Il6 DISEASES AMONG BAKWAINS. 



to make the previous denial of the practice of slavery 

 and slave-hunting by the Transvaal Boers no longer neces- 

 sary was the declaration of their independence. 



In conversation with some of my friends here I learned 

 that Maleke, a chief of the Bakwains, who formerly lived 

 on the hill Litubaruba, had been killed by the bite of a 

 mad dog. My curiosity was strongly excited by this 

 statement, as rabies is so rare in this country. I never 

 heard of another case, and could not satisfy myself that 

 even this was real hydrophobia. While I was at Mabotsa 

 some dogs became affected by a disease which led them 

 to run about in an incoherent state ; but I doubt whether 

 it was anything but an affection of the brain. No indi- 

 vidual or animal got the complaint by inoculation from 

 the animals' teeth ; and from all that I could hear, the 

 prevailing idea of hydrophobia not existing within the 

 tropics seems to be quite correct. 



The diseases known among the Bakwains are remark- 

 ably few. There is no consumption nor scrofula, and 

 insanity and hydrocephalus are rare. Cancer and cholera 

 are quite unknown. Small-pox and measles passed 

 through the country about twenty years ago and com- 

 mitted great ravages ; but, though the former has since 

 broken out on the coast repeatedly, neither disease has 

 since travelled inland. For small-pox the natives em- 

 ployed in some parts inoculation in the forehead with 

 some animal deposit ; in other parts they employed the 

 matter of the small-pox itself ; and in one village they 

 seem to have selected a virulent case for the matter used 

 in the operation, for nearly all the village was swept off 

 by the disease in a malignant confluent form. Where 

 the idea came from I cannot conceive. It was practised 

 by the Bakwains at a time when they had no intercourse, 

 direct or indirect, with the southern missionaries. They 

 all adopt readily the use of vaccine virus when it is 

 brought within their reach. 



A certain loathsome disease which decimates the North 

 American Indians, and threatens extirpation to the South 

 Sea islanders, dies out in the interior of Africa without the 

 aid of medicine. iVnd the Bangwaketse, who brought it 

 from the west coast, lost it when they came into their 

 own land south-west of Kolobeng. It seems incapable 

 of permanence in any form in persons of pure African blood 

 anywhere in the centre of the country. In persons of 



