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 ^AFRICAN 
 ADVENTURERS 
 
 JEAN KEN YON MACKENZIE
 
 / ^
 
 TWO HAUGHTY SCHOOLBOYS IN KAMERUN
 
 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 By JEAN KENYON MACKENZIE 
 
 Published by 
 
 THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE ON THE UNITED 
 
 STUDY OF FOREIQN MISSIONS 
 
 West Medford' Mass. 
 
 and the 
 
 MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT 
 
 OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 AND CANADA
 
 Copyright 1917 
 
 THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE ON THE 
 
 UNITED STUDY OF FOREIGN 
 
 MISSIONS
 
 BV 
 
 3500 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. The Family of Akulu Mejo 7 
 
 II. White Men and their Adventures 31 
 
 III. Assam tells more about Livingstone. ..... 51 
 
 IV. An Adventure with the Dwarfs 73 
 
 V. Adventures of Assam and Mejo 89 
 
 VI. The Return of the Adventurers 105 
 
 Reading List 118
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Facing 
 Page 
 
 Two Haughty Schoolboys in Kamerun . Frontispiece 
 
 Sawing Lumber by Hand ...... 5 
 
 Carrying Poles for the New Church Building at Melet 
 
 Too Economical to buy a Wagon 5 
 
 Congregation of Ngqokwem Church under Nat'l Bapt. 
 
 Conv. (Composed of American Negroes) 12 
 
 The Agricultural Exhibit 16 
 
 African Burden Bearers ...... 33 
 
 Canoe on Kamerun River ...... 37 
 
 Children of the Missionary and the Tusks of an Ele- 
 phant . ..... 44 
 
 Medicine and Charms turned over to Southern Meth- 
 odist Missionaries by an African Convert . . 44 
 
 A Great Chief 48 
 
 Young Zulu Warriors . . 53 
 
 The Boys and the Camera 60 
 
 One of 17,000 Schoolboys in Southern Kamerun . 69 
 
 "Just a Bit Shy" 76 
 
 The Mango Tree in the Village 85 
 
 The Dead Leopard 85 
 
 Basket Makers in the North East Congo ... 92 
 
 Some Apprentices and the Head of the Frank James 
 Industrial School, Elat . . .101 
 
 A Neighbor Teacher 108
 
 SAWING LUMBER BY HAND 
 
 CARRYING POLES 
 
 For the New Church Building at Melet Too Economical 
 to buy a Wagon
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 Miss Mackenzie, author of this book, is also a great 
 adventurer in Africa. She knows the girls and boys; 
 speaks their language; and has journeyed far into the 
 dark forest, even into the homes of the dwarfs. ' She is 
 now on her way back to Africa, where she has been 
 called to help the people in this terrible time of war. 
 Her family and friends dreaded the dangers of the voy- 
 age, but she said, "When people are called to the front 
 now, they go," and took the first ship. May God bless 
 her in this last adventure. 
 
 L. W. P.
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 THE FAMILY OF AKULU MEJO 
 
 | HE little brown mother of Mejo sat by the 
 door of her hut waiting for him to come 
 home. On the fire that was laid on the 
 clay floor of the hut a big clay pot gur- 
 gled. Mejo's dinner was in this kettle, well tucked in 
 under some wide banana leaves. Presently, when she 
 saw the body of her son enter the clearing, Mejo's 
 mother lifted the kettle from the fire ; with quick move- 
 ments of her hardy hands she took off the layers of 
 green leaves that covered the kettle, and Mejo's dinner 
 steamed in the little hut. There were two courses for 
 dinner there was a mess of greens and there were 
 ears of corn. The greens and the corn were there to- 
 gether in the kettle. 
 
 Mejo's mother found a wooden bowl on the floor and 
 a wooden ladle thrust by its handle into the bamboo 
 slattings of the wall; she blew on the bowl and the 
 spoon to dust them, then she filled the little bowl with 
 hot greens. But for the ears of corn she made a little 
 platter of a green leaf. 
 
 Mejo was no more than thirteen years old but he had 
 to duck to enter the hut, for the walls were low. In- 
 side he could stand upright for the ridge of the roof 
 was all of ten feet from the ground. Mejo sat upon his 
 heels before his little dinner and his mother sat oppo- 
 site him on a little stool hewn from a block of wood. 
 They ate with little wooden spoons from the wooden 
 bowl. But before they ate at all they bowed their 
 heads and said.
 
 8 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 "Akeva, Zambe !" That is to say "Thanks to God !" 
 
 "They say we live in Africa," said Mejo, when he 
 had been a little time silent and busy with greens and 
 corn. 
 
 "Who says so?" asked his mother. 
 
 "The teacher says so," said Mejo. 
 
 "What kind of a teacher says so is it the white man 
 or one of the black people? 
 
 "Even if it were a black teacher and it was, it was 
 Ela from Asok will you doubt it? He heard it from 
 the white man. And when he doubted it and he 
 knocked on the white man's door at night, to ask him 
 of this thing; the white man said, 'Surely, yes.' The 
 white man showed Ela in a book a word that says that 
 the black people live in Africa." 
 
 "Was it a book in the Bulu speech or a book in the 
 German speech?" 
 
 "It certainly was a book in the German speech." 
 
 "Was it a word from God?" asked Me jo's mother 
 "did Ela read in Gcd's Word that we live in Africa?" 
 
 "No, I cannot say that that book was one of the 
 words of God. It was just a white man's book." 
 
 "Well, then," said Mejo's mother, "I don't believe 
 it. I who have lived in this forest always, did I ever 
 hear that we live in Africa ? What the old and wise of 
 the tribe never knew, how can the white man know it 
 who is a stranger of yesterday. If you ask me where 
 we live I will still tell you that we live in the country 
 of the Bulu tribes ! It is just pride that is in all this 
 teaching that Ela teaches you. He lies to you about 
 the words he reads in the white man's book! He 
 knows that you are still ignorant and he does not fear 
 to lie !"
 
 THE FAMILY OF AKULU MEJO 9 
 
 "You are certainly a person of doubts. I believe him. 
 I believe him because all the things I doubted one day 
 I saw them to be true the next day. When he taught 
 me the little marks that are letters he told me always 
 that those letters if you knew how to join them, would 
 be created words. I always said in my heart, words 
 are made in the mouth, they are never made in the eye. 
 Then one day I saw a joining of letters make a word 
 Eke strange thing! Even as he said. Now I am 
 able to believe him." 
 
 "You believe too much," said Mejo's mother. "You 
 just better believe all the words that are the words of 
 God; that will be enough for you to believe. You 
 were certainly very late on the path tonight. I thought 
 the sun would be lost before you came. I asked my 
 heart, that son of mine, where is he? Does he not 
 have wisdom enough to fear the things of the dark? 
 Where did you linger?" 
 
 "I visited my traps," said Mejo, "those little traps I 
 set on the day that is Saturday when we do not have 
 school. I set some bird traps over by the great rock in 
 the direction where the sun rises." 
 
 "Did you kill anything?" 
 
 "How can you ask me that when you and I eat just 
 nothing at all but greens and corn ! I feel such a meat- 
 hunger that I could eat a rat. Though I am too big to 
 eat rats now !" 
 
 "Don't hang your heart up," said Mejo's mother 
 "if you kill nothing tomorrow, myself, I will cook you 
 some good food. All day when I work in the garden 
 I will watch for a snail or caterpillars and if when the 
 sun is in the middle I have found nothing, I will come 
 back from the garden in time to kill you a few little 
 fishes."
 
 10 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 It was growing dark now in the little hut, except 
 where the light of the fire lay low between the fire 
 stones. 
 
 "It is the sixth hour now," said Mejo. 
 
 "What is that new word you say?" asked his mother. 
 
 "I said, it is the sixth hour. Because they told us 
 in school today that when the sun is lost then it is the 
 sixth hour of the night. When it rises that hour is the 
 sixth hour of the morning." 
 
 "And when it is the middle?" 
 
 "Then it is the twelfth hour. And when the women 
 begin to come from their gardens it is then the second 
 hour after noon." 
 
 "How do they know all that? Who said that this is 
 one hour and another hour? What is an hour?" 
 
 "The clock tells them. You saw the clock when you 
 went to see the white man's baby. All these questions 
 you ask me are so many questions. Did any hen lay an 
 egg today?" 
 
 "A hen certainly did and there are now six eggs in 
 the corner by my bed." 
 
 "Ah, mother give me those six eggs!" 
 
 "I am to give you those six eggs? And a little 
 chicken in every egg! What new thing do you have in 
 your heart that you should beg all my six eggs and all 
 those six little chickens from me? You are not so hun- 
 gry that you must eat an egg, are you?" 
 
 "Never could I bear to eat an egg but I want to buy 
 a writing stone (a slate). My old one is broken. You 
 know that I must work for many mornings on the mis- 
 sion farm to buy another writing stone. And those six 
 eggs are half the price of the stone. I hate to rise from 
 my bed when the women rise to go to their farms ; then
 
 THE FAMILY OF AKULU MEJO 11 
 
 the dew is everywhere and I hate to work among the 
 weeds with my body all wet with dew. So I said in my 
 heart, I believe my mother will give me some eggs, 
 and so with some eggs one day and some another I 
 can buy my writing stone." 
 
 "How soft are the bodies of boys that they cannot 
 bear the chill of the morning. Have not the mothers 
 of men risen always all these generations of men 
 and suffered the dew on their bodies and the chill that 
 is in the dawn, that men might eat good food from the 
 garden ! But just ask a boy to rise early and to walk 
 in the wet grasses then he has a sullen face. No I 
 must keep my eggs for my own debts. You know as 
 well as I do that I will be wanting a gift for God on the 
 day that is Sunday when the people of God bring every 
 one a gift to God. And three of us who are people of 
 God in this town have tied ourselves to buy medicine 
 for old Vunga who lies on her bed in her hut." 
 
 Now it was dark in Mejo's mother's house. There 
 was no moon that night, the oil palm trees in the mid- 
 dle of the clearing were lost in the dark. Across the 
 street of the town other little huts of other wives of 
 Mejo's father were lost too, except where firelight 
 shone through the slits in the bark walls, or through 
 the doors that were still open. 
 
 "I will go and salute my father," said Mejo. 
 
 "You school boys never know the news of the town," 
 said Mejo's mother. "I might run away or a tree In 
 falling might fall on me, and you would come in at the 
 day's end to ask, 'Why does not my mother show me 
 my evening meal?' Now everyone but you knows 
 that your father is not in town." 
 
 "Where then is he?"
 
 12 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 "He has gone to Mekok. A carrier with a load of 
 rubber for the trader at the beach passed on the path 
 this morning. He said that six days ago when he 
 passed the town of Mekok he asked a drink of water 
 from a woman in that town. In that woman's house 
 was a little girl who begged him to take a packet of 
 peanuts to her mother as he would be passing her 
 mother's town." 
 
 " 'I am Asala,' she told that carrier, 'the daughter of 
 Akulu Mejo. I am the sister of Mejo Akulu. I am 
 married in this town of Mekok since the last rainy sea- 
 son. My mother is a little thin woman, one of the 
 wives of Akulu Mejo. She is a person of God. She is 
 easy to find everyone knows her. Perhaps you too 
 have a little daughter sold into a far marriage. So I beg 
 you to take these peanuts to my mother. Tell her that 
 Bilo'o, my husband's wife in whose house I live, has 
 permitted me to take these peanuts from her garden. 
 Because I have no other present to send my mother. 
 Tell my mother that I think of her always from the 
 dawn of one day to the dawn of another day. Tell her 
 that a man who passed on the path two moons back 
 gave me this news, that at the time of the planting of 
 peanuts my mother was sick. When I heard that news 
 my heart dried up and I could not eat. Then I begged 
 God for my mother. Tell my mother now I am thin 
 with grief and longing !' 
 
 "All this news of your little sister the man with the 
 load of rubber told me, and I cooked him some plan- 
 tains and he ate. But while those plantains were on 
 the fire I went to the palaver house where your father 
 sat talking to a guest and because my heart was 
 heavy in me I did not fear to speak before the guest.
 
 THE FAMILY OF AKULU MEJO IS 
 
 I said to your father, 'How many times have we plant- 
 ed peanuts since you bought me from my father in his 
 town that is on the path that comes from the sun's 
 rising?' 
 
 "Your father just looked at me, it would be a long 
 hunting that would remember all those planting of pea- 
 nuts that we have planted since that day he bought me 
 for a big ivory, and I was then a girl no bigger than 
 your wrist. 
 
 "Then I asked him another question. 'How many 
 times before I became a person of God did I run away 
 from this marriage that you and I are married?' 
 
 "Your father hunted to remember those runnings 
 away that I ran. On his fingers he counted six run- 
 nings. And he said, *Yes Six runnings you ran away. 
 As long as your mother lived you would run away to 
 her. And after she died you ran away for other rea- 
 sons. You were certainly a bad runner away !' 
 
 " 'I hear ! and since I am a person of the tribe of God 
 how many runnings away have I run?' 
 
 " 'Why, none at all,' said your father. 'Do women 
 who are persons of that tribe run away?' 
 
 " 'I tell you a true word/ I said to your father, 'My 
 heart has run away today to my little daughter who is 
 married in Mekok. She sends a message for me. I 
 must see that child. I beg you to let me visit her.' 
 
 "Then your father said No he would visit her. He 
 said that one of the goats that Asala's husband had 
 given on the dowry had died. So he must go to beg 
 of Asala's husband another goat. He would say to 
 Asala's husband, 'Now the girl I gave you did not die, 
 did she? Or I would have given you another of my 
 daughters in her place. But the goat you gave me has 
 died. So you must give me another goat.'
 
 14 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 "Then your father called some of his young men for 
 a journey. Together they went away at noon. As for 
 me, I have just sat in my house all day and desired 
 with a great desire to see my little daughter. Now I 
 am going to lie down upon my bed. Before we part 
 teach me the new word of the Word of God that you 
 learned in school today." 
 
 " 'The Son of man came to seek and to save that 
 which was lost.' Now repeat," said Mejo. 
 
 " 'The Son of man,' he that was Jesus," said Mejo's 
 mother, "came to seek the people lost in the forest and 
 to save them." 
 
 "You have caught the argument, but you have put 
 too many words in it, try again," and Mejo set the 
 model again. But Mejo's mother always said, "lost 
 in the forest." 
 
 "Even so," said she, "you see that the Word of God 
 says nothing about Africa; it does not say that we 
 were lost in Africa that country that you tell about. 
 And I know that we were lost in the forest, so it is 
 hard not to put those words into the word !" 
 
 "If you were in school," said Mejo, "they wouldn't 
 let you do it, so / won't." And he persisted until his 
 mother said his verse correctly. 
 
 "I am going to bed now," said he. 
 
 He took a brand from the fire and went out into the 
 street. He waved the brand about to keep the burn- 
 ing end of it bright. This he did to drive away any 
 snake that might be abroad in the dark. By this dim 
 and ruddy light, Mejo came to a little house where he 
 lived with Assam, his half brother, one of the older 
 sons of Akulu Mejo. The mother of Assam was dead. 
 
 The boys had built this little house for themselves.
 
 THE FAMILY OF AKULU MEJO 15 
 
 Together they had cut and trimmed the young sapling 
 trees that were the frame work. They themselves had 
 peeled from great trees the big plates of bark that were 
 the walls. Their father had given them the mats of 
 palm-leaves that were the thatch of the roof, and some 
 "real men" of the village had helped them bring in and 
 raise the long straight sapling that was the ridge pole. 
 That day they had all sung the song of the roof tree. 
 Many little brothers had helped them thatch their roof, 
 singing the song of the thatch. Now they lived to- 
 gether under this roof with the dignity of school boys. 
 
 Assam was perhaps sixteen years old, perhaps seven- 
 teen. He had three loin cloths all his own, and two 
 singlets. 1 He had a felt hat, but his father often bor- 
 rowed this and wore it on long journeys. He owned a 
 Book of the Word of God in the Bulu language. He 
 owned a lantern the only lantern in that town. He 
 could write in a beautiful, clear hand. He was very 
 much admired by his father, and by the people of the 
 village. For nick-name and drum name the villagers 
 gave him a name that they beat upon the call drum 
 when they summoned him from a distance too great for 
 the call of the human voice. This phrase is that name 
 they gave him 
 
 "He stands like a dagger." 
 
 This was a phrase of admiration because Assam 
 was a fine youth, straight and slim. 
 
 "Strange thing about Assam," the villagers said, 
 "he is not proud." And for this they approved him and 
 admired him the more. 
 
 On this night of which I tell you, when Mejo came 
 into their little house, Assam was studying his lessons 
 
 1 Really an undervest, much worn as an upper garment.
 
 16 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 by the light of the lantern that stood on a little table of 
 bamboo the boys had built a table in their house. 
 
 "Assam," said Mejo. 
 
 "Say it !" said Assam, not looking up from his book. 
 
 "It is a question," said Mejo. 
 
 "Ask it," said Assam 
 
 "Today did they speak in your class about the things 
 of teaching?" 
 
 "They did," said Assam. "They said vacation was 
 near, and it would be well to see the company of boys 
 who were willing to teach in the villages during vaca- 
 tion. They said that many villages far away were call- 
 ing for teachers. Mr. Krug said all the boys who were 
 people of God and who were willing to go on those 
 journeys and teach in those schools must rise from 
 their seats." 
 
 "Did you rise from your seat?" 
 
 "I did," said Assam. 
 
 "What boy goes with you?" 
 
 "How do I know what boy goes with me? Mr. Krug 
 said he would ask the younger boys, 'Who is willing 
 to walk in the company of a teacher, to be his com- 
 panion in a strange town, to cook his food, and to help 
 teach the classes?' He said he would ask the younger 
 boys that question, and I thought perhaps you would 
 promise to go with me. Did he ask?" 
 
 "He certainly asked," said Mejo. 
 
 "Did you promise?" 
 
 "I did not," said Mejo. Then after a while he said, 
 "I was afraid. I thought just two boys in a strange 
 town how do we know what thing the people of that 
 town will do to us? They promise to feed us, but will 
 they feed us? All this rainy season I have just sat in
 
 THE FAMILY OF AKULU MEJO 17 
 
 school. Now the dry season is here I long to fish and 
 hunt. I long to camp in the forest with our own people 
 when they visit the dwarfs. I don't want to teach 
 school in vacation. I want to stay at home." 
 
 "Don't you think I want to stay at home too?" said 
 Assam. 
 
 "Well, then, why don't you?" 
 
 "Oh ! go to sleep !" said Assam. "Some things you 
 understand, but God has not yet opened the eyes of 
 your heart!" And Assam put out the lantern. 
 
 Soon two school boys were asleep on the bamboo 
 bed. Assam owned a red blanket, together they slept 
 under that blanket. But in none of the other houses in 
 that town was there a blanket. Fires burned beside all 
 the other bamboo beds, and now and again through 
 the night there woke beside the fires that burned low a 
 sleepy black man or woman who mended the fire and 
 slept again. 
 
 How quiet the night was in that little village where 
 there were no lamps ; where no more than twenty huts 
 were ranged in two rows with a clearing between them 
 like a street. At either end of this little street there was 
 a palaver house where the "real men" of the village 
 lived. And about this village, all built of the bark of 
 trees and thatched with the leaves of trees, stood the 
 trees of the forest, dripping with night dews. Some- 
 times in the forest a bird would call. Sometimes a big- 
 ger animal would make a crashing in the bush. There 
 were wild cows in the forests of that neighborhood, 
 and leopards and elephants and gorillas. Often at 
 night a leopard would steal a sheep of that village, and 
 often in the dead of night bands of monkeys would 
 chatter and play in the trees behind the little brown
 
 18 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 huts, or in the moonlight that fell upon the deserted 
 street. 
 
 One day perhaps a week later, Andungo, the mother 
 of Me jo, was coming home from her garden with her 
 basket on her back and a great bunch of plantains in the 
 basket. The little forest path was brown under her 
 brown feet, the great trunks of the trees were gray 
 about her brown body, and above her were the millions 
 and millions of green leaves making up and up to the 
 roof of the forest. On that roof bright birds sunned 
 themselves, and there were the flowers of such trees as 
 bloomed. On the roof of the forest the sun shone, but 
 down where Andungo walked there was a kind of gray 
 green dusk you see, it was the cellar of the forest. 
 
 Andungo, Mejo's mother, "was studying her lessons as 
 she walked alone. She was saying to herself : 
 
 "This must be the second hour, because Mejo said it 
 is the second hour when women begin to return from 
 their gardens. This must be the day that is Tuesday, 
 because Tuesday is the day that is two days after Sun- 
 day and twice have I slept on my bed since Sunday. 
 He ! the great day that was Sunday ! I heard the school 
 boys say that there were seven thousand people under 
 the roof of the church on Sunday. That thing that is 
 a thousand is too much for me to know, women can- 
 not know these things but with my eyes I saw that 
 great company ; I heard that great shouting they made 
 before we began to worship God, and I heard too that 
 great silence when we began to worship God. That 
 was a silence like the silence that is the ceasing of a 
 great rain upon the roof when you are astonished at 
 that silence. And I heard those many voices singing 
 the praise of God. I wish I knew all the words of that 
 song that says :
 
 THE FAMILY OF AKULU MEJO 19 
 
 "God is loving, 
 He has loved me, 
 God is loving, 
 He loves me. 
 I tell you again, 
 God is loving, 
 God is loving, 
 He loves me. 1 
 
 "More of that song I wish I knew. 
 
 "I am glad I found those nuts of the wild mango 
 tree that Mejo loves to eat. I will roast them in the 
 fire and Mejo shall eat them all." 
 
 But Mejo never so much as saw those mango nuts 
 with his eye, because when Andungo the mother of 
 Mejo ducked down to enter her hut, two little brown 
 arms were thrown about her body a little young body 
 clung to hers. That was the body of her girl Asala. 
 Her girl Asala was crying out, 
 
 "Ah, mother, I have come! Ah, mother, they have 
 permitted me to visit you! Ah, mother, the many 
 nights I lay upon my bed and longed for my mother! 
 Sometimes when I slept you entered my head at night. 
 That dream was so quick to pass. Now I see you with 
 my eyes ; I touch you with my hands ! Tell me all the 
 news !" 
 
 That is why Mejo never saw the mango nuts his 
 little sister ate them while she answered her mother's 
 many questions. 
 
 "That is a new way they dress your hair now," said 
 Andungo. 
 
 "Yes it is the dressing that they dress the hair of 
 girls in the town of my marriage," said Asala. 
 
 1 She was singing Bulu words to the old German air, "Gott ist dip Liebe."
 
 20 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 She was perhaps twelve years old ; she wore a little 
 apron of green leaves and this was attached to a belt of 
 leopard's skin. She wore besides a bushy little tail of 
 dried grasses. About her neck was a necklace of dog's 
 teeth strung on one of the strong black hairs of an ele- 
 phant's tail. Just below the knee of her right leg she 
 had tied a narrow ribbon of a bright green grass and 
 another such a green ribbon was tied about her fore- 
 head. These bands of green were very pretty on her 
 brown body. Her feet and hands were dainty. This 
 little brown girl was like the small gazelles that run in 
 the forests. When her mother looked at her she 
 thought "How beautiful she is !" 
 
 "Do they say that you are beautiful in the town of 
 your marriage?" 
 
 "They say I would be beautiful if I were tattooed," 
 said Asala. " 'Why did not your father have you tat- 
 tooed?' they ask. 'You look so strange without any 
 marks upon your body.' Then I feel shame in my 
 heart. All the others are tattooed. Sometimes I make 
 a paint of charcoal and the gum of a tree, and with that 
 I make marks upon my body but not very well. I am 
 too stupid to make good marks." 
 
 "You should tell them the truth," said her mother. 
 "Say that you are the child of a Christian woman who 
 knows that God made your body as it pleased Him to 
 make it, and that it is forbidden to spoil that body He 
 made with knives and the things of tattoo. You should 
 tell them that." 
 
 "Oh! I do tell them that you are a Christian," said 
 Asala, "I tell them that more than anything. All the 
 wives of my husband speak to me of that thing that 
 my mother is a Christian. Women come from across
 
 THE FAMILY OF AKULU MEJO 21 
 
 the river to ask me questions of my mother that is a 
 Christian. The women of our neighborhood are al- 
 ways asking me, 'how do the people of the tribe of 
 God do this thing and that thing? Tell us about the 
 rules of the tribe of God. Tell us about that Jesus, 
 Son of God.' Those questions they are always asking 
 me." 
 
 "I hope you are wise to answer." 
 
 "I answer as I am able," said Asala. "Some ques- 
 tions it is hard to answer. Now that wife of my hus- 
 band in whose house I live begins to pray." 
 
 "Thanks to God," cried Andungo, "now she will be 
 good to you!" 
 
 "I tell you a true word," said Asala, "she was always 
 good to me. Yes, from the very first day that I went a 
 stranger into that town walking before my husband 
 with my hands clasped upon my head and tears run- 
 ning from my eyes from that day she was good to me. 
 She tells me always that I am like a child of her own. 
 She never had a child but me !" 
 
 "When / came to my marriage it was not so," said 
 Andungo. "Your father put me in the house of Eda; 
 she is dead now. She had a bad heart, that woman, 
 and I too, I had a bad heart. Under that roof that cov- 
 ered two bad hearts what quarrels we made ! She was 
 big and I was little she always won ! But the thing 
 you tell me of that woman in whose house you live is a 
 good word. I will send her a present when you go 
 back and as many of the words of God as I can teach 
 you. How is it that your husband permitted you to 
 leave his town?" 
 
 "It was because of you, mother. Because of the 
 news my father gave my husband of you.
 
 22 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 " 'Asala's mother is a Christian, a member of that 
 new tribe that is growing in the forest' my father told 
 my husband, and that a Christian must keep her word, 
 and that you would drive me back to my husband's 
 town because you were a Christian. 
 
 " 'You can trust that word,' said my father. 
 
 " 'Strange thing !' said my husband. 
 
 " 'Those women of mine who are Christians do not 
 run away,' said my father. 
 
 " 'Strange thing !' said my husband. 
 
 "Then he said to me, 'If I permit you to visit your 
 mother for one moon do you swear by the dead that 
 you will return?' 
 
 "Then I said to my husband, 'Not by the dead do I 
 swear ; but by the living God.' 
 
 " 'Is that a good oath ?' asked my husband, and my 
 father said that it was a strong promise. 
 
 "Then my husband said, 'If I let you go I do not let 
 you go free. I tie you with this tying 1 that when 
 this moon that is making is lost and the morning after 
 the making of the next moon, you must leave your fa- 
 ther's town; your father will show you the path back 
 to my town. And when you return you must have a 
 word from the white man. It would be well to have 
 that word written in a book, for I see that all the white 
 people make their strong words in a book. And the 
 word I want is a promise. That white man must send 
 us a teacher. He must promise to send us a teacher. 
 All the news I hear of these things that are the things 
 of God make my heart desire them. I sit in my pala- 
 ver house in ignorance. Tell the white man that Efa, 
 the headman of Mekok, would learn of the things of 
 
 1 To be tied is to be bound to do a, certain thing.
 
 THE FAMILY OF AKULU MEJO 23 
 
 God. Do you promise to tell to the white man this 
 word?' 
 
 " 'I promise,' I said to my husband. So he let me 
 come. Ah, mother, such joy in my heart ! It fills my 
 heart full. Where are all the girls?" 
 
 "They are fishing, and there on the wall is your own 
 little net." 
 
 Asala's little net was of a knotted cord strung to a 
 hoop of twigs. She hung the circle of it on her shoul- 
 der and went away in the great sunlight. She knew 
 the old path to the river. When she came to the river 
 bank she saw all the girls of the village playing in the 
 brown water. There were the little girl-wives of her 
 father, and the girls born in the town and not married 
 yet. They ran up the bank to greet her, all wet with 
 bright water. 
 
 "Asala has come home !" they cried. "How she has 
 grown and her hair is dressed a new way ! Ah, Asala, 
 did you run away from your marriage that we see you 
 with our eyes again? Ah, Asala, here is a new girl that 
 you do not know she is from the neighborhood of 
 your husband's town she asks news of her mother, of 
 her brother. Ah, Asala, tonight when we dance you 
 will teach us new dances that you learned in that far 
 country !" 
 
 It was four weeks later that Andungo, the mother of 
 Mejo, said to her husband : 
 
 "Some days run too fast. Some days are as slow as 
 a chameleon and some run like gazelles. Now there are 
 only two days before Asala must go back to her hus- 
 band's town." 
 
 The parents of Mejo were sitting in the big palaver 
 house at the end of the street. Akulu, the father of
 
 24 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 Mejo, was busy making a box of the bark of a tree. 
 He was making this box very carefully, sewing it to- 
 gether with a rattan thread. When it was done he 
 meant to put some precious bones in the box bones 
 that were fetish. He hoped that when he made a 
 charm with these bones certain desirable things would 
 come to pass. He had a good many worries about his 
 town, and about some evil spirits that were troubling 
 the people of his town, and so he was trying to make a 
 strong new "medicine" against those evil spirits. This 
 is why he was so busy sewing away at his bark box. 
 Andungo had brought him a little cake of mashed plan- 
 tain and a little peanut paste in a green leaf. They 
 were alone in the palaver house, and she told him how 
 sorry she was because Asala's visit was almost all run 
 away. 
 
 "That thing is easy," said Akulu. "Keep her." 
 
 "Keep her!" cried out Andungo. "How can I keep 
 her? She gave the promise of a Christian that she 
 would return!" 
 
 "You Christians are hard-hearted," said Akulu, "to 
 drive a child away like that." 
 
 "Am I driving her? Not I! It is herself. Last 
 night, when we saw the new moon and all the children 
 in the village cried out, 
 
 " 'The new moon is made ! 
 
 " 'The new moon is made !' 
 
 "Then Asala came away from the other girls where 
 they were dancing. She sat by me in the hut. In the 
 dark I could hear her cry. And she said, 'Ah, mother, 
 when we see the new moon two nights then in the 
 morning I must rise and go to my husband's town. 
 Because that was the time I promised. And I am a 
 Christian.' "
 
 THE FAMILY OF AKULU MEJO 25 
 
 "Such a little Christian," said Akulu. "Surely they 
 will never believe the word of such a little Christian! 
 They will say, her heart is the heart of a child, and 
 she lingers by her mother's side. There can be no 
 harm in that!" 
 
 "Little or big," said Andungo, "she is all the Chris- 
 tian the people of that town know. And she must 
 show them the path. They all take example by her. 
 She must go." 
 
 "But if I say that I am not ready to go with her? 
 Here I am these days, trying to make a new medicine 
 charm for my son Ze who grows so thin. What if I 
 say that I cannot leave my town now? How will she 
 keep her promise?" 
 
 "We thought of that," said Andungo. "Then Assam 
 will go to show her the path." 
 
 "But he is in school !" 
 
 "Even so, he will beg the teacher to let him go, that 
 the Christians may keep their promises." 
 
 "Such persistence !" said Akulu. 
 
 The next morning when Mejo sat in school, he saw 
 a woman and a girl come in. "There is my mother and 
 my sister," he thought. He felt surprised and uncom- 
 fortable. "Now they will do something stupid," he 
 thought, "and I will feel shame!" 
 
 The school house was a great roof thatched with 
 leaves, over rows and rows of seats and desks rough 
 hewn from the logs of the forest. The walls of the 
 school were of bark and so low that a boy might sit 
 in his seat and look off into the forest. Under that 
 great roof there was a murmur of many voices, for 
 there were four hundred boys in this school. This was 
 the lower school, the upper school was near by. At
 
 26 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 the end of the school a white man sat at a table on a 
 platform, and here and there, among the pupils, the 
 pupil-teachers stood before their classes. There were 
 thirty young black boys teaching in that school. 
 
 Andungo and Asala came in by the little breach in 
 the wall. Outside the sunlight was too bright and too 
 hot, for it was near noon, but in the school there was a 
 cool shade. Andungo and Asala felt strange when 
 they stepped into that shadow crowded with the bodies 
 of wise young men and boys. They stood together 
 near the wall and whispered. 
 
 "I fear ! and I feel shame," said Asala. 
 
 "I too," said her mother. "Let us go, they may 
 laugh at us." 
 
 "Only the promise that I promised is able to force 
 me," said Asala. 
 
 "Come, then, we will do quickly," said her mother, 
 and they went on up to the platform. 
 
 "Ah, teacher of men !" said Andungo. 
 
 The white man looked up from a great book that he 
 was writing. 
 
 "I greet you, mother of Mejo," said he. 
 
 "This little girl is my daughter ; she is in a far mar- 
 riage and she makes us a visit. She has a word to say 
 to you." 
 
 "Such impudence," thought Mejo, who was watching 
 from his seat and feeling shame. He could see a little 
 red feather in Asala's hair and that little feather trem- 
 bled ; his heart softened. "She fears," he thought, and 
 he pitied her. 
 
 "It is because of a promise I made my husband that 
 I have come," said Asala, and her voice trembled like 
 the feather in her hair. "I promised him that I would
 
 THE FAMILY OF AKULU MEJO 27 
 
 beg the white man to send a teacher to the village of 
 Mekok. The people of Mekok desire to learn the 
 things of God. They desire to read the book of the 
 words of God." 
 
 "Who is the headman of the village of Mekok?" 
 
 "My husband is the headman. His name is Efa." 
 
 It was very quiet in the school now because all the 
 boys and all the teachers were listening. Asala clung 
 to the edge of the white man's table and he saw her 
 little brown face looking at him over the edge. 
 
 "Will the people of Mekok pay the teacher if I send 
 him?" 
 
 "My husband says that he knows the custom of pay- 
 ing the teacher, and the people of the town will cer- 
 tainly pay the teacher." 
 
 "Will the women of the town feed the teacher every 
 day?" 
 
 "Every day they will feed the teacher. He shall not 
 be hungry a single day." 
 
 "Will the boys and young men of the town build the 
 school house?" 
 
 "They will! Already they are cutting bark for the 
 walls and hunting leaves for the thatch. All these 
 things are understood by my husband as the custom of 
 the tribe of God." 
 
 "Are there so few Christians in your husband's town 
 that a little girl must bring this great message?" 
 
 "There is no Christian but me. I alone am a Chris- 
 tian in that town." 
 
 "Then it is from your mouth that your husband and 
 the women of his town have learned this news of the 
 things of school and of the custom of the tribe of God. 
 I hear."
 
 28 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 And the white man took counsel with himself. 
 
 "Will not you yourself come to school with us? 
 There is a white woman who cares for girls like you 
 and teaches the things of women who are women of 
 God. Does not your heart draw you to come and be 
 with her?" 
 
 The white man saw tears soften those brilliant eyes. 
 
 "Tomorrow I return to my husband. I made a prom- 
 ise," said Asala. 
 
 "You are a good little girl," said the white man, sud- 
 denly, "you must keep your promise. Tell your hus- 
 band that I received his great message from your 
 mouth, and that I promise a teacher for the village of 
 Mekok. I will write this word in a book. I am a 'real 
 man' and I will keep my promise. He too is a real man 
 and must keep his promise to pay and to feed and to 
 build. You may go now. As you go God keep you." 
 
 Mejo watched his mother and his sister go away. 
 "She is brave," he thought. 
 
 The next morning Asala left for her husband's town. 
 Her father went with her. And that night Mejo said 
 to his brother Assam, 
 
 "I wonder to see Asala so brave." 
 
 "It is the power of God," said Assam. 
 
 "Will they send a teacher as they promised?" 
 
 "They certainly will," said Assam. 
 
 "Are you sure? Have they chosen that teacher?" 
 
 "They have," said Assam, "and I am that teacher." 
 And he put out the light. 
 
 "There go my brother and my sister," thought Mejo 
 as he lay beside his brother in the dark, "together 
 they walk the new path that is the path of God. They 
 certainly have a peculiar courage !" And he sighed.
 
 THE FAMILY OF AKULU MEJO 29 
 
 SOME EXPLANATIONS FOR CHAPTER I. 
 
 In reading this book you are reading about tribes, mem- 
 bers of the African race that is called by the white man, 
 Bantu. There are many tribes of the Bantu people. They 
 live in Central and Southern Africa. Some parts of that 
 country are forest, some are open country. The open coun- 
 try is called by the white man the grass country. The Bulu 
 tribe is living in the forest country about two hundred miles 
 north of the equator and near the west coast. The customs 
 of the Bulu are like the customs of other Bantu people who 
 have not been a long time in contact with the white man. 
 They have no knowledge of the world outside the forest; of 
 their own country they know only their own neighborhood. 
 They travel on foot by little trails from settlement to settle- 
 ment. They have no written language, but they have a good 
 language to speak. The men are good hunters and fishers, 
 and good builders of towns. The towns of the Bulu are built 
 as you will read in this story, but other tribes of the Bantu 
 build with different material, some with grass, some with 
 clay and wattles. The Bulu make their furniture of wood. I 
 have told about their furniture in the story. The women are 
 the farmers. They plant bananas and plantains, many kinds 
 of yams, peanuts, corn, cassava, savoury herbs that we white 
 people do not have, and other foods that we do not have. 
 There are wild fruits in the forest, some nuts and other 
 fruits. But there is no complete diet growing wild in Africa; 
 the people must plant to eat. 
 
 The Bantu tell time by the sun for the day, the moon for 
 the month, the stars for the season. They do not speak of 
 years; they speak of rainy seasons and dry seasons, and they 
 count time by their plantings, especially among the Bulu, the 
 planting of peanuts. 
 
 News is spread by travellers, and in another way it is 
 announced by drums. Upon wooden drums a good drummer 
 will beat out a message that sounds like the clicking of a 
 telegraph machine. But that clicking is very loud; it can be 
 heard miles away. Our call drum at Efulen mission station 
 could be understood seventeen miles away. Almost any
 
 30 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 news can be told by the call drum, and every grown person 
 has a drum name by which he may be called from a distance. 
 
 All Bulu women and nearly all the women of the primi- 
 tive Bantu tribes are bought and sold. A little girl is sold by 
 her father or her elder brother. The man who buys her puts 
 her with some older woman of his town, who will keep the 
 girl until she is marriageable. A Christian man does not sell 
 his daughter or his sister before she is marriageable, or 
 against her will, or to a man with other wives. 
 
 In spite of the fact that little girls are sold and sent away 
 from home, the're is a strong family love and loyalty among 
 the Bantu. And there is a strong bond among the members 
 of the clan, and the townspeople. The dress of Bulu men 
 used to be made of the bark of trees, beaten into a sort of 
 cloth. Women used to wear, and still do wear, aprons of 
 leaves and a kind of thick tail of dried grasses. They still 
 tattoo their bodies, they still wear necklaces of the coarse 
 hair of the elephant's tail, or necklaces strung with dog's 
 teeth, or the teeth of leopards. They wear bracelets of brass 
 and ivory. The men carry spears tipped with brass or with 
 iron. But there are many things now in the forest that are 
 manufactured by the white man. Calico and beads and 
 umbrellas and hats and many more things of the white man 
 may be bought of the black traders who are trading through 
 the forest.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 WHITE MEN AND THEIR ADVENTURES 
 
 T was a dark night "the moon was lost", 
 as the forest people say, and the people of 
 Akulu's village were sitting about the fires 
 in the palaver house. There had been an 
 elephant hunt that day, Akulu had made a strong 
 medicine for the hunt and yet the elephant had got 
 away. 
 
 "That is because all my strong young men are in 
 school," said Akulu, who was in bad humor. "They 
 are followers of the white man my boys and my men 
 their old father goes to the hunt unattended. Soon 
 the men of our clan will give me a new nickname, they 
 will call me 
 
 'You walk alone! Where are your brothers?' 
 
 When they beat my nickname on a drum that is the 
 name they will beat 
 
 'You walk alone! Where are your brothers?' " 
 
 The young sons of Akulu sat together in a little 
 group peeling and eating sugar cane. One of the older 
 boys said: 
 
 "Some boys took new names today. Mr. Krug 1 told 
 us stories of brave men, and some boys said that they 
 would name themselves for those brave men." 
 
 "Were those brave men white men or black men?" 
 asked Akulu. 
 
 1 Mr. Adolph Krug is a missionary of the Board of Foreign Missions of the 
 Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. and has since 1903 been engaged in edu- 
 cational work at Elat, Kamerun, West Africa.
 
 32 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 "They were white men," said Assam. 
 
 "What kind of bravery was their bravery?" asked 
 Akulu. "Were they brave hunters or brave fighters? 
 Tell me about that bravery !" 
 
 "It was not a bravery of hunting or of fighting, it 
 was a bravery of walking alone in a strange country 
 among strangers and enemies. They were makers of 
 roads in the forest. In canoes they followed strange 
 rivers. Alone they approached great and angry head- 
 men. Every one of these brave men might say his 
 nickname was 
 
 "You walk alone! Where are your brothers?" 
 
 At this moment, Akulu rose and went out into the 
 dark, where his call drum lay under the eaves of the 
 house. Presently he drummed the call to his neigh- 
 bors. Akulu was a great drummer; far, far away in 
 the forest the murmur of his drumming was heard by 
 other headmen sitting by their own fires. "That is a 
 call from the town of Akulu Mejo," they said; and 
 those men whose villages were neighbor to his rose to 
 answer the call from Akulu. 
 
 He came back into the palaver house and sat down. 
 
 "Go on," said he to Assam, "this talk that you talk is 
 a real word. It is well that other men should hear this 
 talk about brave men. What were they hunting, 
 these brave white men? Ivory, was it, or rubber? 
 What goods did they carry? Were they traders? Tell 
 us news of them." 
 
 "One of them was Ngutu, 1 " said Assam. 
 
 "He ye e!" cried out Akulu. "He was my friend! 
 
 1 Ngutu is the native name of Adolphus C. Good, a member of the Presby- 
 terian Mission in West Africa. He opened up the Bulu interior, and died in 
 that country. He is still remembered by the Bulu. His widow and his only 
 son. who is now grown, are at work among the tribes of that forest. Boys and 
 girls who want to know more of Adolphus C. Good should read "A Life for 
 Africa," by Miss Ellen C. Parsons.
 
 WHITE MEN AND THEIR ADVENTURES 33 
 
 Yes, I agree that he was brave. That coming that he 
 came to us when I was a young man like one of you 
 that was a brave coming. Alone he came, as you say. 
 Ten black men of the beach tribes walked in his com- 
 pany. His first appearing was in the town of Abiete. 
 All night and all day of the days that he slept in Abiete 
 the drums of Abiete were busy with the news. All 
 those days the people of the forest were running to the 
 town of Abiete to see the white man. Strange word 
 of him we heard. His hair is like a monkey's hair, we 
 heard ; his face is not like our faces. He does not dress 
 his hair; he wears a thing on his head that he takes 
 off in the house. Then, when he goes on the path, he 
 puts that thing on his head again. His voice is kind, 
 his manner is kind. You don't see his body at all; it 
 is covered. The thing he has come to do we do not 
 yet know, but he says many words about "Zambe He 
 who created us." But we do not yet know truly of the 
 thing he has come to do. This is the news we heard 
 of him." 
 
 Some of Akulu's neighbors were coming in out of 
 the night. They carried reed torches, and these they 
 beat out upon the floor. To them Akulu said: 
 
 "You who are 'real men,' do you remember the days 
 of our youth when Ngutu came to our country?" 
 
 "We certainly remember." 
 
 "It is of those days that we are speaking now. My 
 father was then headman of a town near Abiete. He 
 had many sons some older than I all brave young 
 men. And he had brothers younger than he all brave 
 men. In those days we all carried guns. Those were 
 good days before there came a white governor to take 
 away our guns. Now a man is only half a man because
 
 34 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 he has no gun. A young man of my time was of a 
 peculiar beauty so brave he was !" 
 
 "You say a true word, Akulu !" cried out an old man, 
 who warmed his hands at the fire. "In those days we 
 were as beautiful as leopards. The villagers of a 
 strange village trembled when we passed upon the 
 path; they hid themselves in the forest, leaving their 
 houses empty and open." 
 
 "How true !" sighed one. 
 
 "The good days of the past !" sighed another. 
 
 "I long for those days," sighed a third. 
 
 "I dream of a gun in a dream that comes into my 
 head at night !" 
 
 "Well, it was so, as you say. In your youth we were 
 beautiful and we carried guns. So my father said to 
 us all : 
 
 'When the white man passes through our town we 
 will beg him to sleep in our town. And when his car- 
 riers have laid their loads upon the ground, we will 
 just steal those loads. That will be easy. The goods 
 in those loads are all fine goods beads for our head- 
 dresses, yellow wire to make bracelets, strange cloth 
 that is not made of beaten bark like our cloth, and 
 bundles of wonderful little Sticks for making fire. It 
 is his custom to give some little portion of this goods 
 to the men who befriend him but it will be easy for us 
 to take it all.' 
 
 "This was how we took counsel together, and this 
 was our plan. 
 
 "The day he came to our town was a day of the dry 
 season. He came in the late afternoon, from the direc- 
 tion of the setting of the sun. Many of our neighbors 
 
 1 Matches.
 
 WHITE MEN AND THEIR ADVENTURES 35 
 
 walked in his company, laughing and talking and mak- 
 ing a great noise. He did not laugh or talk. He 
 walked like a man who is worn out. I saw him with a 
 great surprise. I called out with the others, 'He ye e ! 
 His hair is like the hair of a monkey! The strange 
 thing on his head !' I was so surprised to see a white 
 man. He came in to the palaver house where my fa- 
 ther sat. His carriers put their loads down in the 
 street, they came into the palaver house. He took the 
 thing off his head. He gave my father a greeting, and 
 he gave us all a greeting like a brother. He spoke 
 our tongue, but in a way to make us laugh. He spoke 
 like the tribes across the Ntem river. You know the 
 way we always laugh at the talk of the tribes across 
 the Ntem?" 
 
 "We certainly laugh !" said young and old, and they 
 laughed. 
 
 "Well, so we laughed on that day of the past when 
 Ngutu first spoke to us. We all stood up in the pala- 
 ver house, beautified with our guns and fierce with the 
 fierceness of strong young men. We said to my 
 father: 
 
 " 'Let us go now to steal the loads there they are 
 on the ground ! His carriers have no guns it will be 
 easy to steal the loads.' . 
 
 "Ngutu heard us say this, and the carriers heard. 
 They feared greatly those carriers. Some rose to run 
 away ; but Ngutu said to them, 'Sit down !' " 
 
 "To my father he said he was weary. This much 
 talking made him very weary. And he said he was 
 thirsty. He begged for a drink of water. My father 
 sent a little girl to the spring. He looked at Ngutu a 
 long time. Ngutu looked at him. We still spoke of
 
 36 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 the goods in the load. Ngutu drank the water from 
 the spring. And suddenly my father said : 
 
 " 'This white man fears nothing. He must have a 
 strong fetish that protects him. We do not under- 
 stand white men and their medicine. Let us be wise 
 and treat him with kindness, or evil may come upon us 
 and upon our villages.' 
 
 "Then all the young men put their guns down. We 
 were disappointed, but we respected the voice of my 
 father and we respected the bravery of Ngutu. This 
 time that I tell you was my first sight of Ngutu. He 
 was not yet my friend. That night by the light of the 
 palaver house fires he told us first the news of Jesus, 
 the son of ^ambe He who created us. He told us 
 how the son of Zambe redeemed us, because we were 
 forgetful of Zambe and had broken the great law of 
 Him-who-created-us. That was the first time I ever 
 heard of the tribe of God, that is now so strong in this 
 country. My own sons honor the things of the tribe 
 of God more than the things of the tribe of their 
 fathers." 
 
 "Not the young only," said Oton, a big man who 
 was an elder in the church. "Many 'real men' are 
 Christians and they pray for you every day, Akulu." 
 
 "Yes, and we pray for you," said Assam. 
 
 "Even so," said Akulu, "I am not a Christian. It is 
 too much trouble to be a Christian. That was always 
 the argument I used to make to Ngutu, when he spoke 
 to me of the tribe of God. Yet I was a friend of 
 Ngutu. My eldest son was born the day after Ngutu 
 was put in his grave on Efulen hill. That was my son 
 Ngutu, who was a Christian when he was a lad, and 
 he died. The Christians made me bury that boy with- 
 
 1 Zambe is the Bulu name for the Creator of men.
 
 WHITE MEN AND THEIR ADVENTURES 37 
 
 out any of the dances of mourning or the proper 
 charms for the spirits of the dead. They say he sits 
 down in the town of God. Who knows?" 
 
 "I know," cried out the mother of the boy Ngutu. 
 "And the path to that town I know. Ah, Akulu, will 
 you never rise up to follow after Christ?" 
 
 "Be still!" said Akulu, "there is more news to hear. 
 Assam will tell me news of those brave white men 
 they that were spoken of in School today." 
 
 "There were many," said Assam. "There was a 
 great one named Livingstone. Mr. Krug told us that 
 among all the sons of the white man none exceeds that 
 man for bravery." 
 
 "Where does he have his town that man Living- 
 stone?" asked Akulu. 
 
 "He is dead now. He died when Mr. Krug was a 
 baby." 
 
 "That would be a long time ago," said Akulu. 
 "What great deed did this man do that he lives so long 
 in the memory of his tribe? Tell me that thing he did. 
 Was he a son of the English?" 
 
 "He was a son of the Scotch and that is a tribe I 
 do not know, but brother to the English." 
 
 "Was he a son of a chief?" 
 
 "He was not. The people of his father's house 
 worked with their hands they were weavers of cloth 
 the cloth of the white man. Himself he made cloth 
 until God called him to do the work of the tribe of 
 God. Then he studied many things in books. He 
 studied medicine." 
 
 "It is a strange thing," said Akulu, "how these peo- 
 ple of the tribe of God must always be studying in 
 books. Now there is Ze, who is headman in Yefuzok.
 
 38 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 I saw him with my own* eyes sitting with a book on 
 his knees and a school boy was teaching him the 
 things that are in the book. I said to him: 
 
 " 'Ah, Ze Zom, I feel shame to see a headman learn- 
 ing of a child. You are a headman, like myself.' But 
 he just laughed. He said, 'It is true that you see me 
 with your eyes for a headman, but in the eyes of the 
 Lord Jesus I am a servant. So I humble myself that 
 I may read the law of the tribe of God in a book. Sit 
 down,' Ze said to me, 'until I finish my task.' 
 
 "And then I heard him say like a sheep, 'B-a-Ba!' 
 And like a frog he said, 'B-o-Bo !' " 
 
 Akulu laughed and everybody laughed. 
 
 "About Livingstone, 1 " said Assam. "He studied 
 medicine." 
 
 "Was he a great doctor in his own town?" 'asked 
 Akulu, "and a maker of Magic?" 
 
 "He was not. The great deeds he did were not done 
 in his own town, but in the country of the black people. 
 This country that the white people call Africa." 
 
 "Livingstone !" said Akulu. "Now that is a strange 
 thing. I do not know that name. Did you ever hear 
 in our country of a white man by that name?" 
 
 Akulu looked around the palaver house, where the 
 fire lit the faces of his friends. 
 
 "I hear that name for the first time tonight," said 
 one and another. "This is a white man's fable that 
 you tell us. We keep in our hearts the names of all 
 the white men we have ever seen!" 
 
 "Not a fable," said Assam, "but a thing of distance. 
 All the great deeds of Livingstone and his great walk-
 
 WHITE MEN AND THEIR ADVENTURES 39 
 
 ing were beyond the Ntem river and beyond the 
 Congo." 
 
 "Stop, boy!" said Oton, the elder. "The Ntem river 
 we know do not we fight with the tribes beyond that 
 river? But this river you call the Congo is that a 
 real river?" 
 
 "It is a real river. The tribes who live on that river 
 see it every day. It is a great river. Our country of 
 Africa is a great country more than we black people 
 know. Mr. Krug says so." 
 
 "Mr. Krug!" cried out Akulu "some day Mr. Krug 
 will want to tell me how many wives I have and how 
 many children. Has Mr. Krug seen all this great 
 country that he can give us so much news?" 
 
 "Not himself. He has not seen the country that 
 Livingstone saw; but he has read the book Living- 
 stone wrote all white men read that book and believe 
 it. In the book are written all those things that Liv- 
 ingstone saw on his great walks." 
 
 "Was he a great walker?" asked Akulu. 
 
 "He was the best. Even Ze Zom, who walks so 
 well, cannot have walked more than Livingstone." 
 
 "It is hard to believe that," said Oton "you know 
 that Ze Zom has this nickname 
 
 " 'If the sun sets I will walk by moonlight I will 
 walk by moonlight.' Let me tell you about the walks 
 of Ze." 
 
 "No," said Akulu, "this is a night to listen to the 
 walks of Livingstone. Where did those walks begin ?" 
 
 "They began very far from here on the beach. But 
 not the beach we know. If you stand with the place 
 where the sun rises on your left hand and the place of 
 the setting on your right hand, then the place toward 
 which you turn your face is the South."
 
 40 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 "The South! another thing of the white man!" 
 
 "Yes. And if you walk many seasons rainy and 
 dry seasons then you come to that beach where Liv- 
 ingstone began to walk. That place is called Cape- 
 town." 
 
 "Show us on the ground the things of that white 
 man's walk." 
 
 Assam took some strippings of sugar cane in his 
 hand. One he laid on the ground and said : 
 
 "This is the beach we know at Kribi." Another he 
 laid upon the ground and said, "This is the beach we 
 never knew where the sun rises." 
 
 A third he laid upon the ground and said, "This is 
 Capetown." Then, with the sharp end of a sliver of 
 sugar cane, he drew about these on the clay of the 
 floor, an outline of an ear. 
 
 "This that I draw," said he, "is Africa." 
 
 "He ye e!" cried out his father and their friends. 
 "Let us see this thing with our eyes." And they all 
 rose to see that drawing on the ground. They leaned 
 above it, laughing and slapping their thighs. 
 
 "Show us that river they said that is the Congo." 
 
 And Assam made the Congo with a strip of sugar 
 cane. And another great river he placed for them 
 that was the Nile. 
 
 "Tell us," said Akulu, when his friends had sat down 
 "what the white man was hunting on these walks. 
 What drew him so far from home?" 
 
 "Three things he was hunting rivers and waters he 
 was hunting the rivers and waters that were hidden 
 in the great country of Africa. He was a hunter of riv- 
 ers and waters." 
 
 "We hear," said Akulu, "though that is a strange 
 word. What else?"
 
 WHITE MEN AND THEIR ADVENTURES 41 
 
 "A path he was hunting among strange tribes and in 
 hard places this path would be for the caravans of 
 the missionaries who would follow after when the 
 paths were known. He was a hunter of paths." 
 
 "We hear," said Akulu, "and that is not so strange. 
 He was just the man who goes before the caravan 
 with a cutlass. We know that man and how to pick 
 him. He must be a strong man." 
 
 "And a third thing he was hunting that was news 
 of the buyers and sellers of slaves. In those days 
 among many of the tribes of the black people, there 
 went many cruel foreigners cruel they were and 
 fierce. It was their custom to buy black people, and 
 where they could not buy to steal. Men, women and 
 children they drove from their homes in the forests 
 and in the grass countryout by the paths to the sea, 
 where they sold them." 
 
 "To whom?" 
 
 "To white men. And these took them beyond the 
 sea in great canoes you know what the white man 
 calls steamers." 
 
 "Some little news of this thing I have heard," said 
 Akulu, "though it was never a thing of our neighbor- 
 hood. But why must Livingstone learn about the 
 slavers? A man of the tribe of God would never be 
 slaving?" 
 
 "It was the news he was hunting not the slaves. 
 He said, 'If I see with my eyes and tell with my mouth 
 the great sorrows of those slaves, their tears, their 
 hungers, their thirsts, their wounds, their deaths by 
 the side of the path, their poor dry bones still wearing 
 the chains and the stocks, if I get all this news and 
 tell it to the great tribe of the people of God in the
 
 42 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 world, they will listen and will be angry. They will 
 rise up and forbid those slavers who come from with- 
 out to spoil the villages of the tribes who live in the 
 hidden places of Africa! This news was the third 
 thing he hunted. Now you know the three works that 
 God gave him to do ; and the things that drew him on 
 those many, many bad paths for those many, many 
 seasons that he walked. Until at the end he was old 
 he was gray he was no more than the bones of a man. 
 But when Livingstone came to Africa he was young 
 and strong. He did not know at first that God was 
 going to push him to walk so far. He began to walk 
 among the tribes in the neighborhood of Kuruman." 
 And Assam laid a leaf that was Kuruman upon his map. 
 "But his heart was not sitting down in that neighbor- 
 hood it pushed him north." 
 
 "What is north ?" asked an old man. 
 
 "North is where you look when the rising sun is on 
 your right hand. The hidden things of Africa were all 
 there. The lakes and the rivers and the tribes of the 
 forest were there, but the eyes of white men had not 
 yet seen them. I will show you the waters that were 
 found by Livingstone before he died." 
 
 Now with leaves and little twigs Assam furnished for 
 them the rivers and the lakes of the heart of Africa. 
 
 "Livingstone found this great water, Ngami," said 
 Assam, putting down upon the map a little leaf that 
 was the Lake Ngami. 
 
 "And this is the river Zambesi," with a twist of plan- 
 tain cord he made the river Zambesi, and he told them 
 how Livingstone found "the early things" of the Zam- 
 besi. 
 
 "And this is Lake Nyassa, and Lake Mweru and 
 Lake Bangweolo."
 
 WHITE MEN AND THEIR ADVENTURES 43 
 
 "Other white men found Lake Victoria Nyanza and 
 Lake Tanganyika," said Assam, "but I will put them 
 down for you to see the many lakes that are in our 
 country. And Livingstone did pass upon the Lake 
 Tanganyika in a canoe. Now you see the lakes and the 
 waters found by Livingstone. And I will tell you that 
 the years that passed him while he did this work were 
 thirty years as white men count years. And I will tell 
 you that the miles he walked were twenty-seven thou- 
 sand miles. Miles are a thing of the white man. Then 
 I will ask you, was this a small work that he did, or 
 was it the work of a real man?" 
 
 "Let me say," said Ze Zom, "I who am a real man, 
 and a man who if the sun sets will walk by moonlight 
 I say that I never knew that a man could do so great a 
 work." And the others in the palaver house agreed. 
 Of other things Assam told them. He told them of 
 the sign that God gave him while he was yet a young 
 man, still busy in the south 
 
 "That sign," said Assam, "was a little girl no bigger 
 than your wrist. She was an orphan. Other men than 
 the men of her father's house spoke of selling her. When 
 she heard that talk of selling her she ran from the vil- 
 lage to the path where Livingstone was passing. She 
 sat down beneath his wagon. She begged Livingstone 
 to take her in his caravan to his town, she would walk 
 all the way behind his wagon. Livingstone gave her 
 food and she was glad. That day began well for her, 
 even so suddenly she cried out with a loud crying 
 there was a man with a gun who had followed her! 
 Now she thought, "It is finished !" But no a black man 
 who was a man of God and who walked in Living- 
 stone's caravan said to her
 
 44 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 'Take the beads from your body.' She had many 
 beads upon her body, and with those many beads, by 
 the advice of the black Christian, she ransomed her 
 body from the man who had followed her. He went 
 away. Livingstone then hid that child in his wagon 
 so well that five tens of men could not have found her. 
 This doing that he did for that little girl I say it was 
 a sign of the work he must do for Africa!" 
 
 "I understand your meaning," said Akulu. "But I am 
 thinking, what a poor price for a girl just the beads 
 she wore. That man with a gun did not know how to 
 sell a girl! I could have done better!" 
 
 Of the scar upon Livingstone's arm Assam told them 
 and the day when the 1 lion at Mabotsa sprang at 
 Livingstone. Many lions were in that neighborhood 
 and on one day one lion killed nine sheep ! 
 
 "How do you mean one day?" said Akulu. "It is 
 one night you mean!" 
 
 "I mean one day and that day in the middle with 
 the light of the sun everywhere. Livingstone and 
 many black people ran to kill the lion. Livingstone 
 fired a shot. The lion sprang at him and caught him by 
 the shoulder with eleven of his teeth the lion broke 
 the white man's bone ! He put his paw upon Living- 
 stone's head, " 
 
 "He is a dead man now !" cry out the men in the pal- 
 aver house. 
 
 "No because there was a man to save him a black 
 man of God was there. He shot at the lion and missed, 
 but the angry heart of the lion turned away from 
 Livingstone; he sprang at the black man and caught 
 him on the thigh, he caught a third man on the 
 
 1 There are no lions in West Africa, but the Bulu have a tradition of lions.
 
 CHILDREN OF THE MISSIONARY AND THE 
 TUSKS OF AN ELEPHANT 
 
 MEDICINE AND CHARMS 
 
 Turned over to Southern Methodist Missionaries 
 by an African Convert
 
 WHITE MEN AND THEIR ADVENTURES 45 
 
 shoulder. Then some shot had found him for he 
 fell dead ! But all those three men still breathed. God 
 permitted them to live. This story that I tell you is a 
 story that white men tell each other and, when they tell 
 it, they marvel." 
 
 "Well, we marvel too even we, who are so wise in 
 the things of hunting. That white man must have had 
 a strong charm against lions! Tell us about that 
 charm." 
 
 "Tell us," said Oton "the name of the black man 
 who saved Livingstone." 
 
 "His name was Mebalwe. He was a teacher of 
 men." 
 
 "Akeva! 1 " said Oton. 
 
 Assam told them of Livingstone's marriage with 
 Mary Moffat. She was a daughter of a missionary, 
 he told them, so that she understood all the custom of 
 the tribe of missionaries, how they must be enduring, 
 how they must wander among strange tribes and eat 
 out of the kettles of strangers she understood all 
 those things. About their children Assam told, and 
 the hardships of those early days when this family 
 traveled by ox cart and before Livingstone sent his 
 weary family home, and went on his way alone through 
 the forests of Central Africa. In that palaver house 
 that night mothers sighed over the death of that little 
 month-old girl who was born and buried and whose 
 grave was the first Christian grave in that wilderness. 
 "Pity that woman," the women said, when they heard 
 Assam tell of a five days' drought when Livingstone 
 feared that his children must die of thirst. 
 
 "She was a brave woman," said Assam; "Living- 
 
 1 Akeva is a kind of thanksgiving word.
 
 46 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 stone has written that praise of her in his book. He 
 said that the tears fell from her eyes, but she did not 
 accuse with her mouth. And on the fifth day a black 
 man of that caravan found water !" 
 
 "The women in that palaver house heard with sor- 
 row that now Livingstone sent his family home "Be- 
 cause he was so sorry for them," said Assam, "so sorry 
 for all the wanderings of those little children and that 
 weary woman." 
 
 "But who now," asked the women, "would care for 
 Livingstone and cook his food for him?" 
 
 "There were black men to do that," Assam told 
 them, "for Livingstone had been eleven years as white 
 men count years in Africa and he knew the speech of 
 many tribes. More than ever God was pushing Liv- 
 ingstone to the north, upon paths that were too hard 
 for women and children. When Livingstone was alone 
 he walked more quickly than a man may walk with 
 his wife." The men in the palaver house understood 
 that. Black people understand loneliness and home 
 sickness with a great understanding. A black man or 
 woman will die of this "dryness of the heart" that 
 comes from homesickness. 
 
 "But could he not make friends with the black men 
 he met by the way? Were there no great chiefs to 
 befriend him, as my father befriended Ngutu?" 
 
 "There were such friends. The first of these was 
 Sechele. He was not at first a friend, but an enemy. 
 He heard news of a white man and not seeing him with 
 his eyes he was offended. He said. 'Why does he 
 never visit me when he visits? Because he has not 
 been quick to visit me but visits other chiefs who are 
 not so great as I am I am angry. And when he does 
 come I will do him a mischief.' "
 
 WHITE MEN AND THEIR ADVENTURES 47 
 
 "I understand that man," said Akulu "tell me 
 more !" 
 
 "When Livingstone came at last to Sechele's town, 
 there was a great sorrow there because two children of 
 that town were dying. And one of these was Sechele's 
 only child. Livingstone with his white man's medicine 
 healed those two children. Not all the witch doctors 
 in that country could heal those children, but the mis- 
 sionary healed them. Now I ask you, What mischief 
 did Sechele then do to the white man who had healed 
 the children of his town?" 
 
 "What could he do," cried out Akulu "but make a 
 bond of friendship !" 
 
 "That thing he did," said Assam. "And Living- 
 stone spoke to him about the things of God. When he 
 told Sechele of the things of God, Sechele asked him 
 a question. 
 
 " 'Why did not the people of your tribe come to tell 
 us this news before? My ancestors have all perished 
 and not one of them knew what you tell me !' " 
 
 "That word struck Livingstone to the heart. After- 
 ward Sechele became a person of the tribe of God and 
 walked much in Livingstone's company, but Living- 
 stone never forgot that word of reproach. It was a 
 word to drive him north. 
 
 "And now," said Assam, "I am worn out with all 
 this talking. My voice has died in my stomach. I 
 want to go to bed." 
 
 "Ah, my son," said Akulu, "when will we hear how 
 Livingstone walked? is this all the news of his great 
 walking?" 
 
 "It is no more than the beginning," said Assam. 
 "Another night I will tell you more."
 
 48 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 Then all the brown bodies of men and women and 
 children in that palaver house rose; they stretched 
 themselves, they lit their reed torches at the fire, and 
 the guests went away murmuring together of the great 
 things they had heard. The name of Livingstone was 
 heard along the little paths of that forest neighborhood 
 that night. 
 
 Mejo said to Assam when they lay under their blan- 
 ket in the dark of their hut, 
 
 "Ah, Assam, what new name did you choose?" 
 
 "I have not chosen yet," said Assam. "I am still 
 choosing." 
 
 "I will tell you my new name," said Mejo. "I choose 
 the name of Livingstone." Assam said nothing. 
 
 "Do you like that?" said Mejo. 
 
 "I think you are full of pride," said Assam. "You 
 chose a name that is too big for you. Since when do 
 you walk upon hard paths and suffer hunger that you 
 may tell those who are ignorant of the things of God? 
 That is the work of a boy who calls himself Living- 
 stone." 
 
 Mejo thought to himself, "Assam believes that I am 
 silly and a coward" ; and he felt shame for a little while 
 before he dropped asleep.
 
 A GREAT CHIEF
 
 WHITE MEN AND THEIR ADVENTURES 49 
 SOME EXPLANATIONS FOR CHAPTER II. 
 
 Certain African tribes have great headmen with power 
 over many people. As you read the life stories of Living- 
 stone, Moffat, Mackay, Coillard, and other missionaries, you 
 will learn the names of some of these great chiefs. Among 
 the Bulu, however, the headmen are simple folk, with power 
 over their own towns-people, and with just a local fame. In 
 their own neighbornoods, however, they are obeyed and re- 
 spected. They are tne governors of their neighborhoods. 
 
 The Bulu, like other Bantu tribes, believe that God, the 
 Creator, has forgotten them. So they have made up a sys- 
 tem of religion of their own. They are sure that many evil 
 spirits are present in the world to do harm, and that the 
 spirits of their dead ancestors may be induced to protect 
 them. To keep off the evil spirits they make charms and 
 rules of conduct. To make friends of friendly spirits they 
 make other charms and other rules; and to induce the an- 
 cestor spirits to guard the town and the interests of the clan, 
 they make little offerings and little prayers to the wooden 
 images that are the little habitations of the ancestor spirits. 
 Certain men of the tribe make a specialty of magic; they are 
 the witch doctors and have great power, especially as every 
 death is thought to be the evil work of magic. Headmen 
 must always practice a certain amount of magic for the good 
 of the town. 
 
 School boys, you will notice in this story, are respected; 
 and their wisdom is admired. This is very generally true in 
 the neighborhood of the great mission schools. The school 
 boy is New Africa. His elders look to him for light on mod- 
 ern problems. He is distinguished, not only by his little 
 accumulation of knowledge, but also by the little pack of 
 possessions that he has been everywhere ambitious to ac- 
 quire, and by his new custom that is not just like the old 
 town custom. Often he is proud and overbearing, but often 
 he is such a boy as I have tried to show you in Assam. 
 
 The palaver house in a Bulu town is a big house at the 
 end of the street where the real men of the village sit and 
 smoke and talk and eat. Guests are received there and all 
 matters of general interest are discussed there.
 
 SO AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 The Bulu were disarmed when Africa was divided up 
 among the great white races not so many years ago. The 
 Bulu came under the German government and were grad- 
 ually disarmed. At the beginning of the European war, how- 
 ever, the black people under their white officers German, 
 French and English were armed and led into battle. This 
 little story is written about the time before the war. 
 
 I would like to say about the narrative of Livingstone's 
 life as recounted by Assam, that no boy, black or white, 
 could keep so long a story in his head. But an African can 
 keep very long tales in his head. He is always glad to illus- 
 trate his tale as Assam did, by a diagram upon the ground. 
 The story of Livingstone, as told in this book, is told as if it 
 were translated from the Bulu language, and the comments 
 upon it are just such comments as I have heard a thousand 
 times upon one and another account of the things of the 
 white man.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 ASSAM TELLS MORE ABOUT LIVINGSTONE 
 
 | HE next night when dark began to fall 
 Akulu beat on his drum the call to his 
 neighbors. 
 
 "That is the voice of Akulu's drum," said 
 one to another in all the little villages of that neighbor- 
 hood. "He calls us to hear the talk of his son Assam. 
 They say that the talk of Assam last night was a great 
 talk. We too, we must hear that talk." 
 
 Then men took their spears in their hands and 
 women took their babies in deer-skin slings by their 
 sides, and by the light of torches little companies 
 walked single file on the paths that ran to Akulu's town. 
 All about these people, who talked as they walked, 
 the great forest was dark in the night. The dew was 
 wet on the feet of those people. The torch-bearers 
 waved their torches as they walked, and if there were 
 snakes on the path they slid away from that light. 
 
 In the palaver house of Akulu too many people 
 crowded. They sat thick upon the bamboo beds. They 
 sat upon the clay floor of that house, having first made 
 a little mat of leaves to sit upon. The many brown 
 arms and the many brown legs were crowded to- 
 gether. The many heads of men and women turned 
 toward Assam in the firelight. Bright eyes shone in 
 that light and white teeth in many laughing, dark faces. 
 Brass ornaments glittered about the necks and the 
 arms of the women and the little girls, their hair was 
 dressed and hung with garlands and fringes of beads
 
 52 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 and of shells. The women were tattooed and the men 
 were tattooed with great drawings in a purple black 
 upon their brown faces and upon their bodies. On 
 two tall drums that were dance drums, two little wood- 
 en images sat they were the great fetishes of Akulu's 
 village. They had eyes but they did not see Assam, 
 ears they had but they did not hear the great talk about 
 Livingstone that Assam talked all that evening until 
 the middle of that night. 
 
 There was still upon the clay floor of the house that 
 map which Assam had made the night before. All day 
 the idlers in the village had bent over it, naming rivers 
 and lakes, and laughing as they named them. They 
 were proud to know, after all the generations of black 
 men who had died without knowing the "things of 
 Africa." And now they listened with a great wonder 
 and a great attention to the story of Livingstone's long 
 way. 
 
 Upon Assam's map they followed Livingstone from 
 Koboleng to Linyanti, from Linyanti to Loando, from 
 Loando back to Linyanti, from Linyanti to Tette. 
 From Tette they could not follow him home in the 
 white man's boat that journey was too strange for 
 them. But they welcomed him back to Africa; they 
 followed him up and down the Zambesi river on his 
 second journey that was so much a water journey; 
 they welcomed him upon his return from his second 
 visit home. They made with Assam upon the map the 
 heroic journeys of Livingstone's last eight years, when 
 he wandered from Lake Nyassa to Lake Bangoweolo, 
 from Bangoweolo to Lake Tanganyiki and from there 
 north and west always hunting the sources of the 
 Nile, and so nearly tapping the sources of the Congo.
 
 MORE ABOUT LIVINGSTONE 53 
 
 That lonely and heroic man, in his admiral's cap of 
 tarnished gold lace, came back to the imaginations of 
 those black men and women who heard his story that 
 night. 
 
 All the hardships of this journey were very real to 
 the black men and women in that palaver house, all 
 the violent rains that fell upon him were real to them, 
 all the fury of the violent sunlight, all the swollen 
 rivers that he must cross in canoes that must be bor- 
 rowed from unwilling owners, all his bleeding wounds 
 when he must make his way through thorny thickets, 
 all his escapes from wild animals and from unfriendly 
 chiefs. These dangers and these cares were of a tribe 
 they knew. The men in that audience were native to 
 the dangers and the deaths of that great forest which 
 sighed about their little clearing in the night, as it had 
 sighed about Livingstone on all the nights of his Afri- 
 can wanderings. 
 
 "Tell us about the great chiefs he met," they asked. 
 And Assam told them about Sebituane, that great chief 
 of the Makalolo tribe who ruled at Linyanti on the 
 mighty Zambesi river. 
 
 "Before Livingstone ever saw Sebituane with his 
 eyes he heard great news of him," said Assam. "That 
 man was famous in the mouths of men. They said 
 that he was a great ruler, a great warrior, a great trav- 
 eler, a great runner, a great hunter and a great giver 
 of gifts. They said that he was kind to the poor, and 
 that he liked to sit and talk with the least company, 
 and that sitting and talking with humble folk he would 
 share the choicest food with them. Men said of him 
 'He is wise, he is kind !' " 
 
 "Now there is a man I would like to visit," cried 
 Akulu, "does he still live?"
 
 54 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 "He is dead," said Assam, "and I will tell you about 
 that, 
 
 "Before Sebituane saw the white man, he longed to 
 see a white man. That was his great desire. It was 
 as if God had put that wish in his heart. And when 
 Sebituane saw Livingstone his heart sat down he was 
 satisfied. He liked Livingstone. When the day that is 
 Sunday came and Livingstone called all the people to 
 hear the Word of God, Sebituane heard that Word. He 
 came to that meeting. He never came to another meet- 
 ing to hear the Word of God, because he sickened and 
 died. Ten days and four days he lay upon his bed and 
 then he died. The last words Sebituane said were 
 words of kindness to Livingstone's little boy. He said, 
 'Take him to Maunka, my wife, and tell her to give 
 him some milk. ' He never spoke again. Livingstone 
 made a little song about Sebituane, and it is written 
 in his book he made a little song of grieving. Those 
 who read his book read that little song and remember 
 Sebituane." 
 
 "That is good," said Akulu, "Livingstone had a heart 
 like a black man. It is certainly a thing of grief to re- 
 member Sebituane and his great desire to hear the 
 Word of God, and that he heard it only one hearing. I 
 like this news of great chiefs tell me more." 
 
 Assam told them of Sekeletu, the son of Sebituane, 
 who sat in his father's seat and ruled the Makalolo. He 
 told of the great state of that young man, of how when 
 he went upon a journey he was attended by strong men 
 whose headdresses were made of the manes of lions 
 and the waving feathers of birds. He told of how the 
 Makalolo greeted their chief when he passed their vil- 
 lages saying, "Great Lion mighty chief, sleep, my
 
 MORE ABOUT LIVINGSTONE 55 
 
 Lord !" He told of the flesh of oxen that was eaten by 
 the happy men of such a caravan, of their dancing and 
 their feastings, of their long talks about the night fires 
 when they were in camps, of their songs, and of how 
 Sekeletu would rush out with a whip of rhinoceros 
 hide to beat his young men until they were quiet. The 
 story of so much grandeur of so much gilded youth 
 and power made the humble hearers very envious, 
 they wished to wander in such caravans, singing and 
 dancing and feasting. Then Assam told them of the 
 enemy of Sekeletu, who was his half brother Mpepe, 
 and of how three times in one day he tried to kill Seke- 
 letu. Himself he would be chief of the Makalolo. His 
 spear was raised against his brother when Livingstone 
 passed between the bodies of Sekeletu and Mpepe. 
 The body of the white man saved the life of the black 
 chief. But for his treachery Mpepe was killed by the 
 Makalolo. Assam told this of Sekeletu, that when 
 Livingstone returned from his long journeys to the 
 west he found his friend Sekeletu a leper. 
 
 "Death does not spare beauty," said Akulu. 
 
 "You till the ground that covers you," said another. 
 And these two sayings are Bulu proverbs. 
 
 Assam told them of the twenty-seven Makalolo men 
 who carried Livingstone's loads on his journeys to and 
 from Linyanti to the west coast, and to the east coast. 
 He told of the goods that was in those loads, the ivory, 
 the calico, the beads, the brass wire, the many things of 
 barter to buy food by the way, and of the four books 
 that were in the loads. One of these books was a book to 
 write in in that book Livingstone wrote the things of 
 every day. He told of the robbers by the way, and of 
 those chiefs who came with spears and arrows to kill
 
 56 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 Livingstone when he should pass. He told of God's 
 care over that caravan, so that when at last they re- 
 turned to Linyati there was not a man of the twenty- 
 seven missing. 
 
 That all the men of the caravan saw their home again 
 after such dangers upon strange paths was a great mar- 
 vel to Akulu. 
 
 Ze Zom said, "This doing was the doing of God; 
 thus He cares for the men who do His work." 
 
 "Tell us what those forest people said when first they 
 saw the sea," said Akulu, "did they rejoice to see the 
 water? Perhaps they danced the dance that the men 
 of our tribe dance when first they stand upon the 
 beach?" 
 
 "They marveled. They said, 'The ships are as big 
 as houses ! They are as big as towns ! These are not 
 canoes. And we thought ourselves sailors. Only the 
 white men are sailors that come up out of the sea 
 where there is no more earth; but earth says, I am 
 gone, dead, swallowed up, and there is nothing but 
 water left.' " 
 
 "That saying was good," said Akulu. "I myself had 
 such a wonder when I saw the sea. I see that the Ma- 
 kalolo tribe have hearts like ourselves. But I am not 
 able to think why Livingstone, who stood upon the 
 beach after such journeys upon such bad paths, did not 
 now go back in a white man's canoe to his own town." 
 
 "Because of his promise," said Assam. "The prom- 
 ise that he made to the Makalolo men that he would 
 take them home." 
 
 "Such persistence !" said Akulu. "But I see custom 
 of the tribe of God is strong for the truth. They are 
 tied by their promises. I see that even in my own 
 town."
 
 MORE ABOUT LIVINGSTONE 57 
 
 Assam told them about the return to Linyanti that 
 was slower than the journey to Loarida. Ze Zom 
 said 
 
 "Yes because they were now weary." And Assam 
 said that they were often ill. 
 
 Those men and women in the palaver were glad 
 when Livingstone found letters and a package from 
 home at Linyanti. They laughed when they heard that 
 Livingstone called the great falls of the Zambesi river 
 after the name of a chief who was a 1 woman. They 
 were angry at the great chief Mpende who would not 
 befriend Livingstone, but who made charms and spells 
 against him. They marveled at that courage with 
 which the white man of God, when he must cross the 
 Zambesi river with armed enemies at his back, sent his 
 men and his goods over first, while he himself amused 
 his enemies with his watch and his burning glass. 
 They were so surprised at these marvels that they let 
 the caravan pass. 
 
 "Even so," said Akulu, "when he himself would get 
 in the canoe, at the last, they would then forget their 
 wonder and would spear him, or shoot him with ar- 
 rows. Did he not fear?" 
 
 "He did not fear," said Assam. "The night before 
 this day, he had said in his heart, 'Perhaps they will 
 knock me on the head tomorrow.' But he read in the 
 Word of God that Jesus said, 'Go ye therefore, and 
 teach all nations and lo, I am with you alway even 
 unto the end of the world.* That word gave him cour- 
 age, so that when he saw that he must get in the canoe, 
 he thanked those people for their kindness, he wished 
 them peace and he turned his back." 
 
 1 Victoria.
 
 58 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 "Akeva!" shouted the people who were of the tribe 
 of God in that palaver house. 
 
 When Assam told them of Livingstone's home go- 
 ing, they asked all the news of his town. 
 
 "Besom b'akele he !" cried out the women and that 
 is to say "Lucky ones go home !" 
 
 These women were thinking of the towns in which 
 they were born, where their fathers and mothers still 
 lived, and which they had not seen since they had been 
 taken away in marriage. 
 
 "Besom b'akele he!" 
 
 They asked were his children glad to see him. And 
 Mary Moffat was she glad? They liked to hear how 
 Livingstone was admired in his own country, so that 
 the people crowded him in the streets and in the house 
 of God. They heard how the great chief of his country 
 made him a present. 
 
 "The chief that was a woman?" asked Akulu. 
 
 "That one," said Assam. 
 
 "Then it would be a present of food," said Akulu 
 "food that she had cooked herself." 
 
 "Not of food," said Assam, "but of the yellow metal 
 the great treasure of the white man." 
 
 "And when Livingstone said he would return to the 
 country of the black people, did she not send a present 
 to the black people by the hand of that man who was 
 going from her town to the towns of the black chiefs? 
 Did she understand that custom?" 
 
 "She did," said Assam, "and she sent a present. That 
 present was a boat to go upon the rivers that the work 
 of God might be swift to pass among the tribes of the 
 black people." 
 
 "She was then a person of God, that woman?" asked 
 Ze Zom.
 
 MORE ABOUT LIVINGSTONE 59 
 
 "She was." 
 
 "Akeva !" cried out the Christian women in the pala- 
 ver house. 
 
 "If I could send her a present !" said one. 
 
 "If I could send her some peanuts !" said another. 
 
 "If I could embrace her !" said a third. 
 
 The people in that palaver house watched the river 
 journeys of Livingstone on the Zambesi and the tribu- 
 taries of the Zambesi and into the great Lake Nyassa. 
 They rejoiced when Assam told that Mary Moffat came 
 to meet her husband a day of one rainy season, and 
 when they heard that on a day of the next rainy season 
 she died, there was a great compassion in the hearts of 
 those black people. 
 
 "Now, surely," they said, "he walks alone. Now he 
 will not be wishing ever again to go back to his own 
 house, where the hearth is cold!" 
 
 "But in his own country there were still his chil- 
 dren," said Assam, "and, to see their faces, he did go 
 back to his own rountry. He saw them, but he could 
 not stay with them, because there were still hidden 
 things in Africa that he had not found. Waters that he 
 had not yet found, better paths for the caravans of the 
 missionaries who should follow him, and more sor- 
 rows of slaves than he had counted." 
 
 And Assam told his friends the story of the last 
 eight years of Livingstone's life. About his caravans 
 Assam told them, and how some of those men were 
 treacherous. There was a new grief in that palaver 
 house for the old wrong two black carriers did Living- 
 stone when they ran away, on a rainy day, with his 
 medicine chest, and left him ill without medicine. 
 There was a new praise that night for the faithful boys
 
 60 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 Susi and Chuma, who did not fail their master even at 
 his death. There was a new sorrow for those days of 
 weaknesses and fever those months when Livingstone 
 could not walk because his feet were sore. 
 
 The women that night cried out when Assam told 
 them of the little boy "no higher than your knee" 
 who was bought by a slaver before Livingstone's eyes. 
 Four yards of cloth was paid for that little boy who 
 cast his arms about his mother, and his mother was 
 sold for two yards of cloth. 
 
 Men cried out when Assam told of the great chief 
 called Casembe. That man had a fine house. The gate 
 of his house was ornamented with six tens of the skulls 
 of men. 
 
 "Do you speak a true word?" cried Akulu, "now that 
 is news !" 
 
 "He was a cruel man," said Assam, "he had many 
 people without ears and without hands. His wife car- 
 ried two spears. She was carried by men. Men ran 
 before her beating drums and swinging axes as they 
 ran. But that woman was a good gardener." 
 
 "She would be too proud for me," said Akulu. 
 
 Assam told them of the Manyuema tribe and that 
 they were cannibals. "The people of the Manyuema 
 tribe," said Assam, "did many wicked things and Liv- 
 ingstone wrote those things in his book." 
 
 "Stop," said Akulu, "while you open a word for me. 
 You are always speaking about this book he wrote 
 this thing in his book, he wrote that thing in his book. 
 What kind of a book was this? I want to know." 
 
 "We too, we ask that question !" said they all. And 
 one man said, 
 
 "I tremble when I think of that book in which the 
 deeds of men were written !"
 
 MORE ABOUT LIVINGSTONE 61 
 
 "His book was like this," said Assam, "Livingstone 
 said, 'It is well that white men should know the hid- 
 den things that I find. All the things that I see I will 
 write.' And that man saw everything. He writes 
 about everything. He writes about lip-rings how the 
 people of some tribes put rings in their lips. He writes 
 about the things of tattoo, and about the red powder 
 that we black people grind from the bark of trees and 
 rub upon our bodies to make us beautiful. He writes 
 about beads those beads we love and all the many 
 tribes of beads that traders sell to black men. Those 
 that are black and the white ones and the red beads we 
 call bird's eye and some tribes call them blood. He 
 writes about all the ways of building huts, and about 
 the little seats and the beds in the huts he writes. 
 
 "He writes about ivory those men who have ivory, 
 those villages where ivory is. About the Babisa tribe 
 he writes that they made their door posts of ivory and 
 their house pillars of ivory." 
 
 "Their house pillars of what?" shouted Akulu, and 
 some men in the company sprang to their feet. 
 
 "Of ivory!" said Assam. 
 
 "Some things I believe, but not that thing," said 
 Akulu. "Even so, the tribe of the missionary is known 
 to tell the truth. Go on." 
 
 "He writes about the great sunlight and the great 
 rains that are stronger than the sunlight and the rains 
 of the white man's country. He writes of headmen 
 who are beautiful and those who are not beautiful; 
 with his eyes he judges them." 
 
 "I like that," said Ze, "most white people are stupid 
 about judging the things of the bodies of men." 
 
 "He writes about hunters and manners of hunting;
 
 62 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 and about how God gave skill to blacksmiths, and of 
 how wise black men make salt out of a kind of grass." 
 
 "As our fathers did," cried out an old man. 
 
 "Yes," said Assam, "and animals he writes about 
 all kinds of monkeys, some very big and some very 
 little. About giraffes he writes and rhinoceroses, about 
 elephants, those with tusks and those without tusks. 
 He writes about lions that break through the roofs of 
 houses, and of leopards that steal dogs and a sheep. He 
 writes about an old man that wore bracelets of ele- 
 phant hide on his arm two tens and seven bracelets he 
 wore on his arm and that was the number of ele- 
 phants this old man had killed with his own spear." 
 
 "He writes about the making of clay pots how 
 women make them with their hands and a little tool of 
 bone. He writes about all tools of iron and tools of 
 stone. He writes about flowers and about fruit. He 
 writes about drumming and about dancing. He writes 
 about spears and about arrows and about the poison 
 that is good to put on arrows." 
 
 "He writes much about blacksmiths and that they 
 are clever, and he tells how the bark of trees is soaked 
 in water and pounded into cloth with a mallet of ebony 
 just as we do." 
 
 "He tells how for the dead there is a little hut made 
 and there is put the food that the dead man loved while 
 he was yet alive." 
 
 lu Pity us all, who are of the tribe who die!" 
 
 "He writes about the dancers that dance to make 
 rain, and all the medicine we black people make that 
 the rain may fall. He writes about the great markets 
 of the people of the Manyuema tribe where there gather 
 as many people as come here on a Sunday to hear the 
 
 1 Buln proverb.
 
 MORE ABOUT LIVINGSTONE 63 
 
 Word of God, and about the little girls who run among 
 those many people selling little cups of water for a few 
 small fishes." 
 
 "Since I was born !" cried our Mejo's mother, "Now 
 that is a new way to catch fish !" 
 
 "And in that market he saw a man with ten jaw bones 
 of ten men hanging on a string from his shoulder he 
 said he had eaten those ten men, and he laughed." 
 
 "And that laugh is written in the white man's book, 
 with the count of those ten jaw bones?" asked Ze Zom. 
 
 "It is," said Assam. 
 
 "Pity that man of evil deeds," said Ze. 
 
 "He writes on a certain day of the Arab slavers that 
 they rushed in among the people who had come to that 
 market and killed more than three hundred of the people 
 of the Manyuema tribe ; and ten villages and two vil- 
 lages they burned that day. These things of death 
 they did to give a sign that they were a strong people 
 not to be denied. I cannot remember all the things of 
 death they did. But Livingstone made a strong writ- 
 ing in his book about this matter, and he made a 
 strong prayer to God. And he himself without the 
 force of a gun or other such force, but with the force 
 of a white man and a man of God he forced the slav- 
 ers to release thirty slaves. Some of those slaves so re- 
 leased looked at Livingstone, the tears ran down their 
 cheeks. I cannot tell you all the things he wrote about 
 the sorrows of slaves. He counted all those sorrows, 
 their hungers, their thirsts, their wounds, their chains 
 and their stocks, their homesickness, their deaths by 
 the way and their poor bones that he saw continually. 
 Until after all his many thoughts of slaves and his long 
 counting of the things of the driven slave he said :
 
 64 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 " 'Of five men who are hunted and taken by the 
 slaver one man alone survives the troubles of the 
 path from his own country to the sea !' " 
 
 "Pity those slaves!" cried out Assam's friends. 
 
 "Other things he counted and wrote in his book," 
 said Assam. "Every kindness that was ever done to 
 him and his men. Every present of an ox or an ivory 
 or a hen or an ear of corn. Every great kindness and 
 every least little kindness is written in that book. It 
 is written that on a night of the rainy season, when he 
 was upon a journey with Sekeletu, Livingstone lay 
 down to sleep in his wet clothes and Sekeletu gave him 
 his own blanket to cover his body that night." 
 , "I like to think that man had friends," said Akulu, 
 "when he was so long with the black people that the 
 white people forgot him." 
 
 "They did not forget him," said Assam, "and I will 
 tell of his great white friend. After those terri- 
 ble things of death that Livingstone saw among the 
 Manyuema people when the slavers killed them Liv- 
 ingstone went away. He was sick with sorrow. He 
 went to Njiji. That was a bad journey. Three times 
 in one day he escaped death. One spear on that day 
 grazed his neck ; another spear fell at his hand, and a 
 great tree in falling fell so near him that he was cov- 
 ered with dust. But the poor white man felt such a 
 great weakness of the body that he thought he was 
 dying as he walked. And on that day his goods was 
 stolen from him, all that was left of his calico ; a glass 
 to see the things that are far away ; his umbrella ; five 
 spears." 
 
 "Such a day !" said Ze Zom, "If I were not a person 
 of God, I would certainly say that there was a charm 
 to keep that man alive ! God is a great keeper !"
 
 MORE ABOUT LIVINGSTONE 65 
 
 "He was now no more than the bones of a man 
 hunger and sickness had caught him. But he thought 
 always of the food at Njiji where he would find much 
 goods. He had begged his friends to send him a cara- 
 van of goods. He wrote in his letter, 'I will meet 
 that goods at Njiji !' So he came to that place with an 
 empty stomach, as a man returns from a hungry coun- 
 try to his own toWn and he believes that there is good 
 food for him in the kettles of his own town." 
 
 "Well, when he came to Njiji here is the thing Liv- 
 ingstone saw. He saw the slaves of the Arab whose 
 name was Shereef and those slaves were coming from 
 the market with all good things in bundles on their 
 heads. They had traded the goods of Livingstone for 
 those things of the market. Because the men had sent 
 Livingstone's goods to Shereef, the Arab, with this 
 word, 'Keep the goods of this caravan until the white 
 man comes.' And Shereef had stolen that goods !" 
 
 "If I were a young man," cried out Akulu, "I would 
 walk to that town of Njiji, and with my own hand I 
 would kill that thief!" 
 
 "And we would walk in your company !" shouted the 
 men in the palaver house. 
 
 "Listen to the great escape God made for him. Five 
 days Livingstone sat in that town eating what little 
 food he could buy and his heart was heavy in his 
 stomach. On the fifth day Susi and Chuma ran to tell 
 their master that a white man's caravan was coming 
 on the path from the rising sun. They ran to greet 
 that white man, they thought he was an Englishman. 
 But when Livingstone saw the caravan he saw that the 
 first carrier had a piece of cloth it was like the piece 
 of cloth that is hung over the mission station on a 
 pole."
 
 66 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 "Then it was the American flag," cried out little 
 Mejo. 
 
 "You have said it," said Assam, "and that white 
 man was the man the people of America sent to find 
 Livingstone. They said in their hearts, 'All these days 
 that Livingstone does the work of God in the hidden 
 places of Africa What is his news? Does he still 
 breathe? Or is he dead?' To answer these questions 
 the people of that tribe sent Stanley." 
 
 "That was a great meeting of two white men/' said 
 Akulu, and the people in the palaver house listened 
 to all the news of that meeting. They heard how Liv- 
 ingstone, when he saw all the goods in that caravan 
 the pots and kettles and tents and tin baths, thought 
 in his heart: "Here walks a rich man and not a poor 
 vagabond like me." 
 
 They heard how Stanley knew Livingstone by the 
 cap he was always known to wear. They heard how 
 Stanley took off his helmet when he saw Livingstone, 
 and Livingstone took off his cap as white men do in 
 salutation. And that they then thanked God for their 
 meeting. 
 
 The Africans understand homesickness and loneli- 
 ness too well. They were glad that night in Akulu's 
 palaver house that Livingstone could speak with Stan- 
 ley the tongue of his own tribe after six years of lone- 
 liness. 
 
 "Surely," they said, "the talk of those two white men 
 must have been as abundant as rain." They were glad 
 of the many letters that Stanley brought Livingstone, 
 and of the presents he brought him. When they heard 
 that Stanley begged Livingstone to go home with him, 
 they thought he must surely go. But no, Assam told
 
 MORE ABOUT LIVINGSTONE 67 
 
 them, Livingstone did not go home. He remained to 
 finish his work. 
 
 "For five moons those two white men ate out of 
 the same kettle, they walked in the same caravan, 
 they slept in the same tent, they talked the talk of 
 friends. Then Stanley rose up and went away. That 
 morning he went away he could not eat for sorrow. 
 Livingstone showed Stanley the path. Stanley looked 
 at Livingstone many times ; he thought in his heart, 
 'Perhaps I will never see this man again.' He said to 
 Livingstone, 'The best of friends must part, you have 
 come far enough, now I must beg you to go back.' " 
 
 "Livingstone gave Stanley great thanks for his many 
 good deeds to him. He said to Stanley, 'God guide 
 you safe home.' They parted. Who knows the things 
 of the heart of Livingstone when he watched the going 
 away of Stanley ! No other white man had shown him 
 such kindness. In his book Livingstone wrote about 
 Stanley 'a dutiful son could not have done more.' " 
 
 "No white man ever saw Livingstone again. All the 
 kindnesses that Livingstone ever knew again were the 
 kindness of black people." 
 
 Now it was very late at night "the night was in the 
 middle" while Assam told his friends about the end 
 of Livingstone's long way. They listened in silence. 
 "With the eyes of the heart," as the Bulu say, they 
 saw the last journeys of that tired man. 
 
 "Now he can no longer walk, and the men of that 
 last and faithful caravan make a hammock swung to a 
 pole and they carry him. At night they build little shel- 
 ters where he sleeps. Coming to a village called Ilala 
 they make a little shelter. The chief of that town is Chit- 
 ambo, he and his people are all away in their gardens.
 
 68 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 They hear that the white man is come ; they return to 
 look at him where he lies under the eaves of a hut. 
 They lean upon their bows looking at him. The rain 
 falls ; and his men build the shelter. Those men know 
 all the work of the white man's camp. Livingstone is 
 glad that night to be in his shelter." 
 
 "The next day Livingstone is very weak ; he cannot 
 talk with Chitambo who comes to salute him." 
 
 "The second night in the village of Ilala, Living- 
 stone is no better. A fire is laid at the door of his hut 
 and some of his men sit about that fire. Once in the 
 night Susi went in to the hut and Livingstone speaks 
 to him. Just before the crowing of cocks Susi and 
 Chuma with three other men went into the hut. There 
 was a candle burning there and by that little light the 
 men saw their master on his knees beside his bed. 
 They knew that to kneel was his custom when he 
 prayed. But soon they saw that he no longer breathed. 
 When they touched him they found that he was cold." 
 
 "They laid their master on the bed, they covered 
 him. They went out into the night to consult together. 
 They then heard the cocks crow. They did not wail or 
 cry out as foolish men would have done; they knew 
 that they must be wise and silent. They were far from 
 home, without a protector. They were among a 
 strange people who would accuse them and perhaps 
 kill them when it would be an open word that the 
 white man died in Chitambo's town. Those people of 
 Ilala would be saying that the spirit of the white man 
 was come to trouble their town. So Livingstone's sor- 
 rowful men spoke quietly together." 
 
 "They chose Susi and Chuma for their leaders. 
 They said that the body of Livingstone and all his
 
 ONE OF 17,000 SCHOOLBOYS IN 
 SOUTHERN KAMERUN
 
 MORE ABOUT LIVINGSTONE 69 
 
 goods must be carried to the beach. They said they 
 would keep his death secret. But when the next day 
 was in the middle, Chitambo came to them. He said, 
 'Why did you not tell me the truth? I know that your 
 master died last night. You were afraid to let me 
 know, but do not fear any longer. I know that you 
 have no bad motives in coming to our land, and death 
 often catches travelers on their journeys.' " 
 
 "Chitambo spoke many wise words to those poor 
 men who mourned their master. And in his town he 
 permitted them to prepare Livingstone's body for the 
 journey. In Chitambo's town the heart of Livingstone 
 was buried near a great tree that was a mark for that 
 grave. With a knife they cut upon that tree the name 
 of Livingstone." 
 
 "They wrapped the body in cloth, and again they 
 wrapped it in bark. They said 'good-bye' to their 
 friend Chitambo and to the people of Ilala; they went 
 off on the paths to the sea carrying their dead master." 
 
 "For nine moons they walked upon that journey and 
 God cared for them. Many troubles they saw upon 
 that journey, but none conquered them. Some tribes 
 were friendly to them and some unfriendly. Once they 
 feared that the body of their master would be stolen. 
 Then they pretended to carry it away to bury it. But 
 they did not bury it. They made a new cover for it. 
 The old cover of the bark of trees they threw away, 
 and about the body they wrapped calico until you 
 would certainly have said, those men are carrying a 
 load of calico. Now none of the tribes by the way 
 knew that the body of a white man was among the 
 loads." 
 
 "This long work of carrying their master, those
 
 70 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 black men did because they loved him ; they were faith- 
 ful men. When they came at last to the beach, they 
 delivered the body to the white men there, and they 
 were praised." 
 
 "The body was known by the old scar on the arm, 
 where the lion had wounded Livingstone long days 
 before at Mabotsa so the body was received by the 
 white men. By them it was sent across the sea. And 
 Susi and Chuma were sent across the sea to tell the 
 people of Livingstone's tribe all the last things of Liv- 
 ingstone and to receive the thanks of the people of his 
 tribe for their long carrying of Livingstone's body." 
 
 "That body the white people buried in a great house 
 of God that is in their great town. 1 They keep his 
 memory; they count the lakes and the rivers that he 
 found ; they destroy the things of slaving where he said 
 that they must destroy them. They send missionaries 
 in companies upon the paths where he walked alone. 
 They do not let his name die. Black men who hear his 
 name, as we hear it, never forget that name again. We 
 ignorant ones who say that the spirits of the dead re- 
 turn to harm us what will we be saying about this 
 white man who is dead since Mr. Krug was a baby, 
 and only good things spring from remembrance of 
 him?" 
 
 "I say that he is the ancestor of missionaries !" said 
 Akulu. 
 
 "I say that God, when He built the house that is 
 Africa, made a servant to furnish it," said Oton the 
 elder. 
 
 "I say that a blacksmith could not have done better 
 than Susi and Chuma did," said the blacksmith of 
 Asok. 
 
 1 Westminster Abbey in London.
 
 MORE ABOUT LIVINGSTONE 71 
 
 "I say that it is near morning," said Assam, "and the 
 star that keeps the dawn is risen." 
 
 "Good night, Assam," said all. "Great thanks!" 
 And they began to light their torches and to go weary 
 to their beds. But as they went they still spoke to- 
 gether of the things that they had heard. 
 
 "I have more than ten questions in my heart," said 
 Ze Zom. 
 
 But none waited to hear or to answer. 
 
 "Assam," said Mejo in a sleepy voice, when they lay 
 upon their bed, "I will be Susi or perhaps Chuma." 
 
 "Not yet," said Assam.
 
 72 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 SOME WORDS ABOUT CHAPTER III. 
 
 Any one reading the story of Livingstone, as recounted 
 in this book, must not be satisfied with this account. Poor 
 black men and women, sitting by the palaver house fire, 
 what could they know of the great adventures and the great 
 heart of that great Christian Adventurer. It is for white peo- 
 ple to know and to admire this hero of their race. All that 
 treasure of heroism that is stored in the great books by Liv- 
 ingstone and about Livingstone are the inheritance of the 
 tribes of the white man. Other such treasure there is in the 
 lives of Robert and Mary Moffat, Mackay the white man of 
 Works, Hannington the lion hearted, Mary Slessor of Old 
 Calabar. Not to please any one other than oneself should 
 these books be read and Oh! I promise you the long 
 hours of pleasing!
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 AN ADVENTURE WITH DWARFS 
 
 [HE next day after school, Mejo presented 
 himself to his father in the palaver house. 
 "I am going with Assam when he goes 
 to teach the school at Mekok," he said. 
 "Some boy must go with him and I must be that boy. 
 I told Mr. Krug this morning that I must be that boy, 
 and now I tell you." 
 
 "How do you mean you mast" said Akulu. "Who 
 has tied you to this journey? When I look at you I 
 see you still a child and not yet a person to go on long 
 journeys." 
 
 "No one has tied me, but my own heart has tied me. 
 I see that for a person of the tribe of God, even if he is 
 no more than a child, there is work to do." 
 
 "I hear," said Akulu, "and I agree. Because I want 
 a boy of mine if he must be a Christian, to be a Chris- 
 tian with courage. When do you leave ?" 
 
 "School closed today and we leave day after to- 
 morrow." 
 
 Two days later, at the hour of the rising of the sun, 
 there was a farewell meeting for the boys who were 
 going to teach the vacation schools. Under the eaves 
 of the school house they left the loads they must carry 
 on their journey , and went in to their meeting. Many 
 people of the tribe of God were there to bless these 
 boys before they went. Mejo's mother was there ; she 
 looked at her boy in his white singlet and his bright 
 loin cloth, sitting down in the company of the young
 
 74 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 men who were going upon such lonely journeys. She 
 could not sing with her friends when they sang the 
 songs they love. 
 
 "Everywhere with Jesus I can safely go," they 
 sang. And they sang "Faith is the Victory." But 
 she could not sing with them that morning. Ze Zom 
 prayed for them and in her heart she could pray. Mr. 
 Krug said wise words to them, but she did not listen 
 to those wise words. Many questions troubled her 
 heart: 
 
 "Where will my boy sleep tonight?" 
 
 "They say there is a great river to cross on that jour- 
 ney. Ah, God, do not let him drown in that river. I 
 have no other son!" 
 
 "Will the women of that strange town give him good 
 food to eat?" 
 
 These questions troubled her. Presently she saw 
 the boys rise to go away. They crowded about their 
 loads that were under the eaves. These loads were 
 carefully tied into a rattan casing, with shoulder straps 
 made of soft strands of plantain fibre. When the boys 
 slipped their arms into these straps the loads just 
 fitted their backs. 
 
 Assam had a heavy load of slates and school books. 
 Mejo carried their little personal belongings some 
 brass rings and needles and fish hooks and matches 
 these were to buy food and lodging by the way. He 
 carried their lantern and a clock. On top of his load 
 and of every load there was a little piece of dried fish. 
 Mr. Krug gave this present to every boy for a great 
 treat. Now Mejo's mother put a corn cake upon 
 Assam's load and upon Mejo's load. 
 
 "Walk well," she said, and everyone said to those 
 little caravans,
 
 AN ADVENTURE WITH DWARFS 75 
 
 "Walk well God keep you!" 
 
 The boys, leaning forward a little under the weight 
 of their loads, looked gravely at the members of their 
 clan gathered about them in the early morning light. 
 Already they felt pangs of the homesickness that is a 
 familiar sorrow to the African. They said, "We must 
 go!" 
 
 "Goon!" 
 
 And they walked away, all leaning forward a little 
 because of their loads. They were still walking in a 
 group until they should come to the first four partings 
 of the way, when they would separate into four com- 
 panies. And so at partings of the way they would 
 continue to separate all day until two and two would 
 be left to walk together. 
 
 At noon of this day, Assam and Mejo came to a fork 
 in the path where their last two friends must leave 
 them. Here the four sat down to eat their corn cakes. 
 From a running stream near-by they drank, making 
 cups of great leaves. In the thick shade of the forest 
 there was no yellow fall of sunlight. One path ran 
 brown among the roots of trees. It was a worn path 
 even a white man could have followed that path. But 
 the second path at the forking of the way was a path 
 so thin such a thread of a path that a white man 
 might easily pass by and never see it. This was the 
 way to the dwarf people who followed the little dwarf 
 headman, Be. 
 
 Oton's son, Obam, was going to spend the vacation 
 speaking the Word of God to the dwarfs. Little Minla, 
 a boy of twelve and one of the white doctor's errand 
 boys, was with him. These two boys had been very 
 carefully chosen for this work. They had a good rep-
 
 76 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 utation for endurance. Work among the tribes of the 
 dwarfs is very difficult; Obam and his companion 
 would have much wandering before they would sleep 
 again on the beds or eat out of the kettles of their own 
 town. 
 
 "Where will you sleep tonight?" Obam asked Assam. 
 
 "I will sleep in Aka's town," said he. 
 
 "That is too far," said Obam, "I know this path bet- 
 ter than you do. The houses of that town will be 
 barred for the night before you reach there. Sleep 
 with us among the dwarfs. We had word on Sun- 
 day that they are in their little old clearing by the 
 Bekua river, drying the meat of the monkeys they 
 killed on their last hunt." 
 
 So the four boys went by way of the thread of a 
 trail through the deep forest to the dwarf clearing. 
 
 No human being stirred in that clearing when the 
 school boys came out of the shadow of the forest into 
 the sunny open. Little shelters built of leaves were 
 there, fires burned in the shelters. Fires burned in 
 the center of the clearing, and upon forked sticks about 
 these fires hung the meat of monkeys. 
 
 A white man would have thought that the inhab- 
 itants of that settlement were far away, but the school 
 boys knew that bright eyes were watching them from 
 the near wall of the forest. They laid their loads aside, 
 sighing with relief. The biggest shelter of leaves they 
 knew must be the palaver house ; there they sat down, 
 sure that the dwarfs would soon be coming to salute 
 them. 
 
 Oton, the father of Obam, was a friend of Be, the 
 headman of this group. Often Oton had followed 
 them to trade the things of "real people" for dried meat
 
 'JUST A BIT SHY
 
 AN ADVENTURE WITH DWARFS 77 
 
 and honey and nuts, "The things of dwarfs." Obam 
 had come with his father on these trading expeditions, 
 and, when Be saw from his hiding place the face of his 
 friend's son, he came quickly to salute him. After him 
 came many little brown bodies of dwarf men and 
 women and children. Soon that little leafy shelter was 
 full of these who looked in silence at the beautiful 
 young men of the Bulu tribe, so grand in their singlets 
 and their loin cloths. 
 
 Some of the dwarf men were no bigger than Mejo. 
 Some were bigger, but none was so big as Assam. The 
 women were very little women, they wore aprons and 
 tails of grass. The men wore loin cloths of the bark of 
 trees. Be himself wore a loin cloth given him by 
 Oton. He was hoping, as he looked at Obam, that 
 there was much fine goods for him in the loads. 
 
 "I greet you all," said Be to the school boys; and 
 they greeted him. 
 
 "I ask you why have you come to us at this time? 
 Is it because of the meat of the last hunt that is now 
 drying by the fires? Did the news of that meat bring 
 you with cloth and other goods to trade for it? Much 
 money I have in little gourds, do you wish to trade for 
 it? Or nuts, do you wish? Open up the loads quickly 
 so that I may see the beautiful goods brought to me 
 by Obam the son of Oton." 
 
 "Two of those loads are on a journey," said Obam. 
 "They sleep but one night in your town. And these 
 two loads that are mine are not loads of barter. They 
 are my blanket to cover me at night and a lantern and 
 some oil. There are besides some of the words of God 
 that I have brought for your ears. Ah, Be headman 
 of this people my father, Oton, and other great men
 
 78 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 of the Bulu tribe who are now members of the tribe of 
 God they desire to share with you the "Things from 
 above." So they have sent two of their sons to open 
 for you these things that have been hidden from you 
 in the past." 
 
 "As for me," said Be, "I have no use for the words 
 of which you speak. They are not for us. They are 
 for the white people. I believe that trouble will come 
 upon those black people who follow these new things. 
 And even if great black chiefs agree to these new 
 things and follow the white man's God where will I 
 end if I go on that path? Do the men who follow the 
 new things make medicine for the hunt? Do they 
 know a charm to protect those who climb trees and the 
 steep cliffs? There is no profit for me or for my peo- 
 ple in the new way. I myself, before the last rainy sea- 
 son, I went to see the white man who is the man of 
 God and I begged him for dried fish No! I begged 
 him for rum No! I begged him for a leaf of white 
 man's tobacco as big as an eye lash No! I said 'I 
 have a child at home that is a girl child give me a 
 little piece of cloth that I may tie it about her head.' 
 No! 
 
 "Then I said to that white man, 'I, the headman 
 Be, have now come to your. village for the first time 
 and am I to leave without a present? Nothing to carry 
 away in my hand?' And the white man said, 'This is 
 not a town where presents are made. This is a town 
 where there are teachers and teaching of the Word of 
 God He who created you. The old law of God is 
 known in this town and here your children may come 
 and learn wisdom. Here your sick may come and be 
 healed. But if you come to salute me ten tens of times,'
 
 AN ADVENTURE WITH DWARFS 79 
 
 said that white man, 'and beg me with as many beg- 
 gings as there are stars above for the goods of the 
 white man and the riches of men, I will never give you 
 of these as much as an eyelash.' " 
 
 " 'If that is so,' I told that white man, 'I am going.' 
 And I went. And I have never desired the new things 
 of which I heard that day. I do not desire them now. 
 I desire all the things that the men of your father's 
 tribe carry up from the beach on their backs, the good 
 things of the white man, rum, and cloth, and beads, 
 and iron pots that are not quickly broken as clay pots 
 are. I beg of you, open your loads and we will bargain 
 for the goods. Then you may go with loads of dried 
 meat and honey and nuts." 
 
 "There is no trade goods in my loads," said Obam. 
 "I come on another palaver. Every morning at dawn, 
 and every evening when the stars are created, I will 
 teach you of the things of God. These words that you 
 hate before you have heard them perhaps you will 
 love when you have heard them. All this moon and 
 the next moon I will open to you this wisdom." 
 
 "We are not sitting down in one place, as your fa- 
 ther does," said Be. "We people who are dwarfs must 
 do the forest work, we must go on the many little 
 paths hunting and fishing and nutting. So it cannot be 
 that you will visit us for two moons. We rise and go 
 away from this place tomorrow." 
 
 "Where you go, I too, I will go," said Obam. 
 
 "And sleep where we sleep?" 
 
 "As you say." 
 
 "And eat what we eat?" 
 
 "Certainly." 
 
 "Since I was born!" cried out Be, "I never saw a
 
 80 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 son of your father's tribe that would endure these 
 things. What new customs people begin to have!" 
 And he slapped his thigh and laughed. All the little 
 dwarf people laughed. They all laughed at the fool- 
 ishness of the four Bulu boys who sat in their little 
 palaver house looking very grave and dignified. 
 
 That night was a night of full moon. There was a 
 great sound of drumming in the little clearing, with 
 the palms of their hands the drummers beat the skin 
 that was stretched on the heads of the upright drums. 
 In the silver moonlight, the dark little bodies capered 
 to the sound of that drumming. 
 
 When Obam lit his lantern that light was a golden 
 light. He drummed upon the call drum a little call to 
 assemble. Then he sat upon the call drum. The four 
 Bulu boys sitting together by the golden light of the 
 lantern began to sing. One by one the dwarfs drew 
 away from the dance they gathered to the sound of 
 that singing even the drummers at last came near. 
 The singing was about the love of God. Presently 
 among all those people who sat in a dark group upon 
 the ground, Obam rose to tell them of the remember- 
 ing with which ^ambe had remembered them. 
 
 "All these generations of men who said 'He-who- 
 created-us' has forgotten us they were all mistaken. 
 'He-who-created' remembered so much He remem- 
 bered that He made a visit. That visit was in the body 
 of the son of 'Him-who-created.' That son was the 
 Lord Jesus. And He is the chief of the new tribe that 
 is being created by Zambe 'He-who-created' all 
 tribes. Jesus is the headman. He shows those who 
 follow Him the custom of the new tribe that is a 
 
 1 Bulu name for the Creator.
 
 AN ADVENTURE WITH DWARFS 81 
 
 different custom from the old custom of the black 
 people, and the law of this custom is ten words of 
 law. He alone knows the path beyond death. 
 
 "Many things of all this news I will tell you on the 
 nights of these two moons," said Obam. "But now 
 we who have traveled today, we will go to bed." 
 
 The dwarfs laughed as they listened to Obam and 
 his news a laughter of surprise and of amusement. 
 They laughed and talked together as they moved away 
 in the moonlight. Soon the drums throbbed again and 
 the dancers leaped above their black shadows. 
 
 The four Bulu boys lay beside the fire in the palaver 
 house that was no more than a little leafy roof. Those 
 dwarf beds were too small for the Bulu boys, they 
 twisted and turned and stuck their legs out into space. 
 All four were a little homesick. 
 
 Mejo said to his brother, 
 
 "Ah, Assam, if they laugh at us in the town where 
 we are going how I shall feel shame in my heart. 
 How can we bear it if they laugh at us !" 
 
 "How did Obam bear it?" said Assam. "God gives 
 the strength to bear it. What is your name tonight? 
 You who run from laughter!" 
 
 The next morning Assam and Mejo went away on 
 their own path. Sleeping in the villages by the way 
 they made four days' journey without accident. On the 
 fifth day they were detained by a headman who asked 
 many questions about the things of God. That is why 
 the boys came late to the crossing of the So river. 
 
 When they came out of the forest to the broad water 
 the last red was in the sky. There was no village on 
 the west side of the river, and on the east side the vil- 
 lage was set back from the bank. The canoes of
 
 82 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 the village were grouped against the side of that further 
 bank. The sound of drumming came across the water 
 all the cries of Assam and Mejo were lost in the 
 drumming. They shouted themselves hoarse, before 
 Assam said, 
 
 "Those people will dance all night. We must just 
 sleep where we are." And he set about gathering 
 wood for a night fire. 
 
 Never before in his life had Mejo slept like this with- 
 out arms and without shelter. Always when he had 
 camped in the forest there were "real men" of the tribe 
 with bows and arrows and spears; then he had slept 
 in a great trust of his father and his father's friends. 
 Now he watched his brother in the growing dusk with 
 a fear that he was ashamed to speak. Assam laid his 
 fire by the water's edge where there was a little sandy 
 clearing. He filled his little iron pot with the river 
 water and set it on the glowing heart of his fire. He 
 put a great snail into the pot. 
 
 "It is good that we found a snail this morning," said 
 he. "You have the salt put in a pinch." 
 
 He took a corn loaf out of his pack. Upon some 
 leaves that Mejo had spread out like a mat, the boys 
 sat down. They heard the rushing of the great river 
 and they felt a loneliness come into their hearts. 
 
 "So much water is too much water," said Mejo, 
 rather anxiously. 
 
 Then the pot began to boil that sound was a sound 
 of home. The night darkened about them but their 
 fire sent up ruddy flames. Above them the stars were 
 thick as rain ; and the thoughts of these two boys called 
 upon God, the Maker of stars, to protect them. Old 
 fears of spirits who walk at night to do mischief to
 
 AN ADVENTURE WITH DWARFS 83 
 
 men, were stirring in their hearts, but they quieted 
 these old fears with the new hopes and the new prom- 
 ises. They feared the beasts of the forest, but their 
 fire should frighten these. 
 
 They ate their supper and lay down upon the bed of 
 leaves. When the late moon rose, Assam and Mejo 
 were sleeping beside a fire and a thread of smoke. And 
 when the guinea fowl called before the dawn they woke 
 as travellers must awake when the guinea calls as 
 safe and sound as any other sons of their father's house. 
 
 "That was a good night," said Assam. He began to 
 call for a ferryman, and when the first light of day was 
 gray upon the water, there came a man with a canoe 
 to ferry them across. 
 
 That day when the sun was in the middle, the boys 
 knew that they were in the neighborhood of Mekok. 
 In a town where they rested they were told, "You will 
 cross but two streams and beyond the second stream 
 you will find the gardens of Mekok. The women of 
 Mekok will then be upon the path returning from their 
 gardens to the village." And this was true. The 
 women of Mekok were indeed upon the path. They 
 cried out when they saw the school boys with their load 
 of slates. 
 
 "They have come Akeva ! The teachers have come. 
 Now we believe the word of Asala!" 
 
 Back in the gardens other women heard the news. 
 Mejo heard the glad shout of his little sister as she 
 ran through the thick screen of the cassava plants. 
 Presently that little brown body sprang into the path 
 and embraced the brothers. Such laughter! Such 
 shouting ! Such clamor for news of home ! Asala ran 
 before them into the village. She dared to go into the
 
 84 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 palaver house, though her husband had not sent for 
 her. Out of breath she told him that the teachers had 
 come and that they were her brothers. 
 
 Now the headman saw the boys enter the clear- 
 ing from the forest. They wore singlets and loin 
 cloths. They leaned a little forward under their loads. 
 The smallest carried a lantern. They walked with the 
 plodding gait of travelers who have walked for many 
 days. 
 
 "Those boys are tired," said Efa, "it would be well 
 that you cook them good food. Ask your J ntyi to kill 
 a chicken for those boys; and you yourself make the 
 mango nut gravy for that chicken." 
 
 Thus were Assam and Mejo kindly welcomed in the 
 town of Efa Nlem. Asala ran to cook for them. Efa 
 received them in the palaver house. They laid aside 
 their loads and sat at ease under the brown roof. The 
 villagers gathered to look at the teachers, little naked 
 boys clustered in little groups and murmured their lit- 
 tle comments to each other. But there was no great 
 conversation as yet between Efa and his guests. There 
 would be time for that. Only Efa said, 
 
 "I hope that you have brought white man's medi- 
 cine." 
 
 And Assam said, "Yes" he had skin medicine and 
 medicine for the heat in the body and medicine for 
 ulcers. 
 
 "That is good," said Efa. "With what they have my 
 people will buy those medicines.'* And he began to 
 smoke his long pipe in silence. 
 
 Mejo looked at Efa when Efa was not looking at 
 him. "I like him," he thought ; "but I fear him too, and 
 
 1 A senior wife into whose care a little girl wife is given, and with whom 
 she will remain until she is marriageable.
 
 THE MANGO TREE IN THE VILLAGE 
 
 THE DEAD LEOPARD
 
 AN ADVENTURE WITH DWARFS 85 
 
 that is good." Me jo looked about at the little groups 
 of boys and at the women who were looking at him. 
 Three or four real men were sitting by the ashes of the 
 fires. Mejo was embarrassed to look at them. But in 
 his heart he felt important. It was fine to have so 
 many people concerned about him and about Assam. 
 He remembered his father's story of Ngutu and of how 
 Ngutu first came to Abiete. "I too," thought Mejo, 
 "am a teacher of the new things." 
 
 And suddenly he said, "I am thirsty!" 
 
 Immediately two little girls rose and went out into 
 the sunlight their little grass bustles beating about 
 their brown legs. From a nearby hut they returned 
 with gourds of water. One presented her gourd to 
 Assam, the other drew a corncob stopper from the neck 
 of her gourd and presented it to Mejo. 
 
 As Mejo raised the gourd to his lips he met the eyes 
 of a boy in the shadow of a corner. This boy was al- 
 most a man, his hair was finely dressed and studded 
 with blue beads. He wore a splendid loin cloth. 
 About his arms were many ivory bracelets and about 
 his neck hung a great amulet. 
 
 "That young fellow has such style," thought Mejo, 
 "that he must be the headman's son. But he looked at 
 us without the friendly eye." 
 
 Now Efa told them that they might go with Asala. 
 
 "You are weary and you should rest," he said. "Asa- 
 la's ntyi is named Bilo'o. Lie upon the bed in her 
 house until the time of the setting of the sun. Then 
 return to speak with me of the many things of school." 
 
 In the house of Bilo'o there was happy talk of home. 
 There were portions of good food laid out upon green 
 leaves by willing little brown hands. About the doors
 
 86 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 of Bilo'o's hut clustered the persistent bodies of little 
 boys who murmured together. Back of these little 
 boys were older boys, silently looking at their teach- 
 ers, those young benefactors who had come to open 
 up the new paths to the feet of their tribe. Women 
 entered the hut quietly by the back door. They were 
 the women who were a long time wishing to hear the 
 Word of God ; they brought little presents of food. 
 
 Presently Assam said to Mejo very low 
 
 "Don't be proud!" 
 
 And Mejo said softly "I hear! I will keep pride 
 down. Did you see the young man who does not like 
 us?" 
 
 "He that sat in the shadow? I saw him. Even so, 
 we must try to draw him to us." 
 
 That night Efa and Assam spoke long together of 
 the things of school. 
 
 "That big new house at the end of the clearing is 
 your school house. My people have been a long time 
 building it. All the boys of the neighborhood have 
 helped. Asala told us how we must cut logs of the 
 1 mesung tree for seats. There are rows of seats in the 
 school house. The walls are very low as Asala said 
 they should be. And for yourself we have built a house 
 too. It is a good little house, all new, and near the 
 school house. There are two beds in that house. 
 There is a window in that house like a white man's 
 window. A woman has made a fire between the two 
 beds and now, if it pleases you, you may go to your 
 house. Ah, Bekalli!" said Efa, and a boy rose in an- 
 swer. "Take your teacher to his new house." 
 
 At this word the youth with the unfriendly eyes rose 
 from his place. 
 
 1 The nmbrella tree
 
 AN ADVENTURE WITH DWARFS 87 
 
 "Ah, father," said he, "I have a word to say !" 
 
 "Say it!" said Efa. Everyone looked at the young 
 man. The firelight shone upon his bright beads, his 
 ivory bracelets, and his body rubbed with oil. In his 
 dark face his eyes and his teeth were bright. 
 
 "Since I was born," said he, "did you ever build me 
 a house? What day did you ever say to me as you 
 now say to this stranger, 'Go sleep in the new house 
 I have built you P This is a question I ask you !" 
 
 Efa looked in surprise at his son. 
 
 "Ah, Bekalli," said he, "I hear with astonishment 
 this word of reproach. Are not all the houses in my 
 village your houses? All my houses are your houses. 
 Why should you grieve because I show a kindness to 
 these young men who have come to do us the work of 
 teaching? What shall I say further?" 
 
 "This you may further say," shouted Bekalli trem- 
 bling, "You may say that you give me the new house 
 I who am your eldest son. Let the sons of strangers 
 sleep in the house that is outside the village." 
 
 "But it leaks," said Efa mildly. 
 
 "Then let the strangers patch the roof with leaves. 
 Doubtless all the roofs of their father's town are 
 patched with leaves. Let them cut the grass that 
 grows about that house. And, if they fear the evil 
 spirits that come about that house at night, let their 
 new God protect them; give me the new house!" 
 
 Efa looked in silence at his son, who continued to 
 tremble, standing up very straight in the firelight. 
 Then he said, 
 
 "There is a headman in this town and I am that head- 
 man. Our guests will sleep in the house I have built 
 for them. And tomorrow we will begin to cut bark
 
 88 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 for the walls of a house I will build you, and to gather 
 leaves for the thatch," 
 
 "If you build me ten houses," said Bekalli, "I will 
 never sleep in one of them!" And he put his leg over 
 the high sill of the door and went off into the dark. 
 
 SOME EXPLANATIONS OF CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Dwarfs or Pygmies are a race of African people 
 smaller than the men of other known races. Their average 
 height is four feet seven. They are dwellers in the forest 
 hunters and wanderers. They do not build towns as other 
 African tribes do, nor plant gardens. They often attach 
 themselves to superior tribes and wander about in their 
 neighborhood. They are very shy and timid. The great 
 African explorer, Paul Du Chaillu has written about his en- 
 counters with them ; Stanley and other white men have written 
 about them. I have visited the clearing where the little dwarf 
 headman Be had built some leafy shelters. He himself 
 showed me the trail to that clearing. It was as I tell you in 
 this story. 
 
 This little sermon that Obam preached to the dwarfs is 
 just a common beginning sermon. The boys who go into the 
 villages to speak to the people about the things of God speak 
 to the more ignorant ones in this way.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 ADVENTURES OF ASSAM AND MEJO 
 
 |OW began for the two brothers a time of 
 great busyness; there were all the things 
 of school to be made ready. 
 
 Little lads with brooms of leaves swept 
 out the school house with its rows and rows of log 
 seats. As they scrambled about under Mejo's leader- 
 ship they made their little silly comments upon the 
 things of learning. 
 
 "Now we shall know all the things of the white man," 
 they told one another. "And about the tribe that lives 
 down in the earth we shall know. And about the many 
 moons that are made and that are lost again; and 
 about a country that is not a forest country; and 
 about the thing that is a clock. The teacher has that 
 thing and it shows a sign to him about the time of day 
 as if it were the sun." 
 
 And all the little sweepers paused to look at Assam's 
 clock where it ticked on a little rough table at the end 
 of the school room. 
 
 "Get busy!" said Mejo sternly, and once more was 
 heard the rustle of their brushy brooms. 
 
 Assam hung his alphabetical charts about the room. 
 All his little adventurers would begin their adventures 
 upon these charts. And they all yearned to be off; 
 they dropped their brooms to stand before those white 
 banners, tattooed with mystic figures. Daring little 
 brown fingers ventured here and there in that strange 
 country until Mejo forbade them; the older boys of
 
 90 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 the village like copy-cats cried out the same pro- 
 hibition. Others hung about the slates. One unhappy 
 little boy dropped a slate and was carried shrieking to 
 Assam. He howled and he trembled, rolling horror- 
 struck eyes. 
 
 "The writing stone is broken," said the bigger boys 
 who had captured him, and the captive writhed in 
 their hands. 
 
 The slate was not broken, but an awe of slates fell 
 upon the little sweepers. 
 
 The next morning in the many villages of that neigh- 
 borhood was heard the first drumming of the school 
 drum, 
 
 "The promise that we made yesterday we keep today! 
 "The promise that we made yesterday we keep today !" 
 
 The villagers, listening to the clamor of that phrase 
 beaten out on the drum of Efa Nlem's town, knew that 
 school was calling. Everywhere in the huts little boys 
 bustled about, worrying their mothers for a bite to eat 
 before they went to school, for a hen to pay the 
 school tuition, for a bottle of palm oil, for a basket of 
 peanuts, for anything with which to pay for school. 
 
 Bigger lads at the sound of that drumming were 
 about the same business. They took ivory bracelets 
 off their own arms, leopards' teeth off their own necks. 
 They twisted the long vine that is the bush rope 
 into marketable coils, they looked long at knives 
 which they would never carry again, but must pay to 
 go to school. Sad partings took place that day be- 
 tween boys and their possessions. 
 
 In the palaver houses of these villages the youth of 
 the tribe went to inquire of age. Every boy must re- 
 ceive of his father permission to do this new thing.
 
 ADVENTURES OF ASSAM AND MEJO 91 
 
 Some fathers said, "It is well, go in peace and, with 
 what you learn, return to strengthen the tribe." 
 
 Some fathers said, "Why do you ask me? Your 
 heart is set on it ; don't bother me." 
 
 Some fathers raged and called to mind the old wis- 
 dom of the tribe, the old custom, the things of magic 
 all these good old ways that would now be forgotten 
 because all the fine young lads were turning away to 
 foolishness. 
 
 But all these fathers of their different sorts all these 
 fathers felt deserted and lonely when they saw the lit- 
 tle companies of brown bodies, laughing and chatter- 
 ing, go away out of the village to school ! 
 
 "No man knows where this will end," they said in 
 their hearts. 
 
 Sometimes that morning when the school drum was 
 calling, a little girl stole into the palaver house to beg 
 of her father. Some little girls never found courage 
 to open their mouths, they stood about idly until they 
 were called by the women who were going to the gar- 
 dens; then they went slowly away. And all that day 
 the elder women scolded them or laughed at them, 
 saying : 
 
 "Today you walk like a worm without eyes." 
 
 "You are as slow today as a chameleon." 
 
 Some little girls said what they wanted, 
 
 "I want to go to school!" 
 
 "I envy those who go to school." 
 
 "Ah, Father, me too permit me too !" 
 
 "School! What next? Shall I bring a curse on my 
 town by sending women to school ! Who would marry 
 you then? Get along!" 
 
 In the school house Assam was writing the names
 
 92 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 of the boys who were paying their tuition to Mejo. 
 The pupils stood in line ; one at a time they put down 
 their treasure of payment ; they murmured their names 
 watching with awe the hand of Assam traveling over 
 paper and leaving a trail of marks. Some were so 
 taken out of themselves that they could not speak their 
 names; they panted for their turns to come and when 
 at last they stood before the teacher, with his magic 
 hand, they fixed him with vacant eyes and were dumb. 
 
 Some coming to their turn had no tuition; these 
 were cast out weeping to return again tomorrow, as 
 Assam knew very well they would with the offering. 
 
 Once the voice that answered Assam was a girl's 
 voice, and he looked up into an eager girl's face. 
 
 "My name is Adda." 
 
 "Does your father permit you to come to school?" 
 
 "My father does not know. I ran away." 
 
 "It is forbidden that a girl should come to school 
 without her owner's permission. To receive girls who 
 have run away would be to hunt trouble in the school." 
 
 "We told her!" cried the boys in a line. "And we 
 said, who wants girls in school? They are as stupid 
 as hens !" 
 
 "Be still," said Assam. "If you ask, who wants the 
 girls in school? I will tell you that the teacher wants 
 them. Go in peace," he said to Adda. "It may be that 
 God will change your father's heart and then you may 
 return." 
 
 She went away crying. 
 
 Another girl's voice spoke, and this was Asala. 
 
 "He says I may," whispered Asala, over the edge 
 of the table. "I am to go to school, Efa permits me." 
 
 Her eyes were brilliant in her little, soft, brown face
 
 ADVENTURES OF ASSAM AND MEJO 93 
 
 that was not tattooed. She laid her tuition before her 
 brother Mejo, it was a fishing net. Such pride was 
 in her heart that she could not conceal it. 
 
 "She will be too proud," said a boy in line, and 
 others said so. But the teacher frowned, and again it 
 was still while the name of Asala was written on the 
 school roll. 
 
 At the end of ten days there were one hundred and 
 twenty-five pupils in school. There were groups of 
 ardent adventurers before all the primary charts. Lit- 
 tle boys and big boys labored over slates, sticking out 
 their tongues ; and when the slates ran short there were 
 classes making marks upon the sand outside the school 
 house. Mejo, standing before his classes and Assam 
 before his, struck the charts with pointers, and there 
 was a murmur of response, 
 
 "B a=ba" 
 
 "B o=bo." 
 
 "These were the little murmurs that broke the hot 
 silence in that little bark shelter. At the opening pe- 
 riod and the closing all those young voices sang the new 
 songs that they were so quick to learn. With a curious 
 obedience they were all day obedient to their young 
 teachers. They who had run so wild so long now rose 
 on signal and were seated on signal. On signal they 
 spoke or were silent. They curbed their voices and 
 their bodies to a new custom, and behind their tattoo 
 their faces looked out with a common expression of 
 discipline. 
 
 Among the pupils, many were as old as Bekalli, Efa's 
 eldest son. But Bekalli never came to school. Some- 
 times he stood on the outside of the low wall, looking 
 in and smiling. Sometimes, when the real men of the
 
 94 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 village passed the school house on the way to hunt, 
 Bekalli stopped at the open door leaning on his bow- 
 gun, or signalling to the older boys. He never saluted 
 the teacher as the real men did. 
 
 Once on a bright moonlight night when Assam lay 
 with Mejo in bed, they heard a murmur in the school 
 house. Assam, creeping close to trap the intruder, saw 
 over the wall the head of Bekalli. He stood before a 
 chart that was very white in the moonlight. With his 
 dark finger he traveled from letter to letter and to him- 
 self he murmured their names. 
 
 "He is saying the names of letters," Assam whis- 
 pered to Mejo when he went back to bed, "but he is 
 mistaking them !" 
 
 All the first months of school there was a great con- 
 tentment in the town of Mekok. Assam, speaking the 
 Word of God at the morning and the evening prayers, 
 saw more and more brown bodies gather about him in 
 the early and the late dusk. Women who had begged 
 the Word of God from Asala's little store now received 
 a daily portion from Assam, and went away to their 
 gardens murmuring over and over the verse of the 
 morning and the evening lesson. On a Sunday when 
 Assam beat the call to the service, many real men came 
 to hear for themselves these new things that were ru- 
 mored everywhere. Of an evening when Assam sat 
 in his little house, one and another would come to ask 
 him privately of these things as Nicodemus came to 
 Christ of old. 
 
 To the house of the two brothers there came the sick 
 who desired to try the white man's medicine. Little 
 gaunt children devoured by itch were healed, poor 
 bodies fading away with malaria were restored. The
 
 ADVENTURES OF ASSAM AND MEJO 95 
 
 simple drugs for simple ills were dispensed by the boys, 
 who put away the goods received for medicine with 
 the goods received for tuition, until all this treasure 
 should be carried back to the mission at the close of 
 school. 
 
 These were good days. There could be no enemy, 
 you would have said, in the town of Mekok. Until the 
 night Efa Nlem fell ill, then trouble came as thick as 
 rain. Assam woke to find a woman shouting at his 
 door. 
 
 "Rise," she cried, "and make medicine for the head- 
 man he is dying!" and she rushed away. 
 
 By the light of his lantern, Assam found the town 
 gathered in the palaver house. Efa lay upon his bed, 
 leaning against the shoulder of Bilo'o ; his breath was 
 short and his body burned under Assam's hand. But 
 he was not unconscious. He begged Assam to give 
 him the white man's medicine. 
 
 "Ah, my son," he said to Assam, "I am dying!" 
 
 Assam gave him quinine. But when two days 
 passed and the heat did not pass from Efa's body, As- 
 sam told Mejo that he did not know what to do. This 
 illness did not look like the old sickness of the heat in 
 the body that the white man calls malaria. 
 
 On the second day the great medicine man from Me- 
 dong came to heal Efa. His healing was not a noisy 
 healing as so much witch doctoring is noisy. This fa- 
 mous witch doctor made a little booth for himself of 
 leaves, and his communication with the sick man was 
 by means of a bush rope strung like a cord between the 
 leafy booth and the body of Efa where he lay in the 
 palaver house. 
 
 "This is a new kind of charm," said Assam to Mejo, 
 "I think he learned it from some beach people."
 
 96 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 The medicine man would talk with no one but Be- 
 kalli. Bekalli alone had seen his face during the time 
 of his present operations, but his high rough shout like 
 the bark of a gorilla awed the villagers where they 
 sat in the palaver house. There they sat and sighed, 
 while Efa groaned, and the cord of bush rope at- 
 tached to his body was jerked and trembled. 
 
 Assam and Mejo felt strange now in the village, they 
 felt uneasy. They were grieved too, for Efa had been 
 kind to them and Assam feared that he was about to 
 die. "If he dies," he thought, sitting with Mejo in his 
 little house, "then the town's people may trouble us. 
 They may say that we gave him a witch." Mejo, look- 
 ing at Assam's face, read these thoughts there. 
 
 At this moment a real man of the town stood at the 
 door. 
 
 "You are summoned," he said, and he went away. 
 
 This was bad. The two boys did not dare hesitate, 
 they followed him immediately. In the palaver house 
 they were fixed by every eye, only Efa did not gaze 
 at them. He lay as if he slept. There was a great still- 
 ness in the palaver house and the brothers, standing 
 beside Efa's bed, were still. Mejo felt terribly fright- 
 ened; he trembled, and Assam put his warm arm 
 around about his little brother's shoulders. 
 
 Suddenly Bekalli rose and began to speak. 
 
 "You all know that I killed a leopard ten days ago 
 with my own spear. With your eyes you saw the 
 leopard still warm upon the floor of this palaver 
 house. Now I ask you, did you see with your eyes 
 the leopard's whiskers?" 
 
 One and another said, yes, they had seen the leop- 
 ard's whiskers.
 
 ADVENTURES OF ASSAM AND MEJO 97 
 
 "Even so," said Bekalli, "when I began to skin that 
 leopard there were no whiskers not so much as your 
 eyelash !" 
 
 A great silence fell upon the people in that palaver 
 house. Mejo and Assam were not the only frightened 
 creatures there. 
 
 Bekalli continued: "I do not accuse the members of 
 my father's household, nor of his town, nor of his 
 neighborhood. Why should they hate my father or 
 hunt a way to hurt him? I say, it is these strangers 
 who are troubling my father." 
 
 At this moment the bush rope on the floor was vio- 
 lently agitated. Every eye in the room looked with 
 horror at that cord. 
 
 "Bekalli continued: 
 
 "These strangers have brought new things to this 
 town that are not the things of black men. They have 
 brought a new magic to this town. And a new power. 
 By the strange magic of their power they cast a spell 
 upon the boys in school. All day in that school there 
 is a great silence except as these strangers permit the 
 boys to speak!" 
 
 A curious look of intelligence dawned upon many 
 faces in that crowd. 
 
 "But that magic," Bekalli went on, "did not have 
 power over real men. None of you felt that power. I 
 did not feel it. My father continued at all times to 
 speak as he pleased. For this reason, because the new 
 magic had no power over my father, these strangers 
 struck him with a leopard's whisker." 
 
 Now a murmur began to grow in that company. One 
 took counsel with another. Bekalli standing in the 
 midst said no more, but a friend of his brought the
 
 98 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 bright leopard's skin from where it was stretched to 
 dry in the sun ; it was spread upon the clay floor, and 
 its absence of whiskers was noted. The clamor of com- 
 ment grew, and Efa groaned. Every one was then 
 still; but at the sound of that groan, angry eyes were 
 fixed upon the teachers. Mejo felt Assam's hand grip 
 his shoulder, and Assam began to speak. 
 
 Although he was a person of the tribe of God, he 
 said, he was not ignorant of the old things of the black 
 man. His father was Akulu Mejo wise in every 
 knowledge of magic. Therefore he knew that the next 
 word from the mouth of Bekalli would be a word about 
 the trial by poison. 
 
 At this Bekalli sprang to speak. But Assam con- 
 tinued very quietly to say that there would be no help 
 for him nor for his brother if they were tried by poison, 
 and fell, and were killed by the daggers of strangers in 
 this town of strangers. Many innocent men had fallen 
 in the ordeal by poison, and so might he fall and his 
 little brother. But what hope would there be for Efa 
 in their death? 
 
 "There is indeed a new power in this country," said 
 Assam. "It is the power of the people of the tribe of 
 God to heal disease. It is not a magic, it is a knowl- 
 edge a wisdom. The doctor of the tribe of God has 
 that knowledge. At the missionary town there is such 
 a doctor. He is not a witch doctor he does not speak 
 of witches. With his great wisdom he hunts the sick- 
 ness in the body of a man, and he makes a medicine 
 to cure that disease. If I lie here dead in this palaver 
 house and my brother beside me, how will our two 
 deaths heal Efa our friend and the father of this vil- 
 lage? But if four real men of this village rise up and
 
 ADVENTURES OF ASSAM AND MEJO 99 
 
 bear Efa upon the path that I can show them, and if I 
 lead them to the missionary town, and if we there beg 
 the Christian doctor to heal this disease which has 
 caught Efa, then shall the living praise God!" 
 
 From the bed where Efa lay he suddenly spoke, and 
 his friends were astonished. 
 
 "I desire to follow Assam to the town of the Chris- 
 tian doctor. Those who love me must carry me !" 
 
 And nothing more would Efa say but those two 
 words in his feeble voice, 
 
 "I desire! I desire!" 
 
 None in that company dared oppose him, not even 
 his angry eldest son. The real men of the neighbor- 
 hood were bound to obey him. They had respected 
 Assam, and there was a calm and a courage about his 
 manner at this time which impressed them. It was de- 
 termined to carry Efa at night lest the heat of the day 
 overcome him. 
 
 That very night in a hammock made of Assam's 
 blanket tied to a pole and borne by relays of two 
 men, Efa went away upon the path to the place where 
 the sun sets. Assam led the way with his lantern. 
 
 Bekalli was left to rule the town and Mejo was left 
 to keep the school. 
 
 Mejo stayed because his brother said that the school 
 must not "die." 
 
 "It is our work, however hard. It is harder for you 
 than for me," said Assam. "I wish I could take you 
 with me, but you see how God has made a path for 
 us in all these dangers, and we must believe that He 
 will care for you even when you are alone. Try to do 
 all the big works and let the little works go. Take the 
 clever boys to help the slow ones. You know if I will 
 hurry back."
 
 100 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 And Assam had begun to hurry already. Before 
 Mejo could say any of the fear and loneliness of his 
 heart Assam's lantern was walking away beside 
 Assam's legs. Soon that dear light was lost upon the 
 forest path. 
 
 Mejo stood at the door of his house, asking his heart 
 how he could sleep alone in that place. If even he had 
 had his blanket or his lantern! And while he was 
 dreading to enter that little hut, where he would miss 
 his brother too much, Bekalli came through the dark. 
 He carried a torch. His mother was with him and 
 had a load of his belongings. He did not speak to 
 Mejo; he entered the teacher's house and his mother 
 followed him. Presently she came out again. She 
 carried the torch, the school clock and all the books. 
 
 "Follow me," she said, "by order of Bekalli I show 
 you the path to your house. He says he will send you 
 all the school goods tomorrow." 
 
 Poor Mejo could not speak. He followed that wo- 
 man to a lonely cabin that was a little way outside the 
 village. She turned to leave him at the door of that 
 hut and he begged her for the torch. 
 
 "There is no fire in the house, I beg you to leave the 
 torch." 
 
 "Then show me the path back to my own house !" 
 
 And Mejo showed her the path back to her own door 
 by the torchlight. He was hoping that some of the 
 older school boys would see him going away by him- 
 self and would pity him. "Perhaps some two will come 
 tc sleep with me in that lonely house," he thought. 
 But none did. He entered his new house alone. By 
 the light of the torch he saw the mushrooms growing 
 out of the moldy clay floor and he saw the gray mold
 
 ADVENTURES OF ASSAM AND MEJO 101 
 
 on the bamboo beds. He smelt the odor of a musty, 
 unused house. 
 
 He knew that he must work quickly for his torch 
 was burning down. There was no fire wood in the 
 house, but there was a rotten drum and a bit of log 
 rough-hewn to a stool. He would make a fire of these. 
 And he busied himself. 
 
 Moving about in the stillness of that deserted place, 
 he heard the dropping of heavy dews from the plantain 
 leaves back of the house. And presently he heard an- 
 other sound there a rustle and a breathing. His heart 
 stood still. The back door of the little hut was barred, 
 while the front door was open. A friend, he thought, 
 would come to the front door. And he thought of the 
 witch doctor, with his painted face, who had left the 
 town in anger. The rustling crept along the rear wall 
 of the house and breathed against the door. Mejo 
 thought of spirits. He smelt an odor of wood smoke 
 through the cracks in the bark, and he thought again 
 of the witch doctor. Poor little Mejo trembled, stand- 
 ing very still. Then he heard a soft little voice and it 
 was the voice of Asala ! 
 
 "Ah, Mejo," she whispered through the door, "Let 
 'me in ! Bilo'o and I we are here. We crept secretly 
 through all the back yards. We have come to keep 
 you company! But first shut the front door, so that 
 none may see !" 
 
 Mejo slid the bark door into place and barred it. He 
 was laughing. He could not help laughing he was so 
 glad. Asala came in with Bilo'o. Mejo suddenly loved 
 his little sister with a great love that was the sum of 
 his love of his brother and his father and his mother 
 and the village at home. She looked at him with her
 
 102 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 sweet bright eyes. She carried a kettle hot from the 
 fire. Bilo'o carried firewood still warm and from the 
 smoking ends she blew a flame. Soon the kettle was 
 on the fire, the sound of its boiling made a sense of 
 home about the two children and the childless woman 
 who sat about the fire. Softly they began to speak 
 together in a great peace and quiet. 
 
 "Every night Bilo'o and I will come to you like 
 this," said Asala. "We will then cook your food for 
 you. None shall know, and when the food is eaten and 
 the work is done, you will teach Bilo'o from the word 
 of God. Ah, Mejo," said Asala, looking at her brother 
 with little lights in her eyes, "My ntyi Bilo'o wishes 
 to become a member of the tribe of God!"
 
 ADVENTURES OF ASSAM AND MEJO 103 
 
 SOME NOTES FOR CHAPTER V. 
 
 In one Africa mission at the beginning of the European 
 war there were seven station schools where the teachers were 
 under the supervision and instruction of white men and 
 women ; there were nearly two hundred village schools taught 
 by black teachers. In the schools of this mission there were 
 over seventeen thousand pupils. Among so many young 
 teachers there were some who were thriftless ^and lazy, In- 
 competent, and even dishonest. But the great majority were 
 faithful plodding boys, and the better sort were of the type 
 of Assam. I assure you that I have not idealized, in Assam 
 and his school, the best type of school and the best type of 
 teacher. Every established Africa Mission can show the 
 equal of these. Neither have I exaggerated, in the story of 
 Asala, the influence of a little Christian girl in a forest com- 
 munity. Mejo is just such a boy as is common in our school 
 many a boy of his age and type has had to bear heavy re- 
 sponsibilities. In the account of every missionary's expe- 
 rience there is record of boys and of girls who have distin- 
 guished themselves. It is fine to read in the life of Mackay 
 of Uganda about Sembera, the first Christian among the 
 Baganda. It is sad but very thrilling to read of those young 
 Baganda boys, who were martyred for their faith on January 
 30, 1882. In our own mission we must always remember a 
 young lad who was killed by black soldiers because he would 
 not deliver to them the mission mail bag. Another young 
 lad of our mission kept for us in hiding a treasure of nearly 
 one thousand dollars, and faithfully returned every piece of 
 silver money when the danger of robbers was past. Girls, 
 too, have been brave and faithful. Read, if you can, about the 
 bravery of a little maid servant, on page 125 of the book 
 by John Mackenzie called Ten Years North of the Orange 
 River. There are more of such stories than I can mention, 
 you must be looking for them yourselves. 
 
 This matter of trial by poison is a common way, devised 
 by witch doctors, to find out who has given the "witch" to 
 the sick person. If the person who drinks the poison gets 
 dizzy and falls down then he is guilty, and those people wh-> 
 are present kill him. It is true that the Bulu people attach a
 
 104 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 great importance to the killing effects of a prick by a leop- 
 ard's whisker. Some of them think there is magic in such an 
 injury, but our mission doctors begin to believe that wicked 
 men dip the whisker in a poison that they make, and with the 
 poisoned whisker prick their enemies.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 THE RETURN OF THE ADVENTURERS 
 
 (HESE things happened in the time of the 
 new moon. All that moon and when that 
 moon was lost Mejo did the work of 
 Assam in the village. 
 
 In the morning and in the evening he called the vil- 
 lagers to assemble and he read to them the Word of 
 God and prayed. More and more of the villagers an- 
 swered the call to these daily gatherings, when the 
 book of God was opened up to them by a little lad. 
 On a Sunday he called them for a service, and they 
 began to learn the custom of the service, singing with 
 the school children, and stumbling along with the 
 recitation of the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Command- 
 ments. 
 
 In all these matters Mejo tried to conduct himself 
 like Assam. He was not thinking now of Livingstone 
 or Susi or Chuma he was remembering his brother 
 Assam, who was so kind and so dignified and so quiet. 
 When in the morning he opened the school, standing 
 by his table before the rows of boys, so many of them 
 bigger and older than himself he stood like Assam. 
 He met all those attentive eyes with Assam's expres- 
 sion, and in the voice of Assam he gave his orders. 
 He had no time to be frightened or to be proud. 
 
 He put the boys who were studying the advanced 
 charts over the laggards who were still stumbling 
 through the alphabet. He exacted, with a severity 
 which he had learned from Assam, a good physical dis-
 
 106 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 cipline. Classes rose on signal like one man. Silence 
 reigned, broken only by the murmur of recitations ; an 
 austere little teacher hunted and reproved dirty hands 
 and jiggered feet from class to class. 
 
 Bekalli, swaggering into the school one day early in 
 Assam's absence, was greeted in order. The school 
 rose like a machine; many voices like one voice said, 
 
 "Our chief! Mbolo." 
 
 And like a machine the many brown bodies were 
 seated. 
 
 "Ah, Mbolani," murmured Bekalli, looking at them 
 a little awed. In action like this all these boys and 
 youths seemed strange to him, no longer like his 
 neighbors and companions. Of course he was, in his 
 father's absence, the keeper of the town. He came in 
 often after this ; they saluted him, and he returned the 
 salutation. 
 
 The teacher and the young headman never spoke 
 together. But neither did the headman further perse- 
 cute the teacher. Bekalli adopted more and more the 
 manner of his father, Efa, and Mejo was more and more 
 like his brother, Assam. 
 
 Asala and Bilo'o came every night to the hut outside 
 the village, and no longer in secret. Bekalli knew of 
 their visits, but made no prohibition. Other women 
 began to visit Mejo with little presents of food. School 
 boys continually hung about the door of that hut to 
 observe and admire their teacher. Imitations of 
 Assam's manner, passed on through Mejo, began to be 
 seen in every village of that neighborhood and upon 
 every path. 
 
 Thus it was that Assam returned to find Mejo in a 
 great peace and busyness. On a day after the making
 
 THE RETURN OF THE ADVENTURERS 107 
 
 of the new moon, when the sun was in the middle and 
 the boys were filing out of school, the cry went up 
 
 "B'asoya!" (They have come.) And there was a 
 stampede. All the school boys and all the villagers ran 
 to the path that came from the west. Mejo stood at 
 the door of the school. He saw Efa come from the 
 shade of the path into the violent sunlight of the clear- 
 ing. Efa wore a felt hat and a gorgeous loin cloth. A 
 leopard's skin hung upon his shoulders. He carried a 
 staff. He was laughing. A great sound of shouting 
 and of laughter filled the clearing. Brown bodies, big 
 and little, pressed about Efa. 
 
 Presently Mejo saw the dear body of Assam move 
 away from the crowd. Assam was looking for his 
 little brother. 
 
 "Is he well?" he asked one and another of the school 
 boys. 
 
 "Certainly he is well!" they answered. And Assam 
 saw Mejo come to meet him from under the eaves of 
 the school house. 
 
 They met, greeting one another with their eyes. 
 They could not speak their hearts out in that public 
 place, with school boys gathering about them. Assam 
 gave Mejo his lantern and a little pack he carried on 
 his head. 
 
 "Why do you go upon that path?" he asked his little 
 brother, when Mejo turned out of the clearing. 
 
 "Our house is upon this path," said Mejo. 
 
 Assam turned to the many boys who crowded at his 
 heels 
 
 "Go home," he said, "let two brothers speak together 
 in peace." 
 
 And a great peace fell about the two sons of Akulu
 
 108 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 Mejo where they sat together during the noon hour in 
 that little hut that was away from the clamor of the 
 village. Only a little girl came to salute her elder 
 brother, to bring him food and to sit upon his knees 
 in the old Bulu custom of greeting when the young of 
 the family salute their elders. 
 
 All the news of their father's town was good and 
 all the news of the journey. Efa's healing was a good 
 healing. The doctor said that Efa's sickness was a 
 sickness from eating meat that was too ojd. Perhaps 
 the meat of the leopard was too old when Efa ate the 
 last of that meat. Now that he was well again he was 
 a great friend to Assam, and to others of the tribe of 
 God. 
 
 "He and the real men of the tribe of God have 
 spoken much together of the things of God. He has 
 asked me every day upon the path many questions 
 about these things as a man asks when the spirit of 
 God knocks at the door of his heart." 
 
 "Then he will be a great friend to our school," said 
 Mejo, "and it will be more than ever a good school." 
 
 "Silly !" said Assam, laughing. "Did you not see the 
 rain fall yesterday?" 
 
 "I saw it, the first rain of the rainy season." 
 
 "Did you not know that the first rain is the sign to 
 close the vacation school and to return to the station 
 school? Mr. Krug said to me, 'Return with Efa, 
 close the school well, and bring back all the boys who 
 begin to read the primer.' " 
 
 Mejo looked at his brother in astonishment. 
 
 "You speak the truth ! The months of village school 
 are now three months. But I had forgotten!" 
 
 "Do any of the boys begin to read in the primer?" 
 asked Assam.
 
 THE RETURN OF THE ADVENTURERS 109 
 
 t 
 
 "Two tens of boys read in the book. Ten of them 
 read the lesson about the cutlass, but the clever ten 
 read about the elephant." 
 
 "A good real reading or a speaking by heart?" 
 
 "A good real reading that begins in the middle if 
 you choose." 
 
 "Fine !" said Assam. "I give thanks." 
 
 "Ah, Assam," said Asala. 
 
 "Speak!" 
 
 "I too am reading I read about the elephant-!" 
 
 "I have a great word for you," said Assam. "Mr. 
 Krug was speaking with Efa. He told Efa that you 
 must return with us to school, he promised Efa that 
 the white woman would care for you day and night. 
 He said that you would learn all the things of the 
 black women that are good things, farming and cook- 
 ing and to keep a house. He said you would learn obe- 
 dience, and to speak with a good mouth. And the 
 word of God you would learn. Efa said, 'Well. Those 
 were good things to learn.' He said that he would 
 trust the white woman to keep you, because that wo- 
 man is the wife of the doctor who healed him. So you 
 return with us !" 
 
 "What shall I say !" said Asala, and her little brown 
 face was astonished. 
 
 "Eh my mother !" she whispered. 
 
 "Another thing Efa told Mr. Krug. He said that he 
 meant to give you away when you were no longer a 
 child, but a girl to be married. He means to give you 
 to his son Bekalli." 
 
 Asala turned her back upon her brothers and looked 
 at the wall. They did not speak to her further. Mejo 
 told Assam how Bekalli stole his house.
 
 110 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 "What other deeds of hate has he done?" 
 
 "None." 
 
 "That is good," said Assam thoughtfully, looking at 
 his little brother. 
 
 "Ah, Mejo, God has given you wisdom in these days 
 to do His work well. What is your name now 
 Susi or Chuma or perhaps Livingstone?" 
 
 "Don't tease me," said Mejo. "And truly I had for- 
 gotten about the choosing of names !" 
 
 Three days later, those boys who had begun to read 
 from the primer packed their little loads. From their 
 mothers they begged food for the journey. From their 
 fathers they begged leave to go to the white man's 
 school. The caravan gathered in Efa Nlem's town. 
 Assam and Mejo sat in the palaver house beside their 
 own loads, and the loads of goods that had been paid 
 in for school tuition, and that must now be carried to 
 the Mission station by the school boys. 
 
 At noon the little caravan moved away ; twenty boys 
 and a happy little girl followed the young teachers. 
 There was a gay clamor and laughter, last good-byes 
 were called and the voice of youth, set out upon the 
 path of progress, died away in the forest. 
 
 "Besom b'akele he!" sighed those women whose 
 hearts had been touched by the Things of God. And 
 Bilo'o said to them, 
 
 "Some day we will beg Efa to let us make them a 
 visit. Then we will cook them a present of food. And 
 when we come to the white man's town, we will see 
 the tribe of God gather under the great roof that is 
 there." 
 
 So those who were left behind spoke together all 
 day, and remembered the absent. But these, on the
 
 THE RETURN OF THE ADVENTURERS 111 
 
 journey, spoke continually of the new things they were 
 to see in school. 
 
 They slept that night in a new clearing where a 
 headman was building a town. In the street of this 
 half-built town two great logs, the last of the debris of 
 the forest, were still burning. The boys ranged them- 
 selves the length of this low fire. They set their 
 kettles upon it here and there, they waited under the 
 stars for their supper to cook. Asala was busy cooking 
 for her brothers ; they too sat beside the fire. 
 
 Suddenly from the dark about them a young man 
 appeared ; he sat down beside them. In the light of the 
 fire Mejo saw with a great astonishment that it was 
 Bekalli. And he looked at Assam. 
 
 "Bekalli, Mbolo," said Assam. 
 
 "Ah, Mbolo," said Bekalli. 
 
 "Are you going to the beach?" asked Assam after a 
 pause. 
 
 "Not to the beach, but to school. I am walking in 
 your caravan to school." 
 
 Assam said nothing, he looked embarrassed. Mejo 
 noticed that, and so did Bekalli. 
 
 "Isn't it good?" he asked, quite humbly. 
 
 "It would be good," said Assam. "Certainly good 
 if you could read. But I fear for you with Mr. Krug 
 when you tell him that you cannot read. Then per- 
 haps he will send you away, and you will feel shame 
 and I will feel sorrow." 
 
 "I can read," said Bekalli, still humbly. "My little 
 brothers taught me to read all the charts, and when I 
 went too fast for them and wished to learn to read in 
 a book, then Asala taught me." 
 
 "I hear, and it is good. Good for you and for us 
 all."
 
 112 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 Mejo said nothing and Assam said no more. Asala 
 presently took her kettle off the fire ; upon three clean 
 squares torn off a green plaintain leaf she put the 
 smoking plaintains that she had baked in the hot ashes. 
 These she laid at the feet of the three boys. They 
 dipped, each with his own wooden spoon, their supper 
 of greens from the common kettle. She herself stood 
 aside until they should finish, but Assam said to her, 
 
 "Eat, then." 
 
 Arid she dipped her little folded leaf with the others. 
 
 "Asala is a strange child," murmured Mejo to Assam, 
 when they lay together upon a bed of the palaver house 
 that night. "Don't you fear that she will be too 
 proud?" 
 
 "I don't see it yet- she carries herself well. Don't 
 hang your heart up about Asala, but watch your own 
 walk." 
 
 "I hear," said Mejo. 
 
 "On the last day of that journey they met, at every 
 forking of the way, other such caravans of eager youth. 
 Obam they met, followed by seven dwarf boys, and 
 carried by two dwarf men. From his hammock made of 
 a blanket Obam told them that he had sprained his 
 ankle. 
 
 "These Bulu boys," said the dwarf man who carried 
 the foot of the hammock, "are wise in the things of 
 books ; many things of the things of God they teach us. 
 But the day they follow the dwarf people up the face 
 of a cliff they are as stupid as women. We said to 
 Obam: 
 
 'Are you a dwarf that you should climb Nko'ovas? 
 A teacher that breathes is better than a dead one !' '*
 
 THE RETURN OF THE ADVENTURERS 113 
 
 "Even so, he tried to follow us, and from that day he 
 taught his people from a bed. Everywhere we have 
 gone in the forest we have carried him as if he were 
 an elephant's tusk of great weight and of great value !" 
 
 The dwarfs laughed and everybody laughed. Obam 
 put his head out of the hammock and laughed, looking 
 at Assam. 
 
 "As I say," continued the dwarf. "And now we re- 
 turn our elephant's tusk to the rich man's town. We 
 say to that great chief, 'Keep for us this treasure 
 while we leave it here. And when we return in the dry 
 season, give it to us again, that we may bear it to our 
 own place !' " 
 
 "Akeva !" said Obam from his hammock. 
 
 Bekalli, from his place in the growing file of school 
 boys, saw many of his own age among the strangers 
 that came in from the many paths of the forest. Greet- 
 ings were shouted from teacher to teacher, for these 
 teachers were classmates of old. And presently these 
 caravans, made up of little community groups, began 
 to sing. Snaking along the trail that wound its way 
 among the great trees, the long file of youth began to 
 sing; and they moved to the rhythm of the air 
 
 "Those people are as many as the sands 
 "They are many as the sands of the sea!" 
 
 "I understand," thought Bekalli to himself, "that 
 they sing of the new tribe. And I begin to see that the 
 people of the new tribe are many. It is well that I see 
 this thing with my own eyes otherwise I could not 
 know it. And a fine young man like myself must know 
 these new things, he must know, that he may choose." 
 
 "One more stream to cross," shouted the teachers to
 
 114 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 the strangers, "then you will see the cassava gardens 
 of the mission." 
 
 And in the evening light the stream of school boys 
 poured in to the clearing of the Mission station. 
 
 "They certainly say," thought Bekalli to himself, 
 "that the new tribe is as abundant as rain. And I see 
 for myself that in this place the many little streams 
 gather to a great pool!" 
 
 The clearing was full of the bodies of school boys 
 old and new. The old boys were calling greetings to 
 their friends. The new boys were turning their heads 
 this way and that as their teachers said : 
 
 "That big house is the house of God." 
 
 "That big house is the upper school, and beyond is 
 the lower school where you will enter." 
 
 "That fine house with the iron roof is the medicine 
 house, where the doctor does the work of healing. 
 Those houses beside it, like a little village, is the vil- 
 lage of the sick people." 
 
 "That little village down that path with the fine 
 houses all of plank, is the town of the carpenters and 
 the blacksmiths and the wise ones who are taught to 
 work with the hands." 
 
 "What a town !" thought Bekalli. "I am dead with 
 wonder !" He felt his Bulu pride fall from him and he 
 had a wish to run away from this place where his 
 youth and beauty could not distinguish him. 
 
 Assam drew near to him. "You feel strange to- 
 night," said Assam. "As I did one day many dry sea- 
 sons back. I beg you to endure the strangeness and 
 the loneliness. Ah, Bekalli," said Assam, "for the sake 
 of your clan, and the day that you will be headman 
 in the seat of your father I beg you to endure ! Like 
 a cutlass that must be sharpened on a stone for a
 
 THE RETURN OF THE ADVENTURERS 115 
 
 great work to be done, so I beg you to endure the 
 hard things of school !" 
 
 "I hear," said Bekalli. "Akeva." 
 
 The beginning of a love for Assam was in his heart. 
 And that night when he sat under the eaves of one of 
 the ten great houses that were the boys' town, he re- 
 membered that word. About him in the clearing be- 
 tween the two rows of houses, the hundreds of young 
 bodies gesticulated. At one end of the village there 
 was drumming and dancing. At the other end beside 
 many little fires groups of boys were cooking their 
 evening meal. A joyous clamor rose from this com- 
 pound to the night sky. 
 
 Bekalli held in his hand a cutlass the tool that had 
 been given him by the headman of the tool house. And 
 ten boys had been given him for a work-gang. 
 
 "Tomorrow morning," he had been told, "when the 
 drum calls to work, and before the time of school, you 
 will go with many others to clear for a new garden. 
 The white man is making a rubber plantation, and 
 your gang goes to the clearing. This work that you do 
 buys your food for the day. Every morning you work 
 and that work buys your food. Every boy works." 
 
 "I understand," said Bekalli when he received his 
 cutlass. But he did not altogether understand. "Why 
 must I work like a woman?" he thought, and he re- 
 membered as he sat in the dusk, turning his cutlass 
 over in his hand, the word of Assam. 
 
 "He said," thought Bekalli, "that I was like a cutlass 
 that must be sharpened for a great work. And the 
 school is the grindstone. All these strange things of 
 work are the grindstone. Assam himself has been 
 ground on that stone. I agree that he is sharp and 
 bright. His nickname is 'He stands like a dagger!'
 
 116 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 It remains for me to endure !" And Bekalli joined the 
 little brothers of his clan about a kettle. 
 
 About a kettle in the palaver house of Akulu Mejo, 
 Assam told the news to his own clan. Mejo sat near 
 his father, who gave him a chicken leg from his own 
 portion. 
 
 "Perhaps you are not to be stupid," said Akulu Mejo 
 to Mejo. "This news of the school is great. You did 
 that work well. These sons of mine who are Chris- 
 tians make me famous." And Akulu laughed. 
 
 "Go salute your mother in her house," he told Mejo. 
 
 There by the firelight Mejo found his mother and 
 his sister. In the morning Asala must enter the girls' 
 school, with the girls she must work in the garden, in 
 the clean compound of the girls' town she must live 
 under the eye of the white woman. She must cook 
 with a new cleanliness in the kettles of that town. 
 She must wash her little belongings in the running 
 stream, she must learn to sew, and all the afternoons 
 she must learn the things of school under the thatch 
 of the girls' school, with many tens of girls. 
 
 "I shall like it," she told her mother. "But tonight 
 let me sleep by you on your bed!" 
 
 Presently the great army of the rain came trampling 
 out of the forest. The sound of its passing in the night 
 was an uproar. It raged upon the roofs of the girls' 
 town and upon the roofs of the boys' town. On the 
 many rough beds the tired bodies of little African ad- 
 venturers came to rest. They fell asleep under the 
 familiar tumult of the rain upon the roof. Lulled by 
 that tumult Asala slept beside her mother. Mejo slept 
 upon his own bed. Assam sitting by his table in the 
 lantern light casting up his school accounts grew 
 drowsy with the sound of rain. He put his books aside.
 
 THE RETURN OF THE ADVENTURERS 117 
 
 and his eye fell upon the fly leaf of Mejo's Bible, still 
 open at this legend, 
 
 LIVINGSTONE MEJO AKULU 
 and below that written at another time, 
 
 CHUMA MEJO AKULU 
 and written tonight in ink that was just dry, 
 
 MEJO AKULU, TEACHER OF THE SCHOOL 
 OF MEKOK. 
 
 Assam laughed. "What a strange boy !" he said, as 
 he put out the light and laid his weary body down be- 
 side the weary body of his little brother. And he said, 
 
 "Mejo Akulu, teacher of schools, I salute you!" 
 
 A NOTE FOR CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Here is an end of a story which is all within the limits of 
 every-day life in our part of the forest. In every established 
 Africa Mission there are such great centers for the education 
 of boys and girls. And in every such center many such 
 young people as Assam, Mejo, Bekalli and Asala are being 
 sharpened on the grindstone of school for the hand of our 
 Lord Jesus, the great master and user of tools.
 
 118 AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 SOME BOOKS THAT MIGHT BE READ BY THE 
 STUDENTS OF AFRICAN ADVENTURERS 
 
 Missionary Heroes in Africa; J. C. Lambert, 1912 75c. 
 
 Uganda's White Man of Work; Sophia Lyons Fahs; Missionary 
 Education Movement, New York, 1912 60c. 
 
 Lion-Hearted, The Story of Bishop Hannington's Life; E. C. Daw- 
 son; J. B. Lippincott Company, Boston, 1912 
 
 Livingstone, the Pathfinder; Basil Mathews; Missionary Education 
 Movement, New York, 1912 50c. 
 
 Livingstone Hero Stories; Susan Mendenhall; Missionary Education 
 Movement, New York, 1912 15c. 
 
 God's Image in Ebony; J. H. Darlow; Missionary Education Move- 
 ment, New York, 1914 50c. 
 
 Black Tales for White Children; C. H. Stigand; Houghton Mifflin, 
 1914 $1.50 
 
 BOOKS THAT CAN BE RECOMMENDED 
 TO THE TEACHER 
 
 God's Image in Ebony (see above). Excellent history of African 
 Missions written "for senior schoolboys." Hard to get in 
 this country 50c. 
 
 Savage Childhood; Dudley Kidd; MacMillan 85 Co., New York, 1906 
 $3.50 
 
 Africa, Facts from Foreign Mission Fields; Women's Foreign Mis- 
 sionary Society, Methodist Episcopal Church, 581 Boyleston 
 
 St., Boston 5c. 
 
 An excellent leaflet. 
 
 SOME LEAFLETS 
 
 At Dawn; Lydia J. Wellman, 1913; Women's Board of Missions of 
 the Interior, 19 South La Salle St., Chicago 5c. 
 
 Dweshula; Mrs. Amy Bridges Cowler; American Board, 704 Con- 
 gregational House, Boston 2c., per doz., 20c.
 
 SOME LEAFLETS 119 
 
 The Blind Zulu's Story; Gertrude Hance; Woman's Board of Mis- 
 sions, 704 Congregational House, Boston 2c., per doz., 20c. 
 
 Autobiography of Vinda Bidiloa, A Congo Evangelist; American 
 Baptist Missionary Union, Boston Ic. 
 
 A Story in Pictures; Methodist Episcopal Church Board, 156 Fifth 
 Avenue, New York 5c 
 
 Africa, The Congo Mission (Quick information series); American 
 Baptist Foreign Missionary Society, Ford Building, Boston, 
 1913 
 
 The African Drum; A. W. Halsey, D.D.; Women's Board of Foreign 
 Missions of Presbyterian Church, 156 Fifth Ave., New York 
 2c., per doz., 15c. 
 
 An African Heroine; Nettie Carlisle; Women's Board of Foreign 
 Missions of Presbyterian Church, 156 Fifth Avenue, New 
 York Ic., per doz., lOc. 
 
 The Brave Hunchback; Rev. W. H. Stapleton; Women's Board of 
 Foreign Missions of Presbyterian Church, 156 Fifth Avenue, 
 New York 2c., per doz., 15c. 
 
 Other Children; Jean K. Mackenzie; Women's Board of Foreign 
 Missions of Presbyterian Church, 156 Fifth Avenue, New 
 York 2c., per doz., 20c.
 
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