A few months ago, while discussing with some elderly Matabele Natives the subject of miscegenation in South Africa generally one of the old men voiced the opinion of the meeting thus: 

“White people do what they like, they take what they like, and when they like certain girls they take them, and what can we say?  And, after all, why should they not do so?  Everything belongs to them, we are their people, our girls belong to them, the white people only take what is theirs to take.”

“But,” I interpolated, “white men do not take the girls away from you, it is the girls themselves who leave their own kind and go to the white men.”

“No,” he replied, “I say they take the girls because they know as well as we do that women—­all women—­will always go where they can live with ease and have plenty and be without work, and this they can do when they go to the white man, whereas with us they must work.  Therefore I say that the white men take the girls away from us, but I do not say that they do wrong so long as they only play with them and have no children by them, for it is the manner of all the world that men and women come together and no law can be made to stop them from doing so, but the white men do wrong when they allow the black women to have children by them because such children grow up without proper homes, and that is very sad and wrong.”

I think the average white man, whatever his own opinion may be on this matter, will acknowledge that there is clear thought and strong common-sense in the old man’s dictum, and this old man is an ordinary raw Native, without any European education.

My good friend, Mahlabanyane, is a typical Tebele of the old school.  In his youth he accompanied the hunter Selous on many wanderings, and he never tires of telling of the ways and habits of the game and wild animals he has seen and shot.  One day he told me that he had observed all the wild animals of Rhodesia, big and small, and that he had examined them all after they had been killed.  He had come to the conclusion, he said, that many of the bigger animals were related to one another in some wonderful way, and that they had probably come out of the earth, all alike, and had then afterwards become different, “as people do when they separate and live always by themselves away from other people,” he added.

“Look at the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and the wild pig,” he said, “they must at one time have been one kind; their teeth are alike, and none of them chew the cud.  I think they must be cousins to one another, and, one time, perhaps, they were brothers.”

Leaving aside the question of the absolute correctness of the old man’s observation there can be no doubt that we have here a thinker who, being struck with the physiological similarity of some animals is attempting to account for the fact, and does so along the lines of Darwin and his predecessors, but without any of the facts and theories that were recorded before they began their labours.  I asked the old fellow if he had ever heard Selous talk about this matter, and he said he had not; the idea, he said, had come out of his own head.