The women being at work in the fields, hoeing the Indian corn, and the
noble savage being asleep in the shade, the chief has sometimes the
condescension to come forth, and lighten the labour by looking at it. On
these occasions, he seats himself in his own savage chair, and is
attended by his shield-bearer: who holds over his head a shield of
cowhide—in shape like an immense mussel shell—fearfully and wonderfully,
after the manner of a theatrical supernumerary. But lest the great man
should forget his greatness in the contemplation of the humble works of
agriculture, there suddenly rushes in a poet, retained for the purpose,
called a Praiser. This literary gentleman wears a leopard’s head over
his own, and a dress of tigers’ tails; he has the appearance of having
come express on his hind legs from the Zoological Gardens; and he
incontinently strikes up the chief’s praises, plunging and tearing all
the while. There is a frantic wickedness in this brute’s manner of
worrying the air, and gnashing out, ‘O what a delightful chief he is! O
what a delicious quantity of blood he sheds! O how majestically he laps
it up! O how charmingly cruel he is! O how he tears the flesh of his
enemies and crunches the bones! O how like the tiger and the leopard and
the wolf and the bear he is! O, row row row row, how fond I am of him!’
which might tempt the Society of Friends to charge at a hand-gallop into
the Swartz-Kop location and exterminate the whole kraal.
When war is afoot among the noble savages—which is always—the chief holds
a council to ascertain whether it is the opinion of his brothers and
friends in general that the enemy shall be exterminated. On this
occasion, after the performance of an Umsebeuza, or war song,—which is
exactly like all the other songs,—the chief makes a speech to his
brothers and friends, arranged in single file. No particular order is
observed during the delivery of this address, but every gentleman who
finds himself excited by the subject, instead of crying ‘Hear, hear!’ as
is the custom with us, darts from the rank and tramples out the life, or
crushes the skull, or mashes the face, or scoops out the eyes, or breaks
the limbs, or performs a whirlwind of atrocities on the body, of an
imaginary enemy. Several gentlemen becoming thus excited at once, and
pounding away without the least regard to the orator, that illustrious
person is rather in the position of an orator in an Irish House of
Commons. But, several of these scenes of savage life bear a strong
generic resemblance to an Irish election, and I think would be extremely
well received and understood at Cork.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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