Chapter VIII: Visitors Arrive

The dulness and pettiness of native life--Arrival of two
visitors--Bakula questions them about the white man--They relate the
little they know about him--Old Plaited-Beard stirs the people up
against the white man--They exchange their views about him--They
agree to oppose him--The white man is seen approaching--He is driven
from the town and has to sleep in the bush.

The excitement of the funeral festivities, and of the hunt for and murder of the witch had passed away, leaving a deadly dulness on the town. The men suspiciously snarled at one another, and the women quarrelled with monotonous regularity. Their lives were petty, mean, and there was not enough dignity in a whole village to supply one man. For generations they had lived on a low level, with their eyes, thoughts, and hearts on the ground, and apparently the art of looking into the infinite spaces of God above and around them had been lost in their animalism.

Daily the women went to the farms, or to the markets to barter their produce; and the men went to the forests, to the markets, or to the hunt.

But one evening the town was set agog with the news that a white man was visiting the various villages, and would soon arrive in their town. The men who brought this news had much to tell about the coming visitor, for he had spent two or three days in their village. They were the “lions” of the evening, and their only regret was that they had not larger stomachs to accept comfortably all the invitations to the evening meals that poured in on them.

The visitors had come to transact business with the chief; consequently Satu’s fire was the centre that evening of a large and interested gathering. Men and lads crowded near the chief and visitors, while the women and girls hovered about the outskirts of the circle picking up such scraps of information as filtered through to them.

My owner, Bakula, was there, and put the first question, or rather series of questions: Who is this white man? What is he like? Where does he come from? What is he doing in this country? And Bakula stopped not because his curiosity was exhausted, but from sheer lack of breath.

Bakula had put into words what all were longing to know, so they sat quietly, while one of the visitors said: “We don’t know who this white man is. He is not one of the traders whom we have seen at Mboma,[21] for he is new to these parts, but he speaks our language very well, though at times he makes stupidly amusing mistakes. His carriers say that he comes from Congo dia Ngunga[22]--the king’s town away south. He will not sell us things like a trader, for he only barters for food for himself and carriers, and not for ivory or slaves. He offers to give us medicine, but we are afraid to take it, for who knows but it may bewitch us to death. He has invited some of our boys to his school, and has promised to teach them to read and write, and also how to make doors, windows and bricks, like white men. He even promised to clothe and feed them; but we shall not let any of them go. What we cannot understand is this: Why should the white man take all this trouble? Why should he offer to feed and clothe our children, to teach them, and to give us medicine?”

Footnote 21:

See note 19, p. 347.

Footnote 22:

See note 20, p. 347.

“I know why they do all these things,” shouted the old man with the plaited beard. “They want to bewitch you; they desire to take your spirits away, and then they will buy up your bodies and send them to their own country to turn, by their great magic, into slaves. You know what I told you on the road;” and with angry, burning words and vehement gestures he repeated to the whole crowd what he had told the few around the fire the first night I spent among them; and then, with foaming lips and glinting eyes, he cried: “This is the kind of white man against whom I warned you. If he comes here let us kill him.”

The women clapped their hands in horror of the wicked white man, and held their children tightly to them, and the men shifted nervously in their seats, and loosened the knives in their belts.

If, at that moment, the white man had walked into the town he would have been murdered, and his mutilated body thrown into the bush.

It was some time before they had so quieted as to continue their interrogations of the visitors. “Well, you have not told us what this white man is like,” called a voice from the back of the crowd.

“No, I have not,” replied the visitor, “because Tata stopped our talk with his horrible charges against the white men. This man who is coming is a white man, and you have all seen white men. This one is neither short nor tall, he has no beard, but he has tin saucepans to cook his food in, and a funny thing called a frying-pan, which always makes a lot of noise when it is put on the fire. He is a dirty white man, for the two days he was in our village he never washed more than his hands and face, and he smells just like all the other white men.”[23] And the speaker and others held their noses with expressions of exaggerated disgust.

Footnote 23:

See note 21, p. 348.

“I do not think he is dirty,” chimed in one of the listeners. “When I was last at the coast I asked one of the white man’s boys if his master was dirty, and he said: ‘No, he takes a bath every day in his house.’ You see this white man is travelling, and has no bath-house with him, and consequently in front of you he only washes his hands and face.“

“Oh, is that it? Perhaps you are right,” answered the visitor in an unconvinced voice.

“I will tell you something else,” continued the first speaker. “Once when I was at the coast I was talking to one of the interpreters there about this very matter--the smell emitted by white men; and he said: ‘They give off a bad odour, I know, but one day I heard one of the white traders say: “Those wretched niggers do stink badly!”’ So after all it may be that we smell as badly to them as they do to us, therefore we must not complain.”

The man with the plaited beard eyed the speaker for a few moments in angry contempt, and then he burst out at him in such a tirade that I feared his words would choke him.

“You dog,” he cried, “you witch, are you in the pay of the white man that you should thus speak for him? You white man,[24] you bewitched our chief to death; not Mavakala, I always said he was innocent and he vomited the ordeal three times, yet they would kill him; but you are the witch; you sold our chief’s spirit to these cursed white men, and now he is slaving for them, and we shall all die through your witchcraft and greed.”

Footnote 24:

See note 22, p. 348.

By the time the old man had finished his invectives the two chief actors in this scene were standing by themselves in a circle of anxious, terror-stricken faces. They were types of the old order and the new--the old order, slaves to witch-doctors, charms and superstitions that demanded the continuance of things as they are; the new order, men and lads upon whose minds new ideas were dawning and struggling for the mastery against their crude, superstitious fears,--men who were yearning for they knew not what, and were restless through strange strivings in their hearts.

There, flooded by the glorious, soft moonlight, stood the two men glaring at each other. Murder was in their hearts, and their hands were on their knives. A few moments more and the pent-up feelings of the surging crowd would have burst their strained barriers and much blood would have been shed, for each had his adherents, when Satu, the chief, stepped between the two men.

He was still dressed in mourning for his brother, and the thick coating of oil and soot on his face--a sign of his sorrow, had not yet been removed. He was a superstitious man and much travelled, a man in whose soul what-he-had-seen was struggling with his ignorant, superstitious fears.

In a few calm words he poured oil on the turbulent passions of his people. He scouted the idea that because a man related what he had seen and heard that therefore he was a witch; and he soothed the old man by promising to oppose the white man.

There was no more talk that night about the coming white man, for very soon after Satu uttered the above diplomatic words the people separated, and went either to whisper their fears to each other around their own fires, or to spread their mats for sleep. Several times during that night women woke from horrid dreams, screaming that the white man had stolen their children, or was trying to throttle the souls out of them.[25] In the morning as the women went to the farms they related to each other the dreams of the previous night, but instead of regarding them as nightmares caused by the exciting events of the preceding evening, they were taken as undeniable proofs of the devilish designs of the white men to carry out the awful predictions of the old man with the plaited beard.

Footnote 25:

See note 23, p. 348.

A few evenings after these happenings the much-talked-about _Mundele wa N zambi_ (or white man of God) was seen descending the hill on the other side of our valley. The women, screaming, snatched up their children and fled; the men beat some loud sounding notes of alarm on the drums; and then, picking up their guns, machets, knives, sticks, and any weapon to hand, went hurriedly to bar the entrance to their town. We saw the white man hesitate, stand still a moment, and then come on slowly and deliberately. He evidently knew the meaning of those excited thuds on the drum and the screams of the women.

Bakula, with a heavy stick in his hand--how he longed to have a gun so as to have a shot at those cruel white men!--ran with the men to the road by which the white man must come. As we hurried forward we could hear the men discussing what was to be done. Some were for killing the white man at once, but the majority said: “No, we will hear what he has to say. We will smell out his wickedness first, and then if there is cause we will help you to kill him.” Satu said: “We will neither hear him, nor kill him; but send him back the way he has come.”

The white man was now mounting the hill. It was a narrow, difficult, rough track that led to our town. He was panting by reason of the steepness of the ascent; and seemed utterly wearied with his long journey. He saw the ugly demonstration in front of him; he heard the yells and screams of rage and defiance; but he came quietly on--a lonely man to a surging torrent of wild, uncontrollable passions. His carriers and boys hung back, for they were overawed by the threatening aspect of the crowd.

As he drew near the white man held out his hand as a sign of his friendship; but Bakula, filled with the terrible stories he had heard about white men, struck at the proffered hand, and missed it in his blind rage.

Then arose a babble of curses, contradictory shouts, and threats to kill him if he did not go back. They hustled him about like a battledore. They tore his clothes; but he was so mixed up with them that they could neither use guns nor machets without great risks to their friends, and he was not worth that. When their fury had somewhat spent itself, the undaunted white man calmly asked them for permission to sleep in their town.

“No, we don’t want you,” the people screamed.

“I have only come to do you good,” he said.

“No, you have not, you have come to bewitch us to death,” they shouted.

“If I wanted to bewitch you to death I should have brought guns and soldiers, but you see I have neither. I want to speak to you about the great and good God Who sent His Son into the world to tell you of His love, and to save you,” was his quiet reply.

“You are a cunning, crafty witch. We want neither you, nor your goodness, nor your talk about God, therefore go away,” they cried.

“It is nearly dark, and the next town is a long, long way, and my people and I are very tired. Let me sleep here outside your town!” he pleaded.

“No, not here,” they said. “It is too close to us; go and sleep by the stream in the forest.”

“It is cold and damp there, and plenty of fever and mosquitoes are in that place. Let us sleep here, we shall not harm you!” he smilingly said.

“No, not here. Down there is good enough for a witch. Keep the fevers and mosquitoes away with your magic,” they sneeringly retorted.

Sadly and wearily the white man retraced his steps, and as he went down the hill he called his carriers and boys, and that night they put up some waterproof sheets to serve as a tent to protect them from the heavy dews and dripping trees.

Well, it might have been worse, and through his God-given calmness the white man had come out of a very difficult and dangerous position with only a few rents in his clothes and a few bruises on his body. We heard many things about the white man next morning when his boys came up to the town to buy some food from the people.

All through that night the natives in the town danced around their fetishes to keep them alert in protecting them from the white man’s devilry: drums were beaten and gongs sounded to frighten the evil spirits away; and guns were occasionally fired to warn off witches, and the lonely white man down in his camp, as he heard the various sounds, prayed: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,” and especially did he pray for the lad who struck at his outstretched hand.