South Africa -- Description and travel; South Africa -- History -- 1836-1909; South Africa -- History -- To 1836
Round his limbs he wears round shining
ornaments of various material, brass, ivory, wood and beads. I once took
from off a man’s arm a section of an elephant’s tooth which he had
hollowed, and the remaining rim of which was an inch and a half thick.
This he wore, loosely slipping up and down and was apparently in no way
inconvenienced by it. Round their heads they tie ribbons and bandelets.
They curl their crisp hair into wonderful shapes. I have seen many as to
whom I would at first have sworn that they had supplied 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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