Note 78.1 — PSYCHE’S TASK

The custom of avoiding mother-in-law and own daughter among the Akamba of British East Africa. Among the Akamba, a Bantu tribe of British East Africa, “if a man meets his mother-in-law in the road they both hide their faces and pass by in the bush on opposite sides of the path. If a man did not observe this custom and at any time wanted to marry another wife, it would prove a serious stigma, and parents would have nothing to do with him. Moreover, if a wife heard that her husband had stopped and spoken to her mother in the road, she would leave him. If a man has business he wishes to discuss with his mother-in-law, he goes to her hut at night, and she will talk to him from behind the partition in the hut.… If a girl of the age of puberty meets her father in the road, she hides as he passes, nor can she ever go and sit near him in the village until the day comes when he tells her that it has been arranged for her to marry a certain man. After marriage she does not avoid her father in any way.”78.1 Thus among the Akamba a man must avoid his own marriageable, but unmarried, daughter exactly as he avoids his wife’s mother; but the custom of avoidance ceases when his daughter marries. This extension of the rule to a man’s own daughter, and its limitation to the time during which the girl is nubile but single, are most significant, and point plainly to a fear of improper relations between father and daughter. To that point we shall return shortly.