Not only financial rights, but all other individual rights and responsibilities, were absorbed by the superior right and duty of the family. If an individual committed theft, murder, or any other crime, the offended party would, if convenient, lay hold of him for punishment. But only if it was convenient; to this plaintiff justice in the case was fully satisfied if any member of the offender's family could be caught or killed, or, if the offence was great, even any member of the offender's tribe. Families recognized this custom as proper, and submitted to it; for the family expected to stand by and assist and defend all its members, whether right or wrong. Each member relied upon the family for escape from personal punishment, or for help in their individual weakness or inability. In getting a wife, for instance, no young man had saved up enough to buy one. His wages or other gains, year after year, beyond what he had squandered on himself, had been squandered on members of his family. The family therefore all contributed to the purchase of the wife. Though he thenceforth owned her as his wife, the family had claims on her for various services and work which neither he nor she could refuse. If in the course of time he had accumulated other women as a polygamist, and, subsequently becoming a Christian, was required to put away all but one (according to missionary rule), it was difficult for him to do so, not because of any special affection for the women involved in the dismissal, nor for pity of any hardship that might come to the women themselves. True, they would be a pecuniary loss to him; but his Christianity, if sincere, could accept that. And the dismissal of the extra women does not, in Africa, impose on them special shame, nor any hardship for self-support, as in some other countries. The real trouble is that they are not his to dismiss without family consent. The family had a pecuniary claim on them, and the heathen members thereof are not willing to let them go free back to their people. If this man puts them away, he must give them to some man or men in the family pale who probably already are polygamists. The property must be kept in the family inheritance. Thus, though attempting to escape from polygamy himself, this man would be a consenting party in fastening it on others. His offence before the church therefore would still be much the same. For such concentrated interests as are represented in the family, there naturally would be fetiches to guard those interests separate from the individual fetich with its purely personal interests. Respect for the family fetich is cognate to the worship of the spirits of ancestors. Among the Barotse of South Africa, for this worship, "they have altars in their huts made of branches, on which they place human bones, but they have no images, pictures, or idols."