2-888-502 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Kaffir Woman, 1850. 'The Kaffir Woman...carries on her head a water-melon, which grows in the colony to a luxuriant size. Numbers of Kaffirs are employed as labourers; though the woman here portrayed is in her native district - the well-known kraal being shown in the distance...Of late years, the chiefs and their wives, as well as those of superior grade, have imitated the English costume by piecemeal, and many of them cut a very grotesque appearance. The ladies wear a shabby, gaudy-tinted petticoat, a shawl of doe-kin, and a coloured handkerchief bound round their woolly pates similar to the Hottentot women, and which never comes off until it falls off by age and dirt; ablution being never resorted to by these races'. From an article about South Africa in "Illustrated London News", 1850.