Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case

Nobody cared that a small dissident group who had nothing to do with the local tribe sang their own hymns apart. Only the doctor, who had once worked in the Lower Congo, recognized them for what they were, trouble-makers from the coast more than a thousand kilometres away. It was unlikely that any of the lepers could understand them, so he let them be. The only sign of their long journey by path and water and road was an unfamiliar stack of bicycles up a side-path into the bush which he had happened to take that morning. ‘E ku Kinshasa ka bazeyi ko: E ku Luozi ka bazeyi ko….’ ‘In Kinshasa they know nothing: In Luozi they know nothing.’ The proud song of superiority went on: superiority to their own people, to the white man, to the Christian god, to everyone beyond their own circle of six, all of them wearing the peaked caps that advertised Polo beer. ‘In the Upper Congo they know nothing: In heaven they know nothing: Those who revile the Spirit know nothing: The Chiefs know nothing. The whites know nothing.’