"This new species of slavery which they have adopted serves to supply
the lack of field labour only. The demand for domestic servants must be
met by forays on tribes which have good supplies of cattle. The
Portuguese can quote instances in which blacks become so degraded by the
love of strong drink as actually to sell themselves; but never in any
one case, within the memory of man, has a Bechuana Chief sold any of his
people, or a Bechuana man his child. Hence the necessity for a foray to
seize children. And those individual Boers who would not engage in it
for the sake of slaves, can seldom resist the twofold plea of a
well-told story of an intended uprising of the devoted tribe, and the
prospect of handsome pay in the division of captured cattle besides. It
is difficult for a person in a civilized country to conceive that any
body of men possessing the common attributes of humanity, (and these
Boers are by no means destitute of the better feelings of our nature,)
should with one accord set out, after loading their own wives and
children with caresses, and proceed to shoot down in cold blood, men and
women of a different colour, it is true, but possessed of domestic
feelings and affections equal to their own. I saw and conversed with
children in the houses of Boers who had by their own and their master's
account been captured, and in several instances I traced the parents of
these unfortunates, though the plan approved by the long-headed among
the burghers is to take children so young that they soon forget their
parents and their native language also. It was long before I could give
credit to the tales of bloodshed told by native witnesses, and had I
received no other testimony but theirs, I should probably have continued
sceptical to this day as to the truth of the accounts; but when I found
the Boers themselves, some bewailing and denouncing, others glorying in
the bloody scenes in which they had been themselves the actors, I was
compelled to admit the validity of the testimony, and try to account for