Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/144

 serve him and furnish him with food. The wife is always purchased from her father at a price agreed on, and often from her earliest infancy. In this case she is placed under the care of the husband's chief wife. The husband-proprietor does not interfere at all with the agricultural labour executed by the wives; he only requires them to supply him with food. If he has bought them, it is merely as a profitable investment. He consequently treats them as slaves, or as domestic animals, and has no scruple in lashing them with a whip for nothing at all, and thus causing ineffaceable scars. "I have seen very few women," says Du Chaillu, "who had not traces of this kind on their bodies."

The whip which serves for these conjugal corrections has a double thong, made of hippopotamus or sea-cow hide. "You should hear," says the traveller, "the worthy husband cry out—'Ah, wretch! do you think I have bought you for nothing?'" The Gaboon tribes, of whom Du Chaillu speaks, are reckoned the least civilised of negroes; but even among the least gross of African races the conjugal régime and the degree of subjection imposed on women are scarcely lessened.

At Tchaki, and at Badagry, etc., when Clapperton spoke of English monogamy to the natives, all his auditors, without distinction of sex, burst into a laugh, so absurd did the thing appear to them. Throughout Africa the number of a man's wives is only limited by his resources. If, as Schweinfurth tells us, among the Bongos of the upper Nile, a man rarely has more than three wives, it is simply on account of the strict law of supply and demand; for a woman costs no less than ten iron plates, each weighing about two pounds, to which must be added twenty iron spear heads, all precious articles and not easily procured. At Bornou also men in easy circumstances have seldom more than three wives; and the poor have to content themselves, whether they will or not, with monogamy. But among the negroes of Kaarta and the Fantis of the coast of Guinea polygamy is excessive. In Kaarta a private