120 BAROTSE ERAS. 



to Sekcletu. A stranger, seeing an animal he had never 

 viewed before, killed it, and brought the trophy to the 

 chief, thinking that he had made a very remarkable dis- 

 covery : we thereby lost the breed of cats, of which, from 

 the swarms of mice, we stood in great need. 



On making inquiries to ascertain whether Santuru, the 

 Moloiana, had ever been visited by white men., I could find 

 no vestige of any such visit; there is no evidence of any 

 of Santuru's people having ever seen a white man before 

 the arrival of Mr. Oswell and myself in 1851. The people 

 have, it is true, no written records; but any remarkable 

 event here is commemorated in names, as was observed by 

 Park to be the case in the countries he traversed. The 

 year of our arrival is dignified by the name of the year 

 when the white men came, or of Sebituane's death ; but 

 they prefer the former, as they avoid, if possible, any direct 

 reference to the departed. After my wife's first visit, great 

 numbers of children were named Ma-Eobert, or mother of 

 Ivobert, her eldest child; others were named Gun, Horse, 

 Wagon, Monare, Jesus, &c. ; but though our names, and 

 those of the native Portuguese who came in 1853, were 

 adopted, there is not a trace of any thing of the sort having 

 happened previously among the Barotse: the visit of a 

 white man is such a remarkable event, that, had any taken 

 place during the last three hundred years, there must have 

 remained some tradition of it. 



The town or mound of Santuru's mother was shown to 

 mo : this was the first symptom of an altered state of feel- 

 ing with regard to the female sex that I had observed, 

 There are few or no cases of women being elevated to the 

 headships of towns farther south. The Barotse also showed 

 some relics of their chief, which evinced a greater amount 

 of the religious feeling than I had ever known displayed 

 among Bechuanas. His more recent capital, Li Ion da, built, 

 too, on an artificial mound, is covered with different kinds 

 of trees, transplanted w T hen young by himself. They form 

 a grove on the end of the mound, in which are to be seen 



