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

BLACK MAN = BLACK MANNERS 441
Mweru negro into very crooked sanitation—the old
story of the negro debasing his surroundings and the
surroundings taking revenge by debasing the negro. A
hundred huts packed together means that a smothered
incipient cough beginning away at the corner of the
hamlet is, in a few days, heard infectiously cough, cough-
ing its way round the beehive town. But if so with an
elementary cough, how about the infectional terrors of
sleeping sickness ? In Lubaland, as I now write, whole
towns are being wiped off the map—the Nodder they
call that .
disease. So, too, smallpox licks up a whole
population, the disease sweeping through the land like
the annual grass-fires. Here, then, we see them crowding
and verminating in their filth. Living in crowds they
must die in crowds, like the flock of five duck you can
shoot with one cartridge from that same stockade. For
the Luban duck are like the adjacent smallpox Africans,
they stupidly flock thickly, a half-dozen easily falling to
one shot. In Lubaland one burning arrow silently fired
into that grass village did literally burn the whole of
the mushroom edifices out of existence—a perfect type
this of what inflammable diseases do all over our weary,
Christless land.
Such, then, is the precious price they pay for the
plan of higgledy-piggledy. For the crooked ways of the
crooked negro have not yet been exhausted, and long ago
it must have been obvious to the most superficial reader
that this crooked sanitation must also breed a crooked
set of morals. Laugh at the Missionary as the modern