TRUSTING DISPOSITION OF TEE AFRICANS. 535 



ensure speedy assassination. I have no reason to suppose that Speke was 

 mistaken in his statements as to the numbers of women led away to execution 

 — two hundred Baganda. People now here assert that many were led away 

 to become field labourers ; and one seen by Grant with her hoe on her head 

 seems to countenance the idea. But their statements are of small account as 

 compared with these of Speke and Grant, for they now all know that cold- 

 blooded murder, like that of Mteza, is detested by all the civilised world, and 

 they naturally wish to smooth the matter over. 



"The remedy open to all other tribes in Central Africa is desertion. 

 The tyrant soon finds himself powerless. His people have quietly removed 

 to other chiefs, and never return. The tribes subjected by the Makololo had 

 hard times of it, but nothing like the butchery of Mteza. A large body went 

 off to the north. Another sent to Tete refused to return ; and seventeen, sent 

 with me to the Shire for medicine for the chief, did the same thing. When 

 the chief died, the tribes broke up and scattered. Mteza seems to be an un- 

 whipped fool. We all know rich men who would have been much better 

 fellows if they had ever got bloody noses and sound thrashings at school The 

 two hundred of his people here have been detained many months, and have 

 become thoroughly used to the country, but none of them wish to remain. 

 The apparent willingness to be trampled in the dust by Mteza is surprising. 

 The whole of my experience in Central Africa says that the negroes not yet 

 spoiled by contact with the slave-trade are distinguished for friendliness and 

 good sound sense. Some can be guilty of great wickedness and seem to 

 think little about it. Others perform actions as unmistakably good with no 

 self-complacency; and if one catalogued all the other good deeds or all the 

 bad ones he came across, he might think the men extremely good or extremely 

 bad, instead of calling them, like ourselves, curious compounds of good and 

 evil. In one point they are remarkable — they are honest, even among the 

 cannibal Manyema. A slave-trader at Bambarre and I had to send our goats 

 and fowls up to the Manyema villages, to prevent their being all stolen by 

 my friend's own slaves. Another wide-spread trait of character is a trusting 

 disposition. The Central African tribes are the antipodes of some of the 

 North American Indians, and very unlike many of their own countrymen, 

 who have come into contact with Mahomedans and Portuguese and Dutch 

 Christians. They at once perceive the superiority of the strangers in power 

 of mischief and readily listen to and ponder over friendly advice. 



"After the cruel massacre of Nyangwe, which I unfortunately witnessed, 

 the fourteen chiefs whose villages had been destroyed, and many of their peo- 

 ple killed, fled to my house, and begged me to make peace for them. The 

 Arabs then came over to their side of the great river Lualaba, dividing their 

 country anew, and pointing out where each should build a new village and 

 other plantations. The peace was easily made, for the Arabs had no excuse 



