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

236 THINKING BLACK
then the ivory is claimed by Mpweto at the Lualaba
crossing.
(Later.)
As farther West, so too here in the Interior, there is
the usual African massacre of the innocents ;
" dentition
deaths " these are called. Eead this Luban episode.
Here is a bonnie baby doomed to die because its little
milk teeth "sprouted" on the wrong i.e. the upper
gum first. Far from being the usual little black bundle
of screams, behold, a dear little, queer little morsel who
must be murdered. This dental abnormity is the tribal
terror, for every negro must go the way of his blood, must
wear the blinkers, so to say, must follow his father's lead.
Here, then, is a baby who dares so early to break normal
precedent in the fashion of teeth, and the cherub must die
as a monster. No Rachel ever weeps for such a child,
and when the mother detects the first tooth on the wrong
gum she flees from the innocent, frozen with fright. For
does not the proverb say that the babe that breaks the
normal law of dentition must be broken ? Lutala is the
child's name, and the idea is that there is a fiend taking
ambush inside such an abnormal baby, therefore death is
the doom. For if a demon be inside baby, and baby be
inside the town stockade, then woe to that town, and woe
to that baby. The chief Nkuva is a case in point. He
was the father of three bouncing boys all of whom he
murdered in succession, the appearance of the upper teeth
doing it all. When dentition drew near the poor mother
spent three agonising days in suspense, each baby being