Masina Of Kuruman Had No Children
After The Birth Of Her Daughter Sina, And Had No Milk After Sina Was
Weaned,
an event which usually is deferred till the child is two or three years old.
Sina married when she
Was seventeen or eighteen, and had twins;
Masina, after at least fifteen years' interval since she had suckled a child,
took possession of one of them, applied it to her breast, and milk flowed,
so that she was able to nurse the child entirely. Masina was at this time
at least forty years of age. I have witnessed several other cases
analogous to this. A grandmother of forty, or even less, for they
become withered at an early age, when left at home with a young child,
applies it to her own shriveled breast, and milk soon follows.
In some cases, as that of Ma-bogosing, the chief wife of Mahure,
who was about thirty-five years of age, the child was not entirely dependent
on the grandmother's breast, as the mother suckled it too.
I had witnessed the production of milk so frequently by the simple
application of the lips of the child, that I was not therefore surprised
when told by the Portuguese in Eastern Africa of a native doctor who,
by applying a poultice of the pounded larvae of hornets
to the breast of a woman, aided by the attempts of the child,
could bring back the milk. Is it not possible that the story
in the "Cloud of Witnesses" of a man, during the time of persecution
in Scotland, putting his child to his own breast, and finding,
to the astonishment of the whole country, that milk followed the act,
may have been literally true? It was regarded and is quoted as a miracle;
but the feelings of the father toward the child of a murdered mother
must have been as nearly as possible analogous to the maternal feeling;
and, as anatomists declare the structure of both male and female breasts
to be identical, there is nothing physically impossible in the alleged result.
The illustrious Baron Humboldt quotes an instance of the male breast
yielding milk; and, though I am not conscious of being over-credulous,
the strange instances I have examined in the opposite sex make me believe
that there is no error in that philosopher's statement.
The Boers know from experience that adult captives may as well be left alone,
for escape is so easy in a wild country that no fugitive-slave-law
can come into operation; they therefore adopt the system of seizing only
the youngest children, in order that these may forget their parents and remain
in perpetual bondage. I have seen mere infants in their houses repeatedly.
This fact was formerly denied; and the only thing which was wanting
to make the previous denial of the practice of slavery and slave-hunting
by the Transvaal Boers no longer necessary was the declaration
of their independence.
In conversation with some of my friends here I learned that Maleke,
a chief of the Bakwains, who formerly lived on the hill Litubaruba,
had been killed by the bite of a mad dog.
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