“impolitic custom of hording together in families, and of not marrying out of their own kraals, has, no doubt, tended to enervate this race of men, and reduced them to their present degenerated condition, which is that of a languid, listless, phlegmatic people, in whom the prolific powers of nature seem to be almost exhausted.”

It does not, therefore, surprise us to be told (by Thunberg) that “it frequently happens that a woman marries two husbands.”  And these women are anything but feminine and lovable.  One of the champions of the Hottentots, Theophilus Hahn, says (Globus, XII., 304) of the Namaqua women that they love to torture their slaves:  “When they cudgel a slave one can easily read in their faces the infernal joy it gives them to witness the tortures of their victims.”  He often saw women belaboring the naked back of a slave with branches of the cruel acacia delinens, and finally rub salt or saltpetre into the wounds.  Napier (I., 59) says of the Hottentots, that

“if the parents of a newly born child found him or her de trop, the poor little wretch was either mercilessly buried alive, or exposed in a thicket, there to be devoured by beasts of prey.”

While he had to take it for granted that there must be love-songs among these cruel Hottentots, Jakobowski had no trouble in finding songs of hate, of defiance, and revenge.  Even these cannot be cited without omitting objectionable words.  Here is one, properly expurgated: 

“Take this man away from me that he may be beaten and his mother weep over him and the worms eat him....  Let this man be brought before your counsel and cudgelled until not a shred of flesh remains on his ... that the worms would care to eat; for the reason that he has done me such a painful injury,” etc.

HOW THE HOTTENTOT WOMAN “RULES AT HOME”

Jakobowski’s assertion that a man’s oldest sister may have him chained and punished is obviously a cock-and-bull story.  It is diametrically opposed to what Peter Kolben says:  “The eldest son has in a manner an absolute authority over all his brothers and sisters.”  “Among the Hottentots an eldest son may after his father’s death retain his brothers and sisters in a sort of slavery.”  Kolben is now accepted as the leading authority on the aboriginal Hottentots, as he found them two centuries ago, before the missionaries had had time to influence their customs.  What makes him the more unimpeachable as a witness in our case is that he is decidedly prejudiced in favor of the Hottentots.[138] What was the treatment of women by Hottentots as witnessed by Kolben?  Is it true that, as Jakobowski asserts, the Hottentot woman rules at home?  Quite true; most emphatically so.  The husband, says Kolben (I., 252-55), after the hut is built,