POLYGAMY IN SOUTH AFRICA

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 6 September 1901, Page 3

POLYGAMY IN SOUTH AFRICA

The Bishop of Mahonaland has been writing to the Diamond Fields Advertiser on the evils of polygamy in the native social system. He holds that: “As long as wives are mere property, and can be bought at so much per head, and are mere burden bearers and menial breeders of daughters for the marriage market, you will never get' the native to believe he ought to work for work’s sake.” This plurality of wives is an old difficulty in the mission field, and everyone will remember the wicked story of the Fijian chief in the early days who, finding that he could not be baptised as a Christian whilst he had more than one wife, went away sorrowful, but came back joyful, having solved the difficulty by eating the superfluity. But the Bishop of Mashonaland’s proposed remedy is much more up-to-date. His idea is to impose a sort of progressive income tax, treating the extra wives as luxuries. Perhaps the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s experiments in sugar might come in useful to the African native who decided to reduce his luxuries to the Christian simplicity of one wife, for he will naturally want to retain the sweetest.