HIS FIRST SUIT

Sometimes the father or the mother may give a child its name, or sometimes a friend may name it. Many of the names have no special meaning, but some of them refer to things that happened or were seen at the time the child was born. Boys’ and girls’ names differ from one another although the difference is not clear to the white man. But if he stays long enough among the black children he will begin to know what are boys’ names and what are girls’. I know a bright boy who is called “Mang’anda.” In English you would have to call him Master Playful. Another child I can recall is called “Handifuna,” which means “Miss they don’t want me.” But wherever the white man is settling in Africa the people are picking up European names; and it is a pity, I think, that the old names will pass away.

Little black children are not nursed and tended so carefully as white children are. From a very early age they are tied on to their mother’s backs and are taken everywhere. It is seldom that an accident happens through a child falling out, for the black children seem to have an extraordinary power of holding on. If mother is too busy another back is soon found for baby to show his sticking-on ability. In any village you may see a group of women pounding corn in their mortars under a shady tree. It is hard work, this daily pounding of corn. Up and down go the heavy wooden pestles. Backwards and forwards go the heads of the babies tied on the mothers’ backs. At each downward thud baby’s neck gets a violent jerk, but he is all unconscious of it, and sleeps through an ordeal that would kill his white brother. Again a woman with an infant on her back may go a journey of many miles exposed to the full blaze of the African sun. Yet baby is quite comfortable and never gives a single cry unless when he is hungry.

Then black children have no cribs and cradles as have white ones. When mother is tired of baby, and there is no other back at hand, she simply lays him down on a mat and leaves him to himself to do as he likes. If he makes a noise, well he can just make it. He will disturb nobody, and is allowed to cry until he is tired. Unless he is known to be ill, his squalling, be it never so loud, will attract no attention. Most of the mothers are very proud of their children, and oil them and shave their woolly heads with great care. But in spite of all this care on the mother’s part, great numbers of the babies die. Very often they are really killed through their mother’s ignorance of how they ought to be fed and nursed when sick. Then diseases like smallpox pass through the villages at intervals and carry off hundreds of children.

A black infant is not clothed like a white one. If his mother is very proud of him he will have a string of beads round his neck or waist. Round his fat little wrist or neck you will often see tied on by string a small medicine charm, put there by his fond mother to protect him against disease or evil influence. When the babies are big enough to toddle they begin to look out for themselves, and when they have fairly found their legs they go everywhere and do almost anything they like so long as they do not give trouble.

A little boy’s first article of clothing may be made of different coloured beads carefully woven into a square patch, which he wears hanging down before him from a string of beads encircling his waist. Or it may perhaps be only the skin of a small animal worn in the same way as the square of beads. He may, however, begin with a cloth from the beginning. If so his mother provides him with a yard of calico, rolls it round him, and sends him out into the world as proud as a white boy with his first pair of trousers.

He gets no special food because he is a child. He eats whatever is going and whatever he can lay his hands upon. Thus he grows up not unlike a little animal. There is not much trouble taken with him. If he lives, he lives; and if he dies—well, he is buried. No fond lips have bent over him and kissed him asleep, for kissing is not known to his people. Nor has he learned to lisp the name of Jesus at his mother’s knee. It is not that his mother does not love him, for she does in her own peculiar way. But all are shrouded in ignorance, father, mother and children, all held in the grip of dark superstitions from which nothing but the light of the Gospel of Love can free them.