386 THE LAND OF THE LION 



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. As a 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 



