Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/342

 in principally for sheep, of which he has many thousand head, but he does general farming as well, and has two hundred and fifty natives on his farms, counting women and children. These live in small villages or kraals on the land, and both Mrs. Meek and her daughter speak the Kaffir language. Some of the Kaffir men on the Meek farm have six wives; the farm foreman has that number, and Mrs. Meek says he is a very reliable and capable man, in spite of his love affairs. The foreman has twenty-eight children, and each of his six wives lives in a different hut. When he takes a new wife, there is no marriage ceremony; he simply invites his friends to a wedding feast, which the other wives prepare. He buys his wives, usually paying ten head of cattle each; there are no love preliminaries, except that occasionally a young girl comes to the foreman's kraal, and remains until he takes her as his wife. He is a prosperous man, and prosperous men are everywhere popular with the girls. The wives of the foreman get along very well together; they have always been accustomed to the system of plural wives, and do not seem to object to it. The children living in the kraals, Mrs. Meek says, are very healthy; more so than white children living in modern houses in the same vicinity. The grass-covered huts in which the natives live are less liable to leak in rainy weather than the houses of the whites, which are almost universally covered in South Africa with corrugated iron. Mr. Meek pays his native workmen about $2.50 per month, and board, providing they are reliable and steady. Their board consists of a certain amount of shelled corn; about all they eat is corn-meal porridge, and their idea of luxury is to have