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

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THINKING BLACK
African hears that line of the Bible he shudders
"The rich man died, and was buried." Instinctively
they think of a holocaust with its stream of blood
and then it is Jeremiah's famous "weepers" put in an
appearance, professional tear-manufacturers these, who
produce—for a consideration— "tortoise-tears" (sic) by
the jar-ful. "Consider ye, and call for the mourn-
ing women, that they may come ; and send for cunning
women, that they may come :
and
let them make haste,
and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run
down with tears, and our eyelids gush out with waters "
(Jer. ix. 17)—how often have these words been uttered
in Lubaland ! Two
of the prettiest wives are gloriously
dressed and anointed with oil to accompany the corpse
to the "west coast of Africa," i.e. the spirit-world
(Kumbonshi), and never, never to come back again.^
They always say that these and the like go to their
own death with alacrity ; and when I protest later,
they remind me of a case very well known to me by
a personal link. That is the Mbogo Senior incident
down in the Sera plain. At the MpaJci ceremony,
and against all entreaty to the contrary, the infirm old
wife of his youth insists upon accompanying her own
consort down into the tomb of suffocation. She brushes
aside the younger folks, and orders the catching and
cooking of her best barn-yard fowl for her own last
supper. She assists in her own " death toilet," her own
1 That ia to say, the setting sun symbolises the advent of dark night,
i.e. death.