Scotland/Scots > Last years of Livingstone

THE LAST TEARS OF LIVINGSTONE.
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“ Why your own slaves are your greatest enemies. I hear
everywhere how they have baffled you.” He closed the
bargain with Livingstone provisionally, but required a
few days to consult his associates. Then occurred an
event which precipitated the return of the expedition ;
we give the traveller’s own account of it:—
“ Two days afterwards, or on the 13th of June, a mas¬
sacre was perpetrated which filled me with such into¬
lerable loathing that I resolved to yield to the Banian
slaves, return to Ujiji, get men from the coast, and try to
finish the rest of my work by going outside the area of
Ujijian bloodshed, instead of vainly trying from its interior
outwards.
“ Dugambe’s people built their huts on the right bank of
the Lualaba, at a market place called Nyanwe. On hear¬
ing that the head slave of a trader at Ujiji had, in order to
get canoes cheap, ‘mixed blood’ with the head men of the
Bagenya on the left bank, they were disgusted with his
assurance, and resolved to punish him, and make an im¬
pression in the country in favour of their own greatness by
an assault on the market people, and on all the Bagenya
who had dared to make friendship with any but themselves.
Tagamalo, the principal undertaker of Dugambe’s party,
was the perpetrator. The market was attended every
fourth day by between 2,000 and 3,000 people. It was held
on a large slope of land which, down at the river, ended in
a creek capable of containing between fifty and sixty large
canoes. The majority of the market people were women
many of them very pretty. The people west of the river