“Our property at Malange is worth probably $6,000. Samuel J. Mead has charge of a big farm and is making it pay. Brother Willie trained four native men to run two pit-saws, and in the last year has turned out $1,500 worth of lumber, which sells for cash at the saw-pits. These men are also preachers, and preach several times each week in the Portuguese language. In labor, money and building material they have recently completed a new two-story mission-house and other mission improvements, amounting to an aggregate cost of $1,200, without any help from home. Men who are making money and attending to all their duties as missionaries have a legal right, under the Decalogue and Discipline, to a fair compensation from their net earnings; but all the missionaries we have still abiding in our Angola Missions, go in with the self-sacrificing, suffering Jesus under the ‘new Commandment.’ They invest their lives with all they possess, including all the money they have or can make in his soul-saving work in Africa, and have no separate purse which they call their own. If on this line of life they should suffer lack, or bring the Lord in debt to them, it would indeed be ‘a new thing under the sun.’
“We have graves at Malange also. Mrs. Dr. Smith, an estimable Christian lady, sleeps there. Dear Edna Mead, one of ‘our children’ of 1885, a lovely Christian, perhaps of 12 years, sleeps
in our own cemetery on our mission farm. While I was there last June, we buried a Libolo young man—brought up and saved in our mission—in our cemetery; and six weeks after her marriage, our dear Bertha, our grand missionary Bertha, was smitten down and laid there to rest.
“A great many good people in the Church on earth do not believe in my missions, but God means that the Church above all shall think well of us: hence, he has not taken from us a single dwarfish, shabby specimen, but from the beginning has selected from the front ranks of the very best we had, so that we are not ashamed of our representative missionaries in heaven. Nearly all of our present force in Angola have made a marvelous achievement in the mastery of the Portuguese and Kimbundu languages. Prof. H. Chatelain has printed them in the form of a grammar, beside a primer and the Gospel by John in the Kimbundu. The rest of our people there, the same as himself, learned the vernacular by direct and daily contact with the natives, but Brother Chatelain’s books are of great value to them, both in advance study and in teaching.
“Our Angola Missions were commenced a little over four years ago. They have furnished many useful lessons from the school of experience, and demonstrated the possibilities of success in the three great departments of our work, educational, industrial and evangelical, and of early self-sustentation later, absolute self-support and then self-propagation—founding new missions without help from home. Our work has to be run mainly along the lines of human impossibilities, combining rare human adaptabilities with Divine power and special providences under the immediate administration of the Holy Spirit. Hence, our greatest difficulty is to find young men and women possessing these rare adaptabilities. We have them now in Angola, and also on the Congo and west coast, but the sifting at the front required to get them is too big a contract for me. I can only do the best I can, and commit and intrust all the issues to God. He works out his will patiently and kindly. The people he sends home are good Christians, but on account of personal disabilities, or family relationship and responsibilities, find themselves disqualified for this peculiar style of work and not able to make self-support, and hence quietly leave for home.
Many of such would gladly stay if we would pay them a salary, which we cannot do, though we don’t question their natural rights. Thus we lose numbers and gain unity and strength.
“From Malange, a tramp of 1,000 miles northeast will bring us to Luluaburg, in the Bashalange Country, discovered by Dr. Pogge and Lieut. Wissmann, in 1883. The Governor-General of the Independent State of Congo, at my request, gave to Dr. Summers, one of our men from Malange, permission to found a station for our mission at Luluaburg, which he did, and built two houses on it, and was making good progress when he became worn out by disease and died. I hope soon to send a successor to dear Dr. Summers.
“I have arranged at the land office in Boma for the completion of their conveyance of title by deed to our mission property at Luluaburg, on my return to Boma in April next (D.V.). Those vast countries of the Upper Kasai and Sankuru Rivers are immensely populous. By the will of God we shall hold our footing and a few years hence shall (D.V.) plant a conference in that county.
“From Luluaburg, a week of foot traveling northwest will bring us to Lueba, at the junction of the Lulua and Kasai Rivers. Thence, in a little steamer descending the Kasai River about 800 miles, we sweep through ‘Qua mouth’ into the Congo, descending which seventy miles we will tie up at Kimpoko, near the northeast angle of Stanley Pool. We opened this station in 1886, designed as a way-station for our transportation to the countries of the Upper Kasai. The Lord is by delay preparing us the better to go up and possess the land in his set time. He meantime approves of our good intentions. We have now stationed at Kimpoko, Bradley L. Burr, Dr. Harrison, Hiram Elkins and his wife Roxy. At Kimpoko, we made an irrigating ditch a mile long, drawing from a bold mountain creek an abundant supply of water to insure good crops at all seasons. We have there about ten acres under cultivation, and grow in profusion all the indigenous food that we can use. To provide good beef in abundance and ready money, Brother Burr goes out for a few hours and kills a hippopotamus or two. They are in demand among the traders and the natives for food. Brother Burr recently sold three in Kimpoko for $80. Brother Burr, who is our
Presiding Elder at Kimpoko, writes that the station has been nearly self-sustaining from the beginning, but entirely so since the beginning of this year. They are building a new mission-house this dry season, about 15x80 feet. In this work they may require a little help—a few bales of cloth from home. At a low estimate, our property in Kimpoko is worth at least $1,000.