THE SEFARI 27 
and that savage cultivators should be induced or forced 
to make use of what remains to them. ‘There is plenty 
of land still for every one, but it is the speculator who 
makes here as everywhere else the loudest outcry. But 
these poor folk cannot understand such philosophy in a 
day. There is no one yet to teach them, to prepare them 
for acceptance of the cruelly inevitable, but a scattered 
band of devoted men and women missionaries. They 
cannot be expected to welcome a cutting down by half 
of their grazing lands, if they are herdsmen like the Massai; 
or a ruthless removal of their shambas to equally rich lands 
as those they till, but many miles back from the railroad, 
if they are Kikuyus, because the iron rail means little to 
them, tho’ everything to the incoming settler. 
Why, too, they ask, should they be obliged to pay 
two rupees tax on each of their huts. They never paid such 
a sum to any one before, and the huts and gardens are just 
the same that their forefathers builded and tilled. It mat- 
ters not to them that the hut tax can be paid out of the 
increased money they earn, and that when fully rendered 
it does not pay the cost of their protection against enemies 
and cattle plagues. 
In time they will understand, but fifteen short years 
of partial occupation is not nearly time enough to reach 
the intelligence of a dozen different tribes, speaking a dozen 
entirely different languages, with no means of intercom- 
munication except tribal gossip. No schools as yet, often 
no chiefs who wield any real authority. (One of the mis- 
takes made by the administration, as it seems to me, is 
the too common lessening of the native chief’s authority.) 
But they will watch you, the white man, wonder at you, 
study you. Your stay among them will surely help them 
up, or tend as surely to pull them down. 
I don’t judge harshly the local Afrikander influence, 
when I say it rarely indeed troubles itself about any such 
