Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 176, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 July 1911 — LIFE ON A BOER FARM [ARTICLE]

LIFE ON A BOER FARM

NOT INVITING FROM AMERICAN Point of view. Woman Traveler Describes the Monotony and Discomforts She Found In the Agricultural Regions of South Africa. An American woman traveling in South Africa was detained by floods and compelled to spend a month on a Boer farm. “The first night’s monotony,” she writes in Health Culture, “was broken by the roaring of ostriches under our windows. We thought it was a tame lion. "The farmer and Ms family lived chiefly on sour bread and sour skimmed milk. I was therefore hungry most of the time and the ripe figs hanging in dusters were pretty alluring. After pushing back the skin of the fig and enjoying the soft fruit with its tropical taste I had a refreshing night’s sleep, only to awaken in the morning pretty wqH scared, for my tongue was so swollen and black that I could not talk. ’The Boer wife laughed and enjoyed my discomfiture and explained that the skin of the fig had numerous fine thorns and I had not been careful to remove it when eating. “When I told the farmer’s wife that I liked buttermilk in quantity I noticed that I had a cupful'or so given me, but she threw it by the pailful to the pigs. They were of far more consequence to her than I, for they would stay longer with her and were her familiars. I was not. ‘Then again, when I was hungry for butter on my bread, a white clammy substance made from ‘sheeptail fat’ was handed to me, and I could not allow the farmer’s wife to see me quiver. She sold her butter In the village close by at 75 cents a pound, more or less. Sour bread and green strawberries (plenty of them) were considered good enough. "The Boer family was one of the wealthiest of their kind. There was not a ripple of fun or exuberant life in anything but the live stock. Conversation was a dead language—unknown. “The women are mute belngß, accepting their destiny with a deep stillness. The wife gives of her strength to the limit,, and dies after giving birth to a dozen or more children, to make way for wife number two, who gives another dozen children to her country. Her adobe house, with its dirt floor made o’s anthill clay mixed with beef gall, is a chamber of borror to an Amerivan traveller. “The farmer depends tfpon his ten to eighteen children, of all sizes, to help him. A Kaffir as an employe is undependable as the wind that blows. Yet that Kaffir is tbe hired man In the mines and elsewhere in South Africa. The white man as a day laborer is a general failure. He cannot be worked In droves like tbe Kaffir from the Interior, whose language, in clicks and vowel sounds, is hardly human. . “The Boer is not long lived. One seldom met an aged Boer of the old stock. Oom Paul Kruger, who was 75 years old when he died, was an exception. Hatred toward the Ultlander and the lust for gold and power was what kept the fires of life burning at white heat within him. ’To stem the elements alone In Africa takes the stoutest heart. Fevers asAll the discouraged and underfed home boy. The easily forded streams become rivers, like swirling JNiagaras, in a few hours and the terrific thunderstorms paralyze one sensitive to electrical Influences. “There is no pretty little, far-off streak In the sky which the amateur photographer can catch on bis film, but tbe air is charged with electricity bo appalling in its violet hued and deep orange earthbound clouds that one has toxome to a complete standstill whether walking or riding on the open veldt, so as not to attract the rlbbonllke lightning playing around him and venting -its fury on any moving object.”