The Impatient
Spouses Had Therefore To Wait A Little Longer.
Some of them,
however, eloped with other men; the wife of Mantlanyane, for
instance, ran off and left his
Little boy among strangers.
Mantlanyane was very angry when he heard of it, not that he cared
much about her deserting him, for he had two other wives at Tette,
but he was indignant at her abandoning his boy.
CHAPTER VIII.
Life amongst the Makololo - Return journey - Native hospitality - A
canoe voyage on the Zambesi.
While we were at Sesheke, an ox was killed by a crocodile; a man
found the carcass floating in the river, and appropriated the meat.
When the owner heard of this, he requested him to come before the
chief, as he meant to complain of him; rather than go, the delinquent
settled the matter by giving one of his own oxen in lieu of the lost
one. A headman from near Linyanti came with a complaint that all his
people had run off, owing to the "hunger." Sekeletu said, "You must
not be left to grow lean alone, some of them must come back to you."
He had thus an order to compel their return, if he chose to put it in
force. Families frequently leave their own headman and flee to
another village, and sometimes a whole village decamps by night,
leaving the headman by himself. Sekeletu rarely interfered with the
liberty of the subject to choose his own headman, and, as it is often
the fault of the latter which causes the people to depart, it is
punishment enough for him to be left alone. Flagrant disobedience to
the chief's orders is punished with death. A Moshubia man was
ordered to cut some reeds for Sekeletu: he went off, and hid himself
for two days instead. For this he was doomed to die, and was carried
in a canoe to the middle of the river, choked, and tossed into the
stream. The spectators hooted the executioners, calling out to them
that they too would soon be carried out and strangled. Occasionally
when a man is sent to beat an offender, he tells him his object,
returns, and assures the chief he has nearly killed him. The
transgressor then keeps for a while out of sight, and the matter is
forgotten. The river here teems with monstrous crocodiles, and women
are frequently, while drawing water, carried off by these reptiles.
We met a venerable warrior, sole survivor, probably, of the Mantatee
host which threatened to invade the colony in 1824. He retained a
vivid recollection of their encounter with the Griquas: "As we
looked at the men and horses, puffs of smoke arose, and some of us
dropped down dead!" "Never saw anything like it in my life, a man's
brains lying in one place and his body in another!" They could not
understand what was killing them; a ball struck a man's shield at an
angle; knocked his arm out of joint at the shoulder; and leaving a
mark, or burn, as he said, on the shield, killed another man close
by.
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