OCR Rendition - approximate

342 SIR H. B. FRERE.-On the Laws affecting the Still worse are the effects of habits of spirit-drinking, too often contracted by the native labourers at the diamond fields and wherever their labour is in demand for European employers. The subject is one of primary importance in any scheme for improving the condition of the natives, either physically or in any other direction, and it deserves a more than passing notice. I did not hear of any tribe in South Africa in which the habit of drinking some kind of fermented and exhilarating beverage was not universal before the advent of the white men. There are various kinds of mead in use among some tribes, especially the Bushmen, but the usual Kaffir beverage is a kind of beer, varying much in the mode of manufacture and in strength, but generally made from a mixture of corn meal, either millet or maize, and water, fermented. It it usually thick and pasty, requiring to be stirred up before drinking, slightly acid, and only slightly intoxicating, so that gallons may he drunk at a sitting without producing helpless intoxication. It muddles the drinkers brain and makes him stupid-affectionate or quarrelsome according to his temper. To be a great drinker is accounted everywhere among the heathen Kaffirs a sign of manhood, and I have heard of incredible quantities being consumed at one bout, e.g., of chiefs who prided themselves on being able to drink nine gallons at a sitting without being incapacitated for talking or locomotion. Such bouts, of course, are not of every day occurrence, they are subjects of much previous talk and preparation, and guests are invited from a distance, and often in great numbers, to partake of a great man's hospitality-but beer of some kind is generally to be found at all times in the kraal of a prosperous Kaffir, and in moderation it is clearly wholesome food. This, however, can only be said of Kaffir beer unmixed with spirits or other intoxicating drugs, a fashion consequent on intercourse with European traders, and much, I fear, on the increase. But no adulteration of Kaffir beer can make it as pernicious in its effects as the drinking of spirits-a habit entirely attributable to intercourse with Europeans, and so pernicious as to be deservedly regarded as the monster evil of native association with Europeans. The spirits consumed by the natives are usually bad in quality, partly from bad manufacture, and also from artificial adulteration with various kinds of poisonous intoxicating materials. It is impossible to over-estimate the mischief thus done to all classes of natives, and the evil is more deplorable because intelligent natives are fully sensible of the evil, and of the ease with which, by various measures which they are not slow to point out, it might be checked.