Page:Plunder (Perlman).djvu/30

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made beasts of us. By brute force they have deprived us of our humanity--they want to think of us as spiritually lower beings.

EDWARD

You're going nuts, Pretoria! You won't tie me into that racial riot!

CHUANA

What had you or Moses Burumba done to them?

PRETORIA

I was only a girl then, a girl with all of life in front of me. Edward promised me everything I had ever dreamed of.

MOKSA

Perhaps men like Burumba remind them that beneath our outward appearance we are still men, whereas beneath theirs, they are beasts. This is a knowledge they cannot stomach. They hate us for it. The more we become what they make us, the more they hate us.

CHUANA

They will not rest until they have killed all of us.

MOKSA

If they kill us they will have no one to hate. For centuries the Europeans crowded men into stinking ships and sold them in America like dogs, pigs and horses. They judged men by strength, by age, by tricks. After doing this to men the Americans learned to hate them so fiercely that one forgot there was still a human spirit in men who hated this way. You see, it is themselves they turned into wild beasts, and they hated those responsible for it. I had thought their hatred died down