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

184 THINKING BLACK
de Loanda, requesting the hand of any of his young
daughters—the ivory dowry fixed at thirty tusks. Fail-
ing in this, his quest out along the Benguella road was
more successful. The stinging sarcasm of the proposal
was of course quite lost on the degraded Portuguese, and
one grim day, yes !
*' Madam Mushidi " actually arrived
from the far West. What a zenith hour for Bluebeard
when that daring item, so long down in his programme,
was marked ofi" as fact stranger than fiction. Then it was
he proclaimed himself by the name " Telwatelwawatel-
wanekumwineputu "—the spelling is mine, reader, the
pronunciation thine. This means, "The always-spoken-
of-one, spoken-of-even-in-the-Courts-of-Europe," and the
title is a one-word unit rattled oflf breathlessly with no
pause. ^ But Mushidi was far too clever a person to see
anything exactly as it was, nor did he dream of those
domestic bickerings in store for His Majesty. A plain
man had married a brilliant woman, but what plain man
wants a blaze of fireworks at his fireside ? Certainly not
this type of woman, for I once heard her call Mushidi " a
pig." Maria de Fonseca was her name, her father a
Portuguese officer ; the proud brother being the famous
(or notorious) Senhor Coimbra, who lived west of
Bailundu. The same rogue this, Lourengo da Souza
Coimbra, who with his gang of fifty-two slaves tied in
lots of seventeen or eighteen, fell in with Lovett Cameron
^ If you ask me how to pronounce this long-as-a-comet name, may I
parenthetically reply that it is done the way a great man said he pronounced
*' Chicago "1 "I never pronounce it," said he.