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It is asked, What have they got to do with our position? I tell you, as much as we have to do with that of our Kaffir neighbours. As little as we can allow barbarities among the Kaffirs on our borders, as little can they allow that in a state on their borders anarchy and rebellion should prevail. 'Do you know what has recently happened in Turkey?
They had been well treated, and suffered little loss, till the advent of the conquering British, when forty or fifty hens were taken by Highlanders at night. A lovely warm afternoon, and for a wonder freedom till four, the first spell of it for weeks. Went to a puddle some way off, near a Kaffir kraal, and washed.
I thought at first I would demolish the few grass and matting huts which, with some empty kerosene tins and heaps of bones and débris, formed the Kaffir kraal, but on consideration I decided to play cunning, and that this same innocent-looking Kaffir kraal would materially assist me to hide my defences.
He had ceased to be the Kaffir king, or the Christian minister, or indeed any one of his former parts. Death was stripping him to his elements, and the man Laputa stood out beyond and above the characters he had played, something strange, and great, and moving, and terrible. 'We met for the first time three days ago, he said, 'and now you will be the last to see the Inkulu.
I remember thinking how smart and incongruous that dressing-bag, made appropriately enough of crocodile hide, looked in this Kaffir hut with its silver-topped bottles and its ivory-handled razors. "Time to get up, Sir. Bath ready, Sir," he said in his jolly, drawling voice, pointing to a calabash full of hot water. "Hope you slept as well as I did, Sir."
There was a child in the tavern on the veld; it lay in an old orange-box, half-filled with shavings, covered with a thin, worn blanket, in the daub-and-wattle outhouse, where the Hottentot woman, called the chambermaid, and the Kaffir woman, who was cook, slept together on one filthy pallet.
He had a perfectly smooth face, ruddy complexion, and fair hair. He was of middle height, and was rather inclined to stoutness. He was so fond of talking that his comrades nicknamed him "Magpie." A colonist by birth, he could speak the Kaffir language like a native. Whitson was a sallow-faced, spare-built man of short stature, with dark-brown beard and hair, and piercing black eyes.
One of them had some Kaffir beer in a calabash, which he gave me to drink. The stuff was thin and sickly, but the fermentation in it did me good. I had the sense to remember my need of sleep. 'The day is young, I said, 'and I have come far. I ask to be allowed to sleep for an hour. The men made no difficulty, and with my head between Colin's paws I slipped into dreamless slumber.
This time, however, the name he called out was Mwamwazela, which in its shortened form of Wazela, was the Kaffir appellation that the natives had given to Stephen Somers. It means a Smile, and no doubt was selected for him because of his pleasant, smiling countenance. Having passed it through the right-hand fire of the three, he examined it and laid it down. So it went on.
It is curious to observe that the very people who are most critical of the line of policy actually adopted, were also most severe when it appeared that the alternative might be chosen. The British nation would have indeed remained under an ineffaceable stain had they left women and children without shelter upon the veldt in the presence of a large Kaffir population. Even Mr.
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