DR. LIVINGSTONE

Waka Maori, Volume 10, Issue 9, 5 May 1874, Page 106

DR. LIVINGSTONE

(Continued from the Waka of 21st April, 1874.) In our last we left Dr. Livingstone and his party at Bamangwato. Leaving that place on the 28th of January, 1853, they passed over much parched-up country, burning sandy plains, and salt-pans, where

the little water obtainable was so nauseous as to be almost undrinkable. They dug out several wells, and on each occasion they "had to wait a day or two till sufficient water flowed in to allow their cattle to slake their thirst. Their progress was therefore slow. Herds of animals stood for days on the widespread flats around them, looking wistfully towards the wells for a share of the nasty water. To the north of a place called Kamakama they entered a dense mphonono bush, which required the constant application "of the axe to make a passage for the wagons. The elephant feeds much upon the bark of the mohonono tree in this forest. In the month of March every man of the party, except Livingstone and a Bakwain lad, was laid" low by fever. They were accordingly brought to a stand for a few- days, during which the lad looked after the cattle, while Livingstone attended to the patients. At length, by making beds in the wagons for their worst cases, they managed to move slowly on. Thev frequently got entangled with trees, both standing and fallen, and the labour of cutting their way was more severe than ordinary; but, notwithstanding an immense amount of work, Livingstone's health continued good. As they proceeded north, the country became lovely. The grass was green, and often higher than the wagons, and the vines festooned the trees. The hollows contained large patches of water. Next came watercourses., which now resembled small rivers, and were twenty yards broad and four deep ; and the further they went, the broader and deeper they grew. The elephants wading in them had made numbers of holes, in which "the oxen floundered desperately. Their wagon pole was broken, and they were compelled to work up to their waists in water for three or four hours. The great quantity of water through which they had passed was pare of the annual inundation of the Chobe. They arrived at last at the Sanshureh, which is only one of the branches of the Chobe which carry off its overflowings to the south-east. It was nevertheless a large deep river, many places with reeds, and having hippopotami in it. You remember the description of " behemoth," or hippopotamus, in Job: "He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed and fens. The shady trees cover him with their shadow : the willows of the brook compass him round about." This river presented an insuperable barrier to their further progress; therefore they drew up under a magnificent baobab tree, and proceeded to search for a passage. They made many attempts to get over, in the hope of reaching some of the Makololo on the Chobe. At length, after several days of fruitless effort, the Bushmen, who had joined their party a few days before, became tired of the work and slipped away by night. Dr. Livingstone then, taking with him one of the strongest of his still weak companions, crossed the river in a pontoon, which he carried' with him in one of the wagons. After wading and paddling about for several days amongst reeds, and bramble, which severely lacerated their legs, they at last succeeded in reaching the Chobe River, and, after paddling on its waters from midday till they perceived, on its north bank, the "village ok a chief named Moremi, one of the Makololo, whose acquaintance Livingstone had made -on a former visit. Next day they returned in canoes across the flooded lands

to their wagons, and found that in their absence the men had allowed the cattle to wander into a small patch of wood infected by tsetse. Through this carelessness they lost ten fine oxen. After a few days some of the head men of the Makololo came down with a large party, from a settlement called Linyanti, to conduct them over the river. They took the wagons to pieces, and carried them across on canoes lashed together. They then travelled in a north-west direction towards Linyanti, the capital town of the Makololo, where they arrived on the 23rd of May, 1853. _ The whole population of Linyanti, numbering some six or seven thousand, turned out to see the wagons in motion.. Sekeletu, the chief then in power, received them in royal style. He was not so able a man as his father Sebituane, but equally friendly to the English. He was about eighteen years of age, and of a very light-coloured skin, the distinguishing mark of the Makololo, the other tribes on the rivers being quite black. The women long for children of light colour so much that they sometimes chew the bark of a certain tree in the hope that it will have that effect. Sebituane installed his daughter, Mamochisane, into the chieftainship long before his death, and, to prevent her having a superior in a husband, he told her all the men were hers; that she might take any one, but ought to keep none. The Makololo have a saying that " the tongues o£ women cannot be governed;" and as Mamochisane acted up to her father's advice in her marital arrangements, the women made her miserable by their remarks. One paramour she selected, they called her " wife;" and her son "the child of Mamochisane's wife." Her position was so distasteful to her that, when Sebituane was dead, she declared she would never consent to govern the Makololo while she had a brother alive. Sekeletu wished her to retain the authority ; but in an assembly convened to discuss the question, she stood up and addressed her brother with a womanly gush of tears : " I have been a chief only because my father wished it. I always would have preferred to be married and have a family like other women. Tou, Sekeletu, must be chief and build up our father's house." And so he became chief. "While Dr. Livingstone was at Linyanti in 1353, a half-caste Portuguese slave-trader paid it a visit. He had no merchandise, and pretended that his object was to enquire what sort of goods were necessary for the market. Sekeletu presented him with an elephant's tusk and an ox; and when he had departed about fifty miles to the westward, he carried off an entire village of the Bakalahari belonging to the Makololo. He had a number of armed slaves

with, him; and as all the villagers—men, women, and children—were removed, and the fact was unknown until a considerable time afterwards, it was not certain whether he obtained his object by violence or bv promises. Mpepe, a rival candidate for the chieftainship, favoured these slave-traders. A party of them, under the leadership of a native Portuguese, had erected a stockade of considerable size to the north of Linyanti, where they carried on the abominable traffic in human beings. Mpepe fed them with the cattle of Sekeletu, and formed a plan of raising himself, by means of their fire-arms, to be the head of the Makololo. The usual policy of slave-traders is to side with the strongest party in a tribe, and get well paid by captures made from the weaker faction. Long secret conferences were held by these dealers in men and their rebel ally ; and it was agreed that Mpepe should cut down Sekeletu the first time they met. Some of the party divulged the plot, and Sekeletu, resolving to be beforehand with him, immediately sent some persons to seize him, and he was led out a mile and speared. On Dr. Livingstone explaining to Sekeletu that he wished him and his people to become Christians, he said he did not want to learn to read the Book ; he was " afraid it might make him change his heart, and be content with one wife, like Sechele." He wanted, he said, five wives at least. The Makololo ladies cut their woolly hair short, and delight in having their whole person shining with butter. Their dress is a kilt reaching to the knees ; its material is soft ox hide. The hide is prepared by being stretched in the sun and dried. It is then shaved with small adzes on the fleshy side until the skin is left quite thin. A quantity of , brain and some thick milk are then smeared over it. It is next scraped with an instrument made of iron spikes tied round a piece of wood, so_ that the points only project beyond the wood. Milk or butter is applied to it again, and it forms a garment nearly as soft as cloth. The ornaments most coveted by the women are large brass anklets, and armlets of brass or ivory. Strings of beads are hung round the neck. They frequently used to ask Dr. Livingstone for his looking-glass; and the remarks they made while he was engaged in reading and apparently not attending to them, were very amusing. One would say, "Is that me?" Another, " What a big mouth I have !" IC My ears are as big as pumpkin leaves ;" "I have no chin at all;" " See how my head shoots up in the middle." As they spoke, they laughed vociferously at their own jokes. One man went to view himself in the glass when he thought Dr. Livingstone was asleep, and, after twisting his mouth about in various directions, remarked to himself: "People say I am ugly, and how very ugly I am indeed ! " On the 30th of May, Dr. Livingstone was seized

with fever for the first time. At the end of a month he had recovered, and he then left Linyanti for the purpose of ascending from Sesheke a great river called Leeambye or Zambesi, tate tribes inhabiting the country between Linyanti and Sesheke, and on the banks of the great Biver Zambesi, are all black, and are called Makalaka. They were conquered by the Makololo under Sebituane, and they now all paid tribute to his son Sekeletu in corn, fruits, spears, honey, canoes, paddles, tobacco, prepared skins, ivory, and a great variety of other matters. These things the chief divides amongst the people, retaining a small portion only for his own share. The Makololo are distinguished from the Makalaka principally by the colour of their skin, which is very light, almost as fair'as that of a half-caste. They treat the conquered Makalaka with great kindness, as if they were one people. Sebituane used to say, " All are children of the chief." On leaving Linyanti, Dr. Livingstone was accompanied by Sekeletu and many of the under chiefs and their attendants. "It was pleasant," he says, "to look back upon the long extended line of our attendants, as it twisted and bent according to the curves of the footpath. Some had caps made of lions' manes ; others, the white ends of ox-tails on their heads, or great bunches of black ostrich feathers, which waved in the wind." The common men acted as porters; the gentlemen walked with a small club of rhinoceros horn in their hands, and had servants to bear their shields ; the battle-axe or fighting men carried their own. They passed through prodigious herds of antelopes of various kinds on their way. The antelope is a genus of quadrupeds, intermediate between the deer and the goat. When the party arrived at any village, the whole of the people turned out to welcome the chief Sekeletu;. waving their hands after the fashion of the Maoris, and calling out "Great lion!" "Great chief!" &c. At length they reached a part above Sesheke called Katonga, where there was a village belonging to a man named Sekhosi. The river at this place was not less than six hundred yards wide. Several days were spent here in collecting canoes from different villages for the purpose of ascending the river. Having at last collected a fleet of thirtythree canoes, and about one hundred and sixty men, they "began to ascend the river. In paddling, the men stand upright, and keep the-stroke with great precision. The canoes are flat-bottomed. The country through which they were passing had never been looked upon by an European before. This magnificent river is often more than a mile broad, and adorned with many islands from three to five miles in length, which at a little distance seem great masses of sylvan vegetation reclining on the bosom of the glorious stream, with the lofty palmyra towering far above, and casting its feathery foliage against a cloudless sky. The banks of the river are equally covered with forest down to the edge of the water. The adjacent country is undulating, and abounds in elephants and other large game. There are rapids and cataracts in some parts of the river, and in one place our travellers had to convey their canoes more than a mile by land. For many miles below the G-onye falls, the channel is narrowed to a hundred yards between high rocky banks, and at

the times of the inundation of the river, the water rises fifty or sixty feet between these banks, or cliffs. P art J P ass ed up the river, the inhabitants of the different villages turned out to present Sekeletu with food and skins as their tribute. At length they arrived at the Barotse Valley. The forest here opened out and stretched away on either side, leaving an open valley some thirty miles wide and one hundred miles long, with the Leeambye winding gently in the middle. The people inhabiting this valley are called the Barotse, all subjects of Sekeletu. The valley is inundated annually by the Leeambye, exactly as Lower Egypt is inundated by trie Eiver jS"ile, and is extremely fertile in consequence The villages of the Barotse are built on artificial mounds, which, during the inundation, look like little islands m the surrounding waters. The soil is extremely fertile, and produces two crops of grain in a year. The Barotse say, "Here hunger is notknown." There is abundance of high grass, and the large herds of cattle yield the natives a copious supply of milk. l This was the first visit Sekeletu had made to these parts since he attained the chieftainship, and the persons who had taken part with his rival Mpepe were in great terror. The father of Mpepe had joined with another man in counselling Mamochisane to put Sekeletu to death, and marry Mpepe. On the arrival of the party with Dr. Livingstone at the town where these two conspirators lived, they were seized by Sekeletu's followers and cast into the river. Naliele is the capital town of the Barotse in this valley. It also is erected on an eminence, thrown up by a former chief named Santuru, and which took many years to complete. The natives cultivate great quantities of food of various descriptions, have in addition wild fruits and water-fowl, and plenty of fish in the river. No part, however, of this district is exempt from fever. With a view of discovering a healthy locality for forming a mission station, Dr. Livingstone left Sekeletu at Naliele, and started to make a complete examination of the Barotse country. Sekeletu furnished him with men, and they ascended the river and visited a number of villages, and examined various rivers which flowed into the Leeambye. They were kindly received everywhere by the'inhabitants, but failed to discover a healthy place for a settlement; so they returned down the river to Sekeletu, who accompanied them back to Sesheke, and from thence to his capital town Linyanti. The Makololo were eager to open up a direct trade with the sea coast, and Dr. Livingstone felt that no permanent elevation of a people could be effected without commerce. He had heard from a tribe called Mambari that many English lived at Loanda, on the west coast, and thither he prepared to go. The three servants he had brought from Kuruman had frequent relapses of the fever, and Were helpless ; so he allowed them to return south. The fever had caused considerable weakness in his own frame. He was frequently seized with giddiness, and, if he did not catch hold, of some support, he fell heavily to the ground. He had now with him twenty-seven men belonging

to various tribes, who were appointed by Sekeletu to accompany him. The Makololo were fearful that, in the event of Dr. Livingstone's death, they would be blamed by the Europeans for permitting him to go away into an unknown country of enemies. He told them he would leave a book with Sekeletu which would explain all that had happened up to the time of his departure. He left his wagon and the most o£ his goods in the charge of the Makololo, taking with him only a small tent and a few necessaries and five guns, including a rifle for his own use. Thus equipped he again started from the town of Linyanti, on the 11th of November, 1853, accompanied by Sekeletu and his principal men, to embark on the Chobe. But we must leave the account of this till our next issue. [We stated at the commencement of this history that Dr. Livingstone's friends in England did not fully credit the report of his death. They thought it might have been concocted by the natives, as was the case on a previous occasion. By the last telegrams, however, we learn that his body has been conveyed to England, and, on the 18th of April, interred in "Westminster Abbey—a very ancient and magnificent church, the last resting-place of the Kings, Queens, and great men of England for ages past. The Queen sent a beautiful wreath to be placed on the coffin, and she has granted a pension of £I,OOO to his children. Livingstone's two sons were amongst the pallbearers.]