The Machinga, at Mponda’s on the Upper Shiré, made a raid on Ntumbi and Nziza, in May 1894, for the purpose of capturing women and children, but the men of the place frustrated this attempt, and took two prisoners, who were sent up to Chekusi’s, but released (I believe) after their guns had been taken from them. There is reason to believe that they had been more successful on previous occasions, not so very long before, and that the women in question had been smuggled across the Shiré, and, as there was no safe opportunity of sending them down to the coast, bought by various Yaos in the Shiré Highlands, who set them to work in their gardens, and, if inquiry was made, passed them off as their wives. In Livingstone’s time even the Anyanja, who have themselves suffered so much from the slave-trade, at times kidnapped people and sold them to the Portuguese. There is a special word for this (_fwamba_), and though practised it seems to have been always more or less reprobated—or at any rate felt to be wrong. CHAPTER XII TRADITIONS AND HISTORY Probable origin of the Yaos. The Makalanga. Undi. Migrations of the Angoni. The Tambuka. The Yaos believe themselves to be descended from the same stock as the Anyanja, Anguru, and Awisa, while they count the Angoni as a different race, and do not profess to know whence they came. These four tribes, therefore, must have kept together till a much later period than that at which the Zulus separated from the main stock of the Bantu. The Yaos imagined the tribes with whom they acknowledged kinship to have started with them from Kapirimtiya, and gone in different directions. The story of how Mtanga improved the Yao country in the beginning by moulding it into hills and valleys, seems to bear out the opinion that the mountainous region of Unangu was the early home of the race; but how long they lived there, before the raids of the Magwangwara sent them forth on their wanderings, is hard to say. Dr. M’Call Theal says: ‘There is not a single tribe in South Africa to-day that bears the same title, has the same relative power, and occupies the same ground as its ancestors three hundred years ago. The people we call Mashona are indeed descended from the Makalanga of the early Portuguese days, and they preserve their old name and part of their old country; but the contrast ... is striking.’ The more one studies the wars and migrations of the Bantu tribes, the more one is reminded of the state of things in our own island between (roughly speaking) 500 and 1000 A.D. We are apt to forget the length of time over which this process extended, and that though the Bantu, so far as we can tell, began it later, there seems no valid reason why it should not, in their case, have a similar termination. However, as we have to do with facts, not speculations, it seems futile to discuss a point which only posterity will have an opportunity of deciding.