Chap. XIII. A JAW A MIGRATION. 355 



presence. We naturally felt apprehensive that we should 

 never see Katosa again. A migratory afflatus seems to 

 have come over the Ajawa tribes. Wars among them- 

 selves, for the supply of the Coast slave-trade, are said to 

 have first set them in motion. The usual way in which 

 they have advanced among the Manganja has been by 

 slave-trading in a friendly way. Then, professing to 

 wish to live as subjects, they have been welcomed as 

 guests, and the Manganja, being great agriculturists, 

 have been able to support considerable bodies of these 

 visitors for a time. When the provisions became scarce, 

 the guests began to steal from the fields; quarrels arose 

 in consequence, and, the Ajawa having firearms, their 

 hosts got the worst of it, and were expelled from village 

 after village, and out of their own country. The Man- 

 ganja were quite as bad in regard to slave-trading as the 

 Ajawa, but had less enterprise, and were much more fond 

 of the home pursuits of spinning, weaving, smelting iron, 

 and cultivating the soil, than of foreign travel. The 

 Ajawa had little of a mechanical turn, and not much love 

 for agriculture, but were very keen traders and travellers. 

 This party seemed to us to be in the first or friendly stage 

 of intercourse with Katosa ; and, as we afterwards found, 

 he was fully alive to the danger. 



Our course was shaped towards the N.W., and we 

 traversed a large fertile tract of rich soil extensively cul- 

 tivated, but dotted with many gigantic thorny acacias 

 which had proved too large for the little axes of the culti- 

 vators. After leaving Nkwinda, the first village we spent 

 a night at in the district Ngabi was that of Chembi, and 

 it had a stockade around it. The Azitu or Mazitu were 

 said to be ravaging the country to the west of us, and no 

 one was safe except in a stockade. We have so often, in 

 travelling, heard of war in front, that we paid little 

 attention to the assertion of Chembi, that the whole coun- 



