ent." This reply, which
I have Englished almost literally, is typical of the Native form of
argumentation and it shows good all-round thinking ability; it is not a
particular instance of special intelligence, but a fair example of
average Native perspicacity.

A few months ago, while discussing with some elderly Matabele Natives
the subject of miscegenation in South Africa generally one of the old
men voiced the opinion of the meeting thus:

"White people do what they like, they take what they like, and when they
like certain girls they take them, and what can we say? And, after all,
why should they not do so? Everything belongs to them, we are their
people, our girls belong to them, the white people only take what is
theirs to take."

"But," I interpolated, "white men do not take the girls away from you,
it is the girls themselves who leave their own kind and go to the white
men."

"No," he replied, "I say they take the girls because they know as well
as we do that women--all women--will always go where they can live with
ease and have plenty and be without work, and this they can do when they
go to the white man, whereas with us they must work. Therefore I say
that the white men take the girls away from us, but I do not say that
they do wrong so long as they only play with them and have no children
by them, for it is the manner of all the world that men and women come
together and no law can be made to stop them from doing so, but the
white men do wrong when they allow the black women to have children by
them because such children grow up without proper homes, and that is
very sad and wrong."

I think the average white man, whatever his own opinion may be on this
matter, will acknowledge that there is clear thought and strong
common-sense in the old man's dictum, and this old man is an ordinary
raw Native, without any European education.

My good friend, Mahlabanyane, is a typical Tebele of the old school. In
his youth he accompanied the hunter Selous on many wanderings, and he
never tires of telling of the ways and habits of the game and wild
animals he has seen and shot. One day he told me that he had observed
all the wild animals of Rhodesia, big and small, and that he had
examined them all after they had been killed. He had come to the
conclusion, he said, that many of the bigger animals were related to
one another in some wonderful way, and that they had probably come out
of the earth, all alike, and had