p the progress of the contagion. The plague had
come slowly down through German and Portuguese East Africa, propagated,
it is said, by the wild animals, especially buffaloes. Some kinds of
wild game are as liable to it as domesticated oxen are, and on the Upper
Zambesi in September, 1896, so large a part of the game had died that
the lions, mad with hunger, were prowling round the native kraals and
making it dangerous to pass from village to village. This new and
unlooked for calamity created a ferment in the minds of the natives. The
slaughter of their cattle seemed to them an act of injustice. Just when
they were terrified at this calamity (which, it was reported, had been
sent up among them by Lo Bengula, or his ghost, from the banks of the
Zambesi) and incensed at this apparent injustice, coming on the top of
their previous visitation, the news of the defeat and surrender of the
Company's police force in the Transvaal spread among them. They saw the
white government defenceless, and its head, Dr. Jameson, whose
kindliness had impressed those who knew him personally, no longer among
them. Then, under the incitements of a prophet, came the revolt.

This, however, is a digression. In October, 1895, we travelled, unarmed
and unconcerned, by night as well as by day, through villages where five
months later the Kafirs rose and murdered every European within reach.
So entirely unsuspected was the already simmering disaffection.

The native question which occupied Bulawayo in September, 1895, was
that native-labour question which, in one form or another, is always
present to South African minds. All hard labour, all rough and unskilled
labour, is, and, owing to the heat of the climate as well as the
scarcity of white men, must be, done by blacks; and in a new country
like Matabililand the blacks, though they can sometimes be induced to
till the land, are most averse to working under ground. They are only
beginning to use money, and they do not want the things which money
buys. The wants of a native living with his tribe and cultivating
mealies or Kafir corn are confined to a kaross (skin cloak) or some
pieces of cotton cloth. The prospect of leaving his tribe to go and work
in a mine, in order that he may earn wages wherewith he can buy things
he has no use for, does not at once appeal to him. The white men,
anxious to get to work on the gold-reefs, are annoyed at what they call
the stupidity and laziness of the native, and