An African Despot 
One of the female converts would not eat meat 
sacrificed to idols nor let her little son do so, and 
she was severely beaten by her husband for such 
sacrilege. When the missionary appealed to 
Areh to protect her for the sake of common jus¬ 
tice, he simply asked, “Is she not the man’s 
wife?” and then refused to give the subject 
further attention. As he viewed the matter, to 
interfere in such a case would be an unlawful 
meddling with the husband’s conjugal rights. 
Again, when the family of an influential man 
complained that their relative had given his son 
to the missionary to be educated in the Christian 
faith, Areh replied, “Is the boy not the man’s 
son ? ” His ideas of justice thus worked both 
ways. Though he gave the missionaries per¬ 
mission to preach the gospel to the Yoruban peo¬ 
ple, he would not listen to it himself. 
Areh was a strange compound of childish 
superstitions and practical good sense. Very fine 
fish were sometimes caught in the brook flowing 
by the town gate, and when a man was accident¬ 
ally drowned in it, Areh declared that the brook 
was angry because of the murder of its children, 
and he threatened death to any one who caught 
another out of it. That this superstition was 
peculiar to himself was proved by the fact that 
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