75 The moon has risen. The sound of boys and girls singing in chorus and the clapping of bands tell of village sport. You turn out of the village square to see lads and girls at play. They are dancing, but every act is awful in its shamelessness, and an old grandmother, bent and withered, has enterd the circle to incite the boys and girls to more loathsome dancing. You go back to your tent bowed with an awful shame to hide yourself. But from that village and that other, the dance choruses are rising, and you know that under the clear moon God is seeing wickedness that cannot be named, and there is no blush in those that practise it. Next morning the village is gathered together to see your carriers at worship, and to hear the news of the white stranger. You improve the occasion and stand ashamed to speak of what you saw. The dance boys are there, the same old grandmother, but clear eyes look up and there is no look of shame anywhere. It is hard to speak of such things, but you alone are ashamed that day; and when you are gone the same horror is practised under the same clear moon. No, I cannot speak of the bitterness of heathenism, only its horror. True there were hags there who were only middle-aged women, and there were men bowed, scarred, dull-eyed with furrowed faces. But when these speak or sing or dance, there seems to be no alloy in their merriment. The children are happy as only children can be. They laugh and sing, and show bright eyes and shining teeth all day long. But what of that? Made in God's image to be His pure dwelling-place, they have become the dens of foul devils; made to be the sons of God, they have become the devotees of passion. I have passed through the valleys of two little rivers only and have seen there something of the external life of those who can be the children of God. The horror of it is with me day and night. And on every side it is the same. In hidden valleys where we have never been, in villages quite near to this station the drum is beating and proclaiming shame under God's face. • — W. A. Elmslie, quoting from Donald Eraser, Among the Wild Ngoni, p. 54. 76 AN AFRICAN TRAIL QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER II. 1. What races occupy Africa? 2. WTiat religions are prevalent among these races: 3. ^Mlat race occupies your own African field? 4. Is your mission working in a forest country or a grass country? 5. What are the marriage customs of the tribes of that region? 6. What is the native form of government? If by headmen, are the communities so governed large or small? 7. Do you know the names of any of the famous leaders of these tribes? 8. How do the tribes of your district build their houses? 9. How do they dress in the more primitive parts of your field? 10. WTiat is the principal occupation of the women? the men? 11. What is the system of agriculture there? 12. What is the form of currency in use, if any? IS. What are the native crafts and arts? 14. Are any of the people cannibals? BIBLE READING AND PRAYER FOR CHAPTER III. Hebrews 1:1-4 inclusive John 1:1-18 inclusive Prayer OTHOU, who art the true Sun of the world, evermore rising, and never going down; who, by Thy most wholesome appearing and light dost nourish, and make joyful all things, as n ell that are in heaven, as also that are on earth; We beseech Thee mercifully and favourably to shine into our hearts, that the night and darkness of sin, and the mists of error on every side, being driven away. Thou brightly shining within our hearts, we may all our life long go without any stumbling or offense, and may walk as in the daytime, being pure and clean from the works of darkness, and abound- ing in all good works which Thou hast prepared for us to walk in. Amen. — Erasmus. THE BULU AND GOD 83 Many Thonga claim to have seen the old, old road by which these two came. White it is and straight — worn and widened by the innumerable feet of the caravans of men who followed. At that time the stones were not yet hardened. The Thonga have seen the marks made by the mortars of the women in that expedition, and the little marks made by the hemp pipes laid down by the men. So say the Thonga; and our Bulu of the elders say,— "When Zambe created this country he created people then. He created Man-of-Zambe, Dwarf-of- Zambe, Gorilla-of-Zambe, and Chimpanzee-of- Zambe. And he gave them all things that were the tools of labor, and gave them seed for food and gave each one a live ember. And to each he gave his woman (mate). "Then Zambe left them. Said he — T will come again and visit you.' And Zambe left them. And they separated by four paths — they with their mates. "And the chimpanzee laid down all the things (tools of labor) that Zambe had given him, and the live ember, and left them on top of the path. He said to his mate, 'Come on, let us eat the fruit of the forest,' and they turned aside into the forest and ate the fruits of the forest. They never thought again of the things they left on top of the path. And the fire died. They turned to the forest (this implies a degeneration). "So, too, did the gorilla. M AN AFRICAN TRAIL "And the dwarf went into the forest with his fire and his axe and his knife, and all the things that Zambe had given him. And he gathered food and killed animals and slept there. And the dwarf said, 'I feel trouble to make a clearing and plant food.' So he left the seed on the ground. "And Man-of-Zambe went by his path, he took his cutlass and made a clearing and burned the clearing. Then they planted food. So they stayed there. They planted, they ate. "And Zambe said, T had better go and visit them.* He first turned off on the path the gorilla had gone. And he found on top of the path that all the seeds of food were still on top of the path. And he suddenly heard the gorilla bark. And Zambe said, 'You are foolish, you are a gorilla.' And he left him there, he went away. "And he followed the path the chimpanzee had gone. And he found the seeds still on the ground and that the fire had died. He heard the chimpanzee cry. So he said to him, 'You are certainly an animal.' "Then he followed the path of the dwarfs and he found a fire-place and the refuse of meat there and that they had made a shelter. And the dwarf said to him, 'Ah, Father, I feel trouble to make a clearing and to plant food, I will just hunt animals and gather the fruit of the forest.' And Zambe agreed. "Then Zambe followed the path of the man. And he found that he had built a town, and there was much food in the town. He said to him, 'You are certainly a real man, you will hold your place over all things, you are of a wise heart.' " THE BULU AND GOD 85 The So much for creation, for equipment, estrangement. f^j. i\i^i paternal care which provid- ed a name, and an ember, and seeds, and the tool. You would say that the man and his woman were set up in life, with a future, with a Father-God. You would say that they were an established people. But no. There is an enemy — a deceiver. Watch what comes. Among the Thonga it is the chameleon. Death, say the Thonga, came by fault of the chame- leon. Among our BuJu the lizard was the arch de- ceiver, and the chameleon, who might have saved all, was too slow. Say the Bulu, of the things of the beginning — the early morning of things: "And Zambe tied man with this tying — 'Your first born, if he die, do not dig a grave but put him up in the rack above the fire, and I will come, and I will come, and decide about death.' "And Zambe returned (from whence he came). "Time passed (literally, nights passed) and the woman bore a child. And the child died. They put him in the rack above the fire one night. Then the lizard came and deceived the woman thus: " Zambe said, *Do not put the child in the rack, but dig a grave/ "The woman believed this word and called her husband and told him the news. They buried tli3 child. And the chameleon came. He said; " 'You have mistaken the tying Zars^e gave you. Now it will be that some people will die, others will live.' 86 AN AFRICAN TRAIL "A little time passed and Zambe came. He asked them, 'AMiere is the child?' Said they, 'We have buried him in a grave.' Said Zambe, 'Why so.'*' Said they, 'The lizard told us that God had said, "Bury the child." ' "Then Zambe said, 'Since you have despised me, therefore you will die and die.' "Then death increased in the land." God Here, so far as I have ever been told withdrawn. \yy ^ black man, and so far as I have been able to discover in the notes of other white men of our neighborhood, is an end of visiting between the Bulu and his Maker. That august presence, withdrawing by way of the sea, passes off the scene. About God the commonest saying is : "Zambe, having created us, forgot us." Yet of that remote friendship between God and man this much remains — a knowledge of God as one, as creator, and as august. Knowledge of More remains. *Dr. Good, the pio- certain Divine neer, in his short encounter with the " " ® * Bulu, found that Zambe concerned himself with matters of life and death. "O, Zambe, Thou hast made us, why then dost Thou take away an only wife?" "Zambe, do not take me till I first see how my son will hunt!" "Zambe has saved him, he is a son of Zambe" (said of one who has experienced a remarkable deliverance) . * A lAfefor Africa, by Ellen Parsons, p. 226. THE BULU AND GOD 87 Of another tribe of the Bantu, the Galwa, Dr. Good notes the following conventional salutations, old family proverbs or mottoes, of which the two friends recite each his phrase. Address — "There is no fetish of life that can give life!" Reply — "Fetish only Anyambi!" Address — "Death knows no doctor!" Reply — "Doctor only Anyambi!" Address — "Do not ridicule me!" Reply — "Anyambi!" (meaning do not ridicule me, for God Himself made me what you see me). More there is of this thrilling matter in the record of Dr. Good's life, and in the lives of African pioneers. The mark of the Divine foot is in the rock, worn now almost away, so that the young of the race may not know how deep an impress it once was. Petition Of certain tribes of the Bantu it is and sacrifice. gajd that they pray to the Creator— in matters of life and death and in times of great stress. The people of Nyasa-land in case of epidem- ics, in the person of their chief address the Creator: "Pass by, God, and do not punish us, but render us aid." Such a prayer is accompanied by sacrifice. Again and again in accounts of the life of Bantu tribes there is record of religious sacrifice accom- panied by prayer. Mr. W. C. Johnston, of our mis- sion, saw in a Bulu community the sacrifice of a lamb, whose blood was sprinkled on the ground with a plea for mercy. To whom addressed? "Zambe, who created us, forgot us." 88 AN AFRICAN TRAIL The Bulu Now, in a world emptied of the struggle with original and paternal beneficence the supernatural ^^^^ g^^^ j^ j^^^ ^^ j^j^ interminable struggle with the supernatural. To come to terms with the malice and the hard-won favor of minor and malignant spirits — this effort offers him a perpetual career — a career of experimental magic. The millions of strange shadows — to come to terms with these! Spirits; their The disembodied, the things of the grades and types, trees, of the rivers, of rocks, the mu- table manifestations of the spirit essence of the uni- verse — the wise know the ranks of these, the names of their kinds, their dignities, their disposi- tions, their intentions tov/ard mere man. There are ancestor spirits of so great a reputation that they are as gods and so served. There are humble spirits so homesick foi the village that they gather about the dancers in the evening — they warm themselves at the familiar hearths. There are those which possess animals, and those which possess men. There are spirits which make or mar births, there are spirits — these are legion — which kill. There are lesser spirits to blight or bless in lesser measure. It is not for me to tell or you to know the list of spirits or their fixed functions. This is the wisdom of the black man. Created by God and forgotten by Him, he has worked out for himself with fear and trem- bling a salvation. A salvage — let us say — of his interests that are under the sun. In particular, a salvage of "life." He has apprehended a system in the flux of the immanent spirit world and he deals THE BULU AND GOD 89 with it methodically. The dead who protect or aflBict the tribe, he has a service of these. The things In the dusk of how many forest huts of fetish. J have seen little wooden images perched upon the tall dance drums, and have recog- nized one of the supreme fetishes of the village. These little grotesques were invested with spirit. This is fetish, "the investment in a material object natural or artificial, of spirit." And this is fetishism, "the reverence of that object and the worship of that spirit." It is important that the reader who is interested in the nature of fetish should note that the material object is reverenced, that the spirit is worshipped. The skull of the ancestor, that most sacred object, is only a "medium of communication" as Mr. Robert Milligan says, between the living son and the spirit of the dead father. The rubbings of the little images by our Bulu with oil, with the red powder of the camma tree, is a kind of service by proxy to that ancestral spirit which is addressed in prayer, "Ah, Father, give me riches. Keep me on my journey. Prosper my hunting. Protect me from harm." Supernatural By service cunningly devised to meet commerce. spirit-need in the matter of spirit- hunger, spirit-thirst, spirit-craving for honor and remembrance, the spirit is lured to the fetish — is placated. For this, little offerings of food, of orna- ment, of the "things of man." By prayer the spirit is supplicated. By way of dreams, the spirit is sometimes articulate. "My father came to my head 90 AN AFRICAN TRAIL at night" is the Bulu explanation of a significant dream. The Bulu say "there are tribes and tribes and customs and customs." So there are spirits and spirits and fetishes and fetishes. From the powerful ancestral spirits that are tribal in their influence and that possess the little grotesques that leer in the palaver house, down to the least local spirit that inhabits the fallen log — there is a science of fetish. There is a charm for every major event of life and for every minor event. There are charms against fire and against water, there are charms against charms. A man with a canoe will know how to deal with the sacred rock of his neighborhood; there is a spirit in that rock to be placated, with a word, with a silence, with a leaf of tobacco — how do I know? The man who lives under the shadow of a cliff knows the way of the spirit in the cliff, and the river man has the cult of the river. As there are local spirits so there are local fetishes. As there are spirits inimical to the things of birth, so there are charms protective of the things of birth, and of marriage and of labor and of death. This human being so beset by the supernatural devises con- tinually a way among his difficulties. The And this is to be remembered of the difficulties. difficulties of his way— Fetishism is not a fixed science. It is an experimental science. It is a desperate unceasing effort to cover all the ground. It is the expression of a sleepless anxiety. All the arduous and dangerous business of witch- THE BULU AND GOD 91 craft, and testing for witches, the terrors of ordeal, trial by poison, all the minutiae of divination, all the devious cruelties and inhumanities and stu- pidities and subtilties of what might be called by a white man "the black art"— all this tireless effort is never met with a sure, a permanent token, of success. There is no love potion so potent that a woman may rest in peace and the thought that her man is her own. There is no fetish so sure that a mother may hang it about her baby's neck and know that now at last the evil is averted. When by divination a vital issue is settled, there is still a ques- tion. And when a valuable woman accused of witch- craft has fallen under the ordeal and has followed her alleged victim to the grave, there is still a ques- tion. All this business of fetish, and its allied sciences is terribly up in the air. Eager as a man is to fill his side of the contract there is no counting on the party of the second part. The tragic Here is the pathos — so much is at aspect. stake. For him, as for us, everything is at stake. Upon him as upon us there beat the winds of chance and change. About the little candle of his fortune he puts the two hands of his religious effort; one of the hands is fetish, the other is taboo. „ . Taboo. How is the white man to Taboo. 1. 1 11 J. realize the nature and the power ol taboo, how conceive the enslavement of men to a man-made yoke? *0f taboo, Henri Junod says, * The Life of a South African Tribe, by Henri A. Junod, vol. I, p. 36. 92 AN AFRICAN TRAIL "Any object, any act, any person (is taboo) that implies danger for the individual or for the com- munity and must subsequently be avoided; this object, act, or person being under a kind of ban." Taboo is, let us say, a law of avoidance observed with a view to placating the supernatural. Types of Food of a given sort may be taboo — taboo. |.Q ^ given individual at a given time, to a given individual at all times, to a given sex at all times, or at given times. It is recognized as an object implying danger to the individual or to the community; it is taboo. The flesh of a certain gazelle of our forest is called "so," the meat of this animal is taboo for all women at all times. A woman who would eat "so" would bring a curse upon her town; this is a perpetual and unmodified taboo. On the other hand, a man who expects to become a father may not e t "so," though this meat is not taboo for men at ther times; this is an occasional taboo. Or, a mother who seeks to insure some par- ticular well-being for her child may "tie" him from his infancy to abstain from "so" or from another given common food; this is a personal perpetual taboo. There are objects upon which a given sex or a given individual may not look, at a given period or at any time. The skulls of the ancestors are in this sense for women perpetually taboo. So much for taboo as expressed in an object which imphes danger to the individual or to the community. Taboo as embodied in an act runs the same gamut. Tt lias to do wit^a individual acts or with communal THE BULU AND GOD 93 acts; it takes accoiint of sex and of circumstance; it has a time limit or may be a perpetual taboo. One of the most characteristic types of the act as taboo is described by Dr. Weber who tells of a man "tied" from infancy never to receive into his hand any gift. This man had never in his life opened his hand to a proffered object. For him the act of manual recep- tion was a personal perpetual taboo. Taboo as embodied in a 'person is subject to time and circumstance and sex, may be limited or per- petual, incidental or essential. I have seen a mother hide her baby from the presence of a childless woman; this hea^^-hearted one was taboo for that little being. This was not a permanent ban. The leaders of men's secret societies in the performance of their office, or in their official paraphernalia, are for women intensely taboo, and always. For Mabale, the father of Nobngo, his grand- children were taboo; this was a personal, perpetual ban. Penalties of The Bantu is a pitiless creator and a taboo. scrupulous observor of taboo. He approves it and subscribes to it and observes it at whatever cost. He has a perfectly clear conviction of the fate which blights a breaker of taboo. It is obvious — he does not prosper. In aggravated cases he sickens, he dies. The man who ignorantly breaks a secret taboo has no excuse in his ignorance, he, too, falls upon evil times, or he sickens, he dies, speculative to the end, and uncertain as to the nature of the taboo he may have broken. 94 AN AFRICAN TRAIL The Bantu of our neighborhood speak of taboo as a "tying." They are as indefatigable as their fellows, and have their troubled share in this racial zest for authority, this need of a religious command- ment which is so large a factor in the curious aban- donment of the Bulu to his ultimate Christian ex- perience. For this amenity to a supernatural law, and this knowledge of an august creator, and this sense of an immanent spirit presence in the world — these are the gates to the Bulu mind by the which, w^hen they be lifted up, the Eang of Glory shall come in. The WTio is this King of Glory? And your Annunciation. Bantu is arrested by the annunciation. The angel of the annunciation, — how often he is a young Bulu buck speaking by the light of a lantern to a group of villagers, all seated on the ground there under the stars before a palaver house of some obscure hamlet. There has shone upon them sud- denly the light of a lantern, and they have seen one like themselves rise to make the annunciation. Or, marvel of marvels, he has bent beside the light to read the printed page. On how many windless nights, in how many little clearings, I have seen such an intent young face — black, tattooed, set with brilliant eyes — lean above the lantern on the ground, his book turned sidewise to catch the light, a white page turned by those dark hands, a virile voice reading from "the Letter" the "News." And about him in the shadow what brown bodies struck to still- ness in the night, and about these the little brown THE BULU AND GOD 95 huts, and beyond these the walls of the forest and the dark. There, in the heart of all that darkness is the lantern, in the heart of all that silence is the voice; and again the Word becomes Man, the im- peccable adventures go forv/ard, Christ is born into the tribe of men and by men is undone and men by Him are again redeemed. Awe falls upon that com- pany, and wonder and compassion. They laugh for wonder — and they sigh for wonder, they sigh, too, for compassion. They speak the name of "Yesus, son of Zambe," they pass that name from one to the other. And when at last they rise and stretch their bodies and stroll away each to his place they say to one another, "Who will sleep this night in this town? Each will lie on his bed and wonder." This scene of the annunciation is repeated every night in the great public rest houses upon the main travelled paths of our neighborhood. Here the carriers between the beach and the interior will be crowding in, men and women. About the fires laid upon the floor they will be gathering, an aroma of burning logs and of supper on the fire will be there, a great sound of laughter and of grumbling will over- flow that caravansary where the load is laid aside and there is ease. How often into such a house I have seen Ze Zonema go to speak "five words of the Word of God." Then in the light of the many little fires I have seen the same arrest, the same huddling of brown bodies into groups, the same concerted and — how shall I say — innocent attention fix all those tattooed faces with their brilliant eyes. I 98 AN AFRICAN TRAIL know how he would speak and how they would answer. "Do you luiderstand?" he would ask and "We understand!" they would assert — vehemently and with one voice. How, to this chorus, I have heard him announce, in his urgent voice, "the Things of God." A Word of "Zambe created us and returned to ^°^- His town, that town which lies beyond death. All needful things He left us in the country which He gave us, which is this life, and with ten tyings He tied us. A word of "And if you say, as our fathers have remembrance. g^id, that He created us and forgot us, see first, before you say this. His perseverance in remembering us, — the food our women bring every day from the garden, the water they draw every day from the spring, yes, and even the sun that daily goes down the old path to the sea, and the many moons that wax and are big and wane. Tolo, too (constellation of the hare), that in his own time stands above the roofs of the houses for a sign to the sons of men that they must fell the clearings for the new gardens before the great rains have spoiled the work. When you see all these remembrances that Zambe who created us has remembered us, will you still say that Zambe forgets us? No, not even a single day! But I ask you — what man remembers Zambe.'* Who when he eats his portion gives Zambe thanks .-^ Who drinks his water and thinks of Zambe? A BANTU CHIEF THE BULU AND GOD 97 A word of "And a thing which is more than the law. these things, — who keeps the ten tyings with which Zambe tied him? And if you say, 'those ten tyings, who told us of those ten tyings that we should keep them?' I, too, I ask you, who when he committed adultery believed in his heart that he did the straight thing? Who killed a man and believed he did the straight thing? How many of you have killed in secret and keep that secret still hidden in your hearts because you know that you have done a thing that is crooked? The things of shame that are hidden in your heart, who told you that these things were things of shame? Do not again tell me, 'those ten tyings, who told us of them?' when you continually do the things that you know in your heart are crooked. Myself I tell you this true word, that we all, from the birth of men, we have continually scorned God — He-who-created-us and who is able to destroy us. Not a man of you is able to tell me that I lie. These are true words. I tell you that Zambe is angry with us for our scorning of Him. I tell you, too, that we are like people lost in the forest. All our paths are crooked paths. A word of the "And if you feel fear at these true Son of God. words I tell you, I will tell you a new thing — the good news of Yesus, son of God, He it is that said to Zambe, 'Because the people You created are like those who are lost in the forest, I will go down and show them the path.' For this He was born of a woman, and endured the life of this coun- try. Because of His good heart He loved us. 98 AN AFRICAN TRAIL A word of "Himself He redeemed us, as one redeeming. brother may redeem another. Be- cause He was straight in every deed He did, Zambe agreed that He redeem us. And His life was the great price He paid. He did not pay goods like the tusks of the elephant to redeem us. He paid His hfe. As one brother may pay the debts of another He paid ours. And because of this paying that He paid for us I agree that He possesses us. We must agree that we are His. He bought us, we who were of the tribe of the people who die. A word of "And I tell you this, not a man of you death. ^ut knows this— that he will die, and not a man of you but knows this, too — that the paths beyond death are dark. Who of all that have gone by those paths has returned to tell the news? They go that way, but none return to tell the news. Yesus, son of Zambe alone knows the paths beyond death, ^lio should know the way to the father's town but the son? And if the son says to you, 'Come, I will show you the path to the Father's town,' will you doubt the word of the son? I tell you that Yesus, He alone, is able to say, 'The man who follows Me I will show him the path be- yond death, the path to the town of Zambe.' . ,... "Life is with Him, all life; Zambe A word of life. , , ,, ,,. who created us possesses all lite. Enough life for always. Men who desire life must receive their portion from Zambe. Those who speak the name of Yesus, who are His men, are able to become members of the tribe of Zambe. They are ITHE BULU AND GOD 99 able to renew friendship with Zambe. They will not be driven from the town of Zambe beyond death. They will have life, even beyond death. . . . "This is a good news I tell you, that A word of love. -.r i • <• n tt* Yesus desires men to lollow Him. He does not hate any man of any tribe; He loves men. He sends them messengers that they may turn from the crooked path to the straight path. Even you who are here, people of the forest, very ignorant, as your fathers were, and still following after evil — He desires you. A word of "^^d i^ yo^ ^^y^ *^® *^^ ignorant the good Spirit people — how will we be able to truly ° ** ' understand these things.?' I can tell you about the Helper of men. He that is the Good Spirit of Zambe. He enters the hearts of men. He opens in their hearts the things of Zambe. He draws men upon paths that lead past the villages where the people of the tribe of Zambe speak of the things of Zambe. By His drawing the carriers desire to sleep in this house and not in another palaver house where there is ignorance of Zambe. Because of the work that the Good Spirit of Zambe is able to do in the hearts of men, I speak this word this night and you who carry loads — you hear. "Do you hear?" "We hear!" they assert of that annunciation. And there in the smoke and the firehght of the palaver house there will be one and another head lifted, one and another face struck with the light of supernatural truth, one and another ear strained 100 AN AFRICAN TRAIL to catch a faint call that has an echo in the soul, not articulate as yet, no more than a vibration. Old filialties are stirred by the announcement of the Father-nature of God, old dreams recalled by the God-man, Son of God, old sacrificial instincts satisfied by the tragedy of the atonement, old racial convictions verified by the assertion of a Spirit- presence in the world. These dim affinities are not felt to the point of recognition, they are often overlaid with laughter, always with amazement. But they are there. TheBuluaad That Christ who meets the Bulu or the Word. ^]^q Bene or the Ngumba carrier some night in a clearing under the stars or in a palaver house by the fire, does not address him in a foreign idiom. He who is the Word is the Bantu word — yes and the Pass- word. He is the "Child of the sister" — the Monekd — that being bom of two tribes, and on his mother's side kin to her brothers, and on his father's side kin to his father's tribe. By this double blood-bond he is in time of war the intertribal mediator, with defined and understood functions. And Christ is the Moneka, child of the "Tribe of Above" and child of Mary, our sister; our very kin, famihar with the custom of our country, compassionate to our adventures, and able by his divine sonship to speak to God in our excuse. He is the Mediator. I know this because the Bulu tell me. Those faces lifted in the firelight to the first dim revealings of the face of Christ — how many such have come to salute Him, when He Himself THE BULU AND GOD 101 drew near, as Brother and as Son of God. For them there has been in Him no offence nor strange- ness. *Casalis tells of a chief among the Basuto who used often to be asking of the things of God. "He did not declare himself a Christian until the approach of death, when he died with this filial cry, — " 'Let me go to my Father, I am feeling very near to Him!' " This new confidence in the ancient disquieting dark, this sense of Divine protection in the ultimate panic, of what inner revelation is this the outer sign? "Before I knew the things of Jesus," said a Bulu to me, "I was like a young child crying in the dark for fear; until the day when I knew Jesus, then it was as if my mother put her hand on me." * My Life in Basutoland, by Eugene Casalis, p. 232. 102 AN AFRICAN TRAIL THE ANIMIST AND FEAR For us who know we are in God's bands, it is impossible to imagine what a dreadful power this fear is in the life of the heathen. There we see revealed the kernel of real heathenbm, and all its theology and mythology are but the shell enclosing it. With this fetter every Animist is bound. The incessant fear of demons, and of their evil plots, and of the sorcery closely con- nected with their worship, by which these people are tormented, passes our conceiving. Alienation from God, who alone is to be feared, is the ultimate basis of this irrational fear. Heathenism has lost God, and, consequently, has been given up to the fear of spectres, whose power is real just in proportion to the estrangement from God. The heathen world furnishes an example of how surely fear debases man. Men of fearless character are mostly noble-minded; the fearfid are cruel. Surrounded by fell powers of destruction, the Animistic heathen grow distrustful and cruel. Fear poisons every social relationship, distrust becomes a second nature to the harassed. The poor fear the rich, the weak the strong, the sick the healthy, for each knows that the other is trying to enrich his own soul power at the expense of his fellow. But those whom no one needs to fear are mercilessly trodden under foot. What an immense amount of fear is involved in witchcraft, head snatching, human sacrifice, burial ceremonies, and kindred Animistic abominations. Cruelty is everywhere one of the fruits of Animism; from that fruit we can infer the nature of the tree. How sweetly must sound the words of peace and rest on the ears of these poor souls in bondage, for in Animistic heathendom there is no such thing as security or peace. To the heathen these demons whom they fear are realities. God has become an abstraction, but they have personal contact with the demons. Questioned about God and divine things, Animists will always admit they know nothing definite about them, but if asked whethCT evil spirits really exist, they will unhesitatingly answer yes, siirprised that such a strange question should be put. If they THE BULU AND GOD lOS were not so firmly convinced of the existence and power of the demons, they would not be so sorely tormented by fear of the spirits. Such fear is not to be trifled with. — John Wameck, The Living Christ and Dying Heathenism, p. 116, Fleming H. Revell. SOME THINGS OF THE ANCESTORS The skull or other relics of the ancestor differ from the common fetish in that the possessor of the former cannot compel the ancestor to do his will; he can only persuade him, or induce his help and favor by offerings and kind treatment. But the possessor of the common fetish does not make offerings to it; the fetish is under his control and he can compel the spirit within it to serve him. If it should destroy him he will punish it. The usual punish- ment is to hang it in smoke. Fetishes have a horror of smoke. I do not know that the native ever punishes his ancestor for refusing a favor. If he should leave the skull in a cold or wet place, or should neglect offering food, the ancestor will suffer discomfort, but the discomfort is slight compared with the evil that he will send upon his undutif ul son as a punishment for such neglect. — ^Robert Milligan, The Jungle Folk of West Africa, p. 259, Revell, 1908. THE CLAY AND THE POTTER A native evangelist writes: "Now and then we have spoken very earnestly with Mukoma (a headman) and he listens to us seriously and sadly, without despising or laughing at us. But the word about the end of the world appeared to him incredible, and he said : 'The world will not pexish; and how could it, it is so firm ? It will abide as it has been formed.' Thereupon I replied: THear, O master, when a man has built a house or a shed, if he wants to tear down this building, shall they withstand him and say: "We cannot be torn down?" * " — Bishop J. T. Haanilton, The Nyasa Mission, p. 137, Bethlehem Printing Co., Bethlehem, Pa., 19U. 104 AN AFRICAN TRAIL QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER III. 1. What is the religious belief of the natives of your district? 2. What is their name for God? 3. Have they a form of worship? 4. What are some of their superstitions? 6. What do you know about witchcraft? 6. What are some of the native attitudes toward illness? 7. What is the character and equipment of the native doctor? 8. What is their expectation beyond death? 9. What equipment has your mission as to medical work? 10. Have you records of the attitude of the natives of your district when they first heard the Gospel? 11. Is your mission taking up new work among any untouched people? 12. If not, why not? For there is a reason. THE WIFE OF A CHRISTIAN MINISTER BIBLE READING AND PRAYER FOR CHAPTER IV. Galatians 5:16, 6:1-10 inclusive MiCAH 6:6-8 Prayer ALMIGHTY God, who art the Giver of all wisdom; Enlighten our understanding with knowledge of right, and govern our wills by Thy laws, that no deceit may mislead us, nor temptation corrupt us; that we may always en- deavour to do good, and to hinder evil. Amidst all the hopes and fears of this world, take not Thy Holy Spirit from us; but grant that our thoughts may be fixed on Thee, and that we may finally attain everlasting happiness, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen. — Samuel Johnson. CHAPTER IV. THE TEN TYING8 The perfect The ten commandments as appre- t^'^oo. hended by the white man in their ethical splendor are not so apprehended by the black man when God "ties him with ten tyings" in the "early morning" of his Christian day. They are not then to him the expression of ideals, they are facts, definite laws of abstainings, of omission and commission. They are the Eldorado of taboo. The They are emancipating — the door of emancipation. escape from a man-made yoke. Given a Father-God, there is no greater benefit that He could have conferred upon our pragmatic Bulu than ten exphcit tyings. The practice of the law promises at first to be an exact science, the perfect taboo for which our Bulu has blindly searched and which is here given him with the marks of Divine authority. "He-Who-made-you," says one Ibia of the seventh "tying," "forbids you of this matter. The slain who have died because of adultery are count- less." Here is the expressed understanding of the com- mandments as taboo with penalty. Our Bulu "very much desires the knowledge of those ten tyings"; and such knowledge — broken — 108 AN AFRICAN TRAIL isolated from the body of Christian truth — drifts back into the forest, finding lodgment with in- dividuals in obscure places. As there have been found lonely men who pray, so there have been found those whose knowledge of God had only one chapter; one commandment had passed from hand to hand and found lodgment at last with a man or a woman who has appropriated it, and has poured into the practice of it all the Bulu pragmatic enthusiasm. One of our missionaries itinerating in an obscure part of the forest — a backwoods of the forest — found two old women who persistently observed a seventh day. These women had a little wooden calendar of seven holes, with a peg to mark the passage of the days, and coming to the seventh day they rested in their houses. Other women might go to their gardens on that day, as for them — they were religious. Any missionary can give instances of such appropriation of a fragment of truth; and will agree, I think, that the minds of such radicals have been found in general to be open to the deeper things of God. There is a very moving intensity in the first contact between such a seeker of the true way, and a Christian. "Is there a person of God in this town?" I asked of a little company in the street of an obscure village. "I am a person of God," said a woman pressing forward and looking at me with an almost anguished timidity and with a most passion- ate appeal. Her husband, near by and leaning on his spear, observed her with an affectionate and con- temptuous tolerance. THE TEN TYINGS 109 "Not so," said he to me, "she is not a person of God, but she desires to be; she has learned a com- mandment." This precious possession had made that timid black woman bold to speak to the white woman, in the presence of contemptuous men, and with her conscious ignorance heavy upon her. Emancipation The ten commandments, I say, are from fsar. ^^ emancipation. They are an eman- cipation from fear — that deep, sleepless fear of the supernatural which is the great darkness of a people without God in the world. Of those things I will let Ibia speak to you. Ibia was a Benga, of the Island of Corisco. He was born in something like 1835. What he was before he came to be a Christian, what he would have become had there been no mission school on the island, none of you can conceive. Look over the edge, but do not suppose that you see the bottom of the pit. The heathen knows his own bitterness, the white man may not. Christ knows. But there was a school on Corisco and a man had a chance. Ibia became a Christian; by the painful efforts which lie between the primitive black man and an intelligent ministry he became a minister; by a self-control which Christ alone can appreciate this black man lived a godly life among his people. Not born to ideals as you and I were, he achieved them; he furnished his mind, he read, he thought, he wrote a book, if you please — an argument against native superstitions and the vices of his tribe. In this book he attacked murder 110 AN AFRICAN TRAIL and gossiping, adultery and want of courtesy, modes of building and the having of property in common. From the headings of his chapters it is plain to see that he raked with a rake of many teeth. I have a translation of his book made for me by one Myongo, a contemporary of Ibia's — like himself a Christian, now an old man. This translation is from the Benga into the quaint English which survives among beachmen of a certain age, those who were taught in American and English mission schools before the partition of Africa. And this is what we have from these two black men about the emancipation of their kind from the things of darkness: "The things of Magic are the gods of the ungodly; fearing of these things tells plainly that you have not taken God, that he is your confidential God who cannot suffer you to have an accident without a plan coming from him. If you be his lover and his true worshiper you will no more fear these things. They are not. Also, if they are to be, they would not be able to do you a thing whether good or bad, God will not consent. Also if God wants to give you a good thing he will not handed it to the spirits, he will handed it to the persons which he sends — that is, the angels." This triumphant assertion, so quaintly termed, is a black man's proclamation of emancipation to his people, based upon the first tying which says, "Thou shalt have no other Gods before me"; and upon the second tying which says, "do not make a fetish charm." THE TEN TYINGS 111 And if these tyings are an emancipation from the fear of supernatural perils — if they are as the arm of God barring from the path of Ilis children the evil things of the dark — so, too, are they an emancipation from the sorceries, the charms, and the machinations of inimical men. They make a place of sanctuary for the hunted and the haunted: a sanctuary for refugees from the valley of the shadow of death. How many such refugees I have seen rush into this sanctuary; and behind these I have heard the clanging of the door of promise — "showing mercies unto thousands of them." Here is Ze Zhom, with the scar above her knee that her one-time husband made, not for ornament but for malice — a symbol of taboo. Marriage was to be for Ze Zhom forever taboo. And here she is in the sanctuary, the Chris- tian wife of a Christian man. Here is that Eyinga who moved once under the shadow of a spell. Her husband, "two marriages back," still hated her and continually made a charm against her. She came to see the white woman, and "look at my body," said she, "I dry up, I neither eat nor sleep. I know and my neighbors know, that I shall certainly die." She, too, found sanctuary in the commandment; she heard the gate clang be- tween her and the pursuing hatred. Here are those little ones, the children of the people of the tribe of God, they have been suffered to come into the sanctuary. There is no amulet hung upon those little bodies that were bom without the aid of charms ; it is said of them that God gave 112 AN AFRICAN TRAIL them. God standing at the door of Hfe has ushered them in. They live under the divine protection. The mother of such a child, if the child die, is here sufTered to mourn her little one in peace. No dark imputation is put upon that death, no accusation of witchcraft laid at the mother's door. In this sanctuary the barren woman and the widow are at peace. Here might Ndongo Mabale have taken refuge, whose grave is in a far country among strangers. The basis of Again, the commandments are an a sex equality. emancipation from a sex-bondage. Man-made tyings always take account of sex — being a woman, the woman must do thus and so. There is food which she must not eat, objects which she must not see, words which she must not speak, acts which she must not perform — ^yes, and I would almost say — thoughts which she must not think. She must not think herself clever, or important, or even necessary. "How should I know; I am stupid as a hen!" This is the ultimate fruit of those man-made tyings which have thrust her into a groove of "vain abstainings," as Ibia says, based upon an ignoble thought of sex. Now it appears that God has tied his children with an equal tying, and this sense of a common honor is one of those elements in her religious experience which contributes to the new dignity of the African woman . Says Ibia : "The people do say, — 'A woman and a man are two different tribes.' This is not so, woman and the man are but of one nation. THE TEN TYINGS 113 "Human beings. Of town and streets. Their one root. Also their one end. Let the woman know everything, that which the man knows only; that which she herself does not want to learn; and let her eat that which the man eats also, except herself refuse. Let them not be kept in ignorance any more, let them not be deprived of good things. Thus the law has made the woman of an equal freedom with her husband. "That which cannot offend a man, it could not also offend a woman. ' And to outraged manhood defending its prerogative the merciless Ibia writes: "I know that they shall ask me that I should shew them the nobility of a woman. I will also ask them that they should shew me the nobility of a man." The tools The girl who is taken in marriage to of a craft. another than her native tribe, and who is reared in the house of one of the elder wives of her husband, will be given from time to time at the hands of that elder woman the tools of her domestic craft. There will be for her a scoop net of a corded plantain fibre and with a withy rim, little baskets for fishing, pots of clay that have been dried in the sun and baked in the fire — "the things of women who are wives." These tangible tools will be given to the girl, with many rules of conduct — "the custom of our tribe" which is not the custom of her father's tribe. 114 AN AFRICAN TRAIL The rules And the regulation of conduct is of custom. lodged in custom; of that girl it is expected that she will grow daily in the grace of the custom of her husband's tribe. In some such way does the Bulu conceive his initiation into that new tribe which is the Tribe of God. With a change of tribe he expects a change of custom; the ten commandments are the regulation of that custom. Almost, so objectively does he con- ceive his religion, they are the tools of his craft — of his new art of living. He takes possession of them with a pride and a manifest joy, and he applies himself to the use of them. They are intricate. There is nothing in the custom of his country to prepare him for their use; they do not belong, as he says of familiar ideas, to "the things of birth." But he has greatly desired them, he has acquired them with a painful effort of the memory and it remains to practise them. On the business of the minutiae of the ten commandments he will make long journeys lest he fail in a jot or tittle of their use. I see in my heart an old woman, — strange to me but for her familiar aspect of a woman beat upon by life and sorrow, — a woman w ho had borne and buried many children and who looked in upon me of that afternoon with a beautiful, controlled eager- ness. Three days she had walked, sleeping two nights by the way, to speak to the white woman about the eighth commandment — the eighth tying, she said. And this she said: "My town is toward the beach, — ^j^ou do not know THE TEN TYINGS 115 my town; not another person of the tribe of God lives in my town. I alone am of that tribe in the eyes of the people, and some of the women of my town have said to me, *We are watching the walking that you walk. If it is indeed a good walking and it is a straight path, we, too, will arise and follow after you.' For this cause my heart is hung up, lest it be that in my ignorance I spoU one of the ten tyings in the eyes of my towns-people. So when my son — not that he is indeed the son of my body, for all those are dead, but he is another son of my hus- band's, who sees me as his mother — when this young man asked me to keep the cutlass he found, I had a doubt. He thrust the cutlass in the bark of the wall and he said, 'Ah, mother, keep it for me while I go on a journey'; and I asked him many questions about the cutlass. Because he found that cutlass in the forest. He did not buy it so that he was able to say that it was his own cutlass. It is a true word that he found it in the forest, as if perhaps it might be the cutlass that a dwarf had lost. Even when he had told me all these things, hiding nothing, I doubted. I said in my heart, 'This cutlass — is it a thing which a Christian woman may keep in her house.? Does it spoil the eighth tying?' And be- cause of my ignorance and the women of my town who examine the things of God, I arose and came to you. I have slept two nights by the way. You certainly very much understand the command- ments, and I ask you to open this thing to me!" Thus spoke Awu Ding, looking at me very hope- 116 AN AFRICAN TRAIL fully, very wistfully, — sure that the white woman could tell her how to be the perfect Christian. K this were ten times a study book, I must still pause to salute from the heart that meek, old woman who ordered with such patience her walk and conversa- tion. The basis of ^^ every qualified Christian many the technique of such women come, and men come; vmg. T5yjjgj.eygp ^|jg Word of God has been accepted in our region there has begun to be a busyness about the practice of religion. The tech- nique of the art of Christian living has always proved to be a matter of immediate excitement. The little brown hut where the foremost Christian lives, the man or woman most approved as expert by the neighbors, becomes a sort of school of tech- nique. The little Those little huts which house the academies. master Christians — how well we mis- sionaries know them! Strangers and aliens stoop to enter into them; there is always need of more little stools in them; the outlandish headdresses from the backwoods congregate there; there is a place by those firesides for the beaded and bridled Ntum people, for the little dwarf people, for whoever will be inquiring about the things of God and the technique of the Christian life. The master In such huts as these there will be a Christian. murmur of voices and grouped eager faces turned on one face, — the disciplined face of an old woman, the face of a man whose arrogance has THE TEN TYINGS 117 suffered control, the face of some young creature quick with the facility of youth. Here the things of the new tribe are applied to the things of gain, of sex, and of fetish; to the things of the family, of the town, of the garden, of trade, of hunting — ^yes, and to the things of marriage, of birth, and of death. "The tying that ties you not to make a charm, — does that forbid a charm to hold your husband's love? For he did exceedingly love me when I was new, and now he has that girl from Nkole he does not so much as eat my food! And my mother knows a charm for this thing, only I said, 'Before I make that charm that you know, I must ask a person of God, I am a Christian and am I able to make that charm.?' " "And that tying about the day of Sunday, how may you do when the headman has sent you to the beach with a load of rubber? Himself he walks in the caravan, and in his heart is such a hunger for goods that he hates to sleep at night, let alone rest of a Sunday." Of course, you know that you must not work in your garden of a Sunday — but may you not shell peanuts? For the guests are many and your husband wants them to eat well. And the difficult seventh commandment, — ^how does it bear upon you and the man to whom your husband has loaned you these many moons and you love him: now that you are a Christian woman must you bar the door to him? "Before I became a person of the tribe of God it 118 AN AFRICAN TRAIL was my custom to help my sister with her peanuts. Always she sent me a message from her town that I must come to help her. We two, we must harvest her peanuts. And now I am a Christian, still she sends me that message. I ask you who are strong in the things of God, am I able to go to help my sister?" Ah, the wise old black face that is turned on the young black face! "Those days back, before you were a person of God, had you a sweetheart in that town where your sister is married.''" "It is as you say. There is a man in my sister's husband's town; he and I were as you say." "Do not go to that town where you used, when you were ignorant, continually to spoil the tying that is the seventh tying! I who am a woman of God, I tell you that the path to your sister's town is closed to you; that path is a path of danger." In such little huts how many sorrows are opened up and how many iniquities, how many autobiog- raphies flow on and on, out-living the fire on the floor! Out of such little huts how there go con- tinually men and women who have been enriched by some little portion of that divine wisdom which has a spokesman there! A Bulu proverb says, "The rich man's town does not release the treasure." Yet in the town of many a headman there is a continued release of treasure at the hands of some humble old woman, or the hands of an unconsidered boy — "poor bodies" who yet possess the tools, and in some measure the skill, of the new way of life. THE TEN TYINGS 119 And if a little you begin to think of A discipline. i the commandments as a precious possession of the Bulu, and as an emancipation, you must think of them, too, as a discipline. You must remember upon what untrained shoulders their yoke falls. We who have borne the yoke from our youth up, and our fathers and mothers before us, the custom of whose country is so colored by the ten commandments that we may not break some of them without fear of imprisonment, or others without incurring the adverse opinion of mankind, or others without self-scorn — how may we know of the check of that yoke upon the wild heart of a Bantu woman, of a Bantu man! There is no tradi- tion in that blood to mate with the ten tyings. There is no common consent in that town to the maintenance of them. There is no conventional shame at any breach of them. There is only a willing and personal abnegation, — a submission in mid- career without parley and without condition. They are accepted with the simplest confidence. There is not, in the initial phase of acceptance, any appre- hension of the long road that stretches or of any lapse. Amenta! As discipline: consider them first discipline. g^g g^ mental discipline. If it were only the memorizing of them, there is for the adult Bulu who does not read and who has no mental precedent for their content, a sustained, most intent effort in the memorizing of the commandments. Men who can tell the nature of the dowries paid for 120 AN AFRICAN TRAIL every girl and every woman and every grandmother in the neighborhood, — and that is to remember curious lots and assortments of dogs and guns and goats and sheep and dog-bells and girls and sheets of brass and coils of brass and the little pieces of iron tied in bunches of ten that are currency for women, — men who can recall the testimony of wit- nesses long dead to adventures long past, must make by a painful effort a niche in the mind for the novel content of the commandments. Never a man of their tribe spake thus; there is no ready-made receptacle for this possession. The attention of how many tattooed faces I have seen turned inward with an almost piteous intensity while they conned the ten commandments! How I have seen a man in his prime take his lesson from a school boy — blunder, return, repeat, and achieve! There, by the light of the night fire in his own palaver house at the head of his own town, arrogance was put aside for a meek and lowly effort. Women I have seen go down into the stress of a repetition of the ten com- mandments trembling; I have heard the beatings of their hearts as they took the diiBBcult places in that rough way, and I have seen them come to the end short of breath and triumphant. Some of them I have heard say, "Certainly the power of God has helped me in this thing that is so hard!" How many women have come to say, "Pray with me that I may learn a certain tying. I am stupid as a hen and that tying kills me. Other things I can THESE MEN ARE HUNTING A RUNAWAY GIRL A common event in Bantu THE TEN TYINGS 121 say, but this one about the day of Sabbath, or this one about the things of magic, it will kill me!" Mrs. W. C. Johnston tells of one old woman, not slow in faith or in works, but whose struggle with the memorizing of the ten commandments always yielded this fruit, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." This was the only one of the ten command- ments that old Abiaingon ever learned by heart. Ask her for any one from the first to the tenth, and she brought out of the wallet of her mental poverty her unique gold piece, with its known image and superscription. So much for the initial effort of memorizing. There remains the never-ending mental discipline of application, the nice fitting of the tyings to the things of the family, of the town, of hunting, of trade — to the things of women and gain and fetish. The new code accepted in such simplicity — "A road to run on," as a young Bantu said to Frederick Amot, — ^proves to be of universal application. We are back again in the brown huts of the master Christians — where the poor, untutored mind is broken to unaccustomed uses, where women stupid as hens are driven to become wise as serpents. "Thou shalt not kill— another's woman !" declares old Mpashima with emphasis. "No! — No!" cries out Bekalli, "don't lose your- self on that path; go back again!" And there between these two followers of the new way, who so sincerely desire to do the will of the Father, there is the renewed effort to know of the doctrineo 122 AN AFRICAN TRAIL A physical The Commandments are tremen- discipUne. dously a physical discipline. For the black woman as well as for the black man they are a daily physical discipline. Now is the body troubled! There is a crucifixion here, as Christ knows. This struggle — how often with ignoble things! — is not ignoble, this look of a broken body is not without honor. Myself, who have seen the iron of the seventh commandment enter the soul of so many women — I know its power. In the practice of this commandment I have seen girls — the wives of old men who were oflFered daily con- solations both public and secret — I have seen such girls take upon their young shoulders the yoke of the seventh commandment when, by virtue of their enslaved circumstance, it was the cross of celibacy. I have seen Bulu women, as maternal as any women sacrifice the hope of children to the observance of this commandment. Until I think I know a little of how much a Bulu woman means when she sighs and says, "The seventh tying — ^it is certainly strong!" Certainly strong it is. More I cannot say of this matter to white readers, imless I may tell them of that young Bulu woman of whom Mrs. Love says, that she was speaking as a master Christian to a group of women. These were saying of the ninth tying that it was easy, but of the seventh tying that God had made a mistake in tying them "wnth that seventh tying! These poor bodies were thinking that the seventh tying would be their Waterloo. THE TEN TYINGS 123 But "No," Mejo told them; and she told them — "I like to call the seventh God's love commandment. When we have a friend whom we very much love and who very much loves us we are able to ask more of him than of an acquaintance. Like that it is with God. K He is the friend we most love, and we love Him as we should love Him, we will be given strength to keep the seventh commandment." So much for the thought of a Bulu woman about this difficult matter. She knew, and I ask you to believe, that the Bulu Christian who is to stand fast must endure a discipline of the body which is without respite. And upon the faces of such as these there comes to be as if it were a harness — a perceptible, spiritual harness — the bands of a strong control. Amoral Again — the tyings are a moral dis- discipUne. ciphne. This truth which is so trite to us — ^how little it is trite to the man who first salutes his own soul! "We knew," says Minkoe Ntem, of the days before the knowledge of the things of God, "that a man is two men — the man of the body and the other man — that the things of man are of two tribes — the things of the body and the things of the heart. We knew, but we did not altogether know." Now it would appear that Zambe, who altogether knows, has devised a code for the things of the heart. Having broken the mind to the effort of the com- mandments and the body to the abnegation of them, there is still the wayward heart to be bent to them; and "the things of the heaH," say the Bulu, "are very strong." 124 AN AFRICAN TRAIL The Bulu does not appreciate the commandments on diflFerent levels and take the breach of certain of them to be catastrophic, and the breach of the others to be minor. Malice, envy, hatred, these passions of the heart are big with him. They have been so long pragmatic and they have in his cus- tom worn so many paths to action, so many short cuts to sudden and violent deeds, that he knows their potential power. I will not be saying that this sense of their power is a faculty of conscience; it is a deposit of experience. Without an intelligence of sin, he has seen that the fruit of en\^ is death. One tying ties him not to kill — "I understand!" agrees he in the old formula. With another tying he is tied not to envy — and again he agrees. And of envy he declares that it is present with him: "I very much know that thing." The Bulu woman has a fire of envy in her heart. How many have sighed to me of this. "I envy another's beauty"; "I envy another's husband — another's youth"; and always in the mouth of a barren woman, 'T envy another's child." Malice too, and hatred — these passions are not obscure to them. Many women on many days have come to my door to speak of the things of malice. "My tongue destroys me; my children and my husband run from my tongue." 'T quarrel with a wife of my husband; I rise in the morning not to quarrel, and when the sun is in the middle, while it is not yet afternoon, I quarrel! Is there power with God for this matter?" THE TEN TYINGS 125 Is there power "Is there power with God for this for these things? matter?" ask the novices of the master Christians in the httle brown huts. "I commit adultery — I am a coward — I am envious — is there power?" And there is an answer to this voiced human frailty: "There is power," declares Asala, cast off by a cruel husband and by him persecuted after fashions of which it is a shame to so much as speak — surrounded by enemies and by tempters, infinitely lonely in her isolated career of virtue, trembling at night in her little bark hut in that village of the backwoods where she alone was a person of the tribe of God. "There is certainly Power with God!" says the triumphant Asala, who curbed her own body and withstood the contradiction of sinners for two tens of moons and four more moons, when God showed her a plain path to an honorable marriage. "There is power," says old Nyunga, remembering the day the black soldier knocked her down. He had set her to catch a chicken for him . "Is it my chicken that I should catch it for you? Who are you that I should break for you the eighth command- ment?" And in the power of God Nyunga suffered the expected violence. "There is power," says Ngwa, who was a man of sudden and blind rage until God put a hand of re- straint upon that spirit of anger, so that now when Ngwa is crossed he counts out his level words as a miser parts with gold. 126 AN AFRICAN TRAIL "There is power," claims little middle-aged Ndek Zik, looking at you with that mild radiance which is the little lighthouse of her neighborhood. You must know, says Ndek Zik, that she was, before her heart turned to God, of a peculiar wickedness. Yes, you are told that of a peculiar wickedness was Ndek Zik until the ten commandments laid a check upon that wild career, and the power of God made the great change that you see. "There is indeed power," say one and another of the disciplined ones to those wistful apprentices with whom evil is so present. "God will give the power." The simplest old woman who has learned her ten tyings by months of effort will tell you that these things exceed the strength of mankind, but that Zambe gives strength for the keeping of the commandments. This news passes from hand to hand; v/omen tell it to women, and wives to hus- bands and children to parents, that Zambe who gave the tyings gives strength for their keeping. And this claim is not to be taken on blind faith as the commandments are; it is a spontaneous account of personal experience, and it is pointed with tangible example. I remember one Wanji, who was a year gone far inland. He was hunting an ivory — that is, he was sitting in a village of the backwoods where the head- man owned an ivory, the express object of Wanji's desire and of his bargaining. Before he left home he gave his little fortune, his collection of marketable objects, to the care of Ze, a wife of his who was a THE TEN TYINGS 127 Christian. Two rainy seasons and two dry seasons passed — the measure of the white man's year — before Wanji returned, and when he came home one of his wives was missing, she had run away. Another wife had a child. Wanji did not wonder at either of these women. But much he marveled at Ze who still "sat in her house" caring for his possessions. They were all packed under her bamboo bed. And of her the neighbors said: "Every night of the many nights you have journeyed Ze had sat in her hut, as you see her today so has she continually sat. She has gone to her garden, she has cooked her food in her pot, she has eaten, she has slept, just as you see. We have no word to tell you of Ze," Then Wanji put on his felt hat that was made in Germany and that was his badge of office, for he was a little of a headman; and he put a lad before him in the path with a lantern — it was broad day, but this was ostentation — and he made a call at the town of the white man. He looked what he was, — the old type of headman, — and without preamble he said: "I have come to tell you that I wonder at my wife Ze. She is a person of the tribe of God. I have been inland two rainy seasons and two dry seasons — yet that woman has kept the commandments of God. This thing I know was never done by the strength of a black woman, though a white woman might be able to do even this. I see the white women that they are in a tribe by themselves (literally. 128 AN AFRICAN TRAIL unique). Only the strength of God is able for such a strange thing with a black woman. And I have come to tell you that I marvel at the power of God for this thing that I have seen in my wife Ze. I agree that it is a good thing to be a Christian. But as for my- self, my own heart is too much with the things of this world." And he went away. I tell you this to illustrate the practical sense in which the Bulu associate the power of God with the practice of the commandments. And I tell you further of Ze and of Ndek Zik that they so com- mended their religion in their conduct that their husbands came, after rainy seasons and dry seasons, to be among their converts. Surely you will be agreeing that these children struggle with old enemies not unknown to yourself. And you will be agreeing with them that if they con- quer it will be by the power of God. *Listen to Casalis and his friend the chief of the Basutos talking together in secret at night, as Jesus did with Nicodemus in the day of Nicodemus. And like the latter twain, so Casalis and the chief are speaking of the things of God. Side by side they lie upon mats through the night of stars. "The chief was greatly struck," says Casalis, "by the commandments of the decalogue. 'That,' said he, 'is written in all our hearts. We knew nothing about the Sabbath, but we knew it was wicked to be ungrateful and to be disobedient to parents, to rob, to kill, to commit adultery.' " And this he said, * My Life in Basutoland, by Eugene Casalis, p. 222. THE TEN TYINGS 129 that wise black man, upon whose heart there was so legible a writing from the finger of God : "To do good is like rolling a rock to the top of a mountain; as for the evil, it comes about of itself; the rock finds it easy to roll to the bottom." The inner There is our Bulu, with his shoulder vision. iq i\iQ rolling stone of the ten tyings. There is nothing in the Bulu heart to endure. If the Bulu Christians endure, it is as seeing Him who is invisible. There is certainly in these lowly hearts an inner vision, and an inner voice. If we who are strangers to that heart, cannot know all the bitter- ness of certain practical abnegations required of it by Christ, neither can we enter into all the joy of that inner revelation. Christ is the Word that was with God, and came to dwell with the Bulu and is the Bulu word. "I give you an example," says the Christ of the Bulu, to the Bulu Christian. Many times I have been sure of this revelation. "Tell me the way of God in this difficult matter," says a woman to me of something very foreign to the white woman. For this I have a black Christian to counsel me in these clinics. And sometimes when I am alone I cannot tell. Then I have said to such an inquirer: "You know the Lord Jesus-, some things of His heart, you know them, and some of His desires — what thing would He desire for you in this matter.'' I ask you." And I have seen such an one, behind her face, go away to consider, and she has come back enlightened. "I see now," she has told me, "that of these two paths I must choose this one." ISO AN AFRICAN TRAIL "And why?" "Because the Lord would say of the other one it is crooked, but this one — He would see it straight." It is not for nothing that the Bulu carries through the discipline of the ten commandments a shining face — that he counts his tyings like possessions and wears them on his forehead like an ornament. For him the "Child of the sister" sits at the well by the way. Between them there is talk of all things ever the Bulu did; and that conversation deepens in intent as the day advances, until from talk of tribal things, of the things of sex, of fetish, there comes to be talk of the Father, of His desire for men, of the things of the spirit, of true words, of the high duty of man in a pure worship of God. "Take my yoke upon you," says Christ to the Bulu; and the Bulu bends his neck — with its scar at the nape that is the seal of his initiation to the old Bulu secret society; he bends his neck with its tattooed seal of all that is evil — to that holy yoke. "Learn of me," says Christ to the Bulu woman who is "stupid as a hen," who is "no more than hands." And the Bulu woman learns. THE TEN TYINGS 131 DR. GOOD SPEAKS TO THE BULU OF THE THINGS OF GOD In nearly every case the Gospel seemed to make a profound impression, at least for a time. The truth of what I said was rarely questioned. You will wonder at this in a people v/ho never before heard even a rumor of divine truth, until you understand how wonderfully the truth we preach harmonizes with and supple- ments what they already believe. They believe in an eternal Being who has made all things, to whom all men return at death, but they do not think of this Being as observing their actions, or that after death He may call them to account for deeds done in the body. The fundamental truths which they hold seem like fragments of a broken chain, which they are too thoughtless to connect; but when the missionary comes along and connects these several fragments, they cannot help seeing how they fit together. I ask them who made them and all things, and they reply at once, "Nzam." "Who gives you all the blessings you enjoy?" "He does." Do you love and worship Him and thank Him for all His goodness? "No." "Why not?" At once they see their conduct must be displeasing to God. "Are Ijang, stealing, killing, right or wrong?" "Wrong, of course." "How do you know?" They cannot tell; they just know it. To the suggestion that these things are written in their hearts, like the words in a white man's book, they assent at once as a satis- factory explanation. "Who wrote those things in your hearts?" "We don't know," they say. "Who made you?" "Nzam," or "Njamhe," both words are used. Then, "Did He not write these laws in your hearts?" Here was a break in their knowledge, but the moment the missing link is supplied the chain is made complete in their minds. "Yes," in a chorus, "yes. He gave us these laws in our hearts." Then I am ready to press home the great truth from which there is now no escape. "If God made this law. He must be angry when it is broken. He must see when it is broken, for He made the eye; as he made the ear. He must Himself hear what is spoken contrary 138 AN AFRICAN TRAIL to this law!" "Yes, that must be so." "Then, when death calls you into the presence of this Being whose laws you have broken, how will He receive you?" They attempt no evasion; they admit that God will be angry; and when I tell them of heaven and hell the excitement becomes intense. Then I lead them on to the blessed truth that God is a God of mercy; and often when the strange new story is finished, trade and greed, all else seem for- gotten. —Ellen C. Parsons, A Life for Africa, p. 192, Revell, 1900. THE FANG AND THE THINGS OF GOD I have sometimes foimd a town in a state of preparation and eager inquiry through their casual meeting with native Chris- tians. One day I sailed with the Evangeline to a town fifteen miles away, called Elen Akidia — Daxim of the morning; for it is built upon a hill that rises above the surrounding bush, so that they can see the first light of day. I stayed in the town over night. In the evening a large audience gathered in the palaver-house, which was lighted by a tiny lamp. It had no chimney, to be sure, but still it was the boast of the towTi. They had been learning for several years of the Christian reUgion from ill-instructed natives, but I do not know that any Protestant missionary had ever preached there. They listened so attentively and earnestly that I talked to them for more than an hour. Then, being tired, I went out and sat near by in the dark, but they remained gravely discussing what they had heard. The chief in closing said: "We have done all these things that God hates. We have beaten our wives and made them work like slaves. We have been cruel to children, and we have neglected the sick, but I think God will forgive us when we tell Him we did not know. We have lived in great darkness, but now the light has come; we must change our ways. And you women, you need not be puffed up because the white man took your part; for you are the cause of most of our troubles. We must all change our ways. I hope the white man will come back soon and help us, for we need help." THE TEN TYINGS 1S3 The grave tone and serious manner of the speaker, with the dark and silent night surrounding, all deepened the impression of his words, which seemed the most pathetic from heathen lips; and often again I went to Elen Akidia — Dawn of the morning. — R. H. Milligan, The Jungle Folk of Africa, p. 369, Revell, 1908. THE CITY OF REFUGE "You are servants of God, men of peace; you have seen coun- tries where Justice reigns. But you do not know us Barotsi yet. We are men of blood; we murder each other drinking, talking, and laughing together." Which, alas, is only too true. Nevertheless, it is something, if, as they assure us, our presence here prevents the parties from coming to blows and killing each other. The station is neutral ground, a city of refuge. Both parties feel that here they would not dare to kill anybody. When the chiefs of the two parties meet, it is not to the village (a stone's throw from here) nor yet to their own houses that they go; they prefer to stop just here, and make shelters if they have to pass the night. To see them sitting together under the shade of a large tree, without arms, except for a stick which in their hands is a formidable weapon — taking snuff, clapping their hands, scattering the usual "Shangwes" and every possible token of politeness, you would think them the most inoffensive people and the most intimate friends. But, as soon as darkness descends to twilight, they take their arms and flee, each distrusting the other. — F. Coillard, On the Threshold of Central Africa, p. 200, American Tract Society, 1903. 1S4 AN AFRICAN TRAIL QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER IV. 1. What vices among the natives of your mission field are con- trolled by the law of God? 2. What elements in the social system of the natives of your mission field are contrary to God's law? S. What bearing has God's law upon the practice of witch- craft? 4. Can you cite from your own mission records any incidents where God's law has been a shield against violence? 5. By what agencies is the law of God propagated in your mission in Africa? 6. What bearing do you think medical work must have upon the knowledge and practice of the law of God? 7. What bearing must book learning have? 8. WTiat bearing must industrial education have? 9. What part have the school children in this propagation? 10. Do adults in your African Mission learn to read and WTite? 11. How do adults, unable to read, leam the Ten Command- ments? 12. Are the native Christians of your region teachers one of the other, and of the heathen? 13. Why must the native Christian be the ultimate evangelizer of Africa? BIBLE READING AND PRAYER FOR CHAPTER V. Isaiah, Chapter 60 Prayer OThou King eternal, immortal, invisible, Thou only wise God our Saviour; Hasten, we beseech Thee, the coming of Thy kingdom upon earth, and draw the whole world of mankind into willing obedience to Thy blessed reign. Over- come all the enemies of Christ, and bring low every power that is exalted against Him. Cast out all the evil things which cause wars and fightings among us, and let Thy Spirit rule the hearts of men in righteous- ness and love. Restore the desolations of former days; rejoice the wilderness with beauty; and make glad the city with Thy law. Establish every work that is founded on truth and equity, and fulfil all the good hopes and desires of Thy people. Manifest Thy will, Almighty Father, in the brotherhood of man, and bring in universal peace; through the victory of Christ our Lord. Amen." — Book of Common Worship. A ZULU TRAINED NURSE, FROM THE AMERICAN BOARD'S HOSPITAL AT DURBAN CHAPTER V. THE NEW TRIBE The Creator of In our neighborhood the people speak the new tribe. continually of the tribe of God and the tribe of this world, God, they say, who has made all tribes, is now busy in the creation of a new tribe. And it is to be seen more and more "with the eye" that there are two tribes and two destinies. The paths are two and the towns are tv/o. As a rich man of a superior tribe may buy women of one tribe and another, assimilating them into his own tribe, exacting of them the observance of his tribal custom, so are the people of the tribe of God recruited from this tribe and another — no tribe being scorned by the Headman of the tribe of God. It is agreed that even a dwarf — that thing to laugh at — may be a Christian. But it is said of the tribe of God that, whereas a headman of the tribes of this world, in buying a woman, never asks if her heart agrees, nor does a white man hunting a man to carry a load, God in gathering His tribe does indeed ask that question. He does not set a soldier to catch you, or force you as a rich man forces a woman. He draws you, and you turn your heart. The "turrxing This "turning of the heart?" How of the heart." often I have heard of it, sitting knee to knee with a black woman, while she was still 138 AN AFRICAN TRAIL what old Minkoe Ntem would call a "little new thing" in the tribe of God : "A wife of my husband is a person of the tribe of God and the words of God in her mouth very much drew me to be a Christian." "The things of women are hard to bear, therefore I turned my heart to the things of God." "Many evil things I have done, all evil I know and have done, — these evil things that I have done, I throw them into the river and I turn my heart to the things of God." "I have borne no child, for this my heart is heavy and full of shame; there is a Christian in my town who tells me that there is help for the heart in the words of God." "I fear the things of beyond death, therefore I want to straighten my path and turn toward God." "I was sick and near death, then I saw that there is a quick end to the things of this world and I tied myself in my heart to enter the tribe of God." "I, too, I covet these new things, I, too, I want to follow the people of God to the town of God. I want to sit down in the seat where the tribe of God will sit beyond death." These are they who are drawn by sorrow, by ill- ness, by the disillusions of old age, by fear, by a kind of emulation, and always — and all — by the racial thirst for life. On the lips of all — the old cry "I desire life," now intensified and extended — "I desire life beyond death." THE NEW TRIBE 1S9 We have our bargainers. Of the Ngoni Dr. Elmslie writes that they said, — "If we would agree to countenance one more raid on the people at the north who were rich in cattle, and would pray to our God that they might be successful, they would on their return give us part of the spoil in cattle and wives, and would pro- claim that the Book was to be accepted by the whole tribe." And I remember one Ngo' Ntoto, who struck a bargain with God, and who put the Almighty to a test; he would be a Christian if God gave him a sign. And this was to be the sign — of his many women he chose one, and this a barren woman, and a Christian. The others he put away. And it was his custom to pray in the forest for a child. God had done as much for Abraham and Sara, so might he do — clamored this bargainer on his knees among the fallen leaves of the forest — for Ngo' Ntoto and his Bela. And so much indeed did the Lord do, and more He did, for he gave Ngo' a new heart and a gentler, to serve his Master. ^^ ^ We have, too, our dreamers of dreams. The dreamers. There is nothing in the black man's religious experience less kin to the white man's re- ligious experience than the dreams which the black man will sometimes tell the white man. In the eyes of the black man there is such a naive awe, such a concerned gravity. In the eyes of the white man there is such a sophisticated patience. There, be- tween them is unfolded the dream. It is such a crude 140 AN AFRICAN TRAIL dream. Not always, of course; there is in Bishop Hamilton's account of the Nyasa Mission a story of a heavenly vision adequately interpreted. But all the dreams ever I heard a Bulu tell bore the im- print of the Bulu mind. Here is a characteristic one recounted to me by Dr. Lehman of a headman of our neighborhood. The doctor had visited this man more than once. He was dying; as he was about to die, and after a period of unconsciousness, he revived and to his sons who sat beside him in his little bark hut he said, — "Believe Yesus! I am going, Satan has given me a load to carry to Etotolan (the old Bulu Hades). I have to carry it there, and I see the people there now weeping. As for me, I have rejected the word of God." And so he died, going away with his invisible load on the old path that is unknown. No one familiar with Bantu obedience to dreams will ask whether those sons so bidden by a dying father were long in making their way to the town of the people of God. Menge, the wife of Nkolenden, was dead. I tell you what the Bulu tell me. She lay upon the grass mat in which they would presently bury her. Her husband in the plantain grove behind the hut mourned for her from the heart, because he loved her though he had many other women. And he wailed to drive away that poor spirit that had been, in the body, his wife. The mourning women called to him from the hut that Menge had returned. Menge sat up on her grass mat. All the crescendo and the legato and the staccato and the pianissimo THE NEW TRIBE 141 and the furioso of the many- voiced wailing ceased. Menge explained in that sudden silence that God had sent her back from His town to call the people of her husband's town to turn their hearts toward God. And with her feeble voice she did so call them. Ten days later to the nearest house of God, perhaps ten miles away, there came a caravan led by a woman who looked to Bekalli, the evangelist in that house, as though she were about to die. This was Menge, and her husband Nkolenden, and literally — all the inhabitants of their vUlage. These had come to make peace with God, which they did. These things were told me by the people of God, black and white, in our neighborhood; yet when I slept in that town and ate the food cooked by Menge, and spoke the word of God to the assembled inhabitants, there was never any mention of this adventure. These villagers had been warned against dwelling upon the supernatural element in their conversion. Menge, back from august and mysterious journeys, must be busy in the garden and about the kettle on the fire. There must be no taint of hysteria in the religious experience of these children. The But it is, in the main, by very plain simple folk. and lowly paths that the little new things come in; by bands woven of common human experience — "the bands of a man" — that they are "drawn" to their divine adventure. Many with such self-seeking hearts, and no more spiritually articulate than I have told you, are put under the rudimentary discipline of the tribe. 142 AN AFRICAN TRAIL ^ , Many thousands of such there are, The leaders. ^ for as many score of another type — the type of chosen leader, the man and the woman of some particular spiritual gift, of whom is to be required some particular spiritual service or sacri- fice. Minkoe Ntem, that mother of Christians, who asked of her own heart when her first born lay on her knees — "What skill has been at work here?" Bekalli, that shepherd of men, who was carrying a load of salt from the beach to the interior and who slept one night in a village where a man read from "that thing of the white man — a book," an argu- ment like this — "Come unto Me all that feel trouble and are wearied of burdens and I will give you rest." These words, the accomplished speaker had claimed, were "words from God"; and Bekalli the carrier rose with the morning and walked continually for many days toward where the sun rises, with his load of salt on his back, and he very much pondered these words in his heart. Because the knowing one had said that God in speaking thus was speaking of the things of the heart, and not of the burdens of the caravan — Bekalli himself, being a real person and no longer a youth, very much understood this saying. And returning that same way he heard the "good news of the Lord Jesus." Thus was Bekalli converted who has never ceased to speak the Word, and who is approved of God and man. In every beginning there are such as these — first fruits of a peculiar virtue — first leaves on the tree that are to be for the healing of the tribe. Wameck THE NEW TRIBE 148 speaks, in his wonderful book on the "Living forces of the Gospel," of such as these, born more mature than others into the tribe. "We can thus see that on many mission fields God is fitting out men among the peoples to be evangelized. The forces of heathenism and the hindrances resulting therefrom are powerless over such men; and the bridges necessary elsewhere do not need to be built for them — facts that might have been deemed psychologically impossible. They ven- ture boldly to leap the gulf between heathenism and Christianity. Missionaries, surprised and glad- dened by their presence, see in them no fruits of their own patient labor, but rather the immediate gifts of God. We do not mean to say that these men are at once finished Christian characters, but from the first hearing of the Gospel they cease to be heathen; they go a swifter and surer way into the sanctuary than is possible to other heathen. God creates such men for Himself because He means to use them as pioneers among His people." The gifts of God! Every mission field in Africa has had such gifts. Ask the Baganda, the Barotse, the Zulu, the Bechuanas, the Yorubas — ask of any tribe at all that has heard five words of the Word, of these gifts of God. Among the Bulu, too, there have been such gifts. The Bulu name them in their hearts; they have a tribal fame. They are loved by the missionaries with an indescribable affection. It is as if God had seen that there must be a helpmeet for the work and for the worker; it is as if while on 144 AN AFRICAN TRAIL a night of exhaustion and discouragement the mis- sionary slept, God had made him a helpmeet out of his very rib — the rib nearest his lonely heart. This is why in all the little leaflets and the little biographies written by missionaries of their black friends, there is a lack of measure; there is an ex- ceeding appreciation. So much have these leaders in the tribe and these helpers of lonely white men been the gift of God that there is a never-forgotten wonder at the events of their careers — at the Chris- tian virtue of their characters. These are the elements of the Tribe of God in our neighborhood — the simple folk and the leaders. How may I be telling you by how many paths that are all old paths, like the village paths to a common spring, the people of the forest come to the well of living water! Or how many will be returning with very little jars and water roiled by their own roiling, and how there are those who will be carrying great jars — vessels of honor — and who will be bringing back to their neighbors the water of Life — and that more abundantly. Adjustments of There is among us a notable lack of the new convert, emotional excess either in the begin- ning or in the course of religious experience. The things of God bear too heavily upon the untried shoulders. There are no margins for the enjoyment of an excess of emotion. The impact of the new things upon the things of sex, of gain, and of fetish is too immediate and too jarring. Your man and your woman, stripped of old customs of sex, of THE NEW TRIBE 145 gain, and of fetish, must make shift to piece together a mode of Hfe. So many practical details call for immediate attention. This "little new thing" is so often beat upon by the winds of persecution, and must so soon go down into the valley of abnegation. About this bewildeied little new thing there crashes the very perceptible and practical conflict of the things of God with the things of sex and gain and fetish. There is a kind of Gdtterddmmerimg about the little new thing — and voices come out of that darkness full of challenge. The familiar voices of the old things menace and warn, the voices of the new things encourage and urge, there is a voice of black fear, and a voice at which the heart trembles — the voice of honored customs laid aside. And in all this clamor, there are things to be done, difficult things. Open confessions to be made, public retributions to be borne, chastisements, often physi- cal chastisements, to be endured, and impoverish- ments. These adventures are not academic, they are adventures of flesh and blood, adventures of the pocket, adventures of the heart, adventures of the will. _ ^ . I see an old woman sitting on a bench Confessions. . ° m a brown bark house that was tne minister's house in our clearing. She wants to make her confession to the minister — who had heard how many tens of confessions in that week! But she edged up and down her bench, hedging in her account of her career and glancing at me. "You fear the white woman"; said the minister, "myself I tell you 146 AN AJiaCAN TRAIL not to fear her. Her mouth is shut." Then our old woman said that she had killed three men — oh, long ago; not on one day, of course, but wisely, with an herb of the forest that she knew. This she had put in the food of her enemies. For they were indeed her enemies. These were they who had killed her three sons. Yes, once she had had three sons — real men. And one and all they had died, each man of a witch. She knew in her heart what three men had given a witch to her sons, and for this, when suffi- cient time passed, she had poisoned the food of her enemies. Not all on the same day, you understand? The minister understood. Now, said our old woman with a look of guilt and of relief, now that this word was opened up, and this deed was thrown into the river, would God accept her? She desired the new things, and to follow the path of the people of God. She had heard of Yesus, son of Zambe, that he had paid a price that was sufficient for all the evil deeds! Terrible old woman, never to be forgotten in her look of guilt and her look of hope. Another of our ministers told me of a man who returned to him a few hours after his confession, to say: "I forgot this thing — that I have eaten men. Will God forgive me this, or is it a deed which will spoil me in His eyes?" Thus one and another spells out the secret com- bination to his past — ^you hear the click of the lock, and there before you are spread out the hidden and the hideous things. THE NEW TRIBE 147 e . , In this dark hour men count over social Adjustments: their women. The conflict with poly g- Polygamy. ^^^ -^^ gantu Africa has taken differ- ent forms in different localities, for the forms of polygamy vary. The regulations of dowry vary, the status of women, the honor accorded or not accorded the first wife — these things vary among the tribes of the Bantu. So far as I know monogamy is in every Bantu locality the ideal of the new tribe; I do not know of aaiy Bantu mission where a man is received into the church with a plurality of wives. There are localities where a woman, to be publicly received among the people of God, must withdraw from a polygamous marriage. In other localities, as in ours, women are so enslaved, so much the chattel, that it cannot be required of them that they withdraw from a condition into which they have been sold. Whatever the variations in the dealings with polyg- amy, and however imperfect to the reader the oper- ation may seem to be, he is to remember that it is an operation, performed by those who have given the malady a skilled attention — and never without consultation. In our locality, the man takes stock of his women, and chooses that one who is to be, after the custom of the new tribe, his wife. He is not bound by any consideration to choose the first woman purchased or inherited by him, as such an enforcement might well be a cruelty both to himself and to the woman. He may have inherited in his boyhood, from his father, a woman much older than himself. In 148 AN AFRICAN TRAIL choosing a wife from among his women he is expected to take that one with whom he thinks he can most happily adapt himself to monogamy. This adjust- ment may be — it often is — an adventure of the heart. It is always an adventure of the will. And it is always a mental discipline, often an extreme mental discipline. For the Christian in disposing of his women may not sell them ruthlessly; he must dis- pose of them after the fashion of the new tribe, with respect to the inclination of the woman, and never to a man who has other women. He must take account of the maternal rights in children who are legally his; he cannot deprive a mother of young children and must permit her the charge of these where she is at all concerned for them. When eligible buyers are not forthcoming, a man is obliged to send his women to their father's town without any immediate or certain return of his dowry. Here you have an adventure of the pocket, indeed these adjustments always impoverish the Christian. It is not possible for a Christian Bulu to be an "nkuk- um" or man of means; he has no illusions about this, for Christ's sake he becomes poor, or at best he finds himself with that slim means which the Bulu call "the size of the hand." There is no adjustment of the old things of the Bulu to the new things of God more vivid, more objective, than these marriage palavers. They go forward under the eaves of the houses by day, beside the palaver-house fires at night. Fathers and brothers orate and gesticulate; girls are sounded THE NEW TRIBE 149 as to their preferences — and are suddenly and per- versely dumb; Christian wives of a common husband who have been praying these many seasons, rainy and dry, for the conversion of their man, take the disturbing answer to their prayers in a kind of dazed sweet patience. The women least desirable are first disposed of — it is easiest to let them go — until at last a man must come to a choice between those who appeal to his heart, to his senses, to his habit. I think of one man, young, eager, keen to excel in the things of God. His ultimate choice lay between two women, both mothers of children, both young, both comely. He did, indeed, love them both. Both were Christians, and both willing to further his interests. But he s withered. He could not drive either out of his life. He would have first one and then the other, until he exasperated and enraged both. The town of this young headman was, for a matter of two or three years, nondescript, neither the town of a Christian, for he might not call himself that while he so outraged the custom of the tribe of God, nor was it the town of a heathen, for he served God in all his ways but one. Believe that this young man, who wrestled until he was at last blest, carries upon his face the tribal mark of dis- cipline. His was an adventure of the heart and will. Acknowledgment !» ^^^^ ^^^^ of open confession young and payment men who have owed many a headman ° ® ^* in secret for stolen favors, must make acknowledgement of these and the promise of pay- ment. I have known a young man to be several years 160 AN AFRICAN TRAIL in finding the wherewithal to pay such debts as these. Young women must confess to brutal hus- bands the secrets of their wild years, must suffer stripes and the outcry of the \nllage. How strongly God draws these girls themselves can tell. One of the weakest of these, how well I remember her reluc- tance! We were sitting in her brown hut, the hut nearest old Obam Ze's palaver house, for she was the then favorite of that connoisseur of young women. Andungo was in her early twenties, pretty and gentle with that grace of manner which so much distinguishes many forest women. We had spoken of many things, the things of the gardens and of the village. When I spoke at last of the things of the new tribe — "Are you never drawn by these things?" I asked Andungo. There was then an agitation behind that young face, a wistfulness and a reluctance. She spoke softly with an exaggeration of caution. "I am indeed drawn, every day I am drawn. The women of this village who are Christians, they speak continually words that draw me. My own heart agrees to their words, and my heart draws me. My mother is a person of God, she speaks to me words that draw me. But, ah, my friend! I am of a peculiar cowardice! My mother, she is of a peculiar courage; when she was first drawn to become a Christian she just went to her husband and con- fessed her bad deeds and endured her beatings and endured the talk in the village. But, ah, my friend! how could I bear to go to Obam Ze and open the word of my bad deeds to him. I cannot endure that THE NEW TRIBE 151 thing. I am of a peculiar cowardice!" And she looked at me with a kind of subdued agitation — a reluctance, a wistfulness. "Who gave your mother her peculiar courage?" I asked her, and she told me Zambe had given that peculiar courage to her mother. Then we thought it would be useless to go to Obam Ze until God had given Andungo something to go on. These things are past the endurance of trembling girls like Andungo. It would be six weeks after this conversation when Andungo came to see me in my house, and she showed me her new face. There was the face of a person of God. Every African missionary will know what I mean. And she said in her soft, hurried voice that God had given her courage, peculiar courage, so that she had endured to go to Obam Ze. To him she had said that she could no longer be a person of this world, she was drawn to be a person of the tribe of God. And she must tell him all her disobediences and some things of shame. "Go away!" said Obam Ze, "take away your bad deeds, don't spoil my ears with them, I cannot endure to hear them!" This reluctance of Obam Ze is not characteristic — other husbands have a peculiar courage with which to listen to the trembling confessions of little new things, and there are women who will carry the marks of these hours to their dying days. These are adventures of poor flesh and blood. The break In this hour one and aU, the timid with fetish. qj^^ j-j^g qJ^j g^jj^ ^^q downtrodden and the barren, as well as the proud and the brave, one 152 AN AFRICAN TRAIL and all must break in the sight of his fellows — and with what inner trembling who can know? — with the things of fetish. This break is the supreme effort of the will, the initial sally into what must be a lifelong war. To the people of the tribe of God the little new things bring the poor rubbish that has hitherto helped them — skulls that are the earthly vessel for the spirit of the ancestors; the angular little images that are informed by the aristoc- racy of the spirit world; minor fetishes — amulets for the hunter, for the fisher, for the trader, charms for the times of planting, for the expectant parent, for the traveler, love potions, beauty charms, charms against fire, against wild beasts, against falling trees, charms against charms. See how naked our poor Bulu stands at last in this world of inimical spirit life! And other abnegations he makes; the words of his mouth, the meditations of his heart, the ancient wisdom handed down through genera- tions — all these must suffer change. That Bulu, divested of all outward protection against spiritual attack and counter-attack, must put aside his wisdom and the subtle arts of fetish and must come to be, indeed, a little new thing, relying upon God alone for protection from what are to him relentless enemies. These Mark that these abnegations, these adjustm ents persecutions, are suffered not in any are pu c. sheltered place. They are suffered in the open. There is no quiet hour when a man may take breath and renew his strength. There is always the voluble concern in the palaver house, the scorn THE NEW TRIBE 16S of some, the tears of others — the many- voiced river of the tribe breaking continually on the rock of his conviction. These Continually. Not just in the dark antagonisms hour of his submission, but in every areperpetu . hour and adventure of his life — the hour of marriage, of childbirth, the seasons of plant- ing and of harvest; of the hunting and the fishing, of the new moon and the waning— at all these hours and in every season, the voice of his tribe urges and the voice of his own heart recalls the old wisdom, the old custom, the dark things of sex, of gain, and of fetish. Until at last upon his death bed that man of many temptations must wave away the last one in the person of some old and wise mother of his tribe, who would put upon him a sure spell to keep him from the outer darkness. Perhaps you feel as you read how small is the place in this long toil for emotional excess. We have not found emotional excess to be a major peril in our black man's holy war. „ . So much for conversion, so much for Regeneration. . i i ^ <■ coniession, and what oi regenera- tion.? What does this little new thing become? The things On one Sunday at a communion of baptism. service among an inland tribe I saw the missionary baptize two hundred and forty-six members of the new tribe. It was a gray Sunday of the long dry season, a day in July. All the week before by the little ways of the forest the Christians had been coming in to the gathering of the tribe. Single file they would be walking, their food on their 154 AN AFRICAN TRAIL backs, their children slung to- their sides. The Saturday night those who came thus would be sleeping in the huts of fellow Christians — often strangers and aliens by birth, now made nigh in Christ. Those who might not find shelter made a little fire in the open and slept on leaves. In this camp and by these many little fires, under the thatch and under the stars, what long talk of the things of God and of the tribe of God there would be! In every little company how there would be one or more master Christians — the wise ones, the strong ones — and, here and there in that camp, one to be baptized on the morrow ! Probation and Man or woman — such an one sitting instruction by the night fire on the eve of such before baptism. .• u i. i consummation — would nave come by a long road to a conspicuous station. Philip and the eunuch falling in together on a journey spoke a little of the things of God and nothing hindered that the happy eunuch be baptized. By divine permission he was baptized. This sudden distinction of the Ethio- pian eunuch — his ready acceptance into the kingdom — how many an apprentice to the things of God has "very much envied" the eunuch! Myself, I have seen the envy of him in a thousand faces. But as God creates the new tribe in our part of the forest. He does not so create it. The things that hinder that the little new things be baptized are legion, they are as near and stubborn as the things of the forest; it is as if you must make a clearing in them and must make a garden, yes, and must show THE NEW TRIBE 165 the fruits of this garden to the eyes of the people of this world and the people of God before you may be baptized. Rainy seasons and dry seasons pass while you achieve these fruits. No little new things are bap- tized, only men and women instructed in the things of God, diligent in the work of the tribe and ap- proved of their neighbors. Many little new things never come to their maturity — they fall. Yet on this Sunday of which I speak two hundred and forty- six stood up under the great leaf thatch of Elat church as approved for baptism. Behind them were the thousand members of this church, and behind these again five thousand men and women — all struck into silence — turning untutored faces on these chosen ones who waited, in a great pride and a great meekness, their baptism. Of these new members of the tribe it was under- stood : That they were new men in Christ Jesus. That they were versed in the essential history and the custom of the tribe of God. That they were not, nor had they been during their years of probation, liars, thieves, adulterers, breakers of the Sabbath, murderers, or sorcerers. That they were at peace with all men and the debtors of none. That they had been diligent in the business of the tribe, with converts for trophies. So they were baptized. Caught in their neradi- cable net of tattoo, they lifted new faces to the man 166 AN AFRICAN TRAIL of God who, passing down the long line of their row upon row, mustered them by their names into the body of Christ. I was a stranger in that neighborhood and in my eyes those ranks of Christians were as grass. But in their home villages, in their neighborhoods, in their clans, their names were known — they had a fame of good works. Of the least of them it might be said, as the Bulu say of the notable achievements of the modest, "the little parrot has eaten all the palm nuts." And of the greater it might be said, as the Bulu say of their heroes, "all tribes shelter under the palm." So much are these major members of the tribe of God the hope and the help of their villages, their neighborhoods, and their tribe. The things "But," question the white disciples, of failure. ^g they consider these things, follow- ing after our Lord along these paths of the forest, "these many black men — do they hold? Do they persevere.''" The white disciples incline an ear; they think they hear in that long caravan the sound of stumbling feet. They imagine, say they, that the black man falls; and they are right, the black man falls. On that communion Sunday of which I have spoken there were stricken from the roll of Elat church, then numbering a thousand members, the names of two; and twenty-one members were sus- pended. This was publicly done and the causes of discipline specified. I remember that some were suspended for quarreling, some for the selling of THE NEW TRIBE 157 women into unsuitable marriages; nine had broken the seventh commandment; one had carried a load on Sunday — this with his own consent; one had made a charm to regain her husband's love; one had made a charm for hunting; one had, in an extremity of illness, submitted to a charm at the hand of her heathen mother, and some had been lazy. When at dawn the drums of their villages had called the people of the tribe of God to the morning prayers, these latter had not gathered with the others to "beg of God"; they had not met with the other Christians of a Sunday. They no longer spoke of the things of God to the ignorant ones in their own village, nor to the carriers who would put their heads in at the door to beg a drink of water.* I would say at once that these, the lazy ones, are of the least hopeful sort. Of this sort were those two who were stricken from the church roll that day, after a long discipline and many exhortations. These are the laggers behind, and it must be that the caravan, moving on, leaves them. They sleep now and take their rest. Of them there is no more mention in the history of the new tribe. But of the sinners — those stumblers — there is, more often than not, further mention. Caught again in the old snares of sex and avarice and super- stition they are — as there is record at every com- munion season in every African church; their names * This was Elat Church in 1913. In 1916 the membership of the church was 4,074 : six per cent of this membership was dis- ciplined in this year. 168 AN AFRICAN TRAIL published as incompetents, the ten commandments by them mutilated, the white man who thought he heard them stumbling, justified; all this — and then what? The things Surprise. They had not thought to of repentance. Jq j|. j^ t^g technique of the art of Christian living which they had so hardly acquired, how came the hand to slip? "I am surprised," said one such to me, "I am like an animal who went away on a visit and there was one dug a pit for him, and that animal returning fell into the pit. He did not know of the pit, he fell in." And shame. To have been so inefficient, to have played the game to lose, to have walked yesterday among the people of God a good workman approved; and to be today a bungler, of whom it is begged that for a time, at least, you keep your hands off lest you spoil the things of God. Oh ! the hurt, the shame of this. And sometimes, in a deeper soil, a root of repent- ance. To have brought shame upon the people of God and upon the name of Jesus! I remember to have seen a whole community suffer vicariously this deeper sense of sin. They were surprised, on a com- munion Sunday, by the suspension, for a breach of the seventh commandment, of an elder of the church. When this defection of their honored elder was announced tears began to run upon the faces of the church members. After the service one and another who came to greet me could not speak for tears, could only shake the head. THE NEW TRIBE 15» In the main our Bulu Christian is more con- sciously saint than sinner. His virtues are more im- pressive to himself than his sins. And it is rather with a sense of fault than of sin that the stumbler, picking himself up to find himself alive, sets about repairs. "I came to tell you that I broke the seventh com- , mandment and I am a person of the tribe of God. It is now five moons that I am a person of God. Do not tell me that I cannot be a Christian, because in my heart I greatly desire to be a Christian. The breaking that I broke, it was yesterday — and there is still tomorrow that I may be a Christian," How may I tell in a book how much in this voice there was of shame and pride and urgence or how, be- hind the tattooed face, the spirit defied the failures of the flesh.? This Bantu who cons the law with such a prag- matic passion, how his poor thumb has stained the margins of the second and the seventh and the eighth and the ninth commandment; and he who was once so patient in the practice of magic, how often he mas- ters his discouragement in the path of God. "I broke the tying yesterday; but I will not break it again!" And from a sinner who had been put down from a high place in the tribe of God and who had suffered a stunning blow to his pride, — this word at last: "The Lord has lit my lamp again; I see the path." „ . In our neighborhood that path back Restoration. . from the wilderness to the shelter of the tribe has been by way of humility and effort. 160 AN AFRICAN TRAIL Rainy seasons and dry seasons pass you on that way. The proud man comes back humbly and the rash, who was "quick to do evil," walks that way "as slow as a chameleon." Some are too arrogant to come back and some too lazy. Some are drawn away by the things of this world; on the path of the things of this world there wander away many of those young Bulu bucks, schooled, trained to be teachers, to be dispensers of drugs, to be overseers. This is a special type of loss, an impoverishment of the tribe. I have seen many a proud spirit, stung to the quick, fling away to lose himself. Yet of those who stumble in the ranks of the mature Christians, many and most recover themselves. The Lord lights their lamps. And at every communion service in every church of our forest, for some who are disciplined, some are restored. I was speaking to one of our senior missionaries about this matter — seeking from this wise man statistics for the white disciple, and he told me that he expected, after long years of experience, to discipline one church member in twenty; and that he could count on his two hands those church members who had not responded to discipline and whom he had ultimately excommuni- cated. This was a record of twenty years' service in the Kamerun interior. Of secret evil in the church I will say that where it exists — and it does, of course, exist — it cannot persistently exist. We live in the open by circum- stance; "what is whispered under the eaves is heard THE NEW TRIBE 161 in the street before the palaver house." There is less place for secret evil in the African church than in the church at home. So much for stumblers whose proportion among the established people of God certainly is short of the tragic one in twelve. For these the long journeys of the white man, his rough inhabited clearings, his exiles, and the gifts of the poor and the rich of the people of God — yes, and the gift of God in Christ Jesus, and His long journeyings and His exile and His ultimate passion, all this outpouring of the love of God for such as these, in vain. So have I heard a headman tell over the accumulated goods given on a woman, who, having been so dearly purchased, has run away or is barren or is dead. The growth Of little new things that prosper, of grace. there is a great tribe. They increase daily; they are born into the kingdom hourly. They grow in grace. By God's grace they are what they are. His grace that was bestowed upon them is not in vain. That dowry cannot be counted in the palaver house as waste. It is for this that the new tribe has a new heart and a new freedom and a new obedience, a new custom — ^yes, even a new tongue and a new face! "Behold, I make all things new," says the Lord Jesus. Today, to prove it. He makes a new African, "by grace and true words." This mortal, so rescued and so wrought upon by Divinity, begins to bear certain marks of the immortal design. It doth not yet appear what he shall be, but he begins to be blocked in; or, say, those virtues which 162 AN AFRICAN TRAIL are the foreordained fruit of his race begin to show in him. A man of He is a man of faith, all missionaries '*^**^- are agreed upon this. By an initial act of faith he goes out from his own country — the familiar things of sex and gain and fetish, the shelter of custom — not knowing whither he goeth. "The old things of the past," said a man to me, "are to my heart ve belik"; which is to say a deserted village no longer inhabited and falling into ruin. "What will you do tomorrow.'''* I ask a woman, and she says to me, "Why will you ask me of to- morrow? The path of tomorrow — God will show me that path," and God who has shown the Bantu "the straight path" compensates His daring child with a near sense of the unseen. He conceives his religious adventure in the terms of his experience. "I am no more a person of the town," says a friend of mine, "I am just a person of the leafy shelter; why should I, who am a passer-by in this country, build me a house? I am as a hunter who makes a shelter of leaves and sleeps a night and is gone." "I am a carrier," says another, "and the load I carry is the ten tyings and the things of God. Heavy as they are I will bear to carry them, because this is the order." "Though the path is bad there is a Man ahead of me!" This Man in the path ahead — how much He THE NEW TRIBE 16S figures in the annals! "Yesus shows me the path." "Yesus helps my heart." "Yesus gives me an iron heart." "Because of Yesus, I endure!" Who are we to say of that caravan, threading the forest, that they do not endure as seeing Him who is invisible? A man of Because he is a man of faith, the prayer. Bulu is a man of prayer. Strange sudden intimacy between God and this silly child! It grows with every day after the initiation. I have heard the first stammer of the first salutation, and that was in the house of one Menge. Menge had six children and so was an enviable woman. Her little hut was cluttered with little wooden bowls, with the day's refuse, with odds and ends of service- able contraptions. Menge, busy always about the things of food, was grinding peanuts between an upper and nether stone, and the white woman was saying, "You who have borne six children, Menge, how can you bear not to beg of God on their ac- count.?" "I not beg of God.'*" says Menge; "I certainly beg of God! Not a single day but I say to God, Ah, Tat! Ah, Tat! Ah, Tat!" This is to say and to reiterate. Ah, Lord! Thus Menge begged of God for her six children. Between this prayer and the prayers of Ze Tembe, a young Bulu buck long a Christian, how much of experience! — "Oh, God, Thou who created us, we complain to Thee of Evil! Evil continually follows after us; the feet of the evil things are swift to pursue us. But we ask Thee, was Evil the first- born that he should govern us? Good was the first- 164 AN AFRICAN TRAIL born! And we beg of Thee who created us that Thou will give us Good to rule over us !" This same voice saying, "Ah, Christ, who had the power to turn stones to bread and did not, we tell Thee of our hearts that they are stone, and we beg of Thee to turn them to that true bread which comes down from above!" Between the minor stammer of Menge and the major rhapsody of Ze Tembe, what a gamut of prayer goes up! The prayers of the barren and the prayers of the Christian parents of wayward children; mean prayers of revenge and beautiful self-forget- ting intercessory prayers; little prayers about a lost cutlass, and a quarrel ; prayers in the garden over the planting, and prayers about trading. Little groups of Christians sitting on their heels about a common kettle, their heads bent above their knees in a grace before food. Little groups of Christian carriers gathered at night about a common fire with the forest sighing about them, they pray. At dawn in every village where there is more than one Chris- tian, the brown bodies come slipping into the hut of one, they leave their baskets and their nets and their loads of rubber at the door, they pray. Beside how many graves they pray, and beside how many child beds! If, indeed, prayer is incense, how from clear- ings in the Southern Kamerun there will be on the Sunday morning the incense of ten thousand prayers ! A man of And he is a man of works. Of this ^°^^^' I must be speaking at length in the next chapter, for it is out of the works of the new THE NEW TRIBE 166 man that spring the customs of the new tribe. But I must say in this place, that having shown you his faith I am prepared to show you his works. Like Abraham, his works and his faith leave their marks by the path. The white man's camp, say the Bulu, is known by the empty tins; Abraham's camp was known by the stones of his altar; the camp of how many Bulu is known by a deposit of the Word of God in the hearts of the villagers. Many little com- panies of two Bulu starve for friendship, starve for pleasure, yes, and starve for a good square meal, while they endure to live in a foreign tribe on the outskirts of a strange village, ill-fed by careless women, that they may drive in the first wedge of the things of God. If you ask, having been shown their faith, to see their works, I will show you the symbol of the works of a good man. That is his tooth brush. He jour- neyed on the paths that go toward the rising of the sun quite alone, and everywhere speaking the word of God. Everywhere there were those who listened and those who laughed. But for every man who brought to this man of God his sacred fetishes and who said that he, too, he desired rather to follow the things of God, Bekalli made a nick in the handle of his tooth brush. It was a commonplace Bulu tooth brush, made of a twig frayed at the end. When this man came to the end of his journeys he was thin, he was weary, he was a most contented man, and he had over two hundred little nicks on the handle of his tooth brush. 166 AN AFRICAN TRAIL A giver I as^ you to observe that this carrier of gifts. of the ten commandments, this seer of things invisible, this prayer of prayers, is a giver of gifts. He has always a little gift about his person for his Lord. If he carries loads for hire, if he sells to a white trader an ivory, if he gathers rubber, if he sells his days to labor, there is a portion of his gain for the things of the Kingdom. No woman so poor but she has a few coppers for the plate. For this she will have sat hours beside the path that goes to the sea, her offering of food in a kettle covered with a leaf, until a carrier pauses to buy and eat. Out of such kettles and the loads of rubber and the effort of consecutive labor and the catch of fish from the sea, and the victory over racial avarice, the finances of the new tribe are assured. If I tell you that the beach and bush tribes of our mission which had at a given date an enrollment of twenty thousand converts, and a church membership of five thous- and — if I tell you that this people gave in the year of that date the sum of fourteen thousand dollars, gathered as I have told you, and applied to the service of the Kingdom, will you not be saying that this Bantu is a man of works? Himself he paid the four hundred black evangelists who w ere in the local schools and in the local churches, and the schools and churches among foreign tribes to the east. The Lord Jesus, standing over against the treasury, watches this child of His unwrap from a leaf packet or take out of a beaded headdress two mites — and that is often and often the whole fortune! I have THE NEW TRIBE 167 seen — and not long since — such ofiFerings as forest people bring today where money is not known, heaps of knives forged in what primitive smithies, rattan baskets woven in what obscure villages, round nets with a withy rim and knotted of a cord rolled, during what rare hours of leisure, between the thumb and the thigh of a Christian woman. Little wooden spoons there would be in this offering, of the ancient, impeccable patterns, bottles of oil pressed out of the oil-palm nut, ivory bracelets, little precious neck- laces of elephant hairs banded with brass and hung with dogs' teeth. A thousand sacrifices of the most personal sort were here, heaped up, smelling of wood smoke and mold and dried fish — the never-to- be-forgotten odor of the things of the forest. Every African missionary knows the character of this treasure, and over against every such treasury stands the Lord. 168 AN AFRICAN TRAIL SOME LEADERS OF THE BAGANDA The Baganda seemed to me to possess not only a peculiar aptitude for teaching but a singular desire to engage in it. No sooner was a reading sheet mastered than at once the learner became a teacher. It was the same with the Gospels, every fact noted, every truth mastered was at once repeated to groups of eager inquirers. It was a most touching sight to see little groups scattered about here and there in the church, each of which had in its centre a native teacher who was himself at other times in the day an eager learner. I inquired as to the qualification of the best of the native workers with the object of setting them apart publicly for work as Lay Readers. The names of six were suggested .... (among others, Sembera Mackay). He was the first of those under in- struction in Uganda to confess his belief in Christ as his Saviour and to ask for baptism. On October 8, 1881, he brought to Mackay a letter written by himself, "with a pointed piece of spear grass and some ink of dubious manufacture." It ran thus: "Bwana Mackay, Sembera has come with compliments and to give you great news. Will you baptise him because he believes the words of Jesus Christ?" He was baptized with four others on March 18, 1882. He, too, had passed through all the troublous times of persecution and in 1886 was elected a member of the church council. He had refused a chieftainship in order to be free to work as a church teacher. — Alfred Tucker, Bishop of Uganda, Eighteen Years in Uganda, p. 112, 2 vols., Arnold. 1908. AN INCIDENT IN NYASALAND Here as so often in the history of missions, the messengers had come in the fulness of time. God in His providence had been preparing the people to receive them as expected guests. Prophetic utterances, that gleamed like stars in the dark night of heathen- ism, had prepared the way for them in a manner unknown to the church that sent the messengers and unknown to the messengers themselves. THE NEW TRIBE 169 Once, while instruction was being imparted to the recently baptized Christians in Rungwe, the text was met with, "There shall be signs in the heavens." Thereupon Numuagire related that about thirty years previously strange signs in the sky had at- tracted general attention in Kondeland. It appeared as though •many camp fires were lit there — then, as they began to die down, as though people sat around them. A man of her people named Muakikando had then uttered the following prophecy: "There is also another Lord, who is very great and good. And there is another town, which is very beautiful. Are our chiefs good? No, they deceive us. Are our villages good? No, they are poor. The great Lord in heaven has sent His fire to us; but that is not all. He will send people to us; people, whom we have never seen, will come and tell us of this Lord, and what He would have us do. "These people will bring with them much stuff for clothing. When I am dead you will see that I speak the truth." She added to this, that when the missionaries Meyer and Richard pitched their tent in Muakapalile, her husband had at once said to her: "There are the people of whom Muakikando had spoken." Because she had been prepared in this manner, she had so quickly grasped God's word. Most of that which the missionaries had said appeared to her new; but it seemed to her as if she had heard some of the message previously. In this corner of the earth as elsewhere, the old order was followed: "in the fulness of time" the Saviour appeared. The surprisingly good reception which the missionaries everywhere received was accounted for. — J. Taylor Hamilton, The Nyasa Mission, p. 74, Bethle- hem Printing Co., 1912. 170 AN AFRICAN TRAIL A WITNESS We asked our guide whether he had known any of those who had suffered (in the persecution of 1884). "Yes!" he replied, he "knew most of them, but one was a very dear friend, almost a brother" to him. "Were you a Christian then?" I asked. "No!" was the answer, "but my friend often talked to me about Jesus Christ, and besought me to become a disciple; but I hardened my heart." "But what led you to become a Christian at last?" "My friend, it was because my brother died for what he believed to be true. If he had not died I should never have become a Christian. How coidd I refuse then?" "And how did he die?" "My friend, first they speared him, and then they burned him," was the answer. And who was this that thus endured this two-fold agony? Was it one who had been trained from infancy in Christian truth, who had spent his manhood in battling for the faith once delivered to the saints, and who now in all the fervor of a matured belief and the power of a life-long conviction laid down his life rather than deny his Saviour? Naj% it was but a simple lad who had lived his short hfe in the heart of heathen Africa. But one day there was unfolded to him the story of the Cross. He believed it. He accepted Christ as his Saviour. With the faith of a little child he clung to Him and died rather than deny Him. — Alfred R. Tucker, Eighteen Years in Uganda, p. 12S, Arnold. London. 1908. THE NEW TRIBE 171 QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER V. 1. About how many adherents to Christianity are there in your field in Africa? 2. How many of these are church members? 3. What is the average time between the conversion of a native and his admission to the church? 4. How is this time occupied by the convert? 5. How does the school serve as a feeder for the church? 6. How on your field do the dispensary and the hospital serve as feeders for the church? 7. What are some of the sacrifices required of a convert among the tribes of your field? 8. Must they suffer persecutions? 9. What particular Christian virtues do your missionaries claim for their converts? 10. What are the chief causes of backsliding among them? 11. What do you know about the system of church collectioo on your field? 12. Are the native evangelists in your field paid by the native chm-ch or by the home Board? 13. Do you know the names and anything of the lives and characters of the more prominent Chiistian native leaders? BIBLE READING AND PRAYER FOR CHAPTER VI. Revelation 7: 9-17 Prayer OLORD, save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance: feed them also, and lift them up for ever. Remember, O Lord, Thy con- gregation, which Thou hast purchased of old: pour out Thy Spirit as floods upon the dry ground, and refresh Thy waiting heritage. Let Thy priests be clothed with righteousness, and let Thy saints shout for joy. Show Thy mercy also unto them that are afar off, and gather all the lost sheep into Thy fold; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." — Book of Common Worship. CHAPTER VI. THE NEW CUSTOM Secular There are more roots than the reli- influences gious root to the new custom of the for change. people of our neighborhood. The white man and his government have had power to modify the aspect and the habit of Hfe upon our beaches and throughout our forest. The government with its curious regard for human Hfe has checked so many of the natural sports of the Bulu. New attitudes Intertribal wars are discouraged, toward violence. Murder is discouraged. Abuse of women is discouraged. Certainly, the forest is wide and the highway is narrow; in the backwoods town the old evils flourish; but the government enlarges its sphere, its curious preferences are enforced upon a wider and wider area, until it begins to look as if tomorrow a man must hunt a corner in which to kill his own wife. Our Bulu suffers new hesitations along the old paths of violence. New thoughts He entertains, too, new thoughts of of labor. labor. The yearly head tax, with us a matter of from a dollar and a half to two fifty, has had a tremendous influence in modifying the thought and life of the tribe. The head tax is the equivalent of a month's unskilled labor; every adult male is taxed. Thus, every man must discharge once every 174 AN AFRICAN TRAIL year a debt to be met either by labor or by cash. Influence The introduction of money as cur- of money. rency has had influences very wide- spread and subtle. The nkukum (the rich man) of the primitive type has so clumsy a possession in the bodies of women, of wandering sheep, in the big tusks of ivory, — a possession so hard to be hoarded, so prone to run away, to be begged away, to die, that the nkukum must be clever indeed and sleep- less. Cash is a commodity so small that it can be hidden ; your very brother need not know that you have it. It has an understood, unvarying value. It accumulates by the process of labor with a curious inevitability, as if a hen were guaranteed to lay a daily egg. I have seen a young hammock carrier, not clever, no more than diligent, unwrap from a bandanna handkerchief a little fortune of nearly three hundred marks. We had come in our journeyings to sleep in a village where there was an evangelist. It pleased my young carrier, because he was about to spend the night with his brothers in a near-by town, to leave his fortune with his friend, the man of God. He knelt upon the clay floor of the evangelist's house and by the light of my lantern he ranged his money in piles of ten marks. Having verified the amount he tied it again in the handkerchief and passed it over to Ze. In the person of that young man depositing his fortune in the bank of an honest man's hand I first realized the emancipating poVer of cash, and its relation to the changing custom of the tribe. THE NEW CUSTOM 176 The ambition of the black man, wherever the white man has "shown his body," to dress Hke the white man, to be housed Hke the white man, to have a portion in the white man's culture — this passion of imitation has modi- fied, along the white man's thoroughfares, the aspect of the black man and his life. "That old thing," the bark cloth — that "thing of the birth of men" — is worn only by backwoodsmen nowadays. I saw a maker and wearer of bark cloth at Metet two years ago. He was an old man and beginning to have a certain local fame for skill in a craft that is disappear- ing. Yet, ten years ago half the carriers who passed our way wore bark cloth. More than half the male carriers were elaborately coifed ten years ago, and all the women. Into the windows of our little bark house they used to thrust what brave heads strung and studded with beads and shells and brass! Two years ago I traveled among the Ntum, the master hairdressers, whose women are headed like brilliant flowers. But not a man was coifed. "Because," they told me, "since we have seen the white man we know that the headdress is a thing of women and we feel shame to dress the heads of our men." There is an end of that art in that neighborhood. Wherever the black man sees the white man he feels shame for his own rusticity, for his lack of fashion. His native sense of personal ornament, which in our neighborhood has been distinctive, not grotesque, he sacrifices; his freedom from the burden of clothing he sacrifices; all the harmony of his person and his 176 AN AFRICAN TRAIL aspect of appropriate forest beauty he sacrifices to his conviction that the white man is the glass of fashion and the mold of form — all but his dark skin and his ineradicable tattoo. Poor mimic of white men — how his glory is departed! New need and Out of his new custom and the en- new supply. campment of white men in his country new needs are born, new industries urged upon him, old needs supplied in new ways. Now he need no longer smelt the iron out of the rock; there is a trader to sell him an imported cutlass for cash. The noble and complacent company of native blacksmiths recedes from the main-traveled regions. There is less and less need to bake earthen pots, to hew vessels of wood, to carve the hairpins of ebony, or the spoons of the old and charming designs. All these things are imported and are to be had along the highways for cash. Here are offered "new lamps for old." And now it is urged upon men that they be tailors, cobblers, carpenters; yes, it is even urged upon men that they take a hoe and, like women, till the ground ! Hew These are a few of the modifications opportunities. ^f uf^ which violently thrust the black man out of his immemorial groove. Many of these modifications you will perceive to be oppor- tunities which he is not fitted to meet. "The things of the Fathers" have not prepared him for these things. Except the Lord take him up he is to make a poor showing in the face of these opportunities. Left to his own poor adjustments under the shock THE NEW CUSTOM 177 of the things of the white man there is a swift col- lapse. Let any old coaster, trader or government, tell you of the wreckage. How to meet with honor the new opportunities of cash and commerce, labor and government — this essential education so necessary to a primitive people in the too sudden dawn of a new day — this is the immediate service of the things of God. For this the "medicine" of agricultural schools, indus- trial schools, trades and training. For this the medicine of discipline in the relation between time and money, between mine and thine. For this long oppositions to begging, hospitalities refused by the missionary and hospitalities paid for by him. For this the most rigid insistence upon money values, until money and its moral significance shall have meaning to the black man. Standards of value, money, time, contract, — these to be driven into the mind of the African that he may meet with honor his too sudden opportunities. And how to cope with the disinte- grating influences of a foreign, im- posed custom — for not all the effects of a white man's government are benign. Old habits of dis- cipline are broken down, old notions of responsibility laid aside; the very amenities are forgotten in a country where the criminal code has suffered a sudden and perplexing change, where a man may be hanged for cannibalism, and a disobedient wife may no longer be tied to a pillar of her husband's house and burned with a torch. Nowadays the very 178 AN AFRICAN TRAIL women have a "hunger for goods," they do not so much as ask their husbands' leave to carry loads on long journeys. They themselves are paid for such labor, they themselves spend their wage. The old discipline breaks down in a thousand ways among a people without a moral substitute. Impudence, thieving, drunkenness, venereal disease, anarchy are swift upon the white man's highway, where the headmen of the villages are powerless to inflict upon passing caravans the old penalties attaching to the breach of the old communal laws. God's law the The life of the clan, of the village, new restraint. of the family, suffers from the lack of the former habits of restraint — from the new habits of freedom. It must be that the Lord will take up these fragment?: of the old order and save them from waste. TJiC law of God is ^'medicine" for the disorders of the time of transition. The ten tyings, — these are yokes upon the necks of young Bulu bucks who wander unmolested down paths cut by the white man. The old things pass away and the white man makes new rules for old. But God still says to the eager young of the black man, "Honor thy father and thy mother." Upon their hot ambitions He blows a cooling breath, "Thou shalt not covet." In the heart of that girl carrying a load in a miscellaneous caravan — she who might not, in the old days, so much as show herself in the palaver house unless her owner called her — in the heart in that emancipated young body, the voice of God says, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." THE NEW CUSTOM 179 Not all the new customs of our Bulu are rooted in religion; surely you begin to see this, and to see that the things of God must serve the black man to meet new opportunities and to mend the breaches in the walls of his city. „. These cities whose walls have been ajic new town* mended by men of the tribe of God — you come upon them here and there in our forests. For fifty villages where there are people of the tribe of God, there will be one village where the headman is a Christian. In such a town as this there is an extraordinary modification of custom. In every community where the people of God are in force there will be a thatched roof which is the school of a week day, and of a Sabbath, the church. But come into the town of Bekui Amuku of a week day and you will find that impressive Christian headman learning his letters, his big body crowded in among the bodies of the children of his village. And of a Sunday, under the same roof, Bekui Amuku will be leading his people in prayer. His is a Christian town with a Christian headman. All the Christian ambition and effort and patience of his people are encouraged by his example. I remember one night, ten years ago, when the first Christian headman of our neighborhood came to beg of the people of God a leader, that his town might be a Christian town. Old Mejio, austere and silent, with two "real men" of his village, on that night long ago, outlined their intention — their new thought — ^for their village. They were the pioneers 180 AN AFRICAN TRAIL of their tribe, middle-aged radicals — than which there is no more stubborn radical. Their purpose never has flagged, their village took the form they had planned. And if today the village of Lam, on the road to the interior, is a less radical affair than it had seemed in the day of its inception — why, this is the fate of all radical ventures. In this town is a church built of bark by the townspeople, by them thatched with a thousand leaves of the palm tree. Here is the school and a little house for the Bulu who is the school teacher. By the townspeople he is paid, by the women of the town he is fed. Here is an evangelist, paid, too, by the townspeople. Is he not their father? Old Mejio sitting in his palaver house sees the boys go to school and the girls. Morning and evening he sees the villagers climb the hill to pray in God's house, carriers from the far places of the forest trail in the wake of these. Myself on a Sunday of the dry season, I have seen a hundred foreigners drop their loads to enter the church at Lam. I have lain down at peace in that town with the knowledge that no black woman would suffer violence there, no witchcraft would be prac- tised, no cruelties perpetrated. Of such a town as this a young girl said to me, "It is good to be there; one may be merry without fear." Such a common well-being as this prevails only in the town of a Christian headman. New men and But the things of God are not de- new thoughts. layed by the sloth of princes; where the king's heart is still evil there is yet a prophet THE NEW CUSTOM 181 to care for the tribe of God. In how many towns where the headman is still the old Adam, God has set a new man of His own choosing to serve His children. He has less need of new towns than of new men, with new customs, with new thoughts. New men — and in my heart I see them. In my first year I saw four new men in the making, four middle-aged men who were then born again. In my last year I heard each of these four men address his own congregation in his own parish. It would be hard to choose between them for faith or for works. In my heart I see one of them, Bian by name, and that name means "medicine." He stands before his people of a Sunday in a white singlet and a loin cloth; no shoes or other white man's fashion for Bian. He is deliberate, with a virile, rather raucous voice, a controlled emotion, and an absolute con- viction. On this day he spoke about the supremacy of Christ in the councils of God, not that he so analysed his subject. Said he : "Righteousness is three: the righteousness of God embodied in Christ, the righteousness of the Word of God forever showing forth Christ, and the righteousness of the missionary (or evangel) con- tinually preaching Christ." And to his people he said: "I shudder for you that you put the things of this world before the things of Christ so that you say, *I am hated, else I would have been made a church member. I am hated, else I would have been made an elder!' What is a church member.'' What is 182 AN AFRICAN TRAIL an elder? Has God required of you that you should be a church member? Or an elder? He has required of you this one thing — that you should believe in Christ! He is not like a man who is giving his daughter in marriage and who names in the dowry many kinds of goods and when the husband has paid all these he says, 'Still another thing you must find and give me.' So that the poor husband says, 'I have given all. Where shall I find this one thing more?' Not so has God dealt with you. He has named but one thing that you must give to possess Christ, that is — your faith. Just your faith. And you man of God, if you are rich and possess goats and sheep and hens and much goods, be always saying, 'One thing I possess, Christ!' And you poor man of God, still be saying, 'Even so; one thing I possess, Christ!'" So urges the new man speaking his new thought of gain, of possession, of ambition. Another of these four men, Bekalli, when he would be married and had given the last of the dogs and the dog bells, the sheep and the guns, when the last articles of the dowry had been accepted by the bride's kinsfolk — Bekalli thought how he might best express his new thought of the new custom of a Christian marriage. The missionaiy has not in our neighborhood instituted a religious marriage cere- mony; it has been required of Christian men that they shall pay the last item ot" barter before con- summating t'le marriage, this being the condition of an honorable mating. Bekalli, having come to an THE NEW CUSTOM 183 end of these transactions at the close of a day, lit his lantern and went about among his friends, calling them to a thanksgiving service, I was among those called. I followed the light of that lantern under the thatch of the church and saw that little man with the tender face of a black apostle John read the Word of God. I heard him thank God for his wife and beg of Him to make the "paths of marriage straight paths," which God has done. Bekalli and his wife have been given power to demonstrate the endurance and the peace and the love of Christian marriage. New women and New men, new thoughts of sex, new law marriage. customs of marriage — these make new women. Abwa was one of the wives of Bekui Amuku. Almost, she was the favorite wife, but not altogether so; for when, led by Abwa, Bekui became a Christian he chose another of his women for his wife. Yet of Abwa he said that he would never sell her. When a Christian man, "a man strong in God," should desire Abwa, and she, too, should desire him, then Abwa would be given in marriage without price. Never would he ask goods for Abwa, rather he would give a goat with this woman whom he had loved, and so he did. On the day that the evangelist Melom — a young man strong in God and acceptable to Abwa — on the day that Melom took Abwa from the hands of Bekui, he took her "free," and a goat walked with that little caravan on the path to Melom's town. Do not think that such new thoughts of sex 184 AN AFRICAN TRAIL and of gain were without power to mold a woman so radically dealt with. I have followed that caravan of the new man and the new woman bound by the new marriage along many paths of the forest, to find an ember of their new thought still bright in many a dim hut. "Surely you speak like one who is not ignorant of the Word of God.''" I have asked more than one responsive woman of the backwoods, who has said, "A man and his wife, people of God slept a night, two nights, three nights in my town; that woman's name was Abwa. She was a woman certainly strong in the new things, and I very much remember the word that she taught me." This is the most radical marriage that has come to my knowledge, but a thousand new words I have heard from lesser men and women. A Bulu of the old-fashioned type, converted in full manhood, was arranging his future; his name was Se Menge. His brother was a headman with women to spare, and had kept Se Menge supplied with a mate from the women of his own town. Becoming a Christian, Se Menge must fend for himself; as Ibia has said "Every Christian, like an orphan chick, dependent on his own bill." How do I know upon how many women Se Menge cast an appraising eye.'' One day he announced to me that he had found a wife. "Is she young, is she beautiful?" asked the white woman, knowing how hard is the road of monogamy to unused Bulu feet. "She is not very young and I am not saying that she excels for beauty, but she is a person of the BULU WOMAN THE NEW CUSTOM 185 tribe of God, and her sisters are of that tribe and her brothers. Since I am a Christian, I see that marriages are of two kinds, the marriage of desire and the marriage of friendship. This marriage that I am marrying, I am able to say of it that it is a marriage of friendship," said this middle-aged Bulu man with dignity. Later, the white woman met the little Bulu object of the marriage of friendship; she was not far from young, and in the fashion of her tribe she was beauti- ful. Her husband, plain man that he was and dull, had yet devised a thought which should honor her marriage and his with a new dignity. The new mar- ^^ is, of course, among the younger riage and the members of the tribe of God that the mission school. • • . new marriage is most common. Young school-bred men seek young girls who shall be pliable to the new training. Many a little Bulu gazelle of a girl is put into the hands of a white woman that a suitable wife may be made of her. Now she will be one of a hundred such young, wild things to be disciplined, to be taught the things of God, while she yet pursues the things of the Bulu woman, — the things of cooking, of planting, of harvesting. To read the Word of God, to count money, herself to sew her "things of ornament" — so much of the white woman's art will be exacted of her. To keep her body clean, her bit of cloth clean, to hold her wild tongue, to come when she is bidden, and to keep herself for her future husband alone, — this is the sum of the accomplishments which 18C AN AFRICAN TRAIL are so much desired by that new young African who means to make a new wife of the young girl upon whom he is giving goods, and who will not be taken by him in marriage until she is marriageable. T^^ °®^™"" How many such young things, the service. husband seventeen to twenty, the little bride fourteen to fifteen years of age, have gone away together to establsh in their own towns or in the towns of alien tribes the things of the new mar- riage. And I must be saying, how many of these have come to grief! by way of the girl's unruly tongue, or her temper, or the hand that unbarred the hut to a lover; by way of the young man's arrogance, or his exactions, or his infidelity. Many little new marriages that were to have been candles to light a naughty world have guttered down into the original darkness. But how many there are, black men and white, to witness that the marriage of the people of God is indeed strong; boys and girls that were our mission children, are men and women practising with honor the new things of sex at home and abroad. I have come upon them in what lonely backwoods; young teachers, young evangelists and their little wives, suffering exile for Christ's sake. That girl asking a blessing over food of another's planting, sleeping under the thatch of strangers, cheerfully enduring a circumstance of exile which is the supreme hardship for a woman of her tribe, and commendmg daily to the heathen about her — by her Christian face, her Christian grace — the things of the Lord Jesus — how proud of her I have been and how often THE NEW CUSTOM 187 astonished! Yes, I have found such an one often in my journeys, to amaze me. She had never promised us in her school days so much. She had been a wild little girl, very heedless, very shallow. Here she is, by her husband's side in some of the outposts of the things of God, demonstrating with dignity the things of the Christian home, with dignity and with humil- ity tending, before the attentive eyes of ignorant women, the sacred shrine of the new marriage. As there is a new husband and a new wife there is also a new father and a new mother. A father who sees in the little girl born to him more than goods, who has other am- bitions for his little son than that he shall be a rich man, owner of many women. This new mother goes down into her maternal experience not unaccompanied — there is a rod and staff to comfort her. I remember such a new father and mother showing me their baby, as it was proper that they should do, for was I not their mother, having known them since their childhood? Atongon was perhaps fifteen; Oye'e was twenty. Oye'e was overdressed, he wore all available white man's ornament, including a high collar and pointed shoes. I agree that he was gro- tesque, as too much the aspect of young Africa is grotesque. But those young feet had been beautiful on long journeys, bringing good tidings to the tribes to the east. Little Atongon had been with her husband until she must prepare for her little one. This she had done in her mother's town near the 188 AN AFRICAN TRAIL mission clearing. Now I must take their son in my arms. They told me that his name was Isaac — for the child of Christian parents must always have a Bible name. But of this little Isaac I was told, "No, really he has no Bulu nickname. No other name than Isaac for this little one!" And then I heard how Atongon had dreamed. Yes, she had wakened in the dark before the dawn of a certain day and had spoken to Oye'e of their child. The Lord had told her that they were to have a child, and in her dream she perceived that there was in- deed a child, whose little hand the Lord held in His hand; the other little hand He placed in the hand of Atongon, saying to her, "This is your child; you will call him Isaac." So were you named, little Isaac, and of your mother it was told me that she would have no thing of magic about her child-bed. No, when the mis- sionary doctor came to see how it fared with Atongon, whose husband was still inland on the business of the tribe of God, he found a person of God, a black midwife there, and when you were born it was mid- night. It was very still in the village, only your mother watched and the doctor and the old black woman who was a person of the tribe of God. When you were placed beside your little mother she put her hand out to where there lay upon the slattings of her bamboo bed a hymn book. It was open at a hymn which your mother had chosen before your birth. "For," said she to the doctor, "I said in my heart, when I shall see my child we will sing this THE NEW CUSTOM 189 hymn. Therefore, sing it!" Then the doctor and the old woman and your little mother sang a hymn together on your birthnight while the village and the things of evil slept. Thus were you born to a Christian name of a mother who was a handmaid of the Lord! Old marriages This marriage of the young who are made new. members of the tribe — this is the obvious mold for the making of the new father, the new mother, the new family. The material is so plastic. Yet it is in God's power so to soften the hearts of the mature that established marriages take new forms; marriage is, as it were, born again — often by the travailing prayers of a Christian wife. The heart of the wife made new is continually "hung up" on her husband's account. She is informed by a persistent spirit of protest. She cannot let her husband alone. She knocks at his soul's door in season and out of season. She prays about him in public; she rises — six of her, ten of her — in the big gatherings of Christian women to beg for him their common prayers. She prays for him in private with all a woman's lack of discretion. I heard a woman of God say to her daughter-in-law: "When you pray for my son that God will turn his heart, get down upon your knees beside the bed where he lies and pray aloud, speaking to God of my son by name. For he will be greatly troubled in his spirit when he hears you speak of him to God by name; he will not be able to withstand that." Nor was he. There was shortly a new husband 190 AN AFRICAN TRAIL for that new wife — a new father for the children of that Christian woman. The uneven This Christian family is surely a y<*^®' favorable condition for the demon- stration of the new custom of the tribe of God. Happy those men who find themselves so placed, and those women! Upon such the eyes of the less fortunate dwell with envy. Yes, hard-pressed women who fight their holy war without human aid have told me of that envy, "I cannot see Malinga with her husband in church and her children but I break the tenth tying! I covet her good seat (her good position) that she has a Christian husband to help her walk straight, to help her teach her children. "WTien I see little girls whose fathers are people of God I feel pain in my heart for my child whose father is a person of this world. Already he re- ceives dowry for my httle girl who is no bigger than your wrist." So they complain, these new women who do not have the moral support of the Christian family; these new mothers who must bear alone their parental burdens. The man whose wife has not followed him into the tribe has his trials, his shame, and his temptations; but he can force the custom of his household to con- form more nearly to the custom of the tribe. The Christian woman must triumph by grace. I love to think how she triumphs as a wife! If a headman have a hundred wives with their hundred THE NEW CUSTOM 191 hearts, he will yet agree that those among them who are Christians are the better wives. And this even when he has beaten the meekest of them for announc- ing her intention to attend the communion service, whether he will or no. Yes, they triumph as wives. Their heathen husbands praise their virtues in the palaver houses. They have new customs of honesty, purity, diligence. They strive to hold their tongues. They are the best monitors over wild young brides. They do not run away except when hunger for the Word of God drives them to make a journey to some gathering of the people of the tribe of God; and from these journeys they return without scandal. More headmen than Wanji have said of a Christian wife, "The doing that she does makes me marvel at the power of God." They triumph, too, as mothers. How at every communion season they come, these Christian mothers, with their babies in slings of deerskin at their sides ! With what happy solemnity they present these little ones for baptism! How they have stripped their babies of amulets and all evil that would hinder, how they do, indeed, "suffer" that the little ones come unto Him! With what new thoughts and new customs these children are urged by maternal hands into the tribe of God! The new There is a phase of the moon which children. jg gpoken of by the Bulu as "the deceiver of children." It is the third quarter of the moon, whose rising is delayed beyond the first hour of the early dark. It is so called, their fathers tell 192 AN AFRICAN TRAIL me, laughing, because the children have gone to sleep before the moon rises. They who love the moonlight have been deceived by its slow appearing. The bright- ness of the rising of Christ upon the African's dark- ness, how the children are wakened by their parents to rejoice in it! Here is no "deceiver of children." Here, presented by the new father and the new mother, is the new child. Little Atongon, the new mother, sang her thanksgiving beside a new child. In the tribe of God there is a new childhood. New thoughts of gain, of sex, and of fetish, — these have built a new custom about the child. Let Donald Fraser tell you, in his Winning a Prim- itive People, of the old shameful customs which must be displaced by the new custom of the tribe of God. Especially in the abolishment from the Christian family of the things of shame is the child a new child. I was once asked by a fellow missionary to hear the confessions of eighty little girls. They had come to him, who was our minister, in a body. They wished to be "people of the tribe." I applied myself for a week to these eighty interviews, uncovering the secret sins of those little lives. A number of these children had Christian mothers and when this was the case I received a certain type of answer: "These things are not done in the house of my mother." "I am able to say that mother is a person of God, and has forbidden these things." "Although the girls of our town do these things my mother has tied me not to do them." THE NEW CUSTOM 198 "My father and mother are Christians; they tell me daily that they would feel a peculiar shame if I were to follow the old custom of the Bulu in this matter." More I could say, but have not space, of the em- phasis laid by the children of Christian parents upon the ennobled custom of their family. The new This new child, who is set in a new schooling. home, is sent to a new school. The dark initiations into secret societies which were the old custom of care for the boy, the old things of shame which were training for the girl, — these are displaced in the custom of the tribe by the Christian school. The hundreds of village schools which you will never find on the map of Africa and the great central schools whose names are not unknown — these are the mints where the gold of the new childhood is coined and stamped with an image and superscription which will make it current in the hands of the Head of the tribe. On the forehead of the little daughter of the heathen there is tattooed a tribal mark; on the nape of the little boy's neck there are two little scars, the stamp of his initiation into the evil wisdom of a secret society. But the young of the tribe of God are stamped for service. The new child will have for diploma when his school day is done a position of responsibihty in a Christian neighborhood. The new There is a new neighborhood. There neighborhood. jg^ wherever the Word has become Ufe, a community to be served. The old community 194 AN AFRICAN TRAIL has been a community to be exploited, the new community is a neighborhood to be served. Ibia says at the close of one of his rebukes against the exploiting of the community: "It is of the 'visit of begging' and the 'begging friend' that we do speak, because visitation and friend will not cease in the world." Again he says: "Slothfulness and prideness does kill you. Get out slothfulness and prideness from yourself. Prideness makes the people to refuse serving lest they be said that they are not great men. Where shall you find power if you do not serve each other? From stealing and begging.? Don't look disdainfully at the men who do work and them that serve you. They do save the people on the earth. They that doesn't do are unqualified in the world." I give you this comment exactly as it appears in Myongo's translation. It is the signpost at the fork of the road; here is the worn path to the community to be exploited, and here is a new path, a new little breach in the forest still full of the d6bris of its clearing, and this little pioneer path is the way to the neighborhood to be served. The caravans of the tribe of God go up this path, and with them they carry the new things of service. Thus laden, there comes into the old clearings by this new path — the neighbor. In the pack of the neighbor, a heavy The neighbor. , , 4. ^ i?!,- j pack, what treasure 01 thmgs new and old ! Old things renewed by Christ, dim old treasures of instinct rubbed up on the sleeve of His seamless THE NEW CUSTOM 195 coat and put into the neighbor's pack for the use of the community. There is the patriarchal instinct of the Bulu put to its Christian use, lest the tribe of God lack for fathers and judges. There is the maternal instinct enriched and released for the neighborhood. The old Bulu communal life has cut a groove for these. The Bulu has more fathers and mothers than the white man. "She is my mother, because of the many kindnesses; he is my father because he is my father's kin" — of how many old men and women a young Bulu will give this account. "I see her as a child of my own, because her mother was just a little bride in my house when she was born." So will a childless woman say, among the Bulu, of another's child, until now the neighbor will be saying of the child of another who has died, or who has deserted, "God sent me this child." "Is this, indeed, the child of your body.?" I asked a friend of mine from whom I had been separated, and in whose hut, now that I had returned, I found a child. "You white women are always speaking of the things of the body! No — this child is not a child of my body, she is a child of my heart! God did not give me a child until the day this little girl's mother ran away with a young man who stole her. That day I said, 'This, now, is my child that God has given me. Every day while she is little I shall tell her the Word of God, and before her eyes — though they are the eyes of a child — I shall do the things of 196 AN AFRICAN TRAIL God; and the day she is as big as need be, she must go to school; and when she opens her eyes (to the things of marriage) she herself shall choose the man !* Her father agrees !" So said the neighbor-mother who was Ze, the wife of Wanji, taking the bright tool of her sharpened motherhood out of the pack of service. With such a tool as this old Nyunga works, to whom God has given scores of girls to mother in a school I know. Over that wild company with its laughing and its sulking, its boisterous play and its waves of dis- order broods old Nyunga, the children of whose body are all grown and gone. To this extreme — this almost desperate adventure of motherhood — Nyunga came from such a fireside as old women commonly frequent; quiet was there, and a little soup was in the clay pot. Now, you would say, the grasshopper is a burden to old Nyunga; when God calls her to the charge of a community of girls, a whole pest of grasshoppers! With what love, what patience, what sleepless Argus eye and what blind mother eye Nyunga has served her community — let white women and black women relate! I remember a day speaking to a headman who was a Christian and who was suffering under the discipline of the alphabet. He was, he told me, the father of his village. And as such, and for the sake of all those people whom God had given him, he must learn to read the Word. No one knew better than he how unskilled he was in that new justice which it was his part to administer. The Word of God, he knew, was THE NEW CUSTOM 197 the text of the new code. But this thing of reading, he told me, looking at me very wistfully from behind his mature, tattooed mask, was of all things, hardest ! "You are that cutlass," I told him, "that was bought of a trader, but it was not sharp. So the Man who bought you and who has work waiting His tool, is sharpening you on the stone that is school!" "I give you great thanks," said the neighbor who was indeed so much, to my knowledge, the tool in God's hands. "Brother, I greet you!" says the neighbor, to no matter whom. This is the hand the neighbor puts upon a stranger's shoulder. Be sure that the stranger starts. Do not forget, that the neighbor, before he was a neighbor, was to every alien an enemy. Before the people of God began to spring up in the forest there was no intertribal talk of "brother," unless between allied tribes. I once heard long talk of this matter on a forest journey. I had four hammock carriers, each of a different tribe. "This walking that we walk today," they told each other on that journey, "is a strange walking for black people to walk! Four men of four tribes walking in one company and doing one work! God alone could unite us after this fashion," and to the white woman they said, "Before the time of the things of God, not one of us but would have feared to meet the other. Ah, brothers, is it not a true word?" "He tells the truth!" 198 AN AFRICAN TRAIL "And now, we eat together and we sleep together like people of one village!" The new There is at the hands of this neighbor hospitaJity. ^ new hospitality. "Before the white man came we knew friendship and the things of hospitality," said Min Koe Ntem — and that is true, as the white stranger in the land must always acknowledge. But another woman said to me: "I marvel at the new things of hospitality ! Always we have excelled in hospitality toward men who were our husbands' honored guests, and to our own kin, but now there begin to be new things of hospi- tality, — we cook our best food even for women and for those who are the less 'real' people." I know a little neighbor who never slept in her own bed, but upon the clay floor, when in the days before and after the communion Sunday the hospi- tality of the neighborhood was taxed to the limits Do not think lightly of the new things of hospitality among a people whose custom of polygamy is re- placed by monogamy. There is now only one wife with two hands for the old tasks that v/ere so easily turned off by the many wives. The new There are new things of consolation, consolation. <'jj^ such a town one may be merry without fear!" Yes, and in such a town one may be sad without fear. How little the white man knows of the reality of this emancipation. To mourn with- out fear the dead! To escape the accusation of witchcraft when your child has died ! To sit in your house feeling a grief, knowing that in the palaver- THE NEW CUSTOM 19!* house the father of your child feels a grief that is a friend to your grief. Or, if you must bear the con- tradictions of sinners, to see — in your lonely hour of sorrovf — the neighbor come up the street. To feel the kind dew of a new consolation fall upon you! This mercy of consolation is all new. Never the Bulu spake like this until the Lord spake in them. Those Christian women whose silence is louder than the wailing of the mourners — who, when they are permitted to speak, speak comfort to that distracted being in the ashes; who know how, for God has taught them, to draw into the brown dusk of that poor hut the radiance of man's immortal hope, — these are the neighbor, mending with a new skill the old mortal break in the human heart. The neighbor The neighbor must endure long evangelist. journeys and exile. God has set the world in his heart. He has errands far from home. Yes, as far from home as a day's journey. He must take the Bread of Life to the aliens who perish a day's journey away and across a river, and two days' journey, and a week's journey, and presently there is for the neighbor a moon of journeying and a lonely season in a "cold" town. In such adventures as these the neighbor suffers hunger and scorn — the laughing scorn of the African, which the African bears so ill. But the neighbor bears it. Still in his hunger and his embarrassment he blows upon the ember which he has brought on his long journeys to this town of darkness. He is "the-man-who- brings-the-ember." Yes, he is that. Poor man of 800 AN AFRICAN TRAIL many failures, many dark shadows on his past, many evil currents in his blood, he is yet "the-man- vrho-brings-the-ember" — a kind of humble and accredited Prometheus. He and his ember! Cannot you trace him by that little light, busy upon the map of the African dark- ness? Your statistics that run into the thousands — into the hundreds of thousands — what are they but the sum of the neighbors, each with his ember, his coal off the altar! How upon the African map they outline the African church! They are like that Bulu father who must show to his son the "things of Tolo." Tolo is the constella- tion of the Hare. Near the mighty Orion it shines, the chosen constellation of the Bulu. It is his treasure out of the golden store. For him Tolo naarks the year. Those five stars are to him a bright head, and hands and feet. When, in the first dark, Tolo stands above the roofs of the houses, then is the time for the sons of men to be felling the trees of the forest, that they may burn the debris of the new clearing, and that the women may plant in these before the season of rain. All the "real men" of the Bulu watch the bright body of Tolo walk upon the upper paths; and to every lad of the Bulu, so the Bulu have told us, there comes a night of initiation, when his father shows him the sky. Then, because the lad is slow to find the body of Tolo in all those swarming stars, his father takes five coals from the palaver-house fire, and on the village street he spreads them out in the bright design. Then, on THE NEW CUSTOM «01 the floor of the clearing between the walls of the rifted forest there appears — for the uplifting of a little boy — an incarnation of Tolo, the mighty and the glittering one, the counsellor. Hunting among the inaccessible stars he sees the bright head, the hands, the feet — ancient and lovely. He discerns them, because in the dust of the village street there has been drawn out for him their express image, in the trembling rose of mortal embers. Yes, the church of Christ in Africa is thus out- lined upon the dust of the village streets. Trembling old hands and the quick hands of the young spread out in the village commons the embers of obedience to God, of love to God, of service to their neighbors. These new things of humility, of chastity, of truth, of justice and of mercy — what are these but the express image, upon the floor of the African clearing in the dark of the African night of that One who is the Son of God and the Son of Man? Be sure that upon this outline among them the dark tribes ponder. Be sure that, pointed by the neighbor, they raise their faces to the skies. And there, in the heart of the old confusions of their universe, they behold the shining of the Wonderful, Counsellor, the Saviour, the Prince of Peace. There He stands above the roofs of their houses, proclaiming the season of clearing and burning and planting; sum- moning the "real men" and the "real women" of Africa to the work of a mighty harvest. "I know thy works," saith He that holdeth the seven stars in His right hand, who walketh in the fl02 AN AJUICAN TRAIL midst of the seven golden candlesticks; "I know thy works and where thou dv/ellest, exen where Satan's seat is." And again He says, "To him that over- cometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving him that receiveth it." "I know," saith He that holdeth the stars and walketh among the candlesticks — "I know the statistics of the African church." THE NEW CUSTOM 808 KHAMA, THE CHRISTIAN CHIEF OF THE 3ECHUANA From the very outset the young chief declared his intention of ruling his people according to Christian principles, and it may be doubted whether any native potentate in South Africa has en- deavoured as faithfully to carry out his original intention, or has succeeded so signally. In spite of the opposition of the old heathen element, he was successful in gradually putting down objection- able customs, such as witchcraft, circumcision, wife purchase (bogado) and slavery; in stopping the introduction of brandy into his territories; and in building up a stable kingdom upon the ruins of the old lawless and disordered state. He was likewise successful in preventing, through strong representation and a personal visit to England, the absorption of his territory by the chartered company. Kliama remains today the most eminent example in South Africa of a Christianized native chief. — J. du Plessis, A History of Christian Missiotis in South Africa, p. 278, Longman's & Co., 1911. KINDNESS AMONG CHRISTIANS One knows of cases where lads have carried to hospitals sick persons who have been abandoned, that they might be cared for. One of the most popular funds of the native church is that for the care of the widow and helpless. To this money is given cheer- fully and many a miserable old slave woman has had her latter days brightened by the care of the Church. I came into a little village recently and found none of the Christians there. After pitching my tent, I waited till the evening for their appearing, and then they came with their evangelist at their head. They had spent the whole day hoeing the garden of an infirm old widow who could not keep herself. And one knows many cases like this, and has seen the strong young Christians, when a new village was being built, setting apart some days to build a house for some sick or widowed Christian, who had no other claim upon them than that she could do nothing for herself. — Donald Fraser, Winning a Primitive People, p. 99, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1914. «04 AN AFRICAN TRAIL THE AFRICAN AND CHANGE There have bean more changes id the South African tribes during the last fifty years than during the fifty or five hundred preceding centuries, and tliis process of transformation is bound to continue at a geometrical rate of progression, during the fifty ensuing years. Taking into consideration for a moment the real and permanent interest of the Native, let us ask to what probable goal this transformation is leading him. I leave on one side, for the present, the influence of Missionary enterprise. Ci%Tlization has certainly brought some blessings to the tribe and I have impartially and carefully noted them. Disappearance of deadly famines, owing to the development of trade; better clothing (this is a mixed blessing); better seeds and agricultural implements (plough); possibility of earning money; incentive to work in order to pay taxes (this Natives would certainly not call r blessing I) ;decrease of polygamy; broadening of ideas, consequent . a travelers and work in towns. But the curses of civilization far exceed its blessings for the South African Native: he has lost more through it than he has gained. Loss of poUtical interest and responsibility, loss of hierarchic respect for the chiefs and for the elder brother; loss of personal dignity; moreover, we notice decrease of religious faith and of respect for taboos. In addition, the vices of civilization have found a deplorable welcome on the part of these primitives, and these vices have caused new and very dangerous diseases w^hich are now quickly spreading amongst them: Alchoholic cachoxy, sj^philis, a great increase of consumption, due to the work in towns, without speaking of the criminal instincts which have developed under these influences — miu"der and rape (hence the Black peril, which was unknown in the primitive state). The tribe has lost its orien- tation and moral and physical results have quickly followed. To fight against these new and frightful foes the Black race happily possesses a considerable physical strength, and great prolificacy, but these may not necessarily last forever. They can be lost. ... I cannot conceal the fact that I consider the situa- tion of the South African tribe, under present circumstances, a THE NEW CUSTOM 205 very serious one. If these influences are not checked I believe in the possible extinction of the race, in the long run, and I think every thoughtful observer will come to the same conclusion. Ought not certain steps to be taken by the government in order to stop the progress of the evil? Would not, for instance, a policy of segregation be commendable? Or, would it not be in the interests of the Natives to remove them to tropical Africa, leaving the white man alone in South Africa? These questions have been discussed at length in South African papers, and I have nothing to say about them except that such steps seem to be absolutely impracticable. I am con%dnced that the only remedy for these deadly dangers is the formation, in the Black tribe, of a strong moral character accompanied by suflScient enlightenment of mind to enable the Native, himself, to perceive the danger and overcome it. I am con\'inced that Christianity is the only true solution of the problem. Christianity, not merely a new set of rites taking the place of the old animistic rites, but the spiritual Christianity — which perfectly combines the religious belief and the moral duty — accepted by the Bantu soul — and leading the weak and carnal Bantu savage to the height of the Christian ideal, thus victoriously replacing the non-moral religion and the non-religious morality of the Native. Christianity, the religion of sanctity, affording the only real satisfaction to the aspiration for purity so conspicuous in the Bantu rites. Science will soon dispel all the superstitious dread of the taboos. Let those imaginary fears be replaced by the fear of moral wrong — sin becoming for the Christianized Native the real, the true taboo — and a healthy life will then be possible. Christianity, the religion of conversion, regeneration, super- natin*al transformation, bringing within the reach of the Native a power from above to deUver him and save him. Magical notions are doomed to die before long in the light of Science. . . . But the faith in an all-powerfid Father will free the savage from the fear of spirits and open his heart to the holy influences of the Religion of Christ. ms AN AFRICAN TRAIL Clirlstianily, the religion of love, love between individuals, and love between the races, regulating the relations between Whites and Blacks, who are both indispensable to the cultivation, exploitixtion, and full utilization of the marvelous riches of South Africa, dispelling race hatred, and promoting the helpful collabo- ration of /liricanders and Africans. But is the Bantu capable of accepting such a high and spiritual religion? I answer: "Yes! Their intelligence can understand the Gospel of 'the Father WTio is in Heaven,' as they already possess the rudiments of this central teaching of Christianity in the beliefs of Ancestrolatry, and in their conceptions of Heaven. That their heart is able to grasp it by faith — the only con- dition of entrance into the Kingdom of God — is proved by a thousand instances." — Henri A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe, p. 340, Imprimerie Attinger Freres, Neuchatel, Switzerland, 181S. THE NEW CUSTOM 207 QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER VI. 1. What are some of the secular agencies that have modified the primitive circumstance of the people of your African field? 2. What are some of the benefits of these secular influences for change? 3. What are some of the regrettable features? 4. What is your mission striving to do to prepare the natives to prosper in these new conditions? 5. Are there any Christian headmen in your neighborhood? 6. What is the effect upon village life of the conversion of a headman? 7. WTiat is the effect upon domestic hfe in your neighbor- hood of the conversion of the husband? 8. Of the wife? 9. Of the parents? 10. What is the effect upon dsmestic life ef the Christian education for girls? 11. What is the effect upon child life in your missisn wf the Christian home? 12. The Christian school? 13. What is the effect in your neighborhood of the Christian theory of medicine? 14. What have your missionaries to say of the growth of the Christian as a neighbor in your field? 15. What are some of the functions of the Christian of your neighborhood in operation for the common good? A BRIEF READING LIST The books included in the following bibliography are but a few of those that may be read with profit, but they present a rather formidable list to the average busy woman. I have made, there- fore, a little selection of the more indispensable books, and have supplemented it with the names of other valuable books which may be read by those who have time and opportunity. Of books touching upon Africa in general the following are suggested: The Opening up of Africa, Sir H. H. Johnston (Henry Holt, New York) $0.75. One of the following: The Future of Africa, Donald Fraser (Chiu-ch Missionary Society, London, 1911) $0.75. Christus Liberator, Ellen C. Parsons (Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions, West Medford, Mass., 1905) $0.50. Daybreak in the Dark Continent, W. S. Naylor (Young People's Missionary Movement, New York, 1904) $0.50. Suggested further reading where time affords and a library is available: Dawn in the Dark Continent, James Stewart (Oliphant, Ander- son & Ferrier, London, 1903) Qs. net. History of Christian Missions in South Africa, J. du Plessis (Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1911) $3.50. Daybreak in Livingstonia, James W. Jack (Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, 1900) $1.50. Natives of British Central Africa, A. Werner (A. Constable & Co., London, 1907) 6s. net. Thinking Black, Dan Crawford (Doran, New York, 1913) $2.00. 210 AN AFRICAN TRAIL Snap Shots from Sunny Africa, Helen E. Springer (Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, 1909) $1.00. Pioneering in Central Africa, Samuel P. Werner (Presbyterian Committee of Publication, Richmond, Va., 1903) $2.00. Pioneering in the Congo, John M. Springer (Methodbt Book Concern, New York, 1916) $1.00. The chapter on Africa in The History of Christian Missions, Chas. H. Robinson (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1915) $2.50. Any of thr books by Sir H. H. Johnston. CHAPTER I. Suggested reading: The Lives of Robert and Mary Moffat, John S. Moffat (A. C. Armstrong & Son, New York, 1888) $1.50. The Personal Life of David Livingstone. W. G. Blaikie (Fleming H. Revell Co.. New York) $0.50. Further suggested reading; Alexander Mackay of Uganda, Mrs. J. W. Harrison (A. C. Armstrong & Son, New York, 1899) $1.50. On the Threshold of Central Africa, Francois Coillard (American Tract Society, New Y'ork. 1903) $2.50. A Life for Africa (biography of A. C. Good), Ellen C. Parsons (Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, 1900, 2nd Ed.) $1.25. James Hannington, E. C. Dawson (Anson, Randolph & Co., York, 1887) $2.00. Stefwart of Lovedale, James Wells, D.D. (Fleming H. Revell Co., New York. 1909. 2nd Ed.) $1-50. A BRIEF READING LIST 211 Mary Slessor of Calabar, W. P. Livingstone (Hodder & Stough- ton. New York, 1915) 3s. 6i. On the Borders of Pigmy Land, Ruth B. Fisher (Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, 1905) $1.25. How I Found Livingstone, Henry Stanley (Scribner, New York, 1891) $3.50. And any of Livingstone's Books. There are three. I would note that Mary Slessor's field was north of Bantu Africa; but her biography is so rich and so characteristic that I have included it in our list. Leaflets: Africa Factsfrom Mission Fields, Flag Series (Women's Foreign Missionary Society, Methodist Episcopal Church, 581 Boyleston St., Boston, Mass.) $0.05. Isabella H. Nassau of Africa (Women's Board of Foreign Missions of Presbyterian Church, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York) $0.03; $0.30 per doz. CHAPTER 11. Suggested reading: The Article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica on Bantu Lan- guages (11th Edition). Among the Wild Ngoni, W. A. Elmslie (Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, 1899) $1.25. Among Congo Cannibals, J. H. Weeks (Lippincott, 1913) $3.50. Further suggestions: My Life in Basvioland, Eugene CasalLs (The Religious Tract Society, 56 Paternoster Row, London, 1889) 5s. The Baganda, Their Customs and Beliefs, John Roscoe (Mac- millan, New York, 1911) $5.00. 212 AN AFRICAN TRAIL Savage Man in Central Africa, A. L. Curean (Fisher Unwin, London. 1915) 12s. 6d. The Essential Kafir, Dudley Kidd (A. & C. Black, London, 1904) 18s. Particularly, I would suggest to interested students who have access to an adequate library to read with this chapter, vclume one of: Life of a Smdh African Tribe, Henri Junod (Attinger Freres, Neuchatel, Switzerland, 2 vols., 1912) 30s. Leaflets: The Women of West Central Africa, Bertha D. Stover (Women's Congregational Board, Room 523, 40 Dearborn St., Chicago, 111.) $0.02; $0.20 per doz. The Umbunda Baby and Its Mother, Elizabeth R. Eunis (Woman's Board, 704 Congregational House, Boston, Mass.) $0.02; $0.20 per doz. Home Life in Africa (Women's Board Foreign Missionary Society of Presbyterian Church, 501 Witherspoon Building, Philadelphia, Pa.) $0.02; $0.20 per doz. Other Children, Jean Kenyon Mackenzie (Women's Board of Foreign Missions of Presbyterian Church, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York) $0.02; $0.20 per doz. Brass Rods and Beads, Mrs. O. W. Scott (Women's Foreign Missionary Society, Methodist Episcopal Church, 581 Boyleston St., Boston, Mass.) $0.02; $0.20 per doz. The African Drum, A. W. Halsey, D.D. (Women's Board of Foreign Missions of Presbyterian Church, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York) $0.02; $0.15 per doz. A BRIEF READING LIST 815 CHAPTER in. Suggested reading: Among Congo Cannibals, J. H. Weeks (Lippincott, 1913) $3.50. Chapter VlII of vol. I of Pioneering on the Congo, W. H. Bentley (Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, 2 vols., 1900) $5.00. The Jungle Folk of Africa, Robert Milligan (Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, 1908) $1.50. Further suggestions : The Baganda, John Roscoe (Maemillan, 1911) $5.00. Life of a South African Tribe, vol. II, Henri Junod. (See note on this book under bibliography Chap. II.) Fetishism in West Africa, R. H. Nassau (Scribners, 1904) $2.50. Leaflets: The Pentecost on the Congo, Rev. Henry Richards (American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society, Ford Building, Boston, Mass.) $0.05. Umzumbe Revisited, Mrs. Amy B. Cowles (Woman's Board, 704 Congregational House, Boston, Mass.) $0.04; $0.40 per doz. Wonder Stories, Mrs. Charles W. Egan (Woman's Board of Foreign Missions of Presbyterian Church, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York) $0.03; $0.30 per doz. CHAPTER IV. Suggested reading: Chapter XXXI of Among Congo Cannibals, J. H. Weeks (Lippincott, 1913) $3.50. God's Ways vnth the Bantu Soul, Henri Junod {International Missionary Review, Jan., 1914). 214 AN AFRICAN TRAIL FetUkism in West Africa, R. H. Nassau (Scribners, 1904) $2.50. Leaflets: Opals from Africa, A. F. Hansey (Foreign Christian Missionary Society, Cincinnati, Ohio) $0.10. The Blind Zulu's Story, Gertrude Hance (Woman's Board, 704 Congregational House, Boston, Mass.) $0.02; $0.20 per doz. A Story in Pictures (Methodist Episcopal Board, 150 Fifth Avenue, New York) $0.05. CHAPTER V. Suggested reading: Pioneering in the Congo, John M. Springer (Methodist Book Concern, New York, 1916) $1.00. Winning a Primitive People, Donald Eraser (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1914) $1.50. This book, with the book previously suggested under Chapter II— The Wild Ngoni, Elmslie. These four books give a complete history of a great missionary effort. Twenty Years in NyasaJand, J. H. Taylor (Bethlehem Printing Co., Bethlehem, Pa., 1912) $0.75. Further suggestions : Eighteen Years in Uganda, Alfred Tucker (Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 2 vols., 1911) $2.10. Black Sheep, Jean K. Mackenzie (Houghton Mifflin, 1916) $1.50. Leaflets: Paul, the Apostle of Banza Manteke, Rev. Henry Richards (American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society, Ford Building, Boston, Mass.) $0.05. A BRIEF READING LIST 215 Dweskula, Mrs. Amy B. Cowles (American Board, 704 Congre- gational Building, Boston, Mass.) $0.02; $0.20 per doz From the East and from the West, Rev. George A. Wilder (Ameri- can Board, 704 Congregational House, Boston, Mass.) At Dawn, Lydia J. Wellman (Woman's Board of Missions of the Interior, 19 South La Salle St., Chicago, 111.) $0 05. Hobeama, Gertrude R. Hance (Woman's Board, 704 Congrega- tional House, Boston, Mass.) $0.02; $0.20 per doz. The Brave Hunchback, Rev. W. H. Stapleton (Women's Board of Foreign Missions of Presbyterian Church, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York) $0.02; $0.15 per doz. A Church with a Waiting List of Fifteen Thousand, Rev. A. W. Halsey (Women's Board of Foreign Missions of Presbyterian Church, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York) $0.03; $0.30 per doz. CHAPTER VI. Pioneering in the Congo, John M. Springer (Methodist Book Concern, New York, 1916) $1.00. Winning a Primilive People, Donald Fraser (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1913) $1.50. Twenty Years in Nyasaland, J. H. Taylor (Bethlehem Printing Co., Bethlehem. Pa.) $0.75. Bolenge, Mrs. Royal J. Dye (Foreign Christian Missionary Society, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1909) $1.25. Further suggestions : Eighteen i'ears in Uganda, Alfred Tucker (Longmans, Green & Co., 2 vols.. New York, 1911) $2.10. Leaflets: Missions in Africa: The Congo (American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society, Ford Building, Boston. Mass.) $0.10 216 AN AFRICAN TRAIL African Missioiis (Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 150 Fifth Avenue, New York) $0.10. Nana, The Mother, Jean Kenyon Mackenzie (Women's Board of Foreign Missions of Presbyterian Church, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York) $0.02; $0.20 per doz. Historical Sketch of the Mission in Afri/:a (Board Foreign Missions of Presbyterian Church, Witherspoon Bldg., Phila- delphia, Pa.) $0.10. Striking Contrasts in South Africa, Cornelius H. Patton (Ameri- can Board, 704 Congregational Building, Boston, Mass.) $0.05; $0.50 per doz. Autobiography of Vinda Biddoa, A Congo Evangelist (American Baptist Mission Union, Ford Building, Boston, Mass.) $0.01. Twenty Years in West Central Africa, Thfi East Central Africa Missions and The American Board Mission in South Africa (The American Board, 704 Congregational House, Boston, Mass.) $0.05; $0.60 per doz. Africa Mission, Bishop Joseph C. Hartzell (Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 150 Fifth Avenue, New York) $0.10. INDEX Adiilteries, men, 149; women, 150 Africa, opening up of, 21 African, the, 17, 22, 72-73, 176- 177, 204-206 Agricultural schools, 177 Ancestor, skull of, 89 Ancestors, 80-88, 103 Andungo confesses sin, 150 Animist. Bulu, 66-71; salvation, 88; fear, 102 Annunciation, the, how receiv- ed 94 Arnot, Fred S., 23, 27 Asala and power of God, 125 Awu Ding, 115 Backsliders, shame of, 158 Baganda, leaders of, 168 Bantu, 20, 49, 49-51, 56, 72, 79- 84, 87, 94, 94-96, 205-206; see Bulu Baptism, 153-155 Baptist missionaries, 21 Barnard, Lady Anne, 42-44 Beach towns, 19 Bechuana, Elama of, 203 Bekalli, 121, 141, 142, 165, 182 Blaikie, W. Gordon, 23, 28, 34 Book of Common Worship, prayers from, 14, 136, 172 Brotherhood, new conception of, 197 Bulu, the, 49-76; and God, 79- 104; old beliefs harmonize with Gospel, 131-132; see Bantu Bulu children do not belong to mother, 62; contamination of. 75 Bulu Christians, receivers of revelations, 129; the ten tyings, yoke of Christ, 130; fall, 158; 159; excommuni- cated, 160; loj'al to confes- sion, 161; faith, 162; prayer, 163; works, 164; givers of gifts, 166; see Christians Bulu man, a master, 53; town, custom, 54-55; cruelties, 55; abnegation, 57; and woman's work, 64; his work, 64-65; exclusive privileges, 65 Bulu woman, slave, 59; mar- riage, 59-62; fetish, 62; liberated by Christ, 63, 65; character, 63; work, 64; privileges denied, 65; seventh tying, 122-123; dream of a, 188; see Women Cannibalism, executions for, 55; confession of, 146 Casalis, Eugene, 101, 128-129 Character of Bulu woman, 63 Characteristics of white man in Africa, 17 Charms for all events, 90; and ten tyings, 111-112 Childhood, the new, 191-193; see Bulu children Chief, Christian, 203 Christ and power of fetish, 63; liberates woman, 65; mes- sage, 97; redeemed man, 98; yoke of, 130; a martyr for, 170; things of this world be- fore, 181; fruits of service, 201-202 218 AN AFRICAN TRAIL Christian, master, attracts pu- pils, IIG; interprets things of life, 117-118 Christians, kindness among, 203; see Bulu Christians Christianity, prepared leaders from heathenism, 143; fruits of, 201-202; the salvation of South African natives, 205- 206 Church, African, 160; built by natives, 180; work of evan- gelist, 199-202 City of refuge, the, 133 Civilization in Africa, curses exceed blessings, 204-206 Coillard, Francois, 32, 34, 35, 44, 133 Commandments, see Heathen and, Tyings, Ten Tyings Constellation of the hare, 200 Conversion through dreams, 139; by supernatural means, 140-141; by leaders, 142-144; of Bekalli, 142; through martyrdom of friend, 170 Convert, adjustments of new, 144; burdens to be borne, 145; confesses sins, 149-151; break with fetish, 151-153; probation and instruction, 154; lazy, 157; see Statistics Craft, tools of a, 113 Creation, African ideas of, 82- 84^ Criminal code changed, 177 Cruelties, Bulu, 55; Bantu, 56 Cruelty a fruit of animism, 102 Custom, Bulu, 54; division of labor, 6i; slaves to, 66; con- duct of wives, 114; the new, 173-207 Dangers, new, 177-178 Dawson, E. C, 24, 30 Dead, communion with, 89; woman revives and converts her village, 140-141 Death, Bulu fear, 68-71; Thon- ga idea, 85; paths beyond, dark, 98; fear turns man to God, 138; advice at, 140 Debts, 149-151 Desert, African, 23 Discipline, ten tyings a, 119- 124; enforced, 156-158 Dream of mother, 188 Dreams of missionaries, 28-29; Bulu explanation, 89; of black men, 139-141 Dress of white man, 175, 187 du Plessis, J., 30, 56, 72-73, 203 Dutch in Africa, 19 Egyptian traders in Africa in ancient times, 20 Elmslie, W. A., 33, 73-74, 74-76 English in Africa, 19 Erasmus, prayer by, 78 Estrangement between God and man, 85-86 Evangelist, 180, 199-202, 201- 202; see Prophets Evangelists, native, appreci- ated, 143; black. 400 sup- ported, 166-167 Evil, secret, in African church, 160-161 Failure, things of, 156-158 Faith, Bulu Christians men of, 162-163; in Christ, 182 Family, new, 187-189; and new custom, 190-191, 191-193 Fang, the, 51, 52, 132-133 Fatigue, great, 24 Fear, 66-71, 102-103, 138 Fearlessness of missionary, 29 Fetish, Bulu yoke, 62; Bulu woman slave, motive of, 62; and Christ, 63; things of, 89; science of, 90-91; tragic INDEX 219 aspect, 91; and relic, 103; converts break with, 151-153 Fraser, Donald, 45, 203 Freedom, African, 178-179 Gain, Bulu lust for, 52-53 German in Africa, 21 Gifts, givers of, 166-167 God, the Bulu and, 79-104; not an absentee, 96; manifested, 125-129; Dr. Good speaks of, 131-132; the Fang and, 132- 133; draws men, 137-138; a bargain with, 139; prepares leaders, 143 Good, Dr. Adolphus, 21, 30, 86-87, 131-132 Goods, imported, 176 Gospel, 63-64; impression upon Bantu, 94-96; expounded by- native teacher, 96-100; im- pression made by, 131-132; harmonizes with Bulu belief, 131-132; African preparation for, 132-133; its coming prophesied, 168-169 Grace, growth of, 161-162 Grenfell, George, 21 Hamilton, Bishop J. T., 103, 168-169 Hannington, James, 24, 30 Hanno, 21 Harbors of Africa, 15 Harford-Battersby, C. F., 33 Headdress, male, abandoned, 175 Headman, Christian, changes town, 179-180; asks for leader, 179-180; greater se- curity in town, 180; praises his Christian wife, 190-191; and new justice, 196-197 Heart, law of life in, 131-132; the turning of, 137-138; woman, revived, exhorts community to turn, to God, 140-141 Heathen and commandments, 128-129, 131-132 Heathenism, horror of, 75; has lost God, 102; supplies lead- ers, 143; break with, 153 Holy Spirit, work of, 99 Hospitality, the new, 198 Hottentots, in 1798, 42-44 Hysteria, no taint of, 141 Ibia, 109, 110, 112 Industrial schools, 177 Inner vision and voice, 129 Instruction and baptism, 154- 155 Johnson, Samuel, prayer by, 106 Johnston, Sir H. H., 21, 49-51, 52 72 Johnston, W. C, 87 Johnston, Mrs., 121 Junod, Henri, 82-83, 91, 204- 206 Justice, the new, 196-197 Kamerun Colony, 18 Khama, of Bechuana, 203 Kindness among Christians, 203 Knox, John, prayer by, 48 Kumm, H. K. W., 24 Labor, new thoughts of, 173 Laziness defeats convert, 157 Leaders prepared by God, 143 Life, racial thirst for, 138 Lives, Christian, attest power of God, 125-129 Livingstone, David, 22, 28, 29, 33, 34 Love for black friends, 33; a word of, 99 220 AN AFRICAN TRAIL Mackay, 34 Mackenzie, John, 31 Magic, the things of, 110 Mail in Africa, 27-28 Man, natural, law of life in heart, 131-132; Bulu, see Bulu man Marriage among the Bulu, 59- 62; Bekalli and Christian, 182-183; new women and law, 183-185; wife given without goods, 183-184; of friendship, 184-185; new, and mission school, 185-186; wife a witness to new, 186- 187; old, made new, 189 Martyr for Christ, 170 Mediator, Bulu idea of, 100-101 Membership, suspension from, 156-158; of Elat church, 157 Men, new, and new thoughts, 180-183 Menge converts her village, 140-141 Milligan, Robert H., 89, 103, 132-133 Mission station, 1798, 42-44; neutral ground for natives, 133 Missionary, trail, 22; settle- ment, 25-27; mail, 27-28; dreams, 28-29; sufferings, 29; fearlessness, 29; faith in God, 30; friends, 31; love for black friends, 33; devotion to fellow workers, 33; hour of disillusion, 34; functions at outposts, 35; functions at central stations, 36; statistics measure of labor, 37-41; appreciates native helpers, 143-144; see White man Missionary societies, Protes- tant, number in Africa, 25; statistics of results, 38-41 Missionaries, number in Africa, 24; labors foretold by Afri- can, 168-169 Moffat, Robert, 29, 31, 32 Money, influence of, 174 Monogamy the ideal for native convert, 147; how attained, 147-149 Moravian mission, 42-44 Mothers and tribe of God, 191 Murder, confession of, 145-146; discouraged, 173 Nassau, Robert H., 81 Neighbor, the new, 194-198; the, evangelist, 199-202 Neighborhood, the new, 193- 194 Ngoni, Polygamy among, 73- 74 Nyasaland, an incident in, 168 Opening up of Africa, 21 Opportunities, new, 176-177 Outposts, missionary at, 35 Parsons, Ellen, 30, 86, 131-132 Penalties of taboo, 93 Pilkinton, George, 33 Polygamy among the Ngoni, 73-74; does not prevent im- morality, 74; how adjusted by convert, 147-149 Portuguese in Africa, 19, 21 Prayer of Bantu, 87; Bulu Christians men of, 163-164; of wife for heathen husband, 189 Prayers, 14, 48, 78, 106, 136. 172 Presbyterian missions, 16, 21 Privileges of sexes, 65 Probation and baptism, 154- 155 Products of Africa, 19, 22 Property, woman's hunger, 178 INDEX 221 Prophecy about missionaries, 168-169 Prophets to care for tribe of God, 180-182; see Evangelist, Evangelists Protection, sense of Divine, 101 Questions on chapters, 46, 76, 104, 134, 171, 207 Rainy season, 23 Relic and fetish, 103 Repentance, 158 Restoration, 159 Restraint, God's law new, 178- 179 Revelation, Bulu receivers, 129- 130 Righteousness, evangelist on, 181 Sacrifice of Bantu, 87 Salvation, animistic view, 88 School supported by natives, 180; mission, and new mar- riage, 185-186; the new, 193; Nyunga's service in a, 196; a stone for sharpening, 197 Service of wife under new cus- tom, 186-187; new schools prepare for, 193; of new neighbor, 194-198 Settlements of white man, 19 Seventh tying and Bulu wom- en, 122-123 Sex, things of, 56-82; solidarity of, 64; law of, apportions work, 65; ten tyings basis of, equality, 112; new things of, 186-187 Shame, things of, contamina- tion of children, 75; and the new family, 191-193 Skull of ancestor a medium of communication, 89 Slavery of Bulu woman, 59 Spirit and shadow, 70-71; com- munion, skull of ancestor a medium of, 89 Spirits, grades and types, 88; service to meet needs, 89 Statistics of missions, 37-41 Strabo, 79 Sufferings of missionary, 29 Suleyman, 79 Supernatural, Bulu struggle with, 88; commerce, 89; element in conversion, 140- 141 Sutherland, James, 33 Taboo, drives man from home, 67-68; vital in animism, 91; defined, 91 ; types, 92; penal- ties, 93; the ten tjTugs the perfect, 107 Taxes paid by men, 173 Teacher, native, expounds Gos- pel, 96-100 Teaching, Baganda show ap- titude, 168 Ten tyings, the, 107-134; the perfect taboo, 107; and man- made yoke, 107; and fear of supernatural, 109-110; and charms, 111-112; and sex- bondage, 112; interpreted, 117-118; a discipline, 119- 124; and power of God, 125- 129; prized by Bulu Chris- tians, 130; suspensions of church members, 156-158 Thoughts, new, 180-183 Tolo, things of, 200-201 Tooke, W. Hammond, 20, 79 Town, the white man's, 44; the Bulu, 54; the new, 179- 180 Trade of white man, 19 Trades, natives urged to learn, 176; instruction in, needed, 177 B22 AN AFRICAN TRAIL Traders, Egyptian, in Africa, 20 Traditions of ancestors, 80-86 Trail today, 24 Travel, African, 25, 45 Tribe, the new, 137-171 Tribe of God, ten tyings the custom, 114; member yearns for fuller knowledge, 115; things of. applied to life, 117-118; 137-171; prophets to care for, 180-182; custom in new family, 190-191 ; mem- bers of, as mothers, 191 Tucker, Bishop Alfred R., S5. 168, 170 "Tying," taboo a, 94 Tyings recognized by natural man, 97; see Ten tyings Vices, Bantu, 56-57 Violence, new attitudes, 173 Vision and voice, inner, 129 Wanji and Christian wife, 126- 128 War discouraged, 173 Wameck, 142-143 Warneck, John, 102-103 West coast, 19 White man in Africa, 15-46; approach by sea, 15; charac- teristics, 17; effect of contact with Africans, 17; settle- ments, 19; trade, 19-21; way of invasion, 21; influence, 22; trail of missionary, 22; secu- lar influences making for change, 173-178; his dress adopted, 175; male head- dress abandoned, 175; evil effects from, 178, 204-206; see Missionary Wife given without goods, 183- 184; a witness to the new marriage, 186-187; prays for heathen husband, 189; Chris- tian, praised by heatheo husband, 190-191; see Wives Witchcraft encouraged by po- lygamy, 74; arduous and dangerous, 90-91; involves great fear, 102; ten tyings and. 111; murder to avenge, 145-146; mourning and ac- cusation of, 198-199; lessened by Christian chief, 203 Withdrawalof God, 86 Witness unto death, 170 Wives, young, instructed by older women, 113; conduct and custom of husband's tribe, 114; see Wife Woman, Bulu, see Bulu woman Women, Bulu lust for, 52-53; the workers of the tribe, 55; abuse of, discouraged, 173; "himger for goods," 178; new, and law marriage, 183- 185 Work of Bulu woman, 64-65 Works, Bulu Christian a man of, 164-165 Workers, devotion to fellow, 33; native Christian, appre- ciated by missionaries, 143- 144 World, end of, 103; Christians led away by things of, 160; things of this, before Christ, 181-182 Worship, daily, by natives, 180 Zambe, his work as Creator, 83, 84; see God Ze, a Christian wife, 126-128 Ze Tembe, prayers of, 163-164 Date Due ^m '^ *' f 1 ^ BW9340 .M157 An African trail, Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Ubrary 1 1012 00019 0712