MARITAL JEALOUSY 205 



called upombo. The adulterine offspring belongs to 

 the begetter on payment of the upombo otherwise 

 I infer to the husband. Cases are not unknown in 

 which, for the sake of getting the upombo, the husband 

 has induced his wife to commit adultery. 1 



Among the peoples of the Marotse Kingdom in 

 Northern Rhodesia marriage, it is said, hardly exists. 

 A man and woman unite one day and live together as 

 long as they like and separate even more easily than they 

 united. A Swiss Protestant missionary declares the 

 social condition to be the ideal of certain reformers in 

 Europe free love. It would be difficult to find a man 

 of forty who still retained his first wife. There is no 

 ceremony ; the pair enter into no definite engagement. 

 Once the chief authorises the man to marry he is 

 bound to make a few presents to his intended wife, 

 and then they settle down together without the 

 slightest fuss. Even for the children of chiefs there is 

 no ceremony : an ox is killed, or perhaps more than 

 one, for the purpose of a rejoicing ; but it is not until 

 the marriage is over. The husband of the king's 

 daughter is only formally brought to the khotla and 

 officially recognised the day after the marriage has in 

 fact taken place. Family life, as we understand it, 

 has no existence. 2 



Testimony to the licentiousness of the various 

 branches of the Bantu race dwelling south of the 

 Zambesi is unanimous and emphatic from the earliest 

 writers to the present time. Jakob Francken, who 

 visited Delagoa Bay in the sixth decade of the 

 eighteenth century, says that the Kaffir girls of eleven 



1 M. M. Lopes, Journ. Afr. Soc. vi. 364, 356, 382. 

 * Bguin, 113; Bull. Soc. Neuchat. de Ge'og. xi. 99. 



