Congo Christians

As a Sunday school prize little Catharine Mabie won a booklet which told the pathetic story of an African slave girl. From that time forward, it was her ambition to bring Christianity to Africa's heathen. Under the auspices of the Baptist missions society, she set out in 1898 to fight fever and fetish in the Belgian Congo.

Forty-three years later, leaving behind her enough native schools, dispensaries, and simple Christian faith to do credit to half a dozen missionaries, cheerful, chunky Dr. Mabie retired. Last week, at 74, she was back in Leopoldville. The occasion: the first West Central African Missionary Conference to be held since 1928. Said Old-Congo-Hand Mabie tartly: "I am here to deal with missionaries who do not get on with their colleagues. The committee tells me that such a talk is needed at many stations. ... I have often wondered if young Timothy did not have his bad days with Paul, his senior missionary."

Huff-Puff Parable. At Leopoldville, Dr. Mabie joined an assemblage of 200-odd delegates (American, British, Scandinavian, French, Belgian, Portuguese, Swiss and native) sweltering in a cluster of 22 tar-papered U.S. Army hospital buildings. In Babel-like confusion, conferees struggled with Christian heroism to meet a program of four daily sessions, crammed with as many as 19 papers at a single session.

Off to a sludgy start, the conference finally picked up speed, reached some decisions : to concentrate on raising the family status of African women; to petition the Belgian Government for reinstatement of a law encouraging monogamy; to prepare the way for more conversions (of 11 million natives, Protestants and Catholics have thus far baptized about 10%) with an all-out drive for mass education.

When some delegates wrangled over how much education Africans could use, a tiny, coal-black Presbyterian pastor admonished them in parable. Said he:

"A poor woman without resources put a stone in the pot to feed her children, telling the kids to collect firewood and huff-puff for boiling. The kids did. The kids asked for food, and Mama said, 'Wait, wait and huff-puff more,' and the kids did. Later the kids poked the stone with a stick and found it very hard. The kids told Mama, 'You've said wait, wait and we are hungry.' So saying, they ran away, found food and never returned.

"You missionaries had better be careful with Africans. They ask you for education and you have given them stones. Unless you feed your children they will run away [to Catholic missions]."

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