The Fate of the African Woman.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XVI, Issue 5084, 21 September 1891, Page 4

The Fate of the African Woman.

(From the Month.)

Terrible as are the horrors of the slave caravan, the brutal capture, the pitiless march across the desert, and the final destiny of these wretched negroes, it is scarcely less awful to read of the normal and generally accepted position of woman throughout that vast continent. I quote from a letter addressed , by Cardinal Lavigerie to the members of an association of ladies founded in France for the purpose of befriending and converting pagan women, and to whose zealous co-operation the Sisters owe much of their material success. "If you only knew the position of Mussulman women in this country ! They hardly count as human beings at all; they are born slaves, and from the highest to the lowest every woman is for sale. At'an age when they are still too young to understand what is being done to them, without an attempt at any individual choice on their part, they are given over, or as they crudely describe it themselves, they are sold, to the highest bidder. Four pounds is the average price of a wife in Northern Africa—about a third of what- is paid for a horse. The new master, a total stranger maybe, and in all probability a brutal, repulsive savage, appears to claim his property. Should the poor cliiid struggle and resist, the father drives her from his door, having no further use for her now thather price is paid ; her mother thrusts her away, not daring to protect her for fear of her own skin, and having besides no idea even of the possibility of any other solution, and her cries and screams are silenced only by the kicks and blows with which she is welcomed to her new abode. Nor is she more tenderly treated as a mother than as a maiden. I know houses where mother and child were killed together in order to avoid the difficulties arising from the presence of an inconvenient heir; in others, for no apparent reason whatever, they are brutally tortured, and often beaten to death. ' Quite recently,' writes F. Hautecceur, from one of the "further missions which are ill the interior of the country, ' a child was born to one of the slave women here. Regularly every day, in defiance of any consideration she "might have claimed for her child's sake, the wretched woman was cruelly beaten, so that she would spend the greater part of her time prowling among the bushes round the village for fear of the ill-treatment which she knew awaited her re-appearance. One day I heard the baby was dead, and I learnt a little later from the other natives that the poor little tiling's death was entirely caused by the brutality of its own father, who would beat his wife without any regard for the child which she carried on her back, according to the custom of the country !' " One day," continues the Cardinal, "an Arab came to beg of me. *My wife died las: night," he said, " I have 110 money to buy a grave-cloth. Give me 20 francs. God will reward you.' I gave him the money. A fortnight later he reappeared at my door and said, ' I want to marry again, and I have found a wife for sale, but she costs 40 francs. Will you L'ivc me the money for charity's sake T My suspicions were aroused, and on inquiry being made I discovered that he had already had three wives, all of whom he had beaten to death. The last one, whose winding sheet I had furnished, was a poor girl of seventeen, whom he kicked to death for no other reason than that she had dawdled over her household work. The neighbors were so accustomed to the shrieks and lamentations of the wretched victim that they paid 110 attention to her cries for help, and the next morning she was found where she had fallen, having died during the night. In addition to the ill-treatment she receives from her husband, as long as he chooses to recognise her, a woman is liable to divorce at any moment, and for 110 pretext of any kind, and her condition then becomes one of even exaggerated misery. But in Northern Africa we are, so to speak, only at the gate of the great pagan world with all its infamy. The Tuarega and the Kabyles, the descendants of the ancient Christian population who were driven out and forced into apostasy at the time of the great Mussulman invasion of Africa in the eighth century, may still lie said to retain some faint traces of their former Christianity, and form a comparative oasis in the midst of a desert of sin and misery. But among the blacks, further into the interior, the horrible tragedy assumes yet darker aspects. "I killed five of my wives during the night," remarked a Bukumbi chief in the most casual manner to one of his missionaries. Another negro sent his wife to collect firewood. She sank up to her arm-pits in a hog, and her screams attracting his attention, he throw her a stick with which to defend herself against hyenas, and left her till morning, when 110 trace of the wretched woman was to be seen. Speke, the wellknown English traveller, writes from the court of King Mtesa : 'No day has passed without my witnessing the execution of at least one, and sometimes two or three of the unhappy women who compose the King's harem. A cord wound round their wrists, they are dragged to the slaughter, their eyes streaming with tears, and venting their misery in heartrending cries of «i .1. ! hbakki ! hiti ii'i/avio ! "Oil, my lord, my King! Oh, my mother, my mother !" Not a hand is lifted to save them, although here and there a remark upon the beauty of some young victim passes current in a low voice among the crowd.' •Such is the fate of African women at best, and in their own homes. But when capture and exile .are added to their already unspeakable sufferings, when they are snatched from their native villages, bound together, weighed down beneath heavy burdens, driven for weeks and mouths across the desert to an unknown land, there to he sold into abject slavery among strange masters, one's pen literally refuses to describe the horrors of their situation. Young girls and children, too weak to drag themselves along, left by brutal captors to die by the roadside of hunger or to be devovred alive by wild beasts ; babies whose brains are dashed out against a stone before the eyes of their mothers, too incapable from starvation and fatigue to carry both the child and their load of ivory—such are the every-day incidents of the slave caravan 011 its way to the coast ; such are but a a few of the deeds of bloodshed that cry to heaven for vengeance, and to men and women whose lot is cast in happier places for sympathy and help, and for at least an effort to raise the poor creatures from the depths in which they are sunk.