The Brooklyn Daily Eagle from Brooklyn, New York • Page 74

Page Twelve Woman Who Has Labored Among Real African Cannibals Describes Native Fashions Miss Mackenzie Says Old Men of Bantu Tribes Look Askance at English Word "Free," Which Their Wives Have Taken Into Their Vocabulary It was to tell them that Zambe had not forgotten them that Miss Mackenzie spent t-o many years in Africa and that she did not return to the United States until the rigors of the African climate made such inroads on her health that ft became imperative. The play, "White Cargo," Miss Mackenzie said, was a true picture of the effect of the climate in the Cameroon section of Africa. The west coast of Africa isiso surf-beaten that it is almost impossible to make a landing. Miss Jean Kenyon Mackenzie perversely dumb; Christian wives of a common husband who have been praying many seasons, rainy and dry, for the conversion of their man, take the disturbing answer to their prayers in a kind of dazed sweet patience. The women least desirable are first disposed of it is easiest to let them go until at last a man must come to a choice between those who appeal to his heart, to his senses, to his habit." Vividly, indeed, did Miss Mackenzie describe the Christians among the black people preparing worship of a Sunday, where never less than two thousand assemble in a village.

A great call-drum brings the people of the forest together. "Every adult in the forest has a name to be beaten out on "the" calf-drum by this he is summoned from the forest to the village or from town to town. "When Communion Sunday dawns there is a great preoccupation with clothes in the many little huts and beside the camp fires of that neighborhood. Those many brown bodies that stream by to the church have been bathed and anointed with oil. No woman but has got her a new green leaf apron and has donned her best grass bustle.

The wives of. headmen and of evangelists wear loin cloths, or a wider cloth drawn close under their arms. Little girls dragging at their mother's hands wear miniature copies of their mother's dress green leaf aprons and little bustles, belts of leopard skin and superfluous garters of bright beads." "When you go to a Bantu hut," Miss Mackenzie told me, "you must learn to endure without complaint the complimentary sweeping, when the genteel hostess, with a little broom of rushes, worries the dust of her floor. And then there is the poisoning and the magic. No finer hospitality can be offered a traveler than to have a headman of the village taste the food before he hands it to you to show you that it has not been poisoned by his women who prepared it." When you remember that cannibalism still exists among these Bantu tribes there is small wonder that Miss Mackenzie's friends feel safer to have her traveling the subways than to be carried in a hammock over the forest trails of the Cameroon.

Not so very long ago the Government made an expedition into the bush to punish the cannibals who threw a boy's head under the eaves of a missinoary clearing in Yebekolo, saying: "There is Bean-land's portion; let him come and get it!" (Beanland being the missionary.) And there was the story of the pigmy who was entertaining a chief of a superior tribe and, lacking meat, sacrificed one of his wives. The missionaries shudder and will not believe it, though they know it is true. In this region of "Africa a new word has grafted itself into the vernacular of the Bantu. It is the word "free." Somehow it has become twisted and haj become a winged weapon of the irate husband in bringing to her senses his disobedient wife, and ne screams at her "Ye wo buni na ne flee?" you think you are One of the greatest things that has made for the emancipation of the black man, this missionary said, was the introduction of currency. "It is a known quantity, something he can depend upon.

The possessions of the ukukum (the rich man I of the primitive type were so clumsy that lu hid to be clever indeed to keep them. They consists! r. the bodies of women, of wandering sheep, big tusks ivory, dojs end bells and kettles. Mcney has an understood, unvarying value, accumulating by the process of lalw with a cuiious inevitability. It has a great moral value to the black man, which he must be made to understand and live up to." Miss Mackenzie was born in Illinois and educated partly in Germany and partly in France, which incident made it particularly easy for her to adjust herself to first the German occupation of the Cameroon; "before "the war, and later, after the war, to the French Government.

A Cameroon Native in His Surf-riding Canoe fly mi uvt (ft By Jean Piper THE truth of that statement, "We are all brothers under the skin," came home with great force one day as Miss Jean Kenyon Mackenzie sat talking ot her sixteen years work among the Bantu tribes of the Southern Cameroon, Africa. The more she talked, in that low, hesitating voice of hers, the more they seemed to be just folks. Stripped of the complicated veneer of our civilization, we share in common with these black people of Africa many things. And because, deep down in her heart. Miss Mackenzie has an abiding understanding o.

the Bantu, she is able to make us feel that these people children though they seem at times are well on the way toward being "just folks." For sixteen years this petite, daintily formed woman, with the tiny hands and feet and the bright blue eyes, stayed among her "Black Sheep," as she calls them, to teach them about "Zambe." There is one great lack among the Bantus there is no god of any kind. "Zambe having created us forgot us," they say, and the ueeper you delve into Bantu life the greater seems the tragedy of Zambe's forgetting. Superstition runs rampant among them. They are haunted by fears, steeped in visions of the supernatural and are only children at heart The tribes of the southern Cameroon district belong to the Bantu race, occupying parts of the southern half of Africa. You know the Bantu entirely by his speech.

He has no history except as traced and exhibited in his speech. In the forest there are 135,000 black people under insiruction and in the schools there are 30,000 students, of which only one-sixteenth are girls. A Bantu woman is neither born to the possession of her body nor the possession of her children. Women who have been sold from marriage to marriage may leave little children at every station of that aimless wandering. She is only a slave.

"Ask any little nine-year-old who is not yet tattooed," said Miss Mackenzie, "whose young head is shaved in designs the headdress of little girls whose sleek bodies are belted with beads, tailed with dried grasses and aproned with leaves, 'Who is giving goods on and she will know how many goats have been given, how many dogs and dog bells, how many sheets of brass and whether any ivory. Or, if she is to be given in exchange for another woman a wife for her father or a little girt for her brother, who must be set up in the world. A Bantu man is always the master and his woman hij slave. She is slave to the Bantu triple obsession of goods and sex and fetish." Miss Mackenzie was missionary president of the southern part of the Cameroon district, which is now-governed by the French. Before the World War Germany controlled the Cameroon; now it is divided, the Briti in the north and the French in the south.

In the southern Cameroon there are six hundred mission clearings be longing to the Presbyterian Church and eight main mission stations that radiate into the forest, and assisting the missionaries are twelve thousand native mission assistants. The Natives Are Not Ancestor Worshippers "Back of the surf and the sand is the forest," said Miss Mackenzie. "And back of that again is the grass country. The forest belt in southern Cameroon is from three to four hundred miles wide. Here the country is a surge of hills.

All down the west coast of Africa, between the wall of the forest and the wall of the surf, lies the long line of beach towns. And back by way of the high road from the beach go roads that cleave the forest. Everywhere we find traces of the white man, the modifier of thought, of aspect, of manners, of custom exacting by his very presence new attitudes toward life, toward murder, toward women, toward labor. The path of the white man is marked by change, be he trader, governor or missionary. "And because of this change we stress more than anything else among these bush and beach people the Ten Commandments.

They call them the 'Ten Before the taboos of his particular tribe disappear, as disappear they must, when he takes on the things of a new civilization, the Bantu must have something to replace them. It is the great fortifier before he meets the white man's law. The black man undergoes a distinct shock when he meets the civilization of the white man." Everything to the Bantu centers around his town and his tribe, and that is why, when he becomes a Christian, he must swear allegiance to a tribe and joins what he calls "The Children of the Tribe of Zambe," as he calls Cod. "There is no change from the old to the new more striking than the marriage palavers," said Miss Mackenzie. "These palavers go forward under the eaves of the house by day, beside the palaver-house fire at night.

Fathers and brothers orate and gesticulate; girls are sounded as to their preferences and are suddenly and.