Would you kill a rat for it's skin?

"He stopped mentioning what a good shot she was and moved on to the subject of whether you should kill a rat for it's skin or kill a rat for being a rat. Whatever that may meant. Tata Ndu said if it runs in a rat's skin it is a rat."

This quote is said by Rachel when the village is having a meeting on whether they will allow Leah to shoot her bow and arrow when the whole village goes hunting. The rat they're talking about is an obvious metaphor meaning should you judge someone for what they look like or judge them based on how they act. They are at first talking about Leah. Anatole says that you should judge someone for "being a rat", in other words, for how they act. He says that if she's a good shot, then they should let her shoot. But Tata Ndu says that both are the same thing and that there is no way that a girl can shoot with the men. "If it runs in a rat's skin it is a rat." There is no one or the other.

Tata Ndu wasn't just refering to Leah being a girl either; he was refering to her being a white foreigner. In his mind, all white people are bad. They can't just leave the congo alone. From his limited point of view, there is no such thing as a white person that isn't corrupt.

All in all, Anatole and Tata Ndu couldn't come to an agreement, so they ended up having a vote (Leah won.) This in itself is ironic because the whole idea of a vote is a white man's invention. In Kilanga, everyone had to agree on something before a decision was made so the idea of majority rules was new and foreign (which in the elder's minds made is bad.) Just by having the vote showed that the white people were succeeding in taking over the Congo which is the last thing Tata Ndu wanted. This point was driven home when the village voted, by majority, that Leah should participate.

I found this quote to be so significant because it really showed the first real influence that the white foreigners had on this small congolese village. By just changing one thing, their government, everything slowly began to unravel, whether they tried to stop it or not. It's as if the Belgian and American ideals had seeped into the minds of each leader around the country, including Tata Ndu.