130 PYGMIES AND PAPUANS 



village are joined together under a common roof, but 

 each family enters by its own doorway, and, except 

 for the publicity resulting from the lack of dividing 

 walls or partitions, it finds itself in its own private 

 house. It is difficult to say exactly of what the 

 " family-group " consists. There are the man and his 

 wife and the children, and sometimes an extra man or 

 two, and, rarely, an extra w'oman, w^ho is, I believe, 

 always a second wife of the man of the house ; but the 

 position of the extra men and their relationship to 

 the rest of the family I cannot define. At the village 

 of Obota a detached house, rather larger than the rest, 

 was said to be occupied by young men only ; we did 

 not see any other instance of this elsewhere. 



Families are small, as might be expected from the 

 severity of their conditions of life and the long period 

 of suckling by the mothers, and we did not know 

 definitely of any couple who had more than three living 

 children. Though the women do a large amount of 

 the work of the community the}/ are not mere drudges ; 

 they do a great deal of talking, and the men appear 

 to pay considerable respect to their opinion. This 

 was frequently noticeable when we wanted to buy 

 something, such as canoes, from a native ; he would 

 say that he must first of all go and consult his wife, 

 and when he returned it often happened that, prompted 

 by his wife, he insisted on a higher payment than he 

 had asked before. 



On one occasion only did we see a woman ill-treated, 

 and the performance was a particularly brutal one. 

 Two men and a woman walked down from the village 



