"Habitus": sexual behavior, sports & imprisonment

The natural history of a kiss

by E. Royston Pike

What's so strange about a kiss? Surely kissing is one of the most natural things in the world, so natural indeed that we might almost ask, what are lips for if not for kissing? But this is what we think, and a whole lot of people think very differently. To them kissing is not at all natural. It is not something that everybody does, or would like to do. On the contrary, it is a deplorable habit, unnatural, unhygienic, bordering on the nasty and even definitely repulsive.

When we come to look into the matter, we shall find that there is a geographical distribution of kissing; and if some enterprising ethnologist were to prepare a "map of kissing" it would show a surprisingly large amount of blank space. Most of the so-called primitive races of mankind, such as the New Zealanders (Maoris), the Australian aborigines, the Papuans, Tahitians, and other South Sea Islanders, and the Esquimaux of the frozen north, were ignorant of kissing until they were taught the technique by the white men who appeared among them as voyagers and explorers, traders and missionaries. The Chinese have been wont to consider kissing as vulgar and all too suggestive of cannibalism, and, as we shall see in a moment, they have not been alone in this. The Japanese have no word for it in their vocabulary, and the practice is tabooed as utterly immodest and revolting, except of course among those who have made a point of adopting Western ways. But it is Africa which "has the sad distinction of being the largest non-kissing area in the world."

Such at least was the conclusion of the young English traveller Winwood Reade, and (to meet the objections of those who speak out of present-day experience) it should be explained that he was writing of a time when the natives of Equatorial Africa were still savages. The words are taken from his book Savage Africa (1863), in which he describes his travels in the unknown "Gorilla country" of the Upper Gaboon in West Africa. Alone save for a few native attendants, he penetrated farther upcountry than a white man had ever been before, and for some time he remained in a kind of honourable captivity as the guest of Quenqueza, the "king" of the Rembo tribesfolk. It was then that he met Ananga. She was beautiful "full and finely moulded, hands and feet exquisitely small, complexion a deep warm colour, her eyes large and filled with a melancholy expression" no wonder that, in one of those unguarded moments "in which the heart rises to the lips, and makes them do all sorts of silly things," he made to kiss her. 

Not on first meeting, of course, but when for weeks they had been for hours each day in one another's company. He had gone to Africa to study the gorilla in his native haunts, but he found "this pretty savage" a much more delicious study. At first she was timid, very timid, for she had never seen a white man before, but she tried to keep this from him lest she should hurt his feelings, "and I could read it only in her fluttering eyes and in her poor little heart, which used to throb so loudly when we were alone. I found her as chaste, as coquettish, and as full of innocent mischief, as a girl of sixteen would have been in England. In a little while I found myself becoming fond of her." 

So the thought came to him of a "new and innocent pleasure." To bestow a kiss upon lips which tremble with love for the first time that (he reflected) was certainly an epoch in a man's existence; but just imagine what it must be to kiss one who has never conceived the possibility of such a thing, who has never dreamt that human lips could be applied to such a purpose! 

"And so, I kissed Ananga, the daughter of the king." 

And what happened? 

"She gave a shriek, and bounded from the house like a frightened fawn."

What Winwood Reade had forgotten, or perhaps had never realized, was that "this mode of salutation is utterly unknown in Western Africa. Ananga knew that the serpent moistens its victim with its lips before it begins its repast. All the tales of white cannibals which she had heard from infancy had returned to her. The poor child had thought that I was going to dine off her, and she had run for her life!"

Source: Reproduced by permission of The Hamlyn Publishing Group, Limited, from The World's Strangest Customs, by E. Royston Pike.

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