Chapter XIV: Bakula stays with the White Man

The working of a mission station--Buying food--The school--Bakula is
afraid to enter the school--Repairing the station--Boys work in the
gardens--A quarrel, and how it was settled--An evening’s chat with
the white man--Rubbing evil spirits out of a man--Sunday
service--Congregation--Sermon--Visit to a near town--Religious talk
with the King--Boys pray for their white teacher--Witch-doctor’s
trick exposed.

Next morning, at sunrise, Bakula was aroused by the sonorous tones of a large bell, and running out of the house he found the white man pacing slowly up and down the yard of the mission station, waiting for the workmen to arrive. Bakula greeted his friend with a smile, and an inquiry as to whether he had “slept well,”[45] and then stood on one side to observe all that happened. Soon the workmen came, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, and the white man, checking them by his note-book, sent some to cut and carry in bundles of thatching-grass, others for fence sticks, and others for posts; three were sent for papyrus[46] reeds from which to make native string for repairing the fences running round the mission ground, and some were set to work on the station.

Footnote 45:

See note 35, p. 352.

Footnote 46:

See note 36, p. 352.

Having started the men at their work, the white man sat down to his breakfast. It was not like the dinner to which the King had been invited, for it consisted of porridge, coffee, roasted plantain[47] and eggs. During this time women and men were gathering with various articles for sale, and as soon as the white man had finished his breakfast he went out to barter for the different articles he needed. Women with large baskets of _mfumfu_, or cassava flour, and peanuts went with their goods to the door of a store directly the price was agreed upon. Eggs were tested, and a string of a hundred blue pipe beads (worth a farthing) was paid for each, fowls were bought at from ten to twenty strings of beads each, according to size. Yams, sweet potatoes, greens, and small native tomatoes were also purchased with either the ordinary blue beads, which were the currency, or with red, olive, opal or any other coloured beads that happened to be in stock and took the fancy of the seller. Men with bamboos, mats, and planks bartered them for different kinds of trade cloth; and those with goats sold them for cloth, blankets, knives, cast-off soldiers’ coats, or large, bright-coloured handkerchiefs. Then the white man hurried over to the store, measured out the cassava flour and peanuts, and paid the women according to quantity.

Footnote 47:

See note 37, p. 352.

On our markets a great amount of time is wasted by haggling over prices--the seller asking a ridiculous sum at first, and gradually bringing it down to a half or third of the original demand. But I noticed that the white man looked keenly at the article for sale, asked the price, carefully considered for a few moments and then stated the amount he would give, and the vender either assented to it at once, or picked up his goods and left.

There was one man, a stranger, who had a goat for sale. The white man examined it.

“How much?” he asked.

“Twenty-four fathoms of cloth,” replied the man.

The white man whistled, smiled, and said: “I will give you nine fathoms for it, and that is a fair price.”

“Give me twenty fathoms. I can get that on the market,” avowed the man.

“Take it to the market, then,” advised the white man. “Let me see,” he continued, “to-day is Nkenge market. You will not have far to go.” And with that he walked on to the next.

A man standing by said to the goat-seller: "If you stay here all day he won’t change his price. He has only ‘one mouth.’ On the market you may get seven fathoms for the goat, but not more. You should accept the offer."

He wisely acted on the advice, received his nine fathoms, and went away with a truer conception of white men’s knowledge of the prices of native goods, and delighted that he had sold his goat before the sun was very high in the sky.

Just now I heard the big bell ring, and shortly after it was again rung loudly, and the boys on the station and others from various parts of the town went hurrying by into the school-house--a long building of mats, posts, and thatch, built along one side of the courtyard. There were about sixty boys of various ages present when the white man entered. He led them in the singing of a hymn, talked to them a short time about God’s palaver, and then they all bowed their heads in prayer.

After this he called out the names of the boys from his book, and divided them into four lots: one group he set to write in books, another received slates and pencils and wrote down and worked the sums that were written on a blackboard, another set of boys sat round their white teacher and read from books, and over in the corner was a class being taught their letters by a native teacher.

Bakula was asked by the white man to enter the school, but my owner was too fearful of what might happen to him--if he did--to accept the invitation, and at the same time was so interested in all that he saw and heard that he could not drag himself away from the door. He asked and received permission to remain at his place of observation.

At intervals the white man walked round the station to see that the workmen had not gone to sleep, or over to some young men who were learning carpentry under the verandah of his house, and needed some further instruction. Occasionally men came to the door of the school to talk with the white man on matters of business or to seek his advice on native palavers.

About the middle of the morning the white man gave a sign, and the boys left the school helter-skelter for a short time of play. Hockey-sticks were quickly brought out, and the station resounded with peals of laughter and the shouts of those at play. Another sign and the boys skurried back to the school-house, and were soon engaged in other lessons. During the second school the white teacher gave a short talk on physiology, and the boys listened to it with much attention, and asked many questions. It surprised them to hear the number of bones in their body, and the wonderful way in which they were made.

I noticed that the teacher spoke of the foolishness of believing that witchcraft could affect the body, and showed how the witch-doctors tricked, deceived and robbed them. They sang another hymn, and repeated together what I afterwards learned to be the Lord’s Prayer, and the school was concluded. The midday bell rang, the workmen stopped work, the boys went to their house or to the town, and the white man had his dinner and rested during the heat of the day.

In due time (2 p.m.) the bell sounded, and Bakula, full of curiosity and interest, went to see what next the white man would do. He found him standing at the door telling the workmen to continue with the repairs of the fence, and allotting to the boys their work in the garden. At this time about twenty boys lived on the station, some of whom came from distant towns. All of them had their own work allotted to them: thus two boys swept, cleaned, and did all the necessary work in the white man’s house; one boy did the washing and ironing, another did the cooking; one boy fetched firewood and water for the cook-house; two boys looked after the goats, cut grass and fed them in the dry season; and one boy fetched the water for the house from the beautiful spring that gurgled out of the ground half-way down the hill-side. The rest of the boys worked on the garden.

Bakula could understand boys working about the house, kitchen, and goats of the white man; but he could not understand boys working on the land like women and girls; and when he went to look at them, and found them digging with hoes, he asked: “Why do you do this woman’s work? Are you girls?”

“No,” they answered, “we are not girls. At one time we refused to work in the garden, and told the white man that this kind of work was only fit for women; but he came and worked with us day after day, and we thought that the work a white man was not ashamed to do we black boys should not be ashamed of. Since then we have worked as you see us.”

Bakula returned to the courtyard, and found the white man very busy dressing sores, and dispensing medicine to the sick, after which he accompanied him on a visit to various patients about the town who were too ill to come to the dispensary. The rest of the afternoon the white man spent with the carpenter lads, by whose aid he was building a large store.

By sunset the white man looked fagged, and I think it was with a sigh of relief that he drove the last nail for the day, and gave the order to ring the stop-work bell. Just then loud shouts were heard, angry, passionate words came on the air, and the white man, hurrying in the direction of the sounds, found a big boy fighting a small one. He instantly separated them, and turning on the big fellow upbraided him for cowardice in striking a little boy, and charged him with breaking one of the station laws in hitting one smaller than himself.

“He cursed me and was insolent,” aggressively answered the law-breaker in defence of his action.

“Yes, I dare say he was cheeky,” said the judge; “but you know the rule of this place is: All big boys that hit little boys must be punished with the cane, and all small boys who curse and are insolent to their elders must be brought to the white man for him to cane. There is only one who punishes on this station, and that is myself. Is it not so?”

“Yes, that is the law,” they unanimously assented.

“I have told you repeatedly,” continued the white man, “that without such a rule you cannot live happily here. The big ones among you would constantly harry and make drudges of the little ones, and their lives would become unbearable; and the younger ones, too, would irritate you older ones with their curses and impudence. It is a good law, is it not?”

“Yes, it is a good law,” they all agreed.

Thereupon the white man picked up a cane, and gave the law-breaker six good strokes with it on his hands, and turning to the small boy, he said: “If you get cursing or cheeking the other lads I will give you a thrashing that you will not quickly forget.”

The boys trooped off to their house. And Bakula, as he accompanied the lads, was surprised to hear no angry exclamations against the white man. The majority acknowledged the rule to be a good one, and that the white man was absolutely impartial in enforcing it.

During the evening my owner, together with eight or ten other lads, went to have a chat with their white man. On entering his house we found him reading a book and eating roasted peanuts. His evening meal was over, and he was just reading and resting. On our arrival he smiled, and putting down his book, at once began to chat with us. There had been a discussion in the boys’ house as to which was the greatest country: Portugal, Holland, or England,[48] and as the supporters of each were about equally divided they had come to the white man to settle the palaver for them. He listened to our questions, and taking down one of his books, told us the size of each country, the number of people in each, and the different kinds of articles made in each place. He then told us a story he had just read, and asked us to tell him one of our stories, which the oldest lad amongst us at once did, to our amusement. It was now late, but before wishing our white friend “to sleep well,” we all knelt in prayer and thanked the great God for His goodness, and especially for the loving gift of His Son Jesus Christ.

Footnote 48:

See note 38, p. 353.

The next day was Saturday, so the boys swept up the courtyard, and all the various paths about the station, those also leading to the station and the “town square.” Bakula entered heartily into the work of tidying up the place, and by midday all the rubbish had been carried away and burnt. The boys had the rest of the day for themselves--some visited friends in the neighbourhood, others played hockey, one group went off to the forest in search of wild fruits, and another went rat-hunting in the farms and bush.

While Bakula was walking this afternoon through the town he saw a man stretched on a mat with a fowl tied to his leg, and a witch-doctor vigorously rubbing him. He was a sick man, and the “medicine man” had told him to bring a fowl before he could attempt to cure him. The fowl had been brought and a string had been tied from a leg of the fowl to a leg of the outstretched patient.

The witch-doctor was now kneeling by the side of the sick man, rubbing the evil spirit out of his arms into his body; then he chased it out of the body over towards the leg to which the fowl was tied; he thereupon worked it out of the other leg into that to which the fowl was connected by the string, and thus he followed it until he had cornered it near to the string, when suddenly he gave a tremendous push and away it went through the rest of the leg and through the string into the fowl. The witch-doctor cut the connecting string, wrung the neck of the fowl, and threw it over to his wife to cook for his next meal, for he was not afraid of any number of evil spirits that might be in the fowl. The practice was that if a patient did not recover after this rubbing out of the malignant spirits, he had to take another and another fowl until he was either cured or his fowls were finished.

There was no bell at sunrise the next morning calling the men to work; but before the sun was far above the distant tree-tops a bugle sounded out over the town.

“What is that?” asked Bakula of a companion, for he had never heard a bugle before.

“To-day is Sunday,” his friend replied, “and that is Petelo blowing his bugle to remind the people that it is the rest day, and those who want to attend the service to hear God’s palaver must not go to the farms.”

“I know what God’s palaver means,” said Bakula. “But what do Sunday and service mean? I never heard of them before.”

His informant explained the meaning of the day, and also of the word service. He said that ever since the white teachers had come to live in their town many of the folk observed the day and attended the service, but others laughed at both and went off to their farms as usual.

By and by my owner went with the other lads to the school-house, where we found some boys from the town already assembled. The white man came in and greeted us, sat down among us and conducted what I afterwards learned was a Sunday-school class. He talked to us about God’s mercy and justice, and we asked him all kinds of questions. If we started any inquiry that did not belong to the lesson he told us to remind him of it one evening when we went for a chat with him and he would try to answer it then.

When the sun was well up the bell was rung for God’s palaver. All the boys picked up two or three mats and carried them to the “town square,” where they spread them along three sides and placed two of them in the middle. These preparations being completed, the bell was again loudly rung, and the white man, locking up his house, went to the square, followed by a boy carrying his chair.

By this time the people had gathered--the women and girls sat on the mats along one side, the men and boys on the mats extending along two sides. The school-boys arranged themselves on the mats that had been put in the middle, against which the white man’s chair had been placed, and finally the King sat on a chair with a few head men about him at the entrance to his _lumbu_, or enclosure, which occupied the whole of the fourth side. He was gorgeously arrayed in a bright red coat and waistcoat, with a large, bright blue cloth round his loins and a gaudy smoking-cap on his head. Most of the people were dressed in gay-coloured cloths and bright beads, and had oily faces. Here and there were young dandies who, to enhance their charms, had polished their faces with black lead, or streaked them with lines of scarlet, blue, or yellow pigments.

It was a strange, grotesque, pathetic gathering upon which the eyes of the pale-face teacher rested that radiant Sunday morning. The faces of the old women portrayed their greed, jealousy, hatred and vice. From the very youngest girl to the oldest woman there was not a pure, virgin soul to be found. Among the older men there was not one but had broken the whole ten commandments, and the younger men and boys who had not broken them all had failed not from lack of inclination, but of opportunities. There at the back sat in scarlet and blue the man who had murdered the very mother who had nursed him and cared for him in infancy and childhood. What message had the teacher for these men and women?

The white man gave out a hymn, and the schoolboys sang it heartily. Bakula recognized it as the one he heard in Tonzeka’s town on the night of the drunken riot--“God loved the world of sinners lost.”

Then a strange thing happened: the teacher knelt in prayer, and the men and women, boys and girls turned over from their squatting postures on the mats, and bowed their heads while in reverent tones they repeated the prayers phrase by phrase--a confession of guilt, a petition for strength to do right, a note of thankfulness for God’s mercy, and, for His great gift of Jesus Christ, and a request that they might all receive His pardon and salvation. Then came another hymn, and the white man spoke to us on God’s readiness to forgive, if we will but repent and turn to Him, and he illustrated what he meant by telling us a story out of God’s book called “The Prodigal Son.” Another hymn and prayer and the strange meeting was over. The teacher went and spoke to the King and greeted all whom he passed on his way to his empty house.

Soon after dinner the white man called three or four of his boys, and, taking his long walking-stick, started for Mputu, to hold a service in that town. Bakula met the little party and received permission to join it.

Passing through the town, we descended a steep side of the hill, and came to the river Mposo, which we crossed by means of a rickety bridge, and a long walk up and down low-lying hills brought us to Mbumba’s town of Mputu. Apparently the white man was expected, for the folk gathered before the greetings between the chief and the teacher were concluded.

A service was conducted similar to the morning one, the chief and people joining in the hymns and prayer, and listening attentively to God’s palaver. The sun by now was fast sinking, so the white man bade the chief and his people good-bye and hurried back to Congo dia Ngunga. On the way out our white companion had chatted freely with us, but now he asked us not to talk to him, as he had to think over what teaching he should give the King on his return.

In our small party was a lad belonging to the town we had just left, so Bakula asked him if all the rumours of cruelty and murder he had heard about Mbumba were true, for he was notorious throughout the whole district for cutting off ears on the slightest provocation, murdering folk for the smallest offences, and stirring up quarrels and war between towns for the most trivial causes. “Yes,” admitted the lad, “it is all true. He cut off my brother’s ear, because, while sitting in front of him one day, he happened to stretch out his legs;[49] and I was present on another occasion when he ordered a slave to be killed for the same small offence.”

Footnote 49:

See note 39, p. 353.

Mbumba’s record was that of one “whose feet were swift to shed blood.” He had listened quietly to the teaching that afternoon, and had begged the teacher to “come again quickly.”

It was almost sunset by the time we had climbed the hill and reached the town. On arriving at the entrance to the King’s enclosure the white man turned in, we following at his heels. The King, hearing us, called to us to enter without ceremony, and we found his majesty squatting on a low stool with an empty chair opposite him. He shook hands cordially with the white man and, pointing to the chair, invited him to be seated. And sitting there face to face, with only a few boys about them, the white man said--

“The white teachers who first came to live in your town visited you every Sunday evening to explain God’s palaver to you, and for many months now I have been coming, when well, every Sunday evening for the same purpose. What is it that keeps your heart closed so tightly against our message?” Then he pleaded with him to repent of his many great sins and seek help and salvation in God. The shadows deepened as the conversation proceeded, but it was not too dark to see the tears trickling down the pock-marked cheeks of the old man.

At last the quiet talk was ended, and the white man, promising to see him again soon, bade the King “sleep well,” and returned to the lonely stone house that echoed with the voices of those who had lived and worked there before him.

Soon after dark the white man’s personal boy came and informed us that his master had taken some tea and gone to bed with a bad fever, and he had sent to say that he could not talk with any of the lads that night, and begged them not to make much noise, as his head ached severely. A quietness fell upon us all, and although the stone house was some distance off, the boys spoke in whispers for fear of disturbing their teacher. When the light was put out that night, one of the elder boys timidly suggested we might pray to God on behalf of their teacher. As no one dissented he falteringly prayed: “O God, we do not know much about you, for we are foolish and do not learn quickly what our white man tells us about you; but we beg you to cure him of his fever, so that he may teach us every day. O God, take a sharp hoe, dig into our hearts, pull up all the weeds and sow Thy good seed there. In the name of Jesus we beg it. Amen.”

Two or three days after the above events Bakula heard some shouting in the town, and hurried in the direction of the voices. There, in the centre of a crowd, was a witch-doctor, dancing and prancing about in the most ridiculous, though approved, fashion.

In his hand was a bunch of feathers, which he flourished in the air and then darted at the grass wall of a hut near by. Every time he threw it the bunch of feathers stuck in the wall, and everybody shouted with admiration because they thought it was a great charm, as otherwise simple feathers would not fly with such accuracy and stick tightly on a wall. The witch-doctor danced in triumph, and the crowd of onlookers shouted and clapped.

Again the feathers are thrown, and, wonder of wonders, they stick; but before the witch-doctor has finished his fandango of exultation, a school-lad darts from the crowd and, grasping the feathers, he drags them from the wall.

A scream of horror arises from the men and women, for they expect him to fall dead or paralyzed on the ground as a punishment for touching another’s fetish.

But, no, there he stands nervously pulling at the feathers; and before the witch-doctor can reach him he extracts from amid the feathers a sharp iron prong, and throws it and the feathers at the feet of their maddened owner.

Then the people see the trick that has been played upon them and, turning on the witch-doctor, drive him from the town amid hooting, hisses and laughter.