312 
THE NEW AFRICA 
even the approval of the ‘ medicine men/ who now were only 
too glad to enroll themselves under my banner. 
Several forms of venereal disease also came under my ob¬ 
servation, naturally much aggravated by neglect, a souvenir of 
the many visits paid to Kimberley by members of the tribe who 
had found their way there to work in the diamond mines, and 
promptly passed it on to the tribe on their return. 
Mashabie also submitted himself to my treatment, suffering 
from a cruelly enlarged spleen in consequence of malarial fever, 
and from him I learned that the tribe was not yet acclimatised 
through their long residence at the lake. The first arrivals 
had suffered severely from fever, but the next two generations 
appeared to be attacked by a milder form of the disease, 
while the children and young men of the present generation 
were quite free from malarial influence. The aborigines, 
Makubas and others, were quite strangers to the infection, 
although they inhabited the spots most liable to produce 
fever, living principally on islands in the enormous swamps 
of the Cubango. 
All these superannuated cases of intermittent fever showed 
a marked improvement under the treatment by Fowler’s 
tincture of arsenic, and before leaving I gave Mashabie all 
I could spare of this medicine to treat himself and other 
sufferers with. 
Mashabie was the proud possessor of a wife, one of the 
most magnificent women of the tribe, with a queenly behaviour 
that would have graced her in any society. She showed a 
marked preference for our company, and showered gifts of 
food and milk on us so liberally that Mashabie, for reasons 
of his own, thought it advisable to send her to some distant 
possession belonging to him, to look after the cattle, as he 
told us when we jokingly chaffed him for his unnecessary 
forethought. She came to bid us farewell with many tears, 
complaining bitterly of Mashabie’s despotic authority in sending 
her off, and took away several mementoes from Hammar and 
myself in the shape of blankets, coloured cloths and beads 
