ISANGILA TO MANYANGA. - 99 
adjunct to the expedition. They carry burdens nearly as 
heavy as those borne by their husbands and brothers, and 
earry them much more cheerfully. They wash and cook 
better than the meu, and have a way of preparing manioc 
for food that seems beyond masculine knowledge or skill. 
In steady hard work and endurance of fatigue they 
certainly excel the other sex; they ask less pay, they eat 
less food, and, in short, I should seriously recommend the 
utilization of female labour in the formation of all African 
expeditions. Many Zanzibari women accompanied their 
husbands across Africa in Stanley’s great journey, and he 
writes, touchingly, in the ‘Dark Continent,’ respecting 
their patient endurance and dogged perseverance. 
The fact is, woman in Africa has not emerged from her 
proper status—her proper African status, | mean. When 
this great continent is fairly civilized, is traversed by 
railroads, and intersected by canals, when all the rough, 
hard, coarse battling with natural obstacles is over, then 
man—African man—can afford, if he will, to indulge in a 
more delicate and finer-natufed spouse, who is worthy to 
be conceded the privileges which chivalry grants to the 
artificial weakness of her sex. At present the women lead 
a harder life than the men, and they are consequently 
inferior to the better-nurtured males in mental develop- — 
ment and physical beauty. Conscious of their lower 
erade in society, they are thus ever anxious to merit by 
their assiduity in well-doing the approbation of the 
nobler sex. : 
There are several native “kings” round Manyanga. 
One of them was a constant visitor at the station, and a 
terrible beggar, always on the look-out for cloth and beads, 
His name was Mlongo-Mlako, and he was chief of a town 
or district called Dandanga. Shortly after my arrival, he 
made a call on us, avowedly to see the new white man, 
and probably also with the idea that there might be a 
little “cloth” to be given away. His majesty of Dan- 
danga nearly fell a victim to the superstitions of his 
people a short time ago. A wife of one of his sub-chiefs 
fell ill and died; and, as is always the case in this 
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