AFRICAN VISTA

"Our men, accustomed to our ways, thought that the English system of paying a man for his labor was the only correct one, and some even said it would be better to live under a government where life and labor were more secure and valuable than here. While with us, they always conducted themselves with propriety during Divine service, and not only maintained decorum themselves , but insisted on other natives who might be present doing the same. When Moshobotwane, the Batoka chief, came on one occasion with a number of his men, they listened in silence to the reading of the Bible in the Makololo tongue; but, as soon as we all knelt down to pray, they commenced a vigorous clapping of hands, their mode of asking a favor. Our indignant Makololo soon silenced their noisy accompaniment , and looked with great contempt on this display of ignorance. Nearly all our men learned to repeat the Lord's Prayer and the Apostle's Creed in their own language, and felt rather proud of being able to do so; and when they reached home, they liked to recite them to groups of admiring friends. Their ideas of right and wrong differ in no respect from our own, except in their professed inability to see how it can be improper for a man to have more than one wife. A year or two ago several of the wives of those who had been absent with us petitioned the Chief for leave to marry again. They thought that it was of no use waiting any longer, their husbands must be dead; but Sekeletu refused permission ; he himself had bet a number of oxen that the Doctor would return with their husbands, and he had promised the absent men that their wives should be kept for them. The impatient spouses had therefore to wait a while longer. Some of them, however, eloped with other men; the wife of Mantlanyane, for instance , ran off and left his little boy among strangers. Mantlanyane was very angry when he heard of it, not that he cared much about her deserting him for he had two other wives at Tette, but he was indignant at her abandoning his boy." P. 235-6, "The Makololo," EXPEDITION TO THE ZAMBESI by David and Charles a Livingstone (1865)