PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



and twelve years old are usually all lovers and are 

 reckoned marriageable ; jealousy has no place among 

 the Kaffirs, for the mother offers herself and her 

 daughter in the presence of her husband, and some- 

 times the husband offers his wife ; but the Tembe are 

 the most disorderly of all, for as soon as one sets foot 

 in the country the creatures offer themselves, living in 

 this respect like the beasts. 1 



Alberti, who was on military service in Cape Colony 

 at the beginning of the last century, reports somewhat 

 more favourably of the morals of married women 

 among the most southerly tribes, with which alone he 

 came into contact. But the unmarried girls and widows 

 were quite free in their relations with men. It was a 

 token of hospitality to offer to a guest a girl as bed- 

 fellow ; and if the offer were not made he easily found 

 one for himself. 2 According to the testimony of other 

 writers the bedfellow was not by any means necessarily 

 an unmarried girl, but often among both Basuto and 

 Kaffirs a wife of the host. 3 



Fortunately we possess, in the writings of a Swiss 

 Protestant missionary, an account of the population 

 about Delagoa Bay, which is the most complete and 



1 Rec. S. E. Afr. vi. 496, 498. 



2 Alberti, 124, 162. 



3 Endemann, Zeits. f. Ethnol vi. 33 ; Nauhaus, Ibid. xiv. Verh. 

 210. The latter states in comprehensive terms the Kaffir law ot 

 adultery thus : A married man is never an adulterer as regards his 

 own wife. A wife is only guilty if she yield herself to another man 

 against the will of her husband. A man is only guilty who has 

 intercourse with a married woman without the permission of he* 

 husband. A girl is only guilty who has not been successful in 

 secretly applying the means of abortion constantly in use. A man 

 is only guilty who has ravished a girl and been by her denounced 

 to her father ; but this very seldom happens, 



