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

SHUT IN, BUT ALMOST OUT 215
" dramatic neatness of Divine method," the dinner-bell has
gone in Heaven for my "surprise meal."
It was hinted to-day quite blandly that we must
be runaways rom justice. We are nobodies : where are
our belongings ? Yet here again we have gains for pains.
After all, we dare not ignore the fact that the mere
temporalities of the Missionary, with his creaking boots,
do bulk far too largely in the greedy gaze of our bush
negro. A Missionary without God—not without supplies
—is like a rabbit against the Kussian Empire. Oh, the
abysmal and abominable chasm between Mr. White and
Mr. Black I The mediocre Englishman with his mass of
belongings is, by the negro, literally and repellently
called Leza Mukulu ("0 great God"). The same thing
this, as when some raw natives looking over a Mission
fence at a simple wattle-and-daub house said, " Ye are
the people of God :
look at the size of your houses."
Even our endless praising of God before the raw
native is misunderstood, and certainly twice I have
heard a negro grunt, "Yes, well you might praise God,
He has been good to you." But aback of all this,
there is a blacker subtlety still, I mean the endless
negro suspicion that God is an Englishman : the bare-
footed Christ of rocky roads in Palestine they cannot
conceive. They are sure that we are the spoilt and
petted children of a pampered civilisation, and as they
1 Dr. Moloney's statement that not only did Mushidi call us " white
slaves," but that he also despoiled us of our goods, errs in the important
particular that we had no goods to despoil.