Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/252

 analogous practices in India, and even in ancient Greece, in case of well-proved sterility in the wife.

The Bedouins and the Touaregs in general have nothing comparable to the nefir of the Djebel-Taggale, but among them the extreme facility and excessive frequency of repudiations renders marriage nearly illusory. According to Burckhardt, repudiation is so common with the former that a man sometimes has fifty wives in succession. With the Touaregs of the Sahara the wives themselves can demand divorce, and we have seen that they thus force their husbands to bend to monogamy, in spite of the Koran and of their polygamic appetites. It seems that in certain of their tribes the women make it a point of honour to be often repudiated. Only to have one husband is, in their eyes, a humiliating thing, and they are heard to say: "Thou art not worth anything; thou hast neither beauty nor merit; men have disdained thee, and would have none of thee."

This is quite in accord with the laisser aller habitual to the primitive Berbers in regard to marriage. In this respect, however, our Kabyles of Algeria contrast with the other ethnic groups of their race. Their conjugal customs are most rigid; neither liberty nor libertinage exist for the wife amongst them. Their customs in regard to repudiation and divorce are consequently very curious, and are worth studying in detail. In Kabyle, marriage is treated literally as a commercial affair of the most serious kind, especially for the women, who are owned as things by their husbands. The customs and the Kanouns, however, forbid the exchange of wives, and the husband whose wife has fled from the conjugal dwelling is forbidden to sell the fugitive except to a man of the tribe, and even then he is not allowed to have the price. Still, the Kabyle husband has preserved the right of repudiation, and this right he alone enjoys, and without restriction.

There are in Kabyle two kinds of repudiation. In one, the husband simply says, "I repudiate thee;" and he