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

182 THINKING BLACK
amount of wisdom ? But here in the nick of time succour
does arrive. Look at this travel-stained band of four
men and a woman filing into the Sanga stockade at sun-
down : is not this Mushidi, son of the covenanted " friend,"
Kalasa? Truly, here is a friend that sticketh closer
than a brother. And there the whole story begins, yea,
there also it ends, for there is nothing more to tell.
Mushidi said, " tTy suis.fy reste" A born manipulator of
mankind, he made his dispositions accordingly, and with a
mere handful of men followed up the Lubans, attacked
by night, and rescued the kidnapped Sanga folks. Watch
the momentous sequel. There and then, in the double
heat of gratitude to the "friend" and rancour to the
deserting " brother," a solemn pact was sealed : punning
a variant on the old proverb, the grateful Copper King
in one historic precedent cut off all his blood kinsmen
"without a shilling" in the declaration: "A friend in
need is a brother indeed ! Thou, Mushidi, art my
Nswana, or heir apparent ; on thee only I bestow the
Omande shell !
" Now, here in this daring but dangerous
ignoring of sacred blood kinsmanship you have the
slumbering casus belli of the long-subsequent revolt of
the Sanga tribe. Here, too, you have the mainsprings
of Mushidi's bloody policy in these later years—does he
not know that on the first sign of weakness the real
aboriginal lords of the Sanga soil will give his foreign
carcase to the fowls of the air? Here, too, you find
Mushidi's subtle reason for the building of a negro
cosmopolitan state—does he not know that in this