So You Have A Wife - One In Each Village Up
The Whole Of Your Route.
I know myself one gentleman whose wives
stretch over 300 miles of country, with a good wife base in a Coast
town as well.
This system of judiciously conducted alliances, gives
the black trader a security nothing else can, because naturally he
marries into influential families at each village, and all his
wife's relations on the mother's side regard him as one of
themselves, and look after him and his interests. That security can
lie in women, especially so many women, the so-called civilised man
may ironically doubt, but the security is there, and there only, and
on a sound basis, for remember the position of a travelling trader's
wife in a village is a position that gives the lady prestige, the
discreet husband showing little favours to her family and friends,
if she asks for them when he is with her; and then she has not got
the bother of having a man always about the house, and liable to get
all sorts of silly notions into his head if she speaks to another
gentleman, and then go and impart these notions to her with a
cutlass, or a kassengo, as the more domestic husband, I am assured
by black ladies, is prone to.
You may now, I fear, be falling into the other adjacent error - from
the wonder why any black trader survives, namely, into the wonder
why any black trader gets killed; with all these safeguards, and
wives.
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