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

OUR AFRICAN APPRENTICESHIP 51
of our American friends. Here, all alone, he camped on
the edge of a wood, making a beginning by felling tall
trees and roughing out of the thick bush a clearing for his
future site. Soon the songs of the wind whistling through
the woods were answered by the songs of Zion, and thus
at long last the story of centuries of heathendom was
ended and a new chapter begun. The large modern
Chisamba of these later days was long ago cradled there
in that tiny mud hut in the woods, and I should be
insolently ungrateful were I to forget these early days of
promise, eyes ranging over the Eastern skyline,
" Yearning for the large excitement
That the coming years would bring."
But the negro must really be seen in his own compact
and cramped stockade town, and I shall never regret
beginning my life in Africa in one such village on the
Kunje River. Cooped up inside the same stockade, air
stale and sour, we black and white lived together for
months, the same beehive huts and porridge our portion.
" Chenda," or Pilgrim Town, they called the village, and a
kindly old grandmother saw to my comfort. Feeble and
wrinkled, this genial body was only one of the withered
old '* hags " of the modern explorer's book of travels, yet
as the days passed and we got on family talking terms,
here was a seemingly repellent old negress developed into
a charming dowager armed to the finger tips with finish
and polish. Listened to your verb Ndu Pandula (Thank
you) with a pretty pleased old blush. With her old hard,
corrugated hands she stirred my porridge day by day