such men as the eloquent and zealous reverend Tiyo Soga, the devoted evangelist William Koyi, who died as a missionary in Central Africa, William Seti, one of the most painstaking and competent clerks the author of these volumes ever had, John Knox Bokwe (now the reverend), who for many years was secretary and bookkeeper of the Lovedale institution, and a score of others that might be mentioned, must have a lofty future before it. The Xosas, like all other Bantu, are of mixed blood, and among their ancestors must have been Asiatics of high intelligence. The men here named may have owed their qualities to atavism, but even if so, they serve as models for their people to work up to, and in course of time an elevation must take place. If by any mischance they were left to themselves they would not advance, but with civilisation facing them and the leaven of a higher life working in the minds of some of themselves, they must conform to the law of progress.
In 1876 while there was a small section professing Christianity and living to some extent in the manner of Europeans, the great bulk of the Xosa tribe had made little or no advance beyond the condition in which their ancestors were a hundred years before. They had become well acquainted with white people since the dispersion of 1857, and did not hate them as bitterly as before, still there was little love lost on either side. The death of Makoma on Robben Island on the 9th of September 1873 was an event that had caused much ill feeling, for he, the hero of the Xosas, had died in banishment, without a relative or a friend near him, with no one to give him the burial that became a chief of high rank and distinguished valour. The government had decided to send one of his wives and a servant to keep him company, but had postponed doing so until it was too late. Drunkard and half maniac as he was when among his own people, it is impossible not to feel
