From the time when pregnancy becomes apparent to the end of weaning no intercourse takes place.  It is believed that this would greatly endanger the infant, if not destroy it.  This means that for every child the woman, at all events, must remain continent for about three years.[213] Sir H.H.  Johnston, writing concerning the peoples of central Africa, remarks that the man also must remain chaste during these periods.  Thus, among the Atonga the wife leaves her husband at the sixth month of pregnancy, and does not resume relations with him until five or six months after the birth of the child.  If, in the interval, he has relations with any other woman, it is believed his wife will certainly die.  “The negro is very rarely vicious,” Johnston says, “after he has attained to the age of puberty.  He is only more or less uxorious.  The children are vicious, as they are among most races of mankind, the boys outrageously so.  As regards the little girls over nearly the whole of British Central Africa, chastity before puberty is an unknown condition, except perhaps among the A-nyanja.  Before a girl is become a woman it is a matter of absolute indifference what she does, and scarcely any girl remains a virgin after about 5 years of age."[214] Among the Bangala of the upper Congo a woman suckles her child for six to eighteen months and during all this period the husband has no intercourse with his wife, for that, it is believed, would kill the child.[215]

Among the Yoruba-speaking people of West Africa A.B.  Ellis mentions that suckling lasts for three years, during the whole of which period the wife must not cohabit with her husband.[216]

Although chastity before marriage appears to be, as a rule, little regarded in Africa, this is not always so.  In some parts of West Africa, a girl, at all events if of high birth, when found guilty of unchastity may be punished by the insertion into her vagina of bird pepper, a kind of capsicum, beaten into a mass; this produces intense pain and such acute inflammation that the canal may even be obliterated.[217]

Among the Dahomey women there is no coitus during pregnancy nor during suckling, which lasts for nearly three years.  The same is true among the Jekris and other tribes on the Niger, where it is believed that the milk would suffer if intercourse took place during lactation.[218]

In another part of Africa, among the Suaheli, even after marriage only incomplete coitus is at first allowed and there is no intercourse for a year after the child’s birth.[219]

Farther south, among the Ba Wenda of north Transvaal, says the Rev. R. Wessmann, although the young men are permitted to “play” with the young girls before marriage, no sexual intercourse is allowed.  If it is seen that a girl’s labia are apart when she sits down on a stone, she is scolded, or even punished, as guilty of having had intercourse.[220]