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

302 THINKING BLACK
Anglo-Mushidi entente cordiale. Well aware am I how
puerile all this must seem to my Belgian friends— I, a
Britisher, puffing my own race in the third person.
Nevertheless, there you have the naked truth of the
matter, and history owes to Mushidi the attestation that
he did shout : " Sons of the dust, we know the English
to be the true people !
" No amount of arguing, explain-
ing, and smoothing down could convince a Belgian that
this writing East to bring in the English was on Mushidi's
genuine initiative. All the appearances are against us, and
they naturally only see in all this one more instance of
the unplumbed depths of English subtlety. Yet the fact
is, with these good Belgians pressing down so belligerently
from the North, Mushidi proposed the oldest and
simplest of black tactics—namely, the exploiting of one
white nation against the other. Memo, for Missionaries :
Do not dabble in " high politics," so called ; our politics
are higher than the high.
So time goes on until one eventful day a roar from
the North tells of the advent of the Belgians, and here
comes brave Paul Le Marine! first. He has been following
up the Sankuru from Lusambo, and, escalading the
Mitumba Range, arrives at the capital only to be repelled
by the Emperor. The founder of the first Congo State
poste in Katanga, his arrival was desolated by a cruel
fire, the huge caravan of supplies going up in smoke, and
jeopardising the future occupancy of the country. Poor
Legat and Verdickt, who remained, have many a hard
day's fare in store for them, yet to these able men the