Bakula stays with the White Man
The working of a mission station--Buying food--The school--Bakula is
afraid to enter the school--Repairing the station--Boys work in the
gardens--A quarrel, and how it was settled--An evening’s chat with
the white man--Rubbing evil spirits out of a man--Sunday
service--Congregation--Sermon--Visit to a near town--Religious talk
with the King--Boys pray for their white teacher--Witch-doctor’s
trick exposed.
Next morning, at sunrise, Bakula was aroused by the sonorous tones of a
large bell, and running out of the house he found the white man pacing
slowly up and down the yard of the mission station, waiting for the
workmen to arrive. Bakula greeted his friend with a smile, and an
inquiry as to whether he had “slept well,”[45] and then stood on one
side to observe all that happened. Soon the workmen came, rubbing the
sleep out of their eyes, and the white man, checking them by his
note-book, sent some to cut and carry in bundles of thatching-grass,
others for fence sticks, and others for posts; three were sent for
papyrus[46] reeds from which to make native string for repairing the
fences running round the mission ground, and some were set to work on
the station.
Footnote 45:
See note 35, p. 352.
Footnote 46:
See note 36, p. 352.
Having started the men at their work, the white man sat down to his
breakfast. It was not like the dinner to which the King had been
invited, for it consisted of porridge, coffee, roasted plantain[47] and
eggs. During this time women and men were gathering with various
articles for sale, and as soon as the white man had finished his
breakfast he went out to barter for the different articles he needed.
Women with large baskets of _mfumfu_, or cassava flour, and peanuts went
with their goods to the door of a store directly the price was agreed
upon. Eggs were tested, and a string of a hundred blue pipe beads (worth
a farthing) was paid for each, fowls were bought at from ten to twenty
strings of beads each, according to size. Yams, sweet potatoes, greens,
and small native tomatoes were also purchased with either the ordinary
blue beads, which were the currency, or with red, olive, opal or any
other coloured beads that happened to be in stock and took the fancy of
the seller. Men with bamboos, mats, and planks bartered them for
different kinds of trade cloth; and those with goats sold them for
cloth, blankets, knives, cast-off soldiers’ coats, or large,
bright-coloured handkerchiefs. Then the white man hurried over to the
store, measured out the cassava flour and peanuts, and paid the women
according to quantity.
Footnote 47:
See note 37, p. 352.
On our markets a great amount of time is wasted by haggling over
prices--the seller asking a ridiculous sum at first, and gradually
bringing it down to a half or third of the original demand. But I
noticed that the white man looked keenly at the article for sale, asked
the price, carefully considered for a few moments and then stated the
amount he would give, and the vender either assented to it at once, or
picked up his goods and left.
There was one man, a stranger, who had a goat for sale. The white man
examined it.
“How much?” he asked.
“Twenty-four fathoms of cloth,” replied the man.
The white man whistled, smiled, and said: “I will give you nine fathoms
for it, and that is a fair price.”
“Give me twenty fathoms. I can get that on the market,” avowed the man.
“Take it to the market, then,” advised the white man. “Let me see,” he
continued, “to-day is Nkenge market. You will not have far to go.” And
with that he walked on to the next.
A man standing by said to the goat-seller: "If you stay here all day he
won’t change his price. He has only ‘one mouth.’ On the market you may
get seven fathoms for the goat, but not more. You should accept the
offer."
He wisely acted on the advice, received his nine fathoms, and went away
with a truer conception of white men’s knowledge of the prices of native
goods, and delighted that he had sold his goat before the sun was very
high in the sky.
Just now I heard the big bell ring, and shortly after it was again rung
loudly, and the boys on the station and others from various parts of the
town went hurrying by into the school-house--a long building of mats,
posts, and thatch, built along one side of the courtyard. There were
about sixty boys of various ages present when the white man entered. He
led them in the singing of a hymn, talked to them a short time about
God’s palaver, and then they all bowed their heads in prayer.
After this he called out the names of the boys from his book, and
divided them into four lots: one group he set to write in books, another
received slates and pencils and wrote down and worked the sums that were
written on a blackboard, another set of boys sat round their white
teacher and read from books, and over in the corner was a class being
taught their letters by a native teacher.
Bakula was asked by the white man to enter the school, but my owner was
too fearful of what might happen to him--if he did--to accept the
invitation, and at the same time was so interested in all that he saw
and heard that he could not drag himself away from the door. He asked
and received permission to remain at his place of observation.
At intervals the white man walked round the station to see that the
workmen had not gone to sleep, or over to some young men who were
learning carpentry under the verandah of his house, and needed some
further instruction. Occasionally men came to the door of the school to
talk with the white man on matters of business or to seek his advice on
native palavers.
About the middle of the morning the white man gave a sign, and the boys
left the school helter-skelter for a short time of play. Hockey-sticks
were quickly brought out, and the station resounded with peals of
laughter and the shouts of those at play. Another sign and the boys
skurried back to the school-house, and were soon engaged in other
lessons. During the second school the white teacher gave a short talk on
physiology, and the boys listened to it with much attention, and asked
many questions. It surprised them to hear the number of bones in their
body, and the wonderful way in which they were made.
I noticed that the teacher spoke of the foolishness of believing that
witchcraft could affect the body, and showed how the witch-doctors
tricked, deceived and robbed them. They sang another hymn, and repeated
together what I afterwards learned to be the Lord’s Prayer, and the
school was concluded. The midday bell rang, the workmen stopped work,
the boys went to their house or to the town, and the white man had his
dinner and rested during the heat of the day.
In due time (2 p.m.) the bell sounded, and Bakula, full of curiosity and
interest, went to see what next the white man would do. He found him
standing at the door telling the workmen to continue with the repairs of
the fence, and allotting to the boys their work in the garden. At this
time about twenty boys lived on the station, some of whom came from
distant towns. All of them had their own work allotted to them: thus two
boys swept, cleaned, and did all the necessary work in the white man’s
house; one boy did the washing and ironing, another did the cooking; one
boy fetched firewood and water for the cook-house; two boys looked after
the goats, cut grass and fed them in the dry season; and one boy fetched
the water for the house from the beautiful spring that gurgled out of
the ground half-way down the hill-side. The rest of the boys worked on
the garden.
Bakula could understand boys working about the house, kitchen, and goats
of the white man; but he could not understand boys working on the land
like women and girls; and when he went to look at them, and found them
digging with hoes, he asked: “Why do you do this woman’s work? Are you
girls?”
“No,” they answered, “we are not girls. At one time we refused to work
in the garden, and told the white man that this kind of work was only
fit for women; but he came and worked with us day after day, and we
thought that the work a white man was not ashamed to do we black boys
should not be ashamed of. Since then we have worked as you see us.”
Bakula returned to the courtyard, and found the white man very busy
dressing sores, and dispensing medicine to the sick, after which he
accompanied him on a visit to various patients about the town who were
too ill to come to the dispensary. The rest of the afternoon the white
man spent with the carpenter lads, by whose aid he was building a large
store.
By sunset the white man looked fagged, and I think it was with a sigh of
relief that he drove the last nail for the day, and gave the order to
ring the stop-work bell. Just then loud shouts were heard, angry,
passionate words came on the air, and the white man, hurrying in the
direction of the sounds, found a big boy fighting a small one. He
instantly separated them, and turning on the big fellow upbraided him
for cowardice in striking a little boy, and charged him with breaking
one of the station laws in hitting one smaller than himself.
“He cursed me and was insolent,” aggressively answered the law-breaker
in defence of his action.
“Yes, I dare say he was cheeky,” said the judge; “but you know the rule
of this place is: All big boys that hit little boys must be punished
with the cane, and all small boys who curse and are insolent to their
elders must be brought to the white man for him to cane. There is only
one who punishes on this station, and that is myself. Is it not so?”
“Yes, that is the law,” they unanimously assented.
“I have told you repeatedly,” continued the white man, “that without
such a rule you cannot live happily here. The big ones among you would
constantly harry and make drudges of the little ones, and their lives
would become unbearable; and the younger ones, too, would irritate you
older ones with their curses and impudence. It is a good law, is it
not?”
“Yes, it is a good law,” they all agreed.
Thereupon the white man picked up a cane, and gave the law-breaker six
good strokes with it on his hands, and turning to the small boy, he
said: “If you get cursing or cheeking the other lads I will give you a
thrashing that you will not quickly forget.”
The boys trooped off to their house. And Bakula, as he accompanied the
lads, was surprised to hear no angry exclamations against the white man.
The majority acknowledged the rule to be a good one, and that the white
man was absolutely impartial in enforcing it.
During the evening my owner, together with eight or ten other lads, went
to have a chat with their white man. On entering his house we found him
reading a book and eating roasted peanuts. His evening meal was over,
and he was just reading and resting. On our arrival he smiled, and
putting down his book, at once began to chat with us. There had been a
discussion in the boys’ house as to which was the greatest country:
Portugal, Holland, or England,[48] and as the supporters of each were
about equally divided they had come to the white man to settle the
palaver for them. He listened to our questions, and taking down one of
his books, told us the size of each country, the number of people in
each, and the different kinds of articles made in each place. He then
told us a story he had just read, and asked us to tell him one of our
stories, which the oldest lad amongst us at once did, to our amusement.
It was now late, but before wishing our white friend “to sleep well,” we
all knelt in prayer and thanked the great God for His goodness, and
especially for the loving gift of His Son Jesus Christ.
Footnote 48:
See note 38, p. 353.
The next day was Saturday, so the boys swept up the courtyard, and all
the various paths about the station, those also leading to the station
and the “town square.” Bakula entered heartily into the work of tidying
up the place, and by midday all the rubbish had been carried away and
burnt. The boys had the rest of the day for themselves--some visited
friends in the neighbourhood, others played hockey, one group went off
to the forest in search of wild fruits, and another went rat-hunting in
the farms and bush.
While Bakula was walking this afternoon through the town he saw a man
stretched on a mat with a fowl tied to his leg, and a witch-doctor
vigorously rubbing him. He was a sick man, and the “medicine man” had
told him to bring a fowl before he could attempt to cure him. The fowl
had been brought and a string had been tied from a leg of the fowl to a
leg of the outstretched patient.
The witch-doctor was now kneeling by the side of the sick man, rubbing
the evil spirit out of his arms into his body; then he chased it out of
the body over towards the leg to which the fowl was tied; he thereupon
worked it out of the other leg into that to which the fowl was connected
by the string, and thus he followed it until he had cornered it near to
the string, when suddenly he gave a tremendous push and away it went
through the rest of the leg and through the string into the fowl. The
witch-doctor cut the connecting string, wrung the neck of the fowl, and
threw it over to his wife to cook for his next meal, for he was not
afraid of any number of evil spirits that might be in the fowl. The
practice was that if a patient did not recover after this rubbing out of
the malignant spirits, he had to take another and another fowl until he
was either cured or his fowls were finished.
There was no bell at sunrise the next morning calling the men to work;
but before the sun was far above the distant tree-tops a bugle sounded
out over the town.
“What is that?” asked Bakula of a companion, for he had never heard a
bugle before.
“To-day is Sunday,” his friend replied, “and that is Petelo blowing his
bugle to remind the people that it is the rest day, and those who want
to attend the service to hear God’s palaver must not go to the farms.”
“I know what God’s palaver means,” said Bakula. “But what do Sunday and
service mean? I never heard of them before.”
His informant explained the meaning of the day, and also of the word
service. He said that ever since the white teachers had come to live in
their town many of the folk observed the day and attended the service,
but others laughed at both and went off to their farms as usual.
By and by my owner went with the other lads to the school-house, where
we found some boys from the town already assembled. The white man came
in and greeted us, sat down among us and conducted what I afterwards
learned was a Sunday-school class. He talked to us about God’s mercy and
justice, and we asked him all kinds of questions. If we started any
inquiry that did not belong to the lesson he told us to remind him of it
one evening when we went for a chat with him and he would try to answer
it then.
When the sun was well up the bell was rung for God’s palaver. All the
boys picked up two or three mats and carried them to the “town square,”
where they spread them along three sides and placed two of them in the
middle. These preparations being completed, the bell was again loudly
rung, and the white man, locking up his house, went to the square,
followed by a boy carrying his chair.
By this time the people had gathered--the women and girls sat on the
mats along one side, the men and boys on the mats extending along two
sides. The school-boys arranged themselves on the mats that had been put
in the middle, against which the white man’s chair had been placed, and
finally the King sat on a chair with a few head men about him at the
entrance to his _lumbu_, or enclosure, which occupied the whole of the
fourth side. He was gorgeously arrayed in a bright red coat and
waistcoat, with a large, bright blue cloth round his loins and a gaudy
smoking-cap on his head. Most of the people were dressed in gay-coloured
cloths and bright beads, and had oily faces. Here and there were young
dandies who, to enhance their charms, had polished their faces with
black lead, or streaked them with lines of scarlet, blue, or yellow
pigments.
It was a strange, grotesque, pathetic gathering upon which the eyes of
the pale-face teacher rested that radiant Sunday morning. The faces of
the old women portrayed their greed, jealousy, hatred and vice. From the
very youngest girl to the oldest woman there was not a pure, virgin soul
to be found. Among the older men there was not one but had broken the
whole ten commandments, and the younger men and boys who had not broken
them all had failed not from lack of inclination, but of opportunities.
There at the back sat in scarlet and blue the man who had murdered the
very mother who had nursed him and cared for him in infancy and
childhood. What message had the teacher for these men and women?
The white man gave out a hymn, and the schoolboys sang it heartily.
Bakula recognized it as the one he heard in Tonzeka’s town on the night
of the drunken riot--“God loved the world of sinners lost.”
Then a strange thing happened: the teacher knelt in prayer, and the men
and women, boys and girls turned over from their squatting postures on
the mats, and bowed their heads while in reverent tones they repeated
the prayers phrase by phrase--a confession of guilt, a petition for
strength to do right, a note of thankfulness for God’s mercy, and, for
His great gift of Jesus Christ, and a request that they might all
receive His pardon and salvation. Then came another hymn, and the white
man spoke to us on God’s readiness to forgive, if we will but repent and
turn to Him, and he illustrated what he meant by telling us a story out
of God’s book called “The Prodigal Son.” Another hymn and prayer and the
strange meeting was over. The teacher went and spoke to the King and
greeted all whom he passed on his way to his empty house.
Soon after dinner the white man called three or four of his boys, and,
taking his long walking-stick, started for Mputu, to hold a service in
that town. Bakula met the little party and received permission to join
it.
Passing through the town, we descended a steep side of the hill, and
came to the river Mposo, which we crossed by means of a rickety bridge,
and a long walk up and down low-lying hills brought us to Mbumba’s town
of Mputu. Apparently the white man was expected, for the folk gathered
before the greetings between the chief and the teacher were concluded.
A service was conducted similar to the morning one, the chief and people
joining in the hymns and prayer, and listening attentively to God’s
palaver. The sun by now was fast sinking, so the white man bade the
chief and his people good-bye and hurried back to Congo dia Ngunga. On
the way out our white companion had chatted freely with us, but now he
asked us not to talk to him, as he had to think over what teaching he
should give the King on his return.
In our small party was a lad belonging to the town we had just left, so
Bakula asked him if all the rumours of cruelty and murder he had heard
about Mbumba were true, for he was notorious throughout the whole
district for cutting off ears on the slightest provocation, murdering
folk for the smallest offences, and stirring up quarrels and war between
towns for the most trivial causes. “Yes,” admitted the lad, “it is all
true. He cut off my brother’s ear, because, while sitting in front of
him one day, he happened to stretch out his legs;[49] and I was present
on another occasion when he ordered a slave to be killed for the same
small offence.”
Footnote 49:
See note 39, p. 353.
Mbumba’s record was that of one “whose feet were swift to shed blood.”
He had listened quietly to the teaching that afternoon, and had begged
the teacher to “come again quickly.”
It was almost sunset by the time we had climbed the hill and reached the
town. On arriving at the entrance to the King’s enclosure the white man
turned in, we following at his heels. The King, hearing us, called to us
to enter without ceremony, and we found his majesty squatting on a low
stool with an empty chair opposite him. He shook hands cordially with
the white man and, pointing to the chair, invited him to be seated. And
sitting there face to face, with only a few boys about them, the white
man said--
“The white teachers who first came to live in your town visited you
every Sunday evening to explain God’s palaver to you, and for many
months now I have been coming, when well, every Sunday evening for the
same purpose. What is it that keeps your heart closed so tightly against
our message?” Then he pleaded with him to repent of his many great sins
and seek help and salvation in God. The shadows deepened as the
conversation proceeded, but it was not too dark to see the tears
trickling down the pock-marked cheeks of the old man.
At last the quiet talk was ended, and the white man, promising to see
him again soon, bade the King “sleep well,” and returned to the lonely
stone house that echoed with the voices of those who had lived and
worked there before him.
Soon after dark the white man’s personal boy came and informed us that
his master had taken some tea and gone to bed with a bad fever, and he
had sent to say that he could not talk with any of the lads that night,
and begged them not to make much noise, as his head ached severely. A
quietness fell upon us all, and although the stone house was some
distance off, the boys spoke in whispers for fear of disturbing their
teacher. When the light was put out that night, one of the elder boys
timidly suggested we might pray to God on behalf of their teacher. As no
one dissented he falteringly prayed: “O God, we do not know much about
you, for we are foolish and do not learn quickly what our white man
tells us about you; but we beg you to cure him of his fever, so that he
may teach us every day. O God, take a sharp hoe, dig into our hearts,
pull up all the weeds and sow Thy good seed there. In the name of Jesus
we beg it. Amen.”
Two or three days after the above events Bakula heard some shouting in
the town, and hurried in the direction of the voices. There, in the
centre of a crowd, was a witch-doctor, dancing and prancing about in the
most ridiculous, though approved, fashion.
In his hand was a bunch of feathers, which he flourished in the air and
then darted at the grass wall of a hut near by. Every time he threw it
the bunch of feathers stuck in the wall, and everybody shouted with
admiration because they thought it was a great charm, as otherwise
simple feathers would not fly with such accuracy and stick tightly on a
wall. The witch-doctor danced in triumph, and the crowd of onlookers
shouted and clapped.
Again the feathers are thrown, and, wonder of wonders, they stick; but
before the witch-doctor has finished his fandango of exultation, a
school-lad darts from the crowd and, grasping the feathers, he drags
them from the wall.
A scream of horror arises from the men and women, for they expect him to
fall dead or paralyzed on the ground as a punishment for touching
another’s fetish.
But, no, there he stands nervously pulling at the feathers; and before
the witch-doctor can reach him he extracts from amid the feathers a
sharp iron prong, and throws it and the feathers at the feet of their
maddened owner.
Then the people see the trick that has been played upon them and,
turning on the witch-doctor, drive him from the town amid hooting,
hisses and laughter.
[Illustration: A SCENE IN THE CATARACT REGION OF THE CONGO.]
[Illustration: A WITCH DOCTOR.]