Page:The Past, Present and Future Trade of the Cape Colonies with Central Africa.pdf/15

 as barter. The Portuguese trade in the interior has decreased since the year 1872. In that year the English traders from the South penetrated into Central Africa by crossing the river Zambesi. Since that time the Portuguese trade has decreased. Those parts were ruled by a very cruel king, called Sepopo. He was living in the western parts of his empire, in his very fertile mother-country, Barotse. He was dissatisfied with the articles which the Portuguese brought from the East coast; and as one of his natives brought him two guns and good blankets which he had got from some English traders, and he took a fancy to those things, and on account of that he changed his residence, and he came down from the Barotse, and took up his abode in Shesheke (district of the Masujna), a village of which Livingstone makes mention. It is a country inhabited by a poisonous insect, where people cannot breed cattle, excepting in the next neighbourhood of Shesheke, and he preferred those parts only to be nearer to our traders. But Sepopo was killed in 1876, and the people who came from the West coast and had great influence with the advisers and counsellors of the new king, recommended the new man not to deal with our traders, and since that time our trade has decreased. We had such a lively trade with those parts, that between the years 1872–76, not less than £60,000 worth of ivory had been brought out from the one empire alone; in the year 1877 only about £2,000; and since that time nothing. But we have to see about the reasons of the decrease and collapse of our trade in the first, second, and third divisions. We have had the opportunity to observe that this decrease happened through circumstances which would have occurred sooner or later. It was a trade mostly with ivory and ostrich feathers, and as was to be expected, with the progressing extirpation of these animals, the trade would decrease and cease entirely. The time when the trade was opened, there were only a few traders who traded in those parts. Those men made a good business, on account of which their numbers multiplied, and instead of five we observe, in the latest years, about seventy traders. In former times game was plentiful in the first and second divisions, consequently no trouble for a single man to kill twenty or thirty elephants in one season; but during late years since the natives got possession of guns they have begun to use them themselves, frequently decimating these animals, like the white hunters, whose numbers have increased like those of the traders. The natives do not show to the white man the roads into the thickets where elephants were plentiful, but keep them a secret to themselves. Their chiefs impose, at present, taxes upon