Mtesa was most anxious to see white men. Hearing this
I at once wrote to Grant, begging him to come on if he
could do so, and to bring with him all the best of my
property, or as much as he could of it, as I now saw there
was more cunning humbug than honesty in what Riiman-
ika had told me about the impossibility of our going
north from Uganda, as well as in his saying sick men
could not go into Uganda, and donkeys without trousers
would not be admitted there, because they were considered
indecent. If he was not well enough to move, I advised
him to wait there until I reached Mtesa’s, when I would
either go up the lake and Kitanghle to fetch him away,
or would make the king send boats for him, which I more
expressly wished, as it would tend to give us a much better
knowledge of the lake.
Maula now came again, after receiving repeated and
To N’yagussa, angry messages, and I forced him to make a
move. He led me straight up to his home,
a very nice place, in which he gave me a very large, clean,
and comfortable hut—had no end of plantains brought for
me and my men And said, “ How you have really entered
the kingdom of Uganda, for the future you must buy no
more food. At every place that you stop for the day, the
officer in charge will bring you plantains, otherwise your
men can help themselves in the gardens, for such are the
laws of the land when a king’s guest travels in it. Any
one found selling anything to either yourself or your men
would be punished.” Accordingly, I stopped the daily
issue of beads; but no sooner had I done so, than all my
men declared they could not eat plantains. It was all
very well, they said, for the Waganda to do so, because
they were used to it, but it did not satisfy their hunger.
Maiila, all smirks and smiles, on seeing me order the
Halt, 26ti. things out for the march, begged I would
have patience, and wait till the messenger
returned from the king; it would not take more than
ten days at the most. Much annoyed at this nonsense,
I ordered my tent to be pitched. I refused all Matila’s
plantains, and gave my men beads to buy grain again
with; and, f i n d i n g it necessary to get up some indignation,
said I would not stand being chained like a dog; if he
would not go on ahead, I should go without him. Maula
then said he would go to a friend’s and come back again.
I said, if he did not; I should go off; and so the conversation
ended.
2 6 th.—Drumming, singing, screaming, yelling, and
dancing had been going on these last two days and two
nights to drive the Plfopo or devil out of a village. The
whole of the ceremonies were most ludicrous. An old
man and woman, smeared with white mud, and holding
pots of pombe in their laps, sat in front of a hut, whilst
other people kept constantly bringing them baskets full
of plantain-squash, and more pots of pombe. In the
courtyard fronting them, were hundreds of men and
women dressed in smart mbugus—the males wearing for
turbans, strings of abrus-seeds wound round their heads,
with polished boars’ tusks stuck in in a jaunty manner.
These were the people who, all drunk as fifers, were keeping
up such a continual row to frighten the devil away.
In the midst of this assemblage I now found Kachuchu,
Rumanika’s representative, who went on ahead from Ka-
ragiie palace to tell Mtesa that I wished to visit him.
With him, he said, were two other Wakungii of Mtesa’s,
who had orders to bring on my party and Dr K’yengo’s.
Mtesa, he said, was so mad to see us, that the instant he
arrived at the palace and told him we wished to visit him
the king caused f‘ fifty big men and four hundred sm a l l
ones” to be executed, because, he said,' his subjects were
so bumptious they would not allow any visitors to come
near him, else he would have had white men before.
27iA—N’yamgundu, my old friend at Usiii, then came
to me, and said he was the first man to tell Mtesa of our