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

OUR EASTERN EXODUS 335
alive. An eerie, weird, and awful business to reflect
on, here you have cannibalism in full flower and blooming
in torture — two hundred men, women, and children
penned up in a mud house, the terrible thatched roof
sent roaring up in flames. But surely, you suggest, a
feeling of shame shot hotly through the murderer as he
beheld these two hundred Lubans in articulo mortis 1
The obvious answer is that what, to us, is a nightmare
and tragedy is to him something far different—a whiff*
of roasting viands from the Devil's kitchen, nothing more.
Quite civilised in his way, this man s favourite plate is
appropriately an enamel soup-dish from the West Coast,
centred with the King of Portugal's crown, and encircled
by the Portuguese colours. A reeking mackintosh his
fashionable garment under vertical rays, over which he
slings a very horsy pair of field-glasses. Granted (and
gladly) this was a very special blaze of barbarity, specially
wanton I mean, what was the cause ? Merely the shaving
of the cannibals head after a long spell of letting his hair
grow long. Month after month had passed and Luka-
tula's fast - grizzling wool was ominously allowed to
grow unchecked, dark hints thrown out that the day of
his head-shaving would be "the day of many tears."
And come it did, that close shave of his head being
equivalent to a closer shave to many whose lives that
day were in jeopardy.
Here in September you have white African winter,
but it is the whiteness of electric light and as hot as an
engine-room. Compared with Africa our English shiver-