ing clothes of cowhides and the pelts of wild animals. He was assisted by his
unmarried sons and his clients. Boysdid much of the routine work with the
cattle. Women were responsible for raising the children, for planting, weed-
ing, and harvesting the crops, for maintaining the home, for making the
clay pots, and for serving the food. Catholic missionary A. T. Bryant, who
was a collector of Zulu oral traditions, summed up the division of labor:
In the Zulu social system everykraal [homestead] is self-contained and self-
supporting, and by a tradition that bears the force of law, the work of the
home is clearly, though far from equally divided between its male and its
female inmates. It is the peculiar province of the male to provide and main-
tain the fabric of the kraal; of the female to provide the family and to support
it, in other words, to find the food. The men function as the artisans and
pastoralists; the women as the housekeepers and agriculturalists.t?
For a woman, the daily routine was arduous. Not the least of her tasks
was fetching water to the home from the nearest stream, carrying the liquid
on her head in a pot. A man often had more time on his hands and would
spend hours in the village center, making clothes from skins and attending