“If you have but one wife, how can she do all the work? It is impossible! She must herself object to such an arrangement; she would want other wives to help her.”
Let me here remark that such is the case in Caffraria, where a wife will often urge her husband to take more wives, so that her own labour may be lessened; and this is no wonder, when we consider that the most arduous and incessant toil falls to the woman’s lot, while their lords and masters idle their time away in sitting and smoking in their hut when they are not milking their cows or hunting.
In reply to Metilulu, I informed him that women did not work in my country as they did in his. There the men performed most of the out-door labour, while the women attended to the home duties.
The chief smiled derisively as he rejoined that my England must be a very strange country. He then was anxious to know who ground the corn and tilled the fields—whether the men or the women.
“The men cultivate the ground,” I replied, “while the corn is made into flour by machinery.”
The last word seemed beyond his comprehension, so I tried to explain my meaning, aiding the description by tracing a windmill with my finger on the ground; but I fear when I ended that he had but a poor idea of the mechanism after all.
“But if the men work, who hunts?” he asked, adding, with a laugh—“perhaps the women.”
“No,” I said, “England had never possessed the wild animals Africa had, and those which were native to the soil—such as wild cats, wolves, and foxes—had mostly been exterminated, while the forests had been turned into waving corn-fields; therefore there were no hunters as those he referred to.”
Of course I did not mention our fox-hunters, for he would have thought little of Englishmen’s bravery had he heard that some dozen gentlemen, with the aid of a pack of hounds, pursued one poor little fox. As it was, my last statement seemed to him to put the climax to European ignorance and stupidity, for I saw he addressed anything but complimentary remarks respecting our nation to the warriors about him. Then, returning to the subject of marriage, which I had hoped he had forgotten, he continued, with a twinkle in his eyes, as if by the next question he was going to prove me entirely—whether, as men only had one wife in my country, some, no doubt, never married at all.
I stated that was the case, for some by choice remained single all their lives.