Liberia >• 



cease to breed after the age of thirty-two or thirty-three. 

 The custom, at any rate, entails polygamy or marriage with 

 more than one wife as a necessity for all these Negro men. 

 Whether it is as rigidly carried out as all observers insist 

 is sometimes a mafter of doubt to myself when I have compared 

 the successive ages of one woman's children. Still, it would 

 seem to be a valuable hygienic measure. It is doubtful 

 whether in Negro Africa any such case exists as may be witnessed 

 by the hundred thousand in all large European communities 

 of unfortunate women done to death by incessant, unremitting 

 child-bearing ; or dragging out the life of an invalid as the 

 result of twelve to fifteen exhausting years of married life. 

 But although women in Liberia arc punctilious about not return- 

 ing to their husbands till their children are able to run and 

 to eat ordinary food, they do not leave them for more than 

 about three months after birth without any addition to the 

 mother's milk. When they are three to four months old the 

 mothers begin to give their children pellets of pounded banana 

 or mashed manioc (a sort of tapioca). When the infants are 

 a year old they are feeding themselves on rice and other food 

 prepared for their parents. 



Children are very rarely ill-treated. As a rule they may 

 commit many small offences without any punishment. There 

 is great affection between children and parents, the fathers 

 seemingly being quite as fond of the children as the mothers 

 are. 



Mr. Whyte writes from the interior of the Basa country : 

 "The farther one goes into the interior, the better is the 

 physical development of the native tribes, and the larger are 

 the families of children reared by the women. This I believe 

 can be accounted for in two ways : the abundance of good 

 nutritious food, and the fact that the boys are not called upon 



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