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. We saw the man with his shoulder still dislocated.
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