In some districts of central Africa, among populations that are half-civilised, and more or less converted to Mahometanism, matriarchal customs still persist. On the Niger, at Wowow and at Boussa, it is the grandmother who grants or refuses to her grand-daughter the permission to marry.[986] The curious privilege that, according to Laing, the Soulima have, to quit their husband when they please, is perhaps of matriarchal origin also.[987]
The exogamy of the clan, which frequently coexists with uterine filiation, is met with here and there in Africa. Burton has proved the existence of it among the Somals,[988] and Du Chaillu has found it at the Gaboon.[989] Traces of the maternal family still exist, or have existed, in African societies that are more or less barbarous, but which have, however, emerged from savagery; in Madagascar, Nubia, Abyssinia, and especially in ancient Egypt. Among the Hovas of Madagascar, not only wealth, but political dignities, and even sacerdotal functions, are transmitted to the nephew, the sister’s son. The Saccalavas do the same as the Hovas, and among them the women of high rank willingly take husbands of inferior rank, who simply become their servants. As for the children, they inherit the rank and rights of their mother.[990] The same customs prevail among the Nubians, or did formerly prevail; the Arab chroniclers tell us that among them the heritage belonged, not to the son of the deceased, but to the nephew, the sister’s son. The Nubians justified this custom pertinaciously, by saying that the consanguinity of the sister’s son had the advantage of being incontestable.[991] And lastly, Nicholas of Damascus says the same thing of the Ethiopians.[992]
Without the proof of any absolutely precise text, we have an accumulation of facts which render it very probable that, in ancient Egypt, maternal filiation was in force. In a preceding chapter I have spoken of the exceptional position granted to the free woman in the kingdom of the Pharaohs. I will recall, in passing, that until the time of Philometor, who deprived women of the right to dispose of their property, the word husband never occurs in marriage deeds.[993] Besides this, public deeds often only mention the mother, up to the time of this same King Philometor, who, being evidently a determined partisan of the patriarchate, ordered the names of contractors to be registered according to the paternal name.[994] Also, in the valley of the Nile, the hieroglyphic funeral inscriptions frequently bear the name of the mother without indicating that of the father, and it is only in demotic inscriptions that paternal filiation is mentioned.[995] We must add that in Egypt women could reign, and that during the lifetime of the monarch who was their husband they divided with him the sovereign honours, and even, according to Diodorus,[996] received the larger share of them. All these facts seem to attest that in Egypt free women enjoyed an exceptionally favourable position, and they render probable the ancient existence of uterine filiation in the valley of the Nile. There are, however, some contradictory facts, especially the genealogy of the chief priests, of which Herodotus speaks, and also the incestuous endogamy customary in the royal families. According to Herodotus, the Egyptian priests showed him, at Thebes, three hundred and forty-one wooden statues representing high-priests, all born one of the other in the masculine line: “Each of these statues,” he says, “represents a Piromis born of a Piromis.”[997] From which it would result that in Egypt, at least in the sacerdotal caste, masculine filiation was established from the highest antiquity, for a hundred and forty-one generations represent something like ten or eleven thousand years. Maternal filiation is also generally connected with exogamy, while the Pharaohs habitually married their sisters. According to Diodorus, this was even obligatory.[998] In the ancient royal records the qualities of sister and wife of kings are often found united. Under the Ptolemies, all the queens have borne both these titles; and we may perhaps refer to an ancient tradition of Egyptian origin certain customs which recently existed in the Soudan, Abyssinia, and Madagascar. At Massegna, in the Soudan, Barth tells us that Othman Bougoman, Sultan of Massegna, had among his wives one of his sisters and one of his daughters. At the end of the seventeenth century, the sister of the king of Abyssinia displayed a sumptuous style of living peculiarly feminine: “The sister of the emperor appears in public mounted on a mule richly caparisoned, having by her side her women bearing a daïs over her. From four to five hundred women surround her, singing verses in her praise, and playing the tambour in a lively and graceful manner.”[999] And at the present time, among the Malagasy nobility, marriage between brother and sister is very common.[1000]
There is certainly nothing farther from exogamy than marriages between brothers and sisters; but, to say the truth, there is no logical and necessary connection between the form of filiation and exogamic or endogamic customs.
The Malagasy contract what we should call incestuous marriages, while preserving maternal filiation; the Arabs and Kabyles, on the contrary, in obedience to the prescriptions of the Koran, have a horror of incest. The sacred book prohibits a man from taking to wife his mother, daughter, sister, his paternal or maternal aunt, his grand-daughter, his mother-in-law, his daughter-in-law, or even his nurse and foster-sister. A man was not to marry two sisters at the same time.[1001] This is indeed a limited exogamy; and yet the Koran establishes the paternal and even patriarchal family very clearly. The study of the family in Malaya and among the aborigines of India will complete the proof that in the same country, and in the same race, various systems of marriage, family, and filiation, may coexist, and that consequently we must guard against formulating too strict sociological laws in regard to them.
III. The Family in Malaya.
At Sumatra there were three kinds of marriages—1st, the wife, or rather the family of the wife, bought the man, who henceforth became her property, worked for her, possessed nothing of his own, was liable to be dismissed, and could commit no fault without the proprietary family being responsible for it, exactly as the Roman master answered for his slaves; 2nd, the man and the woman could marry on a footing of equality; 3rd, the man bought his wife or wives.[1002] The first form of marriage, that of servitude of the man, who, instead of marrying, is married by the family of his wife, has fallen into desuetude in Malaya, but it has left behind it, in certain districts, the system of maternal filiation. It is the maternal uncle who is the head of the family, or, in default of him, the eldest son of the wife’s family. If there is neither uncle nor son old enough, it is the mother who becomes the head of the family, and the father only takes her place in case she has disappeared, and when all the children are minors. At the death of a man, his property does not go to his wife or children, but to his maternal family, and in the first place to his brothers and sisters. The married man also continues to live in his maternal family; it is the field of his own family that he cultivates, and he only accidentally assists his wife.[1003] In short, under this system the individual, whether man or woman, is not set free in the least from the family in which he is born; it is for this family that the woman bears children; filiation and inheritance must therefore follow the maternal line. But it is not at all the same throughout Malaya. Marsden tells us that a man sometimes buys his wife by giving a sister in exchange;[1004] he must therefore be the proprietor of his sister, and consequently of the wife whom he procures by means of this barter.
In the Arroo Isles the men buy their wives, by giving gongs, clothes, etc., to the parents of the women.[1005]
At Timor the son-in-law buys his wife thus from his father-in-law, and the latter can remain owner of the children if they are not included in the bargain;[1006] but these customs are not easily compatible with the system of the maternal family, and, taken altogether, they prove that in Malaya the family is not by any means constituted in a uniform manner. We shall see that it is the same with the primitive races of India.