Note 555 — Chapter II · GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF SLAVERY.
Reading edition
The Ovampo, according to Galton, have members of foreign tribes living among them in a state of subjection; but whether these people are slaves in the true sense is not clear. “I cannot speak with certainty” he says “of the exact standing in which the Damaras and the Bushmen severally live among the Ovampo. The first are employed principally as cattle-watchers; the second, who are even more ornamented than the Ovampo themselves, are a kind of standing army; but I have great reason to doubt whether either one or the other class is independent. The Ovampo, as I have mentioned, looked down with much contempt on the Damaras; and there is not a single instance, so far as I could learn, of any Ovampo woman marrying a Damara, and settling in Damaraland, but the reverse is a very common case. The Bushmen appear to be naturalised among the negro tribes, and free in the border-lands between them to a distance very far north of Ondonga”555.