found they
shrank from the experiment.

When we reached the Bamangwato, the chief, Sekomi, was particularly
friendly, collected all his people to the religious services we held,
and explained his reasons for compelling some Englishmen to pay him a
horse. "They would not sell him any powder, though they had plenty; so
he compelled them to give it and the horse for nothing. He would not
deny the extortion to me; that would be 'boherehere' (swindling)." He
thus thought extortion better than swindling. I could not detect any
difference in the morality of the two transactions, but Sekomi's ideas
of honesty are the lowest I have met with in any Bechuana chief, and
this instance is mentioned as the only approach to demanding payment for
leave to pass that I have met with in the south. In all other cases the
difficulty has been to get a chief to give us men to show the way,
and the payment has only been for guides. Englishmen have always very
properly avoided giving that idea to the native mind which we shall
hereafter find prove troublesome, that payment ought to be made for
passage through a country.

All the Bechuana and Caffre tribes south of the Zambesi practice
circumcision ('boguera'), but the rites observed are carefully
concealed. The initiated alone can approach, but in this town I was
once a spectator of the second part of the ceremony of the circumcision,
called "sechu". Just at the dawn of day, a row of boys of nearly
fourteen years of age stood naked in the kotla, each having a pair of
sandals as a shield on his hands. Facing them stood the men of the
town in a similar state of nudity, all armed with long thin wands, of a
tough, strong, supple bush called moretloa ('Grewia flava'), and engaged
in a dance named "koha", in which questions are put to the boys, as
"Will you guard the chief well?" "Will you herd the cattle well?" and,
while the latter give an affirmative response, the men rush forward to
them, and each aims a full-weight blow at the back of one of the boys.
Shielding himself with the sandals above his head, he causes the supple
wand to descend and bend into his back, and every stroke inflicted thus
makes the blood squirt out of a wound a foot or eighteen inches long. At
the end of the dance, the boys' backs are seamed with wounds and weals,
the scars of which remain through life. This is intended to harden
the young soldiers, and prepare them for the rank of men. After this
ceremony, and after killin