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Updated: June 5, 2025
We met two large trading parties of Tette slaves on their way to Zumbo, leading, to be sold for ivory, a number of Manganja women, with ropes round their necks, and all made fast to one long rope. Panzo, the headman of the village east of Kebrabasa, received us with great kindness.
On the 26th June we breakfasted at Zumbo, on the left bank of the Loangwa, near the ruins of some ancient Portuguese houses. The Loangwa was too deep to be forded, and there were no canoes on our side. Seeing two small ones on the opposite shore, near a few recently erected huts of two half-castes from Tette, we halted for the ferry-men to come over.
It is currently reported, and commonly believed, that once upon a time a Portuguese named Jose Pedra, by the natives called Nyamatimbira, chief, or capitao mor, of Zumbo, a man of large enterprise and small humanity, being anxious to ascertain if Kebrabasa could be navigated, made two slaves fast to a canoe, and launched it from Chicova into Kebrabasa, in order to see if it would come out at the other end.
The villagers reported that we were on the footsteps of a Portuguese half- caste, who, at Senga, lately tried to purchase ivory, but, in consequence of his having murdered a chief near Zumbo and twenty of his men, the people declined to trade with him.
We were now on the sources of the Loangwa of the Maravi, which enters the Zambesi at Zumbo, and were struck by the great resemblance which the boggy and sedgy streams here presented to the sources of the Leeba, an affluent of the Zambesi formerly observed in Londa, and of the Kasai, which some believe to be the principal branch of the Congo or Zaire.
In the country above Zumbo we did not find a vestige of this law; and but for the fact that it existed in the country of the Bamapela, far to the south of this, I should have been disposed to regard it in the same light as I do the payment for leave to pass an imposition levied on him who is seen to be weak because in the hands of his slaves.
During the night the wind blew directly from the dead buffalo to their sleeping-place, and a hungry lion which came to feed on the carcass so stirred up the putrid mass and growled so loudly over his feast, that their slumbers were greatly disturbed. They reached Zumbo by the 1st of November. Here their men had a scurvy trick played them by the Banyai.
Elephants, or tusks, walking on foot are never absent;" but though we were eager for flesh, we could not give him credit, and went down the defile which gives rise to the Sandili River: where we crossed it in the defile, it was a mere rill, having large trees along its banks, yet it is said to go to the Loangwa of Zumbo, N.W. or N.N.W. We were now in fact upon the slope which inclines to that river, and made a rapid descent in altitude.
Here the doctor discovered the ruins of a town, with the remains of a church in its midst. The situation was well chosen, with lofty hills in the rear and a view of the two rivers in front. On one side of the church lay a broken bell, with the letters IHS and a cross. This he found was a Portuguese settlement called Zumbo.
I may here add the recipe of Brother Pedro of Zumbo for the cure of poisoned wounds, in order to show the similarity of practice among the natives of the Zambesi, from whom, in all probability, he acquired his knowledge, and the Bushmen of the Kalahari.
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