Indo-China and its primitive people

by Henry Baudesson

This magnanimous custom is also found among several of the races which inhabit equatorial Africa, notably the Medgé and the Mangbetù.

Incestuous relationships are by no means uncommon among the Moï. I once spent several months in the village of Lebouy, where the chief was the father of his daughter's children. Nor was any exception taken to his action, which was regarded merely as the exercise of a right which immemorial precedent had sanctioned.

These incestuous connections are by no means confined to the eastern archipelago, but are constantly met with in Africa also. I need only mention the Avura-Gura of the Congo as an example. It is a mere matter of history that incest was practised and recognized by the royal family in ancient Egypt. The most usual instance was a union between sisters and brothers. The object, of course, was to ensure that the royal blood should be transmitted from generation to generation without any admixture of alien strains, and thus preserve its identity with its true and first origin the union of a god and some creature, such as the hawk or gryphon. The example of the princes soon found imitators among their subjects, and after being confined to the nobility and ruling classes, it spread among all orders of society. We possess an accumulation of proof, which places the matter beyond doubt, in the documents and inscriptions which archæological research has brought to light.

By way of contrast, a custom obtains among certain groups in Indo-China (though almost unknown elsewhere), especially the Man Coc, and Man Pa Tong, which formally prohibits intercourse between a woman and her father-in-law or uncles, and likewise between a man and his mother-in-law, his aunts, or his sisters-in-law. I shall have occasion further on to investigate this peculiar veto which is enforced by certain African tribes also.

The Levirate (from "Levir," a brother-in-law, in Sanscrit dêvar) is also found operating as a stringent injunction.

This, as everyone knows, takes its name from that law of Moses which commanded a brother-in-law to marry his deceased brother's widow (in cases where there had been no issue) in order to provide an heir to the family and to perpetuate his name. It was a species of "adoption beyond the tomb."

In the same way, there are laws among certain of the Moï tribes, such as the Radé, by which a widow is compelled to remarry with some member of her husband's family. Various reasons are assigned for this injunction, but primarily it is dictated by a desire to secure the inheritance to the family of the deceased.

I was told of several cases of bestiality which seemed to me, even if proved, to present no features worthy of comment. Sexual perversions of this character are not confined to any one country nor any one period, and it is sufficient to remark that nearly every race has legends of gods changing themselves into animals with the aim of uniting themselves with mortals. These fables are not mere fictions of a poet's brain but reminiscences of a distant period when Egyptians and Greeks worshipped animal-gods whom superstition had endowed with mortal offspring.

One fact which I was able to prove to my own satisfaction was the dietary regulations to which pregnant women are subjected. Among the prohibited foods at that period figures the flesh of all male animals which have not been castrated. Here, without doubt, is an analogy with the law of the Man-Coc that no sexual intercourse may take place after the third month of pregnancy. In particular, the mother-to-be must abstain from fat and green vegetables. She may undertake no kind of work, not even the most trivial of household duties.