Just then an old man with a long plaited beard chimed in: “Yes,” he said, “I had a friend who lived in a part of the country where, instead of using brass rods as we do, they use strings of blue pipe beads as money--a hundred beads on each string. One day my friend sold some ivory to a trader there, and received some packets of beads as part payment; but when he arrived home he found that instead of there being one hundred beads on each string there were only sixty. He was cheated out of forty beads on every string, and before he could pass them on the markets he had to make them up to the proper number.
“After that no native would deal with that trader unless he gave two strings of beads in the place of one, so he lost in trying to cheat us.
“Pish!” exclaimed the old man, “the white men are cheats! They put heavy pieces of iron under their scales to rob us; they put lumps of stuff in their measures to rob us; they give beads in short numbers to rob us; when we work for them they beat us just before our term is finished so that we may run away without our pay, and when we have carried loads for them they often pretend we have stolen from them so as to have an excuse for not paying us.”
The old man had worked himself into a rage as he recalled wrong after wrong; but his voice was drowned in a burst of laughter that came from a group sitting round another fire. “What are you laughing at?” he shouted aggressively.
“Not at you, father,” respectfully answered one of the young men. “We are laughing at what we heard yesterday: A trader had treated his house boys, his people, and his customers very badly for some time, so some of them met together one evening, went to his house, and stripping him of his clothes, they carried him into the bush, and rubbed him well with cow-itch, and then let him go. He had a very bad time; but he has been better to his people since that night.”
There was much snapping of fingers and chuckling over this joke played on the white man.
“For what purpose does the white man buy rubber and ivory?” asked one of the boys of the old man with the plaited beard.
“I don’t know,” replied the old man. “When I was a boy we made pestles and trumpets of the ivory, and drumstick knobs with the rubber; but I think the white man only buys rubber and ivory to hide the real reason of his presence in our country.”
“What is that?” asked the lad.
“Well,” said the old man, with a knowing look in his black eyes, “the white man does not like the work of making cloth, hence they come to this country to buy up all the bodies of those who die to send to their country to make cloth for them. They preserve the bodies in their stores until there is a good opportunity of sending them away in their steamers; and when these bodies reach Mputu (the white man’s country) the spirits are forced to return to them by the magic of their great ‘medicine men,’ and then they are compelled to work for them as their slaves.