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

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THINKING BLACK
quential, annexes your pots and pans with much slamming
and banging. A child of earthenware utensils, what sweet
musft there is to him in the bang of an iron pot. This in
fact is the very thing that makes him careless, for with his
own fragile native thing he must be high-strung and care-
ful even to trembling. But a donkey must be coaxed
with carrots, and this culinary compact is generally signed,
sealed, and delivered by a sort of " taking the shilling " on
his part—calico, not cash, being the currency. It must be
white and not dark in colour this fabric, otherwise you
will have symbolised sorrow and not joy. So you go with
the tempting tide, and having conciliated your friend the
cook (** your mother " is his phrase), off he swaggers to the
native quarters, all glorious in a loin-cloth as white as
the untrodden snow. You can see that his very way of
donning this white prophecy of happiness is, on his part, a
sort of flourish in the face of fortune by which he, the said
Wanga, defies the future and the fates. Indeed, as if it
were all a page of Homer, has he not consulted the
" Omens " for a favourable start ?
Does this story drag ? Blame our negro and let us
move forward—Eastward Ho ! Watch now the rule of
the Far-Interior road. Yonder a thousand miles from the
Ocean is your objective, and the farther in you **bore"
that word again— your pilgrim kit necessarily assumes an
austerely simple aspect. Like ballooning in cloudland, the
higher you want to ascend the more ballast you must
throw out, and even so with this Far-Interior caravan
of ours. At the Mildmay prayer meeting did not that