i 9 8 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



Adultery is punished among the Baganda by 

 whipping the male offender. " On no account what- 

 ever can a woman be subjected to corporal punishment. 

 A wife is not discarded by her husband on account of 

 faithlessness. Even if she contracts disease from 

 promiscuous connection, and temporarily leaves her 

 husband's house, she is taken back when she wishes to 

 return, and the husband even brings the influence of 

 her relatives to bear on her with the object of inducing 

 her to return." 1 Among the Madi and the Shuli on 

 the Upper Nile the unmarried girls sleep in huts raised 

 above the ground like granaries. There the boys 



people fraternal polyandry exists. Mrs. French-Sheldon (/. A. I. 

 xxi. 365), writing before the British occupation, reports that every 

 Taveta warrior had a girl living with him ; the girls were selected 

 for this purpose on attaining puberty and before marriage. The 

 life they thus led did not prejudice their subsequent marriage, nor 

 was the warrior with whom such a girl might happen to live com- 

 pelled or expected to marry her. She describes the ceremony of 

 capture of the bride as if it were that of marriage, but it seems to 

 be betrothal only ; and in this form it is confined to one clan. The 

 Wataita, to whom Sir Harry Johnston assigns it, are divided from 

 the rest of the Wataveta by the river Lumi, and partly (or chiefly 

 perhaps) belong to the Ndighiri clan (Journ. Afr. Soc. i. 100, 98). 

 In Teita the host offers his own wives to his guest (Post, Afr. Jur. 

 i. 472, citing Krapf). 



1 Johnston, Uganda, ii. 553. The king was much stricter 

 before British rule as regarded his own wives. The offending wife 

 and her paramour were literally " chopped up alive together." 

 Adultery is now punished with fines in the native courts. By a 

 custom common among the Bantu north of the Zambezi one of the 

 royal princesses who was called Lubuga (king-sister) had royal 

 precedence. She was never officially married, but she was allowed 

 to take as many men as she liked : all Uganda was said to be her 

 husband. The dowager queen in like manner had complete sexual 

 freedom (Roscoe, /. A. I. xxxi. 122). But neither of these women 

 was allowed to have children ; hence they practised abortion (Id. 

 xxxii. 36, 67). 



