3-070-640 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

A Basuto scout, 1881. 'The South African Wars. Four months of desultory and indecisive warfare on the frontier of rugged Basutoland have already cost the [British] Cape Colony a million of money...In reading, also, of the "capture" of twenty thousand oxen and ten thousand sheep, by the gallant Colonial troops, who expect their share of this "loot," we are inclined to pity the miserable Kaffir population, thus deprived of their cattle, their only means of subsistence. This melancholy consideration is strengthened by the deplorable accounts of starvation among the Zulus, since the war in their country the year before last. All our South African warfare is, in a great degree, an affair of taking the cattle from the hostile nation, and so depriving them of their livelihood'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.