[27] "I cannot understand you," said a thoughtful Bantu to us once; "a man can have his own cow and his own knife, but land is for all." The laws and traditions of all Bantu races are very complex, and, though orally transmitted from age to age, they are scrupulously observed. "It is our custom," ends all argument with the Bantu. Their etiquette in ordinary social life, before they have come in contact with the lower phases of civilization, seems often based on a higher sense of honour than that which governs the ordinary relations of Europeans. When one Kaffir approaches two who are talking he frequently stands still at some distance from them, and then comes nearer. When asked why he does this he replies: "Lest they should not see me coming, and I should overhear what they say." In the division of labour women have the almost entire charge of agriculture and manufacture. House-building, pottery-making, the shaping of clothes and implements are left to them--and especially among the Kaffir branches, all agriculture is entirely in their hands. The men fight and hunt and make their weapons, and the young lads tend the cattle, leaving all other labour to the females. It was by these three orders of native people that South Africa was inhabited when the first white men settled here. And, as we have seen, it was especially with the little, lively, child-like yellow-faced Hottentots, inhabiting the Cape Peninsula, that the newcomers came in contact. The white men had apparently received orders from the East India Company to treat the natives well, in order that they might be induced to trade; and at first it would seem that good feeling existed between the friendly little Hottentots and the white newcomers. The Hottentots gladly sold their cattle to the Company for brandy, beads, or knives; and the Company made vast profits by the trade. Later, when the white men began to enclose the ground of the Peninsula, and ordered off the Hottentots with their cattle, the Hottentots (who, in common with most African races, can easily understand the sharing of lands, but little, or not at all, their exclusive possession by individuals) resented this exclusion from the lands on which for countless ages their forefathers had fed their cattle and built their huts. There was much bitter feeling, and finally there was war. The little Hottentots were exterminated or driven back; and the white men settled down peacefully on the beautiful Cape Peninsula, and in the fruitful valleys beyond. Then it was that the white men began to look about for slaves to till their ground and build their houses, as was everywhere the manner of seventeenth-century colonists. But it was not among the native races of South Africa that they found what they were in search of.