IN THE DARK CONTINENT

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2400, 4 March 1915, Page 3

IN THE DARK CONTINENT

A MISSIONARY'S STORY. _ Another interesting lecture on mission work in tlie Congo basin in Central Africa was delivered by Mr. J. A. Clarke in the Concert Chamber last night. Mr. Clarke had numbers of limelight views to-illustrate his story, and the views showed, as no words of his or any other narrator could have told, tho. marvellous ■ things that have been done by tho Christian missionaries in that heathen land. One story told by Mr. Clarke will serve to show what an nntilled field 'it is where the missionaries go to work. The missionaries come from over the sea, and they are white. The natives refuse to believe there is any land over the seabeyond their vision, for they say they have seen the sut go, down in the sea, and from beyond the place where the sun goes down no man. may come. They say that the missionaries "bob up" out of the 6ea, using the same word as they use m describing ' the "hippo." rising to the' surface to breathe. They ask a missionary, "How long since you bobbed up?" And they say further that it is because the mis-, sionaries have stayed so long under the sea that they are white! Mr. Clarke spoge olso of tho awful ravages of tho sleeping sickness, which, in his own experience, had wiped out every soul in hundreds of villages. One of the tasks of the missionaries was to move the villages back from the shores of big rivers, where the fly which carries the sickness is always most numerous, into healthier lands in the interior. One word he had for 'the decadence of the ultra-civilised as manifested in.freak dances. "All your new-fangled dances, the tango and such like, really oome from Africa," he said, "so that in adopting, these dances you are really going back." He also declared that spiritualism and beliefs and practices of the sort had their counterpart in the demonology of the heathen tribes of Darkest Africa.

Mr. Clarke has an interesting story to tell of Central African experiences: A hearty welcome is extended to all to hear him at the Gospel Hall. Vivian Street, to-night at 7.45, and in the Town Hall Concert Chamber on Friday night at 8 o'clock, when a. selection of slides from photos taken by himself in the Dark Continent will be shown.