anyone else to make the lives of the people wretched and to foment rebellion." An official report by Sir Richard Martin, subsequently issued, records that:
(a) Compulsory labour did undoubtedly exist in Matabeleland if not in Mashonaland;
(b) That labour was procured by the various native commissioners for the various requirements of the Government, mining companies and private persons;
(c) That the native commissioners, in the first instance, endeavoured to obtain labour through the Indunas (chiefs) but failing in this, they procured it by force.
Compelled to work in the mines at a sum fixed by the Chartered Company, flogged and otherwise punished if they ran away, maltreated by the native police, the Matabele doubtless felt that these experiences, coming on the top of their previous ones (to which a cattle disease had added further perplexities), did not impart such attractiveness to life that the risk of losing it in an endeavour to throw off the yoke was not worth entertaining. In his evidence before Sir Richard Martin, Mr. Carnegie, a well-known missionary, thus interprets the Matabele view of matters by themselves:
Our country is gone, our cattle have gone, our people are scattered, we have nothing to live for, our women are deserting us; the white man does as he likes with them: we are the slaves of the white man, we are nobody and have no rights or laws of any kind.
So in March, 1896, profiting by Dr. Jameson's withdrawal of his white fighting forces from the country for the purpose of trying the Lobengula treatment upon the robuster constitution of President Kruger, the Matabele rose, and later on the Mashonas also. The risings were spasmodic and not universal. They were accompanied by the usual brutal murders of isolated settlers and their families, and by the usual panic-stricken and indiscriminate slaughter of human beings with black skins by parties of undisciplined volunteers. The Matabele Times had some plain words on the subject:
The theory of shooting a nigger on sight is too suggestive of the rule of Donnybrook Fair to be other than a diversion rather than a satisfactory principle. We have been doing it up to now, burning kraals because they were native kraals, and firing upon fleeing natives simply because they were black. … Should the policy of shoot at sight continue it will merely drive the natives more and more into the ranks of the insurgents.
