Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/258

 over the ears and tied behind over the apex of the triangle of the handkerchief, the three ends being then arranged fanwise at the back. Add to this costume a sober-coloured silk parasol, not one of your green or red young tent-like, brutally masculine, knobby-sticked umbrellas, but a fair, lady-like parasol, which, being carefully rolled up, is carried handle foremost right in the middle of the head, also for dandy. Then a few strings of turquoise-blue beads, or imitation gold ones, worn round the shapely throat; and I will back my Igalwa or M'pongwe belle against any of those South Sea Island young ladies we nowadays hear so much about, thanks to Mr. Stevenson, yea, even though these may be wreathed with fragrant flowers, and the African lady very rarely go in for flowers. The only time I have seen the African ladies wearing them for ornament has been among these Igalwas, who now and again stud their night-black hair with pretty little round vividly red blossoms in a most fetching way. I wonder the Africans do not wear flowers more frequently, for they are devoted to scent, both men and women.

The usual statements that the African women age—go off, I believe, is the technical term—very early is, I am sure, wrong in many cases. Look at those Sierra Leone mammies, slightly spherical, I own, but undeniably charming; and the Calabar women, although belonging to a very ugly tribe, are very little the worse for twenty years one way or the other; and these women along Congo Français way, Well! I know one who is all forty-five, and yet at present is regarded by a French official, a judge one might think, as une belle femme.

The Igalwas are a proud race, one of the noble tribes, like the M'pongwe and the Ajumba. The women do not inter-marry with lower-class tribes, and in their own tribe they are much restricted, owing to all relations on the mother's side being forbidden to intermarry. This well-known form of accounting relationships only through the mother (Mutter-recht) is in a more perfected and elaborated form among the Igalwa than among any other tribe I am personally acquainted with; brothers and cousins on the mother's side being in one class of relationship, and called by one name, Ndako.

The father's responsibility, as regards authority over his own