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So many slave-sticks lie along our path, that I suspect the people here-about make a practice of liberating what slaves they cian find abandoned on the march, to sell them again. A large quantity of maize is cultivated at Chimsaka's, at whose place we this day arrived. When starting, we found that fork, kettle, pot, and shot-pouch had been taken.
As he did not know of our intention to visit him, we came upon several gangs of stout young men slaves, each secured by the neck to one common chain, waiting for exportation, and several more in slave-sticks. These were all civilly removed before our interview was over, because Juma knew that we did not relish the sight.
It is a motley group, composed of Mohamad and his friends, a gang of Unyamwezi hangers-on, and strings of wretched slaves yoked together in their heavy slave-sticks. 11th December, 1868. We marched four hours unmolested by the natives, built a fence, and next day crossed the Lokinda River and its feeder the Mookosi; here the people belonged to Chisabi, who had not joined the other Babemba.
Being what they were, it was hard to blame them. If we had seen our parents shot, our infants pitilessly butchered, our homes destroyed and our women and children marched off in the slave-sticks to be sold into bondage, should we not have done the same? I think so, although we are not ignorant savages.
The following incident deals with the firm belief in a future state, which enters so largely into the minds of all Africans, and which for very lack of guidance assumes all the distorted growths of superstition. 24th June, 1868. Six men slaves were singing as if they did not feel the weight and degradation of the slave-sticks.
But fortunately he did not see us, because we were in the dark far from the fire." "Anything more, Hans?" "One thing, Baas. These two men lent the knives you gave them to two of the boldest among the slaves that they might cut the cords of the slave-sticks and the other cords with which they were tied, and then pass them down the lines, that their brothers might do the same.
Suddenly I heard a tumult, and looking over the wall which is round the garden and to the left of the house, I saw a great number of men, some of them white, some Arab, and some half-breeds, one mounted and the others on foot, and behind them a long caravan of slaves with the slave-sticks set upon their necks.
Meanwhile they were cleaning out certain small tribes which hitherto had escaped them, owing to the fact that they had their residence in bush or among difficult hills. The track we followed was the recognised slave road. Of this we soon became aware by the numbers of skeletons which we found lying in the tall grass at its side, some of them with heavy slave-sticks still upon their wrists.
To-day we came upon a man dead from starvation, as he was very thin. One of our men wandered and found a number of slaves with slave-sticks on, abandoned by their master from want of food; they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come from; some were quite young. We crossed the Tulosi, a stream coming from south, about twenty yards wide.
After him rushed a great mob of naked men, two hundred of them perhaps, brandishing slave-sticks, stones and the boughs of trees.