ing. Unwittingly summer before last I tore his soul in two.
His reason knows that I am right, but his heart denies his
reason. He was nephew and therefore by African custom heir
of a great chief who for thirty years, back to the time of
Stanley, has co-operated with white Belgium. As a child of
five, young Panda was brought home from the Belgian Congo
by a Belgian official and given to his maiden sister. This sister
reared the little black boy as her own, nursed him, dressed him,
schooled him and defended against the criticism of her friends
his right to university training. She was his mother, his friend.
He loved her and revered her. She guided and loved him.
When the second Pan-African Congress came to Brussels it
found Panda leader of the small black colony there and spokesman for black Belgium. He had revisited the Congo and
was full of plans for reform. And he thought of the uplift
of his black compatriots in terms of reform. All this the
Pan-African Congress changed. First it brought on his head
a storm of unmerited abuse from the industrial press: we were
enemies of Belgium; we were pensioners of the Bolshevists;
we were partisans of England. Panda hotly defended us until
he heard our speeches and read our resolutions.
The Pan-African Congress revealed itself to him with a new and unexplicable program. It talked of Africans as intelligent, thinking, self-directing and voting men. It envisaged an Africa for the Africans and governed by and for Africans, and it arraigned white Europe, including Belgium, for nameless and deliberate wrong in Africa. Panda was perplexed and astonished; and then his white friends and white mother rushed to the defense of Belgium and blamed him for consorting with persons with ideas so dangerous and unfair to Belgium. He turned upon us black folk in complaining wrath. He felt in a sense deceived and betrayed. He considered us foolishly radical. Belgium was not perfect, but was far less blood guilty than other European powers. Panda continues to send me clippings and facts to prove this.
In this last matter he is in a sense right. England and France and Germany deliberately laid their shadow across Africa. Belgium had Africa thrust upon her. Bismarck in-
