On the third day of the Nama chieftain and his entourage at the base, the deal was finally completed.

Liang Hong harvested fifty Basutuo horses and 20,000 kilograms of grain, which were exchanged for captured rifles, those old rifles whose rifling was about to be worn out, he was not interested, and it was not even as good as the single-shot Mauser 1871 rifle.

On the bluestone bunker, seeing the group disappear into the distance, Liang Hong put down the binoculars. Horses and food are immediate gains, and peace with the two communities may be more long-term. In particular, the Nama people, who have a large population base, have shown a keen interest in guns. In the longer term, the captives exchanged by the Griqua people included seven devout believers who had converted to Mingjiao.

The Nama people are far more numerous than the Griqua people, and in Liang Hong's opinion, the Griqua people, who are not prosperous, are more like mercenaries under the command of the Nama. It may make more sense to create a few Nama-looking missionaries and send them to spread the Ming religion among the Nama-looking tribes. Hehe, this is also a very different kind of united front work.

After a few days of meeting, there is another layer of gain for Liang Hong, who is from outside, that is, he has a better understanding of the relationship between various ethnic groups in South Africa today.

The Boers and Griqua seem to be natural mortal enemies, and much of this is due to religion. There are two main components of the Boers, one is the Dutch immigrants, most of whom are descendants of Calvinists, and the other is the French Huguenots who have fled religious persecution, and the two have the same doctrine, but the names in France and the Netherlands are different. Their teachings are also the most paranoid and serious among Protestants, opposing music, singing and dancing, and all things happy, and advocating a life of asceticism and discipline. Among them, the descendants of France, who had experienced the brutal religious wars of their ancestors, were more paranoid and more violent, so they also served as high-ranking commanders in the Boer army. The Dutch descendants only despised the Griquas, while the French descendants preferred to use weapons to exterminate them, just as they had been in the French Wars of Religion hundreds of years earlier.

This character of the Boers is also generally applicable to associations with other ethnic groups. They despised the extravagant life of the British, and despised all the indigenous people of color, including the Nama,, Zulus, Bechuannes, Basutos, etc., and had fierce conflicts with almost every race they came into contact with. This kind of ethnic character is also destined for them to have almost only enemies and no allies in the future Anglo-Boer war.

The Zulu are another legendary ethnic group in South Africa, originally a small tribe of the Ngoni people. In 1816, Chaka, the illegitimate son of the Zulu chief, killed his half-brother and led the Zulu tribe to brutally slaughter and conquer the other Ngoni people, eventually developing into the most powerful empire in southern Africa. Chaka pioneered a new militaristic system, the Peer Corps, a heavily trained Zulu army that swept through and crushed all tribes. But after Chaka's death, the Zulu met their nemesis, the whites. First it was heavily damaged by the Boers, and then, with the support of the British, it became a tool against the Boers. When the British had brought down the Boers, they turned around and used the blood inflicted on the Zulus themselves with even more brutal slaughter. In order to prevent the Zulus from becoming strong again, the British split the defeated Zulu Kingdom into thirteen small emirates, and instigated civil wars among them, killing each other bloody. After the complete decline of the Zulus, the annexation of the Zulu with the Nadal colony was simply announced in 1887, and the annexation was finally completed in 1897.

The rise of the Zulu people objectively caused another catastrophe for the indigenous peoples of southern Africa. In order to escape the murderous Zulus and the white people who used firearms, the Bantu people, who gradually migrated south, fled north, and destroyed countless primitive tribes along the way. In 1819, the Zulu army defeated the forces of the Ngonian kingdom of Ndewandwe, and the Ngoni began to retreat northward, and their migration, like that of the Xiongnu, had a domino effect throughout southern and central Africa. The first to be squeezed out by them was the Matiwang tribe of the Amanwini people, and the Matiwang tribe, which had been attacked, went to attack the Helubians; The Herubis were forced to cross the Drakens, and their Zulu-style army went on a rampage, becoming the dominant force east of the Drakensberg. The 1821 military campaign of the Hrubis against the Sutuos opened the prelude to the inter-tribal warfare on the Transvaal Plateau, known as the Diffacon War. Later, the Transvaal Plateau, which was depopulated, was easily occupied by the Boers who went north.

Unite all the forces that can be united, Liang Hong was deeply impressed by this sentence, and in the face of the chaotic ethnic relations in southern Africa, he intends to do so. Having a base to make weapons is his greatest advantage. Spread Mingjiao to assimilate the natives, arm the believers with modern weapons, and use the ******** military system to fish in troubled waters in the future Anglo-Boer war.

When Liang Hong was thinking about the outside pattern, he himself was also being remembered.

Located on a plateau 400 kilometres southwest of Johannesburg, Kimberley is a city founded in 1870 and built on diamonds. In the heart of the city, the most beautiful and magnificent villa garden in the city, the residence of Cecil Rhodes, the de facto ruler of the Kimberley.

The chubby middle-aged man sat behind the desk and flipped through the papers in his hand. He was Cecil Rhodes, the former Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in England, the richest man in Southern Africa, the diamond magnate and the gold magnate.

"The expedition is all dead, and the killer has not yet been identified?"

Rhodes didn't look up, but there was already a deep dissatisfaction in his tone. He used to be a businessman and has now resigned as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. But he also owns the South African Mining Company, which is legally armed and the company's police are no less effective than the British regular army. In addition, he held a royal charter from the British South African Company, controlled the administration of a large territory in Rhodesia, and established a regular colonial army.

"Yes, sir, but we already have a suspicion."

Barron, who was standing across the table, replied cautiously, he heard Rhodes's displeasure, so he deliberately added the second half of the sentence. It doesn't matter if the company has killed a dozen police officers, but two mining experts are the biggest loss, and if the murderers are not punished, they may be taken as some kind of signal by people with bad intentions, and they are more likely to be in trouble later. As a police commander in a mining company, a former lieutenant colonel in the British Army, he must always think about his boss in order to maintain this generous salary.

"Oh, just suspicion?"

Still didn't look up, and used a rising tone, apparently with some kind of suspicion.

"Yes, there is no evidence, the bodies of all the personnel were eaten by crocodiles. But the investigators sent out found traces of once fierce fighting at the site of the riverbank. Cartridge casings for 7-mm German Mauser rifles were found, which were heavily equipped in the hands of the Boers. ”

"So, the Boers did this?"

This time, Rhodes finally raised his head, his eyes flashing with a chill, the Boers were his sworn enemy.