the house will be pulled down, and
its site will revert to the village, and she will probably return to
her own people in her own village, if she has not done so previously.

Subject to these three allowances, I may dismiss the widow entirely
in dealing with the law of inheritance. I may also dismiss the
man's female children by saying that, if there be male children, the
females do not share at all in the inheritance, and even if there be
no male children the female children will only perhaps be allowed,
apparently rather as a matter of grace than of right, to share in
his movable effects; and that, subject to this, everything goes to
the man's male relatives. I may also eliminate the man's pigs, as
apparently any pigs he has, other than that retained for his widow,
are killed at his funeral.

On the death of an owner everything he possesses goes, except as above
mentioned, to his sons. They divide the movable things between them,
but the bush and garden land pass to them jointly, and there is no
process by which either of these can be divided and portioned among
them. The male children of a deceased son, and the male children of
any deceased male child of that deceased son (and so on for subsequent
generations), inherit between them in lieu of that son. There does not
appear, however, to be any idea in the Mafulu mind of each son of the
deceased owner being entitled to a specific equal fractional share,
or of the descendants of a deceased son of that owner being between
them only entitled to one share, _per stirpes_. They apparently do
not get beyond the general idea that these people, whoever they may
be and to whatever generations they may belong, become the owners of
the property.

They take possession of and cultivate the existing gardens as joint
property. Any one of them will be allowed to clear some of their
portion of bush, and fence it, and plant it as a garden, and it will
then become the sole property of that one man, and if he dies it
will pass as his own property to his own heirs; though, as before
stated, if he abandons it, and lets it be swallowed up by the bush,
it will cease to be his own garden, and will again be included in the
family's joint portion of bush land, and on his death his heirs will
only come into the joint bush ownership.

In this way the ownership of a garden must often be in several persons,
with no well-defined rights _inter se_, and the general ownership of
bush land which has