The Book of Missionary Heroes Part 18

His voice became hard with a tragic sternness.

"I am trying," he went on, "to lead my people to act according to the word of G.o.d which we have received from you white people, and yet _you_ show them an example of wickedness such as we never knew. You,"

and his voice rose in burning scorn, "you, the people of the word of G.o.d! You know that some of my own brothers"--he was referring to Khamane especially--"have learned to like the drink, and you know that I do not want them to see it even, that they may forget the habit. Yet you not only bring it in and offer it to them, but you try to tempt _me_ with it.

"I make an end of it to-day. Go! Take your cattle and leave my town and _never come back again_!"

No man moved or spoke. They were utterly shamed and bewildered. Then one white man, who had lived in the town since he was a lad, pleaded with Khama for pity as an old friend.

"You," said the chief with biting irony, "my friend? You--the ringleader of those who despise my laws. You are my worst enemy. You pray for pity? No! for you I have no pity. It is my duty to have pity on my people over whom G.o.d placed me, and I am going to show them pity to-day; and that is my duty to them and to G.o.d.... Go!"

And they all went.

Then the chief ordered in his young warriors and huntsmen.

"No one of you," he said, "is to drink beer." Then he called a great meeting of the whole town. In serried ma.s.ses thousand upon thousand the Bamangwato faced their great chief. He lifted up his voice:

"I, Khama, your chief, order that you shall not make beer. You take the corn that G.o.d has given to us in answer to our prayers and you destroy it. Nay, you not only destroy it, but you make stuff with it that causes mischief among you."

There was some murmuring.

His eyes flashed like steel.

"You can kill me," he said, "but you cannot conquer me."

_The Black Prince of Eighty_

If you rode as a guest toward Khama's town over seventy years after those far-off days when Livingstone first went there, as you came in sight of the great stone church that the chief has built, you would see tearing across the African plain a whirlwind of dust. It would race toward you, with the soft thunder of hoofs in the loose soil.

When the horses were almost upon you--with a hand of steel--chief Khama would rein in his charger and his bodyguard would pull up behind him.

Over eighty years old, grey and wrinkled, he would spring from his horse, without help, to greet you--still Khama, the Antelope. Old as he is, he is as alert as ever. He heard that a great all Africa aeroplane route was planned after the Great War. At once he offered to make a great aerodrome, and the day at last came when Khama--eighty-five years old--who had seen Livingstone, the first white man to visit his tribe--stood watching the first aeroplane come bringing a young officer from the clouds.

He stands there, the splendid chief of the Bamangwato--"steel-true, blade-straight." He is the Black Prince of Africa--who has indeed won his spurs against the enemies of his people.

And if you were to ask him the secret of the power by which he has done these things, Khama the silent, who is not used to boasting, would no doubt lead you at dawn to the _Kgotla_ before his huts. There at every sunrise he gathers his people together for their morning prayers at the feet of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Captain and King of our Great Crusade for the saving of Africa.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 46: In 1875.]

[Footnote 47: The chiefs open-air enclosure for official meetings.]

[Footnote 48: These are Khama's own words taken down at the time by Hepburn.]

CHAPTER XVII

THE KNIGHT OF THE SLAVE GIRLS

_George Grenfell_

(Dates, b. 1849, d. 1906)

_The Building of the Steams.h.i.+p_

When David Livingstone lay dying in his hastily-built hut, in the heart of Africa, with his black companions Susi and Chumah attending him, almost his last words were, "How far away is the Luapula?"

He knew that the river to which the Africans gave that name was only a short distance away and that it flowed northward. He thought that it might be the upper reaches of the Nile, which had been sought by men through thousands of years, but which none had ever explored.

Livingstone died in that hut (1873) and never knew what Stanley, following in his footsteps, discovered later (1876-7), viz., that the Luapula was really the upper stretch of the Congo, the second largest river in the world (3000 miles long), flowing into the Atlantic. The basin of the Congo would cover the whole of Europe from the Black Sea to the English Channel.

In the year when Livingstone died, and before Stanley started to explore the Congo, a young man, who had been thrilled by reading the travels of Livingstone, sailed to the West Coast of Africa to the Kameruns.

His name was George Grenfell, a Cornish boy (born at Sancreed, four miles from Penzance, in England), who was brought up in Birmingham.

He was apprenticed at fifteen to a firm of hardware and machinery dealers. Here he picked up, as a lad, some knowledge of machinery that helped him later on the Congo. He had been thrilled to meet at Bristol College, where he was trained for his missionary work, a thin, worn, heroic man of tried steel, Alfred Saker, the great Kamerun missionary, and Grenfell leapt for joy to go out to the dangerous West Coast of Africa, where he worked hard, teaching the Africans to make tables and bricks and to print and read, healing them and preaching to them.

When Stanley came down the Congo to the sea and electrified the world by the story of the great river, Grenfell and the Baptist Missionary Society which he served conceived the daring and splendid plan of starting a chain of mission stations right from the mouth of the Congo eastward across Africa. In 1878 Grenfell was on his way up the river--travelling along narrow paths flanked by gra.s.s often fifteen feet high, and crossing swamps and rivers, till after thirteen attempts and in eighteen months he reached Stanley Pool, February 1881. A thousand miles of river lay between Stanley Pool and Stanley Falls, and even above Stanley Falls lay thirteen hundred miles of navigable river. Canoes were perilous. Hippopotami upset them, and men were dragged down and eaten by crocodiles. They must have a steamer right up there beyond the Falls in the very heart of Africa.

Grenfell went home to England, and the steamer _Peace_ was built on the Thames, Grenfell watching everything being made from the crank to the funnel. She was built, launched, and tried on the Thames; then taken to pieces and packed in 800 packages, weighing 65 lbs. each, and taken to the mouth of the Congo. On the heads and shoulders of a thousand men the whole s.h.i.+p and the food of the party were carried past the rapids, over a thousand miles along narrow paths, in peril of snakes and leopards and enemy savages, over streams crossed by bridges of vine-creepers, through swamps, across ravines.

Grenfell's engineer, who was to have put the s.h.i.+p together, died. At last they reached Stanley Pool. Grenfell with eight negroes started to try to build the s.h.i.+p. It was a tremendous task. Grenfell said the _Peace_ was "prayed together." It was prayer and hard work and gumption. At last the s.h.i.+p was launched, steam was up, the _Peace_ began to move. "She lives, master, she lives!" shouted the excited Africans.

A thousand thrilling adventures came to him as he steamed up and down the river, teaching and preaching, often in the face of poisoned arrows and spears. We are now going to hear the story of one adventure.

_The Steamer's Journey_

The crocodiles drowsily dosing in the slime of the Congo river bank stirred uneasily as a strange sound broke the silence of the blazing African morning. They lifted their heavy jaws and swung their heads down stream. Their beady eyes caught sight of a Thing mightier than a thousand crocodiles. It was pus.h.i.+ng its way slowly up stream.

The sound was the throb of the screw of the steamer from whose funnel a light ribbon of smoke floated across the river. An awning shaded the whole deck from bow to stern. On the top of the awning, under a little square canopy, stood a tall young negro; the muscles in his st.u.r.dy arms and his broad shoulders rippled under his dark skin as the wheel swung round in his swift, strong hands.

The steamer drove up stream while the crocodiles, startled by the wash of the boat, slid sullenly down the bank and dived.

A short, bearded man, dressed in white duck, stood on deck at the bows, where the steamer's name, _Peace_, was painted. He was George Grenfell. His keen eyes gleamed through the spectacles that rested on his strong, arched nose. By his side stood his wife, looking out up the river. They were searching for the landing-place and the hut-roofs of some friendly river-side town.

At last as the bows swung round the next bend in the river they saw a village. The Africans rushed to the bank and hurriedly pushed out their tree-trunk canoes. Grenfell shouted an order. A bell rang. The screw stopped and the steamer lay-to while he climbed down into the s.h.i.+p's canoe and was paddled ash.o.r.e. The wondering people pushed and jostled around them to see this strange man with his white face.

_The Slave Girls_

As they walked up among the huts, speaking with the men of the town, Grenfell came to an open s.p.a.ce. As his quick eyes looked about he saw two little girls standing bound with cords. They were tethered like goats to a stake. Their little faces and round eyes looked all forlorn. Even the wonder of the strange bearded white man hardly kept back the tears that filled their eyes.

"What are these?" he asked, turning to the chief.

The African pointed up the river. Grenfell's heart burned in him, as the chief told how he and his men had swept up the river in their canoes armed with their spears and bows and arrows and had raided another tribe.