212 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



by the infidelities she may confess prior to the per- 

 formance : they are purged by the subsequent purifi- 

 cation ceremony. 



The information which we possess in reference to 

 the Hottentots is of a contradictory character. On 

 the one hand Kolben, who visited the Cape of Good 

 Hope at the beginning of the eighteenth century and 

 made a personal study of the Hottentot customs, 

 denies with great emphasis their indifference to the 

 chastity of married women. He asserts that they 

 punished adultery with death, and that a woman who 

 was divorced from her husband by the judgment of 

 the men of the kraal could not marry again during 

 her husband's life. 1 On the other hand, Sir James 

 Alexander, recording his journey about a hundred and 

 twenty years later through Great Namaqualand and 

 confirming Kolben's statements in some other par- 

 ticulars, avers that chastity is of small account among 

 the Namaquas. " The chiefs even, when they go to 

 the sea, lend their wives to the white men for cotton 

 handkerchiefs or brandy ; and if a husband has been 

 out hunting and on his return finds his place occupied 

 he sits down at the door of his hut and the paramour 

 handing him out a bit of tobacco the injured man 

 contentedly smokes it till the other chooses to retire. 

 This surely," observes the traveller with surprise, "is 

 the acme of complaisance." 2 It is generally recognised 

 that Kolben's account of the Hottentots errs, if at all, 

 on the side of leniency. He gives no definition of 

 adultery. His description of their wooing, though 

 antenuptial intercourse is not asserted, leads to the 

 inference that it took place. And if a divorced woman 

 1 Kolben, 157. 2 Alexander, i. 196 



