Fortunately, Fatou was a steady little person, whose mode of life was not extravagant.
Throughout the Soudan, woman is in a position of great inferiority as compared to man.
Several times in the course of her life she is bought and sold like a head of cattle, and at a price which is estimated at inverse ratio to her ugliness, defects, and increasing age.
One day Jean asked his friend Nyaor,
“What have you done with your wife Nokhoudounkhotillé, the one who was so good-looking?”
And Nyaor replied, with a quiet smile,
“Nokhoudounkhotillé talked too much, so I sold her. With the money I got for her I bought thirty sheep who never talk at all.”
The hardest work done by the negroes, the task of pounding millet for the kouss-kouss, devolves upon the women.
From morning till night, throughout Nubia, from Timbuctoo to the coast of Guinea, in all the thatched huts, under the burning sun, the negresses’ wooden pestles are noisily pounding in the mortars of khaya wood. Thousands of braceletted arms weary themselves at this task, and the chattering, quarrelsome workers mingle with this monotonous sound their chorus of shrill voices, which seem to come from the throats of monkeys.
The result is a very characteristic hubbub, audible from afar in the thickets and desert tracts leading to these African villages.