issionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa," London, 1857. On
the Zambesi he ran across the Valonda--a handsome, vigorous negro tribe,
devoted to agriculture--where he found confirmed the informations
received from the Portuguese, and which at first seemed incredible to
him, with regard to the privileged position enjoyed by women. They sit
in council; the young man who marries must move from his own, to the
village of his wife: he thereby pledges himself to furnish the mother of
his wife for life with kindling wood: if he divorces, the children
remain the property of the mother. On the other hand, the wife must see
to the sustenance of the husband. Although, occasionally, slight
disagreements break out between man and wife, Livingstone found that the
men did not retaliate, but he discovered that the men, who offended
their wives, were punished in the most sensitive manner--through their
stomachs. The husband, he says, comes home to eat, but one woman sends
him off to another, and he gets nothing. Tired and hungry he climbs a
tree in the most populous part of the village, and announces in woeful
tones: "Hear! Hear! I thought I had married women, but they are witches
to me! I am a bachelor; I have not a single wife! Is that right towards
a man like me?" If a woman gives physical expression to her anger at a
man, she is sentenced to carry him on her back from the court of the
chieftain to her own house. While she is carrying him home, the other
men scoff at and jeer her; the women, on the contrary, encourage her
with all their might, calling out to her: "Treat him as he deserves; do
it again!"

Similar conditions still exist in the German colony of Cameroon in West
Africa. A German ship's doctor, who studied the country and its people
by personal observation, writes us thus:

"With a large number of tribes, inheritance is based on maternity.
Paternity is immaterial. Brothers and sisters are only the children of
one mother. A man does not bequeath his property to his children, but to
the children of his sister, that is to say, to his nephews and nieces,
as his nearest demonstrable blood relatives. A chief of the Way people
explained to me in horrible English: "My sister and I are certainly
blood relatives, consequently her son is my heir; when I die, he will
be the king of my town." "And your father?" I inquired. "I don't know
what that means, 'my father,'" answered he. Upon my putting to him the
question whether