"When we explained to him that, by the laws of our country,
people could not marry until they were of a mature age, and
then could never have more than one wife, he said it was
perfectly incomprehensible to him how a whole nation could
submit voluntarily to such laws."

He himself had five wives and one of these queens

"remarked very judiciously that such laws as ours would not
suit the Beetjuans because there were so great a number of
women and the male population suffered such diminutions from
the wars."

Sir Samuel Baker (_A.N._, 147) says of the wife of the Chief of
Latooka:

"She asked many questions, how many wives I had? and was
astonished to hear that I was contented with one. This
amused her immensely, and she laughed heartily with her
daughter at the idea."

In Equatorial Africa, "if a man marries and his wife thinks that he
can afford another spouse, she pesters him to marry again, and calls
him a stingy fellow if he declines to do so" (Reade, 259). Livingstone
(_N.E.Z._, 284) says of the Makalolo women:

"On hearing that a man in England could marry but one wife,
several ladies exclaimed that they would not like to live in
such a country; that they could not imagine how English