192 THE GAME OF BRITISH EAST AFRICA. 



morning it will be discovered that they have all run away. They appear to be 

 subject to peculiar fits of alarm and apprehension, only needing someone to tell 

 them that they are going to be taken to a far-off country or something equally 

 fictitious, and they decamp. 



The Baganda and Banyoro porters are also unreliable, but these often appear 

 to have no intention whatever of working. They come in and get themselves signed 

 on and receive an advance of pay and then disappear, knowing full well that they 

 will never be caught. 



Thus it is evident that for comfort and almost every other consideration the 

 staid old professional porter is the man to get hold of, and although his wages 

 are twice as much as some of the local porters, he is often the most economical. 

 For he will march twice the distance in a day that local porters will accomplish, 

 and carry a bigger load the while, and there will be no danger of the trek's delay 

 owing to his suddenly disappearing. 



In Nairobi, most unfairly, the porter's wage is the same, no matter from what 

 tribe he comes, and the wild Kikuyu, who carries forty or fifty pounds, and may run 

 away at any time, draws as much salary as the stalwart Mnyamwezi carrying 

 his seventy or eighty pounds. 



There is in force a regulation by which one is compelled to give a porter an 

 advance of pay and a blanket on enlistment. With the professional porter this is 

 sound enough, as the pay enables him to make provision for his wife during his 

 absence, and he is accustomed to the use of a blanket, and also uses it as a turban 

 on which to rest his load, but with the wild porter the enforcement of this regulation 

 is absurd ; his wife he has left in his village looking after his fields, and he has never 

 had a blanket before, or anything more than a patch of skin to cover him ; moreover, 

 there is no guarantee that he will not run away. The interests of the professional 

 porter are bound up in his work ; he hopes to get employment for several months, and 

 he is dependent on his wages for his living ; but with the wild porter matters 

 are very different, for he makes his living out of the hoeing and tilling of his fields, 

 and he has no desire whatever to leave his village if he can avoid doing so. He has 

 practically been compelled to leave his fields to raise sufficient money to pay his 

 hut-tax ; so that, after some confiding white man has given him enough to cover 

 this hut-tax and a blanket into the bargain in exchange for a fictitious name and 

 address, he really sees no inducement to stop and do work distasteful to him, when he 

 might be sitting in his village. 



I suppose some of these runaway porters are caught and punished, but I must 

 say that, although I have come across many hundreds of cases of porters disappearing 



