Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

"OWN UP AND PAY UP" 113
endless woe. Of all the dunces beneath the patient
heavens there is none like the man who denies that the
Gospel of God is Africa's true solace and salvation. Here
is a man who says he has gone to the extreme of sin, and
here is a Missionary saying that Christ has gone to the
extreme of atonement. What more does the sinner want ?
What more does the Saviour ?
The villages encountered are still of the same vermin-
ating pattern first met near the Coast. As clearly as the
shell of a snail indicates its species, so the Chokwe ^ has
his typical hut. Having no chimney, his roof is a long
needle-pointed spire, their protest this against the smoke
blearing their eyes. Hence height of roof to induce the
smoke to curl up inside, not outside, the cone. Experience
grows, however, and you soon see that more than mere
sounds of the forest are invading the negro home. For
taking another glance out of his ash-heap of a kraal, this
time, your nude negro saw, or rather did not see, one
straight line in Nature, so once again out of sheer servile
allegiance to his Nature-creed the crooked negro has a
crooked town, the black beehive huts scattered all over
in a most random manner. Now, as that hut is itself
only a clump of cut trees tied together with bark ropes,
even so he still drags in forest ideas into the stockade, and
the haphazard growth of a clump of trees is the planless
maze of this grass town. A lighted arrow shot into the
place would send it up in a blaze.
^ Some years later the first to open in Chokwe were our American friends
Messrs. Loutitt, Maitland, and Dr. Morey. Then Mr. and Mrs. Taylor and
others followed and began farther North,