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

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THINKING BLACK
that is where this too true story comes in. The facts are
demonstrable data, "chiels that winna ding," and thus
they run. The village of this Chief Swiva had the mis-
fortune to lie on the trunk road, and was thus much
harassed by passing Government caravans plundering his
people. Of course, in those days, before the splendid
Wangermde regime, very many of the State soldiers were
frank cannibals who would travel with a smoked human arm
or the like tied to their load—Katondo, for instance, did so
at Muntemune and to my knowledge. Thus the endless
rebuffs and indignities from such a horde of brutes made
Swiva long to lata dimo, as he put it, i.e. to die and be
done with it. But suicide is an unworthy death for a
chief, and the negro is a creature of monkey expedients,
so he slowly matures a plan. Why not a mock funeral ?
Why not sham sickness and death and burial ? Do not all
the local spiders, dor beetles and genus Elater, feign death
like a fox when touched ? Thus the weary months pass, and
finally poor old Swiva sees no hope of peace ahead save in
simulating death. This he resolves to do, and one daring
day the false death-wail goes up at midnight ; a wail
this ostentatiously prolonged throughout the next day.
Visitors pass in and out of the village bemoaning a
faithful friend departed, and there, in the dark mud hut,
swathed in his sham shroud, lies the malingering old
Swiva, heaving gently to the systole and diastole of a
bard but sad old heart. (The King is dead, ye negroes
not in The Know, yet long live the King I) But the
fiasco of it all is now about to be made manifest, for far