REASONING WITH KAFFIRS. 55 



veller. The Kaffirs easily appreciate reasoning by ana- 

 logy; I frequently tried its powers upon them, and with 

 invariable success. On one occasion an old Kaffir laughed 

 at me, because of a mistake that I made in speaking his 

 language. I used the word inyama to express black, when 

 I should have used mnyama ; the former word signifying 

 flesh or meat. After he had laughed immoderately, I 

 asked him how long he had known Englishmen ; he 

 said, many tens of moons. I then said, " How much 

 English do you speak 1" " None." " Why not ?" " Be- 

 cause I cannot hear the Englishman's words." I then 

 told him that I had known Kaffirs scarcely twenty moons, 

 that I could speak my own language as well as he spoke 

 his, and, in addition, I could speak his sufficiently well 

 to converse. Therefore he ought to laugh at himself for 

 knowing nothing of my language, not at me for knowing 

 so little of his ; besides which, as his hair was grey, he 

 ought to possess more wisdom. He was much struck by 

 the argument, and repeated it to several other Kaffir men, 

 all of whom appeared equally to appreciate it. I doubt 

 whether a civilized man would have been as much affected 

 by this reasoning as were the Kaffirs ; for how often do we 

 find that foreigners are ridiculed by the ignorant English- 

 man because they cannot speak English correctly, the 

 quiz forgetting at the same time that he cannot utter 

 two words correctly in any other language than his own, 

 and that he very frequently fails even in that. 



But it is the vulgar error to laugh at people as ignorant 

 because we may discover that they know less on some 

 one subject than we do. Some of our most scientific 



