The king, although he still practised rain-magic, had become familiar with some passages of Scripture, and said, with a sanctimonious air, “His ways are past finding out.”
But while Mr. Williams had been interpreting what I said to him, he had kept one eye fixed on his wife; and, observing to his disgust that she was almost falling from her seat in her drowsiness, he only waited until he thought I was not watching him, to give her such a tremendous poke, that she had a narrow escape of knocking her cup off the table with her forehead.
RAIN-DOCTORS.
I occupied all my spare time at Molopolole in exploring the neighbourhood, and procured some good additions to my collection. As zoological specimens, I obtained a very fine head of the Oryx capensis with long horns, a leopard skin, one of the Gueparda jubata, and several of the Hyrax. I also procured a skin of the Viverra Zivetta, which seems to be very rare, besides some of the Felis caligata. Mr. Williams brought me the carcase of a three-year-old caama-fox, that had on some previous occasion been caught in a trap and lost one of its hind paws; it had now been caught a second time, and more effectually. The Bakuena heights are the habitat of the beautiful klipp-springer; and in the country north of Molopolole, we for the first time came across elands and giraffes.
I was very much struck by the number of medium-sized birds of prey, such as sparrow-hawks, falcons, buzzards, and kites. Mr. Williams had killed as many of the kites as he could, on account of the depredations they made amongst his wife’s poultry. A great variety of owls, white owls, barn-owls, and small screech-owls likewise had their abode in the cliffs, and in the crevices of the rocks there were many sorts of mammalia and reptiles, snakes and lizards finding there a most congenial home. Insects, such as lepidoptera and flies, abounded in the luxuriant vegetation, and in the decaying trunks of trees. I also made a large gathering of beetles, spiders, and centipedes. I may say, without the least hesitation, that a student in almost any branch of natural history could hardly fail to make a visit to the Bakuena hills highly remunerative.
Here, just as on the Bamangwato heights, and other rocky ridges of the high plateau of Central South Africa in connexion with the Marico or Matabele mountain systems, we find either the steep, fissured slopes of table-hills, or table-lands studded with conical and isolated peaks. The ascent to this network of hills is effected by a wooded and sandy plain with a scarcely perceptible rise, and the descent is just as gradual to a shallow river-bed, beyond which rises again another similar ridge of heights. The geological composition of these highlands consists of granite, quartz-slate, trapdykes, veins of chalk, and ferruginous sandy clay. The vegetation is characterized by some gigantic aloes, which in places form regular groves.
In concluding my account of Molopolole, I may be allowed to introduce a brief notice of some of the religious and social customs of the Bechuanas generally. I obtained many details from the English missionaries, Messrs. Mackenzie, Hephrun, Price, Williams, Brown, and Webb; from the German missionary, Herr Jensen; and from several of the better educated Bechuanas themselves; and in the course of my three journeys into the interior, I was able to verify many particulars by my own observation.
In the strict sense of the word the Bechuanas, that is to say, the branches of that family in Central South Africa, cannot be said to have any religion at all; nevertheless the circumstance, that upon receiving their first instruction in Christianity, they at once applied to the Unseen God the designation of “Morimo,” without attaching any difference to the signification of the word, would lead to the inference that in bygone times they had rendered homage to some presumed divinity either visible or invisible. Another word, closely allied to Morimo, and not unfrequently heard in the vocabulary of the Bechuanas, is “Barimo,” by which they appear to signify the spirits of the departed. But although they cannot be said to have any actual religion, the mass of the population put a kind of faith in certain ceremonies, which amongst other people professing polytheism would be regarded as religious rites; they likewise avow a degree of veneration for certain animals, inasmuch as they will not kill them, eat them, nor use their skins. We find also that ceremonies such as these to which I refer are performed and inculcated by persons educated and set apart for the purpose, with the king, or if the king should be a Christian, with the heathen next in rank to him, at their head; thus forming a sort of society of priests, having a high priest, called nyaka or nyaga.
As long as the Bechuanas, though subdivided into several families, were united under a single sceptre, the right of kingship was hereditary in the Baharutse tribe; and subsequently the old royal family retained the prerogative of performing what might be called the sacerdotal part in the ceremonials. For a long while after the empire was broken up, and the various tribes had branched off—one to the north, others to the south, east, south-east, and south-west, forming larger or smaller independent states of their own—the ancient royal family was not only respected, but notwithstanding that their sovereign control was limited to the small clan from which they originally sprang, they still held the rank of high priests at all the great superstitious rites, so that even members of other reigning families, as well as the nyakas, would journey from the new states back to the court of the Baharutse to see the ceremonials duly performed by their former chief. Of late years, however, since the branch tribes have developed into important states, and many of their chiefs have become Christians, the custom has almost ceased; nevertheless the ancient royal family is always held in high veneration by the whole of the Bechuanas; and this, in spite of its members through mutual dissension having lost every vestige of power, and residing either as subjects of the Transvaal in and about the town of Linokana, or as subjects of Khatsisive in the town of Moshaneng. The present chief of the eastern Baharutse, and consequently the proper sovereign of the Bechuanas is a young man named Pilani.