Page:South Africa (1878 Volume 1).djvu/334

This page needs to be proofread.

themselves with miraculous wigs made by miraculous barbers. They stick quills and bones and bits of wood into their hair, always having an eye to some peculiar effect. They will fasten feathers to their back hair which go waving in the wind. I have seen a man trundling a barrow with a beautiful green wreath on his brow, and have been convinced at once that for the proper trundling of a barrow a man ought to wear a green wreath. A Zulu will get an old hat,—what at home we call a slouch hat,—some hat probably which came from the corner of Bond Street and Piccadilly three or four years ago, and will knead it into such shapes that all the establishments of all the Christys could not have done the like. The Zulu is often slow, often idle, sometimes perhaps hopelessly useless, but he is never awkward. The wonderfully pummelled hat sits upon him like a helmet upon Minerva or a furred pork pie upon a darling in Hyde Park in January. But the Zulu at home in his own country always wears on his head the "isicoco," or head ring, a shining black coronet made hard with beaten earth and pigments,—earth taken from the singular ant hills of the country,—which is the mark of his rank and virility and to remove which would be a stain.

I liked the Zulu of the Natal capital very thoroughly. You have no cabs there,—and once when in green ignorance I had myself carried from one end of the town to another in a vehicle, I had to pay 10s. 6d. for the accommodation. But the Zulu, ornamented and graceful as he is, will carry your portmanteau on his head all the way for sixpence. Hitherto money has not become common in Natal