HISTORY 
77 
In the Barutse country, a strong kingdom of large extent, existed a ruling 
caste of Bechuana (who had first organised the territories on the Upper 
Zambezi into a large kingdom, and had been subsequently dispossessed of 
power to some extent by revolution) and the descendants of the old rulers, 
who were of Baloi, or Balui, stock. These latter had replaced in sovereign 
power the Bechuana 1 kings. But otherwise the government of the Upper 
Zambezi countries in their political tendencies remained much what it was 
in the days when Livingstone first discovered Barutseland. Eastwards of the 
Barutse country, the lands of the Bashikulombwe, of the Batonga and Manika, 
remained in a state of utter barbarism, fiercely recalcitrant to European 
researches. Little was known of the country since the explorations of Kirk 
and Livingstone; Dr. Emil Holub, an Austrian explorer, had been repulsed ; 
Mr. Selous, who had penetrated farthest into this part of Central Africa, was 
attacked and obliged to fly for his life; and Jesuit Missionaries had either been 
maltreated, killed, or expelled, in their attempts to penetrate these countries. 
On the lower part of the great Luangwa river, the country was harried by black 
chieftains from the Zambezi, who called themselves “ Portuguese,” on the 
strength of remote Goanese descent. In the Senga and Lubisa countries, 
Arabs and Swahilis were carrying on the slave trade, and gradually establishing 
themselves in the land by means of building stockaded towns. At the south 
end of Lake Tanganyika there were one or two missionaries settled and 
building. At the north end of Lake Nyasa a war between Arabs and Scotch 
traders had been going on for two years. Missionaries were peacefully at work 
in West Nyasaland, but on the east coast of the lake their work was 
paralysed by the hostility of Makanjira. The Yao, who, since Livingstone’s 
first arrival in the country, had gradually conquered much of the Shire 
Highlands, and had established themselves at the south end, and along the 
south-east and south-west coasts of Lake Nyasa, were engaged, either in 
incessant civil war amongst themselves, in attacks on their weaker neighbours, 
or in hostilities against the British. In the Shire Highlands coffee-planting had 
already begun under Mr. Buchanan, who had been joined by two of his 
brothers, and under Mr. Sharrer, a British subject of German descent, who 
had established himself as a planter and trader in Nyasaland. In the Shire 
Highlands the missionaries of the Church of Scotland Mission had acquired a 
considerable influence, an influence justly due to their high character and their 
devotion to the interests of the natives, but an influence which at that time 
they were too much inclined to exercise with the view to governing the country 
themselves, independently of Consuls or other representatives of Her Majesty. 
The rival to the Scotch Missionaries, as a governing body, was the African 
Lakes Company, which was half hoping for a Charter, and was striving to 
obtain from the native chiefs a concession of governing rights. Sometimes 
the interests of the Lakes Company and the Mission were conflicting, and 
not infrequently the two or three independent planters could agree with neither. 
The Universities Mission was supposed to hold the opinion that the war with 
the Arabs was unwise, and owing to its friendly relations on the lake with 
the Arabs more or less attached to the Sultan of Zanzibar, that Mission 
did not identify itself with any movement for the expulsion of the Arabs 
from Nyasaland. A French Evangelical Mission had established itself in 
the Barutse country, and was acquiring a very great influence over the natives. 2 
The seat of this Mission, however, lay in British South Africa, and so far 
1 i.e., Makololo. 2 An influence always used for disinterested and proper ends. 
