The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1928, Page 88

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88

THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

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curious and perplexed to know why this particular
white man had come to his town. Many white men
had come before, and they always wanted some gain
or favor. Most of them wanted rubber or ivory.
The Bula Matadi, i. e., the Belgians, wanted to buy
rubber, ivory, and beeswax. Recently some of them
had built a boma at Kapanga, near by, and had
begun to collect taxes. Some of these white men
wanted also to be furnished with native women for
an indefinite period.

But this white man said that he did not want
to buy rubber, he did not want ivory, he had no
wish for native women, and he did not collect taxes.
What ax did he have to grind? It was true that
he said that he had come to tell them about Nzambi,

Service Held with Mwata Yamvo at Kapanga by Dr. Springer
when Chimbu and His Friend “Listened In.”

the great and good Spirit who had made heaven
and earth, but surely he must be on some other
errand.

“No,” emphatically asserted the white man as
he detected the veiled suspicion of the king. “We
have not come to get something, but to give some-
thing. This Nzambi, who made heaven and earth
and who also made you, loves you. He loves you
so much that He gave His Son to come down to
the earth to live, to teach, to heal, and at last to die
for you and for all men, and He has sent us to tell
you the good news. We have come with good words
this day from the loving Father of the spirits of all
men, and here is His Book, in which He has told
us many wonderful things about His love. And we
have already put some of these words into your own
language.”

The king bowed his head gravely. “Those are
good words, indeed, that you have spoken, but we
shall not be able to remember them,” he said at last.
“We want you to sit, kushakama, in our midst and
tell us the same good words every day, for our heads
are hard.”

The missionary shook his head sadly, “We can-
not stay now,” he said. “It will take us one moon
to return to Lukoshi, to the kraal of your subchief
Kazembe, where we abide. I cannot stay now, but
I will come again; and if I cannot come myself,
I will send some one else. Ovani? Do you hear?”

“Namva, I hear,” was the grave reply.

“And remember,” continued the missionary,
“Nzambi loves you, and He is your Father. I have
brought you good words that should make
your hearts glad this day.”

“Ah, those are good words indeed!”
repeated Chimbu as he and his friend
crawled out through the fence; “but we
know they cannot be true. We cannot be-
lieve that Nzambi loves us. It has never
been so told us by our fathers. Those
chindele, white men, are awful liars. But
those are good words, and I wish they
were true.”

So these two piccaninnies passed out
unseen and unnoticed by the two white
people and, for the most part, by the crowd
of natives. . They were only small boys.
They picked up their bamboo sticks and
were soon at play as if nothing unusual had
happened; but the message that they had
just heard was like new seed planted in their
hearts and destined, because tended and cared
for, to bear fruit many hundredfold.

A year passed, and then another missionary
came, Mr. Heinkel, who told the same good news.
There were with him two sturdy sons of Africa;
one was Kayeka from Mwata Yamvo’s own tribe,
who had been taken as a slave to Angola and had
been converted there, and whose twelve years of
praying had finally brought us as missionaries to
his tribe; the other was Jacob Maweni, a Zulu, who
had come from the Far South as a missionary to this
tribe. These natives also preached that God loves
people and that they knew His love in their own
hearts.

The yearning that had been stirred in those
young hearts for the living God was greatly
deepened.

A year after, Mr. Heinkel had to leave on ac-
count of his health, and then Dr. Piper came with

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