Not only are the children killed, but the mother is immediately driven from home for she is no longer regarded as a chaste woman and rapidly becomes an outcast from Society, living upon the proceeds of prostitution. In some districts, however, this custom is less rigorous, and the mothers of twins are allowed to form isolated villages and to engage in trade. Some tribes, again, whilst driving them from the homes of their husbands, permit them to engage in agricultural pursuits upon the husband’s lands. The missionaries are doing much towards weaning the tribes from this murderous practice. One missionary society working amongst the Ibunos, a tribe of five thousand people, claims that through the conversion to Christianity of a large section of this tribe, the horrible practice of murdering the twins and making the women outcasts has ceased. It is of course difficult to control absolutely a statement of that kind, but it is only the Christian missionary who can hope to deal effectively and permanently with a subterranean evil like twin murder. [Illustration: “TWIN POTS” HOISTED ON FORKED STICKS EITHER SIDE OF PATHWAY, IN HONOUR OF NEWLY BORN TWINS, BANGALLA, CONGO.] An interesting custom which survives in the Upper Congo is that a man may never see or speak to his mother-in-law, and should he by accident turn a corner in the village compound and meet her face to face, he must at once send a propitiatory offering. If she should come into the house where he is sitting, he will promptly raise a mat and hold it between them, so that they may not see each other. On the whole the lot of the African woman is a hard one. She has her occasional pleasures it is true, but from childhood hers is a lifelong drudgery with, however, the one sure recompense, that in old age it is the joy and the privilege of the younger generation to support her. PART II CIVILIZATION AND THE AFRICAN I.—The White Man’s Burden. II.—Lightening the White Man’s Burden. III.—Governments and Commerce. IV.—The Liquor Traffic. V.—The Educated Native. VI.—Justice and the African. VII.—Race Prejudice. I THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN There is a type of African traveller who, hurrying to the coast and back again, returns with all the assurance of a long experienced person to pontifically declare that the unhealthiness of West Africa is all moonshine, that if a man dies it is due to his excesses rather than to the climate. There is, of course, a grain of truth in this assertion; cocktails, midnight oil and habits of a worse type, undermine the constitution in a manner which leave little resistance to the climatic diseases. Yet after all, tropical Africa is a death-trap.