us. Even
if we wanted to be good they would hinder us."

The existence of a large class of pagan slave girls, who have been
caught and brought from their own homes and carried into the Hausa
country to become members of the harem of some of the Hausas, also
complicates and intensifies the evil; for this mixture only tends to
lower the standards and make the facilities for sin tenfold easier.

It is not true in the Central Soudan, as is so often stated, that
polygamy tends to diminish the greater evils of common adultery and
prostitution. These are very frequent, and it is perfectly true what man
after man has sadly told me, that no one trusts even his own brother in
the case of married relationships. I am bound to acknowledge, however,
in honesty, that these evils are intensified in the cantonments with
their large number of native soldiers of loose character, and some even
of one's own immoral countrymen.

I have seen very little systematic cruelty towards women or children,
except of course in the slave-raiding and slave markets which are now
happily abolished. Women are able to take care of themselves and
certainly do, so far as I have seen.

The knowledge that a wife may leave at will, that less labor can be got
out of a cruelly-treated slave wife, and that little girls can leave
home and find a place elsewhere, all have tended to make women's lives
freer, and to some extent less hard in the Central Soudan than in North
Africa.

On the other hand, one is struck with the apparent lack of love, and
forced to the conclusion that a woman is not in any sense, to a man of
the Hausa race, more than a necessary convenience; a woman to look
after his house, have children, and prepare his meals. In old age she is
often abandoned or driven away, or becomes a mere drudge. This is often
the case also with a man, if not wealthy; when old his wives will leave
him, and many a case I have seen of such desolation. Of real love which
triumphs over circumstances of poverty and sickness there is but little;
women will leave their husbands when through misfortune they have lost
their wealth, and go and marry another, returning later when fortune has
again favored the original husband and frowned on the later one.

I met one beautiful exception to this. One of the most beautiful girls I
have seen in the Hausa states, with a really good face and one which
anywhere would have been pronounced pretty, brought her blind husband to
me. W