J.
Tyler (61), who relates that flowers are often seen on Zulu heads, and
that one of them, the "love-making posy," is said to foster "love."
Unfortunately that is all the information he gives us on this
particular point, and the further details supplied by him (120-22)
dash all hopes of finding traces of sentiment. The husband "eats
alone," and when the wife brings him a drink of home-made beer "she
must first sip to show there is no 'death in the pot.'" While he
guzzles beer, loafs, smokes, and gossips, she has to do all the work
at home as well as in the field, carrying her child on her back and
returning in the evening with a bundle of firewood on her head. "In
the winter the natives assemble almost daily for drinking and dancing,
and these orgies are accompanied by the vilest obscenities and evil
practices."
As regards poems Wallaschek remarks (6) that "the Kaffir in his poetry
only recognizes a threefold subject: war, cattle, and excessive
adulation of his ruler." One Kaffir love-poem, or rather
marriage-poem, I have been able to find (Shooter, 236), and it is
delightfully characteristic:
We tell you to dig well,
Come, girl of ours,
Bring food and eat it;
Fetch fire-wood
And don't be lazy.
A KAFFIR LOVE-STORY
Among the twenty-one tales collected in Theal's _Kaffir Folk Lore_
there is one which approximates what we call a love-story.
Pages:
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577