The Zulus and Kaffirs wear generally but little clothing. A man wears a
cord about the waist with flaps of leather hanging from it in front and
behind; the woman wears a fringed girdle about her waist. Sometimes they
wear a mantle of hairy skins. At great festivals the men deck themselves
finely. A traveller, describing a young man who was going visiting,
says: “He will wear furs, among them the Angora goat; feathers in his
head-dress; globular tufts of beautiful feathers on his forehead or at
the back of his head; eagle feathers in fine head-dresses, as also
ostrich, lory, and peacock feathers. He ties so many tufts and tails to
his waist girdle that he may almost be said to wear a kilt.”
The negroids, like the negroes, are agriculturists and live in towns of
huts. Some tribes are raisers of cattle and have large herds that yield
milk, meat, and skins. They are hunters, too, and that on a large scale.
They set up long hedges or lines of brush and stakes, which converge
toward certain points where they dig pits and cover them. They then
scatter over a large district and beat it, scaring in the animals and
driving them between the lines of brush into the pits, where they easily
kill them.
The two great weapons of the southern negroids are the _kerry_ and the
_assegai_. The kerry is a short wooden club with a knob at the end. This
is thrown at the game. The assegai is a spear, the shaft of which is
long and slender and the head of which, made of iron, is long and wide.
Assegais are used all through South and Central Africa. The form and
size of the blade varies with tribes: sometimes it is two feet in length
and several inches across. Mrs. French-Sheldon saw the assegai maker, in
one tribe she visited, using a natural leaf as his pattern, and he was
careful to exactly copy its form. Both negro and negroid tribes in some
parts of Africa, especially Western Central Africa, use throwing-knives;
they are made from a flat piece of iron, worked into several blades
projecting in different directions. They are thrown through the air, and
some one of the ugly blades is quite sure to strike.
Kaffirs and Zulus make long oval shields almost as tall as themselves,
for protection in battle. A cowskin, with the hair on, is stretched over
a light and simple wooden frame. Each great section of Africans has its
own kind of shield. The Niam-Niams and some Congo tribes weave beautiful
close and light shields of wicker or basket work; they are long and
narrow, and protect the whole body. The splints of which they are woven
differ in color and are worked into rather handsome patterns. In Nubia
they use shields made of thick and heavy hide, like elephant or
rhinoceros hide; these are circular, not very large, and have a round or
conical knob or boss raised at the centre.
[Illustration: WAGANDA MUSICIANS (RATZEL).]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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