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Updated: May 4, 2025
It is indeed a great pleasure to me finding that to-day the Sakais no longer distrust civilization and some of them, especially the younger ones, do not refuse or shrink from work as they once did and neither do they oppose such an obstinate resistance to those innovations which I too had a part in introducing among them.
As I say, among the Sakais the one sex is not the slave of the other. They live in perfect harmony. The male is considered the head of the family, although there is nothing to be administered or directed and the female shows herself sufficiently deferential towards him, but the custom does not exist among them that one should passively submit to a will with which his, or her own does not agree.
The Sakais catch the meaning and make use of the terms the same as they often learn a word in Italian or Genoese that I sometimes utter when speaking to myself. My little servant boy who was present looked at me frightened, then began to cry and darted away as if mad, although he had nothing to do with my bad temper. Well, what do you think?
Steel being a very scarce article amongst my good friends they have learnt to make great economy with it using it solely for the blades of the knives and for other purposes. They mix the two metals with surprising skill. This is the boldest and most intelligent step that the Sakais have made as yet in the field of industry.
All ornaments have to be put aside; ear-rings, bracelets, necklaces, nasal sticks, flowers, tattooing etc, for a period of time determined by the Elder but generally for not less than six months. The Sakais observe all these prescriptions with the greatest strictness and are scandalized should any of them be infringed before the appointed time.
In our parts the question of divorced people's children serves as a weighty argument to the opposers of divorce and gives to its partisans a difficult problem to study. To the Sakais the solution is easy enough.
The Sakais, stimulated by my presents, built me a solid and pretty comfortable cabin near a rivulet and not far from them, and I installed myself there forthwith. The first day of our acquaintance it happened that I accidentally called them Sakais. They changed face and some of them protested angrily: "You are not good, because you insult us and call us bad names!".
The victim, under the influence of his injurer's glance and presence, would acknowledge whatever misdeed, debt, and even crime was attributed to him, responding to the demand if what his accuser said was true, with the invariable and laconic words: "What he says is true". I may here cite a case in which I took an active part when I was the Superintendent of Sakais under the British Government.
Intellectual development amongst the Sakais of the hills is very limited and as a consequence requires little or no study but much more is to be met with amongst those of the plain for two reasons which I have already explained: one their traffic and consequent intercourse with more civilized races; and the other the mixture of blood from their parents' concubinage with strangers, thus destroying the purity of their own.
I therefore accepted it with great pleasure, the more so as I felt flattered that the British Government should repose so much confidence in an Italian. My first official act was to make enquiries about a serious quarrel that had taken place amongst the Sakais living in the plain, and that had resulted in several deaths.
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