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National Geographic : 1910 Oct
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VOL. XXI, No. 10 WASHINGTON OCTOBER, 1910 IMPRESSIONS AND SCENES OF MOZAM BIQUE BY O. W. BARRETT With Photographsby the Author ACOUNTRY as big as the Atlantic States from Florida to New York, with the capital near the southern boundary and half a dozen smaller towns scattered along the coast; more than 3,000,000 inhabitants, of which only about one per cent are whites; one of the oldest of all European possessions and one of the richest in agricultural possibilities, at least, but one of the least known countries in the world. Such is Mozambique. Four or five good ports and as many bad ones; five towns and a small but up to-date capital city, and a generous num ber of military posts and outposts, a few of which are in the real raw interior; millions of acres of the finest alluvial soil fairly aching to show the farmer what big crops may be grown; waterways like the Zambesi, the Limpopo, and plenty of smaller ones to allow cheap handling of products; no deserts, no salt sinks, no large swamps, no mountainous wastes, no impenetrable jungles; out of some twenty only one or two tribes that object seri ously to paying taxes to the government, now that they realize that the tax collec tor is a vital organ of the white tribe, which objects to any one tribe extermi- nating another in the good old way; for, wicked as a bush policeman tries to be, he must needs fall far short of the unre strained chief's "induna". The early history of this strange sec tion of East Africa should not be, even if it could be, written. We know the' old-time black was as bad as a barbarian can be, and the endless tale of persistent, widespread, and continuous butchery would not be good to read. Yet the ethnologist may well listen to the half legend, half true stories of the clans, tribes, and races that have been lost forever. No pottery, no carvings, no ruins will remain after a few more years; only language traces (for the slay ers sometimes spared a few of the come liest maidens) and father- to- son oral history. To ride over the site of a native village which probably held a thousand huts less than twenty years ago, to note the bits of charcoal, pieces of clay bowls, bones, and the few ominous breaks in the heavy ten-foot stockade fence made of hardwood logs set upright close together, forcibly reminds one of the wretched people, tired of fighting, who sought to gain respite by erecting a barrier that no foe could burn or climb over, only to
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