Missionary Travels and Researches in South AfricaLivingstone, David
Religion
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
Livingstone, David
Missions -- South Africa; South Africa -- Description and travel
The Bakwains at Kolobeng had the spectacle of various tribes enslaved
before their eyes--the Bakatla, the Batlokua, the Bahukeng, the
Bamosetla, and two other tribes of Bakwains were all groaning under
the oppression of unrequited labor. This would not have been felt as so
great an evil but that the young men of those tribes, anxious to obtain
cattle, the only means of rising to respectability and importance among
their own people, were in the habit of sallying forth, like our Irish
and Highland reapers, to procure work in the Cape Colony. After laboring
there three or four years, in building stone dikes and dams for the
Dutch farmers, they were well content if at the end of that time they
could return with as many cows. On presenting one to their chief, they
ranked as respectable men in the tribe ever afterward. These volunteers
were highly esteemed among the Dutch, under the name of Mantatees. They
were paid at the rate of one shilling a day and a large loaf of bread
between six of them. Numbers of them, who had formerly seen me about
twelve hundred miles inland from the Cape, recognized me with the loud
laughter of joy when I was passing them at their work in the Roggefelt
and Bokkefelt, within a few days of Cape Town. I conversed with them and
with elders of the Dutch Church, for whom they were working, and found
that the system was thoroughly satisfactory to both parties. I do not
believe that there is one Boer, in the Cashan or Magaliesberg country,
who would deny that a law was made, in consequence of this labor passing
to the colony, to deprive these laborers of their hardly-earned cattle,
for the very cogent reason that, "if they want to work, let them work
for us their masters," though boasting that in their case it would not
be paid for. I can never cease to be most unfeignedly thankful that I
was not born in a land of slaves. No one can understand the effect of
the unutterable meanness of the slave-system on the minds of those
who, but for the strange obliquity which prevents them from feeling the
degradation of not being gentlemen enough to pay for services rendered,
would be equal in virtue to ourselves. Fraud becomes as natural to them
as "paying one's way" is to the rest of mankind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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