LIVINGSTONE SUSPECTED. 501 



and they assaulted the markets and villages, and made captives, chiefly, as it 

 appeared to me, because, as the men ran off at the report of the guns, they 

 could do it without danger. I had no idea before how bloodthirsty men can 

 be when they can pour out the blood of their fellow men in safety. And all 

 this carnage is going on in Manyema at the very time I write. It is the 

 Banyans, our protected Indian fellow subjects, that indirectly do it all. We 

 have conceded to the sultan of Zanzibar the right, which it was not ours to 

 give, of a certain amount of slave-trading, and that amount has been from 

 twelve to twenty thousand a-year. As we have seen, these are not traded for 

 but murdered. They are not for slaves, but free people made captive. 



"A Sultan with a sense of justice would, instead of taking head-money, 

 declare that all were free as soon as they reached his territory. But the . 

 Banyans have the custom-house, and all the Sultan's revenue, entirely in 

 their hands. He cannot trust his Mahometan subjects, even of the better 

 class, to farm his income, because, as they themselves say, he would get no- 

 thing in return but a crop of lies. The Banyans naturally work the custom- 

 house so as to screen their own slaving agents ; and so long as they have the 

 power to promote it, their atrocious system of slaving will never cease. For 

 the sake of lawful commerce, it would be politic to insist that the Sultan's 

 revenue, by the custom-house, should be placed in the hands of an English or 

 American merchant of known reputation and uprightness. By this arrange- 

 ment the Sultan would be largely benefited, legal commerce would be exalted 

 to a position it has never held since Banyans and Moslems emigrated into 

 Eastern Africa, and Christianity, to which the slave trade is an insurmount- 

 able barrier, would find an open door." 



Sometimes the great traveller met with a cold reception, from his sup- 

 posed connection with Arab slavers and robbers. " In going west of Bani- 

 barre," he says, " in order to embark on the Lualaba, I went down the 

 Luamo, a river of from one to two hundred yards broad, which rises in the 

 mountains opposite Ujiji, and flows across the great bend of the Lualaba. 

 When near its confluence I found myself among people who had been lately 

 maltreated by the slaves, and they naturally looked on me as of the same 

 tribe as their persecutors. Africans are not generally unreasonable, though 

 smarting under wrongs, if you can fairly make them understand your claim 

 to innocence, and do not appear as having your back up. The women here 

 were particularly outspoken in asserting our identity with the cruel strangers. 

 On calling to one vociferous lady, who gave me the head traitor's name, to 

 look at my colour, and see if it were the same as his, she replied with a bitter 

 little laugh, ' Then you must be his father !' The worst the men did was to 

 turn out in force, armed with their large spears and wooden shields, and show 

 us out of their district." 



At Bambarre Dr. Livingstone was laid up with ulcers on his feet for over 



