The Rate, However, In
Which The People Here Will Perish By The Next Famine, Or Be Exported
By Juma And Others, Will, We Fear, Depopulate Those Parts Which We
Have Just Described As Crowded With People.
Hunger will ere long
compel them to sell each other.
An intelligent man complained to us
of the Arabs often seizing slaves, to whom they took a fancy, without
the formality of purchase; but the price is so low - from two to four
yards of calico - that one can scarcely think this seizure and
exportation without payment worth their while. The boats were in
constant employment, and, curiously enough, Ben Habib, whom we met at
Linyanti in 1855, had been taken across the Lake, the day before our
arrival at this Bay, on his way from Sesheke to Kilwa, and we became
acquainted with a native servant of the Arabs, called Selele
Saidallah, who could speak the Makololo language pretty fairly from
having once spent some months in the Barotse Valley.
From boyhood upwards we have been accustomed, from time to time, to
read in books of travels about the great advances annually made by
Mohammedanism in Africa. The rate at which this religion spreads was
said to be so rapid, that in after days, in our own pretty extensive
travels, we have constantly been on the look out for the advancing
wave from North to South, which, it was prophesied, would soon reduce
the entire continent to the faith of the false prophet.
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