Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/374

 800 SOUTH AND EAST AFEICA. tees take charge of the finances, public works, and sanitary matters. The province is unrepresented by any delegates to these boards and committees ; but it elects two deputies, who have scats in the Lisbon Cortes. The Mozambique budget, which shows a heavy yearly deficit, amounting in 1886 to nearly £51,000, is fixed by the central Government. The revenue is derive<l chiefly from the customs and a poll-tax of seven shillings levied on every head of native families. Public instruction is but slightly developed in the province, the few schools for both sexes showing a total attendance of less than four hundred pupils. The bishopric of ^lozambique, which is still subordinate to the archiepiscopal see of Goa, enjoys scarcely any ecclesiastical jurisdiction except over the Portu- guese and men of colour connected with the trading establishments. None of the numerous tribes of the interior have- yet accepted the Roman Catholic form of Christianity, although a first Jesuit mission was sent from Goa so early as loGO to the '* Monomotapa " empire for the purpose of "enlightening" the unbelievers, " as black of soul as of body ;" and although subsequently all the military expedi- tions were accompanied by missionaries who were charged " to reduce the indigenous jKipulations by their teachings as the military reduced them by the sword," the wranglings of the Jesuits and Dominican friars, the spiritual administration of priests banished from the home country for civil crimes or for simony, and above all, the trafiic in slaves, both pagan and Christian, Tesulted in the disappearance of most of the parishes founded at any distance from the settlements on the coast. The churches crumbled to ruins, laid in many places these melancholy remains of misapplied zeal are still seen, surrounded by the superstitious respect or awe of the aborigines. Even so recently as 18G'2 the slave-trade was still actively carried on between Mozambique and the island of Cuba, but in that year the traffic was at last abolished in the great Spanish West Indian colony. The slaves imported from the Afi-ican seaboard to Madagascar had also become so numerous that they were long familiarly known to the .Sakalava and IFova inhabitants of that island by the name of *' ^lozambiques." After a long period of gradual transition the last traces of legal slavery finally disappeared in the year 1878 throughout the Portuguese possessions. The province of Mozambique is divided into districts, each administered by a governor, who delegates his authority in the villages or in the tribes either to the native chiefs or else to capitaeii mors, or " captains-major." In the Appendix is given a list of the ten districts into which the province is at present divided, together with the names, and where possible the population, of their chief towns. J