THE WAK'HUTU. 



121 



seems to increase in the inverse ratio of what is required. 

 Every district in K'hutu has its P'hazi or headman, with 

 his minister the Mwene Goha, and inferior chiefs, the 

 Chanduine, the Muwinge, and the Mbara. These men live 

 chiefly upon the produce of their fields, which they sell to 

 caravans ; they are too abject and timid to insist upon 

 the blackmail which has caused so many skirmishes in 

 Uzaramo ; and the only use that they make of their 

 power is to tyrannise over their villages, and occasionally 

 to organise a little kidnapping. With the aid of slavery 

 and black magic they render their subjects' lives as pre- 

 carious as they well can : no one, especially in old age, 

 is safe from being burnt at a day's notice. They are 

 civil to strangers, but wholly unable to mediate between 

 them and the tribe. The Wak'hutu have been used as 

 porters ; but they have proved so treacherous, and so 

 determined to desert, that no man will trust them in a 

 land where prepayment is the first condition of an 

 agreement. Property amongst them is insecure : a man 

 has always a vested right in his sister's children ; and 

 when he dies his brothers and relations carefully plunder 

 his widow and orphans. 



The dirty, slovenly villages of the Wak'hutu are an 

 index of the character of the people. Unlike the com- 

 fortable cottages of the coast, and the roomy abodes of 

 the Wazaramo, the settlements of the Wak'hutu are com- 

 posed of a few straggling hovels of the humblest de- 

 scription — with doors little higher than an English 

 pigsty, and eaves so low that a man cannot enter them 

 except on all fours. In shape they differ, some being 

 simple cones, others like European haystacks, and others 

 like our old straw beehives. The common hut is a circle 

 from 12 to 25 feet in diameter; those belonging to the 

 chiefs are sometimes of considerable size, and the first 



