Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/251

 quite certain that divorce is largely used in Abyssinia, since Bruce says he has seen a woman surrounded with seven former husbands. In Hayti, the only negro country that is civilised in European fashion, we find either preserved or instituted, by the side of legal monogamic marriage, free unions which recall the Roman concubinate. The persons thus paired are called "placed"; they suffer no contempt on this account, and their children have the same rights as those of persons legally married. There are at Hayti ten times more "placed" persons than married ones; they separate less often than the latter are divorced, and have better morals. But in general the free union, or, what comes to the same thing, the power of divorce, left to the two united parties, is rare enough in countries more or less civilised. Most usually it is the husband who, even without any cause of adultery in the wife, has the right to repudiate her. It is thus, for example, at Madagascar, where, in order to repudiate his wife, a husband need simply declare his resolution to the magistrate who has received the notification of the marriage; it is only necessary for him to pay for the second time the hasina, or duty on marriage. When once he has declared his intention, the husband has still twelve days' grace to retract it; but if he exceeds this delay the repudiated wife becomes her own mistress and free to marry again.

In Kordofan, among the Djebel-Taggale, the great legal motive for repudiation in all the primitive legislations, sterility, justified proceedings that were absolutely savage. The ceremony was called the nefir (drum or trumpet). A woman being apparently sterile, the husband, before repudiating her, called noisily together all his male relatives, who, after a feast, all had intimacy with the barren wife. If this heroic expedient did not result in pregnancy, the husband sold his wife by auction, agreeing to return to his obliging relatives the difference, if any, between the first price and the sum she would fetch in the auction. Extraordinary as this custom of nefir may seem to us, it is, apart from the final sale, but the repetition with more shamelessness of