In Kordofan, among the Djebel-Taggale,[749] the great legal motive for repudiation in all the primitive legislations, sterility, justified proceedings that were absolutely savage. The ceremony was called the _nefir_ (drum or trumpet). A woman being apparently sterile, the husband, before repudiating her, called noisily together all his male relatives, who, after a feast, all had intimacy with the barren wife. If this heroic expedient did not result in pregnancy, the husband sold his wife by auction, agreeing to return to his obliging relatives the difference, if any, between the first price and the sum she would fetch in the auction. Extraordinary as this custom of _nefir_ may seem to us, it is, apart from the final sale, but the repetition with more shamelessness of analogous practices in India, and even in ancient Greece, in case of well-proved sterility in the wife. The Bedouins and the Touaregs in general have nothing comparable to the _nefir_ of the Djebel-Taggale, but among them the extreme facility and excessive frequency of repudiations renders marriage nearly illusory. According to Burckhardt, repudiation is so common with the former that a man sometimes has fifty wives in succession.[750] With the Touaregs of the Sahara the wives themselves can demand divorce, and we have seen that they thus force their husbands to bend to monogamy, in spite of the Koran and of their polygamic appetites.[751] It seems that in certain of their tribes the women make it a point of honour to be often repudiated. Only to have one husband is, in their eyes, a humiliating thing, and they are heard to say: “Thou art not worth anything; thou hast neither beauty nor merit; men have disdained thee, and would have none of thee.”[752] This is quite in accord with the _laisser aller_ habitual to the primitive Berbers in regard to marriage. In this respect, however, our Kabyles of Algeria contrast with the other ethnic groups of their race. Their conjugal customs are most rigid; neither liberty nor libertinage exist for the wife amongst them. Their customs in regard to repudiation and divorce are consequently very curious, and are worth studying in detail. In Kabyle, marriage is treated literally as a commercial affair of the most serious kind, especially for the women, who are owned as things by their husbands. The customs and the _Kanouns_, however, forbid the exchange of wives, and the husband whose wife has fled from the conjugal dwelling is forbidden to sell the fugitive except to a man of the tribe, and even then he is not allowed to have the price.[753] Still, the Kabyle husband has preserved the right of repudiation, and this right he alone enjoys, and without restriction.