It is also a rule of the church that no Christian shall receive marriage money for his daughter, niece, or ward; and no Christian is permitted to give marriage money for his wife, except to a heathen if he asks for it. The reasons for this exception are obvious. We also insist that all Christians shall marry either by civil law or “holy matrimony.” We are interested in the natives and, rightly or wrongly, we devote our lives to them; and if we had desired numbers on the church roll to quote in reports rather than the moral and physical well-being of our parishioners, we should have made these restrictions less rigorous, and entrance to church membership more easy and pleasant for them. Our Society gives us a free hand in dealing with these great problems.

Now we find that Christian teaching and monogamy have conduced to stricter morality among the people, and also to an increase in the birth-rate. In the old days there was in every village on the Lower Congo a house called Mbongi, or Nzo-a-matoko (house for young men), where the lads and unmarried men slept. Girls from an early age had free ingress to these houses, and their mothers encouraged them to go. These houses have been cleared out of all the villages where there is any Christian influence at work, and even from heathen villages also, for they have been greatly influenced by the purer public opinion of recent years. Now that monogamy is practised by so many, the young men know that in due time they will be able to secure a wife, and they desire to receive her as pure as possible, hence the closing of these village bachelor houses even in the heathen towns. Christian parents also use their best endeavour to preserve their daughters in innocency.

We have within a stone’s-throw of Wathen Station a Christian village where monogamy is the rule without exception. There are twenty-four married women living there with their husbands, and they have between them fifty-seven children now living (noted in 1908), and five have died, making in all sixty-two births. Some of these have only been married eighteen months or two years, and there is no doubt that as the years go by there will be many more children born to these twenty-four wives. Now the same number of women tied to one man would not have had a tenth of the children. Again, we have throughout our districts a large number of teachers, many of whom are married, and most of them have children—one, two, or three, according to the length of time they have been married. There is another noticeable thing, that in the Christian villages, i.e. the monogamous villages, there are plenty of children, while the same cannot be said of the heathen in polygamous villages. Some seem to think that polygamy spells large families and a fair state of morality; but on the Congo, and I speak of what I know, polygamy means a very low birth-rate and an absolute lack of morality and common decency. Polygamy is giving place to monogamy, and that means a higher morality, a purer and more self-respecting womanhood, and the introduction of a truer affection between the husband and the wife which will result in a better and more healthy home-life for the children, and will lead to the coming of a brighter day on dark, oppressed Africa.

CHAPTER IX
NATIVE EDUCATION

Precociousness of the children—Teaching the tribal mark—Knowledge of astronomy—Divisions of night and day—Education—Paddling and canoeing—Swimming—Fishing—Hunting—Blacksmithing—The girls learned farming—Cooking—Hair-dressing—Mat and saucepan making—Charms—Taboos—First-fruits—First teeth—No moral training—Great liars and thieves—Capable of truth and honesty.

There were no schools to attend until the white men went to live in their district; but the lads accompanied their fathers and elders and learned by imitation, by listening to the talk on the road, in the canoe and around the camp fire, and by special instruction. Most lads of 14 or 15 knew the names of the innumerable fish in their river and creeks, their habits, and the best mode of catching them. They also knew the names and habitat of most bush animals, either by experience or repute; the names of the birds, insects, trees, plants, etc., were all well known to them and easily distinguished. The village life was so open, so lacking in privacy, that almost every function of the body was performed without any attempts at secrecy, hence observant young eyes drank in all that came within the purview of their vision, and boys and girls of a tender age were precocious in their knowledge of those matters which are left to a much later period in civilized countries.

Tattooing was begun in earliest childhood by the parents, but not more than sufficient to show that the child belonged to the tribe. Later on the boys and girls were urged to cut their own tattoos, and were taught to bear the pain unwhimperingly. I have seen boys and girls sitting by the river’s edge summoning up the necessary courage to make the incisions, and when they failed to do so they were ridiculed by the others until at last they would run the knife, by the aid of a bit of looking-glass or the reflection in the river, along the old lines in the forehead. At the age of 18 or 20 the person—man or woman—who wished to be thought fashionable would work away every week or so, cutting the flesh deeper and putting wads in the cuts to cause the flesh to stand up, until they had a veritable likwala, or cock’s comb, which would be the envy of those who had not attained to such a fine decoration.

There was another pain they were taught to bear patiently, and that was the chiselling of the upper incisors to V-shaped points. Some only had two cut, while others had all the upper incisors done. This operation was supposed to improve their appearance. I said once to a native, “Your teeth are like a dog’s,” and his quick retort was, “Well, your teeth are like a bat’s.” I suppose he preferred being like a dog, to having teeth like a bat. They paid two brass rods for cutting the teeth, and two brass rods every time they bit the operator. The eyelashes also were pulled out as an aid to beauty.

They picked up a little astronomy from their elders. Venus was called “wife of the moon”; a shooting star was “fetish fire”; a cluster of stars (Pleiades) was a “crowd of young women”; the “Milky Way” was “the road of floods and drought.” Both on the Lower and Upper River the natives connect the “Milky Way” with the abundance and scarcity of rains; they say that when the “Milky Way” is bright, clear, and well seen there will be plenty of rain. Three bright stars in Orion’s belt were named the “three paddlers”; and the five stars near each other in Orion were regarded as the “bundle of thunder or lightning.” In the constellation Lepus there is a set of five stars thus :*:, and these were said to resemble a man—the top star being the head, the two lower stars the hands, and the two bottom stars the feet. When this set of stars, called kole, reached the meridian the natives did more planting than at any other season. This kole was so well recognized by the natives that we used the word as an equivalent for our word year.