se soon after one
wife becomes with child _she leaves him for two or three
years_ until her baby is weaned." Apart from these facts
Johnston gives us no hint as to what he understands by
affection except what the following sentence allows us to
infer (429):

"The attachment between these dogs and their African
masters is deep and fully reciprocated. They are
_considered very dainty eating_ by the natives, and are
indeed such a luxury that by an unwritten law only _the
superior sex_--the men--are allowed to partake of
roasted dog."

The amusing italics are mine.

If Johnston really found traces of poetic, ennobling love in this
region, surely so startling a novelty in West Africa would have called
for a full "bill of particulars," which would have been of infinitely
greater scientific value than the details he gives regarding
unchastity, infidelity, commercialism, separation from wives and
contempt for women, which are so common throughout the continent as to
call for no special notice. Evidently his ideas regarding "poetic
love" were as hazy as those of some other writers quoted in this
chapter, and we have once more been led on by the mirage of a "false
fact."[146]

In 1891 the Swedish explorer Westermarck published a book describing
his adventures among the cannibal tribes of the Upper Congo. I have
not seen the book, but the Rev. James Johnston, in summing up its
contents, says (193):

"A man can sell wife and children according to his own
depraved pleasure. Women are the slave drudges, the men
spending their hours in eating, drinking, and sleeping.
Cannibalism in its worst features prevails. Young women
are prized as special delicacies, particularly girls'
ears prepared in palm oil, and, in order to make the
flesh more palatable, the luckless victims are kept in
water up to their necks for three or four days before
they are slaughtered and served as food."

BLACK LOVE IN KAMERUN

From the banks of the Congo to Kamerun is not a very far cry as
distances go in Africa. Kamerun is under the German flag, and a German
writer, Hugo Zoeller, has described life in that colony with the eyes
of a shrewd observer. What he says about the negro's capacity for love
shows deep psychological insight (III., 68-70):

"Europeans residing in Africa who have married a negro
woman declare unanimously that there is