the roadside as we passed along we saw many acres
under cultivation for the produce of sweet potatoes,
beans, and the ground or monkey nut (Arachis). They
make long neat furrows with their hoes beneath the
trees, the shade of which is necessary for their crops.
They are an essentially industrious race, far more so
w o m a n ’s g ir d l e , w i t h c a r t r id g e c a s e s , s k in - s c r a p e r s , a n d
MEDICINE PHIALS ATTACHED
than the Kaffirs of our South African colonies. Here
the men work in the fields, leaving the women to
make pots, build granaries, and carry water. In the
Colony women are the chief agriculturists.
We spent a long and pleasant day within a few
yards of another village called M’lala in Chibi’s
country, also perched on a rocky eminence, where
many objects of interest came before our notice.
Here for the first time we saw the iron furnaces in
which the natives smelt the iron ore they obtain from
the neighbouring mountains. This is a time-honoured
industry in Mashonaland. Dos Santos alludes to it
in his description, and
so do Arab writers of
the ninth and tenth
centuries, as practised
by the savages of their
day.1 In Chibi’s country
iron-smelting is a great
industry. Here whole
villages devote all their
time and energies to it,
tilling no land and keeping
no cattle, but exchanging
their iron-
headed assegais, barbed
arrow-heads, and field
tools for grain and such
domestic commodities as w o o d e n h a i r c om b , c h i b i ’s c o u n t r y
they may require. I am
told also of villages which, after the same fashion,
have a monopoly of pot-making. This industry is
mostly carried on by the women, who deftly build up
with clay, on round stands made for the purpose,
large pots for domestic use, which they scrape smooth
with large shells kept for this object, and then they
1 Chap. VII.