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

BLACK SUFFRAGETTES 243
daily preaches against tobacco as either snuff or smoke.
Pipes of wood or pipes of gourd are all taboo, and the old
definition of this vain thing pleases him hugely : "A
tube
with fire at one end of it, and a fool at the other." Only
by stealth can a smoker pufif his cloud, and no snufi* is
allowed under severe penalty. One poor fellow who forgot
himself into the indiscretion of a pinch of snufi" in the
royal presence was maimed for life. The punishment
farther North for this nasal inhalation is the cutting off
of the lips. Mushidi's axiomatic definition of tobacco is
" death," and he gets leverage for this idea in the local
etymology of the word Fwaka = toh3LGco, i.e. the death-
dealer. Is this the true genesis of the old Kaleigh story
of his servant suspecting he was " on fire at the mouth "
and pouring cold water on the pioneer smoker ?
# * *
Mushidi, I find, is really an Emperor, because all the
aboriginal kings for hundreds of miles stream in and do
fealty. No fussy genuflexion this, but the simple and
solitary shout '* Conqueror !
" (Kashinde), with one
clap of the hands. If you quiz one of these chiefs as to
his rights of kingship, at first he shivers at the im-
pertinence of the thing. Pushing investigations, however,
you find that very rarely has he real title-deeds, and not
even the red spear of Rob Roy, to prove his rights. The
fact is, many of these lesser chiefs have won territory in
lawsuits ; not hard muscles but hard mouths doing it all.
Take some data. Lokona has ancestral rights to his
territory, because the first of his dynasty ate a dog at a