It is
one of the selfish ingredients of love, and is therefore evidence of
self-love, not of other-love. As for the lover's poem, what is it but
the grossest sensualism, the usual African apotheosis of fat? Imagine
an American lover saying to a girl, "You are beautiful for you are
plump, but you would be more beautiful still if you ate more pork and
beans"--would she regard this as evidence of refined love, or would
she turn her back and never speak to him again? Anthropologists are
sometimes strangely naive. We have just seen what kind of
"attachments" are formed by African youths and girls while tending
cattle; Burton adds to the evidence _(F.F_., 120) by telling us that
among the Somali "the bride, as usual in the East, is rarely
consulted, but frequent _tete-a-tetes_ at the well and in the bush
when tending cattle effectually obviate this inconvenience." "At the
wells," says Donaldson Smith (15), "you will see both sexes bathing
together, with little regard for decency." They are indeed lower than
brutes in their impulses, for the only way parents can save their
infant girls from being maltreated is by the practice of infibulation,
to which, as Paulitschke himself tells us, the girls are subjected at
the early age of four, or even three; yet, even this, he likewise
informs us, is not always effectual.
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