CHAP. VII. NATIVE VIEWS OF MATRIMONY. 201 



insisted on other natives who might be present doing the 

 same. When Moshobotwane, the Batoka chief, came on 

 one occasion with a number of his men, they listened in 

 silence to the reading of the Bible in the Makololo tongue ; 

 but, as soon as we all knelt down to pray, they commenced 

 a vigorous clapping of hands, their mode of asking a 

 favour. • Our indignant Makololo soon silenced their noisy 

 accompaniment, and looked with great contempt on this 

 display of ignorance. Nearly all our men had learned to 

 repeat the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles' Creed in their 

 own language, and felt rather proud of being able to do 

 so; and when they reached home, they liked to recite 

 them to groups of admiring friends. Their ideas of right 

 and wrong differ in no respect from our own, except in 

 their professed inability to see how it can be improper for 

 a man to have more than one wife. A year or two ago 

 several of the wives of those who had been absent with us 

 petitioned the chief for leave to marry again. They 

 thought that it was of no use waiting any longer, their 

 husbands must be dead ; but Sekeletu refused permission ; 

 he himself had bet a number of oxen that the Doctor 

 would return with their husbands, and he had promised 

 the absent men that their wives should be kept for them. 

 The impatient spouses had therefore to wait a little 

 longer. Some of them, however, eloped with other men ; 

 the wife of Mantlanyane, for instance, ran off and left his 

 little boy among strangers. Mantlanyane was very angry 

 when he heard of it, not that he cared much about her 

 deserting him, for he had two other wives at Tette, but he 

 was indignant at her abandoning his boy. 



