Sporting Scenes amongst the Kaffirs of South AfricaDrayson, Alfred W. (Alfred Wilks)
History
Sporting Scenes amongst the Kaffirs of South Africa
Drayson, Alfred W. (Alfred Wilks)
Hunting -- South Africa; South Africa -- Description and travel
The sports of Africa are excellent as remedies against attacks of ennui.
Should any gentleman feel that he has finished everything in Europe,
and is disposed for sport and excitement, let him at once give, up white
kids and patents, and take to skin shoes and leather breeches; lay out a
couple of hundreds in rifles, saddles, and powder, and start for the
wilds of South Africa. Thirty days to Australia is now talked about,
therefore twenty to the Cape ought to be work easy enough. That man
must be composed of strange stuff who does not find a new pleasure in
stalking through tropical forests, well stocked with elephants and other
large game; or in riding over plains sprinkled with thousands of
magnificent antelopes; in dodging the charge of an angry rhinoceros; or
escaping the rush of a troop of elephants.
There will be the excitement of midnight hazard, for ivory is plentiful
in Africa, although only in the rough at present, while lions' teeth may
be looked upon as the "bones," and are nearly as fatal. And if the
traveller is not wide awake, the lion will carry off the stakes to a
certainty.
A man who has passed through an African shooting campaign, will find
that his health is improved; that he is better able to help himself, has
a greater trust in his natural gifts, and that trifles cease to annoy
him. He will return to England without having lost much of his taste
for his native sports. He will enter fully into a five-and-thirty
minutes' run across a country at a pace that weeds the mob, or will take
his quiet station near the rippling trout-stream, with just the same
gusto as before his South-African tour.
My parting advice to all sportsmen is--"Try a shooting trip for a year
in the bush, and on the plains of South Africa, the true fairy-land of
sport."
APPENDIX.
The Kaffir words given below may be useful to enable some visitor to
South Africa to make known to the Kaffirs a few of his wants.
I will not vouch for the correctness of the grammar of which I have made
use, but the Kaffirs will understand what may be required from even
these sentences.
Each word ought to be pronounced as it is written, the last syllable but
one being always rested on longer than the others. The _a_, _e_, and
_i_, are pronounced as in French. The plural is in general formed by
prefixing _ama_, and dropping in some cases the first syllable; as,
_indoda_, a man; _amadoda_, men; _ihashi_, a horse; _amahaski_, horses.
The numerals are more easily explained by holding up the
fingers,--_shumi_ being ten; _amashumi_, tens. Thirty would be
explained as tens, three, _amashumi m'tatu_, or by opening and shutting
the hands three times.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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