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

214 THINKING BLACK
welfare, you must needs strip yourself of impedimenta in
order to outwit the cupidity of the black man.
The highest compliment I have been paid in my bush
African wanderings was when a snob chief gave me
a dole of forty yards of calico as a pitying alms, because
I was " out at the elbows." Of course I have since paid
him his own with usury, but the link binding us in
friendship is all the more real because the initial bounty
was on his part. There is nothing to be ashamed of
in poverty except being ashamed of it. The best pair
of boots I had for many a day were a Portuguese
convict's, bought from a negro. So, too, with a mys-
terious suit of clothes which I rescued from a slaver
the fit was faultless. Far too faultless, for it clung to
me as tight as a wall-paper. So, too, with much more.
This famine and fever land in a special and extraordinary
way clears the field for a full display of the power of
His might, for man is often brought low with all his
shrewd contrivances, and only God can avail. The last
and nearest commercial banking-house in the world was
just one thousand miles distant on the seashore. Your
deposit account might be ad libitum, but your powers
of cashing same in the long grass were at zero. Certainly
the pampered civilisation of Great Britain is all on the
side of unbelief, for everything is too cut-and-dried,
and runs in a fixed groove, comes as a matter of course,
not as a wonder. Here, in the bush, it is delightful
again and again to watch how God hears you scrape
the bottom of the meal-barrel. Again and again, with