It is important to observe that in savage societies the woman could not live independently; for her, celibacy is synonymous with desertion, and desertion would mean a speedy death. This is even the reason of the levirate, of which I shall have to speak later. As for all the negroes of Africa, whatever the degree of their civilisation or savagery, they have not even a suspicion of the monogamic _régime_. But, in Africa also, sensuality is only one of the secondary causes of the plurality of wives so strongly desired by all the blacks. Their polygamy is chiefly founded on economic motives. At the Gaboon,[344] says Du Chaillu, the supreme ambition of a man is to possess a great number of wives. Nothing is of more value to him, for they cultivate the ground, and their strict duty is to serve him and furnish him with food. The wife is always purchased from her father at a price agreed on, and often from her earliest infancy. In this case she is placed under the care of the husband’s chief wife. The husband-proprietor does not interfere at all with the agricultural labour executed by the wives; he only requires them to supply him with food. If he has bought them, it is merely as a profitable investment. He consequently treats them as slaves, or as domestic animals, and has no scruple in lashing them with a whip for nothing at all, and thus causing ineffaceable scars. “I have seen very few women,” says Du Chaillu, “who had not traces of this kind on their bodies.” The whip which serves for these conjugal corrections has a double thong, made of hippopotamus or sea-cow hide. “You should hear,” says the traveller, “the worthy husband cry out--‘Ah, wretch! do you think I have bought you for nothing?’”[345] The Gaboon tribes, of whom Du Chaillu speaks, are reckoned the least civilised of negroes; but even among the least gross of African races the conjugal _régime_ and the degree of subjection imposed on women are scarcely lessened.