those persons can be adopted into the tribe who are adopted into some family with artificial kinship specified. The fabric of Indian society is a complex tissue of kinship. The warp is made of streams of kinship blood, and the woof of marriage ties.

With most tribes military and civil affairs are differentiated. The functions of civil government are in general differentiated only to this extent, that executive functions are performed by chiefs and sachems, but these chiefs and sachems are also members of the council. The council is legislature and court. Perhaps it were better to say that the council is the court whose decisions are law, and that the legislative body properly has not been developed.

In general, crimes are well defined. Procedure is formal, and forms are held as of such importance that error therein is prima facie evidence that the subject-matter formulated was false.

When one gens charges crime against a member of another, it can of its own motion proceed only to retaliation. To prevent retaliation, the gens of the offender must take the necessary steps to disprove the crime, or to compound or punish it. The charge once made is held as just and true until it has been disproved, and in trial the cause of the defendant is first stated. . .

In the tribal governments there are many institutions, customs, and traditions which give evidence of a former condition in which society was based not upon kinship, but upon marriage.

From a survey of the facts it seems highly probable that kinship society, as it exists among the tribes of North America, has developed from connubial society, which is discovered elsewhere on the globe. In fact, there are a few tribes that seem scarcely to have passed that indefinite boundary between the two social states. Philologic research leads to the same conclusion.

Nowhere in North America have a people been discovered who have passed beyond tribal society to national society based on property, i.e., that form of society which is characteristic of civilization. Some peoples may not have reached kinship society; none have passed it.

Nations with civilized institutions, art with palaces, monotheism as the worship of the Great Spirit, all vanish from the priscan condition of North America in the light of anthropologic research. Tribes with the social institutions of kinship, art with its highest architectural development exhibited in the structure of communal dwellings, and polytheism in the worship of mythic animals and nature-gods remain.

CHAPTER XI

KAFIR LAWS AND CUSTOMS 1

SECTION 1

THE AMAXOSA TRIBES

1. THE GOVERNMENT AND ITS PRACTICAL OPERATION

It is common to talk of the despotism of Kafir chiefs. If by the use of this term it is intended to be implied that the will of the chief is the sole law of the nation, it is incorrect. The government amongst the tribes on this side of the Bashee is not a despotism. Such a term may be applicable to the rule of Mosheshe, the Basutu chief, who boasted that when he spoke the mountains moved; or to the tyranny of Tshaka, the head of the Amazulu, who would order a number of his people unarmed to catch a hippopotamus alive, and be obeyed, too, so far at least as the attempt was concerned, although it involved the certain and wanton sacrifice of many lives. The government of the Amaxosa and Abatembu tribes is a sort of mixture of Patriarchism and Feu dalism. Age gives great weight and influence to the will of a chief, and most chiefs of rank can generally find means to accomplish their wishes; but if these wishes involve the death or spoliation of any of their subjects, they are usually obliged to resort to some form of law to give colour to their procedure. In the case of a Kafir chief, the principal checks to the despotic inclinations which the possession of power always induces are, first, the division of the tribes, and secondly, the existence of a very influential council.

The operation of succession to the chieftainship, which was explained in the "Christian Watchman" for September, has led to the formation of various tribes nearly equal in power to each

1

[Reprinted from "A Compendium of Kafir Laws and Customs (including Genealogical Tables of Kafir Chiefs and various Tribal Census Returns)"; compiled by direction of Colonel MACLEAN, C.B., Chief Commissioner in British Kaffraria (Grahamstown, 1906). The present account was written by Rev. H. H. DUGMORE.]

other. It is very common for persons who have exposed themselves to the ire of their own chiefs, to take refuge amongst some tribe adjoining; and on doing so, they become so far safe as to be within the protection of a custom which forbids their arbitrary seizure by their own chief, and places them on the same footing (until investigation take place) as the subjects of the chief amongst whose people they have taken refuge. Any attempt to interfere with them by violence, when once they are within the territory of another tribe, would be resented by an instant rising of the clans nearest them in their defence, and that without any enquiry as to the merits of the case. The desire of each chief to increase the number of his retainers, often induces him to throw obstacles in the way of any investigation that would be likely to lead to the surrender of any man who had placed himself under his authority and protection from another tribe. It is therefore very common for all farther prosecution of a chief's quarrel with his delinquent subject to be abandoned, on the culprit once gaining the "city of refuge" which another tribe affords him. The practical limitation of the power of the chiefs, arising from the above circumstances, is easily perceived.

The existence of a council, in which all matters of importance are discussed at length, is another check upon the power of the chiefs. This council, the members of which are called Amapakati (literally "Middle ones"), is composed of commoners, who, by their courage in war, or their skill in debate on public questions, or in unravelling intricate law suits, have acquired great popular influence, and are thus qualified to sustain or control the power of the chiefs. They generally reside in different parts of the country, and have a sort of civil jurisdiction over their respective neighbourhoods. A few of them are mostly to be found at the chief's residence, but on the occurrence of any matter of public importance, the arrival of a message of consequence from the chief of another tribe, or the proposition of any particular measure on the part of their own chief, they are all summoned to the umzi wakwomkulu, and no decision is come to till the matter has been thoroughly discussed in all its bearings. As every one of these Amapakati has his own partizans and favourites in the tribe, so the shield of the patron is often interposed between his client and his chief.

The operation of the influence of the Amapakati in modifying the power of the chiefs is remarkable, as it has its periodical revolutions, its waxings and wanings. Some idea of the nature of

these alterations may be acquired by tracing the operation of a custom, which exists amongst the principal chiefs, of making one of the youngest of their wives the "great wife." The ground of this custom will be best understood from a view of the usual career of a chief in relation to his matrimonial alliances.

The first wife of a Kafir chief, "the wife of his youth," is not unfrequently taken from amongst the families of his own councillors. He is as yet "unknown to fame;" his wealth is not so considerable as it is to be. After awhile his alliance becomes more worthy the attention of those of other tribes, whose daughters demand a higher dowry than was required by the humbler parents of his first wife. Another and another are sent to him; for it must be borne in mind that a Kafir chief does not choose his own wives. He is surprised from time to time by the arrival of a bridal party, bringing with them as his offered bride some chief's daughter whom he has never seen before. The danger of refusing her is according to the rank and power of the family to which she belongs, for to refuse such an alliance is to offer a public insult to the whole tribe. The usual order of things, then, is, that as a chief grows older and richer, wives of higher rank are sent to him, and the reasons which operate against their refusal operate also against their having an inferior rank allotted to them in the successional distribution. The mother of him who is to be the "great son" may thus be the last wife the chief has taken, which is in fact sometimes the case.

The result of this process is, that a chief, dying in his old age, leaves a minor, often a mere child, to succeed him. What then is the position of the young chief? He finds himself surrounded by a number of greyheaded veteran associates of his father, who are strong in the possession of long continued popular influence, and insolent from their consciousness of possessing it. If he will yield himself to their sway, his course is smoothened for him; if he manifests much self-will, they do not scruple to remind him that they were the councillors and companions of his father before he was born; that his mother owed her appointment, and consequently her son his rank, to their advice and influence, and they will sometimes hint that they can unmake as well as make chiefs; and threaten him with the elevation of a brother as a rival.

The rule of a young chief is thus in reality the rule of the old councillors of the tribe. The relative position of the two parties, however, gradually changes. While the young chief is advancing towards the vigour and resolution of manhood, the course of nature

is carrying the most venerable of his haughty mentors to the grave, and thus removing some of the most formidable obstacles to his own exercise of power. On the other hand, his own party, formed of the young and active spirits of the tribe, is growing in strength. By degrees he ventures on bolder measures. One after another of the old Amapakati falls a victim to an accusation of witchcraft, the Kafir state engine for the removal of the obnoxious, and by the time the young chief has grown old in his turn, he has surrounded himself with another set of councillors, who, enriched by the spoils of their predecessors, and inheritors of their influence, are prepared to do for the successor of their master what their own forerunners and victims did for himself, to be in their turn the victims of a system perpetuated from generation to generation.

Such in one point of view is the practical working of the Kafir system of government, as regards the tribes individually considered. That under such a system there should be more than enough of tyranny, might be inferred from the natural rapacity of power. But it is not the tyranny of one, whose will no other dares to thwart. It is divided amongst many, and is often more or less neutralized by the rival popular interests of the tyrannizers themselves.

A view of the constitutional sources of a Kafir chief's revenue, and its expenditure, will throw a little more light on this subject. As cattle constitute the sole wealth of the people, so they are their only medium of such transactions as involve exchange, payment, or reward. The retainers of a chief serve him for cattle; nor is it expected that he could maintain his influence, or indeed secure any number of followers, if unable to provide them with what at once constitutes their money, food, and clothing. He requires, then, a constant fund from which to satisfy his dependents; and the amount of the fund required may be judged of from the character of the demand made upon him. His retinue, court, or whatever it is to be called, consists of men from all parts of the tribe, the young, the clever, and the brave, who come to busa (do court service), for a time, that they may obtain cattle to furnish them with the means of procuring wives, arms, or other objects of desire. On obtaining these they return to their homes and give place to others. Thus the immediate retinue of the chief is continually changing, and constitutes a permanent drain upon his resources. To meet this he has

1. The inherited cattle of his father. Not that he inherits