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.  We saw the man with his shoulder still dislocated.  Sebetuane was present at the fight, and had an exalted opinion of the power of white people ever afterwards.