AN EYE FOR AN EYE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVIII, Issue 292, 7 November 1928, Page 11

AN EYE FOR AN EYE.

FULL PENALTY DEMANDED

There is at least one country in the world where the old 'Mosaic law is followed literally, writes Keith Henderson in Overseas. For in Abyssinia, when a person is found giulty of murder or even of manslaughter, he is handed over to the relatives of the deceased to be disposed of in exactly the same manner as his victim had been slain. In Addis Ababa, the capital, a special stretch of ground is set aside for these informal executions, and there one may seen a wretched assassin held down firmly while the dead man’s son or, it may be, his widow, stabs, shoots or strangles, as the case demands. There is no public sympathy for murderers in those parts. VVhen the prisoner lias been tried, convicted and condemned, the rest is a family matter and nobobdy else’s business. “Blood money” may be. accepted by the relatives, but it is quito usual for this payment to be refused and the full penalty demanded. In this connection as amusing story is told. The Emperor Menelik (a direct descendant, be it noted, of the great King Solomon) had before him a ppor woodcutter who, whilst working high up in a tree, had overbalanced and fallen on a peasant who was sleeping below, killing him outright. The brothers of the dead man refused to accept the blood money which the innocent life-taker had perforce to offer to save his own skin. “A life for a life,” they demanded, and Menelik had no choice but to deliver the poor fellow over to the inexorable avengers. He pointed out, however, that in order to fulfil the letter of the law it would be necessary for the brothers to be taken to the highest branches of the fatal tree and from there jump or be thrown down upon the prisoner as often as necessaiy until they succeeded in killing him. The tree was high enough to induce them to change their minds.

Another example of the intimacy, so to speak, between accuser and accused is afforded by the custom of chaining a debtor to his creditor until the little matter between them has been arranged. It is no uncommon thing in Addis Ababa to see two men, or even a man and a woman, linked together by a yard-long chain and wandering unconcernedly among the crowd. Night and day they remain so shackled until the debtor’s relatives are able to ransom him.

It is open to doubt whether certain people of to-day would be quite £o eager to lend money on note of hand alone if the collection of his debts involved sleeping, eating and walking with a cable length of defaulters firmly in tow.