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 



