"Kafir" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... catch the post, or I should have bored you with a long account of my search with our ammunition cart for the company along the road to Pretoria from Johannesburg. For seven miles we—a comrade, myself, the blank Kaffir driver and mules—struggled and stumbled between long halts after our crowd, past waggons, carts, dhoolies, and chaises of all descriptions, the drivers of most of which were all inquiring for various divisions, ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... in no way touches the exceptional woman or man, belonging to an oppressed class. Such a woman, for instance, as the Kaffir woman spoken of by Olive Schreiner in this passage, ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... her wings and on her feet, Signs of her wanderings are shown, Dust gold-loaded and distant; And she brings aloes blossoming, first-seen, From the land that feeds the Kaffir's flocks. ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... mould; small and slight and anxious to please, he was nevertheless swift to leave his work when once my back was turned. Forsaken in love—for he had been deserted by his wife—he had forsworn the sex and buried his sorrows in "Pombe," the Kaffir beer that effectually deprived him of what little intelligence he had. He was a "fundi" at taking out jiggers, and sat for hours at the feet of our foot-soldiers; quickly adopting an air of authority that ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... off the pavement and saluted. But after a few months of war, at a washing-pump there is little by which you can distinguish officers from men, unless the former have their tunics on. From the washtub to chota haziri. The buffet is not yet open, but a dilapidated Kaffir woman on the platform is doling out at sixpence a time a mess of treacle-like consistency which is called coffee. What would you think if you could catch a glimpse of us? What would the bright little maid who brings in the tea in the morning say, if she could ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... to the Cape of Good Hope to determine its longitude. He got it degrees wrong. He gave to Africa's noble Roman promontory a retrousse twist that would take the pride out of any Kaffir. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... the country remained for three or four years under British rule. Afterwards it was resolved to abandon it, during the administration of the Duke of Newcastle, as a result of the general revision of our affairs which took place at the conclusion of the Kaffir War. The Orange River Territory was recognised as a separate Republic ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... was assigned to him, a sort of beehive of grass and mud, with a hole to enter by. His own lines, strung together in his many unoccupied moments for his children's benefit, are so good a description of the Kaffir huts that form a kraal or village, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... whether these holy wars spoken of in the Koran were not somewhat stimulated, in our time, at least, by the profits that ensued; and I even ventured to hint that it was questionable whether the mighty chief of Footha-Yallon would willingly storm a Kaffir fortification, were he not prompted by ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... for the King's Coronation. The play was 'Our Boys,' and between the acts my next neighbour gave me, without any sign of emotion, a hideous account of the scene at Tweefontein after De Wet had rushed the British camp on the Christmas morning of 1901—the militiamen slaughtered while drunk, and the Kaffir drivers tied to the blazing waggons. The curtain rose again, and, five minutes later, I saw that he was weeping in sympathy with the stage misfortunes of two able-bodied young men who had to eat 'inferior Dorset' butter. My sympathy with ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... need not be detailed, but apparently the most serious of them was the removal of a portion of the black mud which masked the German's face, so as to leave a diamond-shaped patch, of staring cleanness over one eye, after the style of a music-hall star known to fame as the White-eyed Kaffir; the ripping of a small portion of that garment which permitted of the extraction of a dangling shirt into a ridiculous wagging tail about a foot and a half long, and a pressing invitation, accompanied by a hint from the bayonet point, to give an exposition of the goose-step ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... the siege of Ladysmith—names which I refuse to learn or remember—I am perfectly comfortable and were it not for Cecil perfectly content— If she were only here it would be perfectly magnificent— I have a retinue that would do credit to the Warringtons in the Virginians— Three Kaffir boys who refuse to yield to my sense of the picturesque and go naked like their less effete brothers, two oxen and three ponies, a little puppy I found starved in Ladysmith and fed on compressed beef tablets. I call her Ladysmith and she sleeps beside my cot and in my lap when I am reading—I ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... "The 'Kaffir Chief,' outward bound for the Cape of Good Hope," was the reply of the waterman who had been addressed. "Shall I put you on board, ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... the station, where, unobserved, he listens at the ticket office to the voice of That-which-was-James. "One first London," it says and Gerald, waiting till That and the Ugly-Wugly have strolled on to the platform, politely conversing of politics and the Kaffir market, takes a third return to London. The train strides in, squeaking and puffing. The watched take their seats in a carriage blue-lined. The watcher springs into a yellow wooden compartment. A whistle sounds, a flag is waved. The train pulls itself together, ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... sharp little Kaffir came running out with the brown bag, and Mr. O'Flaherty examined it in a leisurely manner, which elicited many an oath ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... curious Leipzigers stole into the room to see him, and how between the first and second parts he dashed off his new Etudes and a new Concerto, to the astonishment of the Leipzigers, and I afterwards resumed my St. Paul, just as if a Cherokee and a Kaffir had met and conversed. He has such a pretty new notturno, several parts of which I have retained in my memory for the purpose of playing it for Paul's amusement. Thus we passed the time pleasantly together, and he promised seriously to return in the course ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... lieutenant-general, son of the preceding; enlisted in the army; served in the later Napoleonic wars; was present at Quatre-Bras and Waterloo; was governor of the Cape; brought the Kaffir war to a successful conclusion; served in the Crimea, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the public domain, but also to the necessity of increasing the productivity of inferior lands. There are still in this country more than 300,000,000 acres of unappropriated and unreserved land. Three fourths of this area is at present fit only for grazing, but the rapid development of kaffir corn, durum wheat, Persian clover, and other crops suitable for dry soils bids fair greatly to increase the ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... cruelty—all is cruelty! Boys are beaten; oxen are stabbed till the blood bursts forth; happy, industrious, dung-collecting beetles are bitten in two by careless, happy, beetle-collecting dogs—everything is wicked and cruel. The Kaffir has beautiful legs, but he will kick his wife, and TANT' SANNIE, alas! will not be there to drop a pickle-tub on his head. And over everything hangs that inscrutable charm which hovers for ever for the human intellect ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... These he concealed, and if a burgher fell or was wounded, one of them was brought out to take his place. The burghers were also destitute of the necessary clothes. Mealies were still abundant, and they had a fair number of cattle, but at the present moment the British had all the mealie and Kaffir-corn fields in their possession, and if they should cut these fields off by a block house line, his food would be in their hands. With reference to the Cape Colony, he had about 1,800 men there, and General de Wet about 600. He saw a chance of ...
— The Peace Negotiations - Between the Governments of the South African Republic and - the Orange Free State, etc.... • J. D. Kestell
... glad to say, have sown wheat, mealies and Kaffir corn. I fear they are feeling the restricted food, as they must now be living chiefly on fish and potatoes. Henry Green has also sown some wheat, and we are hoping others will do the same next year. Repetto has been taking out ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... an R.E. camp just opposite in a very wet wood, and quagmires of mud. They have built Kaffir kraals to sleep in—very sodden-looking; they've just asked for some papers; we had a few. They build pontoons over the Aisne at night and camp ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... Hall was much less crowded, and, as some thought, much more decorous than the one at Exeter Hall. Canon Thornton-Moore, a man of stately presence, high social standing and very considerable wealth—he had married the daughter of one of the most successful operators in the Kaffir Circus—made an ideal chairman. He was a High Churchman and the son of a Bishop. He was the incarnation of the most aristocratic section of the Anglican Church. He was supported by the presence of a Duke and two High Church peers ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... asked him what he had been up to since the war began. He spat, in the Kaffir way he had, and said he had been having ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... was exceedingly kind of them. Whereupon, when the Lieutenant had interpreted to me their permission, we fell upon them and amid countless expressions of mutual esteem gave them and their baggage such a "frisking" as befalls a Kaffir leaving a South African diamond mine, and found them armed with—a receipt from the quarantine doctor for "one pearl-handled Smill and Wilson No. 32." Either they really intended to postpone their little affair until they reached Panama, or they had succeeded in ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... The Kaffir Race—Physically and mentally considered: with engravings, from life, of young and old natives. Northwestern Australians—Appearance, customs, and peculiarities, dress, ornaments, food, ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... spear were looted at Sanoghar, I think. Borradaile looks very like Diogenes in his tub. I also took some Kafirs who strolled into camp. We used to buy their daggers, but they got to asking as much as twenty rupees for a good one after a time. Every Kaffir has a dagger, some of them very good ones, ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... They gain access to gaols and pester unfortunate prisoners with callipers and cameras, and quite unforgivable prying into personal and private matters, and they hold out great hopes that by these expedients they will evolve at last a "scientific" revival of the Kaffir's witch- smelling. We shall catch our criminals by anthropometry ere ever a criminal thought has entered their brains. "Prevention is better than cure." These mattoid scientists make a direct and disastrous attack ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... first in a very stiff official manner, assuring him with a frown that he was very loth to have in his division officers who had been in disgrace; then almost fell on his neck, and asked him if it were true that the Kaffir girls ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... southern Barotseland. Through dialects spoken on the west and north of Tanganyika, these languages of North Eastern Rhodesia and northern Nyasaland and of the Kafukwe basin are connected with the Bantu languages of Uganda. They also offer a slight resemblance to Zulu-Kaffir, and it would seem as though the Zulu-Kaffir race must have come straight down from the countries to the north-east of Tanganyika, across the Zambezi, to their present home. Curiously enough, some hundreds of years after this southward migration, intestine wars and conflicts ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... of men which my father called philistines has this common characteristic, that for all wonders and mysteries they forthwith find a convenient explanation. Does the truth not fit it exactly? Then they do as did the Kaffir, who receiving as a present a much too narrow pair of shoes, solved the difficulty by undauntedly chopping off his toes and then, greatly delighted, went out walking in ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden |
