Part 36 (1/2)
BUSHMAN QUALIFICATIONS FOR LOVE
The eminent anatomist Fritsch, in his valuable work on the natives of South Africa (386-407), describes the Bushmen as being even in physical development far below the normal standard. Their limbs are ”horribly thin” in both s.e.xes; both women and men are ”frightfully ugly,” and so much alike that, although they go about almost naked, it is difficult to tell them apart. He thinks they are probably the aboriginal inhabitants of Africa, scattered from the Cape to the Zambesi, and perhaps beyond. They are filthy in their habits, and ”was.h.i.+ng the body is a proceeding unknown to them.” When the French anatomist Cuvier examined a Bushman woman, he was reminded of an ape by her head, her ears, her movements, and her way of pouting the lips.
The language of the Bushmen has often been likened to the chattering of monkeys. According to Bleek, who has collected their tales, their language is of the lowest known type. Lichtenstein (II., 42) found the Bushman women like the men, ”ugly in the extreme,” adding that ”they understand each other more by their gestures than by their speaking.”
”No one has a name peculiar to himself.” Others have described them as having protuberant stomachs, prominent posteriors, hollowed-out backs, and ”few ideas but those of vengeance and eating.” They have only two numerals, everything beyond two being ”much,” and except in those directions where the struggle for life has sharpened their wits, their intellectual faculties in general are on a level with their mathematics. Their childish ignorance is ill.u.s.trated by a question which some of them seriously asked Chapman (I., 83) one day--whether his big wagons were not the mothers of the little ones with slender tires.
How well their minds are otherwise adapted for such an intellectualized, refined, and esthetic feeling as love, may also be inferred from the following observations. Lichtenstein points out that while necessity has given them acute sight and hearing,
”they might almost be supposed to have neither taste, smell, nor feeling; no disgust is ever evinced by them at even the most nauseous kind of food, nor do they appear to have any feeling of even the most striking changes in the temperature of the atmosphere.”
”No meat,” says Chapman (I., 57), ”in whatever state of decomposition, is ever discarded by Bushmen.” They dispute carrion with wolves and vultures. Rabbits they eat skins and all, and their menu is varied by all sorts of loathsome reptiles and insects.
No other savages, says Lichtenstein, betray ”so high a degree of brutal ferocity” as the Bushmen. They ”kill their own children without remorse.” The missionary Moffat says (57) that ”when a mother dies whose infant is not able to s.h.i.+ft for itself, it is, without any ceremony, buried alive with the corpse of its mother.” Kicherer, another missionary, says
”there are instances of parents throwing their tender offspring to the hungry lion, who stands roaring before their cavern, refusing to depart till some peace-offering be made to him.”
He adds that after a quarrel between husband and wife the one beaten is apt to take revenge by killing their child; and that, on various occasions, parents smother their children, cast them away in the desert, or bury them alive without remorse. Murder is an amus.e.m.e.nt, and is considered a praiseworthy act. Livingstone (_M.T._, 159) tells of a Bushman who thought his G.o.d would consider him a ”clever fellow”
because he had murdered a man, two women, and two children. When fathers and mothers become too old to be of any use, or to take care of themselves, they are abandoned in the desert to be devoured alive by wild beasts. ”I have often reasoned with the natives on this cruel practice,” says the missionary Moffat (99); ”in reply to which, they would only laugh.” ”It appears an awful exhibition of human depravity,” he adds, ”when children compel their parents to perish for want, or to be devoured by beasts of prey in a desert, _from no other motive but sheer laziness._” Kicherer says there are a few cases of ”natural affection” sufficient to raise these creatures to ”a level with the brute creation,” Moffat, too, refers to exceptional cases of kindness, but the only instance he gives (112) describes their terror on finding he had drunk some water poisoned by them, and their gladness when he escaped--which terror and gladness were, however, very probably inspired not by sympathy but by the idea of punishment at causing the death of a white man. Chapman himself, the chosen champion of the Bushmen, relates (I., 67) how, having heard of Bushmen rescuing and carrying home some Makalolos whom they had found dying of thirst in the desert, he believed it at first; but he adds:
”Had I at that time possessed a sufficient knowledge of native character, I should not have been so credulous as to have listened to this report, for the idea of Bushmen carrying human beings whom they had found half dead out of a desert implies an act of charity quite inconsistent with their natural disposition and habits.”
Barrow declares (269) that if Bushmen come across a Hottentot guarding his master's cattle,
”not contented with putting him to immediate death, they torture him by every means of cruelty that their invention can frame, as drawing out his bowels, tearing off his nails, scalping, and other acts equally savage.”
They sometimes bury a victim up to the neck in the ground and thus leave him to be pecked to death by crows.
”LOVE IN ALL THEIR MARRIAGES”
And yet--I say it once more--we are asked to believe there is ”love in all the marriages” of these fiendish creatures--beings who, as Kicherer says, live in holes or caves, where they ”lie close together like pigs in a sty” and of whom Moffat declares that with the exception of Pliny's Troglodites ”no tribe or people are surely more brutish, ignorant, and miserable.” Our amazement at Chapman's a.s.sertion increases when we examine his argument more closely. Here it is (I., 258-59):
”Although they have a plurality of wives, which they also obtain by purchase, there is still love in all their marriages, and courts.h.i.+p among them is a very formal and, in some respects, a rather punctilious affair. When a young Bushman falls in love, he sends his sister to ask permission to pay his addresses; with becoming modesty the girl holds off in a playful, yet not scornful or repulsive manner if she likes him. The young man next sends his sister with a spear, or some other trifling article, which she leaves at the door of the girl's home. If this be not returned within the three or four days allowed for consideration, the Bushman takes it for granted that he is accepted, and gathering a number of his friends, he makes a grand hunt, generally killing an elephant or some other large animal and bringing the whole of the flesh to his intended father-in-law. The family now riot in an abundant supply.... After this the couple are proclaimed husband and wife, and the man goes to live with his father-in-law for a couple of winters, killing game, and always laying the produce of the chase at his feet as a mark of respect, duty, and grat.i.tude.”
It would take considerable ingenuity to condense into an equal number of lines a greater amount of ignorance and navete than this pa.s.sage includes. And yet a number of anthropologists have accepted this pa.s.sage serenely as expert evidence that there is love in all the marriages of the lowest of African races. Peschel was misled by it; Westermarck triumphantly puts it at the head of his cases intended to prove that ”even very rude savages may have conjugal affection;” Moll meekly accepts it as a fact (_Lib. s.e.x._, Bd. I., Pt. 2, 403); and it seems to have made an impression on Katzel, and even on Fritsch. If these writers had taken the trouble to examine Chapman's qualifications for serving as a witness in anthropological questions, they would have saved themselves the humiliation of being thus duped.
His very a.s.sertion that there is love in _all_ Bushman marriages ought to have shown them what an untrustworthy witness he is; for a more reckless and absurd statement surely was never penned by any globe-trotter. There is not now, and there never has been, a people among whom love could be found in all marriages, or half the marriages. In another place (I., 43) Chapman gives still more striking evidence of his unfitness to serve as a witness. Speaking of the family of a Bamanwato chief, he says:
”I was not aware of this practice of early marriages until the wife of an old man I had engaged here to accompany us, a child of about eight years of age, was pointed out to me, and in my ignorance I laughed outright, until my interpreter explained the matrimonial usages of their people.”
Chapman's own editor was tempted by this exhibition of ignorance to write the following footnote: ”The author seems not to have been aware that such early marriages are common among the Hindoos.” He might have added ”and among most of the lower races.”
The ignorance which made Chapman ”laugh outright” when he was confronted by one of the most elementary facts of anthropology, is responsible for his reckless a.s.sertions in the paragraph above quoted.
It is an ignorant a.s.sumption on his part that it is the feelings of ”respect, duty, and grat.i.tude” that make a Bushman provide his bride's father with game for a couple of winters. Such feelings are unknown to the Bushman's soul. Working for the bride's father is simply his way (if he has no property to give) of paying for his wife--an ill.u.s.tration of the widespread custom of service. If polygamy and the custom of purchasing wives do not, as Chapman intimates, prevent love from entering into all Bushman marriages, then these aborigines must be constructed on an entirely different plan from other human beings, among whom we know that polygamy crushes monopoly of affection, while a marriage by purchase is a purse-affair, not a heart-affair--the girl going nearly always to the highest bidder.
But Chapman's most serious error--the one on which he founded his theory that there is love in all Bushman marriages--lies in his a.s.sumption that the ceremony of sham capture indicates modesty and love, whereas, as we saw in the chapter on Coyness, it is a mere survival of capture, the most ruffianly way of securing a bride, in which her choice or feelings are absolutely disregarded, and which tells us nothing except that a man covets a woman and that she feigns resistance because custom, as taught by her parents, compels her to do so. Inasmuch as she _must_ resist whether she likes the man or not, how could such sham ”coyness” be a symptom of love? Moreover, it appears that even this sham coyness is exceptional, since, as Burch.e.l.l informs us (II., 59), it is only when a girl grows up to womanhood without having been betrothed--”which, however, seldom happens”--that the female receives the man's attentions with such an ”affectation of great alarm and disinclination on her part.”
Burch.e.l.l also informs us that a Bushman will take a second wife when the first one has become old, ”not in years but in const.i.tution;” and Barrow discovered the same thing (I., 276): ”It appeared that it was customary for the elderly men to have two wives, one old and past child-bearing, the other young.” Chapman, too, relates that a Bushman will often cast off his early wife and take a younger one, and as that does not prevent him from finding affection in their conjugal unions, we are enabled from this to infer that ”love” means to him not enduring sympathy or altruistic capacity and eagerness for self-sacrifice, but a selfish, transient fondness continuing only as long as a woman is young and can gratify a man's s.e.xual appet.i.te. That kind of love doubtless does exist in all Bushman marriages.
Chapman further declares (II., 75) that these people lead ”comparatively” chaste lives. I had supposed that, as an egg is either good or bad, so a man or woman is either chaste or unchaste. Other writers, who had no desire to whitewash savages, tell us not only ”comparatively” but positively what Bushman morals are. A Bushman told Theophilus Halm (_Globus_, XVIII., 122) that quarrels for the possession of women often lead to murder; ”nevertheless, the lascivious fellow a.s.sured me it was a fine thing to appropriate the wives of others.” Wake (I., 205) says they lend their wives to strangers, and Lichtenstein tells us (II., 48) that ”the wife is not indissolubly united to the husband; but when he gives her permission, she may go whither she will and a.s.sociate with any other man.” And again (42):
”Infidelity to the marriage compact is not considered a crime, it is scarcely regarded by the offended person.... They seem to have no idea of the distinction of girl, maiden, and wife; they are all expressed by one word alone. I leave every reader to draw from this single circ.u.mstance his own inference with regard to the nature of love and every kind of moral feeling among them.”[137]