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And, with this, another question was raised, namely, that of the use of weapons. The party were in the country of the Man-gnaja, a tribe of negroes who were continually harried by the fiercer and more powerful neighbour-tribe of Ajawa, great slave-catchers, who supplied the slave- hunters who came out from Tette to collect their human droves.
Subsequent events have led to the belief that this warfare of the Ajawa was really the advance of one of those great tides of nations that take place from time to time, and that they were a much finer people than the cowardly and false Man-gnaja; but, of course, a small company of strangers, almost ignorant of the language, and communicating with the natives through a released and educated negro, could not enter into the state of things, and could only struggle against the immediate acts of oppression that came before them.
The great need was of some female element, to train and deal with the women and girls; and there was an earnest desire for the arrival of the sisters. But, in the meantime, the occupation of Magomero proved far from peaceful. The Ajawa were always coming down upon the Man-gnaja to burn their villages and steal slaves, and the Man-gnaja called upon the whites as invincible allies.
It appeared that Manasomba was not a Man-gnaja, and that his suspicions were excited by anything so inexplicable to the negro mind as white men going about with so much cloth without buying slaves nor much of anything else.
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