Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/218

 166 SOUTH AND EAST AFRICA. '* Bad People " are in general more devoted to their women than most of the Bochuanas ; they also show great kindness to their dogs, faithful companions in the chase, who in the other communities are for the most part treated with brutality. On the subject of slavery in Bechuanaland some questions were asked in the British House of Commons in 1888, in reply to which Baron de Worms remarked on the part of the Government that the Ba- Kalahari people had hitherto stood in an ill-defined relation of dependence and servitude towards the Bcchuanas proper. According to native custom, these persons can and do hold property of their own, while their servitude towards the Bechuanas takes the form partly of actual labour rendered, and partly of tribute paid in kind. They themselves stand in a some- what similar position of superiority as regards the still more degraded Bushman aborigines. For the guidance of the local authorities, the Secretary of State has now laid down the following principles : 1. Within the newly formed British Protectorate all these people are in the eye of the law already freemen. 2. The magisterial courts will henceforth, as a matter of course, refuse to recognise or enforce any claims arising out of the supposed relations of master and slave, and will punish as an infringement of personal rights any attempts to exercise forcibly tlie claims of a master over a supposed slave. 3. The local administrator will inform all chiefs and headmen as to the state of the law, and warn them against exercising or enforcing rights incompatible with it. Bechuanaland is thus assimi- lated in this respect to the rest of the British South African possessions ; and while the tribal rights and privileges of the chiefs are so far curtailed, all the inhabitants of the land are placed upon a footing of absolute equality before the law. Farini describes at considerable length certain remains of ancient structures, which he speaks of having discovered in the Kalahari desert. Such buildings, if they existed, would seem to attest the former presence in this region of a people at a far higher stage of civilisation than that of its present Bechuana inhabitants. But of such a peopJe there survives neither record nor tradition, while many state- ments made by this traveller have since been shown to be far from trustworthy, Basutoland — Hkad Waters of the Orange. Before the irruption of the Dutch Boers into the regions lying north of the Orange, the western and eastern Bechuana peoples dwelt side by side, occupying conterminous camping-grounds. But the narrow end of the wedge once inserted, the two main sections of this ethnical group became gradually riven asunder. The European squatters creeping up the banks of the Orange and Caledon, and then reaching the waterparting between the Orange and Vaal, encroached inch by inch on the pasture-lands, driving the original occupiers of the soil to the right and left. While the western Bechuanas crossed the Vaal, the eastern tribes of the sime race, grouped under the collective name of Basutos (Ba-Suto, or "Paunched"), were compelled slowly to retreat towards the upland Maluti and Drakenberg valleys.