wife of the doctor’s “wonderlijke” proposal to shoot a “babuin,” and to send its skin and its skull all the way to “Duitsland.”[1]
Many of the Free State farmers are simple and thoroughly good-hearted people, requiring only a little more culture to make them most agreeable companions. Among all my patients I never found any more grateful.
About the middle of the morning we left Kwudu Place and started eastwards, in the hope that we might be in time to catch the smaller herd at their drinking-place. We passed several huts occupied by Basutos and Korannas employed as labourers on the farm. The Basutos come from their homes in the east, with their wives, to hire themselves to the farmers; in return for which they receive their food, and an annual payment of a stipulated number of sheep, or occasionally one or two oxen, or a mare and foal, being moreover allotted a certain portion of land, where they may grow sorghum, maize, gourds, or tobacco.
During my subsequent travels, I learnt that many of the better class of farmers are really owners of small Basuto villages, from which they hire the population in this way. Mynheer Wessels, the proprietor of the canteen we had passed the day
- ↑ The Dutch spoken by most of the South African farmers is not pure, as in Europe; it is a mixture of English, Low-German, French, &c. That, however, which is spoken by the more educated Dutchmen in Cape Town, Bloemfontein, and other towns, is for the most part very good.
G 2
