Sol Plaatje
1916 · South Africa · The opening sentence of the book proper, on the day the Natives' Land Act came into force. Under the Act black South Africans could no longer buy or rent land in almost the whole of the country.
Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.
Native Life in South Africa (1916), first sentence of Chapter I
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Sol Plaatje
1916 · South Africa · From the winter of 1913, when he watched families turned off the farms spend the night in the open with their livestock. Plaatje was travelling these roads by bicycle.
When we saw on that night the teeth of the little children clattering through the cold, we thought of our own little ones in their Kimberley home of an evening after gambolling in their winter frocks with their schoolmates, and we wondered what these little mites had done that a home should suddenly become to them a thing of the past.
Native Life in South Africa (1916), Chapter IV
Sol Plaatje
1916 · South Africa · Written after telling how the Kgobadis, evicted and wandering the roads, had to bury the baby who died on the way secretly, at night, in someone else's land.
Even criminals dropping straight from the gallows have an undisputed claim to six feet of ground on which to rest their criminal remains, but under the cruel operation of the Natives' Land Act little children, whose only crime is that God did not make them white, are sometimes denied that right in their ancestral home.
Native Life in South Africa (1916), Chapter IV
Congo people who handed down proverbs
before the 19th century · Lower Congo · A proverb. Weeks explains it: the verdict of one race against another is to be received with caution.
In a court of fowls the cockroach never wins his case.A proverb in John H. Weeks, Congo Life and Folklore (1911) · in place of the original: the English translation by John H. Weeks (1911)
Xhosa people who handed down proverbs
19th century · Cape Colony, South Africa · A saying applied to Europeans. Theal writes that it first arose from the heavy demands made on the people of Ngqika in return for English protection, and that it is sometimes put: the people who protect with one hand and kill with the other. The English is Theal's own translation, printed directly under the Xhosa.
The people who rescue and kill.
Omasiza mbulala.
G. M. Theal, Kaffir Folk-Lore (2nd ed., 1886) · Proverbs and Figurative Expressions
1 in 100 Billion · The social network of those who came before us