Word: lobagola
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...Ondo bush, hinterland of Dahomey, in western Africa. His people, according to legend, left Palestine after Roman Titus' sack of Jerusalem (A. D. 70), fled to Morocco, to Timbuktu and farther. There, swallowed up by African natives, they still remained a Jewish sect, continued Jewish rites. Says LoBagola: they carry out the ceremony of circumcision to the letter, "although not in the same way as in Palestine today. Our rabbis permit us to use only our teeth and fingernails for the observance." LoBagola's people speak "a dialect of Arabic, mixed a great deal with Hausa, Yoruba...
When Author LoBagola was seven, he and 13 other boys (the oldest n) wan- dered too far from the village, got lost, after 45 days came to the sea. There they saw a steamship, went out to it in a canoe, clambered aboard. LoBagola wandered down to the engine room. When the warning siren blew, it so terrified the little black boys on deck that they jumped over the rail, were all drowned or killed by sharks. LoBagola, locked in a cabin, was carried to Scotland, a savage little animal who' would not wear clothes, bit people who tried...
When Traveler LoBagola, n, returned home, he was received but with suspicion. For transgressing a taboo (insolence to his elder brother) he was beaten on the soles of his feet by seven people, considered himself lucky to escape so lightly. Then after 14 months' preparation he was married to six girls at once. But Gooma, his favorite bride, broke a terrible taboo at' the wedding: embraced him in public. She was unsexed, had her left breast cut off, was sent to the King's bodyguard of Amazons. By his other wives LoBagola became the father...
Three times LoBagola returned to his Scotch family. His native village became more and more foreign .to him: finally he left it altogether, came to the U. S. With no sense of the value of money, he wa usually broke, in England was once jaile< for theft. He worked in an automobil factory, in vaudeville, as a bootblack. During the War he served in the British army in Palestine, Egypt...
...Author. Short, stocky, gleaming-eyed, with black mustache, frizzy white hair, Bata Kindai Amgoza Ibn LoBagola looks like a stout little Jew in blackface...