Amongst some tribes, when a man professes his love for a woman and asks her in marriage, she invariably refuses him at first, lest it should appear that she had been thinking of him and was eager to become his wife! By so doing she maintains the modesty of her sex, as well as tests the love and abases the pride of her lover. This policy is also intended to be of use to the woman in her married life—as, should there be quarrelling, and the husband threaten to send her away, she can remind him of how he made repeated professions of his love and urgently pressed his suit before she consented to become his wife.
The charge which is sometimes brought against white men of "marrying for money" cannot be used against their sex in Africa, for there it is the other way about, husbands having to purchase their wives. When a man has a wife bestowed upon him as an act of charity, he feels that she is not properly his own, and she, if she will, can treat him with contempt. This custom of wife-purchase, although it is to be decried as tending to lower marriage to the level of a commercial contract, is an incentive to young men to work. Lazy youths cannot compete with energetic ones in the matrimonial market, as they are despised by the young women and rejected by their parents as being unworthy of their daughters. The number of polygamists would also be greater were it not that each man has to buy his wife. In order to procure the wherewithal he must necessarily exert himself, and as "the cost spoils the taste," many prefer to remain monogamists.
THE LUCKLESS CHIEF WHO NARROWLY ESCAPED POISONING AT THE HANDS OF A JEALOUS WIFE.
From a Photo. by Rev. T. B. R. Westgate.
Polygamy is the source of much social evil. When a husband pays more attention to one of his wives than the others they become jealous, and probably set about poisoning her or their lord and master as the simplest way out of the difficulty. Thus the polygamist has no easy time in striving to please all his wives and guarding himself against the deadly potion; while if by chance all of them combine against him, his lot is a hapless one indeed. When he has reason to believe that his women-folk are secretly plotting against him, he makes them taste, in his presence, the viands prepared for him (males and females do not eat together, whether married or otherwise) before he partakes of them; or he may make it a rule to have all his food cooked for him by his favourite wife, eschewing all others. The photograph above reproduced shows a chief, living near one of the mission stations in Usagara, who had a hair-breadth escape from being poisoned by one of his five wives, whom he put away on becoming a Christian. The evils of polygamy are further seen in the strife and jealousy existing between the children of the different wives.
THE EXTRAORDINARY COSTUME OF MILLET-STALKS WORN BY THE YOUTHS WHILE PREPARING FOR MATRIMONY.
From a Photo. by Rev. T. B. R. Westgate.