142 A NATURALIST IN THE TRANSVAAL. 



maize) ; he is a cheerful worker, very apt to learn, and 

 after my experience of Coolie labour in the East I have 

 a great respect for the Kafir. He is fairly industrious, 

 cheerful, frugal, and saving, for he has only travelled 

 down to the white man's mart in order that he may in 

 a few months have sufficient money to return and enjoy 

 himself in the Kafir paradise. He does not understand 

 the white man, who is always working to make money 

 and philosophically he is right ; the European too 

 often only looks upon him as a brute when, philoso- 

 phically, he is wrong. The two are old relations, who 

 parted ages ago from the ancestral progenitors and who 

 now meet each other again with a different colour of 

 the skin but the same bodily structure ; with a differen- 

 tiation of ideas and development of brain, but with 

 common animal instincts ; and the Kafir from his heart 

 believes his white brother to be the rich relation. 



The Kafir relies principally upon meal for his food, 

 but only too gladly partakes of meat when he can obtain 

 it. On these occasions his culinary arrangements are 

 best unseen. The head of a slaughtered ox is a great 

 treat, so also is that of a sheep, which is cooked 

 whole with wool, horns, and eyes included. As labourers 

 they are distinctly clannish, and all my men once struck 

 work because I proposed engaging some extra hands 

 who belonged to a tribe who did not practice circum- 

 cision, so strong a hold does this rite have upon their 

 social intercourse. They spend little of the wage- 

 money they earn in the towns where they labour, but 

 carry most of it back to their kraals and locations, and 

 it has recently been estimated by one well-informed 

 burgher that at least half a million of gold coinage, in 

 sovereigns and half-sovereigns, are annually taken away 

 by them, and thus by implication a large sum is with- 

 drawn from circulation. The greater part of this money, 

 however, eventually passes into the hands of the exclu- 

 sively Kafir traders, who reside in their principal neigh- 

 bourhoods, and thus again returns to the commercial 

 heart of the Transvaal. Most of the Kafirs who labour 

 in Pretoria and Johannesburg come down from the 



