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

308 THINKING BLACK
were so maddened by what had taken place that they
cut Mushidi's head from its trunk and carried it on a pole
back to the camp.
"Every bullet has its billet," and the death that
stiffens kings and slaves alike had gripped him.
" There's no pocket in a shroud," says the proverb, but
Mushidi didn't get a shroud, much less a pocket in it.
Thus it came to pass, as so often happens in this old
world's history, that the man who had spent a lifetime
laying violent hands on hundreds of innocents must
himself make exit by the identical doorway of a violent
death. "I happened," says Dr. Moloney, "to glance at
the dead man s face. It seemed to wear a mocking smile
which somehow wasn't easily forgotten." Even in death
the last look he left on his face was a perfect picture of
that curious career of his, the wolf and the pig still
struggling together in the dead features — Satan's
signature, indeed. Better for him had God's witnesses
never come to his country than that, having come, he
should have turned a deaf ear to them, and closed his
eyes against the light. This Mushidi was emphatically
a man " wrapped in the solitude of his own originality."
His head—and he was proud of it—was shaped as I have
seen no other man's, the bumps towering away like
Alps on Alps marking him off as one capable of doing
wild, wicked things. Ever since I have known him, a
look of cunning craftiness clung to his shrivelled features,
his general demeanour overbearing and haughty. With
him it was emphatically Aut Csesar aut nullus, every