ostrich feathers in them, whilst their black legs were
bare.
Ma-Batuen, the chief’s mother, received us somewhat
coldly when we penetrated into her hut ; she
is the chief widow of old Gasetsive, Batuen’s father, a
noted warrior in his day. The Sechuana tribes have
very funny ideas about death, and never, if possible,
let a man die inside his h u t; if he does accidentally
behave so indiscreetly they pull down the wall at the
back to take the corpse out, as it must never go out
by the ordinary door, and the hut is usually abandoned.
Gasetsive died in his own house, so the wall
had to be pulled down, and it has never been
repaired, and is abandoned. Batuen built himself a
new palace, with a hut for his chief wife on his right,
and a hut for his mother .on the left. His father’s
funeral was a grand affair; all the tribe assembled to
lament the loss of their warrior chief, and he was laid
to rest in a lead coffin in the midst of his Tcotla. The
superstitious of the tribe did not approve of the coffin,
and imagine that the soul may still be there making
frantic efforts to escape.
All the Ba-JSTgwatetse 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,
i 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-Baphaelite 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-
JSTgwatetse 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 Mâsoupa a dance was going on
—a native Sechuana dance—in consequence of the
full moon and the rejoicings incident on an abundant
harvest. In the kotla some forty or mòre men had
formed a circle, and were jumping round and round
to the sound of music. Evidently it was an old war
dance degenerated ; thé 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 thè 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