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The Somali are Moslems, permitted to marry up to four wives at a time. Having five wives would be a crime as serious as bigamy in countries practicing monogamy. Actually, very few men have more than one or sometimes two wives, since limits are imposed, as in all countries, by economic limitations.
The nomadic stock-herder needs a large family to handle the family stock and one wife is seldom able to bring up a sufficiently large family to maturity. Polygamy is therefore a natural custom in a thriving community of nomadic stock-herders. Theoretically, the women obey their men folk in accordance with religious law (as in Christianity). In fact, the woman’s position is one of considerable power as long as she carries out the duties imposed on her by the nomadic life. If she successfully tends the folks, makes and erect the movable houses, fetches firewood and water, butchers, cooks, bears children and in her spare time weaves mats, makes ropes, and gathers wild barriers. She is the queen in her own household.
The man’s work in nomadic stock-herding is not always so obvious to the alien observer. The man is seen driving camels, and watering them occasionally. His work of prospecting new grazing and looking for lost is not so frequently noticed. Such work may entail several days walking, often without food or water, perhaps alone in the bush armed only with a club or spear, or even a knife or a stick sharpened at both ends (Garmagati), as protection against lions or enemies. Such feats of endurance and suffering of hunger and thirst are frequent in the life of the nomad stockman, and when he is seen sitting down in a “coffee shop” to drink a cup of tea and listen to the news in other people’s conversation, it must not be inferred that he spends his life in idle chatter, whilst his wife carries wood and water, and goes about her business in the village.
There is no doubt that the nomadic life depends on a very delicate state of balance between the stock and vegetation cover of the country, often resulting in famine in bad years. The Somali nomad must expect lean periods of famine and drought, and only a very few attain plenty for more than short periods in the best months of good rainfall years. It is therefore obvious that, living with the prospect of semi-arid at intervals, he works extremely hard to live at all. Whether the nomadic way of life can be improved by combined organization of the nomadic tribes of the area and improved co-operation with the agricultural and township communities, remains to be seen.
The Somali family seems to average about five persons; father, mother, and three children.
There is an extremely seems high percentage of deaths of children, particularly at very and during weaning, but it is believed that about three children on an average reach maturity, though families of 24 or more are not infrequently brought up by one father.
The value of male life, as assessed by tribal custom, is one hundred camels and that of a female, fifty camels. Customary law varies between tribes and groups of tribes, and though individual know the customs of some tribes, it is doubtful whether any know the detailed customs of the whole protectorate, as subject worthy of patient research and published codification.
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Abdinasir
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