36 ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH [ch. ii 
Many of the natives work for the settlers, as cattle- 
keepers, as ostrich-keepers, or, after a fashion, as 
labourers. The settlers evidently much prefer to rely 
upon the natives for unskilled labour rather than see 
coolies from Hindostan brought into the country. At 
Sir Alfred Pease’s ranch, as at most of the other farms 
of the neighbourhood, we found little Wakamba settle¬ 
ments. Untold ages separated employers and employed; 
yet those that I saw seemed to get on well together. 
The Wakamba are as yet not sufficiently advanced to 
warrant their sharing in the smallest degree in the com¬ 
mon government; the “just consent of the governed” 
in their case, if taken literally, would mean idleness, 
famine, and endless internecine warfare. They cannot 
govern themselves from within ; therefore they must be 
governed from without ; and their need is met in 
highest fashion by firm and just control, of the kind that 
on the whole they are now getting. At Kitanga the 
natives on the place sometimes worked about the house; 
and they took care of the stock. The elders looked 
after the mild little humped cattle—bulls, steers, and 
cows ; and the children, often the merest toddlers, took 
naturally to guarding the parties of pretty little calves, 
during the daytime, when they were separated from 
their mothers. It was an ostrich-farm, too ; and in the 
morning and evening we would meet the great birds, as 
they went to their grazing-grounds or returned to the 
ostrich boma, mincing along with their usual air of 
foolish stateliness, convoyed by two or three boys, each 
with a red blanket, a throwing stick, copper wire round 
his legs and arms, and perhaps a feather stuck in his 
hair. 
There were a number of ranches in the neighbour¬ 
hood—using “neighbourhood” in the large Western 
