306 
AFRICA AND ITS EXPLORATION. 
usual offering; when this has been accepted, the girl is 
at liberty to speak to the man, and is held to have 
pledged herself to him as his wife. There is an entire 
absence of those hideous orgies which characterize both 
the betrothal and marriage ceremonies among other 
South African tribes, and nothing transpires beyond 
this simple form before the marriage is deemed to be 
settled. The next step is for the parents every night to 
vacate their own hut and retire to another in the court¬ 
yard, leaving their usual abode for a week or two at the 
service of the newly-wedded pair. Every morning the 
bridegroom goes out to his work, and the parents re¬ 
occupy their proper dwelling for the day. Meanwhile 
the young man continues to acknowledge every favour 
by repeated gifts of beads; even the al dutions of the 
morning are recompensed in this way ; but at the end 
of a fortnight or thereabouts, the son-in-law brings the 
father-in-law either four couples of goats, or eight rows 
(about 2 lbs.) of beads, whereupon they set to work to 
build a hut—or two if there were not one already in the 
possession of the bridegroom—which henceforward he 
makes his home. 
Any breach of conjugal fidelity was, I understood, 
extremely rare ; on the part of the husband indeed it 
was quite unheard of; the Manansas in this respect 
being superior to the more cultivated Marutse, amongst 
whom the demoralizing system of “ mulekow ” drives 
the wives into unfaithfulness even against their will. 
When any woman is near her confinement a host of 
the old women in the neighbourhood come to her house. 
Their first business is to remove the husband’s gun or 
assegai into his other hut, or if it should happen, which 
is rarely the case, that he has not a second, into the hut 
of one of his neighbours; he is then prohibited from 
entering the sick chamber for a period of eight days ; at 
the end of that time he is conducted by the bevy of old 
nurses back to the hut, where he finds his wife and 
infant, washed in warm water, ready to receive him. 
The visit, however, which he is thus allowed to make, is 
only temporary; he is not permitted to take up his 
