That's what's so wonderfully (and accidentally) subversive about this book. Always playing to his demographic, Victor Fox wanted benighted savage black men for the "natives" but sexy white women for readers to ogle. If you look at this you realize it means that the (straight) village women would have husbands/lovers/etc., and those men would be black. An entire village of mixed-race relationships, something that was not socially condoned at the time the book appeared. In the real world it could have got them jailed, even killed. The movies would never have allowed such a thing for fear of offending certain audiences. I'm quite sure Ol' Vic never thought the matter through. Or maybe he did think it through and said, "What the hell, who cares as long as we get lotsa sexy white gals?"