A STORY OF AFRICAN LOVE

An amusing incident related by Ernst von Weber (II., 215-6) indicates how easily utilitarian considerations override such skin-deep preference as may exist among Africans.  He knew a girl named Yanniki who refused to marry a young Kaffir suitor though she confessed that she liked him.  “I cannot take him,” she said, “as he can offer only ten cows for me and my father wants fifteen.”  Weber observed, that it was not kind of her father to let a few cows stand in the way of her happiness; but the African damsel did not fall in with his sentimental view of the case.  Business and vanity were to her much more important matters than individual preference for a particular lover, and she exclaimed, excitedly: 

“What!  You expect my father to give me away for ten cows?  That would be a fine sort of a bargain!  Am I not worth more than Cilli, for whom the Tambuki chief paid twelve cows last week?  I am pretty, I can cook, sew, crochet, speak English, and with all these accomplishments you want my father to dispose of me for ten miserable cows?  Oh, sir, how little you esteem me!  No, no, my father is quite right in refusing to yield in this matter; indeed, in my opinion he might boldly ask thirty cows for me, for I am worth that much.”

SIMILARITY OF INDIVIDUALS AND SEXES

It is not difficult to explain why among the lower races individual preference either does not occur at all or is so weak and utilitarian that the difference of a few cows more or less may decide a lover’s fate.  Like sunflowers in the same garden, the girls in a tribe differ so little from one another that there is no particular cause for discrimination.  They are all brought up in exactly the same way, eat the same food, think the same thoughts, do the same work—­carrying water and wood, dressing skins, moving tents and utensils, etc.; they are alike uneducated, and marry at the same childish age before their minds can have unfolded what little is in them; so that there is small reason why a man should covet one of them much more than another.  A savage may be as eager to possess a woman as a miser is to own a gold piece:  but he has little more reason to prefer one girl to another than a miser has to prefer one gold piece to another of the same size.

Humboldt observed (P.E., 141) that “in barbarous nations there is a physiognomy peculiar to the tribe or horde rather than to any individual.”  It has been noted by various observers that the lower the race is the more do its individuals thus resemble one another.  Nay, this approximation goes so far as to make even the two sexes much less distinct than they are with us.  Professor Pritsch, in his classical treatise on the natives of South Africa (407), dwells especially on the imperfect sexual differentiation of the Bushmen.  The faces, stature, limbs, and even the chest and hips of the women differ so little from those of the men that in looking at photographs (as he says and illustrates by specimens), one finds it difficult to tell them apart, though the figures are almost nude.  Both sexes are equally lean and equally ugly.  The same may be said of the typical Australians, and in Professor and Mrs. Agassiz’s Journey in Brazil (530) we read that