acknowledge himself his slave, but the man was too shrewd
for th is; he was a great elephant doctor, who accompanied
the hunters, told them when to attack the huge beast, and
gave them medicine to ensure success. TJnlike the real
Portuguese, many of the half-castes are merciless slaveholders;
their brutal treatment of the wretched slaves is notorious.
What a humane native of Portugal once said of them is
appropriate if not tru e : “ God made white men, and God
made black men, hut the devil made half-castes.”
The officers and merchants send parties of slaves under
faithful headmen to hunt elephants and to trade in ivory,
providing them with a certain quantity of cloth, heads, &c., and
requiring so much ivory in return. These slaves think that
they have made a good thing of it, when they kill an elephant
near a village, as the natives give them beer and meal
in exchange for some of the elephant’s meat, and over every
tusk that is bought there is expended a vast amount of
time, talk, and beer. Most of the Africans are natural-born
traders, they love trade more for the sake of trading than for
what they make by it. An intelligent gentleman of Tette
told us that native traders often come to him with a tusk for
sale, consider the price he offers, demand more, talk over it,
retire to consult about it, and at length go away without
selling i t ; next day they try another merchant, talk, consider,
get puzzled and go off as on the previous day, and continue
this course daily until they have perhaps seen every merchant
in the village, and then at last end by selling the precious
tusk to some one for even less than the first merchant had
offered. Their love of dawdling in the transaction arises
from the self-importance conferred on them by their being
the object of the wheedling and coaxing of eager merchants,
a feeling to which even the love of gain is subordinate.
The native medical profession is reasonably well represented.
In addition to the regular practitioners, who are a
really useful class, and know something of their profession,
and the nature and power of certain medicines, there are others -
who devote their talents to some speciality. The elephant
doctor prepares a medicine which is considered indispensable
to the hunters when attacking that noble and sagacious
beast; no hunter is willing to venture out before investing
in this precious nostrum. The crocodile doctor sells a charm
which is believed to possess the singular virtue of protecting
its owner from crocodiles. Unwittingly we offended the
crocodile school of medicine while at Tette, by shooting one
of these huge reptiles as it lay basking in the sun on a
sandbank; the doctors came to the Makololo in wrath, clamouring
to know why the white man had shot their crocodile.
A shark’s hook was baited one evening with a dog,
of which the crocodile is said to be particularly fond;
but the doctors removed the bait, on the principle
that the more crocodiles the more demand for medicine,
or perhaps because they preferred to eat the dog themselves.
Many of the natives of this quarter are known,
as in the South Seas, to eat the dog without paying any
attention to its feeding. The dice doctor or diviner is
an important member of the community, being consulted by
Portuguese and natives alike. Part of his business is that of
a detective, it being his duty to discover thieves. When goods
are stolen, he goes and looks at the place, casts his dice, and
waits a few days, and then, for a consideration, tells who is the
thief: he is generally correct, for he trusts not to his dice
alone; he has confidential agents all over the village, by whose
inquiries and information he is enabled to detect the culprit.
Since the introduction of muskets, gun-doctors have sprung
E 2