BACK FROM THE WILDS

Otago Witness, Issue 3148, 15 July 1914, Page 3

BACK FROM THE WILDS

DAN CRAWFORD AT AUCKLAND. AUTHOR OF “THINKING BLACK.” (Fbou Our Own Correspondent. 1 AUCKLAND, June M. A sturdy, middle-aged Scotchman, with thinking brow and penetrating yet kindly eyes, attracted attention as the passengers .of the steamer Marama lined the rail on her arrival from Vancouver this morning. He was one of the first to land- and the athletic gait which brought him down the gangway proclaimed him as a man of habitual energy. This was Dan Crawford, the worldfamous . missionary explorer. He has made a detour from England and America, in order to visit New Zealand and Australia on his way back to the dark regions of Central Africa;, towards the lighting of which he is doing a noble "work. Mr Crawford does not readily talk about himself, but to a Star reporter he made some modest references to the grand receptions which have been accorded him/ and Mrs Crawford during the year’s furlough that took them to England and America. With a complaint about the stiffness of his collar, one of which he has not worn for 23 years, and with his feet resting on the table, Mr Crawford laughingly explained how life in the wdlds had developed the neglige air, and enabled him to fully appreciate colonial ways. The visitor is perhaps best known as the author of “ Thinking Black.’’ In explaining the why of the story, Mr Crawford said that he resolved to plunge in among the natives, to live with them in their own dirty little hamlets, and to get to the back of the black man’s brain. The inability of the white man to think as the black man, and vice versa, wss at the back of all the inter-racial trouble, even in cannibalism. The African negro had method in his madness. ‘‘ Were I to tell my Africans,” said the visitor, “ of the hundreds of putrifying dead bodies which were lying in the camps while i was in Mexico a few weeks ago, the poor old cannibals would shake their heads and say, ‘ Shikami ya nyoka wi paya wi paya ne kudia ya,’’ which means: ‘Oh, the venomous . hatred of the snake; thou killest the white . man, and thou eatest not what thou killest.’ ” Mr Crawford added that the cannibal only killed for honest beef steak purposes. He ate men because he thought that man alone was most careful of all. He ate and believed in the native adage, “ Eat man and you are doubly man.” An African nigger would not eat a chicken because he regarded it as a domestic scavenger. The speaker had made up his mind never to come out of Africa, but a chance circumstance of political moment had necessitated a visit to England. He had regarded this tour as the tragic chance of his lifetime, for he knew that he would never come back. _ . “ I am going to Australia, ” added this quaint man from the wilds, “ and then good-bye to the whole lot of you. I like you, but I don’t like your ways—just like the old Presbyterian gospel, “God loves the sinner, but he hates his sins.”