Of the Taveita forest region Johnston says: 

“After marriage the greatest laxity of manners is allowed among the women, who often court their lovers under their husband’s gaze; provided the lover pays, no objection is raised to his addresses.”

And regarding the Masai (415): 

“The Masai men rarely marry until they are twenty-five nor the women until twenty.  But both sexes, avant de se ranger, lead a very dissolute life before marriage, the young warriors and unmarried girls living together in free love.”

The fullest account of the Masai and their neighbors we owe to Thomson.  With the M-teita marriage is entirely a question of cows.

“There is a very great disproportion between the sexes, the female predominating greatly, and yet very few of the young men are able to marry for want of the proper number of cows—­a state of affairs which not unfrequently leads to marriage with sisters, though this practice is highly reprobated.”

Of the Wa-taveta, Thomson says (113):  “Conjugal fidelity is unknown, and certainly not expected on either side; they might almost be described as colonies of free lovers.”  As for life among the Masai warriors, he says (431) that it

“was promiscuous in a remarkable degree.  They may indeed be proclaimed as a colony of free lovers.  Curiously enough the sweetheart system was largely in vogue; though no one confined his or her attentions to one only.  Each girl in fact had several sweethearts, and what is still stranger, this seemed to give rise to no jealousies.  The most perfect equality prevailed between the Ditto and Elmoran, and in their savage circumstances it was really pleasant to see how common it was for a young girl to wander about the camp with her arm round the waist of a stalwart warrior."[144]

A LESSON IN GALLANTRY

Crossing the waters of the Victoria Nyanza we come to Uganda, a region which has been entertainingly described by Speke.  One day, he tells us (379), he was crossing a swamp with the king and his wives: 

“The bridge was broken, as a matter of course; and the logs which composed it, lying concealed beneath the water, were toed successively by the leading men, that those who followed should not be tripped up by them.  This favor the King did for me, and I in return for the women behind; they had never been favored in their lives with such gallantry and therefore could not refrain from laughing.  He afterward helped the girls over a brook.  The king noticed it, but instead of upbraiding me, passed it off as a joke, and running up to the Kamraviona, gave him a poke in the ribs and whispered what he had seen, as if it had been a secret.  ‘Woh, woh!’ says the Kamraviona, ’what wonders will happen next?’”

There is perhaps no part of Africa where such an act of gallantry would not have been laughed at as an absurd prank.  In Eastern Central Africa