Excerpt from The Yellow and Dark-Skinned People of Africa South of the Zambesi: A Description of the Bushmen, the Hottentots, and Particularly the Bantu, With Fifteen Plates and Numerous Folklore Tales of These Different People

The difficulties that I laboured under in getting out my History of South Africa were so great that I was compelled to insert chapters on ethnography and memoranda on the same subject in different volumes, instead of bringing all together to be read and studied as one whole. For this some of my critics have been severe upon me, though none of them realised the dis advantages Of such a mode of publication more than I did myself. There are many men interested in the uncivilised people of South Africa who have neither time nor inclination to pore over the history of the European colonists, and to compel them to read eight or nine volumes in order to extract the information that might have appeared in one would have been unpardonable if it could have been avoided. But I cannot upbraid myself with want of honesty or want of skill in this matter: it was sheer necessity that compelled me to act as I did, or not to publish at all. In my history, however, there is a great deal of ethnographical matter that cannot be sepa rated from the other text without causing the information there given to be defective, and that is therefore in its proper place.

Now at last I am able to collect the scattered chapters, memoranda, folklore, etc. Together and to arrange them in proper order, and while doing this I have added so much to them as to make this practically a new book. I trust it will be found of use by ethnologists, as no pains have been spared to make its contents as accurate as human work is capable of.

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