[143] From an article in the Humanitarian, March, 1897, it appears that this "leap-year" custom still prevails among Zulus; but the dawn of civilization has introduced a modification to the effect that when the girl is refused, a present is usually given her "to ease her feelings." At least that is the way Miss Colenso puts it. Wood (80) relates a story of a Kaffir girl who persistently wooed a young chief who did not want her; she had to be removed by force and even beaten, but kept returning until, to save further bother, the chief bought her.
[144] Ignorant sentimentalists who have often argued that the absence of illegitimate offspring argues moral purity will do well to ponder what Thomson says on page 580, and compare with it the remarks of the Rev. J. Macdonald, who lived twelve years among the tribes between Cape Colony and Natal, regarding their use of herbs. (Journal Anthrop. Soc., XIX., 264.) See also Johnston (413).
[145] To what almost incredible lengths sentimental defenders of savages will go, may be seen in an editorial article with which the London Daily News of August 4, 1887, honored my first book. I was informed therein that "savages are not strangers to love in the most delicate and noble form of the passion…. The wrong conclusion must not be drawn from Monteiro's remark, 'I have never seen a negro put his arm around a negro's waist.' It is the uneducated classes who may be seen to exhibit in the parks those harmless endearments which negroes have too much good taste to practise before the public." To one who knows the African savage as he is, such an assertion is worth a whole volume of Punch.
[146] Westermarck (358), as usual, accepts Johnston's statement about poetic love on the Congo as gospel truth, without examining it critically.
[147] Bleek credits these tales to Schön's Grammar of the Hausa Language, Schlenker's Collection of Temne Traditions, and Kölle's African Native Literature, where the original Bornu text may be found.
[148] Folk Lore Journal, London, 1888, 119-22.
[149] Compare this with what I said on page 340 about the behavior of girls in the New Britain Group.
[150] Revue d'Anthropologie, 1883.
[151] See an elaborate discussion of this question by the Rev. John Mathew in the Journal of the Royal Society of N.S. Wales, Vol. XXIII., 335-449.
[152] See, e.g., the hideous pictures of Australian women enclosed in G.W. Earl's The Papuans. Spencer and Gillen's admirable volume also contains pictures of "young women" who look twice their age. After the age of twenty, the authors write, the face becomes wrinkled, the breasts pendulous, the whole body shrivelled. At fifty they reach "a stage of ugliness which baffled description" (40,40).