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

4
THINKING BLACK
sand. Each day two burning darts per ray—and how
many billion rays per day ?
Take the negro now and watch withAl a curious thing.
I mean that hard, impersonal stare of these bottomless-
eyed natives, not the intense, penetrating thing of Europe.
You might be something worked on tapestry or painted
on a china cup, so impersonally does he look at you. He
even denies you credit for any act of your own personal
prowess or initiative, shooting for example. For if, per-
chance, you draw a most careful bead on a buck and drop
him flat in his tracks, he as carefully sees to it that he
allocates the praise between your gun and your imaginary
*' medicine," fifty per cent apiece, and never, nay never a
crumb for you. You are merely the spoiled and petted
child of a privileged civilisation— you, what have you
done ? Only taken the trouble to be born white a little
north of his south—nothing more. " Beyond the sea " is
their great adjective for anything newfangled or European,
your very Gospel being only another " beyond the sea
innovation. "The white man's parable" is another of
their ugly names for our Evangel, a taunt this with the
old Ezekiel sting in it : "Ah
me, Doth he not speak parables ?
Lord God !
they say of
But let us end these didactics and come to our
chronicle. This is how we really begin. Ignoring the
ocean voyage sailed in sameness for hundreds of years, we
land on the Atlantic seaboard at Benguella. Portuguese
to the core, here you find a tropical town nearly fast
•sleep in 1889—asleep, and no wonder. For most of these