The same superstitious ideas being prevalent through the whole of the country north of the Zambesi, seems to indicate that the people must originally have been one.  All believe that the souls of the departed still mingle among the living, and partake in some way of the food they consume.  In sickness, sacrifices of fowls and goats are made to appease the spirits.  It is imagined that they wish to take the living away from earth and all its enjoyments.  When one man has killed another, a sacrifice is made, as if to lay the spirit of the victim.  A sect is reported to exist who kill men in order to take their hearts and offer them to the Barimo.

The chieftainship is elective from certain families.  Among the Bangalas of the Cassange valley the chief is chosen from three families in rotation.  A chief’s brother inherits in preference to his son.  The sons of a sister belong to her brother; and he often sells his nephews to pay his debts.  By this and other unnatural customs, more than by war, is the slave-market supplied.

The prejudices in favor of these practices are very deeply rooted in the native mind.  Even at Loanda they retire out of the city in order to perform their heathenish rites without the cognizance of the authorities.  Their religion, if such it may be called, is one of dread.  Numbers of charms are employed to avert the evils with which they feel themselves to be encompassed.  Occasionally you meet a man, more cautious or more timid than the rest, with twenty or thirty charms round his neck.  He seems to act upon the principle of Proclus, in his prayer to all the gods and goddesses:  among so many he surely must have the right one.  The disrespect which Europeans pay to the objects of their fear is to their minds only an evidence of great folly.

While here, I reproduced the last of my lost papers and maps; and as there is a post twice a month from Loanda, I had the happiness to receive a packet of the “Times”, and, among other news, an account of the Russian war up to the terrible charge of the light cavalry.  The intense anxiety I felt to hear more may be imagined by every true patriot; but I was forced to brood on in silent thought, and utter my poor prayers for friends who perchance were now no more, until I reached the other side of the continent.

A considerable trade is carried on by the Cassange merchants with all the surrounding territory by means of native traders, whom they term “Pombeiros”.  Two of these, called in the history of Angola “the trading blacks” (os feirantes pretos), Pedro Joao Baptista and Antonio Jose, having been sent by the first Portuguese trader that lived at Cassange, actually returned from some of the Portuguese possessions in the East with letters from the governor of Mozambique in the year 1815, proving, as is remarked, “the possibility of so important a communication between Mozambique and Loanda.”  This is the only instance of native Portuguese subjects crossing the continent.  No European ever accomplished it, though this fact has lately been quoted as if the men had been “Portuguese”.