The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1928, Page 183

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

183

may be sent on a visit to the town of his tribal
brother. But her children, born of whatever con-
nection, belong not to herself nor necessarily to
their father, but to the man who owns her; to her
own father or some other male guardian, if born
before marriage, and to her husband if born after
marriage. As she is not born to the possession of
her body, so she is not born to the possession of her
children. Women who have been sold from mar-
riage to marriage may leave little children at
every station of that aimless wandering. ‘Thus the
slave is branded on the heart.

The Things of Fetish.

“And it is by way of the heart that the woman
is slave to fetish. By her body she is slave to goods,
and alas! by the consent of her body, to sex. But
by her heart, — the pangs of it, its maternal pangs,
its hunger for permanent affections, its need to cast
anchor in some certain good, — by that she is slave
to fetish. ‘To keep her husband’s love, what love-
potions! 'T’o ease her jealousies, what evil charms!
To safeguard her little one, what plaitings of grass
anklets and bracelets, what desperate hopes tied up
in little amulets, in little things of magic!, And if
she die, this slave to fetish, they will tie a belt of
bells about her baby’s middle, and the sound of
these bells will continually drive away that maternal
spirit — still a slave.

The Slave’s Liberation.

“To such as these, in a very definite sense, Christ
is a Liberator. It is not for nothing that of the
women who have come under my hand many have
fastened with a peculiar tenacity on the verses that
say for them, ‘He has made the captives free’; “The
truth has made you free.’ ,

“This African woman has a bald knowledge of
her enslaved state. She is violent, undisciplined ;
her tongue is a fire and a sword; she is unmoral;
unreliable; but she is humble-minded. In the
Biblical sense this violent creature, caught in a net
of tattoo, bridled and belted with beads, collared and
- braceleted with brass, this woman — so harnessed
with barbarous ornament — is meek and poor in
spirit. She is poor in the most conscious and the
most pitiable sense. Christ’s act of redemption has
a tangible and obvious application to herself. I have
seen the first words of the Gospel arrest a young
N’tum woman so abruptly that you would have said
a hand had been laid upon her, and back of her
harness of tattoo and of beads her woman face, so

soft and mutable, was stricken to the most profound, -

the most personal, attention. That being, enslaved
to goods and sex and fetish, received, with what
astonishment, in that word of the Word of God, her
first intimation that there is any escape from the
prison of material circumstance. Until she heard that
word, she was never at any time conscious of a self
which could not be bought and sold. Until then she
had never conceived of a personal possession of any
sort, however humble, and how far she had been
from any ‘self’-possession. Never before had her
self been addressed. And in the moment of that
divine address there was a pause in her universe;
the things of the body were smitten to a perceptible
arrest. She had been grinding meal; her hand,
with the upper stone, lay idle on the nether stone;
her eyes were fixed; in all her hut nothing stirred
while that N’tum woman experienced the obscure
shock of her first spiritual summons.

Solidarity of Sex.

“To an extraordinary degree there is among the
Bulus a solidarity of sex. ‘God created all people of
two tribes, the women tell me, ‘the tribe of man and
the tribe of woman.’ The things of one tribe are
hidden from the other tribe. There is ‘a wisdom
of men and a wisdom of women,’ though the wisdom
of women is a small matter, a matter to laugh at
among men. And women, for all they have a house-
wifely and maternal contempt for men, yet are
humble before them, ashamed before them of their
age-old accumulation of wisdom, not displaying be-
fore them their little treasure of verity garnered
from their labors and their loves and their sorrows
‘since the birth of men.’ ‘I am as stupid as a hen,’
is the common feminine self-analysis.

In the Things of Labor.

“A peculiar shame attaches to the performance
of a woman’s work by a man; the division of labor
is determined by the most rigid custom. None but
women grind meal, none but men sew the strips of
beaten bark cloth into squares. And about every
handicraft of the tribes there is the law of sex and
the understood element of nobility or ignobility.
‘Am I a woman that I should bring in food from
the garden? I will starve first.’

“And if in the things of labor the customs of sex
are ‘very strong, much stronger are they in the
matter of fetish. Woe to those who are ignorant in
these matters, who confuse the food,. the acts, and
the liberties which are the privileges of men with
the food and the acts and the liberties which are the
forbidden things for women. It is a very literal

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