82 
MADAGASCAR 
Bara chieftain that he had some hundreds of wives. The 
position of the wife is relatively free and honourable; not 
seldom we find strong marks of family affection, and 
where Christianity has taken root, the inner life of the 
family has decidedly gained. The ruder kind of abuses, 
such, for instance, as the custom that the people should 
give themselves up to immoderate excess on the occasion 
of a birth in the royal family, have long ago been 
suppressed. 
Divorce is easy, but among the Hova it has not been 
practised so frequently of late as it used to be. The 
fate of the divorced wife is a very hard one when re¬ 
marriage has been forbidden to her by the husband. In 
that case there is handed to her at the time of the 
divorce:—first a black fowl to indicate that she is to 
be repellant to all men, then a staff to show that she 
must wander about without a home; a small piece of 
money expresses the fact that she is to be poor and 
dependent on alms. The fourth gift is a piece of white 
wadding expressing symbolically that she is to remain 
in this condition till her hair is white. Among the 
Sihanaka the widow is cruelly treated after her hus¬ 
band’s death; she is overwhelmed with abuse, she is 
violently stripped of her ornaments and treated by every¬ 
one as an outlaw; after she has passed her hard year 
of mourning in this fashion and her husband’s family 
have exonerated her from all guilt concerning his death, 
she is allowed to return to her relations. 
The Malagasy language is strikingly poor in words 
expressing relationship. Vady stands for husband and 
wife, rai is the name for father, reni for mother, but 
both expressions, like the Arabic abu and ti 7 n 7 n^ are 
frequently used in an extended and figurative sense; 
thus any flowing water is called renirmio^ that is “mother 
of water.” Stepfather and stepmother are named raikely 
and renikely^ literally “little father” and “little mother.” 
