Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, Volume 2Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
History
Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, Volume 2
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Africa, West -- Description and travel; Congo River -- Description and travel; Ethnology -- Africa, West
celebrating mass. If the governor is negligent in warning the
people that a missioner has arrived, "he will receive a deserved
punishment, for we make it our business to get such a person
removed from his employment, even within his year,"--a system of
temporal penalties affixed to spiritual lâches not unknown
elsewhere. The following anecdote will show the style of reproof.
Father Benedict da Belvedere, a Neapolitan who had preached at
Rome and was likewise confessor to the nuns, heard the chief
elector, one of the principal nobles, asking the heretical
question, "Are we not all to be saved by baptism?" A "sound box
on the ear" was the reply, and it led to a tumult. The head of
the mission sent for the offended dignitary, and offered him
absolution if he would sincerely recant his words and beg pardon
of the churchman militant. The answer was, "That would be
pleasant indeed; he was the aggressor, yet I must make the
excuse! Must I receive a blow, and, notwithstanding, be thought
to have done wrong?" But the peace-maker explained that the blow
was given not to offend, but to defend from hearkening to
heresies; that it was administered, moreover, out of paternal
affection by a spiritual father, whom it did not mis-become, to a
son who was not dishonoured by receiving it. The unfortunate
elector not only suffered in the ear, but was also obliged to
make an abject apology, and to kiss the offender's feet before he
was re-admitted to communion. At Maopongo the priests lost favour
with the court and the women by whipping the queen, and, by the
same process they abated the superhuman pretensions of the
blacksmith.
When the chiefs and princes were so treated, what could the
subjects expect? The smallest ecclesiastical faults were punished
with fining and a Talmudic flogging, and for disobedience, a man
was sent "bound to Brazil, a thing they are more than ordinarily
afraid of." A man taking to wife, after the Mosaic law, a woman
left in widow-hood by his kinsman, is severely scourged, and the
same happens to a man who marries his cousin, besides being
deprived of a profitable employment. Every city and town in Sonho
had a square with a central cross, where those who had not
satisfied the Easter command or who died unconfessed were buried
without privilege of clergy. The missioners insist upon their
privilege of travelling free of expense, and make a barefaced use
of the corvée. The following is the tone of a mild address to the
laity: "Some among you are like your own maccacos or monkeys
amongst us who, keeping possession of anything they have stolen,
will sooner suffer themselves to be taken and killed, than to let
go their prey. So impure swine wallow in their filth and care not
to be cleansed."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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