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 anyone else to make the lives of the people wretched and to foment rebellion." An official report by Sir Richard Martin, subsequently issued, records that:

Compelled to work in the mines at a sum fixed by the Chartered Company, flogged and otherwise punished if they ran away, maltreated by the native police, the Matabele doubtless felt that these experiences, coming on the top of their previous ones (to which a cattle disease had added further perplexities), did not impart such attractiveness to life that the risk of losing it in an endeavour to throw off the yoke was not worth entertaining. In his evidence before Sir Richard Martin, Mr. Carnegie, a well-known missionary, thus interprets the Matabele view of matters by themselves:

So in March, 1896, profiting by Dr. Jameson's withdrawal of his white fighting forces from the country for the purpose of trying the Lobengula treatment upon the robuster constitution of President Kruger, the Matabele rose, and later on the Mashonas also. The risings were spasmodic and not universal. They were accompanied by the usual brutal murders of isolated settlers and their families, and by the usual panic-stricken and indiscriminate slaughter of human beings with black skins by parties of undisciplined volunteers. The Matabele Times had some plain words on the subject: