The valley of the Bamangwato highland is five or six miles wide, and overgrown with grass and bushwood; it is partly cultivated, and at its point of union with the Shoshong pass it is speckled over with some hundreds of thatched cylindrical huts, about twelve feet in diameter, and rarely more than seven feet in height, some of them overgrown with the rough dark foliage of the calabash-gourd.
Approaching the town from the south, we noticed three farmsteads and five detached brick houses about 600 yards before we entered the place. These houses were built with gables, and had much more of an European than of a Bamangwato aspect. We learnt that they were called “the white man’s quarters,” being occupied during part of the year by English merchants, who come to transact business with the natives, and, in years gone by, supplied provisions to the hunters, to be paid for on their return in ivory and ostrich-feathers. Amongst the firms of this character, the most important, I believe, was that of Messrs. Francis and Clark, but, like other inland traders, they must latterly have experienced very unfavourable times.
Hitherto the king has refused to allow Europeans to purchase any land, but has permitted them to occupy the sites of their premises gratuitously.
The chief thing that struck me as we approached the town was the number of residences that had been abandoned, although in many of these repairs were now going on. In one place I observed some women daubing clay with their bare hands over a wall six feet high, made of stakes as thick as their arms driven about a foot into the ground, and fastened together with grass; while close by was a lot of children, varying from six to ten years old, busily preparing the material for their mothers’ use; these youngsters evidently enjoyed their occupation vastly; they were dressed in nothing beyond their little aprons of beads or spangles, and accomplished their task by treading down the red clay in a shallow trench, chanting continually a kind of song, which was not altogether unmusical; an old woman whose scraggy limbs, parchment-skin, and general mummy-like appearance did not say much for the amount of care bestowed upon her, was pouring water into the trench from the vessels which stood beside her.
In other places women were clambering on to the newly-constructed roofs, and making them tidy by pulling off the projecting stalks, or were putting the finishing touch to their work by fastening thin bands of grass all over the thatch.
All along the paths, in the courtyards, and especially at the hedges, crowds of inquisitive women with infants in their arms, and clusters of small children around them, had assembled to criticize the makoa (white men) and freely enough they passed their opinions about us. Most of them wore several strings of large dark blue beads round their necks, and the breasts of most of them were bare, although occasionally they had cotton jackets or woollen handkerchiefs, the prevailing colours being red and black; nearly all of them had skirts reaching to the knees, if not to the ankles.
It took us about an hour to make our way through the labyrinth of huts before we entered the glen that contains the town. This glen is about 400 yards wide at its mouth, but gradually converges to a narrow rocky pass; at first sight, indeed, it presented the appearance of a cul-de-sac, but the semblance was only caused by the western side of the steep pass projecting so far as to conceal the eastern, which is covered with rugged crags, and called the monkey-rock. The pass has played an important part in the history of the town.
The mission-house of the London Missionary Society lies on the side of the pass, and as we went towards it we saw three groups of houses on the right, forming the central portion of the town, of which another section lies in a rocky hollow on the other side.
BAMANGWATO HUTS AT SHOSHONG.