The Temptation To Sell Their People Is Peculiarly Great, As
There Is But Little Ivory On The Hills, And Often The Chief Has
Nothing But Human Flesh With Which To Buy Foreign Goods.
The Ajawa
offer cloth, brass rings, pottery, and sometimes handsome young
women, and agree to take the trouble of carrying off by night all
those whom the chief may point out to them.
They give four yards of
cotton cloth for a man, three for a woman, and two for a boy or girl,
to be taken to the Portuguese at Mozambique, Iboe, and Quillimane.
The Manganja were more suspicious and less hospitable than the tribes
on the Zambesi. They were slow to believe that our object in coming
into their country was really what we professed it to be. They
naturally judge us by the motives which govern themselves. A chief
in the Upper Shire Valley, whose scared looks led our men to christen
him Kitlabolawa (I shall be killed), remarked that parties had come
before, with as plausible a story as ours, and, after a few days, had
jumped up and carried off a number of his people as slaves. We were
not allowed to enter some of the villages in the valley, nor would
the inhabitants even sell us food; Zimika's men, for instance, stood
at the entrance of the euphorbia hedge, and declared we should not
pass in. We sat down under a tree close by. A young fellow made an
angry oration, dancing from side to side with his bow and poisoned
arrows, and gesticulating fiercely in our faces.
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