[CHAPTER XVIII]
A WOMAN "PALAVER"
I have entitled the following chapter "A Woman Palaver," and this it is—no more. Men may skip it, if they like. Women, I venture to think, will find it interesting. In what I have set down there is, I suppose, little that is of real ethnographical or anthropological value. Nevertheless, the facts were obtained at first hand, and are the result of many long and confidential talks with the women of many diverse native tribes, and of my own observations and deductions, taken and recorded on the spot. The latter portion of the chapter, dealing with caravan life and cookery from a white woman's point of view, I have been led to insert in the hope, which I believe to be well founded, that it may serve a useful purpose in the case of any other woman who may in future visit the West African hinterland under circumstances similar to those in which I found myself.
Marriage, and its natural corollary, the bearing and rearing of children, constitute the main features in a native woman's life; indeed, marriage may be said to be the pivotal point, as it were; round which all else revolves. Broadly speaking, it is, as amongst most primitive peoples, a matter of barter, of sale and exchange. Girls are marketable commodities, just as are cattle, or goats, or fowls, and are, in fact, interchangeable, a wife being bought by so many of one or the other, or by so much salt, or coined money, as the case may be.
Frequently, instead of buying a wife outright, the prospective husband will work for her, exchanging in fact his labour against her value with his prospective father-in-law. In this way a man can obtain a wife, or wives, without any capital outlay whatever, and for this reason the plan is much favoured by the younger and more impecunious natives. Those who are older and better off naturally prefer to pay cash on the nail, or its equivalent.
Girls are frequently bought by far-seeing natives as soon as they are born, and are then considered as betrothed from birth. The price of such is naturally much less than when they are adult, or approaching adolescence, for obviously the child may die before attaining to marriageable age. A girl so betrothed is supposed to keep herself chaste; but an unbetrothed girl is free by native law to indulge her sexual appetite as she pleases. If a child is born out of wedlock, however, it is not necessarily considered to belong to the mother. On the contrary, the reputed father has the first claim to it by tribal law; but he must claim it directly it is born, and if the girl disputes his claim, he must make it good by evidence that will satisfy the chief, or the village elders, as the case may be. If he fails, then the child is retained by the mother, and goes with her to the man who eventually marries her, and who becomes a father to it. As a rule, the fact of a woman having previously given birth to one or more children, is no bar to matrimony. Indeed, the native husband seems rather to prefer it so, for reasons into which I need not enter.
Marriage customs vary widely amongst the different tribes. The semi-wild Tschokossi people of the far north, for instance, seem to have, so far as I could discover, no wedding ceremonies whatever of a fixed settled character, although the occasion is always made one of feasting and rejoicing. The Tschaudjo, on the other hand, who profess Mohammedanism and are by comparison civilised, possess a very elaborate series of marriage rites, which is strictly adhered to. Those precedent to the actual ceremony, however, are secret, and strangers are jealously excluded from any participation in them, nor may they be present even as spectators.
One such wedding took place while I was at Paratau, but although I tried to gain permission to see the thing from start to finish, I was unable to. I gathered, however, that the principal feature of the initial proceedings, so far as the bride was concerned, consisted in a sort of very rough washing and massaging of her whole body, lasting throughout the entire night immediately preceding the actual day of the wedding. This operation took place in a hut set apart for the purpose, the poor bride being rubbed and scrubbed vigorously by relays of village women armed with pieces of porous stone, like pumice, and rough wooden brushes or scrapers, shaped like hair-brushes, but minus the bristles. The ordeal, which lasted practically from dusk till dawn, must have been a pretty unpleasant one, judging from the shrieks and yells that came from the interior of the hut where it was being carried out. At the same time other women were engaged in buffeting and harrying the bridegroom; although the treatment meted out to him, I was informed, was nothing like so violent or painful as that which the bride had to endure.
However, the latter looked, I am bound to say, none the worse when, next day, dressed all in white from head to foot, she took her place with her prospective husband in the bridal procession. Both were mounted on fine horses—the Tschaudjo, as I have already explained, are splendid horsemen—and were escorted by multitudes of people, shouting and firing guns, to the mosque, where the actual ceremony was performed in accordance with the Mohammedan law. The day's proceedings culminated in a feast, after which husband and wife were escorted to their hut by practically all the married women in the neighbourhood, who remained outside all through the night, yelling at the top of their voices, singing, capering, and beating drums.
Every native wife, it may be mentioned, is entitled by tribal law to her own separate hut, no matter how many other wives her husband may possess, and she can also lay claim to an equal share of his society and attentions, the rule being for him to stay with each of his women for five days and nights together in regular rotation. Thus, in the case of a well-to-do native possessing eight wives, a favourite number amongst those who can afford it, it takes him exactly forty days to "go the rounds," so to speak. As I have already intimated, native women do not resent polygamy in the least; and on the whole they seem happy and contented. They take, too, considerable pride in their personal appearance; and they are, speaking generally, far cleaner in their personal habits than are the men. This is largely due, no doubt, to the fact that they bathe two or even three times a day, when going down to the river for water. The men usually bathe once a day, in the evening, and then it is invariably a warm bath, the water for which is carried and heated for them by the women. This, however, does not apply to some of the remote pagan tribes, whose habits are filthy. Practically all the women I came across spend a lot of time and trouble over dressing their hair, with the exception of the Konkombwa, who, as already related, crop their wool quite close. They are also very fond of cleaning their teeth, using little pointed sticks of soft wood, which they are everlastingly twiddling in their mouths with their fingers as they go to and fro for the morning and evening water. Soap they manufacture themselves in little black balls about the bigness of a golf ball, and very good soap it is, giving a soft and abundant lather.
The savage woman looks forward to the ordeal of childbirth with none of those fears and misgivings that so frequently beset her civilised sister. To her, indeed, it can scarcely be counted an ordeal. She is, as a rule, a perfectly healthy female animal, and her strong, supple body has never been compressed by corsets, or had its natural growth and development hindered by tight-fitting skirts, heavy "tailor-made" costumes, and other similar sartorial abominations. Every woman, too, has received during her early girlhood, and quite as a matter of course, a training in midwifery; but of this I shall have more to say presently.