With these Bakele the Fan can intermarry, but
there is not much advantage in so doing, as the price is equally
high, but still marry he must.
A young Fan man has to fend for himself, and has a scratchy kind of
life of it, aided only by his mother until - if he be an enterprising
youth - he is able to steal a runaway wife from a neighbouring
village, or if he is a quiet and steady young man, until he has
amassed sufficient money to buy a wife. This he does by collecting
ebony and rubber and selling it to the men who have been allotted
goods by the chief of the village, from the consignment brought up
by the black trader. He supports himself meanwhile by, if the
situation of his village permits, fishing and selling the fish, and
hunting and killing game in the forest. He keeps steadily at it in
his way, reserving his roysterings until he is settled in life. A
truly careful young man does not go and buy a baby girl cheap, as
soon as he has got a little money together; but works and saves on
until he has got enough to buy a good, tough widow lady, who,
although personally unattractive, is deeply versed in the lore of
trade, and who knows exactly how much rubbish you can incorporate in
a ball of india rubber, without the white trader, or the black bush
factory trader, instantly detecting it. When the Fan young man has
married his wife, in a legitimate way on the cash system, he takes
her round to his relations, and shows her off; and they make little
presents to help the pair set up housekeeping. But the young man
cannot yet settle down, for his wife will not allow him to. She is
not going to slave herself to death doing all the work of the house,
etc., and so he goes on collecting, and she preparing, trade stuff,
and he grows rich enough to buy other wives - some of them young
children, others widows, no longer necessarily old. But it is not
until he is well on in life that he gets sufficient wives, six or
seven. For it takes a good time to get enough rubber to buy a lady,
and he does not get a grip on the ivory trade until he has got a
certain position in the village, and plantations of his own which
the elephants can be discovered raiding, in which case a percentage
of the ivory taken from the herd is allotted to him. Now and again
he may come across a dead elephant, but that is of the nature of a
windfall; and on rubber and ebony he has to depend during his early
days. These he changes with the rich men of his village for a very
peculiar and interesting form of coinage - bikei - little iron
imitation axe-heads which are tied up in bundles called ntet, ten
going to one bundle, for with bikei must the price of a wife be
paid.
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