Now we find that Christian teaching and monogamy have conduced to stricter morality among the people, and also to an increase in the birth-rate. In the old days there was in every village on the Lower Congo a house called _Mbongi_, or _Nzo-a-matoko_ (house for young men), where the lads and unmarried men slept. Girls from an early age had free ingress to these houses, and their mothers encouraged them to go. These houses have been cleared out of all the villages where there is any Christian influence at work, and even from heathen villages also, for they have been greatly influenced by the purer public opinion of recent years. Now that monogamy is practised by so many, the young men know that in due time they will be able to secure a wife, and they desire to receive her as pure as possible, hence the closing of these village bachelor houses even in the heathen towns. Christian parents also use their best endeavour to preserve their daughters in innocency. We have within a stone’s-throw of Wathen Station a Christian village where monogamy is the rule without exception. There are twenty-four married women living there with their husbands, and they have between them fifty-seven children now living (noted in 1908), and five have died, making in all sixty-two births. Some of these have only been married eighteen months or two years, and there is no doubt that as the years go by there will be many more children born to these twenty-four wives. Now the same number of women tied to one man would not have had a tenth of the children. Again, we have throughout our districts a large number of teachers, many of whom are married, and most of them have children—one, two, or three, according to the length of time they have been married. There is another noticeable thing, that in the Christian villages, i.e. the monogamous villages, there are plenty of children, while the same cannot be said of the heathen in polygamous villages. Some seem to think that polygamy spells large families and a fair state of morality; but on the Congo, and I speak of what I know, polygamy means a very low birth-rate and an absolute lack of morality and common decency. Polygamy is giving place to monogamy, and that means a higher morality, a purer and more self-respecting womanhood, and the introduction of a truer affection between the husband and the wife which will result in a better and more healthy home-life for the children, and will lead to the coming of a brighter day on dark, oppressed Africa. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IX NATIVE EDUCATION