Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) -- Description and travel
This may sound like sentimentalism; but you cannot conceive the effect of
looking on the last of a race once the owners of all this land, and now
utterly gone. His look was not quite human, physically speaking;—a good
head, small wild-beast eyes, piercing and restless; cheek-bones strangely
high and prominent, nose _quite_ flat, mouth rather wide; thin shapeless
lips, and an indescribably small, long, pointed chin, with just a very
little soft white woolly beard; his head covered with extremely short
close white wool, which ended round the poll in little ringlets. Hands
and feet like an English child of seven or eight, and person about the
size of a child of eleven. He had all his teeth, and though shrunk to
nothing, was very little wrinkled in the face, and not at all in the
hands, which were dark brown, while his face was yellow. His manner, and
way of speaking were like those of an old peasant in England, only his
voice was clearer and stronger, and his perceptions not blunted by age.
He had travelled with one of the missionaries in the year 1790, or
thereabouts, and remained with them ever since.
I went into the church—a large, clean, rather handsome building,
consecrated in 1800—and heard a very good sort of Litany, mixed with such
singing as only black voices can produce. The organ was beautifully
played by a Bastaard lad. The Herrenhuters use very fine chants, and the
perfect ear and heavenly voices of a large congregation, about six
hundred, all coloured people, made music more beautiful than any
chorus-singing I ever heard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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