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

OUR AFRICAN APPRENTICESHIP 45
versus Commandant, the legal lion bearded in his own
den by his own negress consort. Piqued by the storm
in his own household, the Chefe calmly seeks a scape-
goat and finds it in the harmless escort who courteously
brought the mother after her child. Chuckling with malice
and determined to come out of it with colours flying, the
Judge on the bench (who should have been prisoner at
the bar) condemned the scapegoat to pay two slaves,
because—I quote—he having brought the woman and
the woman having tempted His Honour the Judge, there-
fore judgment must be entered accordingly.
But the really profitable part of this bad business is
" the runaway slave " department. Here you have stay-
at-homes who often make more out of it than the zealous
man-hunters of Lubaland. Take Senr. Z., for instance, and
work out with him this spicy little sum in slave arith-
metic. Problem—how to make one slave produce
twenty- three other slaves plies oxen, rubber, and pigs
thrown in. Now this subterfuge is really as simple as it
is common, for he sets the ball a-rolliug by so maltreating
this one slave that run away she must, and now woe to
all who harbour her ! She darts into a hamlet, and
breathlessly elated, Snr. Z. darts after her, for that townlet
must pay, yes, cash down, ten slaves plus ten ipako {i.e.
any other legal currency). Our peppery old colonial rubs
his hands with glee at this brisk business, but he is on for
more. (Reader, are you working out this sum in awful
arithmetic : one slave has now captured ten more,
including etceteras?) Ne^^t move is nothing new, the