Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 21, Number 67, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 May 1900 — A Kaffir “Smoker.” [ARTICLE]

A Kaffir “Smoker.”

In South Africa the native woman smokes incessantly. Your native servant smokes as slie°cpoks and as she washes. The tobacco she likes is rank. The dainty cigarette’an English *oF Russian lady of fashion enjoys, smoked through a quill, so that no nicotine can stain either teeth or fingers, would be sneered at by a Kaffir. "Give me a pipe and '->methingjii_.it lcan taste,” is in effect what she says. The men Kaffirs arc beyond tobacco. They smoke something so vehement that it makes them cough and splutter, lose their breath, choke and sneeze to hn, alarming degree. They like stuff, too, and are fond of offering and taking pinches of it ("schniff" they call it) when they meet and visit one another. Regarding tobacco as too mild for their taste, the Kaffirs take another weed and smoke that..' They proceed to arrange a smoking party by squatting ou the ground and getting ready their "pipe," a cow horn with a thin tube in it inserted halfway down at right angles tothe horn. The end of the tube is in a basin, and it is from it that the smoker sucks the strong stuff that makes him incapable of anythingbut a series of coughs and chokes for some time after he has had his turn at the pipe, which is passed around from man to man, until a perfect chorus of coughs rends the air. The tobacco the Boers smoke looks like poor tea, and is peculiar in flavor, yet Englishmen who. have, become used to it acquire such a taste for it that they never ask for any other kind.— London Daily Mail.