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Updated: June 18, 2025
The chief of the place was quite willing to sell land, and he received glass beads and other choice wares in payment. Mabotsa lay not far from the present Mafeking, but seventy years ago the whole region was a wild. On one occasion a lion broke into the village and worried the sheep. The natives turned out with their weapons, and Livingstone took the lead.
The good doctor hated all quarrelling, and did not wish that white men should set a bad example to the blacks, so he gladly gave way and moved with his wife forty miles northwards. The house in Mabotsa had been built with his own savings, and as the London Missionary Society gave him a salary of only a hundred pounds a year, there could not be much over to build a house.
When he left, the natives round Mabotsa were in despair. Even when the oxen were yoked to the waggon, they begged him to remain and promised to build him another house. It was in vain, however; they lost their friend and saw him drive off to the village of Chonuane, which was subject to the chief Sechele.
Some rough tools were first hewn out, and he had soon the whole tribe at work, and the canal and conduits were laid out among the crops. And there stood the witch-doctors put to shame, as they heard the water purling and filtering into the soil. In 1843 Livingstone started off to found a new mission-station, named Mabotsa.
When in the country, one feels nothing of that alarm and loathing which we may experience when sitting in a comfortable English room reading about them; yet they are nasty things, and we seem to have an instinctive feeling against them. In making the door for our Mabotsa house, I happened to leave a small hole at the corner below.
The Bakatla of the village Mabotsa were much troubled by lions, which leaped into the cattle-pens by night, and destroyed their cows. They even attacked the herds in open day. This was so unusual an occurrence that the people believed that they were bewitched "given," as they said, "into the power of the lions by a neighboring tribe."
Long after we had settled at Mabotsa, when preaching on the most solemn subjects, a woman might be observed to look round, and, seeing a neighbor seated on her dress, give her a hunch with the elbow to make her move off; the other would return it with interest, and perhaps the remark, "Take the nasty thing away, will you?"
While I was at Mabotsa, some dogs became affected by a disease which led them to run about in an incoherent state; but I doubt whether it was any thing but an affection of the brain. No individual or animal got the complaint by inoculation from the animals' teeth; and from all that I could hear, the prevailing idea of hydrophobia not existing within the tropics seems to be quite correct.
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