The following passage, which occurs in another of Theal's stories (107), shows how unceremonious Kaffir "courtship" is in relation to the girl's wishes.
"Hlakanyana met a girl herding some goats.
"He said: 'Where are the boys of your village, that the goats are herded by a girl?'
"The girl answered: 'There are no boys in the village.'
"He went to the father of the girl and said: 'You must give me your daughter to be my concubine, and I will herd the goats.'
"The father of the girl agreed to that. Then Hlakanyana went with the goats, and every day he killed one and ate it till all were done."
LOWER THAN BEASTS
If we now leave the degraded and licentious Kaffirs, going northward in Eastern Africa, into the region of the lakes—Nyassa, Victoria Nyanza and Albert Nyanza—embracing British Central, German East, and British East Africa, we are doomed to disappointment if we expect to find conditions more favorable to the growth of refined romantic or conjugal love. We shall not only discover no evidence of what is vaguely called Platonic love, but we shall find men ignoring even Plato's injunction (Laws, VIII., 840) that they should not be lower than beasts, which do not mate till they have reached the age of maturity. H.H. Johnston, in his recent work on British Central Africa, gives some startling revelations of aboriginal depravity. As these regions have been known a few years only, the universality of this depravity disproves most emphatically the ridiculous notion that savages are naturally pure in their conduct and owe their degradation to intercourse with corrupt white men. Johnston (409) says:
"A medical missionary who was at work for some time on the west coast of Lake Nyassa gave me information regarding the depravity prevalent among the young boys in the Atonga tribe of a character not even to be described in obscure Latin. These statements might be applied with almost equal exactitude to boys and girls in many other parts of Africa. As regards the little girls, over nearly the whole of British Central Africa, chastity before puberty is an unknown condition…. Before a girl becomes a woman (that is to say, before she is able to conceive), it is a matter of absolute indifference what she does, and scarcely any girl remains a virgin after about five years of age."
Girls are often betrothed at birth, or even before, and when four or five years old are placed at the mercy of the degraded husbands. Capture is another method of getting a wife, and Johnston's description of this custom indicates that individual preference is as weak as we have found it among Kaffirs: