they do wrong so long as they only play with them and have no children
by them, for it is the manner of all the world that men and women come
together and no law can be made to stop them from doing so, but the
white men do wrong when they allow the black women to have children by
them because such children grow up without proper homes, and that is
very sad and wrong."

I think the average white man, whatever his own opinion may be on this
matter, will acknowledge that there is clear thought and strong
common-sense in the old man's dictum, and this old man is an ordinary
raw Native, without any European education.

My good friend, Mahlabanyane, is a typical Tebele of the old school. In
his youth he accompanied the hunter Selous on many wanderings, and he
never tires of telling of the ways and habits of the game and wild
animals he has seen and shot. One day he told me that he had observed
all the wild animals of Rhodesia, big and small, and that he had
examined them all after they had been killed. He had come to the
conclusion, he said, that many of the bigger animals were related to
one another in some wonderful way, and that they had probably come out
of the earth, all alike, and had then afterwards become different, "as
people do when they separate and live always by themselves away from
other people," he added.

"Look at the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and the wild
pig," he said, "they must at one time have been one kind; their teeth
are alike, and none of them chew the cud. I think they must be cousins
to one another, and, one time, perhaps, they were brothers."

Leaving aside the question of the absolute correctness of the old man's