386 THE LAND ‘OF THE LiGN 
Only yesterday this native was a nomad or a slave. 
If he had luck and his tribe had maintained its indepen- 
dence, in that case his own little shamba cultivated by his 
wives, gave him all he needed. In any case, he worked 
only because he had to allay the pangs of hunger. To 
store up goods, to lay plans for a large increase of cattle, 
meant additional risk in a life already too full of it. Eng- 
lish and German occupancy have modified, for him, these 
conditions during the last fifteen years at most. Is it reas- 
onable, then, to expect that people who have only emerged 
from such a social chaos for so little a space, should sud- 
denly change the ingrained habits and tastes of untold cen- 
turies at the half-understood command of some strange 
white man? Yet this is what the settler expects. 
Give the native time and some little chance, and he soon 
shows aptitudes which are full of promise for his own future 
and that of the country. See him work when he is accus- 
tomed to the work exacted of him. Asa burden-bearer he 
is not the child of yesterday. He has, or some of his people 
have, carried burdens for generations. In the line of 
steady, patient, successful burden-bearing under circum- 
stances of extreme difficulty, he is probably without a rival 
on the globe. He will travel farther and faster, he will 
endure greater hardships, and more successfully resist 
disease, eat more frugally and cost less than any other human 
burden-bearer on earth. Carrying sixty to ninety pounds 
a man, from fifteen to twenty-five miles a day, through 
poisonous, thorny thickets, or malarial swamps, over lava- 
strewn stretches, under tropical sun, from early morning 
till late evening for several thousand miles, I have seen 
him march; a cupful of coarse meal or gritty rice and beans 
his daily ration. And he does it all right cheerfully, too, 
starting with a song in the morning, and tramping into camp 
to the wild notes of his reed or horn whistle in the evening. 
Six shillings a month and finding his own rations is his pay 
