Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/103

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The Katia.
79

a manner they could not have been otherwise. Their skins were darker than those of ordinary Bushmen, but not as black as those of Bantu. Their jaws were not so prognathous, and their chins were better developed than in Bushmen of pure blood.

The average height of the adult males was under 152.4 centimetres or five English feet, but one, whose portrait is given here, was 167 centimetres or nearly five feet six inches in height. They dispensed with clothing, and if by chance one of them came into possession of an article of European attire it was invariably misplaced. (See the piece of calico on the back of the man whose portrait is given.) Their language was a dialect of Bushman, with some words derived from the Bakwena and the Ovambo. Miss Bleek had no difficulty in taking down a number of words sufficient to form a comparative vocabulary with five other Bushman dialects, many of the words being identical or nearly so.