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

336 THINKING BLACK
ing summer is not summer at all, it is only Richter's
" winter painted green." A woman, Mrs. Horns, tells me
that farther North she went with her sister to take the
village tribute to the Chief Chofwe, and they slept two
nights in the district capital. Chofwe sent along to their
quarters and regretted his not having a fat goat to send
them for the cooking-pot : was
therefore compelled to
send them, with apologies, a shivering naked boy—as
substitute for soup ! Here it is this lady Masengo presses
a point to the honour of negro womankind ; insists that
no woman ever did eat human flesh, that the men only
do so, that a woman defies any man to bring " man-meat
into her house, and that all her household pots are in-
violate. This witness is true. The rule is that the
cannibal club resort to the dark "groves" (Mushitu), and
there they keep a special supply of large pots for their
revels. The town ladies are jealous of it all, and insist
that these men are unclean until the village priest cere-
moniously cleanses them after *' the red mania." This
means that blocking the path of their return to the town
is the purging process by which alone the man " unclean
by a dead body " can enter his own house. Indeed, priest
or no priest, many a wife sues at law many a husband for
his man-eating orgies, any stroke of bad luck in her house
being traceable to the dead man eaten by her husband,
*'The dead do not really die," say they. But no sigh of
sorrow, mark you. It is all No. 1, and a fear that the
dead man will haunt the living to his undoing.
Another aspect of cannibalism. All Lubans are not