efs will take a long time to die, but the missionaries have now
usually the good sense to see that they do little harm.

As their religious customs were rather less sanguinary than those of the
Guinea Coast negroes, so the Kafirs themselves were, when the whites
first saw them, somewhat more advanced in civilization. Compared with
the Red Indians of America, they stood at a point lower than that of the
Iroquois or Cherokees, but superior to the Utes or to the Diggers of the
Pacific coast. They could work in iron and copper, and had some notions
of ornament. Their music is rude, but not wholly devoid of melody, and
they use instruments of stone, wood, and iron, by striking which a kind
of tune can be played. Some tribes, such as the Tongas, have good
voices, and a marked taste for music. They have some simple games, and a
folk-lore which consists chiefly in animal tales, resembling those
collected by Mr. Harris in his _Uncle Remus_, save that the hare plays
among the Bantu peoples the part of Br'er Rabbit.[15] To poetry, even in
its most rudimentary forms, they do not seem to have attained. Yet they
are by no means wanting in intelligence, and have, with less gaiety,
more sense of dignity and more persistence in their purposes than the
Guinea negro.

When the Portuguese and Dutch first knew the Kafirs, they did not appear
to be making any progress toward a higher culture. Human life was held
very cheap; women were in a degraded state, and sexual morality at a low
ebb. Courage, loyalty to chief and tribe, and hospitality were the three
prominent virtues. War was the only pursuit in which chieftains sought
distinction, and war was mere slaughter and devastation, unaccompanied
by any views of policy or plans of administration. The people were--and
indeed still are--passionately attached to their old customs, which
even a king rarely ventured to disturb (though Tshaka is said to have
abolished among his subjects the rite of circumcision, which is
generally practised by the Kafirs); and it was probably as much the
unwillingness to have their customs disturbed as the apprehension for
their land that made many of the tribes oppose to the advance of the
Europeans so obstinate a resistance. Though they feared the firearms of
the whites, whom they called wizards, it was a long time before they
realized their hopeless inferiority, and the impossibility of prevailing
in war. Their minds were mostly too childish to recollect and draw