Pioneers and Founders: or, Recent Workers in the Mission fieldYonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
History
Pioneers and Founders: or, Recent Workers in the Mission field
Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
Missionaries
All this time the whole party had been working. A school was collected
every morning of both boys and girls; not many in number, but from a
large area: children of white settlers, varying in rank, gentlemen or
farmers, but all alike running wild for want of time and means to
instruct them. They came riding on horses or oxen, attended by their
Kaffirs, and were generally found exceedingly ignorant of all English
learning, but precocious and independent in practical matters: young boys
able to shoot, ride, and often entrusted with difficult commissions by
their fathers at an age when their cousins at home would scarcely be at a
public school, and little girls accustomed to superintend the Kaffirs in
all household business; both far excelling their parents in familiarity
with the language, but accustomed to tyrannize over the black servants,
and in danger of imbibing unsuspected evil from their heathen converse.
It was a task of no small importance to endeavour to raise the tone,
improve the manners, and instruct the minds of these young colonists, and
it could only be attempted by teaching them as friends upon an equality.
With the Kaffirs, at the same time, the treatment was moulded on that of
Mr. and Mrs. Robertson, who at one time paid the Umhlali a visit,
bringing with them their whole train of converts, servants, orphans, and
adopted children, who could be easily accommodated by putting up fresh
grass huts, to which even the Europeans of the party had become so
accustomed, that they viewed a chameleon tumbling down on the
dinner-table with rather more indifference than we do the intrusion of an
earwig, quite acquiesced in periodically remaking the clay floor when the
white ants were coming up through it, scorpions being found in the
Archdeacon's whiskers, and green snakes, instead of mice, being killed by
the cat.
The sight of Christian Kaffirs was very beneficial to the learners, to
whom it was a great stumbling block to have no fellows within their ken,
but to be totally separated from all of their own race and colour. At
Seaforth, the wedding was celebrated of two of Mr. Robertson's converts,
named Benjamin and Louisa, the marriage Psalms being chanted in Kaffir,
and the Holy Communion celebrated, when there were seven Kaffir
communicants. The bride wore a white checked muslin and a wreath of
white natural flowers on her head. This was the first Christian Zulu
wedding, and it has been followed by many more, and we believe that in no
case has there been a relapse into heathenism or polygamy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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