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

248 THINKING BLACK
long before the days of "Kodaks," when he described
Africa as the continent *' whose land the rivers have
spoiled'') The sleeping-sickness fly, malarial mosquito,
and endless etceteras are all cradled there in these
squelching bogs of despair. In plain English, these
marshes mean that this Africa of ours is really rotting for
four months yearly, and all to the tune of millions of
malarial mosquitoes humming their sweet tenor.
Then cometh climax. For sun, stink, and sickness get
so bad that the God Who sitteth o'er all waterfloods calls
an imperative halt to Nature in its mad career. And lo !
from mid- April to mid-October, the land swings back,
like a pendulum, to the exciting extreme of a season
of sun, only sun with not a dream of a drop of rain.
Monotonous months though they seem, what is really
happening is that this scorching sun is most surely and
solidly drying up the awful fecundity of the marshes.
The meteorological objective, in fact, of all this is a
working out at that great *' spring cleaning" of Africa
called "the smokes" :
now
it is our dark green land is a
weary expanse of sere yellow waste, even the murderous
marshes cracked solid and dry as a kiln.
** The sickness
of the land," they call it, and now it is any irresponsible
nobody can, with one lighted firebrand, send broad Central
Africa up in a blaze. Then, too, it is this irresponsible
nobody is overruled by a responsible Somebody, who
uses this beneficent antiseptic blaze to purge out of
His own Africa everything that doth ofi'end, from sea
to sea.