THE KILLING OF TWINS—OTHER EXCUSES FOR
INFANTICIDE—RESTRICTING THE FAMILY—ECONOMIC REASONS
ACKNOWLEDGED—DYING OF DESPAIR.
It has seemed necessary to dwell thus at length on the conditions
among the Papuans and allied tribes as it appeared to me important
that the very beginnings of the family should be understood. The
general agreement of ethnologists as to the low standing of the Papuans
justifies, I believe, our assuming them to be as near the point of
culture of our neolithic (or paleolithic) ancestors as it is possible
to come.
From now on the course is upward. Strange as it may seem, the lowest
tribes are less “human,” both in the matter of offspring and in the
matter of sentiment of love for women, than some of the beasts and
birds,[36] but having touched that depth, the next step brings us in
contact with feelings that, in a way, begin to approximate our own.
In the stages above the Papuans there is some affection for the woman;
her position is nearer to that of wife and less that of captive. In
consequence there is a more kindly regard for the children that she
bears. Now begins the development of the parental _affection_. It is,
however, confined to the female at first; “to this fact, rather than to
doubt of paternity, should we attribute the very common habit in such
communities of reckoning ancestry in the female line only.”[37]
Man, no longer relying on his own cannibalistic brute force to do with
his progeny as he wishes, invents reasons for doing away with his
burdensome offspring.
We have already seen that the Papuans restricted their families to
two children, when it was possible. As late as the middle of the
seventeenth century, Dapper reported that in Benin no twins were found,
as it was regarded as a sign of dishonour for a woman to have twins.[38]
Among the Arunta tribes in Central Australia, twins are “immediately
killed as something which is unnatural.”[39] Among northern tribes they
“are usually destroyed as something uncanny.”[40] With the Kaffirs,
it was found that “when twins are born, one is usually neglected
and allowed to die.”[41] Of the western Victorian tribes we learn
that “twins are as common among them as among Europeans; but as food
is occasionally very scarce and a large family troublesome to move
about, it is lawful and customary to destroy the weaker twin child,
irrespective of sex.”[42]
In some parts of the Benin territory, according to a contemporary of
Dapper, the twin-bearing women are treated very badly.
According to Nyendael, they actually kill both mother and infants,
and sacrifice them to a certain devil, which they fondly imagine
harbours in a wood near the village. “But if,” says this authority,
“the man happens to be more than ordinarily tender, he generally buys
off his wife, by sacrificing a female slave in her place; but the
children are without possibility of redemption obliged to be made the
satisfactory offerings which this savage law requires. In the year
1699, a merchant’s wife, commonly called _ellaroe_ or _mof_, lay-in of
two children, and her husband redeemed her with a slave, but sacrificed
his children. After which I had frequent opportunities of seeing and
talking with the disconsolate mother, who never could see an infant
without a very melancholy reflection on the fate of her own, which
always extorted briny tears from her. The following year the like event
happened to a priest’s wife. She was delivered of two children, which,
with a slave, instead of his wife, he was obliged to kill and sacrifice
with his own hands, by reason of his sacerdotal function; and exactly
one year after, as though it had been a punishment inflicted from
heaven, the same woman was the second time delivered of two children,
but how the priest managed himself on this occasion I have not been
informed, but am apt to think that this poor woman was forced to atone
for her fertility by death. These dismal events have in process of
time made such impressions on men, that when the time of their wives’
delivery approaches, they send them to another country; which makes me
believe that for the future they will correct these inhumanities.”[43]
On the west coast of Africa “twins are killed among all the Niger Delta
tribes, and in districts out of English control the mother is killed
too,”[44] which shows the fanatic point to which a belief, or rather
an excuse, founded on the economic desire to keep down the size of a
family, may be carried.
All Kaffir children are neglected, according to Kidd,[45] but on the
birth of twins, “one frequently is killed by the father, for the
natives think that unless the father places a lump of earth in the
mouth of one of the babies, he will lose his strength.”
The next provision to keep down the “cost of living” is directed
against children with blemishes, a practice that was not easy to check
even among civilized peoples. Among the Australian aborigines “it is
usual to destroy those that are malformed.”[46] Among certain tribes
on the west coast, children whose mothers have died are thrown into the
bush, “as are all children who have not arrived in this world in the
way considered orthodox or who cut their teeth in an improper way.”
A child born with teeth is put to death, in some parts of Africa;
children born in stormy weather are destroyed in Kamchatka.[47] In
Madagascar “the superstition of lucky and unlucky days prevailed
throughout all the tribes, and the unfortunate infants that came into
the world on one of these unlucky days were immediately destroyed.”[48]
How obvious are the so-called reasons for killing the children may
be seen from the fact that according to another authority, the
proscribed or unlucky periods and days include all children born in
March and April, or in the last week of each month, or on Wednesdays
and Fridays.[49] Among the Antankarana tribes of the Amber Mountains
in Madagascar, a child that sneezes at or shortly after its birth is
exposed. Among the Basuto, when a child is born with its feet first, it
is killed,[50] whereas among the Bondei it is killed if it is born head
first.[51]
Among the Bondei, the excuses found for killing children are many. If
the child is born head first, it is a _kigego_ (unlucky child) and
is strangled; if it cries, it is a _kigego_ and is strangled. If the
father has not been in the _galo_ (kekutoigwa), or the mother has not
been in the _kiwanga_ (kekuviniwa) (initiated), the child is a _tumbwi_
(offence) and is strangled.”[52]
Mental processes the world over are much the same. The American
legislator raising the tariff to keep out competitors is not employing
a system entirely dissimilar from that of the barbarians who, finding
the first proscriptions fail to keep down the birthrate, widen the
scope of the proscription. And so the customary law grows to include
female children among the proscribed. Writing in the latter part of the
eighteenth century, Don Felix de Azara declared he had found that among
the Guanas in South America it was the custom for the women to bury
alive the majority of the female children, and that they never brought
up more than one boy and one girl.[53]
Rude attempts to regulate the number of children next appeared. It
has been suggested that this phase of primitive development argues
mentality sufficient to foresee destruction of the tribe that does not
provide for the future. Doubtless, in the mind of some savage Malthus,
the idea that the tribe must allow at least a given number of children
to live, was conceived with the warm glow of discovery.
Among the Tokelaus, or Line Islanders, “no married pair are allowed by
their law to have or bear more than four children; that is, only four
get the chance of life. The woman has a right to rear, or endeavour
to rear, one child. It rests with the husband to decide how many more
shall live, and this depends on how much land there is to divide.”[54]
On Radack Island a woman “is allowed to bring up only three children;
her fourth and every succeeding one she is obliged to bury alive
herself.”[55]
Two boys and one girl were all that the Australian mother brought
up, according to Curr, although the women bore an average of six
children.[56]
Economic ingenuity—and trepidity—could go no further than the practice
in the Solomon Islands, where “a small portion of the Ugi natives have
been born on the island, three-fourths of them having been brought as
youths to supply the place of offspring killed in infancy. When a man
needs support in his declining years, his props are not his own sons,
but youths obtained by purchases from the St. Christoval natives.”[57]
Another author says of the same islands that when “it becomes
necessary to buy other children from other tribes good care is taken
not to buy them too young.”[58]
At Vaitupu, of the Ellice Islands, “only two children are allowed to a
family, as they are afraid of a scarcity of food.”[59] It is on these
coral islands that Robert Louis Stevenson says the fear of famine
is greatest. He bears out the statement that only two children were
allowed to a marriage on Vaitupu Island, and adds that on Nukufetu
only one child was permitted; “on the latter the punishment was by
fine, and it is related that the fine was sometimes paid and the child
spared.”[60]
In the Dieyerie tribe, of Australia, “thirty per cent. are murdered by
their mothers at their birth, simply for the reasons—firstly, that many
of them, marrying very young, their first-born is considered immature
and not worth preserving; and secondly, because they do not wish to be
at the trouble of rearing them, especially if weakly. Indeed all sickly
and deformed children are made away with in fear of their becoming a
burthen to the tribe.”[61]
With the coming of ritual, man assumes to pacify his voracious deities
by the sacrifices of children, thereby propitiating the gods and
reducing the economic burden. The people of the Senjero offer up their
“first-born sons as sacrifices, because, once upon a time, when summer
and winter were jumbled together in bad season, and the fruits of the
field would not ripen, the sooth-sayers enjoined it.”[62]
After telling an almost unprintable tale, Dr. Brinton says of the
Australian blacks that “among several tribes it was an established
custom for a mother to kill and eat her first child, as it was believed
to strengthen her for later births.
“In the Luritcha tribe, young children are sometimes killed and eaten,
and it is not an infrequent custom, when a child is in weak health,
to kill a younger and healthy one and then to feed the weakling on
its flesh, the idea being that this will give to the weak child the
strength of the stronger one.”[63]
Frank admission that the children are in the way and are a burden, may
be regarded either as a sign that the tribe has progressed, or that
it has not yet reached the point of shame where it cloaks the evil
practice under the guise of religious sacrifices, hygienic or customary
regulations.
In this regard it is not possible to say that the father, as opposed
to the mother, is more inclined to do away with offspring, or is more
frequently entrusted with that grewsome duty, although I would venture
to say that an exhaustive research on this one aspect of the study
would probably show that the mother at first opposed and gradually
accepted, under the force of man’s will, the idea that the destruction
of her offspring was good; first for herself and her lord and master,
and secondly for the tribe.
Should investigation uphold such an hypothesis, it would be easily
understood how the frank acknowledgment represented an advanced stage,
when the woman, no longer satisfied with the various trivial excuses
offered for the destruction of her young, insisted on keeping them
alive, and was met with, not the many invented reasons that we have
seen, but the plain truth, that their continued existence endangered
the food supply.
“Urgent want and sterility of the niggardly earth” were the reasons
given by the natives of the island of Radnack for the law limiting the
number of children.[64] A second child is killed among the natives of
Central Australia “only when the mother is, or thinks she is, unable to
rear it”[65] and yet the same authors say that “an Australian native
never looks far enough ahead to consider what will be the effect on the
food supply in future years, if he allows a particular child to live;
what affects him is simply the question of how it will interfere with
the work of his wife so far as their own camp is concerned; while,
from the woman’s side, the question is, can she provide food enough for
the new-born infant and the next youngest?”[66]
The long suckling time, that these authors and other travellers have
noted, and that is here given as a reason, as _opposed_ to the economic
one, for the frequent killing of children, is due “chiefly to want of
soft food and animal milk”.[67]
Among the members of the Areoi society, a peculiar and somewhat
“secret” society[68] of the islands of the Pacific, “a man with three
or four children, and this was a rare occurrence, was said to be a
_taata taubuubuu_, a man with an unwieldy or cumbrous burden; and there
is reason to believe that, simply to avoid the trifling care and effort
necessary to provide for their offspring during the helpless period
of infancy and childhood, multitudes were consigned to an untimely
grave.” A Malthusian motive has sometimes been adduced, and the natives
have been heard to say, that if all the children born were allowed to
live, there would not be food enough produced in the islands to support
them.[69]
From many authorities comes direct evidence of a clash between the
man and the woman in the Polynesian Islands. “As the burden of the
plantation and other work devolves on the woman, she thinks that she
cannot attend to more than two or three children, and the rest must be
buried as soon as they are born. There are exceptions to this want of
maternal affection. At times the husband urges the thing contrary to
the wishes of the wife. If he thinks the infant will interfere with her
work, he forcibly takes the little innocent and buries it, and she,
poor woman, cries for months after her child.”[70]
Among the nomadic tribes it is frankly admitted that the children are
a hindrance. The Lenguas, of the Paraguayan Chaco, make journeys of
from ten to twenty miles, the women doing most of the hard work. The
consequence is that children are not desirable. So with the Abipones,
of whom Charlevoix says: “They seldom rear but one child of each sex,
murdering the rest as fast as they come into the world, till the eldest
are strong enough to walk alone. They think to justify this cruelty by
saying that, as they are almost constantly travelling from one place to
another, it is impossible for them to take care of more infants than
two at a time; one to be carried by the father, and the other by the
mother.”[71]
[Illustration: ZULU GIRL WITH BABY. THE PRACTICE OF EXPOSURE ENDED
AMONG THE ZULUS ONLY WITHIN THE PRESENT GENERATION]
[Illustration: A HINDU CHILD-MOTHER, WHOSE CARES WILL MAKE HER OLD AT
THIRTY]
The explanation offered by the Kurnai was that “it was often difficult
to carry about young children, particularly where there were several.
Their wandering life rendered this very difficult.”[72] In the
struggle with nature, man descends as well as ascends. The unfavourable
conditions into which nomadic tribes frequently come produce not
infrequently, a perverted type that is lower than the animals to which
our semi-human progenitors of the extremely remote past belonged. “The
instincts of the lower animals,” says Darwin, “are never so perverted
as to lead them to regularly destroy their own offspring or to be quite
devoid of jealousy.”[73]
In parts of New South Wales, such as Bathurst, Goulburn, and the
Lachlan, or Macquarie, “it was customary long ago for the first-born
of every lubra to be eaten by the tribe, as part of a religious
ceremony; and I recollect,” says J. M. Davis, “a black fellow who had,
in compliance with the custom, been thrown when an infant on the fire,
but was rescued and brought up by some stock-keepers who happened
accidentally to be passing at the time.”[74]
Ellis declares that among the Marquesans who inhabit a group of islands
to the south-east of Hawaii, children are sometimes, during “seasons
of extreme scarcity, killed and eaten by their parents to satisfy
hunger.”[75]
It has been said that the social, moral, and intellectual condition of
woman indicates, in an ascending scale, the degree of civilization of
every tribe and nation. It might with equal force be said that the
attitude of the tribe or nation toward its young is also a barometer
of progress. Behind the harsh measure and savage customs, underneath
the cruelty and at times ferocious indifference to pain, there is in
general among the lowest of the tribes an affection for their young,
once it has been decided that they are allowed to live.
In that too frequently suppressed affection, stunted as it is by
customary law and the unequal struggle with nature, there is the
beginning of humanitarian progress. Given reasonable security
that there will be a sufficiency of food supply and a surcease of
neighbourhood wars, this affection will pass from precept to concept
and protect even the unborn.[76]
“No people in the world are so fond of, or so long-suffering with,
children,” Stevenson says of the same South Sea Islanders among whom
he has just said infanticide is common.[77] But even after it has
been decided to bring up the child, and it has become an object of
great affection, it is still in danger should famine conditions seem
imminent,[78] or should the cupidity and avarice of the parents be
aroused, with the consequence that children are readily sold into
slavery.[79]
Nature’s methods are stern, and her progress slow; despite perplexing
examples of reactionary forces, the primitive move is steadily toward
an understanding of one’s duties as a human being—or he dies. For the
civilized man, pain is nature’s warning that he has violated the rules
of his own body, and for the primitive man, decay and despair are the
warnings that the path of progress lies the other way.
Looking over this vast field, including not only blacks, Mongols, and
Indians, but even the Europeans, as we shall come to see later, we
gather that those that have struggled upward have been only those who
have taken nature’s lesson of lessons to themselves. Horrible as is the
story of these stationary and degenerate peoples that we get, what must
be the whole story, with its full picture of anguish?