Chapter VIII: The Akasavas

You who do not understand how out of good evil may arise must take your spade to some virgin grassland, untouched by the hand of man from the beginning of time. Here is soft, sweet grass, and never a sign of nettle, or rank, evil weed. It is as God made it. Turn the soil with your spade, intent on improving His handiwork, and next season--weeds, nettles, lank creeping things, and coarse-leafed vegetation cover the ground.

Your spade has aroused to life the dormant seeds of evil, germinated the ugly waste life that all these long years has been sleeping out of sight--in twenty years, with careful cultivation, you may fight down the weeds and restore the grassland, but it takes a lot of doing.

Your intentions may have been the best in disturbing the primal sod; you may have had views of roses flourishing where grass was; the result is very much the same.

I apply this parable to the story of a missionary and his work. The missionary was a good man, though of the wrong colour. He had large ideas on his duty to his fellows; he was inspired by the work of his cloth in another country; but, as Sanders properly said, India is not Africa.

Kenneth McDolan came to Mr. Commissioner Sanders with a letter of introduction from the new Administration.

Sanders was at “chop” one blazing morning when his servant, who was also his sergeant, Abiboo, brought a card to him. It was a nice card, rounded at the corners, and gilt-edged, and in the centre, in old English type, was the inscription--

Rev. KENNETH McDOLAN.

Underneath was scribbled in pencil: “On a brief visit.” Sanders sniffed impatiently, for “reverend” meant “missionary,” and “missionary” might mean anything. He looked at the card again and frowned in his perplexity. Somehow the old English and the reverendness of the visiting card did not go well with the rounded corners and the gilt edge.

“Where is he?” he demanded.

“Master,” said Abiboo, “he is on the verandah. Shall I kick him off?” Abiboo said this very naturally and with simple directness, and Sanders stared at him.

“Son of sin!” he said sternly, “is it thus you speak of God-men, and of white men at that?”

“This man wears the clothes of a God-man,” said Abiboo serenely; “but he is a black man, therefore of no consequence.”

Sanders pulled a pair of mosquito boots over his pyjamas and swore to himself.

“White missionaries, yes,” he said wrathfully, “but black missionaries I will not endure.”

The Reverend Kenneth was sitting in Sanders’ basket-chair, one leg flung negligently over one side of the chair to display a silk sock. His finger-tips were touching, and he was gazing with good-natured tolerance at the little green garden which was the Commissioner’s special delight.

He was black, very black; but his manners were easy, and his bearing self-possessed.

He nodded smilingly to Sanders and extended a lazy hand.

“Ah, Mr. Commissioner,” he said in faultless English, “I have heard a great deal about you.”

“Get out of that chair,” said Sanders, who had no small talk worth mentioning, “and stand up when I come out to you! What do you want?”

The Reverend Kenneth rose quickly, and accepted the situation with a rapidity which will be incomprehensible to any who do not know how thumbnail deep is the cultivation of the cultured savage.

“I am on a brief visit,” he said, a note of deference in his tone. “I am taking the small towns and villages along the coast, holding services, and I desire permission to speak to your people.”

This was not the speech he had prepared. He had come straight from England, where he had been something of a lion in Bayswater society, and where, too, his theological attainments had won him regard and no small amount of fame in even a wider circle.

“You may speak to my people,” said Sanders; “but you may not address the Kano folk nor the Houssas, because they are petrified in the faith of the Prophet.”

Regaining his self-possession, the missionary smiled.

“To bring light into dark places----” he began.

“Cut it out,” said Sanders briefly; “the palaver is finished.” He turned on his heel and re-entered the bungalow.

Then a thought struck him.

“Hi!” he shouted, and the retiring missionary turned back.

“Where did you pick up the ‘Kenneth McDolan’?” he asked.

The negro smiled again.

“It is the patronymic bestowed upon me at Sierra Leone by a good Christian white man, who brought me up and educated me as though I were his own son,” he recited.

Sanders showed his teeth.

“I have heard of such cases,” he said unpleasantly.

The next day the missionary announced his intention of proceeding up country. He came in to see Sanders as though nothing had happened. Perhaps he expected to find the Commissioner a little ashamed of himself; but if this was so he was disappointed, for Sanders was blatantly unrepentant.

“You’ve got a letter from the Administration,” he said, “so I can’t stop you.”

“There is work for me,” said the missionary, “work of succour and relief. In India some four hundred thousand----”

“This is not India,” said Sanders shortly; and with no other word the native preacher went his way.

Those who know the Akasava people best know them for their laziness--save in matter of vendetta, or in the settlement of such blood feuds as come their way, or in the lifting of each other’s goats, in all which matters they display an energy and an agility truly inexplicable. “He is an Akasava man--he points with his foot,” is a proverb of the Upper River, and the origin of the saying goes back to a misty time when (as the legend goes) a stranger happened upon a man of the tribe lying in the forest.

“Friend,” said the stranger, “I am lost. Show me the way to the river”; and the Akasava warrior, raising a leg from the ground, pointed with his toe to the path.

Though this legend lacks something in point of humour, it is regarded as the acme of mirth-provoking stories from Bama to the Lado country.

It was six months after the Reverend Kenneth McDolan had left for his station that there came to Sanders at his headquarters a woeful deputation, arriving in two canoes in the middle of the night, and awaiting him when he came from his bath to the broad stoep of his house in the morning--a semi-circle of chastened and gloomy men, who squatted on the wooden stoep, regarding him with the utmost misery.

“Lord, we are of the Akasava people,” said the spokesman, “and we have come a long journey.”

“So I am aware,” said Sanders, with acrid dryness, “unless the Akasava country has shifted its position in the night. What do you seek?”

“Master, we are starving,” said the speaker, “for our crops have failed, and there is no fish in the river; therefore we have come to you, who are our father.”

Now this was a most unusual request; for the Central African native does not easily starve, and, moreover, there had come no news of crop failure from the Upper River.

“All this sounds like a lie,” said Sanders thoughtfully, “for how may a crop fail in the Akasava country, yet be more than sufficient in Isisi? Moreover, fish do not leave their playground without cause, and if they do they may be followed.”

The spokesman shifted uneasily.

“Master, we have had much sickness,” he said, “and whilst we cared for one another the planting season had passed; and, as for the fish, our young men were too full of sorrow for their dead to go long journeys.” Sanders stared.

“Therefore we have come from our chief asking you to save us, for we are starving.”

The man spoke with some confidence, and this was the most surprising thing of all. Sanders was nonplussed, frankly confounded. For all the eccentric course his daily life took, there was a certain regularity even in its irregularity. But here was a new and unfamiliar situation. Such things mean trouble, and he was about to probe this matter to its depth.

“I have nothing to give you,” he said, “save this advice--that you return swiftly to where you came from and carry my word to your chief. Later I will come and make inquiries.”

The men were not satisfied, and an elder, wrinkled with age, and sooty-grey of head, spoke up.

“It is said, master,” he mumbled, through his toothless jaws, “that in other lands when men starve there come many white men bringing grain and comfort.”

“Eh?”

Sanders’ eyes narrowed.

“Wait,” he said, and walked quickly through the open door of his bungalow.

When he came out he carried a pliant whip of rhinoceros-hide, and the deputation, losing its serenity, fled precipitately.

Sanders watched the two canoes paddling frantically up stream, and the smile was without any considerable sign of amusement. That same night the Zaire left for the Akasava country, carrying a letter to the Reverend Kenneth McDolan, which was brief, but unmistakable in its tenor.

“Dear Sir,”--it ran--”You will accompany the bearer to
headquarters, together with your belongings. In the event of
your refusing to comply with this request, I have instructed my
sergeant to arrest you. Yours faithfully,
“H. Sanders, Commissioner.”

“And the reason I am sending you out of this country,” said Sanders, “is because you have put funny ideas into the heads of my people.”

“I assure you----” began the negro.

“I don’t want your assurance,” said Sanders, “you are not going to work an Indian Famine Fund in Central Africa.”

“The people were starving----”

Sanders smiled.

“I have sent word to them that I am coming to Akasava,” he said grimly, “and that I will take the first starved-looking man I see and beat him till he is sore.”

The next day the missionary went, to the intense relief, be it said, of the many white missionaries scattered up and down the river; for, strange as it may appear, a negro preacher who wears a black coat and silk socks is regarded with a certain amount of suspicion.

True to his promise, Sanders made his visit, but found none to thrash, for he came to a singularly well-fed community that had spent a whole week in digging out of the secret hiding-places the foodstuffs which, at the suggestion of a too zealous seeker after fame, it had concealed.

“Here,” said Sanders, wickedly, “endeth the first lesson.”

But he was far from happy. It is a remarkable fact that once you interfere with the smooth current of native life all manner of things happen. It cannot be truthfully said that the events that followed on the retirement from active life of the Reverend Kenneth McDolan were immediately traceable to his ingenious attempt to engineer a famine in Akasava. But he had sown a seed, the seed of an idea that somebody was responsible for their well-being--he had set up a beautiful idol of Pauperism, a new and wonderful fetish. In the short time of his stay he had instilled into the heathen mind the dim, vague, and elusive idea of the Brotherhood of Man.

This Sanders discovered, when, returning from his visit of inspection, he met, drifting with the stream, a canoe in which lay a prone man, lazily setting his course with half-hearted paddle strokes.

Sanders, on the bridge of his tiny steamer, pulled the little string that controlled the steam whistle, for the canoe lay in his track. Despite the warning, the man in the canoe made no effort to get out of his way, and since both were going with the current, it was only by putting the wheel over and scraping a sandbank that the steamer missed sinking the smaller craft.

“Bring that man on board!” fumed Sanders, and when the canoe had been unceremoniously hauled to the Zaire’s side by a boat-hook, and the occupant rudely pulled on board, Sanders let himself go.

“By your infernal laziness,” he said, “I see that you are of the Akasava people; yet that is no reason why you should take the middle of the channel to yourself.”

“Lord, it is written in the books of your gods,” said the man, “that the river is for us all, black and white, each being equal in the eyes of the white gods.”

Sanders checked his lips impatiently.

“When you and I are dead,” he said, “we shall be equal, but since I am quick and you are quick, I shall give you ten strokes with a whip to correct the evil teaching that is within you.”

He made a convert.

But the mischief was done.

Sanders knew the native mind much better than any man living, and he spent a certain period every day for the next month cursing the Reverend Kenneth McDolan. So far, however, no irreparable mischief had been done, but Sanders was not the kind of man to be caught napping. Into the farthermost corners of his little kingdom his secret-service men were dispatched, and Sanders sat down to await developments.

At first the news was good; the spies sent back stories of peace, of normal happiness; then the reports became less satisfactory. The Akasava country is unfortunately placed, for it is the very centre territory, the ideal position for the dissemination of foolish propaganda, as Sanders had discovered before.