The young man must work hard to get his first wife, for wives cost about $500 apiece. Then, with a helpmeet, it is easier to get the second wife, and a third wife comes still more easily. There is no reason why a man with three wives should work any more, and so life becomes easy for him. As he gets older, he has daughters to sell, and can buy more wives. The average well-to-do Zulu has from half a dozen to a score of wives and it is not unusual for a chief to have several hundred. A man with only one wife has about the same standing as a slaveholder with only one slave had in the south before the Civil War, and, consequently, the earlier wives are eager to work hard to elevate the standing of the family. The whole family lives together in a collection of huts, called a krall (Fig. 7), each wife having a hut of her own, and the polygamous husband boarding around. You can tell the number of wives in a family by counting the houses in a krall.
At Cedara, a government experiment station about eighty miles northwest of Durban, the extensive work in forestation is interesting from both the botanical and economic standpoints. This work is under the direction of Mr. Stayner, who has received all the training Kew affords. Many believe the extensive grass velts of South Africa were originally covered by forests, and that the native, with his childish desire to see things burn, had destroyed the forests before white people
