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

290 THINKING BLACK
the huge pit there are the deaths from suffocation ; and
up in the sunlight, on the new-made mound of earth, there
is a thing called " the blood-plaster " {Kushinga ne milopa).
A mere plebeian negro can only boast of a mud-and-water
plaster, but old King Coal claims a blood-and-mud one.
* ^ ^
Here is the reddest "sunset" of them all. From red
we have gone to redder, and now let us round it all off
with reddest. For the adjective has surely entered the
sad superlative degree : the groans on the crescendo
deaths amounting sweepingly and authentically to the
" wipe out " of a whole town. Note the italics, for there
is nothing visionary or elusive here. The mother and the
babe unborn, the family of six or seven strapping sons,
the boisterous band of precocious negro youngsters, the
grandfathers and the grandmothers—all, cent per cent,
dead in a heap, plus King, plus Queen, plus satellite
concubines. Did I know the man ? Yes, very familiarly.
Could I authenticate such a sweeping "wipe-out" of
human beings ? Yes, to the satisfaction of every reader
of this book. Am I talking in tens or in hundreds ?
Hundreds certainly, and not tens. And that is where
the story begins, the whole tale hinging on the sweeping
character of this annihilation of a solid town. Figures,
I know too well, are tricky things in Africa—witness
the modern tentative census papers. But, granted they
all entered a trap ; granted, likewise, this death-trap had
no vestige of a back door; granted, further, only three
souls emerged therefrom, more dead than alive—and then