All the Ba-Ngwatetse are soldiers, and belong to certain regiments or years. When a lot of the youths are initiated together into the tribal mysteries generally the son of a chief is amongst them, and he takes the command of the regiment. In the old ostrich-feather days Kanya was an important trading station, but now there is none of this, and inasmuch as it is off the main road north, it is not a place of much importance from a white man’s point of view, and boasts only of one storekeeper and one missionary, both men of great importance in the place.
After Kanya the character of the scenery alters, and you enter an undulating country thickly wooded, and studded here and there with red granite kopjes, or gigantic boulders set in rich green vegetation, looking for all the world like pre-Raphaelite Italian pictures. Beneath a long kopje, sixteen miles from Kanya, nestles Masoupa, the capital of a young chief, the son of Pilan, who was an important man in his day, and broke off from his own chief Linchwe, bringing his followers with him to settle in the Ba-Ngwatetse country as a sort of sub-chief with nominal independence; it is a conglomeration of bee-hive huts, many of them overgrown with gourds, difficult to distinguish from the mass of boulders around them. When we arrived at Masoupa a dance was going on—a native Sechuana dance—in consequence of the full moon and the rejoicings incident on an abundant [[12]]harvest. In the kotla some forty or more men had formed a circle, and were jumping round and round to the sound of music. Evidently it was an old war dance degenerated; the sugar-cane took the place of the assegai, many black legs were clothed in trousers, and many black shoulders now wore coats; but there are still left as relics of the past the ostrich feather in the hat, the fly whisk of horse, jackal, or other tail, the iron skin-scraper round the neck, which represents the pocket-handkerchief amongst the Kaffirs with which to remove perspiration; the flute with one or two holes, out of which each man seems to produce a different sound; and around the group of dancing men old women still circulate, as of yore, clapping their withered hands and encouraging festivity. It was a sight of considerable picturesqueness amid the bee-hive huts and tall overhanging rocks.
Masoupa was once the residence of a missionary, but the church is now abandoned and falling into ruins, because when asked to repair the edifice at their own expense the men of Masoupa waxed wroth, and replied irreverently that God might repair His own house; and one old man who received a blanket for his reward for attending divine service is reported to have remarked, when the dole was stopped, ‘No more blanket, no more hallelujah.’ I fear me the men of Masoupa are wedded to heathendom.
The accession of Pilan to the chiefdom of Masoupa is a curious instance of the Sechuana marriage laws. [[13]]A former chief’s heir was affianced young; he died at the age of eight, before succeeding his father, and, according to custom, the next brother, Moshulilla, married the woman; their son was Pilan, who, on coming of age, turned out his own father, being, as he said, the rightful heir of the boy of eight, for whom he, Moshulilla, the younger brother, had been instrumental in raising up seed. There is a distinct touch of Hebraic, probably Semitic, law in this, as there is in many another Sechuana custom.
The so-called purchase of a wife is curious enough in Bechuanaland. The intending husband brings with him the number of bullocks he thinks the girl is worth; wisely, he does not offer all his stock at once, leaving two or more, as the case may be, at a little distance, for he knows the father will haggle and ask for an equivalent for the girl’s keep during childhood, whereupon he will send for another bullock; then the mother will come forward and demand something for lactation and other maternal offices, and another bullock will have to be produced before the contract can be ratified. In reality this apparent purchase of the wife is not so barefaced a thing as it seems, for she is not a negotiable article and cannot again be sold; in case of divorce her value has to be paid back, and her children, if the purchase is not made, belong to her own family. Hence a woman who is not properly bought is in the condition of a slave, whereas her purchased sister has rights which assure her a social standing. [[14]]
From Pilan’s the northward road becomes hideous again, and may henceforward be said to be in the desert region of the Kalahari. This desert is not the waste of sand and rock we are accustomed to imagine a desert should be, but a vast undulating expanse of country covered with timber—the mimosa, or camel thorn, the mapani bush, and others which reach the water with their roots, though there are no ostensible water sources above ground.
The Kalahari is inhabited sparsely by a wild tribe known as the Ba-kalahari, of kindred origin to the bushmen, whom the Dutch term Vaal-pens, or ‘Fallow-paunches,’ to distinguish them from the darker races. Their great skill is in finding water, and in dry seasons they obtain it by suction through a reed inserted into the ground, the results being spat into a gourd and handed to the thirsty traveller to drink. Khama, Sechele, and Batuen divide this vast desert between them; how far west it goes is unknown; wild animals rapidly becoming extinct elsewhere abound therein. It is a vast limbo of uncertainty, which will necessarily become British property when Bechuanaland is definitely annexed; possibly with a system of artesian wells the water supply may be found adequate, and it may yet have a future before it when the rest of the world is filled to overflowing.
We saw a few of these children of the desert in our progress northwards; they are timid and diffident in the extreme, always avoiding the haunts of the white man, and always wandering hither and [[15]]thither where rain and water may be found. On their shoulders they carry a bark quiver filled with poisoned arrows to kill their game. They produce fire by dexterously rubbing two sticks together to make a spark. At nightfall they cut grass and branches to make a shelter from the wind; they eat snakes, tortoises, and roots which they dig up with sharp bits of wood, and the contents of their food bags is revolting to behold. They pay tribute in kind to the above-mentioned chiefs—skins, feathers, tusks, or the mahatla berries used for making beer—and if these things are not forthcoming they take a fine-grown boy and present him to the chief as his slave.
Sechele is the chief of the Ba-quaina, or children of the quaina, or crocodile. Their siboko, or tribal object of veneration, is the crocodile, which animal they will not kill or touch under any provocation whatsoever. The Ba-quaina are one of the most powerful of the Bechuanaland feud tribes, and it often occurred to me, Can the name Bechuanaland, for which nobody can give a satisfactory derivation, and of which the natives themselves are entirely ignorant, be a corruption of this name? There have been worse corruptions perpetrated by Dutch and English pioneers in savage lands, and Ba-quainaland would have a derivation, whereas Bechuanaland has none.
Sechele’s capital is on the hills above the river Molopolole, quite a flourishing place, or rather group of places, on a high hill, with a curious valley or [[16]]kloof beneath it, where the missionary settlement is by the river banks. Many villages of daub huts are scattered over the hills amongst the red boulders and green vegetation. In the largest, in quite a European-looking house, Sechele lives. Once this house was fitted up for him in European style; it contained a glass chandelier, a sideboard, a gazogene, and a table. In those days Sechele was a good man, and was led by his wife to church; but, alas! this good lady died, and her place was supplied by a rank heathen, who would have none of her predecessor’s innovations. Now Sechele is very old and very crippled, and he lies amid the wreck of all his European grandeur; chandelier, sideboard, gazogene, are all in ruins like himself, and he is as big a heathen and as big a sinner as ever wore a crown. So much for the influence of women over their husbands, even when they are black.