Wild Kafir Life and Wild Kaffir Intelligence. 291 



together into villages, which are technically named ec kraals ." 

 The huts are planted upon sloping ground, whence the water 

 can run away easily, and are ranged in circles larger, or small er, 

 according to the number that has to be accommodated. The 

 head of an ordinary family will have perhaps from six to ten 

 huts in his kraal. The chief Ngoza's kraal near Table Moun- 

 tain, to which the hut of the Tinted Plate at page 185 belongs, 

 has some eighty or ninety huts in it, and is a pretty long walk 

 across. Old Umpanda has a royal kraal at Nodwengu in 

 Zululand, containing six hundred huts arranged round the 

 circle in triple ranks. The huts are fenced in with stakes and 

 wattle, which thus form an outer wall to the kraal. But there 

 is also within the circles of huts, an inner wall of similar con- 

 struction, which encloses a kind of court-yard, that is entered 

 by a single opening, and that is employed for herding cattle 

 at night. The huts thus stand in a clear, ring-shaped en- 

 closure of their own. The interior space of the kraal of Ngoza, 

 to which the hut of the Tinted Plate belongs, is so spacious, 

 that upon one occasion, when it contained the wagons and 

 travelling oxen of the writer, and of the Lieutenant-Governor, 

 with the tents of their encampment, in addition to the very 

 large herd of oxen belonging to the chief, it still looked like a 

 large and nearly empty field. 



A very good idea of the appearance and size of the Kaffir 

 hut may be gleaned from the plate, where Ngoza and his men 

 are seen at the back of his own immediate dwelling. This 

 structure is not very unlike a squat bee-hive, large enough to 

 hold men, instead of insects. It is unquestionably a rude 

 affair, when compared with the dwellings of an older and 

 higher civilization. But there is another point of view from 

 which it may be contemplated. Taken as a structure made 

 almost out of nothing, by hands that are almost innocent of 

 instruments, it is really a surprisingly ingenious and complete 

 contrivance. In order fairly to understand this, the reader 

 must conceive a man, just in the state in which nature has 

 made him, planted down on a piece of wild pasture, with 

 nothing but a rudely-fashioned lance in his hand, and told 

 that he must fabricate there for himself a structure that shall 

 at once be both clothing and house, and that shall efficiently 

 shelter him through day and night, through storm and sun- 

 shine, through summer and winter. If the reader himself 

 could be made the actual hero of the situation, he would be 

 better able to comprehend what the task is that the wild 

 Kaffir has accomplished, when he has made this straw house, 

 than he can be without the experience. In constructing the 

 hut a frame-work of wattle is first bent into a hemispherical 

 shape. A thatching of dried grass is then laid over the 



