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

446 THINKING BLACK
things have come to a head at last. Found them, as
a township, a dark mass of dilapidated huts, and the
problem was how to get them out of that hole and give
them a fresh start. That was a year ago. Now all is so
changed that " marvellous " is the true adjective qualifying
the truest of nouns change. After many years' tentative
work in Africa, there seems (from a letter before me) a
serious concession that it has been largely along wrong
lines. The error lay in training exotic carpenters and
joiners, who at once deserted their own tribe and went
far ahead, to return never, never more. The clamant
need is confronting the tribe as a whole, and "housing"
it along sane, simple lines—two- or three-roomed cottages,
that is to say.
To get a whole town so to arise after the sleep of
centuries is a very thrilling thing ; there is a quiver in
the air, and you feel in a very true manner you are getting
nearer the root of things. They do it all, their own
houses built by and for themselves. Then away at the
end of this new town of theirs, you can see the roof of
the Bible-school, the point this where we link up the
spiritual with the temporal. Man can see to the housing
of a town, but God alone can see to the homing of it.
And, remember, in the old dens of darkness the fount of
life was poisoned : no home, no holy felicities of life—
human pigsty. The children of these holes we daily
clutched at as they were daily swept past us, but the
Mission school only has them for two hours, as against
the long reactionary remainder of the day (and night !) in