It happened that two Americans were with me, for I had just reached the pioneer mission station at Chinjamba, beyond Mashiko. One of them was a doctor, with ten years’ experience in a great American city, and after commending the exertions of the native physician, he asked to be allowed to assist in the case himself. The native agreed at once, for the white man’s fame as an exorcist had spread far through the country. Four or five days later I saw the same girl, no longer stretched on hot dust, no longer smeared with spittle, leaves, and paint, but smiling cheerfully at me as she pounded her meal among the other women.
The incident was typical of those two missionaries and their way of associating with the natives. It is typical of most young missionaries now. They no longer go about denouncing “idols” and threatening hell. They recognize that native worship is also a form of symbolism—a phase in the course of human ideas upon spiritual things. They do not condemn, but they say, “We think we know of better things than these,” and the native is always willing to listen. In this case, for instance, after the girl had been put into a shady hut and doctored, the two missionaries sat down on six-inch native stools outside the club-house and began to sing. They were pioneers; they had only three hymns in the Chibokwe language, and they themselves understood hardly half the words. No matter; they took the meaning on trust. By continued repetition, by feeling no shame in singing a hymn twenty or thirty times over at one sitting, they had got the words fixed in the native minds, and when it came to the chorus the whole village shouted together like black stars. The missionaries understood the doctrine, the people understood the words; it was not a bad combination, and I thought those swinging choruses would never stop. The preaching was perhaps less exhilarating to the audience, but so it has sometimes been to other congregations, and the preacher’s knowledge of the language he spoke was only five months old.
A CHIBOKWE WOMAN AND HER FETICHES
At the mission it was the same thing. The pioneers had set up a log hut in the forest, admitting the air freely through the floor and sides. They were living in hard poverty, but when they shared with me their beans and unleavened slabs of millet, it was pleasant to know that each of the two doors on either side of the hut was crammed with savage faces, eagerly watching the antics of civilization at meals. One felt like a lantern-slide, combining instruction with amusement. The audience consisted chiefly of patients who had built a camp of forty or fifty huts close outside the cabin, and came every morning to be cured—cured of broken limbs, bad insides, wounds, but especially of the terrible sores and ulcers which rot the shins and thighs, tormenting all this part of Africa. Among the patients were three kings, who had come far from the east. The greatest of them had brought a few wives—eight, I think—and some children, including a singularly fascinating princess with the largest smile I ever saw. Every morning the king came to my tent, showed me his goitre, asked for tobacco, and sat with me an hour in silent esteem. As I was not then accustomed to royalty, I was uncertain how three kings would behave themselves in hospital life; but in spite of their rank and station, they were quite good, and even smiled upon the religious services, feeling, no doubt, as all the rich feel, that such things were beneficial for the lower orders.
On certain evenings the missionaries went out into the hospital camp to sing and pray. They sat beside a log fire, which threw its light upon the black or copper figures crowding round in a thick half-circle—big, bony men, women shining with castor-oil, and swarms of children, hardly visible but for a sudden gleam of eyes and teeth. The three invariable hymns were duly sung—the chorus of the favorite being repeated seventeen times without a pause, as I once counted, and even then the people showed no sign of weariness. The woman next to me on that occasion sang with conspicuous enthusiasm. She was young and beautiful. Her mop of hair, its tufts solid with red mud, hung over her brow and round her neck, dripping odors, dripping oil. Her bare, brown arms jingled with copper bracelets, and at her throat she wore the section of round white shell which is counted the most precious ornament of all—“worth an ox,” they say. Her little cloth was dark blue with a white pattern, and, squatted upon her heels, she held her baby between her thighs, stuffing a long, pointed breast into his mouth whenever he threatened to interrupt the music. For her whole soul was given to the singing, and with wide-open mouth she poured out to the stars and darkened forests the amazing words of the chorus:
“Haleluyah! mwa aku kula,
Jesu vene mwa aku sanga:”
There were two other lines, which I do not remember. The first line no one could interpret to me. The second means, “Jesus really loves me.” The other two said, “His blood will wash my black heart white.”
To people brought up from childhood in close familiarity with words like these there may be nothing astonishing about them. They have unhappily become the commonplaces of Christianity, and excite no more wonder than the sunrise. But I would give a library of theology to know what kind of meaning that brown Chibokwe woman found in them as she sat beside the camp-fire in the forest beyond the Hungry Country, and sang them seventeen times over to her baby and the stars.
When at last the singing stopped, one of the missionaries began to read. He chose the first chapter of St. John, and in that savage tongue we listened to the familiar sentences, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Again I looked round upon that firelit group of naked barbarians. I remembered the controversies of ages, the thinkers in Greek, the seraphic doctors, the Byzantine councillors, the saints and sinners of the intellect, Augustine in the growing Church, Faust in his study—all the great and subtle spirits who had broken their thought in vain upon that first chapter of St. John, and again I was filled with wonder. “For Heaven’s sake, stop!” I felt inclined to cry. “What are these people to understand by ‘the beginning’? What are we to understand by ‘the Word’?” But when I looked again I recognized on all faces the mood of stolid acquiescence with which congregations at home allow the same words to pass over their heads year after year till they die as good Christians. So that I supposed it did not matter.