The Boers know from experience that adult captives may as well be left alone, for escape is so easy in a wild country that no fugitive-slave-law can come into operation; they therefore adopt the system of seizing only the youngest children, in order that these may forget their parents and remain in perpetual bondage.  I have seen mere infants in their houses repeatedly.  This fact was formerly denied; and the only thing which was wanting to make the previous denial of the practice of slavery and slave-hunting by the Transvaal Boers no longer necessary was the declaration of their independence.

In conversation with some of my friends here I learned that Maleke, a chief of the Bakwains, who formerly lived on the hill Litubaruba, had been killed by the bite of a mad dog.  My curiosity was strongly excited by this statement, as rabies is so rare in this country.  I never heard of another case, and could not satisfy myself that even this was real hydrophobia.  While I was at Mabotsa, some dogs became affected by a disease which led them to run about in an incoherent state; but I doubt whether it was any thing but an affection of the brain.  No individual or animal got the complaint by inoculation from the animals’ teeth; and from all that I could hear, the prevailing idea of hydrophobia not existing within the tropics seems to be quite correct.

The diseases known among the Bakwains are remarkably few.  There is no consumption nor scrofula, and insanity and hydrocephalus are rare.  Cancer and cholera are quite unknown.  Small-pox and measles passed through the country about twenty years ago, and committed great ravages; but, though the former has since broken out on the coast repeatedly, neither disease has since traveled inland.  For small-pox, the natives employed, in some parts, inoculation in the forehead with some animal deposit; in other parts, they employed the matter of the small-pox itself; and in one village they seem to have selected a virulent case for the matter used in the operation, for nearly all the village was swept off by the disease in a malignant confluent form.  Where the idea came from I can not conceive.  It was practiced by the Bakwains at a time when they had no intercourse, direct or indirect, with the southern missionaries.  They all adopt readily the use of vaccine virus when it is brought within their reach.

A certain loathsome disease, which decimates the North American Indians, and threatens extirpation to the South Sea Islanders, dies out in the interior of Africa without the aid of medicine; and the Bangwaketse, who brought it from the west coast, lost it when they came into their own land southwest of Kolobeng.  It seems incapable of permanence in any form in persons of pure African blood any where in the centre of the country.  In persons of mixed blood it is otherwise; and the virulence of the secondary symptoms seemed to be, in all the cases that came under my care, in exact proportion to the greater or less amount of European blood in the patient.  Among the Corannas and Griquas of mixed breed it produces the same ravages as in Europe; among half-blood Portuguese it is equally frightful in its inroads on the system; but in the pure Negro of the central parts it is quite incapable of permanence.  Among the Barotse I found a disease called manassah, which closely resembles that of the ‘foeda mulier’ of history.