Black Population of Natal. 191 



light-hearted, and grotesque negro in his organization; but 

 this organization obviously vibrates between that fundamental 

 and some nobler type. His habits and tastes point to this 

 conclusion as forcibly as his frame. His propensities are 

 pastoral and nomadic. He loves to have fat oxen and graz- 

 ing goats about his kraal, and to wander from hill side to hill 

 side. A stroll of fifty miles is pastime to him in a fine season. 

 He has an inherent impatience of constraint in any form. 

 Chaka could never have made his invading and conquering 

 armies out of negroes. 



In his wild, free state the Kaffir goes entirely naked. He 

 has no other garment than a bunch of strips cut from the skin 

 of a sheep, a wild-cat, or a goat, and suspended from a slender 

 girdle as a kind of diminutive apron. He wears, however, an 

 apron behind as well as in front, and indeed deems the 

 posterior one the more essential covering of the two. If he 

 has had the good fortune to win distinction in the eyes of his 

 chief, he puts on a collar of merit upon his neck, composed of 

 the teeth and claws of the lion and leopard, or of the claws of the 

 eagle, and circlets of bright brass upon his arms. In some 

 instances a necklace of fragments of certain kinds of roots 

 takes the place of the teeth and claws. He pierces the lobes 

 of his ears with wide gashes, which he then ornaments with 

 knobs carved' out of fragments of bone, or uses as the deposi- 

 tory of his snuff boxes constructed from tubes of reed. He 

 hardly ever moves from his hut without having his buckler of 

 ox-skin upon his arm, and a bundle of five or six assegais, and 

 a knobbed stick, or club of hard wood in his hands. Mosl; 

 probably this habit was primarily due to the risk he was 

 exposed to of having to encounter some fierce wild animal 

 at any instant. At night he lies down on the floor of his hut, 

 and there wraps himself in a well-greased ox- skin, now often 

 exchanged for a woollen blanket of English manufacture. 



Although the wild Kaffir has so scanty a wardrobe for the 

 ordinary purposes of life, it must not, however, be supposed 

 that he is indifferent to the graces of personal adornment. He 

 has plumed and furred robes of considerable complexity for 

 ceremony and for war. Our plate gives a portrait, from the life, 

 of the Natal Government chief Ngoza, with four of his men, 

 in heavy war costume, in front of his hut. Ngoza is sitting in 

 the middle. His head-dress is made of circlets and pendants 

 of furred skins, with a crane's feather on the crest ; his breast- 

 plate is a tippet of tails of monkey-skins. His apron is 

 mingled goat-skin and monkey-skin, and his greaves are 

 fashioned from the skin of the white ox. The tall plumes of 

 the attendants are of the feathers of the crane. The shields 

 are dried ox-skins very artistically stretched on wooden frames, 



