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

270 THINKING BLACK
they one by one dropped out and turned aside to a lazy
lotus life in Africa. We, the hardier whites, held on our
Northern way until we were dropped in our respective
habitats. Pointing to the mountains, they show you
solemnly his alleged "footprints" in the rocks, for in
those days, say our good black geologists, "the rocks were
soft." These footprints, of course, are a fraud and merely
the "pot-holes" common to all the world's river-beds,
erosive in character ; nevertheless, it was appropriate that
this " footprints-graven-in-the-rocks " idea should catch
Mushidi's imagination. Deceiving and being deceived,
humbugging and being humbugged his whole life, it was
in the essential irony of things that he. The Fraud, should
believe such a fraud. The conscious grower of a
metaphoric mushroom empire, he vainly longed to go
down to posterity at least " written in the rocks," if not
with the iron pen of history : was not he, too, " God " as
much as Kara ya Rova? Did not he, too, daily and
hourly mould the fates and fortunes of men ? So the fiat
went forth, and Mushidi, standing as solemnly as though
he were being measured by a shoemaker, got his foot-
prints carved out of the rocks. More than that, he had a
backgammon board cut out in the rocks—a memorial
to all generations.
Here it was at Kayumba's he, resolving to make a
water-bottle never before made by man, flayed a human
being to make a water-bottle of the skin. Hence the
catch has gone down to posterity, " Mushidi wa funda
mu ku funda muntu,'^ the horrible play on the word