S._, 178) that in "the Soudan the power
of the women banded together for mutual protection is so great that
men are often put under ban and obliged to emigrate." Mungo Park
described the curious bugaboo(_mumbo-jumbo_)by means of which the
Mandingo negroes used to keep their rebellious women in subjection.
According to Bastian, associations for keeping women in subjection are
common among men along the whole African West Coast. The women, too,
have their associations, and at their meetings compare notes on the
meanness and cruelty of their husbands. Now it is easy to conceive
that among tribes where many of the men have been killed off in wars
the women, being in a great majority, may, for a time at least, turn
the tables on the men, assume their weapons and make them realize how
it feels to be the "inferior sex." For this reason Bastian sees no
occasion to share the modern disposition to regard all the Amazon
legends as myths.
WHERE WOMAN COMMANDS
If we now return from the West Coast to Eastern Africa we find on the
northern confines of Abyssinia a strange case of the subjection of
men, which Munzinger has described in his _Ostafrikanische Studien_
(275-338). The Beni Amer are a tribe of Mohammedan shepherds among
whom "the sexes seem to have exchanged roles, the women being more
masculine in their work.
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