than the men.  These women are Amazons not of their own accord but by order of the king.  But in other parts of Africa there is reason to believe that bands of self-constituted female warriors have existed at various times.  Diodorus Siculus, who lived in the time of Julius Caesar, says that on the western coast of Libya (Africa) there used to live a people governed by women, who carried on wars and the government, the men being obliged to do domestic work and take care of the children.  In our time Livingstone found in the villages of the Bechuanas and Banyas that men were often badly treated by the women, and the eminent German anthropologist Bastian says(S.S., 178) that in “the Soudan the power of the women banded together for mutual protection is so great that men are often put under ban and obliged to emigrate.”  Mungo Park described the curious bugaboo(mumbo-jumbo)by means of which the Mandingo negroes used to keep their rebellious women in subjection.  According to Bastian, associations for keeping women in subjection are common among men along the whole African West Coast.  The women, too, have their associations, and at their meetings compare notes on the meanness and cruelty of their husbands.  Now it is easy to conceive that among tribes where many of the men have been killed off in wars the women, being in a great majority, may, for a time at least, turn the tables on the men, assume their weapons and make them realize how it feels to be the “inferior sex.”  For this reason Bastian sees no occasion to share the modern disposition to regard all the Amazon legends as myths.

WHERE WOMAN COMMANDS

If we now return from the West Coast to Eastern Africa we find on the northern confines of Abyssinia a strange case of the subjection of men, which Munzinger has described in his Ostafrikanische Studien (275-338).  The Beni Amer are a tribe of Mohammedan shepherds among whom “the sexes seem to have exchanged roles, the women being more masculine in their work.”  Property is legally held in common, wherefore the men rarely dare to do anything without consulting their wives.  In return for this submission they are treated with the utmost contempt: 

“For every angry word that the husband utters he is compelled to pay a fine, and perhaps spend a whole rainy night outdoors till he has promised to give his weaker half a camel and a cow.  Thus the wife acquires a property of her own, which the husband never is allowed to touch; many women have in this way ruined their husbands and then left them.  The women have much esprit de corps; if one of them has ground for complaint, all the others come to her aid....  Of course the man is always found in the wrong; the whole village is in a turmoil.  This esprit de corps demands that every woman, whether she loves her husband or not, must conceal her love and treat him contemptuously.  It is considered