Children commence trading very early. A five-year old boy will somehow get three or four strings of beads, and with them will buy a small chicken. After a few months of patient care, it is worth eight or ten strings, and his capital is doubled. He is soon able to buy a small pig, which follows him about like a dog, and sleeps in his house until, by and by, it fetches a good amount on the market. The proceeds of rat hunting, barter among the town boys, and further trade, have meanwhile increased his stock in trade. When he grows older, he accompanies a caravan to the coast, he gets a nice present to carry food for his uncle; en route his ideas of trade are enlarged. He commences to buy india-rubber, and brings back with him next time salt and cloth, a gun and some powder, a knife, and a plate. And so by degrees he is encouraged to fresh effort, until he has sufficient to pay for a wife or two. Continuing still in trade, he buys and sells, investing his property in slave retainers, and hiding some in reserve, in case of misfortune, or against his death. For it is the ambition of all to be buried in a large quantity of cloth. Then the report goes that so and so was buried, and that he was wound in 200 fathoms of cloth, and that 50 guns were buried with him, and so on. This sort of burial is a Congo Westminster Abbey.
The girls help their mothers in farming and housework until they arrive at a marriageable age. In some places they are betrothed very early; the intended husband paying a deposit, and by instalments completing the price demanded by the girl’s maternal relatives. The amount is often heavy—reckoned by Congo wealth—but varies much according to the position of the girl’s family or the suitor’s wealth. It is altogether a business matter. Should the wife die, her maternal relatives have to provide another wife without further payment; and as frequently they have spent the sum paid in the first instance, they are landed in difficulties. Palavers about women are a fruitful source of war.
Children are considered the property of the wife’s relatives, the father has little or no control over them. The right of inheritance is from uncle to