COMMERCIAL PROSPECTS 279 



half-castes of (xoanese extraction set themselves up as iudepeiident chiefs 

 on the Central Zambezi and slew, with the same ferocity as the Arab, those 

 whom they could not enslave. There was scarcely a wilderness which one 

 crossed in the early days of the British Central Africa Protectorate which 

 did not bear traces, old or recent, of destroyed villages and abandoned 

 plantations, and murdered men and women. To possess a few cattle or 

 to have cultivated a little more corn than was absolutely necessary for 

 the food of one's family was sufficient to draw down on one the attacks 

 of robbers or the pressure of one's own chief. A warlike tribe like the 

 Awemba would devastate the countries round their home over a ring fifty 

 miles broad, and of immense circumference. 



If you visit the Kazembe's capital near Lake Alweru at the present 

 day, you will still see a large proportion of the }iopulation without hands 

 or without ears, or mutilated in some other fashion, these being the 

 punishments or acts of spite to which the native ruler was chiefly inclined. 

 I should think, until the British Protectorate became effective, five per 

 cent, of the Negro population of these countries was killed every year by 

 the poison ordeal. In most districts there was not a single woman of fifty 

 but had had perhaps ten times in her life to flee into the bush and conceal 

 herself there half-starved, whilst her native village was in the hands of 

 slave-raiders, invading Zulus, or the soldiery of her own chief, who were 

 amusing themselves and their master by a little rapine and shedding of 

 blood. In the wars which were necessary with Arab, Yao, and Zulu to 

 found the British Central Africa Protectorate — wars, it must be remembered, 

 carried on in the main by natives of the Protectorate fighting under our 

 flag — there cannot have been killed from first to last more than 1,500 

 people on both sides. The subsequent growth of the population is sufficient 

 witness to the gain in human life and happiness which has been purchased 

 by the death of those 1,500 men. 



It has been the same in Uganda. If one reads the works of Speke, 

 of Stanley, of the Kev. W. P. Ashe, of Lugard, and Colvile, one realises 

 what a bloody country was the Kingdom of Uganda before it came under 

 British control. The flow of human blood must have been such a common 

 sight as to render the Baganda singularly callous. Speke gives a pathetic 

 account of Mutesa's wives being hurried off to a cruel execution for most 

 trivial reasons, raising their wailing cries of "0 my lord, my master," 

 as they passed him on the way. Sometimes the reasons for these death 

 sentences were that a wife had failed to close the door as she passed out 

 of a courtyard or she had pulled the door to when to do so was a breach 

 of native etiquette. The worship of the spirits in Uganda and Busoga 

 involved constant human sacrifice. At the accession of a new chief m 

 Busoga disgusting mutilations took i)lace of young men and virgins, which 



