98 ADVENTURES OF AN ELEPHANT HUNTER ch. 
his principal care is to see that his wives do not 
make love to other women’s husbands—perhaps the 
most difficult of all the tasks he has ever undertaken, 
and one in which, I can assure the reader, he 
generally fails. 
Among the natives of East Central Africa, the 
status of a woman varies according to whether she 
is a wife or merely a slave. Though the husband is 
lord and master, let not the reader infer that he 
treats his wife inhumanly, or that the little amenities 
which characterize the union of civilized men and 
women are lacking from the married lives of 
natives. At worst, a negro is more or less a 
mentally undeveloped man : elemental feelings such 
as love of wife, children and parents, of fraternity 
and of friendship are his as well as ours, and, as we 
know, the varnish of civilization does not always 
tend to strengthen these basic factors of human 
character. Among them, just as among ourselves, 
a woman, if she has a grievance, may have recourse 
to the law—rude as that law in many instances is. 
If a man maltreats his wife, she can always complain 
to her relatives, who either settle the matter with 
the husband or bring it for justice before the 
headman of the village. If the quarrel is merely in 
the nature of a tiff, the wife may run away to her 
mother, but there is no budding humorist to 
discover the funny side of such an act and keep the 
