NZOIA PLATEAU AND ITS TRIBES 209 



to establish homesteads here, to say, that they have been 

 the first to see, and avail themselves of, the advantages of 

 the Nzoia Plateau. So far as a stranger could judge of 

 them, by talking with their leaders, they were appreciative 

 of the country, and of the easy conditions offered them to 

 acquire homesteads in it. The Boer certainly has a good 

 eye for country. He will take trouble to find the land that 

 suits him, and having found it he sits down on it, and makes 

 a home. This is just what the Englishman out here does 

 not do, he crowds where some of his fellow countrymen have 

 already settled, and even then nine times out of ten only 

 buys that he may sell at the earliest possible moment. 

 Now the Boer may move on in this land, as he has moved 

 on and on in other lands. But even if he does, he yet stays 

 long enough to outstay the Englishman. And I must say 

 it looks at present as if he was likely to hold and control 

 ultimately much that is best in the Protectorate. He objects 

 to the present arrangement' of long lease for the land, he 

 prefers actual ownership, but since that is denied him by 

 the law as it now stands, he takes up his holding on the best 

 conditions permitted him, confident in his own stubborn 

 mind, that long before his eighty or ninety years lease is out 

 he will have a good deal to say as to the terms of its renewal. 

 He is wise in his day and generation is the Boer, he knows 

 that the man who stays by the land, will in the end settle the 

 terms by which the land stays by him. 



Of all these things and many more I thought as I saw 

 the sun setting beyond western Elgon. Ah, indeed, whoever 

 holds it, this is a land beautiful as it is rich, and so far as 

 human foreknowledge can go, likely to furnish homes of 

 peace and plenty in the future. 



For many years this green land has been tenantless, the 

 chosen haunt of bands of lions and herds of game. But it 

 was not always so. If the dead could come back to claim 

 their own, if ghosts of cruelly injured peoples walked and 



