IN SAVAGE LANDS

Hokitika Guardian, 15 November 1929, Page 7

IN SAVAGE LANDS

MISSIONARY'S EXPERIENCES

CHRISTCHURCH, November 13

A woman who preferred life for years in the midst of cannibals in xiusurveyed lands to a life of ease and luxury told her story to a large attendance at St. Albans Church of Christ, and gave further details to a “ Press ” reporter, in an inters iew last night. lie woman who made such a preference is .Miss 0. Yesbury, a missionary fjif the world-wide Evangelisation Crusade, an organisation commenced by a once world-famed cricketer —Mr C. T. Studd, of Cambridge University—with the definite object of penetrating with the Gospel to lands where it and white men had never entered.

Savage chiefs in Central Africa, whose claims to nobility largely varied with the number ,of wives they had—and not a few had as many as 1030 “ wives ” ! —were numbered amongst the queer personages Miss Yesbury interviewed as prospective new adherents of Christianity. The results have been so encouraging Miss Yesbury said, that once bloodthirsty cannibals now are evangelists themselves in many instances.

WOMEN MERELY CHATTELS. ■Glimpses of realities in Africa and amongst the wild Indians of Amazonia were furnished by Miss Yesbury’s picturesque descriptions and by lantern slides from actual photographs. Native women nnd girls had been simply the goods and chattels of the men, said Miss Yesbury, and their lives had been worth knives, a leopard skin, or a piece of “hippo” hide, and were bought and sold for those considerations. The aged had been—and were still being, where the missionaries had not yet been —turned into the forest to die or he eaten by lions. Humans had been preyed upon by humans, and eaten alive, arm by arm! Conditions are altering slowly but surely under the management of the missionaries. “Once you have heard the wail of a- dying heathen von would never forget it,” declared Miss Yesbury. “It- is absolutely impossible to describe the conditions the people are living under. There are many millions of women whose life is worth less than rust on the sword.”

A missionary’s lDfe is a strange mixture of occupations and greatly different from that commonly pictured as being merely preaching to hungry crowds of natives. Besides acting as preachers. however, missionaries in Central Africa and Amazonia, at least, act daily as composers,'teachers, bakers, cooks, gardeners, barbers, dentists, doctors, tailors, and tinkers. But the arts in which they must excel-are fishing and hunting, or the natives would ask where the missionaries were educated. For food on treks and other occasions the evangelists often martook of the native concoctions. Stew ala Central Africa consisted partly of snakes flesh, rats, and other delicacies.

Mud walls formed tire limits of elurreli, home, and social life in those villages where settlement had become established. 'Although they had lived in lion country teeming with poisonous snakes, ants, and other forms of vicious life, the missionaries had had no casualties, in spite of the fact that the mud houses were made without doors or windows.

M iss Yosbury, who is a young Englishwoman, born in London, has visited Australia, and is completing a lecture tour of New Zealand.