The breasts are always bare in their
own houses, but in the public roads are covered whenever a
European passes. The vulva is never exposed. They say that a
devil, imagined as a white and hairy being, might have
intercourse with them." (Private communication.)
In Borneo, "the _sirat_, called _chawal_ by the Malays, is a
strip of cloth a yard wide, worn round the loins and in between
the thighs, so as to cover the pudenda and perinaeum; it is
generally six yards or so in length, but the younger men of the
present generation use as much as twelve or fourteen yards
(sometimes even more), which they twist and coil with great
precision round and round their body, until the waist and stomach
are fully enveloped in its folds." (H. Ling Roth, "Low's Natives
of Borneo," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, 1892, p.
36.)
"In their own houses in the depths of the forest the Dwarfs are
said to neglect coverings for decency in the men as in the women,
but certainly when they emerge from the forest into the villages
of the agricultural Negroes, they are always observed to be
wearing some small piece of bark-cloth or skin, or a bunch of
leaves over the pudenda. Elsewhere in all the regions of Africa
visited by the writer, or described by other observers, a neglect
of decency in the male has only been recorded among the Efik
people of Old Calabar.
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