Kahena lives on among the Tuareg only as a memory and as a proper name. They do not claim as one of their race the Berber queen who defended Ifrikiya against the Arabs in the seventh century. Ahodu had heard of her as a woman of the Imajeghan who were in the north when the Arabs came. “She led these noble people and defeated the Arabs, it is true, and those Imajeghan were great people, of course, but she was not one of our people: our people are older than they; and the Arabs—why, the Arabs have only just come to the land,” said Ahodu, who, where his own Kel Tadek were concerned, was always an intolerable snob.
Under Moslem law a man may take unto himself four legitimate wives in addition to a number of slave concubines. The rules laid down by the Prophet for the governance of the marital relations of good Moslems are theoretically, at least, in force among the Tuareg of Air. In practice, however, monogamy is more frequent than polygamy. I am not clear whether an explanation of this phenomenon is to be looked for in a survival of a matriarchal state of society where one would indeed be led to expect polyandry rather than polygamy, or whether the reason is rather to be sought in the economic condition of a people whose poverty does not allow them to keep more than one wife. I have no hesitation in disagreeing with Jean when he says[165] that monogamy is rare and even anomalous in Air. It does not accord with my personal observations, nor is it consistent with what I heard of those traditions and conditions which I was unable to verify. How often has it not been said to me that “the Imajeghan respect their women, and therefore have only one wife, not like the negroes, and heathen”? It does not accord with the conditions governing the status of women as described by Jean himself, nor yet with the remarks which he makes on the subject of the matrimonial relations of the Tuareg. It is, finally, in contradiction with the accounts given by Duveyrier[166] and others of the Northern Tuareg, concerning whom his enthusiasm even led him into the exaggeration of asserting that polygamy was unknown.
After considering the question carefully, I have come to the conclusion that monogamy is probably an old tradition dependent upon and consistent with the status of Tuareg women, and not a consequence of economic conditions which have, however, served to perpetuate the custom. It is certainly connected with the matriarchate. The practice of concubinage is restricted, and where it does occur, is usually confined to women of the slave caste. A noble woman is not, and never could be, a concubine so long as the status of noble and of serf continues to exist; but if the maintenance of only one wife were due to economic necessity alone, the same conditions would not obtain in regard to concubinage in a community where every additional slave, male or female, is an asset as a productive unit. The position of women among the Tuareg has no real parallel in any other Oriental country. Even in Ashanti, where there are analogies for some of the matriarchal survivals found among the Tuareg, the exceptional positions of some of the royal women seem to be less favourable than that of any of the noble and most other women in Air, where all the sex is held in honour.
At Auderas I played the rôle of doctor to the best of my ability. I found a great ally in Ahodu’s wife, who, though not a Tuareg by race, had acquired all their traditions and manners. Her appearance was not in the least characteristic; her negroid features were frankly ugly from the European point of view. But she made up for these physical disadvantages by her unfailing sense of humour and constant cheerfulness, which are very valuable qualities in Africa. In general the young Tuareg women are handsome and possessed of considerable charm. They are smaller in build than the men, but when their parentage is reasonably pure, they possess the same aristocratic features and proportions. Their demeanour is modest and dignified. In this Ahodu’s wife resembled them. She was perfectly natural and had great quickness of mind. She was what might be called “une femme du monde.” Ahodu had divorced at least two previous wives for their uncouth or unrestrained behaviour. He was devoted to his present one. He always used to speak with pride of her capability, which he averred was second to no man’s: one could place complete reliance in her. I made a point of taking her with me when visiting sick women and children in the hamlets, and through her tact and presence of mind gradually came to understand their perfect ease and bearing. In their tents or huts they would sit and listen without fear or shyness. After the inevitable diffidence had worn off they talked and were free from awkwardness, but never familiar like the negro or negroid women. They are gay but not infantile. They never lose their dignity. Their dress is staid and sombre like that of their men, with a few ornaments of beads and silver.[167] As they grow older the women of good family and wealth become fat, especially, as Barth remarks, in “the hinder parts,” for fatness is a sign of affluence, since it implies a sufficiency of the good things of life, like slaves and food, to obviate having to do much manual work. But among the unmarried women I saw no large-proportioned ladies: indeed few enough even of the married ones at Auderas were fat, indicating, I am sorry to say, the poverty of most of them. When the women do not run to fat, they age with great beauty; nearly all the old women looked typical aristocrats and conscious of their breeding.
The women use henna, which grows in Air, on their finger and toe nails, and “kohl” (antimony) for their eyes. On festive occasions they have a curious habit of daubing their cheeks and foreheads with paint, prepared either from a whitish earth found especially near Agades, or with red or yellow ochres which occur in several places. The effect of these colours on different shades of skin is uniformly ghastly, especially when the more usual yellow pigment is used, but they apparently like the habit. A possible explanation is that in the first instance the custom was intended as a symbolic or conventional method of expressing the respect felt for the fairer complexions of their original ancestors. The negro is despised in Air, the “red” man is respected; painting the face was perhaps at first intended to create an illusion of purer blood. Although the practice is supposed to be restricted to festive occasions, where the women have little work to do, they remain daubed most of the time: this seemed to be the case at T’imia, for instance, where the women were noble and had plenty of slaves. Tuareg men do not so adorn themselves.[168]
Before marriage, which for Oriental women occurs comparatively late in life, Tuareg girls enjoy a measure of freedom which would shock even the modern respectable folk of Southern Europe. They do no work, but dance and sing and make poetry, and in the olden days they learned to read and write. The art of literature is unfortunately dying out, but the women still are, as they always were in the past, the repositories of tradition and learning. Where the script of the Tuareg is still known and freely used, it is the women who are more versed in it than the men. It is they who teach the children. When families have slaves, the noble woman does as little work as she can: her occupation among the poorer people is confined to the household work or to herding goats and sheep. They make cheese and butter and sort dates, but they do not as a rule work in the gardens. They are never beasts of burden. They have never learnt to weave or spin, but they plait mats and make articles of leather. The leather-working industry at Agades is exclusively in their hands. Their knowledge of needlework is limited; the men on the whole are more skilled than the women at cutting out and sewing clothes.
The household duties are simple but laborious. The children for the first few years of their lives are washed frequently, but when they are able to look after themselves in any way the practice is abandoned. The hut or tent is cleaned out several times a day and food has to be prepared. This entails pounding millet in a mortar and stewing the porridge, or steaming wheat to make kus-kus. The women eat their food with the men, a privilege often denied their sex among other Moslems. Among the Kel Ferwan[169] the women eat their food before the men do so, and the latter have to be content with what is left, which is often not very much. A man once said to me, to emphasise the good manners required by usage to be observed before women, that in the olden days if anyone had dared to break wind in their presence, the insult was punishable by death alone.
Half the poetry of the Tuareg deals with the loves and adventures of young men and women. Marriages are not arranged as among the Arabs. It often happens that a girl has two or more suitors, when her free choice alone is the deciding factor. It is common for a girl who is in love with a man to take a camel and ride all night to see him and then return to her own place, or for a suitor to make expeditions of superhuman endurance to see his lady.[170] Fights between rivals are not uncommon. Illicit love affairs inevitably occur: if they have unfortunate consequences, the man is called upon to marry the woman, but infanticide is not unknown. Once married the woman is expected to behave with decorum and modesty. Public opinion on these matters is strong. The married state, however, does not prevent a woman admitting men friends to an intimacy similar to that existing, perhaps, only among the Anglo-Saxon peoples. In a passage in which Ibn Batutah describes the Mesufa, who before becoming debased were of the Western Sanhaja Tuareg, but had in part settled south of Air, he comments on the status of women in these charming terms:[171]
“The women of the Mesufa feel no shame in the presence of men; nor do they veil their faces. Despite this, they do not omit to perform their prayers punctually. Anyone who wishes to marry them can do so without difficulty. . . . In this country the women have friends and companions among men who are strangers. The men for their part have companions among women not in their own families. It often happens for a man to enter his own house to find his wife with a friend. He will neither disapprove nor make trouble. I (that is, Ibn Batutah himself) once went into the house of a judge at Walata after he had given me permission, and found quite a young and very beautiful woman with him. As I stopped, doubting, and hesitated, wanting to return on my steps, she began to laugh at my embarrassment instead of blushing with shame.” The great traveller is evidently very much shocked, for he goes on: “And yet this man was a lawyer and a pilgrim. I even heard that he had asked the Sultan for permission to perform the pilgrimage that year to Mecca, in the company of this friend. Was it this one or another? I do not know. . . .” Again, he goes on to describe how he visited the house of one of his companions of the road and found him sitting on a carpet, “while in the middle of the house on a couch . . . was his wife in conversation with a man seated by her side. I asked Abu Muhammad: ‘Who is that woman?’ ‘It’s my wife,’ he replied. ‘And who is the individual with her?’ ‘It’s her friend.’ ‘But are you, who have lived in our countries, quite satisfied with such a state of affairs—you who know the precepts of the Holy Writ?’ He replied: ‘The relations of women with men in this country bring good and are correct, they are right and honourable. They give rise to no suspicion. Our women, as a matter of fact, are not like those in your country.’”
And that is the whole truth. The Tuareg men and women are not like the other inhabitants of North Africa. But Ibn Batutah must have been none the less shocked, because, though Abu Muhammad invited him to visit him again, he did not go.