Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 208, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 September 1915 — GAMES OF ZULU CHILDREN [ARTICLE]

GAMES OF ZULU CHILDREN

Youngster* Have Their Own Amusement*, Much as Do Thoae of Other Countries. Zulu children are in moat particulars exceedingly like any other children who chance to arrive in this world with white instead of black skins. They play the same games, or, if girls, love the same dollß, as for the matter of that the old Egyptians did long ago. Indeed, the doll make believe appears to be carried further than is common in civilized countries. Thus the small Kafirs build actual huts for them in place of the houses that here ffre provided ready-made from the toy shop. They give them stones to grind their corn, mats for sleeping, pots for cooking, and so forth. They provide them with a cattle kraal stocked with clay oxen, goats and fowls. They marry them in a realistio manner, singing the appropriate songs. The owner of a boy doll will manufacture and pay away ten clay cattle in order to supply it with a wife or wives in the shape of properly—or improperly—dressed female dolls, and with such married puppets a lad may play, although it is beneath his dignity to amuse himself with ah unwed maiden doll. So it is with everything else. They have their parties which last all night, and their clans that play with/or more generally fight other clans belonging to the next kraal or tribe. The sense of honor is very fully developed In them, and the sense of greediness still more —so much so, indeed, that they will stuff themselves with half-cooked and unplucked birds, caught in the veld, which, did they bring home, they fear would be taken from them and eaten by their elders. They manufacture excellent traps to catch these birds and other wild things, such as mice, which they also eat. They possess an elaborate system of fagging, and a good fight with sticks, not fists, is the Joy of their hearts. As with our children, the boyß look down upon the girls, except on certain occasions, when, for instance, a pair of them will share the Bame pempe, or bird scaring hut, in which they play at being sweethearts, the head boy choosing the best favored girl, or sometimes the prettiest girl selecting her own boy.