Comparing the habits of the Pedi and of the Thonga we meet with this strange fact: Amongst the Thonga the unmarried girl is quite free and the married woman is tabu. Amongst the Pedi it is just the reverse: girls are absolutely prohibited from having any sexual relation before their marriage and, on the contrary, after marriage, a woman who has had children can have intercourse with other men than her husband. . . . As far as I could make it out, the explanation is this: The Pedi fathers lobola girls for their sons much earlier than the Thonga. They push the provision so far that a man will buy "a womb," viz., a girl before her birth for his baby son! This girl not yet born will be given a name, the name of her future son; and if everything happens in conformity with these provisions, that name will be definitely adopted for the girl on the day she is married! If however the child which is born happens to be a boy, the money will be given back. . . . In that way, girls are not free: they must keep absolutely pure; in some clans . . . they must even undergo a physical examination on the day of their marriage at the hands of the old female relatives of the husband to prove their virginity. If afterwards, being married women, they are allowed to lead a very bad life . . . it is probably due to the dreadful fear of the lochia to which we have already alluded.²

The lochia belief is that a woman is rendered very dangerous by childbirth, that this danger persists for an indefinite period and to such a degree that a vengeful woman may cause the death of a man by seducing him to cohabitation. Men who can afford it frequently never cohabit with a wife after she has borne a child, permitting her, however, to be patronized by the lower classes. Junod’s inference may, in fact, be justified in this case, but we know that divergent practices arise in this situation when the conditions mentioned do not exist.

²Junod, n/an/an/an/an/an/a , 1: 98–99 (The Macmillan Company. By permission).