MOTHERRIGHT 263 



who is his father or not is very often of no consequence 

 to his social or legal position. The native law of the 

 Bavili (and the same is true of other tribes) draws no 

 distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. 

 " Birth," we are told by a keen observer who has lived 

 for many years in intimate converse with the natives, 

 "sanctifies the child j" 1 birth alone gives him status 

 as a member of his mother's family. The French 

 cast-iron regulations, made for a different race and a 

 different latitude, puzzled and confounded poor 

 Joseph by the unexpected and absurd questions they 

 required to be put to him. Miss Kingsley sarcastically 

 observes : " As he's going to Boma, in the Congo 

 Free State, it can only be for ethnological purposes 

 that the French Government are taking this trouble 

 to get up his genealogy." Joseph does not understand 

 the French government any more than the French 

 government understands him ; and he has never 

 traced his genealogy along those lines before. 



Joseph was a member of a Bantu tribe ; but the 

 case is the same among the Negroes. The Fanti of 

 the Gold Coast may be taken as typical. Among 

 them, while an intensity of affection, accounted for 

 partly by the fact that the mothers have the exclusive 

 care of the children, is felt for the mother, " the father 

 is hardly known or [is] disregarded," notwithstanding 

 he may be a wealthy and powerful man and the legal 

 husband of the mother. 2 In North America Charle- 

 voix says that among the Algonkin nations the 

 children belonged to and only recognised their mother. 

 The father was always a stranger, " so nevertheless 

 that if he is not regarded as father he is always 



1 Dennett, Journ. Afr. Soc. i. 265. 2 /. A. I. xxvi. 145. 



