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Updated: May 18, 2025
Another clubs a recalcitrant foeman over the head with a knobkerry, and having thus reduced him to a more amenable frame of mind, hoists him over the parapet and drags him after his "kamarad." Other parties are told off to deal with the dug-outs.
I was up on the Knobkerry River, prospecting for diamonds, in Omomborombunga's country. I had nobody with me but poor Jim-jim, who afterwards met with an awful death, otherwise he would have been glad to corroborate my tale, if it needed it. One night I had come back tired to camp, when I found a stranger sitting by the fire.
A knobkerry is a stick with a heavy round knob for a head, overlaid, head and stem, with copper and steel wire, in ingenious spirals and patterns. The Kaffirs make them. I also wired to my brother to meet our train at Elandsfontein.
There was a rush of bare feet on the soft deck, and through the gloom Carey was just able to make out that they were surrounded by a party of blacks, each poising a spear ready to throw and holding in his other hand either a knobkerry or a boomerang. "Go mumkull white fellow; baal, lie down, quiet, still!"
The Staffordshires had the "Blue," which was the Hindenburg Line, and the "Brown" further E. to hold till we came up; the 4th Leicestershires had the "Yellow," which included Knobkerry Ridge, the 5th Lincolnshires the "Dotted Blue" just beyond Magny village; we had the last of all, the "Green" line, including a sunken cross-roads, an old mill on some very high ground, and a small copse called Fosse Wood.
The native loves a stick, and as he is forbidden to carry either an assegai which is a very formidable weapon indeed or even a knobkerry, only one degree less dangerous, he consoles himself with a wand or switch in case of coming across a snake.
Panda, on the Zululand frontier, growled over his assegai and knobkerry. Moshesh, the Basuto, hung grimly on the face of Thaba Bosego, a Mountain of Night in very truth. The embers of a Kaffir war still glowed. Who was to hold the arena? Its hazards were thrown to Sir George Grey.
They were a grim set of fellows, but as, according to a recent law it was not allowable for them to appear armed in the town, their guns had already been shipped, while their broad stabbing spears were rolled up in their sleeping mats, the blades wrapped round with dried grass. Each of them, however, bore in his hand a large knobkerry of red-wood, and they marched four by four in martial fashion.
After some most extraordinary bargaining and after tempting him with solid, visible gold, we each secured a scjambok and a knobkerry at exorbitant prices, and left him even then grumbling and growling. Scjamboks are whips made of rhinoceros' hide. They take a beautiful polish, and a good one is indestructible.
First comes the able-bodied though elderly sire carrying a few light throwing-spears and a knobkerry or a gim-crack stabbing-spear, and close behind him are the adult males of his house similarly armed or with a rifle or two supplied by a benevolent Government for protection against the Mullah, to whom these children of nature frequently offer them for sale at very reasonable prices.
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