The Black Commandments

THE Bantu is a pitiless creator and a scrupulous observer of taboo. He approves it and subscribes to it and observes it at whatever cost. The Bulu speak of taboo as a ‘tying’; they are as indefatigable as their fellows and have their troubled share in this racial zest for authority — this need of a religious commandment which is so large a factor in the curious abandonment of the Bulu to his Christian experiences.

The ten commandments, as apprehended by the white man in their ethical splendor, are not so apprehended by the black man when God ‘ ties him with ten tyings’ in the ‘early morning’ of his Christian day. They are not then to him the expression of ideals; they are facts, definite laws of abstainings, of omission and commission. They are the Eldorado of taboo. They replace with a great calm the agitations of the experimental efforts of the past, when everything was at stake and nothing was sure; when man was exhausted in his effort to fill his side of the contract, but might never count upon the party of the second part.

In this they are emancipating; they are the way of escape from a man-made yoke. Given a Father-God, there is no greater benefit that He could have conferred upon our pragmatic Bulu than ten explicit tyings. The practice of the law promises at first to be an exact science — the perfect taboo for which our Bulu has blindly searched and which is here given him with the marks of divine authority.

‘He-Who-made-you,’ says one Ibia of the seventh ‘tying,’ ‘forbids you of this matter. The slain who had died because of adultery are countless.’

Here is the expressed understanding of the commandments as taboo with penalty.

Our Bulu ‘very much desires the knowledge of those ten tyings’; and such knowledge — broken, isolated from the body of Christian truth — drifts back into the forest, finding lodgment with individuals in obscure places. As there have been found lonely men who pray, so there have been found those whose knowledge of God had only one chapter; one commandment had passed from hand to hand and found lodgment at last with a man or a woman who has appropriated it, and has poured into the practice of it all the Bulu pragmatic enthusiasm. One of our missionaries itinerating in an obscure part of the forest — a backwoods of the forest — found two old women who persistently observed a seventh day. These women had a little wooden calendar of seven holes, with a peg to mark the passage of the days, and coming to the seventh day they rested in their houses. Other women might go to their gardens on that day; as for them they were religious. Any missionary can give instances of such appropriation of a fragment of truth, and will agree, I think, that the minds of such radicals have been found in general to be open to the deeper things of God.

There is a very moving intensity in the first contact between such a seeker of the true way and a Christian. ‘Is there a person of God in this town ? ’ I asked of a little company in the street of an obscure village. ' I am a person of God,’ said a woman, pressing forward and looking at me with an almost anguished timidity and with a most passionate appeal. Her husband, nearby and leaning on his spear, observed her with an affectionate and contemptuous tolerance.

‘Not so,’ said he to me, ‘she is not a person of God, but she desires to be; she has learned a commandment.’

This precious possession had made that timid black woman bold to speak to the white woman, in the presence of contemptuous men, and with her conscious ignorance heavy upon her.

The ten commandments I say, are an emancipation. They are an emancipation from fear, that deep sleepless fear of the supernatural which is the great darkness of a people without God in the world.

Of those things I will let Ibia speak to you. Ibia was a Benga, of the Island of Corisco. He was born in something like 1835. What he was before he came to be a Christian, what he would have become had there been no mission school on the island, none of you can conceive. Look over the edge, but do not suppose that you see the bottom of the pit. The heathen knows his own bitterness, the white man may not. Christ knows. But there was a school on Corisco and a man had a chance. Ibia became a Christian; by the painful efforts which lie between the primitive black man and an intelligent ministry he became a minister; by a self-control which Christ alone can appreciate, this black man lived a godly life among his people. Not born to ideals as you and I were, he achieved them; he furnished his mind, he read, he thought, he wrote a book, if you please — an argument against native superstitions and the vices of his tribe. In this book he attacked murder and gossiping, adultery and want of courtesy, modes of building and the having of property in common. From the headings of his chapters it is plain to see that he raked with a rake of many teeth. I have a translation of his book made for me by one Myongo, a contemporary of Ibia’s

— like himself a Christian, now an old man. This translation is from the Benga into the quaint English which survives among beachmen of a certain age

— those who were taught in American and English mission schools before the partition of Africa. And this is what we have from these two black men about the emancipation of their kind from the things of darkness.

‘ The things of Magic are the gods of the ungodly; fearing of these things tells plainly that you have not taken God, that he is your confidential God who cannot suffer you to have an accident without a plan coming from him. If you be his lover and his true worshiper you will no more fear these things. They are not. Also, if they are to be, they would not be able to do you a thing whether good or bad, God will not consent. Also if God wants to give you a good thing he will not handed it to the spirits; he will handed it to the persons which he sends — that is, the angels.’

This triumphant assertion, so quaintly termed, is a black man’s proclamation of emancipation to his people, based upon the first tying which says, ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me ’; and upon the second tying which says, ‘Do not make a fetish charm.’

And if these tyings are an emancipation from the fear of supernatural perils

— if they are as the arm of God barring from the path of his children the evil things of the dark — why, so too are they an emancipation from the sorceries, the charms, and the machinations of inimical man. They make a place of sanctuary for the hunted and the haunted: a sanctuary for refugees from the valley of the shadow of death.

How many such refugees I have seen rush into this sanctuary; and behind these I have heard the clanging of the door of promise — ‘ showing mercies unto thousands of them.’ Here is Ze Zhom, with the scar above her knee that her one-time husband made, not for ornament but for malice, — a symbol of taboo. Marriage was to be for Ze Zhom forever taboo. And here she is in the sanctuary, the Christian wife of a Christian man.

Here is that Eyinga who moved once under the shadow of a spell, Her husband, ‘two marriages back,’ still hated her and continually made a charm against her. She came to see the white woman, and ‘Look at my body,’ said she: ‘I dry up, I neither eat nor sleep. I know and my neighbors know, that I shall certainly die.’ She, too, found sanctuary in the commandment; she heard the gate clang between her and the pursuing hatred.

Here are those little ones, the children of the people of the tribe of God. They have been suffered to come into the sanctuary. There is no amulet hung upon those little bodies that were born without the aid of charms; it is said of them that God gave them. God standing at the door of life has ushered them in. They live under the divine protection. The mother of such a child, if the child die, is here suffered to mourn her little one in peace. No dark imputation is put upon that death, no accusation of witchcraft laid at the mother’s door.

In this sanctuary the barren woman and the widow are at peace. Here might Ndongo Mabalé have taken refuge, whose grave is in a far country among strangers.

Again, the commandments are an emancipation from a sex-bondage.

Man-made tyings always take account of sex — being a woman, the woman must do thus and so. There is food which she must not eat, objects which she must not see, words which she must not speak, acts which she must not perform — yes, and I would almost say thoughts which she must not think. She must not think herself clever, or important, or even necessary. ‘How should I know; I am stupid as a hen!’ This is the ultimate fruit of those manmade tyings which have thrust her into a groove of ‘vain abstainings,’ — as Ibia says, — based upon an ignoble thought of sex. Now it appears that God has tied his children with an equal tying, and this sense of a common honor is one of those elements in her religious experience which contributes to the new dignity of the African woman. Says Ibia, —

‘The people do say, “A woman and a man are two different tribes.” This is not so, woman and the man are but of one nation.

Let the woman know everything, that which the man knows only; that which she herself does not want to learn; and let her eat that which the man eats, also except herself refuse. Let them not be kept in ignorance any more, let them not be deprived of good things.’

Thus the law has made the woman of an equal freedom with her husband. ‘That which cannot offend a man it could not also offend a woman.’ And to outraged manhood defending its prerogative the merciless Ibia writes, ‘I know that they shall ask me that I should shew them the nobility of a woman. I will also ask them that they should shew me of a man.’

The girl who is taken in marriage to another than her native tribe, and who is reared in the house of one of the elder wives of her husband, will be given from time to time, at the hands of that elder woman, the tools of her domestic craft. There will be for her a round net of a corded plantain fibre and with a withy rim, little baskets for fishing, pots of clay that have been dried in the sun and baked in the fire — ‘the things of women who are wives.’ These tangible tools will be given to the girl with many rules of conduct: ‘the custom of our tribe’ which is not the custom of her father’s tribe. And the regulation of conduct is lodged in custom; of that girl it is expected that she will grow daily in the grace of the custom of her husband’s tribe.

In some such way does the Bulu conceive his initiation into that new tribe which is the tribe of God. With a change of tribe he expects a change of custom; the ten commandments are the regulation of that custom. Almost, so objectively does he conceive his religion, they are the tools of his craft — of his new art of living. He takes possession of them with a pride and a manifest joy, and he applies himself to the use of them. They are intricate. There is nothing in the custom of his country to prepare him for their use; they do not belong, as he says of familiar ideas, to ‘the things of birth.’ But he has greatly desired them; he has acquired them with a painful effort of the memory, and it remains to practice them. On the business of the minutiæ of the ten commandments he will make long journeys, lest he fail in a jot or tittle of their use.

I see in my heart an old woman, — strange to me but for her familiar aspect of a woman beat upon by life and sorrow, — a woman who had borne and buried many children and who looked in upon me that afternoon with a beautiful controlled eagerness. Three days she had walked, sleeping two nights by the way, to speak to the white woman about the eighth commandment — the eighth tying, she called it. And this she said: —

‘ My town is toward the beach —you do not know my town; not another person of the tribe of God lives in my town. I alone am of that tribe in the eyes of the people, and some of the women of my town have said to me, “We are watching the walking that you walk. If it is indeed a good walking and it is a straight path, we too will arise and follow after you. ” For this cause my heart is hung up, lest it be that in my ignorance I spoil one of the ten tyings in the eyes of my townspeople. So when my son — not that he is indeed the son of my body, for all those are dead, but he is another son of my husband’s, who sees me as his mother — when this young man asked me to keep the cutlass he found, I had a doubt. He thrust the cutlass in the bark of the wall and he said, “Ah, mother, keep it for me while I go on a journey”; and I asked him many questions about the cutlass. Because he found that cutlass in the forest. He did not buy it so that he was able to say that it was his own cutlass. It is a true word that he found it in the forest, as if perhaps it might be the cutlass that a dwarf had lost. Even when he had told me all these things, hiding nothing, I doubted. I said in my heart, “This cutlass — is it a thing which a Christian woman may keep in her house? Does it spoil the eighth tying?” And because of my ignorance and the women of my town who examine the things of God, I arose and came to you. I have slept two nights by the way. You certainly very much understand the commandments, and I ask you to open this thing to me!’

Thus spoke Awu Ding, looking at me very hopefully, very wistfully, — sure that the white woman could tell her how to be the perfect Christian. And after many seasons rainy and dry, I must still pause to salute from the heart that meek old woman who ordered with such patience her walk and conversation.

To every qualified Christian many such women come, and men come; wherever the Word of God has been accepted in our region there has begun to be a busyness about the practice of religion. The technique of the art of Christian living has always proved to be a matter of immediate excitement. The little brown hut where the foremost Christian lives, the man or woman most approved as expert by the neighbors, becomes a sort of school of technique.

Those little huts which house the master Christians — how well we missionaries know them! Strangers and aliens stoop to enter into them; there is always need of more little stools in them; the outlandish headdresses from the backwoods congregate there; there is a place by those firesides for the beaded and bridled Ntum people, for the little dwarf people, for whoever will be inquiring about the things of God and the technique of the Christian life. In such huts as these there will be a murmur of voices and grouped eager faces turned on one face — the disciplined face of an old woman, the face of a man whose arrogance has suffered control, the face of some young creature quick with the facility of youth. Here the things of the new tribe are applied to the things of gain, of sex, and of fetish; to the things of the family, of the town, of the garden, of trade, of hunting; yes, and to the things of marriage, of birth, and of death.

‘The tying that ties you not to make a charm — does that forbid a charm to hold your husband’s love? for he did exceedingly love me when I was new, and now he has that girl from Nkole he does not so much as eat my food! And my mother knows a charm for this thing, only I said, “Before I make that charm that you know, I must ask a person of God — I am a Christian and am I able to make that charm?” ’

‘And that tying about the day of Sunday, how may you do when the headman has sent you to the beach with a load of rubber? Himself he walks in the caravan, and in his heart is such a hunger for goods that he hates to sleep at night, let alone rest of a Sunday.’

Of course you know that you must not work in your garden of a Sunday — but may you not shell peanuts? For the guests are many and your husband wants them to eat well.

And the difficult seventh commandment — how does it bear upon you and the man to whom your husband has loaned you these many moons and you love him: now that you are a Christian woman must you bar the door to him?’

‘Before I became a person of the tribe of God it was my custom to help my sister with her peanuts. Always she sent me a message from her town that I must come to help her. We two, we must harvest her peanuts. And now I am a Christian, still she sends me that message. I ask you who are strong in the things of God, am I able to go to help my sister?’

Ah, the wise old black face that is turned on the young white face!

‘Those days back, before you were a person of God, had you a sweetheart in that town where your sister is married? ’

‘It is as you say. There is a man in my sister’s husband’s town: he and I were as you say!’

‘Do not go to that town where you used, when you were ignorant, to spoil continually the tying that is the seventh tying! I who am a woman of God, I tell you that the path to your sister’s town is closed to you; that path is a path of danger.’

In such little huts how many sorrows are opened up and how many iniquities, how many autobiographies flow on and on, outliving the fire on the floor! Out of such little huts how there go continually men and women who have been enriched by some little portion of that divine wisdom which has a spokesman there! A Bulu proverb says, ‘The rich man’s town does not release the treasure.’ Yet in the town of many a headman there is a continual release of treasure at the hands of some humble old woman, or the hands of an unconsidered boy — ‘poor bodies’ who yet possess the tools, and in some measure the skill, of the new way of life.

And if a little you begin to think of the commandments as a precious possession of the Bulu, and as an emancipation, you must think of them too as a discipline. You must remember upon what untrained shoulders their yoke falls. We who have born the yoke from our youth up, and our fathers and mothers before us, the custom of whose country is so colored by the ten commandments that we may not break some of them without fear of imprisonment, or others without incurring the adverse opinion of mankind, or others without self-scorn — how may we know of the check of that yoke upon the wild heart of a Bantu woman, of a Bantu man! There is no tradition in that blood to mate with the ten tyings. There is no common consent in that town to the maintenance of them. There is no conventional shame at any breach of them. There is only a willing and personal abnegation — a submission in mid-career without parley and without condition. They are accepted with the simplest confidence. There is not, in the initial phase of acceptance, any apprehension of the long road that stretches or of any lapse.

As discipline, consider them first as a mental discipline. If it were only the memorizing of them, there is for the adult Bulu, who does not read and who has no mental precedent for their content, a sustained, most intent effort in the memorizing of the commandments. Men who can tell the nature of the dowries paid for every girl and every woman and every grandmother in the neighborhood, — and that is to remember curious lots and assortments of dogs and guns and goats and sheep and dog-bells and girls and sheets of brass and coils of brass and the little pieces of iron tied in bunches of ten that are currency for women, — men who can recall the testimony of witnesses long dead to adventures long past, must make by a painful effort a niche in the mind for the novel content of the commandments. Never a man of their tribe spake thus; there is no ready-made receptacle for this possession. The attention of how many tattooed faces I have seen turned inward with almost piteous intensity while they conned the ten commandments. How I have seen a man in his prime take his lesson from a schoolboy— blunder, return, repeat, and achieve. There, by the light of the night fire in his own palaver house at the head of his own town, arrogance was put aside for a meek and lowly effort. Women I have seen go down into the stress of a repetition of the ten commandments trembling; I have heard the beatings of their hearts as they took the difficult places in that rough way, and I have seen them come through to the end short of breath and triumphant.

Some of them I have heard say, ‘ Certainly the power of God has helped me in this thing that is so hard!’

How many women have come to say, ‘ Pray with me that I may learn a certain tying. I am stupid as a hen and that tying kills me. Other tyings I can say, but this one about the day of Sabbath, or this one about the things of magic, it will kill me!’

So much for the initial effort of memorizing, There remains the never-ending mental discipline of application, the nice fitting of the tyings to the things of the family, of the town, of hunting, of trade — to the things of women and gain and fetish. The new code, accepted in such simplicity, — ‘A road to run on,’ as a young Bantu said to Frederick Arnot, — proves to be of universal application. Now the poor untutored mind is broken to unaccustomed uses, while women stupid as hens are driven to become wise as serpents.

' Thou shalt not kill — another’s woman!’ declares old Mpashima with emphasis.

‘No — no!’ cries out Bekalli, ‘don’t lose yourself on that path — go back again! ’

And there, between these two followers of the new way, — who so sincerely desire to do the will of the Father, — there is the renewed effort to know of the doctrine.

The commandments are tremendously a physical discipline. For the black woman as well as for the black man they are a daily physical discipline. Now is the body troubled! There is a crucifixion here, as Christ knows. This struggle — how often with ignoble things! — is not ignoble, this look of a broken body is not without honor. Myself who have seen the iron of the seventh commandment enter the soul of so many women — I know its power. In the practice of this commandment I have seen girls — the wives of old men who were offered daily consolations both public and secret — I have seen such girls take upon their young shoulders the yoke of the seventh commandment when, by virtue of their enslaved circumstance, it was the cross of celibacy. I have seen Bulu women, as maternal as any women, sacrifice the hope of children to the observance of this commandment, until I think I know a little of how much a Bulu woman means when she sighs and says, ‘ The seventh tying— it is certainly strong! ’

Certainly strong it is. More I cannot say of this matter to white readers, unless I may tell them of that young Bulu woman who was speaking as a master Christian to a group of women. These were saying of the ninth tying that it was easy, but of the seventh tying that God had made a mistake in tying them with that tying! These poor bodies were thinking that the seventh tying would be their Waterloo.

But ‘No,’ Mejo told them; and she told them, ‘I like to call the seventh God’s love commandment. When we have a friend we are able to ask more of him than of an acquaintance. Like that it is with God. If He is the friend we most love, and if we love Him as we should love him, we will be given strength to keep the seventh commandment.’

So much for the thought of a Bulu woman about this difficult matter. But I ask you to believe that the Bulu Christian who is to stand fast must endure a discipline of the body which is without respite. And upon the faces of such as these there come to be, as it were a harness, — a perceptible spiritual harness, — the bands of a strong control.

Again — the tyings are a moral discipline. This truth which is so trite to us — how little it is trite to the man who first salutes his own soul! ‘We knew,’ says Minkoé Ntem, of the days before the knowledge of the things of God, ‘ that a man is two men — the man of the body and the other man; that the things of man are of two tribes — the things of the body and the things of the heart. We knew but we did not altogether know.’

Now it would appear that Zambe,¹ who altogether knows, has devised a code for the things of the heart. Having broken the mind to the effort of the commandments and the body to the abnegation of them, there is still the wayward heart to be bent to them, and ‘the things of the heart,’ say the Bulu, ‘are very strong.’

The Bulu does not appreciate the commandments on different levels and take the breach of certain of them to be catastrophic, and the breach of the others to be minor. Malice, envy, hatred: these passions of the heart are big with him. They have been so long pragmatic and they have in his custom worn so many paths to action, so many short cuts to sudden and violent deeds, that he knows their potential power. I will not be saying that this sense of their power is a faculty of conscience; it is a deposit of experience. Without an intelligence of sin, he has seen that the fruit of envy is death. One tying ties him not to kill — ‘I understand!’ agrees he in the old formula. With another tying he is tied not to envy — and again he agrees. And of envy he declares that it is present with him: ‘I very much know that thing.’ The Bulu woman has a fire of envy in her heart.

How many have sighed to me of this.

‘I envy another’s beauty’; ‘I envy another’s husband — another’s youth ’; and always in the mouth of a barren woman, ‘I envy another’s child.’

Malice too, and hatred; these passions are not obscure to them. Many women on many days have come to my door to speak of the things of malice.

‘My tongue destroys me, my children and my husband run from my tongue.’ ‘I quarrel with a wife of my husband; I rise in the morning not to quarrel, and when the sun is in the middle, while it is not yet afternoon, I quarrel! Is there power with God for this matter?’

‘Is there power with God for this matter?’ ask the novices of the master Christians in the little brown huts. ‘I commit adultery — I am a coward — I am envious — is there power?’

And there is an answer to this voiced human frailty.

‘There is power,’ declares Asala, cast off by a cruel husband and by him persecuted after fashions of which it is a shame to so much as speak — surrounded by enemies and by tempters, infinitely lonely in her isolated career of virtue, trembling at night in her little bark hut in that village of the backwoods where she alone was a person of the tribe of God.

‘There is certainly power with God!’ says the triumphant Asala, who curbed her own body and withstood the contradiction of sinners for two tens of moons and four more moons, when God showed her a plain path to an honorable marriage.

‘There is power,’ says old Nyunga, remembering the day the black soldier knocked her down. He had set her to catch a chicken for him. ‘Is it my chicken that I should catch it for you? Who are you that I should break for you the eighth commandment?’ And in the power of God Nyunga suffered the expected violence.

‘There is power,’ says Ngwa, who was a man of sudden and blind rage until God put a hand of restraint upon that spirit of anger, so that now when Ngwa is crossed he counts out his level words as a miser parts with gold.

‘There is power,’ claims little middle-aged Ndek Zik, looking at you with that mild radiance which is the little lighthouse of her neighborhood. You must know, says Ndek Zik, that she was, before her heart turned to God, of a peculiar wickedness. Yes, you are told that of a peculiar wickedness was Ndek Zik until the ten commandments laid a check upon that wild career, and the power of God made the great change that you see.

‘There is indeed power,’ say one and another of the disciplined ones to those wistful apprentices with whom evil is so present. ‘God will give the power.’ The simplest old woman, who has learned her ten tyings by months of effort, will tell you that these things exceed the strength of mankind, but that Zambe gives strength for the keeping of the commandments. This news passes from hand to hand; women tell it to women, and wives to husbands and children to parents, that Zambe who gave the tyings gives strength for their keeping. And this claim is not to be taken on blind faith as the commandments are; it is a spontaneous account of personal experience, and it is pointed with tangible example.

I remember one Wanji, who was a year gone far inland. He was hunting an ivory — that is, he was sitting in a village of the backwoods where the headman owned an ivory, the express object of Wanji’s desire and of his bargaining. Before he left home he gave his little fortune, his collection of marketable objects, to the care of Ze, a wife of his who was a Christian. Two rainy seasons and two dry seasons passed — the measure of the white man’s year — before Wanji returned, and when he came home one of his wives was missing: she had run away. Another wife had a child. Wanji did not wonder at either of these women. But much he marveled at Ze who still ‘sat in her house’ caring for his possessions. They were all packed under her bamboo bed. And of her the neighbors said, —

‘Every night of the many nights you have journeyed Ze has sat in her hut; as you see her to-day, so has she continually sat. She has gone to her garden, she has cooked her food in her pot, she has eaten, she has slept, just as you see. We have no word to tell you of Ze.’

Then Wanji put on his felt hat that was made in Germany and that was his badge of office, — for he was a little of a headman, — and he put a lad before him in the path with a lantern (it was broad day, but this was ostentation), and he made a call at the town of the white man. He looked what he was, — the old type of headman, — and without preamble he said, —

‘ I have come to tell you that I wonder at my wife Ze. She is a person of the tribe of God. I have been inland two rainy seasons and two dry seasons — yet that woman has kept the commandments of God. This thing I know was never done by the strength of a black woman, though a white woman might be able to do even this. I see the white women that they are in a tribe by themselves [literally, ‘unique’]. Only the strength of God is able for such a strange thing with a black woman. And I have come to tell you that I marvel at the power of God for this thing that I have seen in my wife Ze. I agree that it is a good thing to be a Christian. But as for myself, my own heart is too much with the things of this world.’ And he went away.

I tell you this to illustrate the practical sense in which the Bulu associate the power of God with the practice of the commandments. And I tell you further of Ze and of Ndek Zik that they so commended their religion in their conduct that their husbands came, after rainy seasons and dry seasons, to be among their converts.

Surely you will be agreeing that these children struggle with old enemies not unknown to yourself. And you will be agreeing with them that if they conquer it will be by the power of God. Listen to Casalis and his friend the chief of the Basutos talking together in secret at night, as Jesus did with Nicodemus in the day of Nicodemus. And like the latter twain, so Casalis and the chief are speaking of the things of God. Side by side they lie upon mats through the night of stars.

‘The chief was greatly struck,’says Casalis, ‘ by the commandments of the decalogue. “That,” said he, “ is written in all our hearts. We knew nothing about the Sabbath, but we knew it was wicked to be ungrateful and to be disobedient to parents, to rob, to kill, to commit adultery.” ’ And this he said, that wise black man, upon whose heart there was so legible a writing from the finger of God: —

‘To do good is like rolling a rock to the top of a mountain; as for the evil, it comes about of itself, the rock finds it easy to roll to the bottom.’

There is our Bulu, with his shoulder to the rolling stone of the ten tyings. There is nothing in the Bulu heart to endure. If the Bulu Christians endure, it is as seeing Him who is invisible. There is certainly in these lowly hearts an inner vision, and an inner voice. If we who are strangers to that heart cannot know all the bitterness of certain practical abnegations required of it by Christ, neither can we enter into all the joy of that inner revelation. Christ is the Word that was with God, and came to dwell with the Bulu and is the Bulu word. ‘I give you an example,’ says the Christ of the Bulu, to the Bulu Christian.

Many times I have been sure of this revelation. ‘Tell me the way of God in this difficult matter,’ says a woman to me of something very foreign to the white woman. For this I have a black Christian to counsel me in these clinics. And sometimes when I am alone I cannot tell. Then I have said to such an inquirer: ‘You know the Lord Jesus; some things of his heart, you know them, and some of his desires— what thing would He desire for you in this matter? I ask you.’ And I have seen such an one, behind her face, go away to consider, and she has come back enlightened. ‘ I see now,’ she has told me, ‘ that of these two paths I must choose this one.’ ‘And why?’ ‘Because the Lord would say of the other one it is crooked, but this one — He would see it straight.’

It is not for nothing that the Bulu carries through the discipline of the ten commandments a shining face — that he counts his tyings like possessions and wears them on his forehead like an ornament. For him the ‘child of the sister’² sits at the well by the way. Between them there is talk of all things ever the Bulu did; and that conversation deepens in intent as the day advances, until from talk of tribal things, of the things of sex, of fetish, there comes to be talk of the Father, of his desire for men, of the things of the spirit, of true words, of the high duty of man in a pure worship of God.

‘Take my yoke upon you,’ says Christ to the Bulu; and the Bulu bends his neck — with its scar at the nape that is the seal of his initiation to the old Bulu secret society; he bends his neck with its tattooed seal of all that is evil — to that holy yoke.

‘Learn of me,’ says Christ, to the Bulu woman who is ‘stupid as a hen,’ who is ‘no more than hands.’ And the Bulu woman learns.