This Would Not Have Been Felt
As So Great An Evil But That The Young Men Of Those Tribes, Anxious
To
obtain cattle, the only means of rising to respectability and importance
among their own people, were in the habit
Of sallying forth,
like our Irish and Highland reapers, to procure work in the Cape Colony.
After laboring there three or four years, in building stone dikes and dams
for the Dutch farmers, they were well content if at the end of that time
they could return with as many cows. On presenting one to their chief,
they ranked as respectable men in the tribe ever afterward. These volunteers
were highly esteemed among the Dutch, under the name of Mantatees.
They were paid at the rate of one shilling a day and a large loaf of bread
between six of them. Numbers of them, who had formerly seen me
about twelve hundred miles inland from the Cape, recognized me
with the loud laughter of joy when I was passing them at their work
in the Roggefelt and Bokkefelt, within a few days of Cape Town.
I conversed with them and with elders of the Dutch Church, for whom
they were working, and found that the system was thoroughly satisfactory
to both parties. I do not believe that there is one Boer,
in the Cashan or Magaliesberg country, who would deny that a law was made,
in consequence of this labor passing to the colony, to deprive these laborers
of their hardly-earned cattle, for the very cogent reason that,
"if they want to work, let them work for us their masters,"
though boasting that in their case it would not be paid for.
I can never cease to be most unfeignedly thankful that I was not born
in a land of slaves.
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