On Our
Promising To Rest A Little With Him On Our Return, He Gave Us About
Two Pecks Of Rice, And Three Guides To Conduct Us To A Subordinate
Female Chief, Nkwinda, Living On The Borders Of The Lake In Front.
The Ajawa, from having taken slaves down to Quillimane and
Mosambique, knew more of us than Katosa did.
Their muskets were
carefully polished, and never out of these slaver's hands for a
moment, though in the chiefs presence. We naturally felt
apprehensive that we should never see Katosa again. A migratory
afflatus seems to have come over the Ajawa tribes. Wars among
themselves, for the supply of the Coast slave-trade, are said to have
first set them in motion. The usual way in which they have advanced
among the Manganja has been by slave-trading in a friendly way.
Then, professing to wish to live as subjects, they have been welcomed
as guests, and the Manganja, being great agriculturists, have been
able to support considerable bodies of these visitors for a time.
When the provisions became scarce, the guests began to steal from the
fields; quarrels arose in consequence, and, the Ajawa having
firearms, their hosts got the worst of it, and were expelled from
village after village, and out of their own country. The Manganja
were quite as bad in regard to slave-trading as the Ajawa, but had
less enterprise, and were much more fond of the home pursuits of
spinning, weaving, smelting iron, and cultivating the soil, than of
foreign travel. The Ajawa had little of a mechanical turn, and not
much love for agriculture, but were very keen traders and travellers.
This party seemed to us to be in the first or friendly stage of
intercourse with Katosa; and, as we afterwards found, he was fully
alive to the danger.
Our course was shaped towards the N.W., and we traversed a large
fertile tract of rich soil extensively cultivated, but dotted with
many gigantic thorny acacias which had proved too large for the
little axes of the cultivators. After leaving Nkwinda, the first
village we spent a night at in the district Ngabi was that of Chembi,
and it had a stockade around it. The Azitu or Mazitu were said to be
ravaging the country to the west of us, and no one was safe except in
a stockade. We have so often, in travelling, heard of war in front,
that we paid little attention to the assertion of Chembi, that the
whole country to the N.W. was in flight before these Mazitu, under a
chief with the rather formidable name of Mowhiriwhiri; we therefore
resolved to go on to Chinsamba's, still further in the same
direction, and hear what he said about it.
The only instrument of husbandry here is the short-handled hoe; and
about Tette the labour of tilling the soil, as represented in the
woodcut, is performed entirely by female slaves. On the West Coast a
double-handled hoe is employed. Here the small hoe is seen in the
hands of both men and women. In other parts of Africa a hoe with a
handle four feet long is used, but the plough is quite unknown.
In illustration of the manner in which the native knowledge of
agriculture strikes an honest intelligent observer, it may be
mentioned that the first time good Bishop Mackenzie beheld how well
the fields of the Manganja were cultivated on the hills, he remarked
to Dr. Livingstone, then his fellow-traveller - "When telling the
people in England what were my objects in going out to Africa, I
stated that, among other things, I meant to teach these people
agriculture; but I now see that they know far more about it than I
do." This, we take it, was an honest straightforward testimony, and
we believe that every unprejudiced witness, who has an opportunity of
forming an opinion of Africans who have never been debased by
slavery, will rank them very much higher in the scale of
intelligence, industry, and manhood, than others who know them only
in a state of degradation.
On coming near Chinsamba's two stockades, on the banks of the
Lintipe, we were told that the Mazitu had been repulsed there the day
before, and we had evidence of the truth of the report of the attack
in the sad sight of the bodies of the slain. The Zulus had taken off
large numbers of women laden with corn; and, when driven back, had
cut off the ears of a male prisoner, as a sort of credential that he
had been with the Mazitu, and with grim humour sent him to tell
Chinsamba "to take good care of the corn in the stockades, for they
meant to return for it in a month or two."
Chinsamba's people were drumming with might and main on our arrival,
to express their joy at their deliverance from the Mazitu. The drum
is the chief instrument of music among the Manganja, and with it they
express both their joy and grief. They excel in beating time.
Chinsamba called us into a very large hut, and presented us with a
huge basket of beer. The glare of sunlight from which we had come
enabled him, in diplomatic fashion, to have a good view of us before
our eyes became enough accustomed to the dark inside to see him. He
has a Jewish cast of countenance, or rather the ancient Assyrian
face, as seen in the monuments brought to the British Museum by Mr.
Layard. This form of face is very common in this country, and leads
to the belief that the true type of the negro is not that met on the
West Coast, from which most people have derived their ideas of the
African.
Chinsamba had many Abisa or Babisa in his stockade, and it was
chiefly by the help of their muskets that he had repulsed the Mazitu:
these Babisa are great travellers and traders.
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