If all these statements were real facts--and we shall presently see
that they are not--they would prove no more than that the modern
Hottentots, like their neighbors, the Bushmen, are hen-pecked. Barrow
(I., 286) speaks of the "timid and pusillanimous mind which
characterizes the Hottentots," and elsewhere (144) he says that their
"impolitic custom of hording together in families, and of
not marrying out of their own kraals, has, no doubt, tended
to enervate this race of men, and reduced them to their
present degenerated condition, which is that of a languid,
listless, phlegmatic people, in whom the prolific powers of
nature seem to be almost exhausted."
It does not, therefore, surprise us to be told (by Thunberg) that "it
frequently happens that a woman marries two husbands." And these women
are anything but feminine and lovable. One of the champions of the
Hottentots, Theophilus Hahn, says (_Globus_, XII., 304) of the Namaqua
women that they love to torture their slaves: "When they cudgel a
slave one can easily read in their faces the infernal joy it gives
them to witness the tortures of their victims." He often saw women
belaboring the naked back of a slave with branches of the cruel
_acacia delinens_, and finally rub salt or saltpetre into the wounds.
Napier (I., 59) says of the Hottentots, that
"if the parents of a newly born child found him or her _de
trop_, the poor little wretch was either mercilessly buried
alive, or exposed in a thicket, there to be devoured by
beasts of prey."
While he had to take it for granted that there must be love-songs
among these cruel Hottentots, Jakobowski had no trouble in finding
songs of hate, of defiance, and revenge. Even these cannot be cited
without omitting objectionable words. Here is one, properly
expurgated:
"Take this man away from me that he may be beaten and
his mother weep over him and the worms eat him.... Let
this man be brought before your counsel and cudgelled
until not a shred of flesh remains on his ... that the
worms would care to eat; for the reason that he has
done me such a painful injury," etc.