The Life of a South African Tribe

His Excettency THe Richt Honourasie JAMEs Bryce, O. M. 

His Brirannic Majesty's AMBASSADOR AND PLENIPOTENTIARY, 

WASHINGTON. 
Dear Sir, 

Fifteen years ago I had the great pleasure of receiving your visit in 
Lourengo Marques where I was staying as the head of the Swiss 
Romande Mission. You had been travelling all through South Africa 
and, though momentous political problems were before your mind 
at that time, bearing on the relations between the white races of that 
Sub-Continent, you had devoted considerable attention to the native 
tribes all over the land and tried to understand what they were and 
what their future would be. But you had quickly noticed how scant 
is our knowledge about them and you were trying to stimulate men 
on the spot to undertake a scientific study of their primitive life. In 
the course of our conversation, I was struck by the following remark 
which you made to me: ‘‘ How thankful would we be, we, men of 
the XIXth century, if a Roman had taken the trouble to fully inves- 
tigate the habits of our Celtic forefathers! This work has not been 
done and we shall always remain ignorant of things which would have 
interested us so much ! ” 

This observation was quite a revelation to me. It is possible then, 
that these natives for whom we went to Africa would themselves 
benefit also by sucha study and that, in the course of time, they would 
be grateful to know what they were when they were still leading their 
savage life... This argument added to so many others had never occu- 
red to me. Up to that date I had already collected some Ronga tales 
and studied some curious customs of the tribe. But the science 

vA 

—_— 

which I was cultivating as a favourite pastime was Entomology. 
Delagoa Bay is a splendid place for beetles and butterflies. 1 had come 
across a wonderful forest near Morakwen where I had been fortunate 
enough to discover a new kind of Papilio! Since that time Ethno- 
graphy more or less supplanted Entomology. I started on that sys- 
tematic and thorough investigation which you commended to me and 
I very soon found out that, after all, Man is infinitely more interesting 
than the insect! The material which I gathered amongst the Ba-Ronga 
of Delagoa Bay was first published in my French book ‘* Les Ba-Ronga” 
with the kind help of the Geographical Society of Neuchatel in 1898. 
Since then | pursued my study amongst the Northern Clans of the 
‘Thonga of the Transvaal and, if [am able to undertake this publication 
in which I hope to give a more complete description of the life of 
a South African tribe. I feel that Lowe to you the generating idea, 
the decisive impetus 

That is the reason why [am glad to dedicate to you the present 
work, 

This was the proper time to undertake it, as the following recent and 
sad experience will plainly show. Coming home in 1909, I met, on 
board the splendid U. C. Steamer on which we were travelling, three 
well known native gentlemen who were, I think, going to England for 
political reasons. I had great pleasure in speaking with them, One 
of them was the editor of a native paper; another was a Christian 
chief, the third one was at the head of a Training Institution which he 
founded himself. One dav | made up my mind to gather some ethno- 
graphical facts from them. They were Zulus and I wanted to know 
for purposes of comparison what were the precise ideas of their tribe 
about witchcraft. Never in my scientific carreer did I meet with more 
complete failure! The editor had been born in a Wesleyan family 
and never stayed amongst heathen. The chief knew much more on 
the subject but, for some obscure reason, he was not inclined to dis- 
close his knowledge ; the Principal of the Institution was a very cle- 
ver man ; he first declared that witchcraft was met with amongst white 
people just the same as amongst South African natives ; that it was 
only a form of mesmerism and, as he was always anxious to get more 
knowledge himself, he proceeded to question me about mesmerism ; 
the whole interview ended therefore in a lesson which I was obliged 

to give to him on that mysterious subject and I did not learn anything 
new from my three friends... I left them in quite a melancholy 
mood, thinking how different it was with my Thonga informants, 
Mboza, Tobane and even Elias ! 

In fact, the circumstances in which I found myself amongst the 
Thonga, have been as favourable as they can be for such an investiga- 
tion. The great bulk of the tribe is still absolutely savage. We have 
mastered its language and can understand all they tell us. On the other 
hand we have founded a Church amongst them and have intimate 
relations with some of them. The adults in our congregations have 
been heathen themselves and have practised the rites on which I ques- 
tioned them. They can describe them better than raw heathens as 
they now stand at a certain distance from their old life and can judge 
of it more independently. They possess what our French _ historians 
call le recul nécessaire. Enjoying their full confidence, having learned 
by long practise how to put questions in order to get unpartial an- 
swers, I think that their testimony can be considered as scientifically 
reliable. Of course errors are always possible. But science proceeds 
by successive approximations. I dare say the present monograph of 
the Thonga tribe compared with my book ‘‘ Les Ba-Ronga”’ will be 
a nearer approach to the truth and it is quite possible that later on a 
more perfect account will be given by somebody who will have had 
more time to spare and more insight than myself into this delicate 
work, 

When a historian publishes a monograph, he first gives the list of 
his sources of information. He vindicates the truth of his results by 
showing that they are based on trustworthy documents. My docu- 
ments are not books. They are living witnesses and I beg to introduce 
some of them to my readers as they have been my faithful collabora- 
tors and I owe to them most of my knowledge. 

~The first man whom I questioned systematically was a Ronga of 
Nondwane (North of Lourengo Marques) named Spoon. He had 
been my butterfly catcher and I had often admired his skill and his 
powers of observation. He became my instructor in the art of bone 
throwing. He had been more or less a diviner, using his dice when 
going to hunt ; but after the war of the natives against the Portuguese 
(1894-1895) he lost confidence in his divinatory bones as well as in 

his gods and became a Chris- 
tian. He always had and still 
possesses a great deal of 
imagination. I was often 
obliged to control his expla- 
nations. Spoon certainly has 
the mythological sense more 
developed than any of my 
other tnformants ; however 
he is through and through a 
Bantu and whatever he says 
is always picturesque and 
striking. After him, I under- 
took to gather all the know- 
ledge possessed by Tobane. a hap” Ra 
Tobane was a splendid man Sree 

when I knew him in Lou- 

as bone-thrower in 1894. 

ren¢co Marques, in the years 1895 and 1896. 
Tall, of a remarkable light complexion, his eyes 
very clear and bright, he was a man of mark in 
the Mpfumo clan. From his youth he had been 
in relation with the leading families of the tribe, 
being himself the son of Magugu, the native 
_ general who brought to an end the long war of 
succession of the Shangaan in 1856-1862. He 
had been mixed up in all the ‘political affairs of 
the country for a long time and had a profound 
knowledge of the customs of the court and of 
the tribunal amongst his people. He was a pa- 
triot and when he became a Christian he did his 
best to bring his brethren to his new faith. 
When he understood what I wanted, he at once 
did his best to satisfy me and sometimes he 
even anticipated my questions : “ Tjika, ndt ku 
byela... Keep quiet, I] am going to tell you”, 
said he eagerly! I owe to him most of what I 
know about the tribal system of the Ronga. 
(See Les Ba-Ronga, page 11). 
Having then been called by the development 
of the Mission to leave Lourengo Marques to 

Phot. P. Berthoud 

TOBANE 

: 

a 5 —— 
start a training school amongst the Thonga of the Transvaal, I 
met in Shiluvane near Leydsdorp with a man who was for the 
Northern clans of the tribe an authority as excellent as Tobane 
for the Southern Ronga clans. His name was Mankhelu. He 
was an elder son of Shiluvane, the late chief of the Nkuna clan 

St ne le 
Phot. H.-A. Junod 

MANKHELU 

standing in his village by the magic forked pole. 

and had been for many years the prince-regent of the Ba-Nkuna, 
till the actual chief Muhlaba came of age. Mankhelu was the 
General of the army, the great doctor of the royal kraal, one of 
the main councillors, an entirely convinced bone-thrower, a priest for 
his family, a Bantu so deeply steeped in the obscure conceptions of a 
Bantu mind that he never could get rid of them and remained a hea- 

Sen 

then till his death in 1908. Very kind hearted, very devoted to the 
missionaries, he was a true friend for me and willingly disclosed to 
me the secrets of his medical and divinatory science. I owe to him 
an account of his bone-throwing system which was much more ela- 
borate than the one Spoon had given me in Rikatla though the two 
agree on the main points. Mankhelu had many dealings with the 
Suto or Pedi clans of the N. E. Transvaal. He was a celebrated rain- 
maker and had the more credit amongst them as he was a foreigner. 
] have been on my guard carefully to differentiate what is of a Suto 
origin and what is purely honga in the information he gave me. 

In my congregation at the station of Shiluvane was an old convert 
baptised, odd to relate, by the name of a professor of divinity of Lau- 
sanne, Viguet. He was a clever man but not always a very good 
Christian, | must confess. He possessed a splendid memory. Having 
been headman ina village of Thonga refugees in the Spelonken, he 
gave me valuable information regarding the mysteries of family life as 
well as about the initiation ceremonies. His home was Tsungu on the 
Limpopo but he had moved to the Transvaal during the succession 
war of 1862, He was certainly a first rate informant, possessing 4 
clear head, always using the technical expressions and illustrating his 
points with great skill. He and Mankhelu have taught me most of 
what I know about the Northern clans. [learned however many other 
facts also from Mavwewe, the poct-laureate ofthe Nkuna court and from 
Simeon Gana, one of my pupils who belonged to an old and important 
family, and also from others. 

In 1907 I came back to the coast to start in Rikatla (18 miles North 
of Lourenco Marques) a Training Institution for our work in Portu- 
guese Territory. There I again found my old friend Spoon who 
had been baptised Elias and was one of the elders of the little Church 3 
he had grown old but was always of the same merry character and 
disposed to communicate anything he knew. Another man was his 
co-elder there, a Ronga of the Mazwaya family called Mboza. I found 
him to be a very intelligent man, quite an authority on the rites of 
the clan. He had been ‘‘ possessed” and had gone through all the 
initiation ceremonies of the Ngoni possession, having become an 
exorciser himself. So he was able to give me new information on 
this mysterious subject. | undertook a systematic investigation with 
these two men in 1909 taking as a guide the set of questions prepared 
by Prof. J. Frazer for people collecting ethnographical material and 
giving special attention to the question of the taboo. During this 

— 
study which took me many months | was 
more than ever impressed with the im- 
mense complexity of the Life of a South 
African tribe ! Quoting my sources of in- 
formation I must also mention the pupils 
of my school. Every Tuesday night we 
had a meeting in which one of them had 
to relate a story, to describe a cu- 
miei, to tell a native tale... His 
companions then added what they 
knew and, as some of them were 
srown up men, these debates were 
often very instructive. 

I was able to collect in all more 
than one hundred tales; most of 
them have been published in my 
| Chants et Contes des Ba-Ronga and 
in the book on Les Ba-Ronga. | 
have still a good many in manu- 
script, some of which I intend pu- 
blishing in the second volume of as Church elder in 1907. 

the present work. 

Phot. A. Borel 

SPOON -EIIAS 

My aim, in collecting all this material has been twofold, scientific 
and practical. 

First of all scientific. The Life of a South African tribe is a collec- 
tion of biological phenomena which must be described objectively 
and which are of great interest, representing, as they do, a certain 
stage of human development. These biological phenomena are some- 
times at first of a repulsive character. The sexual life of the Bantu 
especially shocks our moral feelings. I did not think however that 
I could entirely leave out this subject in a scientific book and the 
more | studied it, the more I saw that these strange rites have a much 
deeper meaning than at first appears and that we could not pretend 
to know natives if we remain ignorant of these facts. But while 
trying to give a full account, Iam convinced, on the other hand, that, 
to be truly scientific, such a description must be limited to one well 
defined tribe. I go even further : all the data must be localised ; in 

—e 

the tribe itself there are different clans; customs vary from one to 
another. It is of the greatest importance that all the facts be classed 
geographically. A similar work can be done later for other tribes and 
it is only when a sufficient number of trustworthy monographs have 
been written that a comparative study on Bantu ethnography can be 
undertaken. The ‘‘ Essential Kafir” of Dudley Kidd is very interest- 
ing and full of useful remarks, but the Essential Kafir will not be 
known till a scientific and thorough study of all the tribes has been 
completed. My aim has been to submit the Thonga tribe to such a 
study and I shall be most gratified if it leads other observers to under- 
take the same investigation with regard to other African tribes. 

Though I do not pretend to prejudge anything about any other 
South African tribe, it will soon be seen that many of the customs 
here described are spread more or less over the whole of the Sub- 
Continent and that what I write about the Thonga applies more or 
less to the Suto, the Zulu, even to the Nyandja of Lake Nyassa 
and to tribes in Central Africa. I think therefore that the conclusions 
reached by this study may be of use not only to those interested in the 
Thonga tribe itself but to all Africanists or Bantuists. 

There are two classes of men to whom I should like to bring some 
practical help in their work: the Native Commissioners and the 
Missionaries. 

It is absolutely necessary that Native Commissioners should have a 
better knowledge of the tribe to which they administer in the name 
of civilised Governments. They are apt to make the most dangerous 
mistakes from mere ignorance of the true nature of rites or supersti- 
tions which they do not understand. I have heard of colonial autho- 
rities receiving witchraft accusations, believing that the pretended 
wizards were real murderers and anthropophagists and condemning 
them as such! ‘To govern savages, you must study them thoroughly 
in order both to recognise the wrong conceptions against which 
you have to contend and to avoid hurting their feelings unnecessa- 
rily. ‘This is imperative if you wish to win their confidence and main- 
tain a friendly understanding between them and and the alien Euro- 
pean Government. How many native wars might have been avoided 
if the Native Commissioner had had a better knowledge of Bantu Ethno- 

—= 9 — 
graphy, and, on the other hand, how much good has been done by 
those who have taken the trouble to study the Natives with sympathy 
in order to be just to them! 

And this is equally true of Missionnaries. 

Missionary work is much better understood now than is was for- 
merly. The recent Edinburgh Conference has proclaimed the necess- 
ity for Missionaries of the sympathetic study of native beliefs and 
social customs. One of the eight Commissions which prepared that 
wonderful Congress devoted considerable time to this subject and 
issued a remarkable report whose conclusions are worth reading. It 
urges that on each field a thorough investigation be undertaken in 
order that the message of the Gospel may be presented in such a way 
as will appeal to those aspirations after the truth which reveal them- 
selves in the religion and social rites of the Natives. How superior 
is this conception to that of former times when heathenism was con- 
sidered a creation of the devil through and through. We sce better 
now that, amidst darkness and sin, the heathen mind is often seeking 
light and righteousness and that these rays of truth, these presenti- . 
ments of a higher life must be infinitely respected and utilised in the 
preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For instance look how 
seriously the savage keep their taboo!.. This taboo — as we will 
see — is inspired by strange, unscientific physiological ideas regard- 
ing defilement and contagion which will disappear when scientific 
knowledge has spread amongst them. But let these ideas be some- 
what amended, let the natives understand that what is taboo is not 
physical uncleanness but moral evil and their strong aversion to the 
act taboed may become a powerful moral impulse for good. 

Here is the plan which I mean to adopt. After having briefly 
explained in a preliminary chapter what is the Thonga tribe, I will 
consider an individual and follow him in his career from birth to 
death; the story of the evolution of a man and of a woman will 
constitute the first part of the book. 

Then I shall pass on to the first social organism formed by these 
individuals and study the life of the family and of the village, which 
is but an enlarged family. 

The villages make up the clan and the tribe. The national life will 

—- ze) — 

form my third part, where I will deal especially with the Chief, the 
Court, the Army. 

The agricultural and industrial life and the literary and artistic life 
will then be studied (as collective manifestations of the life of the 
tribe) and last but not least. I will devote a considerable time to the 
religious life and superstitions, trying to know the soul of the tribe, 
to understand the manifold manifestations of its psychic life which 
have always had a special interest for me. 

It would have been safer for me to write this new and enlarged 
edition of Les Ba-Ronga in French, my native tongue. I decided to 
attempt it in English, as the public interested in South African 
affairs is essentially an English speaking public and as a great portion 
of the Thonga tribe is settled in British Territory. I know that [ can 

rely on the indulgence of the English public... When my readers 
notice that the book has been written by a foreigner — | am afraid 

they will often make that remark — I beg them kindly to remember 

that, for me, it would have been much more agreeable to write it in 

Prenclie.; 
Sie 

To know! To observe new facts and to discover new laws, to 
impart knowledge to the world, to gather solid material for the won- 
derful palace which Science ts building is a splendid aim for a man’s 
life. You know yourself by experience that it is a great, a noble task to 
work for Science. You have written books which have become 
classical and have provided a most valuable contribution to Political 
Science. But afterwards you have consented to fill one of the most 
important and most difficult posts which your country could offer 
you and you have devoted your time and your scientific experience 
to maintaining a friendly and fruitful contact between the two great 
branches of the Anglo-Saxon family. In doing so you have taught us 
a lesson: To work for Science is noble; but to help our fellow men 
is nobler still. 

And now — st parva licet componere magnis — allow me this confes- 
sion. In the difficult undertaking wich lies before me, | shall feel 
immensely gratified if scientists find useful material amongst my 
observations for their studies. Anthropologists try to throw some 
light on the dark problem of the origin of the psychic life in mankind. 
May the picture of a South African primitive tribe bring them some 

valuable information. But Ishould feel even deeper satisfaction if my 
work could help my South African brethren and contribute to the 
peaceful solution of our great practical problem there, the native 
problem. White men soon tire of the native when they only see the 
badly educated youths who go about the streets of our colonial towns. 
They despise them, find them « cheeky » and very soon come to the 
conclusion: « Natives are no good!» Who can deny that this position 
taken up by so many South Africans is as dangerous for the peace of 
the country as are the very defects with which they reproach the natives 
and which often come from contact with a depraved and unscupulous 
civilisation? Let those who are prejudiced against the black race 
study more carefully its customs, its rind, such as it reveals itself in 
the old rites of the Bantu tribes. They will see that these natives are 
much more earnest than they thought and that in them beats a truce 
human heart. If, in their ignorance of true morality and of true reli- 
gion, they have submitted themselves willingly to the sufferings of 
initiation, to the painful rites of purification in order to reach what 
they thought to be a higher level of human righteousness, are we not 
entitled to hope that we shall be able to build in them a character, 
when we place them under the moralising influence of Christianity 
and teach them to understand the religion which has saved the world ? 

Should I succeed in eliciting new and more enlightened sympathy 
amongst the Whites for our native brethren, should this book prevent 
the gulf which separates the races from becoming wider, I think it 
will have been worth while writing it. 

May I be allowed one final comment? Colossal changes are now 
taking place amongst the South African tribes. Civilisation has taken 
fast hold not only of the coast but of the interior. It has exercised a 
marvellous influence on the High Velt of Johannesburg and is spread- 
ing to the borders of the desert. Amongst those races so long stag- 
nant, an evolution has started which is proceeding with great rapidity 
and a kind of fatality. What will be its ultimate result? The Ethno- 
grapher does not generally trouble himself with such questions. It is 
enough for him to note the facts carefully and to describe them accu- 
rately. [aim at being a faithful and impartial Ethnographer in the 
study of customs which still exist but will soon have passed away, 
but I cannot forget that I am also a Missionary. I belong to that body 
of men who, with Native Commissionners and liberal minded Colon- 
ists, feel they have a sacred duty to perform towards the weaker race. 
In this most tempting basket of varied fruits which civilisation offers 

to the Native, we feel we must guide his inexperienced hand, pointing 
out to him those which conduce to his happiness and progress and 
those which are poisonous and might be fatal to him. This book is ad- 
dressed to those who can influence this evolution, be they the Autho- 
rities puzzled by the native problem, or be they educated natives who 
are perplexed regarding the future of their race. I will endeavour to 
indicate the line along which it appears to me we ought to direct the 
tribe in order to escape shame and destruction. But these sugges- 
tions will be given in special paragraphs, carefully separated form the 
scientific treatise. - 1 have encugh respect for science to avoid mixing 
the two subjects. On the other hand, I trust those of my readers who 
do not share my religious faith or my philanthropic hope will not 
blame me for here touching upon the important problems of native 
policy : Science has never opposed the betterment and ennoblement 
of humanity! If this book can in the slightest degree help towards 
this end, such help will be its best and most precious justification. 

Henri A. Junop.

THE THONGA TRIBE 

I. Geographical delimitation of the tribe. 

The Thonga tribe is composed of a group of Bantu popula- 
tions settled on the Eastern coast of South Africa, extending from 
the neighbourhood of St Lucia Bay (28° Lat. S.) on the Natal 
Coast up to the Sabie River to the North (1). Thonga are to 
be found therefore in four of the present South African 
states: In Natal (Amatongaland), the Transvaal (Leydenbourg, 
Zoutpansberg and Waterberg districts), in Rhodesia and mostly 
in Portuguese East Africa (Lourengo Marques, Inhambane and 
Mozambique Company districts). The Thonga border on the 
Zulus and the Swazis southwards; westwards on the Ba-Mbayi, 
Ba-Lauti and other Suto-Pedi clans in the Transvaal; north- 
wards on the Venda and Ba-Nyai in the Zoutpansberg and 
Rhodesia, and on the Ndjao near the Sabie; and eastwards on 
the Tonga near Inhambane and on the Ba-Chopi, North of the 
mouth of the Limpopo. 

The tribe comprises a certain number of clans. Those clans 
form six groups which speak the various dialects of the Thonga 
language. 

(1) There are two rivers called Sabie in the Thonga Territory ; one is the 
Sabie of the South which runs in the Leydenburg district and joins the Nko- 
mati not far from Kil. 53 of the Lourengo Marques-Transvaal line and the 
other, the one here refered to, comes from Rhodesia and flows into the 
Indian Ocean not far from the 21° lat. South. 

I]. Tribe, Groups and Clans. 

It is necessary first of all to define clearly the precise mean- 
ing of these three terms. 

We reserve the term /ribe for the totality of the Thonga 
nation. This word is frequently used to designate the smaller 
national units which are called after some old chief whose des- 
cendants are still reigning, like Tembe, Khosa, Nkuna, etc. 
We prefer for the sake of clearness to call those small units 
clans as there is certainly a great ressemblance between them 
and the Scottish clans. As a rule all men belonging to a clan 
bear the name of the old chief who is more or less considered 
as being the ancestor of them all. In the Tembe country most 
of the people will salute each other with these words: ‘‘ Sha- 
wan Tembe, good morning, Tembe”! But Tembe, the name 
of tle clan means not only a sroup of people but a cettam 
part of the country South of Delagoa Bay. In that country, 
men of other clans have settled. There are also sub-clans of 
the Tembe clan which have already adopted special salutations 
because they have formed collateral branches of the big Tembe 
family. However the term clan is the best, I think, to desi- 
enate that kind of national unit as its origin is essentially 
familial. Now some of those clans, those which occupy the 
same tract of country, form groups because they speak the same 
dialect of the Thonga language. 

Il. The generic Name of the Tribe. 

As we shall see, there is no true national unity amongst the 
Vhonga. They are hardly conscious that they form a definite 
nation and therefore they possess no common name for it. 
The name Thonga (pronounce t + aspirated h, not the English th) 
was applied to them by the Zulu or Ngoni invaders who 
enslaved most of their clans between 1815 and 1830. The 

origin of this Zulu name is probably the term Ronga which 
means Orient (buronga = dawn) and by which the clans 
round Lourengo Marques used to call themselves. According 
to the phonetic laws of the two languages R in Ronga becomes 
Th when pronounced by the Zulu. (Ex. Randja, to love, in 
Ronga is thanda in Zulu; raru, three, thathu.) This word 
Thonga became a nickname which, in the mouth of the Zulu, 
was almost the equivalent of slave and they applied it to the 
whole Thonga stock; the appellation is not liked by the 
Thonga, but I know of no other which would be preferable to it. 

Strange to say, the Thonga of the Northern Clans, especially 
those of the Bilen and Djonga groups, like to call themselves 
Tjonga, the Hlengwe Tsonga. This word is perhaps originally 
the same as Ronga and may have meant also people of the East, 
although the R of the Ronga dialect does not permute regu- 
larly in Jj and Ts in the Northern clans; but this meaning is 
doubtful and has at any rate been forgotten. Another name 
which is much used amongst white people to designate the 
‘Thonga is the word Shangaan. Shangaan or Tshangaan was 
one of the surnames of Manukosi, the Zulu chief who settled on 
the East Coast and subjugated most of the Thonga at the time 
of Chaka. It is possible that this name was even older and 
that it belonged to a chief who lived in the valley of the 
Lower Limpopo before Manukosi. At any rate, this valley was 
called Ka Tshangaan and its inhabitants Matshangaan. But this 
term was never accepted by the Ba-Ronga who consider it as an 
insult. It is applied in Johannesburg roughly to all the East 
Coast ‘‘ boys,” even to the Ba-Chopi who are considered by 
the Ba-Ronga of Delagoa-Bay as much inferior to them. Its 
adoption would be objectionable on that account. I recognise 
that the word Ba-Thonga does not enjoy much more favour 
and is not quite satisfactory ; however considering that it means 
originally “‘ people of the East” and that the tribe is indeed 
living on the Eastern part of South Africa, it ought to be 
accepted in the course of time without much difficulty. 

Let us remark that another tribe, quite different for its lan, 
‘guage and ethnographical features, dwelling near Inhambane- 

——aiG 

quite close to our Thonga tribe, calls itself Ba-Tonga. But 
there is no aspirate after T and this is enough to distinguish it 
from our Thonga tribe. 

IV. The six groups of the Thonga clans. 

Let us consider briefly, with the aid of the adjoining map, 
these six main groups. 

tr. All round the Bay of Delagoa, we find the Ronga group. 
This word Ronga is a very old one and very convenient, as all 
these clans consent to be called by it. The real Ronga avey 
I think, the Mpfumo and the Matjolo clans who are settled on 
the west of the Bay. South of the Bay is the Tembe clan and 
its two sub-clans which have become independant : Matutwen 
and Maputju. North of Lourenco Marques are the Mabota and 
Mazwaya clans, the country of the latter, which extends on 
both sides of the estuary of the Nkomati, being called No- 
ndwane. Further North are the two clans of Shirindja and Ma- 
nyisa which form the transition to the following group. The 
new generation speaks a purer Ronga dialect, the old one more 
the Djonga. 

Continuing our survey in a Northerly direction, we cross 
two rivers: the Nkomati and the Olifant. From the Nkomati 
to the Olifant we meet with the Djonga group and from the 
Olifant northward with the Nwalungu group. Djonga means 
South, Nwalungu means North. ‘The Ba-Djonga are the clans 
South of the Olifant, the Ba-Nwalungu North of it. Such 
designations have therefore only a relative value and have been 
evidently invented by people dwelling on the borders of the 
Olifant. But they are used in many places and I do not find 
any better ones to designate the two dialects of the Thonga 
spoken South and North 1s: tle river. 

2. The Djonga group includes the Khosa (in the Khosen or 
Cossine country) the Rikotjo, the Shiburi :and Mathiye clans. 
if we go directly North. On the East of the Djonga clans pro- 
per, we find a number of clans settled on both sides of the: 

Se —— SPE ee a ee ee ie ho ee a 

omal; 

Map of the Thongatribe 

showing the 
different groups of clans 
Fonga group  e —— 

esc Neuchatel, Suisse. 

Limpopo, in the triangle formed by the Limpopo, the Shengan 
and the line of the 24° parallel and calling themselves the Ba- 
Hlabi. They speak a dialect very similar to the Djonga. Their 
names are as follows from the confluence of the Olifant and the 
Limpopo to the South : Mapsanganyi, Tsungu, Mavundja, 
Nkwinika and Makamo. Nkuna was settled not far from this 
confluence. The clan migrated into the Transvaal in great numbers 
together with Mavundja and other Hlabi during the wars of 
Manukosi. 

3. The Nwalungu group includes two different elements : 
first the Baloyi or Ba-ka-Baloyi, in the triangle formed by the 
two rivers northward of their confluence and the Maluleke fur- 
ther North, extending all along the Limpopo as far as its 
confluence with the Lebvubye River and further along the 
Lebvubye itself. They occupy there a part of the Low Country 
of the Transvaal being more or less mixed with the Venda and 
Nyai population. The Maluleke, according to the native histo- 
rians, are one half of a larger clan called the Nwanati whose 
second half is settled near the mouth of the Limpopo under the 
name of the Makwakwa of Khambane and Ndindane. 

These three groups are to be found on the central line, on 
the axis of the tribe. On their west we meet with the Hlanganu 
group and on their east with the Bila and Hlengwe groups. 

4. The Hlanganu group is the smallest of all, including the 
Nwamba clan in the plain of Delagoa Bay, and the Mabila and 
Hlanganu clans in the Lebombo hills. The Hlanganu overflow 
into the Transvaal territory and are scattered in the large desert 
of the Low Country of the Leydenburg district, together with 
clans of Suto (Pedi) and Swazi (Mbayi) origin. The Hlanganu 
dialect is very much akin to the Djonga. 

5. Lhe Bila group called after the name of Bila, the great and 
fruitful plain of the Lower Limpopo valley, includes the clans 
living on both banks of the river. They have had very much to 
suffer from the Zulu invaders who made their home in that fer- 
tile country but their dialect has kept some very peculiar traits. 

6. The Hlengwe group. In the Djonga dialect, Hlengwe means 

wealth. I do not know if this be the etymology of the name 

— ae 

Hlengwe as designating all the Thonga population of the East 
and North-East, from the Limpopo to Inhambane and to the 
Sabie of the North. The name Hlengwe applies properly only 
to the Northern part of the Eastern clans. I retain it however 
provisionally. It seems that that group which forms perhaps half 
of the tribe comprehends at least three great subdivisions : 
1) The Hlengwe proper, facing the Maluleke and the Baloyi on 
the West and extending as far as the Sabie to the North. Their 
main clans are Tshauke, Mbenzane, Mavube, Magwinyane. 
2) The Ba-Tswa (1) of Inhambane with the Hlenbengwane, 
Yingwane, Nkumbi. 3) The Nwanati with the Makwakwa, 
Khambane, Ndindane, bordering the Chopi to the North and the 
West. 

Outside of the proper area of the tribe, we find colonies of emi- 
grated Thonga in many parts of the Transvaal. The largest is in 
the Spelonken district, North of the Zoutpansberg, where they 
form the majority of the population. There they were called 
Magwamba by the Venda and Bvesha who possessed the coun- | 
try before them. These Magwamba are made up mostly of 
Hlengwe, Maluleke and Djonga refugees. In the Modjadji 
country, we find two colonies of Ba-ka-Baloyi with their own 
chiefs. Near Leydsdorp, a more considerable clan, numbering 
about 6000 souls, is the Nkuna clan under Muhlaba. On the 
Sabie of the South, in the plain of the Leydenburg district, ano- 
ther colony has been founded more recently, since the war- of 
the Portuguese against Gungunyane, by the Ngoni and Bila who 

» 

(1) This name Ba-Tswa, is the Hlengwe form of Ba-Tjwa, a term by which 
the Zulu have been commonly designated amongst the Thonga. Ba-Tjwa is pro- 
bably the corresponding form for Ba-Rwa, an appellation by which the Suto 
of the Zoutpansberg plains used to call the tribes of the mountains, whence 
comes the wind called Bu-rwa. The Ba-Rwa properly are the Bushmen as one 
knows, but under that name were included Bantu of a quite different type. 
This shows that the natives, in naming foreign tribes, consider the geographi- 
cal relation between themselves and these tribes much more than their ethnic 
characteristics: so one very often meets with the word « Bakalanga» which 
means people of the North The Bakalanga proper are in Rhodesia, but in 
Louren¢go Marques the Khosa tribe is called Bakalanga. 

The term Ba-Ngoni is applied to the Zulu as well as Ba-Tjwa, but it is res- 
tricted to that clan of the Zulu which was under Manukosi. 

=) _ 
did not accept the new rule. They remain under Mpisane a near 
relative of the late Ngoni potentate. 

In the Orichstadt valley and in many other parts of the Ley- 
denburg mountains little colonies of Thonga are met with, as 
well as in the Waterberg district (especially near Nilstrom) and 
in the towns of Pretoria and Johannesburg. A good many of the 
thousands of Shangaane coming every year to the mines settle 
down definitively in the Town Locations of these great centres. 

V. The numerical strength of the Thonga tribe. 

It is very difficult to ascertain the number of the Thonga. 
The census of the Transvaal taken on the 17 of April 1904 
gives 82,325 souls as being the total Thonga population of that 
colony; of these, 48,117 are located in the Zoutpansberg. This 
is a minimum as it has been recognised that at least 10 °/. ought 
to be added to these figures; there were scarcely any young men 
in the kraals when the census was taken. Let us estimate at 
100,000 the numerical strength of that part of the tribe which 
is located in the Transvaal. 

As regards Portuguese East Africa, we find some interesting 
figures in the Mozambique Year Book. The black population of 
the Lourencgo Marques District is estimated at 99,698 souls dis- 
tributed as follows: 

Circumscription of Morakwen(1) . . . . . 21,510 
» Se MViaMyiica’ 2Xe" eee he: gee res 
» Meso: Ge 5: SON ak Gee ena 12,960 
» » Magudju (Khosen). . . . 18,197 
» » Maputju 22,848 

Total 99,698 

The population of the old region of Gaza which includes Bilen, 
the Makwakwa, the Baloi, the Hlabi and part of the Hlengwe 

(1) I have adopted the native pronunciation of native names and the ortho- 
graphy explained in my Elementary Grammar of the Thonga-Shangaan 
Language. (Lausanne. Bridel.) 

clans, is estimated at 147,995 souls. Gaza having now been in- 
corporated with the Lourengo Marques district, the latter has 
a native population of 257,693. However the Year Book decla- 
res that this isa minimum and states that at least 13,000 ought 
to be added to this number. Let us admit 270,000 for the Lou- 
renco Marques district. As regards the Inhambane district, the 
Year Book estimates the total population at 750.088 souls; a 
very small percentage ought to be deducted for the White and 
Asiatic population, not more than 1 to 2.000. How many of the 
remaining thousands belong to our tribe? There are numerous 
clans of Ba-Chopi on the coast and of Ba-Tonga round Inham- 
bane. However these two tribes occupy but a small area of this 
large district the interior of which is inhabited by the various 
Hlengwe clans. So we may admit that at least half of those 
750.000 natives are Thonga. If we are correct in this estimate, 
the total numerical strength of the Thonga tribe would be about 
750.000. 

VI. The history of the Thonga tribe. 

Everybody who has had to teach South African natives has 
been astonished at their memory. It is so good that it some- 
times prevents the reasoning faculty developing as it ought to. 
Some of these people are able to repeat a tale lasting five or ten 
minutes after having heard it twice or thrice only. It is to be 
wondered at therefore that they have so few traditions, or rather 
that these traditions do not reach further back in history. In 
fact when you investigate what they know of the past, you find 
first a story about the origins which bears a strongly mythical 
character; secondly traditions more or less legendary about the 
migrations of the various clans; thirdly genealogies of the royal 
family containing eight to ten names and fourthly historical nar- 
ratives which go back as far as the beginning of the 19" century 
and which give us the impression of true historical facts. His- 
tory, amongst the Thonga, begins one hundred years ago only. 
What took place before is almost entirely forgotten. This fact 

shows that, even amongst races possessing good memory, before 
the introduction of a writing system, traditions regarding the 
ancient past can hardly be relied upon. 

A. PREHISTORIC PERIOD. 

1) The story of the origin is this: The first human beings emer- 
ged from reeds. Each tribe came into this world with its present 
characteristics. For instance the Ba-Bvesha, who are great black- 
smiths, knew how to forge their iron picks from the first day. 
They «came out» holding them. The Ba-Ronga group calls the 
first ancestors of humanity Likalahumba and Nsilambowa, viz. 
the one who brings a glowing cinder in a shell (the man) and 
the one who grinds vegetables (the woman). ‘he Ba-Djonga 
call them: Gwambe and Dzabana. Another story universally 
believed tells us how death came amongst men by the fault of 
the chameleon (See Part VI). All these stories are purely mythi- 
cal and form part of the African Genesis which is met with in 
most tribes. 

2) Legends about the ancient migrations of the various clans. 
Almost every clan pretends to have come from afar and, strange 
to say, they came from all the points of the compass. Two of 
their clans, without doubt, come from the North, the Ba-ka- 
Baloyi and the Tembe. The Ba-ka-Baloyi, they say, came down 
the valley of the Limpopo in very remote times ; they came in 
such numbers that they opened out a wide track as wide as a 
wagon road: «It is the old, old road of Gwambe, the first man 
on earth who emerged from the reed. So well was the road 
trodden that to this day the grass has not grown over it.» Many 
Thonga pretend to have seen it, white and straight, stretching from 
the northern side of the banks of the Limpopo and going south- 
wards through the desert, just like the road over which Attila 
passed ! At a certain place, near a rivulet where the Baloyi rest- 
ed, one can still see in the rock the print of the mortars of the 
women. « The stones at that time were not yet hardened, and 
they retained the marks made by the mortars in that old expe- 
dition, the marks also of the hemp pipes of the men and of 

their matshuba. » (The matshuba are the little holes hollowed 
out by the natives in four rows, as required in their favourite 
game called tshuba). 

According to some of the native historians, the Baloyi came 
from the Ba-Nyai country along with the Nwanati, who also 
belonged to the Nyai or Kalanga race. They went southwards 
by that wonderful old road till they reached the sea coast not 
far from the mouth of the Limpopo. The sight of the sea, that 
broad unknown river, filled them with great fear. The Baloyi 
felt they could not remain in such a dangerous neighbourhood 
and advised the whole party to go back to the North. In the 
meantime, however, their Nwanati friends had discovered a 
fruit not common on the African high veld, but very common 
on the sandy plains of the coast. In shape it was round, about 
the size of an orange, with a hard outer shell. When broken 
it was found to contain a number of stones, each wrapped in a 
delicate, strongly scented pulp, of which the natives prepare an 
excellent dish. This fruit is called makwakwa. ‘‘ We shall remain 
here to break open our makwakwa”’ said the Nwanati, and they 
bade farewell to the Baloyi, who started back to their present 
abode. Hence the name Makwakwa now given to those Nwanati. 

The Nwanati included the Makwakwa of Khambane and the 
Maluleke. These latter separated from their brethren and came 
back north, to the country of the Baloyi, led by their ancestor, 
Mashakatsi. This man who was a great hunter saw that he 
could easily defeat the Ba-Nyai who were settled in those parts 
and brought back his followers with him. He became the 
founder of the dynasty of Maluleke. (For further details about 
these legends, see Addresses and Papers of the Joint Meeting of 
British and South African Associations for the Advancement of 
Science, Johannesburg 1905.) : 

As regards the Tembe clan, it is said to have come down as 
far as Delagoa Bay from the Kalanga country by the Nkomati 
river on a floating island of papyrus and to have crossed the 
Tembe river and settled to the South of the Bay. An old saying 
alludes to this arrival and to the conquest of the country : 

Phandje, phandje ra nala — Tembe kulu a wela. 

As the palm leaf with its numerous feelers — so did the 
ancestor Tembe when he crossed. 

He put his sons in all the districts of the plain to govern in 
his name. The Tembe people, when they greet each other, some- 
times use the salutation Nkalanga, man of the North or of 
the Kalanga country, and there is little doubt that, notwithstand- 
ing the legendary traits in this tradition, the fact itself of the 
northern origin of these clans is true. In the course of time 
the chiefs of Matutwen and Maputju, descendants of ‘Tembe, 
became independant. 

Most of the other clans point to Zululand or to Swaziland as 
having been their first abode which they left to invade the low 
country of the coast. Mpfumu and Marjolo are both sons of 
Nhlaruti who is said to have been the first invader; from him 
sprang their two clans which have become independent from 
each other, even hostile to each other. The Nondwane families 
point to the neighbourhood of Komati Port as being the place 
from which they came. There vere successive invasions of a 
peaceful character. These people still turn the face of their dead 
to the West, because the clan has come from the Lebombo 
hills, and this rite proves that the tradition is well founded. 
The Nkuna, Khosa, Hlabi also claim the same Western or 
South-Western origin. Amongst the Ba-Nkuna, some old men 
say they know the precise place whence their forefather Nkuna 
started in Zululand and declare that they still have relatives there. 

The Hlanganu and Hlengwe seem to have no tradition of 
this kind. The only one I heard about the Hlengwe is this : 
Tshauke, their first king, took as his wife the daughter of 
another chief belonging to the Sono tribe. The Sono knew 
how to cook their food, the Hlengwe did not : they were still 
ignorant of fire and used to eat their porridge raw. The 
son of Tshauke stole a glowing cinder from the Sono and 
brought it home in a big shell. The Sono were angry and 
declared war on the Hlengwe; but these latter, having gained 
new strength because they had been eating cooked food, won 
the victory. The son of Tshauke was then named Shioki — sha- 
humba — he who brings fire in ashell. This tradition is in con- 

nection with the name of the first man Likalahumba which we 
have just explained and it evidently bears a legendary character. 

Which were the races the invaders found in the country ? 
Their name is still known in some places. In the Khosen 
Country, they were the Ntimba and Shibambo. In the Nondwane, 
the Honwana, Mahlangwana and Nkumba. Everybody agrees 
in saying that they were on a lower scale of civilisation (See 
Part IV) and that the new comers overcame them easily because 
thev were more intelligent and possessed better weapons. 

3) A third source of information regarding the prehistoric 
times is to be found in the genealogies of the royal families which 
each clan has preserved more or less completely. I have gathered 
the following : (1) 

Mpfumu : Nhlaruti, Mpfumu, Fayi, Maromana, Shilupane, 
Hasana (who attacked Lourenco Marques in 1868, was banished 
but was given back his country in 1875; he died in 1878), 
Hamule, Zihlahla, Nwamantibyane (banished in 1896 to Western 
Africa where he died). 

Tembe: Tembe, Nkupu, Nwangobe, Silambowa, Muhari (1781- 
1795), Mayeta (1823), Bangwana, Bukutje (1857), Mabayi 
(banished in 1890), Bukutje I. 

Maputju ; Maputju was the younger brother of Muhari and 
made himself independent from him. Muwayi, Makasana (1 800- 
1850), Tlhuma, Musongi or Nozililo (1850), Ngwanazi (who 
fled to British Amatongaland after the Gungunyana war in 1895). 

Nondwana ; Libombo (probably reigning before the invasion), 
Masinga, Ngomana, Matinana, Makwakwa, Papele, Khobete (who 
rebelled against the Portuguese in 1859), Mapunga, Mahazule. 

Mabota : Mabota, Magwenyana, Lawulana, Magumbin, Mba- 
kana, Nwatjonga. 

Nwaniba: Kopo-Nwamba, Rihati, Sindjini, Malengana, Nkolele, 
Mangoro, Mudlayi, Nwangundjuwana. 

Khosa : Khosa, Ripanga, Mabone, Molelemane, Ripindje, 
Magudjulane, Nshalati Pukwana, Magudju, Shongele. 

(1) Compare E. Torre do Valle. Diccionario shironga-portuguez. Lourengo 
Marques. Imprensa Nacional 1906. 

Nkuna : Nkuna, Shitlhelane, Rinono, Kulalen, Nwarinyekana, 
Muhlari, Ribye-ra ku-tika, Shiluvane, Mohlaba. 

Maluleke : Mashakatsi, Dlamana, Shitanda, Shihala, Nkuri, 
Mhinga, Sunduza. 

These genealogies, as one can see, generally contain eight to ten 
names. The list of Maputju chiefs has six only because this dynasty 
is not so old and did not begin before the end of the XVIII" century. 
But all the others are longer. I do not pretend they are absolu- 
tely correct. In the same clan, there are sometimes variations 
according to the informants. There may have been links omitted 
in the chain because, for the natives, a grandson is a son just 
as a son properly speaking. On the other hand, the law of suc- 
cession amongst the Thonga calls to chieftainship the younger 
brothers of the deceased chief ; so some of these names may 
very well belong to brothers. Therefore it does not at all follow 
that eight names correspond to eight different generations. If it 
were So, estimating a generation at 30 years, we should conclude 
that the first chief lived some 250 years ago, viz. in 1650; but 
I have found a conclusive proof that, for some of these genealogies, 
the first name in the list was already known in 1550. So we 
must consider these genealogies as being in fact too short. Many 
names must have been dropped in the course of time. 

The proof to which I am alluding has been afforded by the 
Portuguese reports published in the Mémoire addressed in 1873 
to the President of the French Republic who was cailed to act 
as mediator in the conflict between England and Portugal about 
the right of possession of the Southern part of the Bay (Lisboa. 
Imprensa Nacional). In this interesting publication, we find the 
oldest documents relative to the Bay and, amongst others, we 
read the following account in a Report of the Portuguese chron- 
icler Perestrello, written in 1554: «Into the Bay flow three 
rivers... The first one to the South, is called Zembe. It separates 
the land of a king of that name from the dominion of the king 
Nyaka... The second is the river of the Holy Spirit or of Lou- 
renco Marques. It separates the land of Zembe from the land of 
two other chiefs whose names are Rumu and Mina Lebombo. 
The third and last is the Manhisa, so called after a Kafir of that 

 2  

name who governs there.» In these statements we can easily 
recognize the names of the actual clans of Tembe (Zembe), 
Mpfumu (Rumu), Lebombo and Manyisa. Those names were 
already known then and the chiefs to whom they apply were 
settled in the same country where they now are or not far from 
it. The chief Nyaka has left his name to the Inyak Island. It 
seems that his dynasty was then reigning over a larger tract of 
country than now. It is possible that he was confined to the 
island where his descendants now live by the military operations 
of Maputju. Let us remark moreover that Zembe and Manhisa 
were names applied not only to those two chiefs but to rivers. 
Zembe is the actual Mi-Tembe which flows between the Tembe 
and Matjolo countries and Manhisa is evidently the Nkomati 
which crosses the Manhisa country some fifty kilometers higher 
than the estuary. Should the natives have already called rivers 
after the name of these chiefs, it is probable that the chiefs 
themselves were already dead and had been living in a 
more or less remote past. All these arguments tend to show 
that four or five hundred years ago at least the chiefs Tembe, 
Mpfumu, Manhisa, Libombo, all of whom still have descendants, 
were already in the country round Delagoa Bay. I do not think 
any scientifically accurate statement could be made going so far 
back into the past and I propose this as a landmark in the his- 
tory of South African Natives. 

B. Hisroric PEriop. 

Having tried to fix what is historical in the prehistoric period, 
we now come to the XIX Century; and here we find a great 
amount of detailed information in which there may be some 
legendary traits but which as a whole seems to be entirely trust- 
worthy. It does not suit our plan to narrate here all these facts. 
Such a work would lead us much too far. Let us only say that 
the history of the Thonga tribe during the whole of the XIX" 
century was dominated by the invasion and migrations of the 
Zulu conquerors who left Chaka and for their own sake enslav- 

ed the poor Amathonga of the coast, just as Mosilekatsi did 
among the Mashona. These Ba-Ngoni were led by Manukosi ; 
he found all the Thonga clans living according to the old Bantu 
style, each for itself, without national unity, and he conquered 
them easily and tried to impose on them the military system of 
dominion created by Dingiswayo and Chaka. Many of the Thonga 
clans emigrated into the Transvaal at that time (between 1835- 
1840) rather than submit to Manukosi; as the Boers had settled 
in the country and as the Ngoni chiefs always feared a war with 
the Whites more than anything else, these Thonga were left undis- 
turbed by Manukosi. They belonged to the Nkuna, Baloyi, 
Mavundja clans and founded numerous colonies in the Trans- 
vaal. Manukosi reigned quietly for more than twenty years in 
the Limpopo valley and as far as the Mosapa (Ba-Ndjao country, 
North of the Sabie). His death took place in 1856. But then a 
dreadful war of succession still known as « the war » (mubango) 
raged for more than six years over the whole area of the Thonga 
tribe. Iwo brothers disputed the chieftainship. According to the 
Thonga law of succession, Muzila was the legal heir; but the 
Ngoni law was against him and in favour of his younger brother 
Mawewe. Mawewe was then proclaimed ; Muzila’s followers fled 
to the Spelonken ; the new king however behaved as a cruel 
despot and, with the help of the Portuguese and of the Ronga 
warriors, Muzila defeated him decisively on the Sabie River from 
August 17 to 20 1862. The Ba-Ronga always remained indepen- 
dent from the Ngoni chiefs, being directly under the Portu- 
guese authorities. 

A Portuguese called Albasini who acted during all that time 
as a chief of the Thonga of the Spelonken played a considerable 
part in these events. 

When Muzila died, his son Gungunyane succeeded him. The 
Ba-Ngoni had greatly diminished in number. In 1890 there were 
not more than a few hundred of them in the whole country. 
However they were holding it very firmly and the Thonga hated 
them. Therefore when the war between the Portuguese and some 
Ronga clans in 1894 led to difficulties between the Whites and 
Gungunyane, the Ngoni chief was abandoned by most of his 

= 35 

people, even by his uncle Nkuyu: his capital Mandlakasi was 
burnt and he himself was captured by Musinho d’Albuquerque 
at the end of the year 1895 ; the despotic rule of the Zulus came 
to an end and it has been replaced by the Portuguese adminis- 
tration much to the advantage of the Thonga tribe. 

VII. Ethnic characteristics of the Thonga tribe. 

What are the characteristic features of our tribe in regard to 
the other ethnic groups of South African Bantu, especially to 
the Zulu and Suto? We shall try to sketch them briefly on three 
main points: language, mental and physical character. 

1) The Language of the Thonga. \t would be useless to give 
here an elaborate description of the Thonga language: this 
work has been done already for the Ronga dialect in my 
« Grammaire Ronga » published with the help of the Portuguese 
Governement in 1896 (Bridel, Lausanne) and for the Djon- 
ga dialect in my Elementary Grammar of the Thonga-Shan- 
gaan language which I published at the beginning of the Thonga- 
English Pocket Dictionary compiled by my colleague the 
Rev. Ch. Chatelain (Bridel, Lausanne 1908). I consider the 
language here only from an ethnological point of view, that 
is to say only to ascertain the proper place of the Thonga 
amongst the Bantu. 

The Thonga idiom belones to the South-Eastern group of the 

Bantu languages and is related both to Suto and Zulu. All these 

languages have in common certain grammatical features which 
distinguish them from other groups. Amongst them I might 
mention: the frequent use of the lateral sounds hl, dl, tl, the 
presence of seven or eight distinct classes of nouns, recogniz~ 

s 

able by prefixes which correspond in those three languages, the 

formation of the locative by a suffix ini or ng and not by pre- 
fixes, the consequent absence of the three locative classes pa, 
ku, mu, etc. It has been asserted by people who have not stud- 
ied Thonga carefully that it was merely a dialect of Zulu. This 

is not true.(1) Thonga is altogether different from Zulu and 
Suto, though it closely ressembles both, especially Zulu. 

Relation to Suto. As regards Suto, its phonetic system is character- 
ised by the absence of a certain phenomenon common to most 
Bantu languages, to Thonga and Zulu especially. The Bantu phon- 
ology is dominated by a peculiar nasalisation of certain consonants 
when prefixed by an ” or an m. This n or m is generally the 
prefix of the class mu-ba, mu-mi or in-tin (zin), and has the 
power of producing marvellous changes in this initial consonant. 
But, in Suto, this prefix is dropped altogether except in a few 
cases and those nasalised sounds are almost entirely missing. As 
regards some other grammatical features, Suto, especially the 
Pedi dialect of Suto, is not so far from Thonga. It is not possi- 
ble to quote many instances; let us only remark that Suto pos- 
sesses the roots Joya for witchcraft and y//a for taboo which are 
also present in Thonga and are lacking in Zulu. 

Relation to Zulu. The great difference between Thonga and 
Zulu as regards phonetics is the complete absence of the three 
characteristic Zulu clicks (2) in Thonga. The Thonga have no 
clicks at all except in a few words borrowed from the Zulu like 
nqolo, wagon. Certain letters regularly permute from one lan- 
guage into the other: Z of the Zulu is t in Thonga; r of the 
Thonga is generally replaced by / or th in Zulu. 

Originality of Thonga. But though Thonga and Zulu resemble 
each other in many respects, Thonga possesses some peculiar fea- 
tures which prove its originality. As regards its sounds, it is charac- 
terised by the frequent occurence of a labial sibilant sound, a little 
like ps pronounced with a kind of whistling and which corresponds 
to the Zulu zin the plural of the class isi-izi. It is further charac- 

(1) Thonga and Zulu do not understand each other. In linguistic terminology, 
I think one ought never to designate as dialect of a language an idiom 
which people speaking that language cannot understand at all. It is a differ- 
ent language altogether and we ought to keep the term dialect for the various 
forms of a single language which are of such a nature that people speaking — 
them can understand each other more or less perfectly. 

(2) The Zulu clicks are, as it is generally believed, of Hottentot origin. No 
wonder they were not adopted by the Thonga who do not seem to have had 
any contact with Hottentots. 

terised by some special nasalisations of initial consonants. N-+-k 
which remains nk in Zulu becomes 4 in Thonga: for instance 
the Zulu nkosi, chief, is hosi in Thonga. (It is Khushi in Suto- 
Pedi where the initial » has been dropped). There is a long list 
of words of the in-tin class which show this phenomenon (homu, 
ox; huku, hen, etc.). The initial , when preceeded by n becomes 
nh (nhena, warrior ; tinharu, three; cf. raru, three, burena, brav- 
ery, morena, in Suto, chief). This seems to be the primitive 
combination. In some other cases it becomes ntjh in Ronga and 
ndj in Djonga; (rako, behind, ntjhako, ndjako). These two r 
probably have a different origin in the Ur-Bantu. These trans- 
formations are peculiar to Thonga. 

As regards morphology, Thonga has some striking peculiarities : 
a great riches of demonstrative forms due to the presence of a 
kind of demonstrative particle /e or /a and also a great develop- 
ment of the participial forms of the verbs. In its conjugation, 
the verb is quite as well provided with auxiliaries as any other 
South African language and we could easily discover in Thonga 
the one or two thousand combinations which have been counted 
in the Zulu conjugation. 

Thonga, for all these reasons, is a language apart which has 
evolved itself with its different dialects. 

The six dialects. We have tried to classify them under six names, 
but this classification is, of course, purely formal: in fact each 
of them presents transition forms and they coalesce with each 
other through a great number of intermediary forms (1). This 
is a very striking fact. I take for instance the word ririmi which 
means, « tongue » in Djonga, North of the Nkomati River. Here 
we find two r-pronounced more or less as rolled r, never gut- 
turally. If we go somewhat further to the South, to the Nond- 
wane, ririmi becomes rjirjimi. The r becomes more palatal. We 
reach Mpfumu: there the word has changed into lidjimi. The 
first r has become a pure dental, the second a palato-dental (with 
a kind of cerebralisation). There is a regular evolution of the 

(1) In Appendix No 1, I intend giving a list of the most intersting words 
showing how they are pronounced in all parts of the tribe in order to charac- 
terise the various dialects. 

sound from one dialect to the other. The same process might 
be followed for b which is a true explosive b in the South of 
the Bay, becomes v, a fricative labial and sometimes almost w, 
a semi-vowel, when we go to the North. This regularity in the 
geographical relation of the sounds is very clear and it shows 
that the language must have developed undisturbed as a tree 
which puts forth its branches, these branches separating more 
and more from each other till the dialects are formed, each with 
its peculiar sounds. | 

This fact is all the more marvellous when we remember that 
the Thonga tribe has been made up of populations of various 
origin which have invaded the country, coming from different 
parts. The only explanation which accounts for these two facts 
apparently contradictory is that those invaders have adopted the 
language of the primitive populations and have not influenced 

it enough to prevent it following its natural evolution... If this 
be true, the Thonga language ought to be considered as the 
oldest element of the life of the tribe and we can understand 
then how it has given to it its unity. 

It is true that the course of events, from a linguistic point of 
view, has been totally different since the Zulu invasion of the 
XIX" Century. The Ba-Ngoni of Manukosi did not adopt the 
Thongaas their language : they kept their Zulu dialect and most 
men of the Thonga clans knew and used it also beside their own 
national tongue. But this difference can easily be explained. The 
Zulu generals who followed the example of Chaka, Manukosi and 
Moselekatsi amalgamated clans and tribes under their military rule 
and could not subsist unless they maintained a despotic domi- 
nation over them; they were an aristocratic race and considered 
their language as superior. Ruling by fear and by the'sword, they 
purposely remained aliens amongst the enslaved tribes. Quite diffe- 
rent was the spirit of the ancient invaders of 1400 or 1500 
A. D. They had not such an ideal of vast domination; they oper- 
ated on a much smaller scale : they were satisfied when they 
took the chieftainship from the aborigines and quickly mingled 
with them, married their daughters (as they still do) and so 
became one with them. | 

Would the Ba-Ngoni have been able in course of time to es- 
tablish their Zulu dialect instead of the Thonga, if the Portu- 
guese had not broken their power ? It is impossible to say. They 
had succeeded in imposing all their Zulu terminology in mili- 
tary matters. Meanwhile the women were not learning Zulu 
and the women are the best safeguards of the purity of the lan- 
guage amongst primitive people. Therefore I do not think they 
would have been able to uproot the old language which must 
have been spoken for many centuries in Thonga territory. 

My conclusion is then that the Thonga language was already 
spoken by the primitive occupants of the country more than 
500 years ago and that, together with a certain number of 
customs, it formed the great bond which bound the Thonga 
clans together in past centuries. 

2) Mental characteristics of the Ihonga. We ask only how the 
Thonga compare with the Zulu or Suto as regards character and | 
especially trom a military point of view. 

Having had the opportunity to witness a war in which the 
Nkuna chief Muhlaba was allied with the Pedi chief Maaghe, 
in the Zoutpansberg, I can testify that the Thonga had ten times 
as much military spirit as the Pedi. I saw the two armies, the 
same day, preparing for the same battle. The Thonga were 
armed to the teeth, forming a great circle, all standing, shouting 
their war songs, gesticulating, jumping, imploring their chief 
to allow them to start. The Pedi warriors were sitting under 
trees, taking their snuff and apparently 
as calm as any other day. 

During the Gungunyane war, the 
Thonga were brave, at least those who 
were not entirely dependent on the 
Ngoni king who had not allowed his 
warriors to kill white men. The 
Ronga of Mpfumu especially showed 
great courage and endurance and those 
who served the Portuguese in their 
Angola war have been praised as being 
very steady and reliable. 

Phot. G. Liengme 

A « zuluised » Thonga, warrior. 

On the other hand everything seems to prove that military 
ability is not an ancient feature of the Thonga character and 
that it has been imparted to them precisely by the Zulu who 
taught them the art of fighting during the last century, pushing 
them to the front in their battles and calling them « Mabuya- 
ndlela », « those who open the way ». Before the Ngoni inva- 
sion, the Thonga armies were ignorant of the mukhumbi viz. 
the armed circle of warriors which is at the base of the Zulu 
military system. (See Part IV): they used to dispose them- 
selves in a straight line and, in their battles very few men 
were killed. They were normal Bantu clans, viz. people living 
peacefully, occasionally quarreling with their neighbours. The 
idea of conquest, of vast dominion, the system of an armed 
nation which Chaka and his followers pursued, was something 
new amongst South African natives and was probably borro- 
wed by Dingiswayo from the Whites. This fact ought not to 
be ignored. 

Under a just European supervision, there is no probabi- 
lity that the Thonga tribe will change its peaceful and mild 
charcter. 

3) Physical . characteristics of the Thonga. It cannot be said 
that the Thonga possess a very distinct and unique physical 
type. They are generally of a dark brown colour, sometimes 
purely black, much darker than the Suto. As a whole, their 
external appearance bears a much closer resemblance to that of 
the Zulu, but, as regards face and stature, they vary very much. 
You may meet Thonga with typical negro faces, broad lips, flat 
noses, prominent cheek bones, and the same day, at the same 
place, other men of the same clan with a much narrower face, 
thin lips and pointed noses. It seems that there are two diffe- 
rent types amongst them, the coarse type which was perhaps 
more wide-spread amongst the primitive populations and which 
has been kept very distinct by the Ba-Chopi of the Coast and 
the finer one which belonged perhaps to the invaders and 
both types have inter-crossed in all possible ways. There 
seems also to have been an Arabic influence on some of the 

clans. A Native Commissioner in the Zoutpansberg has noticed 

amongst some of the Thonga settlements striking Semitic fea- 
tures, arched noses, thin lips. Has there been any intermarriage 
between the Thonga and those Arabs who settled on the East 
Coast long before it was discovered by Vasco de Gama? Who 
can say? 

See @ 

FIRST PART 

, THE LIFE OF THE INDIVIDUAL

THe EVOLUTION OF A MAN FROM BirtTH TO DEATH 
A. INFANCY 

I. The day of the Birth. 

When a new member of the tribe is expected, when the 
mother begins to feel the pangs of childbirth (ku lunwa), the 
father sends word to the midwives of the neighbourhood and 
all of them come at once. They are called tinsungakati (1). 
Every woman having some experience in that department is a 
midwife, no special training being required for the qualification. 

The place chosen for the delivery (phuluka) is generally the 
back of the hut (mahosi) where the pregnant woman lives. 
Some mats are brought and erected in such a way as to form 
a small enclosure. This is done to protect the woman from 
indiscrete onlookers. Should there be enough bush to hide her, 
mats are not used. A big wooden mortar is given to her to 
lean against it during her pains. The whole place is called by 
a special term fukwen or busaken (the nest). Should the birth be 

(1) This word is interesting. Its termination ati is the proper feminine suf- 
fix which is found in nsati, wife, hulukati, female elephant, Nkomati, river of 
that name, the rivers being considered as female by the Thonga. 

difficult, the divinatory bones will probably be consulted and 
the woman will be removed to another place, inside the hut or 
somewhere else. 

The baby can be born without any help, but as a rule the 
midwives consider it their duty to submit their patient to a 
long and painful manipulation, to a regular kneading, in order, 
as they say, to obtain the expulsion of the child and of the 
after-birth all at once. They sometimes succeed in that feat! They 
also often hurt the mother severely. The midwives think that 
they must be very rough and they have no pity at all on the 
poor woman. Sometimes the mother loses all her natural 
feelings in this painful process. I have heard of cases when she 
refuses to let the child come to the light, bites her helpers, 
runs away. Hence perhaps the attitude adopted by the midwi- 
ves. The mother must not fabla nwana, viz. break down the 
child, a technical expression to designate unhappy births. 

During the whole labour, it is taboo (1) for the mother to 
eat or to drink anything; she would kill the child if she did so. 
Of course no man must attend the birth; neither must girls 
come near. A newly married woman may be allowed to enter 
the enclosure in order to «be taught». It is also forbidden for 
the female parents of the woman, her sisters, even her mother 
to come fukwen; they might be ashamed if their relative behaved 
badlyand « broke her child». They will not come till the follow- 
ing day, when they hear that everything has gone on smoothly, 
when the father will kill a hen for them. 

As soon as the child has made his appearance one of the 
midwives ties the umbilical cord (likabana) near the navel and 
cuts it about three inches from it. The little sore is anointed 
with a kind of fat; the bit of cord remaining with the baby is 

(1) We translate by taboo the Thonga word yila which means everything 
prohibited. I beg to give the following provisional definition of this term 
which will be found from the first to the last page of this book : Any object, 
any act, any person that implies a danger for the individual or for the com- 
munity and that must consequently be avoided, this object, act or person being 
under a kind of ban. As often as possible, I shall add the explanation which 
natives give of those taboos. 

—7_ = 
cared for with great attention : it generally falls off at the end 
of the first week and this is the signal for the end of the period 
of confinement. 

The after-birth, the placenta, is also looked: for with much 
anxiety : it is called yindlu ya nwana, the ‘‘ house of the child”; 
or hlalu. When it is delayed too long, the midwives begin to 
fear “‘because the blood which is inside has not all come out 
and will kill the mother”. The placenta is generally buried deep 
behind the hut on the spot where the birth has taken place; but 
some prefer to bury it inside the house, fearing the dogs might 
unearth it, which is taboo. 

The child is then washed with water. This water is thrown 
away as polluted by the blood of the birth, which is 
taboo. 

Naming the child. On the day of birth or on one of the follow- 
ing ones the child receives his name (bito). There are four 
principal ways of choosing this. 

1) Often the parents give their offspring the name of a chief as 
Musongi, Makasana, Miccils etc. It flatters their vanity ! 

2) But frequently the parents like to recall a name of the old 
times (pfusha bito dja khale), the name of one of the ancestors, 
because it is a nice thing to remember them. They go so far as 
to consult the bones. A name is proposed and if the bones in 
falling do not give a favourable indication, another is tried till 
they feel sure that the die ‘‘ has spoken’. (1) 

3) Or it may be that somebody asks the favour of giving his 
name to the new born child; a friend of the family may do so 
but it is often also a traveller who happens to be in the village 
and to whom this privilege is accorded. He will “‘ name himself 
in the child” (kutitshula ka nwana). This fact will establish a 
special relation between this person and the child, a relation 
which bears some resemblance to that of a godfather to his 
godson. Once a year he will come and give “his name ” 
(viz. the child) some presents. When the child is able to 

(1) The christian natives like to ask their missionary to choose the name 
perhaps for a similar reason. 

travel, the mother will go with him to pay a visit to his 
“friend in name ” (mabitokulobye). 

4) A fourth way of naming new born children is to choose a 
name having some connection with the circumstances of the birth. 
Should a child have seen the light when his mother was travell- 
ing, he will be called Ndlelen viz. ‘‘on the way”, ‘‘on the 
road”; should the birth have taken place undera tree, the name 
of that tree will be chosen, put in the locative case and you 
will meet many Thonga called Nkanyen (under the terebinth), 
Nkwakwen (under the Strychnos), Nkuwen (under the fig-tree), 
etc. or Mpfulen (in the rain), Marumbin (in the ruins), Mawewe, 
if the child is born during the war waged by the chief of that 
name, etc. When General Beyers was running over Zoutpans- 
berg with his commando, the natives admiring the swiftness of 
his movements named many children after him. 

The names of the Thonga are the same for the two sexes. 
There are only two of them which cannot be employed indis- 
criminately for girls and boys. Nhwanin is a girl’s name as it 
means ‘‘girl” and Nwandjise a boy’s name as it means ‘‘ boy”. 

All these birth-names are abandoned later on, generally at 
the circumcision school or at the age of puberty in the clans 
where the custom of circumcising has disappeared ; boys and 
girls then choose new names. The men and women who undergo 
the initiation adopt a new name. So do those subjected to the 
treatment for possession who take the name of their pretended 
possessor when he has made himself known. I refer the reader 

to Appendix II for some more information regarding Thonga 

names. 

Premature Birth. When a child is born prematurely and is 
very small and delicate, he is wrapped in leaves of the castor- 
oil plant and put into a big pot which is then exposed to the 
heat of the sun. This is a true incubator and this treatment is 
said to be attended with success (Tobane). 

Protracted Births and Illegimate Births. There would seem to 
be no relation between these ; but, for the Thonga, on the con- 
trary, a protracted and difficult birth proves that the child is not 
legitimate. This conviction is so strong that when a woman 

— “5 — 
knows that the child which she is going to bear is not the son 
of her husband (nuna) but of a lover (mbuye), she will admit 
this secretely to the principal midwife in order to spare herself 
the pains of a difficult birth, as it is taboo to bear a “child of 
adultery” hiding the fact: it would cause the mother untold 
suffering. 

Therefore, if the delivery lasts too long, the midwife will 
begin to have doubts as to the legitimacy of the child. The 
first thing she will do is to send word to the husband. He knows 
what it means. He takes in his shifado (1) a little of his semen, 
mixes it with water in a shell of sala (the big round fruit of 
the Strychnos) and the woman drinks it. It may be that then 
the child will ‘feel his father” if the husband is really his father 
and that this will bring the birth to a prompt conclusion; but 
if this result is not attained, it is proof that the child is really 
illegitimate and the midwife will force the woman to confess 
her guilt and the name of her lover. Should she have had many 
of them and hide some of their names ‘‘the womb will refuse ” 
(khuri dji ta yala) and the birth will be possible only when the 
confession is complete. 

Should an . illegitimate child be born without this delay, he 
will come to the light with his hands closed and refuse to take 
the breast. This will give the midwife the opportunity of extort- 
ing the confession from the mother. These women practise a 
special kind of divination: they take a broken pot, put pumpkin 
seeds into it and place it on the fire. If the seeds, instead of 
burning to cinder, explode with noise, this is proof that the 
woman is guilty. Each explosion means a lover and all their 
names must be revealed. (Tobane.) This confession is strictly 
private. The midwives will consider it a professional duty not 
to divulge the secret to anyone, even the father. But the mother 
must confess, as it is absolutely necessary that the true father 
of a child be known on the day of its birth. 

It is taboo for the lover of the woman to come to the door 

(1) See Note 1 at the end of the volume, in the collection of latin notes 
written for medical men and ethnographers. 

of the hut after the birth of the illegitimate child as long as the 
umbilical cord has not fallen off. The child would die. Even later 
on, should the mother be sitting on the threshold of the hut 
with the baby in her arms, and that man should pass on the 
street in front of them, one of the midwives will go (has she 
not heard the confession ?) and take between her fingers a pinch 
of sand from the footprints of the lover, and, without a word, 
will throw it on the fontanella of the baby. If the husband hap- 
pens to be present, he will know by witnessing thisact that he 
is not the true father. I do not think he will be very angry. The 
child is his and, if it is a girl, nobody else will ‘‘eat the oxen”! 
For him this is the main consideration ! 

As regards the birth of twins, we shall, later on, study the 
strange customs which accompany it: in the olden times one 
of the children was killed ; except in such a case, no child is ever 
put to death wilfully on the day of its birth. 

Il. The first week or Confinement Period. 

From the day of the birth till the moment when the umbi- 
lical cord falls, seven days may elapse : this forms a special period 
called busahana, which is the period of confinement for both 
mother and child. It will be concluded by the special ceremony 
of the child’s first outing marked by the rite of the broken pot. 
During these seven or eight days, the mother is restricted to a spe- 
cial diet and this is a true ‘“‘marginal period” for her. She is: 
absolutely outside the pale of society. The diet is prescribed by 
the family doctor, the one who knows how to treat children, 
and consists of a special dish prepared with Kafir corn (1) 
(mabele) and called shimbimbi with which special medicines have 
been mixed. The aim of this medication (khwebela busahana) 

(1) This use of Kafir corn in this and other old rites proves the antiquity of 
this cereal. It is probably the first which was known to the natives. Maize is 
quite modern amongst the Thonga though the time of its introduction is not 
known. See Part IV. 

is twofold: firstly to expel the unclean blood which follows the 
birth and which is a very great taboo and secondly to stimulate 
the production of the milk. This food is cooked in a special pot 
(shikhwebelo sha busahana) and is eaten not with the hands, as 
some particles of the unclean blood might enter it and cause the 
mother to become phthisic, but with a special spoon. 

Both the pot and the spoon will be fastened over the entrance 
of the hut, inside (shirangen sha nyangwa), at the end of this 
period of seclusion. 

A fowl is also killed during these first days, a hen if the child 
isa girl, a cock if it isa boy. Some medicinal powder is poured 
into the broth and the mother drinks it and eats part of the 
meat, the husband eating the remainder. This little luxury is 
indulged in as it helps the mother to recover her strength soon- 
er; she is attended to by her own mother who has been sum- 
moned as soon as the birth has been satisfactorily effected 
and who helps her to feed the child. 

As regards the child, the umbilical cord is anointed every day ; 
he begins to take the breast and drink the ‘‘milombyana”, the 
great medicine which we shall describe later on. 

During these days many taboos must be observed : 

The husband is not allowed to enter the hut under any pre- 
text ; this is not on account of his being unclean, quite the con- 
trary. A birth does not contaminate the father amongst the Ba- 
Thonga as it does in other tribes. He is not obliged to undergo 
any medication. His exclusion from the conjugal hut is due 
entirely to the fact that his wife is polluted by the blood of the 
lochia, and he would run the greatest danger to himself if he 
came near. 

Excluded also are all married people (bakhili) viz. all those 
who have regular sexual intercourse. Should they touch the child, 
he would die. If however a woman wishes very much to go and 
see the new-born, she must abstain from relations with her 
husband during two days. Then she can be admitted into the 
hut. On the other hand young girls are welcome in the hut, 
but they must not kiss the baby during these first days. “‘It is 
not yet firm; it is only water”, as they say; later on, when it 

begins to laugh and to play, they may kiss it. Even the father 
may do so then; when he comes back froma journey, he holds 
it in his arms and kisses it on the temple. Supposing that the 
umbilical cord has now fallen off normally, the confinement 
period will beatan end. This termination is marked by two rites: 

The mother of the delivered woman will have to smear with 
clay the floor of the hut. This is the great cleansing act which 
brings to an end a marginal period. It takes away all the dan- 
gerous blood and the husband as well as all the other people of 
the village will be allowed to enter the hut. 

The second act is the rite of the broken pot (ku pyibelela shiren- 
velen, viz. to make fire under the shirengele, the bit of broken 
pot used for the purpose). This is a medical treatment and a 
religious ceremony combined. It is performed by the family doc- 
tor on the threshold of the hut in the following way : he puts 
into this piece of broken pottery pieces of skin of all the beasts 
of the bush: antelopes, wild cats, elephants, hippopotami, rats, 
civet cats, hyenas, elands, snakes of dangerous kinds and roasts 
them till they burn. The smoke then rises and he exposes the 
child to it for a long time: the body, face, nose, mouth. The 
baby begins to cry; he sneezes, he coughs; it is just what is 
wanted ; then the doctor takes what remains of the pieces of 
skin, grinds them, makes a powder, mixes it with tihublu (1) 
erease of the year before last and consequently hard enough to 
make an ointment. With this ointment, he rubs the whole 
body of the child, especially the joints which he extends gently 
in order to assist the baby’s growth. 

All this fumigation and manipulation is intended to act as a: 
preventive. Having been so exposed to all the external dan- 
gers, dangers which are represented by the beasts of the bush, 
the child may go out of the hut. He is now able ‘‘to cross the 
foot prints of wild beasts” (tjemakanya mitila) without harm. 
Snakes will not bite him, at any rate their bite will not hurt 
him; lions will not kill him. The remainder of the powder is 

(1) The tihuhlu are the seeds of the nkuhlu tree known under the name of 
matureira. They are oleaginous and the fat (mafura) obtained from them is 
very much used for external applications amongst the Thonga. 

_ 
put into a little bit of reed closed at both ends which the mother 
has to carry with her during the whole nursing period in order 
to continue the treament. . 

This rite of the broken pot is also the great preventive remedy 
against the much dreaded ailment of babies, convulsions. If a 
child suffers from this, they will say: ‘‘a tlalile shirengelen, ” 
viz. “‘he did not find any help in the broken pot” and the parents 
will go to another doctor whose drugs are more powerful to 
have the child once more exposed to the smoke. It may even 
be that a grown-up man will undergo this treatment again, if he 
has been sick with convulsions, but, in this case, the broken pot 
with its pieces of skin is put on the head of the patient which has 
been first covered with a wisp of cuscuta (hare dja yendjeyendje). 
The great aim of all the medication of children by the ‘‘ mil- 
ombyana” is also to fight against convulsions, as weshall see. 
- The Thonga child is always received into this world with great 
joy by the whole family. If it is a girl, it means oxen to buy 
a wife later on for one of the sons; therefore it means increase 
not only to the wealth but to the number of the members of . 
the family. If it is a boy, there is no direct material enrich- 
ment, but the clan has been strengthened and the name of the 
father is glorified and perpetuated. In the case of the birth of a 
first born child (nwana wa matibula), a special ceremony is per- 
formed at the end of the first week. When the grandmother 
has smeared the hut, she goes home, summons all the female 
relatives, sometimes as many as ten or fifteen; they take with 
them food, ochre and fat prepared for this purpose. ‘Two or 
three men accompany them. They enter the village of the. 
child executing a special danse called khana, and singing the fol- 
lowing song (which is the proper song to glorify a first born): 

I celebrate my pot which has done ngelebendye... 

They compare the child with a pot of clay which has gone 
through the firing process. It has been tried as one always tries 
a pot by letting it fall to the ground; but it is not shattered 
because it had not cracked in the furnace, it has kept intact ! 

——_ — 
This is what is meant by the descriptive adverb ngelebendje. 

Then they smear the baby, the mother, the father, everybody 
in the village with ochre. It is a great feast. A goat will be 
killed, if possible, because the father and mother have ‘‘ found 
a village” (kuma muti) by the child, they have ‘‘ grown roots” 
(mila mitju). This isa law, but its omission is not taboo. When 
the grandparents do not perform this ceremony, it is an insult 
to the parents of the child but no evil consequence will follow. 

For any subsequent children, the feast will be reduced to the 
presentation by the grandmother of a basket of food to “‘ tlan- 
gela nwana”, viz to ‘ celebrate the child”. 

Il. The Nursing Period. 

e 

The little child has been taken out of the confi- 
nement hut (humesha busahanen). He is now 
allowed to go outside. The nursing period begins 
then and will last two and half or three years; but 
before we study the rites which mark it, let us con- 
sider the manner in which the baby is carried and 
his diet during this period. 

1) THe NTEHE. 

A little child is not carried by his mother in her 
arms, but in a softened skin which is called ntebhe. 
The preparation of the ntehe is subject to many 
prescribed customs : 

The first of these is this: the ntehe must not be 
looked for before the birth of the child or it would 
bring misfortune. This is a taboo which I might 

call a ‘‘taboo of prevision”. Some other 
taboos of this kind are met with in our tribe. 

For a first-born child, the skin must be 

South-African women with 
her child in the ntehe. 

provided by the maternal uncle. It is a rule, but this custom 
is not taboed (1). The father can also prepare it, if necessary. 

The ntehe must not be a sheep skin. That is taboo. Let 
them take the skin of a duiker (blue antelope), a of goat, of a 
mhala (impala). Sheep skins are only employed when three or 
four children have died in previous years and the mother is in 
the state of destitution called buwumba. (Chap. II.) 

The ntehe is arranged in such a way that the legs of the ani- 
mal are used as straps, the forelegs are tied around the neck, the 
hindlegs around the waist and the child is in that way held well 
against his mother’s shoulders. He can either show his head 
outside his ntehe or be entirely covered by it. This way of 
carrying babies is very convenient: mother and child get so 
accustomed to it that a baby, when you lift it, stretches out its 
legs at once at right angles with its body in order to sit on its 
mother’s back; and the mother can easily do all her work, even 
till her fields with the baby on her back in its ntehe! 

2) THE DIET DURING THE NURSING PERIOD. 

The child is nursed by the mother. He is allowed to take the 
breast at any time. There is nothing like a diet regulation 
amongst natives and they would deem it a cruelty to refuse the 
breast to a crying child. 

‘There are some customs relating to the milk. When a mother 
has to leave her child for a short time, she squeezes a few drops 
of her milk on his neck in order to prevent him feeling thirsty. 
When she has been absent for more than one day (it can only 
happen when the child is able to eat some solid food) and returns 
home, before nursing the child again, she heats a bit of broken 
pot in the fire and squeezes into it a little milk from each breast. 
The liquid evaporates. The reason of this custom is this: the 
mother’s milk has grown cold; it must be warmed again ; other- 

(1) Though the term taboo generally means a prohibition, I take the liberty 
of using it in a positive sense: A custom is taboo or is taboed when its 
transgression is a taboo. 

= 

wise the child will be constipated. This is a taboo (1). When 
a baby bites the teat, it is considered as naughtiness and the 
mother scratches its forehead as a punishment. 

Mothers not having enough milk use a kind of shrub called 
neta as a medecine. The shrub which is an Euphorbiacea con- 
tains milky sap. It is a treatment based on the principle : 
Similia similibus curantur. 

The Thonga believe that milk alone would never suffice to 
make a child grow : Nwana a kula In miri, the child grows by 
medicine, such is the adage which is universally met with. 
When you see a woman carrying a child on her back, you 
will notice hanging to the ntebe the reed (lihlanga) containing 
the black powder which protects against the dangers of the 
bush and a little calabash half filled with water. This water 
is not pure water, it is the medicine called milombyana. ‘This 
word is the plural and diminutive form of nombo which means 
baby’s ailment. There is a great mombo, convulsions, also 
called ti/o, heaven, because this complaint is put in a myste- 
rious relation with the influence of heaven (See Part VI). 
There is a small nombo; this is the infantile diarrhea which so 
often troubles the little ones; but both diseases are supposed to 
be caused by the myoka, the intestinal parasite, the worm or 
snake (nyoka means both) which is in every child and must 
always be combated because, if unchecked, it will pass 
from the bowels to the stomach; it will come and beat the 
fontanella (2) and will finally penetrate the chest. Then the 
little one will turn his eyes, be seized by convulsions and die. 
Happily there are some drugs which have a wonderful effect on: 
this dangerous guest ! One of my neighbours who was a convert 
in Rikatla gave me their names. The first is a very common 
Protacea (?) with large husks called the Dlanyoka, ‘‘ the one 

(1) Compare with the Zulu milk charms described by D. Kidd, Savage 
Childhood. Page 38. 

(2) Tjaba-tjaba, the fontanella, plays a great part in the diagnosis of child- 
ren’s doctors and they often cover it with black wax. When the child hiccoughs, 
his mother or somebody else will blow on the fontanella to prevent vomi- 
ting. This will ‘‘ make his heart stand” (yimisa mbilu) 

——~ — 
which kills worms Mixed with the roots of a Leguminacea 
called Nwamahlanga and with two other plants found near the 
sea, it forces the worm to keep quiet. These drugs are boiled, 
the decoction is carefully poured into a special little pot called 
hlembetwana ya milombyana which will be kept in the hut. 
Every morning the mother will warm the pot a little, pour 
some of its contents into a shell of sala and give the child a 
mouthful to drink, dip her finger into the ce. let two 
or three drops tall from it on the fontanella; then she spits on 
the lower part of the shell and presses it all along the sternum 
of the baby as far as the navel. This is said to ‘‘ nurse the 
child, to-make him -grow ”. Should he be sick, this treatment 
will be repeated many times a day. If he is well and goes 
about with his mother, she will pour the milombyana into the 
small calabash and give him a few sups from it from time to 
time. 

The child must never drink ordinary water, but only the 
milombyana decoction. It is a taboo. Should the mother tra- 
vel far from home and leave behind her the milombyana pot, 
she is allowed to add some water to the calabash, but she must 
always keep a little of the decoction in the calabash before doing 
so. The mother herself is not allowed to drink the water of 
another country. She must only drink water from home and, if 
she is forced to travel, she must take a little powder from the reed 
each time she drinks so that the child may become familiarised 
with that country (r). These laws must be kept during all the 
nursing period. | 

The child begins to eat solid food as soon as his teeth are 
cut and when he is able to take it with his own hands. 
But some people do not like to give it to him too soon, 
as they say his stools become fetid. When later on he is 

e 

(1) A similar custom is observed in the case of moving from one country 
to another. When a Ronga comes back from Kimberley having found a 
wife there, both bring with them a little of the earth of the place they are 
leaving and the woman must eat a little of it every day in her porridge in 
order to accustom herself: to her new abode. ‘This earth provides the tran- 
sition between the two domiciles ! 

— 

able to go outside and to take care of himself, then he can eat 
any ordinary food. 
If the mother dies during the nursing period the little one is 

THONGA CALABASHES 

The smallest are used for keeping medicinal powders (tinhungubane). 
The next in size (minkhubi) are employed for the milombyana. 
Those with the long handles are the mintcheko, used as bottles or 
for drinking, 

= %4 — 
almost sure to follow her. The baby is fed with goat’s or 
cows milk; but the natives do not know that they must add 
water to it; then sooner or later the child dies of enteritis. 

I have heard of some cases in which another woman has taken 
charge of the child, nursed him with her own milk and weaned 
him successfully ; her own child being older, she weaned him 
earlier than the usual time and nursed the other child in his 
place. These women were wives of the same husband at 
Libombo near Rikatla and the foster mother claimed compen- 
sation for her deed. Another wonderful case is the following : 
a woman died shortly after the birth of her boy called Mayim- 
bule ; the grandmother, by name Mishidohi, who had an adult 
son and had had no other child since prepared light beer and 
other appropriate food and succeeded in secreting milk in her 
own breast; so the child was saved ! 

3) Dentirion. 

As soon as the child has cut the two lower and upper inci- 
sors, the mother takes a white bead (tjambu) and ties it to one 
of the child’s hairs above the forehead. This white bead is 
said to help the other teeth to come out normally. If this 
precaution were not taken, the child would not become intelli- 
gent; he would shiver instead of smiling ; he would bring forward 
his lips and his tongue to prevent the air from getting into his 
mouth ! When all the teeth are duly cut, the bead is removed 
and thrown away talen, viz. on thetala. The talais the ash-heap, 
the place behind the hut on which everyone throws ashes and 
dirt. It plays a great part in the customs of the Thonga and 
other South African Bantu. 

The teeth (tinyo-menyo) of the children are called figurati- 
vely hobe. The hobe (pl. tibobe) means the grain of pounded 
maize which is white and very similar to a tooth. Hence the 
expression : “‘A humi hobe”, ‘“‘ he has got out a grain of 
maize », employed to indicate the cutting of the teeth. 

When a child cuts his upper teeth first, it is a bad omen. _ 

In the Northern clans and especially amongst the Ba-Pedi, it 
is a great taboo. At his death the child must be buried in wet 
soil. Amongst the Ba-Ronga the ill-omen is not considered so 
serious. 

Later on, when the child loses his first teeth, he must not 
let them fall out hap-hazard anywhere. He must take the 
fallen tooth, go to the ash-heap, put his finger into the hole and 
say : ‘¢ Kokwa, kokwa, ndji hwe hobe!” (Grandfather, grand- 
father, give me a grain of maize!) Then he throws the tooth 
over his shoulder on the ashes and goes home without looking 
backward. Should he look backward, his grandfather (the 
spirit of the departed ?) would not give him a new tooth. (1) 
This custom is no longer taboo and is disappearing. 

When a younger brother cuts his teeth, they are considered 
as pushing away or pulling the teeth of the elder, as the youn- 
ger brother comes into the world, as a rule, three years after 
ihe elder. 

As regards hair, the first cutting is accompanied by the 
following custom: the mother sprinkles some drops of her milk 
on the forehead and on the occiput of the child; then she cuts 
his hair and throws it away in the midst of thick grass. When 
she cuts her own hair, she always leaves a band on both sides 
of the head for the amusement of the child, till he is able to 
walk. 

These rites are not considered as very important. But there 
are three others which are most punctiliously observed and 
which divide the nursing period into three subperiods : the pre- 
sentation to the moon, after three months, the tying of the 
cotton string after one year, and the weaning ceremonies at the — 
close of the period. 

(1) Comparative Ethnography : I remember quite well that, when I was a 
boy, we were told in Neuchatel that we must not let a broken tooth get lost, 
lest it should be found by a dog and a dog’s tooth would grow in its stead ! 

4) THE PRESENTATION TO THE MOON (KU YANDLA). 

The apparition of the new moon is always received with 
cheers by the Ba-Ronga. The first person who sees it shouts : 
““Kengelekezeeeee !” and this exclamation is repeated from one 
village to another. Kenge is the descriptive adverb which means 
the form of the crescent of the moon. Each ‘‘ moon”, or month, 
is considered as being a new one, the old one having died, and 
there were special names for each month of the year (See 
Part VI). 

As soon as the mother of the child has resumed her menses 
(the menses are called tinwheti, months) and this happens as 
a-rule on the third month after the delivery amongst Thonga 
women, she takes her garments, washes them, puts on new 
clothing and then proceeds to the ceremony of the yandla. 
The child must be ‘‘given his month”. This is done in the 
following way. The day the new moon appears, the mother 
takes with her a torch or only a brand from the fire and the 
grandmother follows her carrying the child : both go to the 
ash-heap behind the hut. There the mother throws the burning 
stick towards the moon, the grandmother flings the child into 
me air saying: “This is your moon!” (hweti ya ku hi 
yoleyo) : then she puts the child on the ashes. The little one 
cries, rolls over in the dirt on the ash-heap. Then his mother 
snatches him up (wutla), nurses him and they go home. 

This ceremony is said to ‘‘ open the chest of the child” other- 
wise “his ears would die”, he would remain stupid. When 
a child is not intelligent, it is usual to say to him: You have 
not been shown your moon ! (1) 

Therefore the yand/la means a progress made by the child, 
the entrance into a new phase of his existence. The fact is 
emphasised by the three following changes which take place on 

(1) However the name of the child’s month is soon forgotten and is never 
afterwards recalled. This seems to show that the custom is dying out as well 
as the knowledge of the names of the various months. 

the day of the yandla: 1) Henceforth his father is allowed to 
take the child in his arms. Up to that day, this was taboo, as 
the child being continually with his mother was perhaps polluted 
by the dangerous blood following the birth; but now she 
has washed her clothing and has been purified by the reappear- 
ance of the menses; the danger no longer exists. 2) It is now 
permissible to push him gently by his elbows and 3) to sing 
him songs to console him (khongota) when he cries. This was 
taboo before the presentation to the moon. 

There isanother custom which seems to be confounded some- 
times with the yandla. It is also performed for small children 
and is called: kulakulisa. When a friend of the family passes 
through the village coming from afar, from Johannesburg for 
instance, he takes the new-born child in his arms, throws him 
up and says: « Kula-kula-kula, u ya tlhasa Johan». (Grow, grow, 
grow and reach Johannesburg.) This is a minor custom (nau 
nyana); it is more or less play and is not taboed as the yandla. 
After the yandla, anew therapeutic agent is added to the decoction 
of milombyana, the diyeketa. Ku biyeketa means: “‘to put inside 
an enclosure”. “Twice a month during the afternoon, when the 
moon is new and when it is full, the family doctor goes to the kraat 
of the baby, he lights a fire before the door of the hut, cooks 
his medicines with water in a pot till they boil. Then he draws 
the embers to one side of the pot and lays on them a big pill, 
a mbula. The mhula is made of fat from an ox paunch or from 
a goat’s paunch mixed with medicinal powder. Then he places 
a mat on end so as to make a small round enclosure : mother 
and baby enter it and he covers them with a piece of cotton 
cloth. They expose themselves to the steam which comes from 
the pot and to the smoke which emanates from the mhula. 
When both have copiously perspired and when the emanation 
has come to an end, the mother tells the doctor to uncover 
them and they emerge from the vapour bath. Then the doctor 
scarifies both of them with a razor on the forehead, on the ster- 

(1) Viz. to the end of the world... These clans are far away north out- 
side the Ronga country. 

a 

num, on the spine between the shoulders, on the elbow, on the 
wrist, on the knees and introduces a little of his medicinal pow- 
der into the small wounds. The pot with the hot decoction is 
then taken by the doctor behind the hut, the mother accompa- 
nying him. She pours a little of the water into his hands: he 
spits into it, uttering the sound tsu (which is the sacramental 
act in the ordinary worship) and throws it on the child. The 
mother rubs the whole body of the little one with it; in the 
meantime the doctor prays to his gods, viz. the spirits of his 
ancestors. Begining with the formula of invocation which doc- 
tors always use, he says: ‘‘Abusayi, akhwari! This is the 
child! May he grow! May he become a man by means of this 
medicine of mine! May his perspiration be good; may the 
impurity go away ; may it go to Shiburi, to Nkhabelane ! (1) | 
May the child play well, be like his companions. This is not 
my beginning! You have given me these drugs ; may they pro- 
tect him against disease so that nobody may say there is no 
power in them, etc.” After this prayer the doctor takes the little 
child and goes back to the central place of the village. The 
mother stays and washes her own body with the decoction, pray- 
ing also to her gods (but without the tsw, as this has been 
uttered by the ‘‘ master of the drugs”’). 

The treatment of the biyeketa is also called ‘‘ hungulo dja 
milombo”, ‘‘ the bath for infantile diseases ;” it is not a cura- 
tive, but a preventative; it aims at ascertaining if the child is 
all right. If he has bad stools (a nga tlambi psinene) the mother 
will perhaps remember that she has forgotten to enclose him 
and she will call the doctor in at once. Should he fall sick, the 
biyeketa will not be performed again but the milombyana admi- 
nistered more frequently. However it is of importance for the 
growth of the child. To neglect it is taboo! (1) 

(1) I hear the converts generally have not abandoned the biyeketa, but they 
do not allow the doctor to perform the sacrificial act and to pray to the spi- 
rits. Sam Ngwetsa, the children’s physician of Rikatla used to pray thus: ‘‘O 
Father of mercy! Ipray thee! Ido not pray the dead but Thee only who 
art in heaven! Grant us to see this child in good health, standing firm, this 
little lamb !” 

As for the scarifications, sometimes they are followed by a 
second vapour bath, as if the doctor wanted to make the medi- 
cine contained in the smoke penetrate through them into the 
body, in which case he will only ‘‘close” them later on by 
introducing a healing powder into them. Children cry gene- 
rally when they see the physician... They dread the pain 
of the scarification. When the mother goes to the doctor’s vil- 
lage, she takes with her the wood, the mat and a pot of beer or 
a fowl in payment. The physician’s charge for a biyeketa is 
six pence to one shilling or a hen or a pot of beer. 

5) [HE TYING OF THE COTTON STRING. 

When the child ‘‘tiyelanyana” viz. ‘‘ becomes a little firm”, 
the mother having to plough her fields and to cook the food 
begins to seat him on the sandy soil, after having made a kind 
of hole of about five inches in depth. We have seen Thonga ° 
babies sitting already at the age of two months. But this ‘‘dump- 
ing” hardly meets all the requirements and the mother looks 
fora girl to help her to take care of the baby (wa ku tlanga 
na ye, to play with him). She puts the child in the charge of 
an elder sister or a cousin; a girl of five to ten is quite strong 
enough for the purpose. 1 have often admired the patience of 
these miniature nurses, sometimes not very much bigger than 
the child they carry, with their very troublesome babies. 

But very soon the child begins to crawl (kasa) and this is the 
time when a very striking rite is performed. This rite seems, 
to be practised all over the tribe, but it has more importance in 
the Northern clans than amongst the Ba-Ronga. I shall here 
give the description of Viguet who belonged to the Tsungu clan 
and had emigrated to the Spelonken. My readers must forgive 
me if I cannot tell the story with all its details and if I am obli- 
ged to write some of them in latin. (1) 

(1) A more complete description of this rite.and of some others related to 
the taboos of the Thonga will be found in the Revue d’ eee et de 
Sociologie, Oct. 1910, Paris. 

These are the ipsissima verba of my informant: ‘‘ This is a great 
law amongst the Thonga. When a child begins to crawl, even 
before, the puri is tied round his waist. The puri is a cot- 
ton (1) string. Father and mother fix the day; ifthey forget to 
do so, their parents, (the grand-parents) will remind them of the 
law. They must have sexual intercourse, but in such a way that 
the mother will not become pregnant, s. n. i. (See Note 2). 
The mother will have to take in her hands “‘their filth” (thyaka 
ra bona) smear the string with it and tie it round the child. 
It will remain there till it falls into pieces. After that operation 
the child is “‘grown up” and three things are allowed which 
were taboo before : | 

1) The child, if he dies can be buried on the hill, in dry soil. 
Before the boha puri he would have been buried in wet soil, 
near the river, as it is customary with twins and children who 
have cut their upper teeth first. 

2) It can participate in the strange purification called h/amba 
ndjaka which takes place afterthedeath of one of the inhabitants 
of the village (See ceremonies of death). 

3) The parents can again have conjugal intercourse though 
they must avoid conception till the child is weaned. Before this 
ceremony it was absolutely prohibited, and should they have 
sinned in this respect and should the mother have conceived, 
they would be very guilty! It is a dangerous taboo! They 
would have “stolen” the child, stolen it from the law (yiba 
nawen). The child would not have “‘entered the law”. It would 
be useless to tie the string any more round him in order to 
repair the evil done. Should he live long, should he even 
become an old man, he will have to be buried in wet soil, other- 
wise the rain would be prevented from falling. 

Amongst the Maluleke and the Hlengwe such children are 
even burnt after their death. We shall speak later on about the 
mysterious relation established by the Thonga between those 
children, their burial and the rain. 

(1) There are plants of cotton probably subspontaneous in the Low Coun- 
try of the Transvaal and of Delagoa Bay. 

Amongst the Ba-Ronga‘ this rite is called boha nshale (to tie 
the cotton) and can be performed in the same way or even 
more simply by the father. (See my paper already quoted in 
the Revue d’Ethnographie et de Sociologie). Parents, when they 
have duly tied the string on the little one are said to have fuya 
nwana, viz. taken possession of the child. 

Amongst them again, another thing is then allowed which 
was taboo before: The child can be carried on the shoulders 
without ntehe by the arms alone (hi minkono). 

It is clear that the tying of the cotton string means the official 
aggregation of the child into the family, even into the human 
society. Before that, he was hardly considered as a human 
being, he was shilo (a thing), kbuna (an incomplete being). 
Now he is nkulu, a grown up child. (1) The expression fuya nwana 
confirms our explanation. ‘This custom is not a protective 
rite : the physician has nothing to do with it; it s really an 
act by which the new-born child becomes a regular member 
of the community. The severe interdiction of renewed con- 
ception before this rite has been accomplished is evidently 
dictated by the feeling that another child must not come before 
this one has been duly aggregated to the family. 

6. THE WEANING. 

A whole year, even more will elapse after the boba puri before 
the little one can be weaned. He will learn to speak, to walk . 
and it is only when his intelligence is sufficiently developed to 
allow him to run small errands that the date of the weaning 
will be fixed. When his parents can send him to the next hut 
to ask for snuff and see him coming back holding the tobacco, -- - 
they say : « Now the time has come! » 

The rite of weaning is accomplished in the following manner 
in Nondwane. (Mboza). : 

(1) This word khuna is also employed to designate boys who have not 
vet gone through the circumcision school. Bukbuna is the despicable state of 

First of all, the father looks for a young ntjopfa tree which 
has only one root. The ntjopfa is an anonacea bush, which 
colonists sometimes call the wild custard. (Its fruit is very 
much like custard fruit and it is said that the true cultivated 
custard can be grafted on it). The root of this tree is said to 
have the property of making people forget. The mother cooks 
a pot of Kafir corn in which she has put the medicine. This 
will help the child to forget the breast. But the great act is the 
hondlola which takes place under the direction of the physician. 
The mother pounds some mealies, pours water on them and 
adds some leaven; in this way she makes a little light beer 
(buputju). She keeps a little of the bran of the pounded 
mealies. The doctor comes, kills a chicken, sprinkles this bran 
with the blood and habla, viz. offers a regular sacrifice. He 
prays to the spirits of his own family and asks those of the 
child’s family to join with them in blessing the little one. The 
beak of the sacrificed hen, one of the claws and one of the 
feathers (psirungulo) will be tied together at the child’s neck. 
A mat is spread on the ground; the child is laid on it and 
greazed with oil and powder brought by the physician. Then 
he is smeared-and rubbed with the bran. The particles which 
fall on the mat are called timbore. They are gathered by the 
mother who makes a ball with them. In the meantime the 
father looks for the nest of a certain kind of large ant which is 
common in the bush. It lives in the earth but the opening of 
its hole is tolerably large. There the mother goes at sunset. 
She introduces the ball into the hole so that the ant will be 
obliged to take all the timbore into the nest. Then she returns 
home without looking behind her. It is taboo; should 
she transgress this rule, she would bring back disease to her 
child. 

This rite is the ordinary hondlola rite which is performed in 
this or in a similar way at the close of any serious disease as 
the conclusion of the treatment with the view of taking away 

uncircumcision. This state of a child before the ceremony of bohi puri is 
another kind of bukhuna. 

the defilement of disease. After having hondlola, the physician 
asks for the payment of his fees. For a child he will ask ten 
shillings or five coins of five hundred reis. (1) 

This hondlola reveals to us the true conception of the nursing 
period held by the natives. For them these three first years of 
the child’s life are a period of disease. So many perils threaten 
the little one’s well-being that he can hardly be considered 
healthy. He is during the whole time under the supervision 
of the physician who takes leave of the little patient on the day 
of weaning. 

This view of infancy accounts also for some other taboos. It 
is yila for instance to say of a child who is particularly fat : Wa 
tika, he is heavy : this would bring mishap to him. One must 
say : A kota ribye, he is like a stone! It is taboo also in 
Shiluvane to make use before a child of the word mfene, baboon. 
There is a disease which is called by that name and it would 
befall him. One must say: the thing which inhabits the 
hills, and so on... 

The very day of his weaning, the child must leave the village 
of his parents and go to stay with his grand-parents. A little 
mat, a few clothes have been prepared for him and the grand- 
mother comes to take him. If he is a first born, he must go 
to the parents of the mother; the second one will be received 
by the parents of the father. Sometimes father and mother 
accompany their offspring themselves, during the night, to faci- 
litate the separation. It is a sad day for them as well as for the 
child! The following day the parents go again to see how the 
little one has withstood their absence. They do not enter the 
village... They remain hidden in the little copse and look at 
their child through the branches! He must not see his mother, ~ 
otherwise he would cry... Touching scene indeed! 

Should the weaned child be obliged to stay with his parents, 

(1) In the Mpfumu clan the rite of weaning is somewhat different. 1 have 
publsihed in ,,Les Ba-Ronga“‘ a description of it given by Tobane. It seems 
that the element of the cotton string rite and of the broken pot rite are mixed 
with the proper weaning rite. I think that the description of Mboza is more 
trustworthy. 

i 
the mother will smear her breast with Jamaica pepper (biribiri) 
so that he may lose taste for the maternal milk as quickly as 
possible. 

The act of weaning is called Jumula. It comes from the verb 
Juma to bite, followed by the reversive suffix u/a which means 
to take away, to undo (like wn in undo). The mother as well 
as the child are said to have /umuka viz. to be in the state 
when weaning has been accomplished. This word is pronounced 
with a curious smile because the act of weaning is in direct 
relation with the sexual life. As we have seen, sexual inter- 
course is absolutely prohibited before the tying of the cotton 
string, viz. for one year after the birth. Afterwards it is allow- 
ed but the mother must not conceive another child before she 
has weaned the one she is nursing. The law is even more 
stringent : she must not conceive before her milk has entirely 
passed away (phya mabelen), after the weaning ceremony, 
because if she became pregnant, that would ‘‘cross the way of 
the weaned child” (tjemakanya nwana), ‘‘cut his road ” 
(tjemela), ‘‘go beforehand” (rangela); he would become thin, 
paralysed, with big holes below the shoulders. He must first 
be firm (tiyela), then a new pregnancy will not be able to 
cause him to suffer from dysentery or other ailments! 

Often parents do not observe this very hard law! If they 
see that conception has taken place before the child is weaned, 
they will hasten the ceremony. But they will be severely 
judged by the old people. Should the little one be sick, the 
husband will be scolded by the parents of the mother. They 
will say : ‘A djambeli nwana”, he has caused damage to the 
child! Ifa man forces his wife to transgress the law, she will 
run during the night to the hut of the father of her husband 
to tell him. In fact this is a very rare occurence. Children 
follow each other regularly at an interval of two and a half or 
three years and seldom is the law transgressed which says : A 
mother must nurse her child during three “‘ hoes”, viz. three 
ploughing seasons. 

~ CONCLUSION ON THE RITES OF INFANCY 

The rule that a mother ‘‘ must plough for her child three hoes” is 
excellent. It is no doubt a splendid preparation for the future life to 
have been fed during three years on mother’s milk. Will it be pos- 
sible to maintain that law under the new conditions of civilized life 
which are adopted more and more all through the tribes? Let us 
remark that this provision, though it has been inspired partly by the 
interest for the child itself, is dictated mainly by a superstition con- 
cerning the lochia secretion which is regarded as highly noxious and 
keeps the mother in an unclean state for a long time. This supersti- 
tion will not withstand the test of science and will pass away. On 
the other hand, polygamy has been invented and is flourishing partly 
on account of this law, A husband being separated from the wife 
who is nursing a child will have other women at his disposal. Poly- 
gamy is doomed to pass also. For both these reasons, it is to be 
feared that this healthy custom will not be maintained in the future. 
It isa pity and we ought to do our best to encourage its continuance. 

Many voung married natives leave their homes and go to Johannes- 
burg to the mines and stay there for one or two years as soon as they 
see their wife pregnant. This is certainly on account of the above 
rule ; but this desertion of the conjugal home is hardly to be approved. 

As regards the whole medical treatment which characterises this peri- 
od which ismore or less considered as a disease, it has no value at all. 
The big intestinal worm is, of course, merely a product of native ima- 
gination. Children sometimes suffer from lombrics, but not more than 
white children, Convulsions are frequent as a result of malaria and 
dysentery, and neither the ever present milombyana nor the bi-monthly 
biyekeia nor the powder of the reed can do anything to prevent them. 
The habit of always carrying water in the calabash and of never empty- 
ing it entirely is harmful. Dr Garin, our medical missionary, exa- 
mined some of these milombyana calabashes with the microscope and 
found them full of bacteria of all kinds. It is a splendid milieu de 
culture for them. However this milombyana custom is hard to era- 
dicate as this principle is deeply rooted in the Thonga mind : ‘* The 
child grows by means of medicine” and even Christian converts res- 
pect it. They will relinquish it when some clearer notion of medical 

a ae 

science has entered their heads — a time which is still remote, 
I fear! 

From the missionary point of view, let us remark the analogy bet- 
ween the rite of the broken pot and Christian baptism as administered 
to children by most of the churches. Natives readily admit a cere- 
mony of benediction for the little ones, be it proper baptism or pre- 
sentation with imposition of hands. But the heathen baptism is a 
baptism of smoke... and not of water — and it is in relation with mere 
external dangers while the Christian rite represents the purification of 
the soul from its sin and the new and pure life. Whatever may be 
the difference between the two customs, we can find in the animistic 
rite a point of analogy which can help us in the explanation of the 
spiritual sacrament and of its deep significance. 

Be CHILDHOOD 

The infant, shiputja (Ro.) shihlangi (Dj.) is on the way to 
become a boy, mufana. During the first years ot this period 
which extends from the third to the fourteenth year, he stays 
with his grand-parents. They do not give him much ‘‘ educa- 
tion”. He grows at Mother Nature’s good pleasure... And 
as Nature is not always synonimous with morality, he some- 
times commits bad actions. Sometimes also, fearing chastisement 
for a particularly wicked deed, he flees from the kraal of the 
grand-parents and goes home where the paternal hand will hold 
him a little more firmly. But the father does not bother much 
with these little boys and they enjoy an immense amount of 
liberty. These years are perhaps the happiest of their whole 
lite. They spend their time in the following occupations : herd- 
ing the goats, stealing, catching game, learning the science of 
the velt, playing. 

1) HERDING THE GOATS. 

Just as the Kaffir corn is the old Thonga cereal which is used 
alone in the rites, so the goat is the domestic animal par excel- 

 GG  

lence, no doubt the first which the tribe knew and that which 
is always employed in the sacrifices. Goats are very common; 
everybody possesses one or two. They are kept together in 
one of the villages and the sons of the master of the village or 
of the other proprietors must tend them. They stay with the 
goats (tjhama timbutin) till their tenth or eleventh year and 

BOYS HERDING GOATS ON THE SHILUVANE PLAIN 

(In the background, the Mamotswiri mountain). 

afterwards they are promoted to the care of the oxen, suppos- 
ing there are oxen in the village. 

The young goatherds having hardly anything on —a meagre 
belt of tails or bits of skin hanging from their loins... _some- 
times only in front, nothing behind... go to the velt playing 
on their little trumpets, made of a bone or a reed. They 
pass in the neighbourhood of the gardens. The goats look 
with one eye at the green mealies, the fresh leaves of 

the sweet potatoes which are not protected by stone walls 
{there is hardly a stone all over the Thonga country) nor 
by barbed wire fences. But the boys are on the watch and 
«cut the road » from the goats (tjemetela) to keep them away 
from the gardens. ‘They safely reach the little plain where 
nothing but hard Gramineae grow. There the boys begin to play 
having handed over the charge of the goats to the youngest of 
the party. The little chap gets tired of watching ; little by 
little the whole herd goes back to the prohibited garden and 
eats with avidity the savoury mealies stems! After a while, the 
boys discover that the goats are away. They run after them, 
bring them back. But the mistress of the garden passes near 
by, coming back from the well with her pitcher on her head. 
She sees the harm done, inspects the traces of the goats, knows 
by them which herd has plundered her field, uproots some of 
the spoiled stems and with great clamour goes to the village of 
the guilty boys and throws down the mealies right before the 
hut of the father. No compensation is claimed in such a case, 
generally, but the father will thrash the boys when they come 
back; or should there be recurrence of the offence, the husband 
of the owner of the garden will himself administer a correction 
to the careless goatherds. 

Boys herding the goats have certain customs. When one of 
them emits a certain incongruous noise from the rectum, the 
others say to him: ‘‘Fakisa!” He must answer: ‘‘Cita munya- 
kanya goben.” (I have let out my wind by the rectum). This 
formula, which is Zulu, is secret. If he does not know it, they 
beat him and make him look after the goats till the end of the 
day. Should another boy reveal the answer to the uninitiated, 
they will punish him in the-same way. 

2) STEALING. 

What were they doing when the goats escaped ? They had 
probably themselves succeeded in stealing some sweet potatoes 
and were roasting them on a little fire, well hidden in the 

velt. Or they had discovered in the bush a broken pot, an old 
mortar perforated, out of use, which some one had placed there 
to attract bees. And indeed there was honey inside. They had 
stolen it... Goatherds are regular thieves and known as such. 

The penalty in this as in the preceeding case is a good whip- 
ping without fine. ‘‘ Psa batjongwana! It is an action of 
little boys!” These minor thefts are not considered serious. 

3) CATCHING GAME. 

Hunger always keeps company with these boys who do not 
find enough to eat at home. ‘Truly they.ate to their heart's 
content (shura) yesterday evening, but this morning they had 
only a very scanty breakfast (fihluta). They try to satisfy 
their never satisfied appetite by catching game : not big game 
of course, as they have no real weapons, but birds, field-mice, 
eggs in the nests (the less fresh they are, the better, because 
there is more meat inside!) etc. To get birds they throw their 
sticks at them and are very clever at killing a partridge rising hea- 
vily from the grass; or they make traps with a flexible stick to 
which they tie a string with a bait. They bend the stick, set 
the trap by means of a little bit of wood and when the bird 
puts its beak into the bait, it is caught round the neck by the 
string. On the borders of the lake of Rikatla, boys used to 
catch even big birds with these traps. They lay many kinds 
of snares. One isa cage made of sticks of palm marrows which 
shuts automatically when a bird enters and eats the grain by 
which it has been attracted. They sometimes build two walls 
of sticks planted into the soil which converge to the same 
point where they reach a little door provided with the trap. 
Hares are sometimes caught in this way. They follow the 
wall and when they go through the door, they tread ona hur- 
dle which communicates with a bent rod: the rod springs back 
and the hare is caught. ~ 

4) LEARNING THE SCIENCE OF THE BUSH. 

This life in the velt, always in the midst of Na- 

ture, develops the power of observation amongst 
boys. They know everything in the bush: the 
big Psyche caterpillar (Eumeta cervina), which 
hangs from the nembe-nembe shrub 
(Cassia petersiana) like a little bundle 
of sticks and which they call maham- 
banindlwane, ‘‘the one which walks 
with his house”; the big Carabid 
beetle which appears with the first Pol G. fone 
rain, the Anthia alveolata, marked A itherea ee 
with large hollows on the elytra and a 
which is therefore named “ the son of the small pox”. Indeed 
I found in Rikatla a boy who knew that a certain white cocoon 
found on the branches of the nkanye tree (Scleryocarpa caffra) 
gives birth to the splendid green Queen Moth (Tropaea Mimo- 
sae). Having collected beetles and butterflies extensively for vears, 
I have had the opportunity of recognizing the power of obser- 
vation of these boys who were my best hunters! Of course they 
particularly appreciate things edible... especially the shitambela, 
a big Bupresta beetle which they roast and suck. 

Learning, as they do, the native names of all these creatures 
and their habits, they certainly acquire a great amount of know- 
ledge during these years. 

5) PLayinc. 

Sometimes the weather is bad; it rains or it is dreadfully hot. 
Then the goatherd suffers and his elder brother comfortably sit- 
ting in the hut trills this song: 

. Far away, there where he is, he weeps, the little boy, 
The keeper of the goats and of the calves! 

PG 

But the bad days are rare and the boys play more than they 
crv | 

The games of the Thonga are very numerous and are played 
either during the day or in the evening, especially when the moon 
shines. I shall here only take into consideration the boys’ 
games, the girls’ later on. 

Neulube yi da mimphobo. (The pig cats mealie cobs). One 
child plays the part of the pig; crawling along, covered with a 
mortar and a piece of cloth, he goes from one hut ‘to another 
followed by the throng of his friends who clap their hands and 
sing the foregoing words. People give food to the pig. It is 
received by its friends. When they have visited all the yards, 
they assemble on the central place of the village and eat the food 
together. Sometimes the pig suddenly turns back and attacks 
his followers who flee in terror. 

The game of asema. It is a disk of woven grass made by 
boys. They pick up sides. The nsema is set rolling by the 
one and the opponents must run towards it and pierce it with 
their sticks before it falls to the ground. It is not allowable to 
touch it when it has fallen (yi holile). This game goes on till 
the disk is quite spoilt (yi bolile). Then the two sides rush upon 
each other and exchange a sound cudgelling, after which they 
all go and bathe in the nearest pool without any ill-feeling. 

There is another game played with this disk, the game of the 
ndlopfa-ndlopfana (that is to say “the little elephant”). A boy 
makes a nsema, ties it to a string made of the fibres of certain - 
palm-trees and hides. His comrades try to pierce his grass disk. . 
But he watches. He has the right to chase them and to beat 
them with his stick. If the opponent succeeds in piercing the 
disk, in pulling it and tearing it from the string, ndlopfa-ndlop- 
fana is vanquished. 

The game of omane is very similar to the English hockey. 
The fruit of a palm tree, which is round and very hard, is used 
asa ball and hit with a stick into the opposite camp. If the 
homane falls between the two camps, the players rush upon it 
and, with their sticks, try to send it into their opponents’ quar- 
ters. 

: 
| 

In another boys’ game, the tlhuba holwane which is played 
mostly by moon light, they also take two sides. A stick is plan- 
ted by the one side in the earth and a piece of charcoal placed 
upon it. One of the opponents comes, hopping like a frog, 
takes out the stick and still hopping goes and plants it in ne 
own ground. If he reaches the goal without falling, he has 
won. An opponent will take his turn, pull out (tlhuba) the 
stick and bring it back to his partners. Evidently the Ronga 
children find this comical ! 

The game of the Jeetle (shifufunu) is played as follows: one 
child is the beetle, and, as a distinguishing mark, he puts a hand- 
kerchief round his head. A hole is dug in the sand; he enters 
it, nestles in it as do some insects until quite covered with 
earth. He remains there perfectly still whilst his comrades 
sing to him the following song : 

Beetle of mine... | 
I will marry thee... . Say ‘* yes” to your brother. 
For the price of an yen 

There is another game of the same kind : the honey pitcher 
is stirred (mbita ya bulombe ya reka-reka). The children in 
two rows face each other and clasp hands. One of them lays 
himself on their arms, and all swing him singing the same 
song. 

The boys also play the game of the man with the huge back who 
could not get out (shikulukukwana sha ku ka buhumo). They 
form a circle, one standing in the centre. He hunches his back 
and rushes forward, head foremost, trying to break the circle and 
to get out either between their legs or otherwise. If he does 
not succeed they give him this long and comical name: shikulu- 
kukwana sha ku ka buhumo. 

Quite a number of little melodies are sung by children to cer- 
tain animals. When we came back in the evening to the plain 
of Rikatla with our waggon drawn by oxen, all the goatherds 
used to meet us and to accompany us a long stretch of the road 
shouting in honour of the oxen : « Gweymanad, Gweyma- 

— Ce 

naé (1) » ! Girls joined in the demonstration, pointing out the 
strange machine to the babies carried on their shoulders (2). 

Nkwama wa ku. (Your purse)... When they eat green mealies, 
oneof the older goatherds gives to another some of the leaves 
covering the cob and tells him to go and throw them away. He 
refuses to do so. Then the elder one collects all these leaves, 
rolls them up in a ball and throws them to the boy who 
refused, saying to him: “‘ Your purse”. The boy answers : ‘‘It is 
not mine !” They all run away. He picks up the ball and tris 
to throw it to another saying the same thing. Should he miss 
him, they will mock him and say : ‘f You are not a man, you 
are but a little boy | 

Shifufunu sha paripari. Itis a kind of big Tenebrionida beetle 
which beats the ground with its abdomen (Psammodes Berto- 
loni). Groups of children, boys together or girls together, play 
two by two. One of the two lies down facing the ground and 
the other sits on his back, looking forward, to ward the head 
of the one who is prone. He sings while beating the other's 
back: **Shifufunu sha paripari ndjuluka hi yetlele!... Beetle turn 
up that we may lie down!” At once all the children who were 
sitting throw themselves down and the ones who were lying | 
down sit on their backs, and so on... 

To develop their courage, boys have another more dange- 
rous game ; it is fhe war on the wasps (mipfi). In their country 
there are big nasty yellow-brown hornets (a kind of Belonogaster) 
which build more or less circular nests attaining sometimes the 
sizeofa man’s head. On a certain day the boys decide to make 
war on these enemies. ‘They make shields with leaves of the 
nala palm tree which they plait together. 

They cut down branches which they wave to protect them- 
selves and one of them goes and strikes a heavy blow on the 
wasp’s nest! The irritated insects rush on their assailants and 
sting them. The boys try to kill the wasps with their sticks or 

(1) See for the tunes of these and other songs ‘‘ Les Chants et les Contes 
des Ba-Ronga”’ page 34 to 64. 

(2) It is customary to show to babies extraordinary and fearful sights, a 
white man passing, for instance, in order to ‘¢ open their minds. ” 

to crush them when they light on them. Sometimes, over- 
come by the pain, they run away; sometimes, resisting to the 
last, they kill and exterminate their winged enemies. 

Besides this there are also big battles between the shepherds of 
the different flocks. ‘The shepherds amuse themselves by taking 
one another’s cattle. Those who are the strongest bring the 
stolen herd triumphantly back to the neighbourhood of their 
village, but they would never let it enter the kraal. The van- 
quished call to their help their elder brothers who come to 
recover their property and, if they can, give the thieves a 
sound thrashing! 

Insults and fights are frequent between the clans. The boys 
of Mpfumu call out to those of Matolo: ‘‘ Forest gadders ! Eaters 
of snails and boas, of lizards and tortoises” (all of which 
are doubtful meats !) (In Ronga: Balala! badi ba tihumba ni 
tinhlaru ni makhwahle ni tinfutchu). Those of Matolo answer 
them: ‘“‘ Crowd of women that you are, clad in cotton material !” 
(Babasati ! matchimbamphela !), in reference to the fact that 
the inhabitants of Mpfumu, living near town, some time ago 
replaced the belt of skins worn by the savages by a piece of 
cotton tied to the waist and hanging down to the knee (ladula). 

The custom of frightening children with imaginary beasts is 
wide spread amongst Thonga. The black man is called Shingo- 
mu-Ngomu or else Shikunkununu and by this very expressive 
vocable they designate a mighty and huge being who walks, 
balancing his big body from right to left with a sound like 
ngomu-ngomu. The ogre is Shitukulumukumba a word originally 
from the Zulus and which corresponds to the Ronga Nuambilu- 
timhokora that is to say: ‘‘the one who has scales on the heart.” 
He eats human beings. These imaginary creatures play a large 
part in the native tales, especially the one who “ has scales on 
me heart”. He feeds on vermin, lice and big white beetle 
larvae which are his almonds. (1) 

When a child cries and cannot be comforted, somebody goes 
and hides behind the hut and slaps his neck saying: ‘‘ U-u-u 

(1) We shall give complete ogre tales in Part V. 

‘ 

while those remaining with the aggrieved little one say to him: 
‘* Be quiet, listen ! Shikukununu is coming ! ” 

There are also the timbelembele, a kind of terrible wasp which 
only exists in the imagination of children. When a boy does 
not dare to follow his companions up a tree on which they 
have climbed, they shout to him: ‘*‘ Make haste! Here are the 

BOYS TRYING TO PLAY BILLIARDS 

at Magudju’s, near Antioka Station. 

timbelembele coming to bite you !” And he isso frightened that 
he at once finds strength to climb. 

Thonga boys are so fond of games that they even try to imi- 
tate those of the Europeans. In the adjoining illustration, you 
see them disposed in two rows throwing some projectiles on 
the ground. I wondered what game this was and was informed 
that these boys, having seen Portuguese officials playing billiards 
at the camp, attempted to do the same and this was the result! 

Crore SIGE OF PUBERTY 

I. Circumcision rites. 

1) SPREAD AND ORIGIN OF CIRCUMCISION AMONGST THE 

THONGA. 

As he grows up, the Thonga boy leaves the flock of goats 
and is entrusted with the care of the big cattle, oxen and cows, 
when his father owns any. He becomes very proud and tyran- 
nises over his younger brothers ; he calls himself their ‘‘hosi’’, 
their chief and sends them to work for him; in Maputu, big 
boys went so far as to scorn water brought from the pool by 
wemen and only to use water specially fetched by small boys. 
If they grow so important in their own eyes, the reason is that 
some special rites are performed on them during this period, 
rites which are calculated to give them great self-confidence. 
Amongst these rites, some have a direct relation with the 
sexual life and some represent only the accession to virility. Let 
us begin with a study of the circumcision, then we shall take 
the other puberty rites and the habit of gangisa. 

In a great many Bantu tribes, the age of puberty is marked 
by ceremonies of initiation often accompanied by circumcision. 
There is little doubt that circumcision was practised all through 
the Thonga tribes in former times. It is still current with those 
Thonga who emigrated into the Transvaal and this is not a cus- 
tom borrowed from the Pedi clans which have all preserved cir- 
cumcision. ‘Though the Thonga often receive the initiation in 
Pedi schools, in the Spelonken, they possess their own schools 
for the Nkuna near Leydsdorp. They have a special word for. 
the physical operation, yimba, (in Ronga soka) which is used 
together with ngoma (Suto goma), the general name of all the 
customs connected with it. 

Amongst the Ba-Ronga, circumcision was abandoned more 
than a hundred years ago, before the arrival of Manukosi, and 
they were called Ba-butoya, the cowards, by other Northern 
clans who said they feared the sufferings of that cruel school. 
Mboza has seen some old Ronga men who had been circumei- 
sed probably at the begining of the XIX" Century. It is well 
known that somewhat later Chaka stopped the custom amongst 
the Zulu ; it did not fit in with the new military system inau- 
gurated by him. When the Ngoni general Manukosi invaded 
the plains of the Low Country, no wonder circumcision dis- 
appeared in those clans also. The constant fighting which 
prevailed in those troubled times did not allow men to stay 
three consecutive months in a circumcision lodge. It was feared 
also that circumcised boys would be killed by the ennemy, being 
unable to run away in case of an invasion. But old men in 
the Bilen country assert that the Ngoma isa very old custom of 
the Thonga and that it has long been practised by all their 
clans. 

Is it possible to ascertain its true origin ? My informants, 
Viguet especially, were convinced that the Ngoma was brought 
to the tribes of the Northern Transvaal by the Balemba and it 
is a historical fact that, as regards the Ba-Venda of that coun- 
try, the rite was adopted quite recently under the influence of 
the Malemba or Balemba. ‘These Balemba are a very curious 
people living amongst the Thonga and the Suto of the Zout- 
pansberg, just as the Jews amongst European nations, without 
chief, without national unity, but with characteristic customs to 
which they adhere from generation to generation... They’ 
resemble the Jews in the fact that they do not eat flesh unless 
all the blood has been first carefully drained away. They dread 
eating blood more than anything else and they shave at each 
new moon. They brought with them the metallurgic art and 
introduced domestic fowls into the country. All these facts 
tend to show that they have had intimate relations with Semitic 
populations and they themselves declare to have come from the 
North by sea and reached the coast after shipwreck. Now 
they practise circumcision with great assiduity and hold a spe-_ 

\ 

~~ 

cial position in the lodges of the Spelonken. They are called 
there the masters of the Ngoma. (1) Circumcision is wide-spread 
amongst Semitic nations and one might be tempted to infer from 
these remarks that the custom has been taught the Bantu by 
Semitic masters. It is certainly true as regards the Ba-Venda in 
the Spelonken. (2) 

In South Africa the ngoma is much older than the arrival of 
the Balemba (which can be fixed some time during the XVIII" 
century). That which has happened in Spelonken, through the 
agency of the Balemba during the XIX‘ century, may have 
taken place at some earlier date for other South African tribes 
andéthe Semitic origin of the Ngoma is quite possible, though 
there is no proof at present extant. 

2) GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CIRCUMCISION RITES. 

I am treating here of the rites as they are met with amongst 
the Thonga of Spelonken especially ; my informants on this 
point have been the old Viguet, who was initiated some 50 
years ago, and Valdo, a much younger man, who went through 
the rites 20 years ago ; both are from Spelonken. There 
Thonga and Bvesha (Suto) candidates enter the same lodges. 
A boy named Pikinini revealed to me the secret formulae as they 
are recited amongst the Nkuna (Leydsdorp). The rites certainly 
vary amongst the tribes, but there is a general resemblance 
between them all. 

I was never fortunate enough to penetrate into a lodge, 
as it is a great taboo. I tried once to obtain admittance... 
in vain, near Shiluvane. But the rites have been described to 

(1) I note in a paper by the Rev. Norton about puberty rites of the Basuto 
(S. A. Journal of Science, March 1910) that, if a Bushman is in a lodge, he 
takes precedence amongst the Suto and that there circumcision is derived from 
the Bushmen just as it is from the Malemba in the Zoutpansberg. 

(2) See my paper on the ‘* Balemba of the Zoutpansberg ” Folklore, Sept. 
1908 and also *‘Zidji ”, my South-African novel. Chap. IT. (Saint-Blaise, Foyer 
Solidariste). 

= 7 — 
me with such a wealth of details that I seemed to have lived 
for three months with the candidates ! 

A French anthropologist, Mr A van Gennep, has published 
I;tely a book on “‘ Les Rites de Passage ” (Paris. Nourry 1909) 
which throws very much light on these mysterious customs. He 
shows that a great number of rites have been inspired by the 
idea of passage from one place to another, and that all the rites 
belonging to this category present the same general features : 
in the first place the separation from the old state of things is 
symbolised by certain rites which he calls separation rites ; then 
begins a period of margin, where the individual or the group 
concerned is secluded from society and submitted to a number 
of taboos or rites ; thirdly, at the close of this period, the per- 
sons who have been tabooed are again received into the com- 
munity as regular members by the aggregation rites. This 
schematism applies perfectly to the Circumcision rites which 
are a Rite of Passage par excellence, and I shall try now to 
explain them briefly in their natural sequence. For more 
details see Zidji, a South African novel which I have published 
in 1910 (Foyer solidariste, Saint-Blaise Switzerland) and where 
a more elaborate description wili be found. 

3) THE THREE SERIES OF RITES OF THE CIRCUMCISION. 

a) Separation rites. 

The circumcision school (Ngoma) is held every fourth or fifth 
year and all the boys from ten to sixteen years are sent to it by 
their parents. Some may escape, but if they happen to be at 
hand on the next occasion, they will be incorporated by con- 
sent or by force. Even an adult member of the tribe can be 
compelled to go through the initiation, if he is found in the 
country being uncircumcised. The time of the year chosen for 
the opening of the school is a month during which the morning 
star appears, in winter. Ngongomela, Venus, is the herald of the 
day. She precedes the sun, so she must lead the boys to their 
new life, from darkness to the light! (Valdo) 

7 —s 

One day all the candidates are gathered in the capital: this 
school is the business of the chief and has been arranged by the 
council of the headmen (tinduna) over which he presides ; he 
has the supervision of it and. will receive the fees from the ini- 
tiated later on. Boys circumcised four years ago must also 
attend the whole school as shepherds (barisi, psitjiba), namely 
as servants of the men and watchers over the candidates. They 
have already partly built the lodge outside the village, in a 
remote place, not too far however, because the women must 
bring each day food for all the inmates of the ‘‘ vard of mys- 
feries ”’. 

After having slept in the capital, early in the morning, when 
Ngongomela rises in the East, the band of the uncircumcised 
goes out from the inhabited world to the wilderness, to the 
lodge. This is the first separation rite. And here is the second : 
they find on the road a fire made of very scented wood ; when 
they smell the smoke, they must jump over it. This rite 1s 
called : Tlula ritsa, to jump over the firebrand. 

Later on when still at some distance from the newly built 
lodge, they hear a great noise, a song accompanied with the 
beating of drums and blowing of antelope horns. . They must 
not understand the meaning of the words which are sung by 
the host of shepherds and the men, as it would frighten them 
too much: 

The little boy cries! bird of the winter ! 

Here they are stopped. Eight of them are chosen and told to 
vo forward. Each one is given an assagai and they are pushed 
between the singers who hold sticks and are facing each other 
in two rows leaving a passage between them. They thus run the 
gauntlet and receive a good whipping ; (the flagellation is often 
alsoa separation rite); having gone through this unexpected 
experience they are caught at the other end by four men and 
deprived of all their clothing. Their hair is also cut, (they must 
evidently sever from all their past), and they are brought to 
eight stones and seated on them. These eight stones are not 

far from the entrance of the yard, in a spot called ‘* the place of 
the crocodile”. Opposite them are eight other stones on which 
eight men are sitting. These men are called Nyahambe, the Lion- 
men. They have a fearful appearance, their heads being cover- 
red with lion’s manes. As soon as the boy is seated on the stone 
tacing the Lion-man, he receives a severe blow from behind : 
he turns his head to see who struck him and sees one of the 
shepherds laughing at him. ‘The operator seizes his opportu- 
nity. While the attention of the boy is diverted, he seizes the 
foreskin and cuts it in two movements: first the upper part 
(this is quickly done and does not cause very much pain), secon- 
dly the lower part and the string, a longer and much more 
painful operation. The surgeons now use an ordinary Euro- 
pean knife ; formerly they had only native made knives. Often 
the boy falls down unconscious; then they throw a jar of cold 
water over him. All the circumcised receive rings of woven, 
very soft grass which they put on their wound, tying them 
round the loins with a string. Formerly they did not anoint 
the sore with medicine : boys used only to drink a decoction 
which is said to stop hemorrhage ; now they use paraffin exter- 
mally 

The boy has crossed (wela, like a boat across a river), a tech- 
nical expression which shows clearly the character of this rite 
of passage. He is introduced into the lodge. 

The ablation of the foreskin, though it cannot have the high 
spiritual meaning of the Jewish circumcision, seems to me also 
distinctly a separation rite, this part of the body representing 
the ancient despicable childish life from which the initiated 
emerges to-day. 

b) Marginal rites. 

The newly circumcised boy is now to be three months seclu- 
ded from society in the ‘ yard of mysteries ” called sungi. Let 
us first describe this lodge and we shall see what his occupations 
will be during this time of trial. 

I. The Sungi. 

(See the adjoining schematic drawing of the lodge). 

The whole, sungi is surrounded by a high fence of thorny 
branches. This is a sign that all that goes on inside must be 
kept secret. No one who is not initiated can be allowed to see 
it, especially women. This fence is prolonged at the entrance 
so as to make a long avenue by which one penetrates into the 
yard. Then the way of access continues between twelve poles 
arranged in pairs (2). The inmates alone have the right to 
follow the road between the poles. Circumcised visitors (uncir- 
cumcised would not be admitted) turn round them and cross the 
road five times so as to reach the men’s entrance at the end (3), 
and not the candidate’s gate, which is on the opposite side (4). 
Further on is the central court of the sungi with the long fire- 
place built with stones and called the Elephant (5) round which 
the boys must sit (8), warming their right hip at the fire. The 
uterine nephew of the chief, the son of his sister, who takes pre- 
cedence in all the rites, who is the first to be circumcised, 
sits on a special stone and the others behind him. He is called 
the Hwatye. Near the fireside are the tables made of hur- 
dles of reeds on which the porridge of the boys is served 
every day (15). The central court is occupied on both sides by 
two square sheds hastily and roughly built, the one on the right (7) 
being the hut of the shepherds and of the men, the one on the 
left (6) the hut of the circumcised. The soil is not smeared in 
those houses. Some men also sleep in separate huts behind (11). 
It is behind the Elephant that the big Mulagaru pole will be 
raised at the close of the school (9). Further at the back of the 
sungi is the place of the formulae where the boys are taught 
(12). A tree sometimes grows in the middle and the instructor 
climbs on it to impart his teaching (10)! 

‘Thave drawn this schematic representation of the sungi with 
the help of Viguet. Having never seen it with my own eyes, I 
cannot guarantee that it does not omit many details... But it is 
correct as a whole. 

The inmates of the lodge are of three categories: 1. the 

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Watch them when they eat, etc. 3. The grown up men 
who have volunteered to come and stay during the whole 
school in the sungi. They eat the flesh of the animals killed 
by the bukwera, carve pestles, weave baskets, enjoy themselves 
and form the council which looks after the well-being of the 
school. Amongst them are the so called father and mother of 
the Ngoma, two men who are specially in charge of the school. 
The ‘‘ father * has a difficult task. He must keep discipline, 
administer punishment, etc. These two men are paid, as are 
the Lion-men and the Manyabe. The Manyabe is the great 
doctor of the school. He has poured his charms on the fence 
to protect the lodge against wizards. He does not stay in the 
sungi but can be called at any time to administer medicine to 
the boys who are unwell or whose wounds do not heal pro- 
perly. 

II. The sexual and language taboos of the sungi. 

The whole sungi is taboo to every uninitiated person espe- 
cially to women. A woman who has seen the ‘ shondo”, 
viz. the leaves which the circumcised put over their wound 
and which form their only clothing, must be killed. But taboos 
are plentiful for everybody. The sexual ones are most notewor- 
thy. Sexual intercourse is strongly prohibited to all inmates, 
men as well as shepherds; breaking this law would kill the cir- 
cumcised. Therefore the men must not go home, at least as 
seldom as possible, during these three months. Married people 
in the village may have sexual relations; but let there be no 
noise, no quarrels between jealous co-wives ; because, if they 
insult each other and if this is known in the sungi, the shepherds 
will come one evening and plunder that village. Strange to say, 
in the meantime obscene language is permitted and even 
recommended — a contrast which we shall often meet with 
during the marginal periods. Some of the formulae contain 
expressions which are taboo at other times ; when the wo- 
men bring the food to the sungi, the shepherds who receive 
it from their hands are allowed to address them with as many 
unchaste words as they like. The mothers themselves have the 

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right of singing obscene songs when they pound the mealies 
for. the sungi. a 

As regards language there are also special expressions used 
during the school which are either archaic or foreign ;* for 
instance, all the orders are given in a tongue which is neither 
Thonga nor Suto: Tshai goma, Go to the table ; Thari, Eat ; 
Khedi, Smear with white clay, etc. Often actions are not desig- 
nated by the ordinary word but by extraordinary terms. For 
instance, the daily smearing of the bodies with clay is called : 
‘to eat sheep’s fat ”. To put on the leaves of the shondlo is 
“* to eat sheep’s flesh ”. To be beaten with the mbuti sticksua™ 
‘* to drink goat’s milk ”. Evidently the aim of this terminology” 
is to increase the impression of mystery which the rites must 
convey to the uninitiated. 

As regards the rites of the marginal period, they are calcula- 
ted to give the candidates the impression that they are new men, 
and that they must prove it in submitting manfully to all the 
trials of this hard and sometimes cruel initiation. 

Every morning they smear their bodies with white clay. 
They are shining. They have abandoned the darkness of 
childhood. When they have eaten their food they must 
pick up the crumbs which fall on the ground and throw 
them away in the pit near the fence, shouting some name in 
disdain, in an insulting manner, the name of an uncircumci- 
sed, of a shuburu (a term of disdain applied to boys before 
they pass through the school). This makes them realise their 
new position. | 

But the Ngoma ‘‘is the shield of buffalo’s hide! It is the cro= 
codile which bites! ” The candidates must accept all the hard- 
ships of the initiation. They are taught to suffer. 

Ill. The trials. 

‘ 

There are six main trials: blows, cold, thirst, unsavoury 
food, punishment, death. 

Blows. On the lightest pretext, they are severely beaten by 
the shepherds at the order of the men of the sungi: Every 
day they must sit round the Elephant and, holding a stick in 

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their hands, lunge at it as if piercing it for more that an hour, 
They sing the following words . 

Elephant keep still ! 

Men and shepherds dance round them singing : 
The black cow kicks! It kicks against the jug of the baboon ! 

They themselves represent the black cow which the boys try 
to milk and they kick the boys! In fact during this daily exercise 
round the Elephant — a rite which is considered as one of the 
most important of the Ngoma —-, they beat the naked shoulders 
of the initiated as much as they like, not so as to bruise them 
however, but quite enough to cause them pain. 

When the boys do not eat quickly enough, they are beaten. 
Sometimes they are sent to catch certain birds of the size of = 
sparrows which they must wrap in leaves tying them in such 
a clever way that the men will be unable to untie them 
Should one of the men succeed in undoing the knots, the boy 
will get a good thrashing during the meal, and so on. 

The unhappy boys who are ill and cannot take part in the 
hunting trips must be on their guard : when their comrades 
come back, much excited, they fall upon them with sticks and 
are allowed to beat them for not having come to help them. 

Cold. The months of June to August are the coldest of the 
South-African winter and, during the night, the temperature 
falls to 41 Fah., even lower. Boys lie naked in their Sheds 
heads turned towards the central court, and suffer bitterly from 
the cold. They are allowed to light fires in the court, but not 
near their feet and it is said that one of the greatest trials of the 
Ngoma is this: the head is warm and the feet cold. Moreover 
they must always lie on their backs. Shepherds watch during 
the night and beat them if they lie on the side. No blanket is 
allowed, only light grass covers. The soil, not being smeared, 
swarms with a kind of white worm which bite severely during 
the night. Ashes are poured on the ground to kill them but 

this is of but little use. In certain lodges, when there is a pool 
in the neighbourhood, boys are led early in the morning into 
the water and must remain in it a long time till the sun 
appears. ‘The shepherds prevent them coming out. This is 
also said to help the wound to heal. (Valdo). 

Thirst. It is absolutely prohibited to drink a drop of water 
during the whole initiation, and this taboo is said to be very 
painful. Boys sometimes succeed, during their hunting trips, 
in enticing their shepherds in one direction and in the mean- 
time some of them escape and go to the river to drink. They 
will be severely punished if caught ! 

Unsavoury food. The law is that women, the mothers of 
the circumcised, must bring plenty of porridge, twice as much 
as‘is required for the boys. Should one of them fail to do it, 
she will be punished at a given time. They deposit their pots 
at some distance, so that they cannot catch any glimpse of the 
Ngoma, and shout : ‘‘ Ha tsoo! We are burning”. ‘They mean: 
‘“* Our heads are sore from having carried our pots such a long 
way.” Shepherds run to meet them and answer with any 
amount of jokes of rather dubious taste: ‘* We know what is 
burning with you, etc.” Is it not the rule of the Ngoma ? The 
shepherds bring back with them the empty pots of yesterday 
which the women take back to their homes. Should one of 
them have provided too little food, her pot will be filled with 
long grass and when she goes home with her comrades, they 
will make fun of her. If she does not learn to do better, the 
“mother of the Ngoma” will organise a punitive expedition in 
her village, kill goats and fowls and thus make her obey. 

All the food is placed on the reed tables and must be eaten by 
the boys without any seasoning. Should the tender mothers 
have brought some ground nut sauce, it will be confiscated and 
eaten by the men. When hearing the order: ‘‘ Tshai goma ”, the 
candidates must rush to the tables, kneel down, and, at the word 
“Thari’’, seize the food with both hands and swallow it as quickly 
as possible. If they delay, they are beaten by the shepherds 
who superintend the meal. When one batch of boys have finis- 
hed, they must rush to another table where other boys are still 

S_ 

struggling with their heap of porridge and help them to finish 
their portions. Owing to this emulation, the meal does not 
- last long. Sometimes, when game has been plentiful, one of 
the men comes and squeezes the half digested grass found in 
the bowels of an antelope over the porridge, saying to the 
boys : ‘* You must have something of the results of your hunting 
too!” 

This diet nauseates them at first. They sometimes vomit 
right on the table. Never mind! Every particle of the porridge 
must be eaten all the same. When they are accustomed to 
the diet, they grow fat, and it is wonderful how their physical 
appearance sometimes improves during the few months. 

Punishments. Blows are punishments for minor offences. 
Should some more serious fault have been committed, the 
father of the circumcision condemns the boy to ‘‘ drink goat’s 
milk ”. There is a shrub called ‘‘ mbuti ”; the same word 
also means goat. Three sticks of it are taken. The boy must 
present his hands, put them against each other and separate 
the fingers. The sticks are introduced between the fingers and 
a strong man, taking both ends of the sticks in his hands, 
presses them together and lifts the poor boy, squeezing and 
half crushing his fingers. 

In former times, the boys who had tried to escape or who 
had revealed the secrets of the sungi to women, or to the unini- 
tiated, were hanged on the last day of the school and burnt to 
ashes, together with all the contents of the lodge. 

Death. The circumcised must also be prepared to die if 
their wound does not heal properly and if the Manyabe’s medi- 
cine is not successful. Many of them have died indeed. It is 
absolutely prohibited to mourn over them. ‘The mother of the 
deceased is informed of his death by a notch cut in the edge 
of the pot in which she brings the food. She must not cry. 
The corpse is buried in a wet place, in a grave dug with sticks, 
as it would make people suspicious if the shepherds were to go 
to the village and take spades for that work. 

f 

IV. The teaching of formulae. 

So the boys are taught endurance, obedience, manliness... But 
there is another side to the training of the Ngoma. It has been 
compared sometimes to a school and it is true that there is 
some intellectual learning in it, though very scanty and insi- 
gnificant. Every morning the candidates are brought together to 
the place of the formulae (nau-milau, law, prescription). There 
is a tree in the midst of this square. A special instructor, 
whose father has already exercised this function, climbs on the 
tree-and begins to teach the boys. He says : 

Little boys, do vou lear me, ‘1 say... 

Then come the words of the secret formulae which are a great 
taboo and which they must learn by heart, sentence after sen- 
tence. I have collected some of them, Thonga and Pedi. Here 
I will only reproduce the Thonga. They are partly incom- 
prehensible, even to the initiated. ‘The first one is called Ma- 
nhengwana. It is the name of a bird. 

Masumanyana a nga suma... 

The little bird has sung. 

A nga suma tinghala ta timhingo... 

It has stirred the handles of the lances which are like lions... 
Tentsha ku ya tlhabana... 

They pierce each other... 

Manhengu. Manhengu bentshile, Bentsha tirula... 

dhe bird.. i r 
Fula ngoma... Mukhubela wa hantana... : 
Forged at the lodge. ? 

Milumbyana saben. Sabe khulu ra barimi. 
? in the sand. The great sand of the ploughmen. 
Ntje-ntje bya ngulube... Bya shinana sha rila... 
The running of the wild pig... Of the frog which cries... 
Byi longolokile byi ya kamba ntjonga wa mbila. 
They are walking in good order, they go to visit the mysterious hut. 
Ba kuma byi ri busonga, songa bya timhiri ni timhamba. . 
They find it like the twisted rings of the adder. 

These words, so far as they have a sense, seem to extol the 
Ngoma and its lodge. These assagais, which are like lions 
which are going to tear each other, represent the school which 

—ee — 

is starting, awakened by the bird of the winter. The running 
of the wild pig is the life of the boy who was idling on the 
spot till the initiation makes a man of him. The croaking of 
the frog (shinana) is his childish stupidity. The shinana is a 
strange animal indeed, a small Batracian which is able, when 
attacked, to swell considerably: then it becomes so hard that its 
enemies, even acock witha sharp beak, cannot pierce it. The 
circumcised, before the initiation, was a shinana before it swell- 
ed up. By the trials of the Ngoma, he will become like this 
frog, an invulnerable and untamable adversary. In the last sen- 
tences we see the bukwera, the troup of the circumcised, pene- 
trating into the mysterious hut, into the Ngoma, and wonder- 
ing at the extraordinary wisdom which is found there. The 
laws, rites and trials are like the inextricable intermingling of 

many snakes. 
The sungi is then celebrated again in the following sen- 

TEMees ; 

AAV TL 1 Sunes 

Sav, it 15 the lodge: 

Hansi ka rona, 1 tleketleka. 

On the ground, there is a disgusting smell, 
Henhla ka rona i tlulawula... 

On the roof, it is elevated and beautiful... 
Makomole i mhandje... 

Its upholders are poles... 

Tinga hi hala 1djibalelo... 

Long rods unite the poles... ete. 

Nwatjabatjabane a nga tjabatjaba... 

The heavy body which goes on heavily... 

Shikari ka mipungu ni mihlanga... 

Through the drifts and the reeds... 

Masheka ya le ndjako, marumbu a wela ndjen. 

Which must be cut open from the behind, because its bowels fall down 
inside its body. 

I ngwenya. 

It is the crocodile. 

Shiborekeketa mahlaluku makambaku... 

The beast which opens the road to the drifts for the elephants. . 
A tahi ku nwa ni ku hlamba... 

It goes to drink and to bathe... 

A mi ri mfubu ? 

Do you not say, it is the hippopotamus ? 

— “7 — 

Nwatjabatjabane makandjya ka ku oma... 

The beast whichmarches slowly on the dry ground... 

Ku sa ku baleka nhlangasi, 

And a marsh is formed by its heavy footsteps, 

Ndlopfu, shibangamaphesa a nga riphembe, hi yona... 

It is the elephant the one who provides clothing (by the sale of its 
teeth) the one who brings wealth, it is he | 

These formulae are so characteristic that they provide the 
principal pass words by which the circumcised recognize each 

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Phot, A. Borel 
Cutting open a crocodile near the Nkomati river. 

other. Should I want to know if a man is initiated, I should 
say to him: ‘‘ Mashindla bya ndjako, the beast which must be 
opened from behind.” If he answers at once: ‘‘ Ngwenya, the 
crocodile ”, I know that he has been circuincised. 

a ae 

There are also some obscene formulae which refer to some 
diseases of women, of which never a word is told outside the 
Ngoma. 

When the instructor has finished, he lifts his stick with a cer- 
tain gesture and all the boys shout at once : ‘* Zithari!”’ Viguet 
told me that that exclamation meant : ‘‘ They are as long as 
that ” and that it was an obscene allusion. The old men take 
great delight in being flattered and, if the boys want to add to 
their pleasure, they will say: ‘‘ When you spit, the wind from 
vour mouth would kill enemies at the other end of the country!” 

As is plain from these quotations, the teaching of the Ngoma 
is quite trivial and the formulae are rather a collection of eso- 
teric words than a proper intellectual training. 

The songs of the Ngoma have no richer meaning. We have 
seen already the song of the Elephant and of the Winter-bird... 
Every morning, just after they wake, the circumcised sing for a 
long time the following words, which they repeat also when 
coming back from hunting trips. 

Sing your song, bird of the morn 
Mafé-c¢-¢-€ ! 

The melody is rude, wild but very impressive. Mafé-é-é-é 
must mean : ‘6 We are the initiated, we are the men! ” 

Hunting. Hunting is the only useful thing taught in the 
Ngoma. Boys go almost every day to the velt and become 
very clever in catching game. They beat the bush, sometimes 
climb hills and chase all the game to the top killing it there 
with their assagais, knobkerries, etc. Near Shiluvane they 
even attack the Mamotsuiri mountain once during their three 
months. All the men of the country are summoned to take 
part in the big expedition which requires real strategic skill. 

To sum up the rites of this marginal period of the Circum- 
cision school, this is the program of a day in the sungi : The 
shepherds awaken the boys very early. They sing for one 
hour the Winter-bird. Then they learn the formulae for one 
or two hours. Afterwards the order: ‘‘Tshayi goma ” is heard 
and they throw away the leaves of yesterday and put on a new 

- 

“shondlo’. ‘They go and sit round the elephant and stab him 
for two hours till acry is heard: the women bringing the food 
announce that they have come. ‘The boys eat for the first time 
and sing again to help digestion. At the command: “ Khedi 
goma ”, they smear their body with white clay. The sun is 
already high in the sky when they start for their hunting trip. 
They come back at sunset, eat for the second time, stab the 
Elephant again for one hour and at the command ‘‘ Khwerere, 
Mayise, Mafefo”, they go to their bed on the dirty soil of 
their hut. 

c) Aggregation Rites. 

I. The Mulagaru. 

The first aggregation rite already takes place many days before 
the conclusion of the school. One morning, very early, the men 
and the shepherds raise a very big pole in the yard of the for- 
mulae and fix it into a hole. At its extremity is a man, half 
hidden in white hair. The boys are awakened and led by the 
shepherds into the yard. They are told to lie down on their 
backs, all their heads turned towards the pole which is called 
mulagaru, and to say: ‘*‘Good morning grandfather”. Thena 
voice comes from the top of the pole and says: “‘I greet you, my 
grandchildren”. ‘They must remain a long time in that position 
in the biting cold of the morning, talking with the ‘‘ grand- 
father”. ‘They are allowed even to complain of their sufferings 
and to ask permission to return home. But they still have to 
stay some days in the sungi. Every morning this ceremony 
will be repeated. It clearly means that the boys are being put 
into communication with the ancestor who represents the clan, 
that they begin to be admitted to the adult life of the tribe. 

A few days later, the great doctor administers to the boys a 
medicine of purification which they drink in a mouthful of beer. 
This rite seems to be rather a separation than an aggregation 
tite. We often see, when a marginal period comes to its end, 
separation rites taking place. ‘They mean separation from the 
marginal period itself which also involved a kind of pollution 

which must be removed. Such is probably the aim of the 
medicine given by the Manyabe. On the other hand, this is 
also an aggregation rite, as the boys are allowed to drink again 
for the first time. 

Il. The Mayiwayiwane dance. 

The second true aggregation rite is called the Mayiwayiwane 
dance. The Mayiwayitvane are a sort of masks which cover the 
whole of the upper part of the 
body, a kind of armour made 
up of woven palm leaves ; on 
the head, it is like a very high 
helmet protruding in front like 
a beak. The boys make these 
masks with the help of the shep- 
herds and of the men and, under 
this disguise, must perform a 
special dance with high jumps 
before the women summoned 
on a certain day to attend. 
The boys must not be recogniz- 
ed. Should one of them let the 
mask fall, it would be a great 
misfortune, because women must 

A Mayiwayiwane mask. not know who is dancing. Mo- 
reover the initiated must appear 
before them as a kind of supernatural beings and fill them with 
respect and awe. Therefore they must not fall when they dance. 
Should one of them totter and lose his equilibrium, the shepherds 
cover him with a heap of grass and the men say : ‘‘He is dead!” 
Because a circumcised cannot fall and live. One of the shep- 
herds goes in haste to a village of the neighbourhing tribe, buys 
a fowl which is killed and its blood is sprinkled over the grass ; 
the boy who fell escapes when the women have gone home, but 
the next day, when they come back to the spot, they see the 
blood and are convinced that, in very truth, a circumcised dies 
when he falls ! 

Sometimes a little child is taken from the arms of its mother 
and brought to the place where the boys are sitting, hidden 
during the dance. They kiss him and smile at him, because he 
is an innocent; he can see what women are not allowed to 
contemplate ! 

Ul. The last day. 

The last day is marked by the greatest and most difficult trial. 
During the whole preceding night, the boys are not allowed to 
sleep... Sleep is the last enemy they must overcome... They 
stab the Elephant and repeat the formulae till the morning. 
Then all the bits of skin remaining from the circumcising are 
picked up by the Manyabe ; he burns them, makes them into a 
powder with which he smears the mulagaru pole. All the 
masks, the grass mats are thrown on the roof of the shed and, at 
dawn, the troop of circumcised, surrounded by the shepherds and 
men, is directed towards a pool and made to run to it without 
looking backwards; (separation from the sungi, from the seclusion 
period). If they were to look at what is taking place behind 
them, their eyes would be pierced and they would be blind for 
ever! Fire is put to the whole establishment by some of the men 
and all the filth and ignorance of childhood is burnt in this great 
conflagration. The boys are led into the water, wash away the 
white clay, cut their hair (separation rite), anoint themselves 
with ochre, put on some new clothing and are addressed by the 
father’ of the circumcision: 

** You are no longer shuburu! Vry now to behave like men. 
It would be unworthy of you to steal sweet potatoes in the 
fields as you used to do before. Now the Ngoma is closed and 
it is taboo to pronounce the formulae or to sing the songs of 
the sungi. Don’t reveal a word of them to anybody; if a boy 
does so he will be strangled! ” ete. 

_That same day the women bring porridge with sauce flavour- 
ings and the shepherds are no more allowed to use insulting 
words when they receive the pots from their hands. 

IV. The Chameleon procession. 

All these are evidently aggregaticn rites. But the greatest of 
all is the procession of the initiated into the capital of the chief — 
which takes place on the day of the closing of the sungi and on 
the following one... Covered with ochre, marching on mats — 
which have been spread on the ground so that they do aot 
touch the dust with their feet, they advance slowly, bowed to 
the ground, stretching out first one leg then the other with a 
sudden brisk motion, trying to imitate the gait of the chameleon, 
the wise, the prudent... They are men who think and no 
longer boys without intelligence! Then they all sit on the 
central place of the capital, their heads always bowed, and the 
sisters and mothers who have come from all the different villages 
must go and recognize them. Each woman brings with her a 
bracelet or a shilling or any small present and searches for her 
boy amongst the throng. When she thinks she has found him, 
she kisses him on the cheek and gives him the present. Then” 
the boy rises, strikes a good blow on the shoulder of the woman 
and utters the new name which he has chosen. In answer to 
this demonstration, the mother begins to dance and to sing the 
praises of her son! 

The chameleon procession is performed in the villages of the 
main headmen of the tribe during the few following days till, at 
last, the ochre of the initiated is removed and they return home 
definitely. 

SOME REMARKS ON THE CIRCUMCISION SCHOOL 

The square form of the sungi sheds, so different from the circular 
form adopted by the Bantu for their homes and implements, might be 
the trace ofa Semitic influence. But, on the whole, all these rites are 
holding well together and their sequence is quite easy to understand. 

The Ngoma is truly a puberty rite, but not a sexual initiation. The 
suspension of conjugal relations, the prevalence of licentious language 
might give the idea that it is in direct relation with the sexual life. But 
these two phenomena are met with on other occasions, as we shall see, 
and seem to be characteristic occurrences in most of the marginal 

periods. Moreover boys of ten and twelve and men of twenty five or 
more can be occasionally admitted to the sungi and this proves that 
the school has nothing to do with marriage, properly speaking. Nei- 
ther is the Ngoma a pure act of aggregation to adeterminedclan. Boys 
of one clan often go to the sungi of another chief to be initiated; they 
do not become his subjects by so doing. Even Thonga sometimes 
enter into Suto lodges and Malemba have a special place in them. It 
is true that the Ngoma is the business of the chief. Only those who 
are really chiefs have the right to build a lodge. But though the ini- 
tiated are exhorted to become good subjects of their chief, the intention 
of the circumcision school is rather to introduce the little boy into 
manhood, to cleanse him from the bukbuna (p. 56) to make hima thought- 
ful adult member of the community. 

What judgment must we pass on this custom to which some tribes _ 
still cling with great pertinacity? This teaching of endurance and of 

hunting We Baaly some value. However these rites as a whole 
have even Tile worth and are useless in the new economy of South 
Africa.” The obcene | language allowed during the Ngoma tends cer- 
tainly to pervert the incl qe the boys and ‘ens an fame prepara~ 
tion for the sexual life. 

Though the Government could not at once suppress the custom, | 
think it might use its influence in checking it. As for the Mission, it 
has acirally: fought against this sotint- of heathenism, but not 
always with success ; boys, even Christians boys, are wonderfully 
attracted by it and many have left their spelling book for the formula 
of Manhengwane ! 

Have we nothing to learn from the Ngoma? One hundred and 
seventy thousand children of black South Africa are now attending 
our schools... more or less regularly. Hundreds of young men are 
boarding in our Normal Institutions. Are we always succeeding in this 
great educational work ? Its results are not quite satisfactory because 
most of the children do not stay long enough in the school to be pro- 
perly taught. As soon as they have acquired some knowledge of 
reading and writing, they leave and go to the towns to earn money. 
Whatever the teacher may say, they escape... I must confess that 
we do not control them as well as the Father of the Circumcision... 
The Ngoma shows us however that a strict discipline is quite possible 

( with native boys and that we must deal with them, without any. tinge 
of harshness of course but, with a firm hand. When the inmates of 
our institutions complain that the sauce of their porridge is not 

savoury enough, we might remind them of the food their heathen 
comrades are eating in the Ngoma! 

There is a striking ressemblance between Bantu circumcision, Jewish 
circumcision and Christian baptism. 

In Jewish circumcision, the same physical operation was performed, 
but it was performed on infants. It had certainly also the meaning of 
an ablation, a carrying off of pollution and an introduction into the 
holy nation. In the course of time, the notion was spiritualised and 
circumcision meant the removal of sin. But it had a strong religious 
character: Jahvé was marking his chosen people by their circumcision. 
This religious element is wanting in the Ngoma of the Thonga and 
the Suto and the national meaning alone remains. 

As regards baptism, the great difference between the heathen and the 
Christian rite is evidently this: Christian baptism is not only a reli- 
gious but also a moral rite. Under its normal form, which is the 
immersion of adult catechumens, it represents in a striking manner the 
washing away of sin and the admission to the Church of Christ ; it is 
a rite of passage: separation from the old life of sin, marginal period 
of instruction, aggregation to a holy community... 

The Ngoma has no such spiritual and moral notions, but it has been 
inspired by the same deep and true idea of the necessity in the evo- 
lution of man of a progress which consists in the renunciation of a miser- 
able past and the introduction into higher life. This idea is certainly 
one of these rays of light, which we are happy to discover amidst the 
darkness of heathendom, one of these ‘‘ points d’attache ” to which we 
can tie truths of spiritual religion. 

II. Other Puberty Rites 

‘The Ngoma has disappeared in most of the Thonga clans, but 
there are a few other puberty rites which have been preserved 
all through the tribe. 

1) ‘THE CUSTOM OF THE EROTIC ‘DREAM (Tilorela). 
When a young man has noticed for the first time an emis- 
sio seminis, he is said to have become an adult (a kulile, a 

= 95 —_— 

thombile) to have ‘‘ drunk the nkanye ”. The nkanye is the 
tree from which the bukanye is made. It is prepared for the 
ereat feast of the new year. Jo drink the nkanye is an euphem- 
ism to designate the entrance into a new phase of life, into 
the age of puberty. According to Mboza, the lad must go early 
in the morning to wash his body and that is all. But Tobane 
says that, in the Mpfumo clan, the family doctor is called ; in 
a broken pot, he roasts pieces of skin of all the beasts of the 
veldt, together with some half digested grass taken from the 
stomach of a goat (psanyi). The boy must eat a little of this 
medicine and rub all his joints with it. This medication will 
strengthen him so that, when he has relations with girls, he 
will not be overcome (gemiwa) by them. This rite, which is 
very similar to the rite of the broken pot performed for 
infants, is connected with the ‘‘ gangisa”’, the sexual habits of 
young people which begin at the time of puberty, as we shall 
see later on. 

At this time also, the boy begins to wear the very primitive 
clothing called shifado (sha ku siba, the thing with which one 
closes, see Note). In former times they wore only the mbayi, 
a small cylindrical or conical object of woven palin leaves 
which was the national dress of the Thonga; the shifado seems 
to be of Zulu origin. It is very much valued as preventing 
contact with the earth : a protection against ants and an aid 
to continence; the lads who do not wear it are blamed and 
accused of being ba-nato. The word nato means a magical 
medicine by means of which men of low morals throw men or 
women into a deep sleep during the night, enter the huts of 
other people and commit adultery with their wives. 

2) THE PIERCING OF THE EARS (Ku tjunya, (Ro.), boshela. (Dj.). 

= 

Wakes place also at this period. There are two ways of 
performing this, either by a proper piercing of the lower lobe 
with a thorn or by cutting it with a knife. The first method 
is the old Thonga custom and has been preserved by the 

c 

women in the original form, at least amongst the Ba-Ronga ; 
they frequently pass a ring through the small opening thus 
produced. The second one was practised by the Zulu-Ngoni 
and was adopted by the Thonga men in order to resemble -their 
conquerors. The result is an ugly hole. This is not a law 
imposed by the chief; however it is kept universally. When 
a lad does not pierce his ears his comrades mock him and say: 
‘““U toya”! ‘* You are a coward! We shall put a spoonful 
of porridge in this big ear of yours!” (Viz. It will hold food. 
because it is not pierced !) 

The operation is performed in the winter by a man who 
knows how to do it. Before it is begun, the boy bites the ndjao, 
the root of a kind of reed which is considered the best means 
of strengthening the virile force. The doctor introduces into 
the hole a small piece of reed ; he takes it out every day to wash 
the wound and puts it in again to keep the hole open. As long 
as the ear is not healed, the lad must eat his food without salt : 
he must not go about in the kraals and partake of the porridge of 
other people, because this food might have been prepared by 
women having intercourse with their husbands (ba ku khila) 
and this would make him very ill. He must also keep away 
from girls. When he is healed, he takes away the piece of hard 
reed and replaces it by a nice white object. 

Some Thonga tatoo themselves or used to do it formerly, 
but this custom is disappearing and is now preserved only by 
women. We shall describe it in the chapter on the Evolution 
of the woman, as well as the hleta custom, the pointing of teeth. 

It is probable that in former times the taboo character of these 
various ceremonies was more marked that now. Actually they 
are but a shibila sha tiko, a custom of the country. 

3) THe Ganeisa. 

When a boy has gone through the puberty rites, he is grown 
up and is allowed to practise the gangisa. This word comes 
from ganga which means “‘ to choose a lover”. Each girl is 

=e — 
asked by the boys to choose one of them; they make thenz 
choose (gangisa, factitive derivate). I once witnessed some 
boys — they were still very young — flirting round three or 
four girls just as bees round ripe plums, running after them 
saying repeatedly : Choose me! « Choose me!» There is a spe- 
cial blue cotton print with large white patterns which is called 
‘‘ sangisa ntombi” viz. to make a girl choose, as it is offered by 
the lover to the damsel of his choice in order to obtain her 
favour. When a girl has made her choice, her boy plays with 
her as husband and wife, first in building little huts, etc. but 
later on in aless platonic way. In fact nothing is prohibited in 
the relations between young people of both sexes. A married 
woman is sacred amongst the Thonga, but an unmarried girl is 
not. However she must not become pregnant. If this happens, 
the parents will say to the lover: ‘‘ You have spoiled our daugh- 
ter, you must buy her in marriage’. If he refuses, the child 
will belong to the family of the girl. Excesses in gangisa are 
condemned. A boy who commits them is said to be an adul- 
terer (a ni bupse); of a girl they say: « She will lose her head 
(a ta ba singe). » 

As the unmarried boys and girls live in special huts, the /ao 
of the boys and the uhanga of the girls, at the entrance of the 
village, it is easy for them to meet during the night. During 
the day, they behave themselves generally becomingly. But 
when the lads pay visits to their girls who sing to the 
accompaniment of rattles, they stay sometimes with them till 
late in the night. They bring them small presents, clothing or 
anything else, and thus get permission to have intercourse with 
them. Mboza described to me a very immoral meeting which 
takes place sometimes in those huts in connection with the 
milebe habit, and which belongs to this gangisa. It is impos- 
sible to give the details here. Students of ethnography can find 
a full description of it in my paper published in the “* Revue 
d'études ethnographiques ”. I have also there tried to prove 
this curious fact: that sexual relations between unmarried people 
are not considered as having the same ritual value as intercourse 

between those lawfully married. 

The gangisa custom is, from our point of view, very immoral. 
Amongst natives it is rot censured at all and it would be more 
accurate to speak of amorality than of immorality, amongst 
them, on this particular point. A boy who has no such flirt 
no shigango, is laughed at as a coward ; a girl who refuses to 
accept such advances is accused of being malformed. However 
Mboza told me he had never had a shigango himself and the 
abuse in this respect is not approved by old people. In Manyisa, 
I heard of a young chief who was leading all the lads to gangisa 
and forced the girls to accept them. The extent of this-evil 
depends very much on the character of the boys and girls. I 
may add that, as regards the young people of the capital, they 
are not allowed to practise the gangisa because they belong to 
the royal family and are closely watched. 

When becoming Christians, natives readily accept our standard 
of morality ; but cases of fornication are very frequent amongst 
converts, so much so that this has been rightly called the Afri- 
can sin! I mention this fact. I must say on the other hand 
that thousands of pupils in our Native Institutions lead a very 
moral and continent life and they do not seem to find it very 
difficult. 

If the gangisa spoils all the life of the. young heathen, it is 
only just to add that they do not practise two vices which are 
prevalent amongst certain civilised nations, onanism and sodomy. 
These immoral customs were entirely unknown in the Thonga 
tribe before the coming of civilisation. Unhappily it is no 
longer so now. I know boys on missionary stations who learn- 
ed masturbation in the towns and, as regards sodomy, it is 
raging now in Johannesburg compounds and in the prisons of 
the Transvaal to a fearful extent. Thonga and Zulu are parti- 
<ularly addicted to it. In some prisons they constrain the new 
comers by violence to indulge in it. This new evil ought 
to be combated with the utmost rigour. In this as in.many 
other respects, civilisation threatens to destroy the native life. 

Comparing the habits of the Pedi and of the Thonga we meet 
with this strange fact: Amongst the Thonga the unmarried girl 
is quite free and the married woman is taboo. Amongst the 

=_i99 — 
Pedi it is just the reverse: girls are absolutely prohibited from 
having any sexual relation before their marriage and, on the 
contrary, after marriage, a woman who has had children can have 
intercourse with other men than her husband. I am afraid 
_this difference does not come from a higher morality on the part 
of the Pedi. As far as I could make it out, the explanation is 
this: The Pedi fathers ‘‘ lobola” girls for their sons much earlier 
than the Thonga. They push the prevision so far that a man 
will buy ‘‘a womb ”, viz, a girl before her birth for his baby 
son! ‘This girl not yet born will be given a name, the name 
of her future son ; and if every thing happens in conformity with 
these previsions, that name will be definitely adopted for the girl 
on the day she is married! If however the child which is born 
happens to be a boy, the. money will be given back. Moreo- 
ver most girls have already their lawful husband when they 
are born, because every boy has a kind of right of preemption 
on the daughter of his maternal uncle, on their “‘mudzwala”, 
as this relative is called. In that way, girls are not free: 
they must keep absolutely pure ; in some clans (the Venda 
e. g.), they must even undergo a physical examination on the 
day of their marriage at the hands of the old female relatives 
of the husband to prove their virginity. If afterwards, being 
married women, they are allowed to lead a very bad life, so bad 
that it is quite possible to speak of polyandry amongst some 
Pedi clans, it is probably due to the dreadful fear of the lochia 
to which we have already alluded. The chief of the Bukhaha 
(Shiluvane Country) married only virgins. He had inter- 
course with his new wife till she had her first child. ‘Then she 
was impure ; he feared to have any more relations with her 
and allowed her to live with her lovers. Each of his wives 
had a regular lover, a kind ‘of second husband. When this 
chief bought a new wife, he was said to “ lobolela tiko ”, to 
buy her for his country, for his subjects!) The subjects, being 
miserable, overcame their own fears and accepted the royal 
present! Neither the Thonga nor the Pedi system of sexual 
manners is much to be admired ; but if I had to make a choice, 
I think I would prefer the Thonga to the Pedi! 

In his book on Kafir Socialism, Dudley Kidd has laid great 
stress on the fact that the mental development of the African 
native is arrested at the time of puberty and he has tried to 
find remedies for this inferiority. It may be said that the viva- 
city of mind, the rapidity of comprehension which is sometimes 
wonderful in younger boys decreases when they reach the age 
of fifteen or sixteen. Even cases can be recorded amongst 
them of an arrest or a slackening in the evolution of psychical 
faculties at the time of puberty. But this is by no means the 
rule. In all our Institutions we have pupils who show great 
zeal for study and increased intellectual power between sixteen 
and twenty. I may say that Dr Mac Vicar of Lovedale conclu- 
ded as I do, that this assertion of D. Kidd is very much exag- 
gerated. 

D. MARRIAGE 

According to the old Thonga idea it is only when a boy is 
full grown that he can think of marriage. In former times 
lads used to enjoy their youth in carelessness and pleasure, 
going to dance in all the villages, till they were twenty five 
years old. Nowadays boys marry very early. Money is 
found more easily to lobola and ‘‘ gangisa” is not as easy as it 
used to be, two reasons which hasten the time of marriage 
in the present generation. 

I. The Love charms. 

Should a boy not have been successful in his ‘‘ gangisa ” 
should he be despised by the girls and have no chance of bein 
accepted, a special rite is performed to help him to find a wif 

—— Oy -— 

The Ba-Ronga do not know the love-philter as such, but they 
have a substitute for it; the old village cock is put on the lad’s 
head and kept there for a long time; the cock scratches him 
with his claws; he is then let go. The boy will now succeed; 
he will be like the cock who never lacks spouses!) (Mboza). 

Other charms are used for girls, especially a certain medicine 
which produces an abundant lather when boiled in water. The 
physician washes her body with it and then she will ‘‘ appear ” 
(a ta boneka) to the eyes of would-be suitors (Tobane). 

Should however a girl not find a husband in the lawful way, 
she has another mean at her disposal, the marriage by abduction, 
and thus no one or hardly any one remains unmarried amongst 
the Thonga. Mankhelu, who was a great doctor, treated this 
«complaint of singleness » with more seriousness! He used his 
strongest medicines to heal the boy or the girl who was unable 
to find a partner in life. This is the treatment followed by 
him : He takes a she-goat, if it be for a boy, a he-goat if for a 
girl, anoints it with fat mixed with his precious medicinal 
powder; he rubs the animal (hondla) from the mouth to the 
tail, extends all its limbs and kills it. No prayer is offered but 
the psanyi (the half digested grass which is found in the stomach) 
is carefully collected. The boy is then called, enters his own 
hut, spreads a mat on the ground, sits on it quite naked 
and rubs his whole body with this substance. ‘‘A tihorola, a 
tilurulula” says Mankhelu. He rubs away from himself all his 
filth. When he has finished, he coughs to call the doctor who 
comes and gathers into a pot all the ‘‘timhorola”, the particles 
which have fallen on the mat; he takes a portion, squeezes it 
into a small bag of lizard-skin so as to make a shitjungulu or 
amulet. The sister will have to come after sunset without any 
clothing into the hut of the boy and will tie the bag round his 
neck. What remains of the timborola will be used to smear the 
hat. Then all the girls will love him ; or if it be a girl, she 
will soon be asked in marriage. 

This ceremony is a characteristic ondlola, the same which is 
performed on the weaning day (see page 57) and after any se- 
rious disease; it is a rite of removal of impurity. (Notice the 

— Os == 

termination ola, ula, ulula in those verbs; it means generally to 
undo, to take away). 

Let us now hear from Tobane the description of the marriage 
rites amongst the Mpfumo clan. We shall afterwards see how 
the customs differ in other Ronga and Thonga clans. 

II. Marriage ceremonies of the Mpfumo clan. 

1) THE BETROTHAL (buta). 

When a young man has made up his mind to get married, 
and when he is in possession of the necessary lobola(1) cattle, 
he starts, one fine day, with two or three of his friends to look 
for a wife in the villages. He puts on his most brillant orna- 
ments and his most precious skins. Here they are, arriving on 
the square of the village; they sit down in the shade. They 
are asked: ‘‘ What do you want?” ‘‘We have come to see the 
girls”, they answer bluntly. And the reply is: ‘‘ All right. 
Look at them. ” 

Of course the girls do their very best to be as pleasing as 
possible, as the mother has told them that these are suitors. 
The suitor is easily known by his special attire, a belt of skins 
either of leopard or tiger cat. He goes from one yard to the 
other, talks with the cooks, inquires their names, looking at 
themas, with a vigourous and graceful movement of the body, 
they crush the mealies in their mortar. If the seekers have 
found what they want, they return home, if not, they go to the 
next hamlet. (Let us say here that each village consists of not 

(1) Ku lobola means to buy in marriage. Ku lobota (a factitive derivate 
of the verb) is said of a father who claims a sum of money from his daughter’s 
suitor. Lobolo or ndjobolo or bukost (wealth) is the sum paid, the oxen, the 
hoes, or the pounds sterling. We shall use these words which are employed 
in Thonga as well as in Suto and in Zulu and which ought to be adopted 
as ethnographic technical terms. I use the verb for the act of paying and 
the noun for the sum itself. ; 

more than six to twelve huts built in a circle, and leaving a 
central circular place, the shaded ‘‘ square”, of which the oxen 
kraal occupies the middle.) (See Part II.) 

When he is satisfied, the suitor goes home and says to his 
parents : ‘‘So an so pleases me. Go and woo her. (Ku buta).” 
Then a middle aged man of the village is sent to the parents of 
the young girl. He is received in the father’s hut and, with 
all the circumlocutions required by etiquette, he carries out his 
errand. ‘The girl is called and told that the visitor who came 
the other day has chosen her; she is asked if she also loves him 
(or if she wants him... for there is only one word in Ronga to 
express these two kindred notions, ku randja). « Oh! is it the 
one who looked thus ‘and so and who wore this and that? 
Yes, I consent to accept (to eat) the money out of his hands 
(ku da bukosi ku yene).» If she does not care for him, she 
will declare it quite as plainly: the suitor will have to seek 
elsewhere. It is a fact worth noting that, amongst these so- 
called savages, a father very seldom obliges his daughter to 
accept a husband whom she dislikes, except in the case of 
debts. If the matter is arranged to the satisfaction of all parties 
the buta(1): or betrothal is concluded and the messenger is 
feasted, while he, on his part, gives a present (shihlengwe) to the 
girl’s parents of the value of a hoe or ten shillings; this present 
“‘strengthens their bones” (ba tiya marambo) and nothing 
further remains to be done but to choose the day on which the 
betrothal visit will take place. 

2) THE BETROTHAL visits (Tjekela and koroka). 

This visit (ku ya ku tjekelen) is paid in the following 
manner. The fiancé chooses his best friend to be his ‘‘shang- 
wane”; the fiancée does the same on her part and these two 
c& o> 0 e 

shangwane ” must do their best to help them both during the 
whole of these complicated ceremonies. Then the bridegroom 

(1) Buta might be a factitive derivate of the verb bula, to speak : to cause 
somebody to speak, to give an answer. 

assembles, together with his shangwane, three or four other 
friends of his own age and a little lad to carry their mats. 
They go and bathe and put on their finest attire : rich skins, 
bracelets hung on their belts, horse-hair necklaces with white 
beads threaded here and there which wave up and down on 
neck and breast. Neither do they forget their small shields of 
skin which give them a martial appearance without, however, 
suggesting any thought of war or strife. Before starting they 
take a good ‘neal cooked at home. In the evening, after sunset, 
they reach the village of the fiancée. They sit down outside 
the gate and cough to make known they have arrived. Then 
the inhabitants, who were expecting them, come out to meet 
them and beg them to enter. The visitors make difficulties. 
They pretend not to want to do so. The people of the village 
insist. At last, with apparent reluctance, they advance into the 
central square. A hut is prepared for them and they are invited 
to go and rest there. They begin by refusing. But the young 
girls take out of their hands their sticks and their miniature 
shields and carry them into the hut. At last, with a bored air, 
they enter. Mats are brought and unrolled before them; this 
is the act of hospitality par excellence. They remain standing 
as if they had no wish whatever to sit down. Girls entreat 
them to rest and finally they consent to accept the hospitality 
offered them with such insistence. 

The parents of the fiancée then come, squat near them 
and ask news of their home. They answer and inquire about 
the health of their hosts. This is the djungulisana, the exchange 
of greetings which always takes place when a visitor is received. 
Soon however large pots of well prepared food are brought : 
‘*No”,say the young men. ‘‘ We have eaten at home, we are not 
hungry.” The same comedy is gone through again ; the masters 
of the place insist, the guests refuse systematically according to 
the native laws of civility — or incivility! The night however 
has come. The young men have consented after all to partake 
of the feast. The old people retire to their huts to sleep. The 
young girls remain. The custom requires them to spend the 
whole night with the young men according to the law of the 

shigango which was spoken of previously. The bridegroom’s 
shangwane chooses the bride’s shangwane and all the other boys 
choose their giri. But the fiancée hides behind her friends and 
takes no part in these immoral games. 

In the early morning the young men go to bathe and the 
girls, their amphoras on the head, go to fetch water from the 

Drawing water from the Maputju river. Phot. A. Borel 

lake. On their return they perform another act of hospitality 
towards their visitors, namely they throw water down their backs. 
The boys wash the whole of their bodies after which the girls 
anoint them with fat. The day is spent in a pleasant far 
niente... The fiancé and his friends sit in the shade on the 
Square, clad in all their ornaments. They hum songs, they 
amuse themselves by swaying themselves about whilst sitting ; 
the little girls keep them company. Meanwhile the elder girls 
prepare nice food for them and go to the fields. Towards eve- 
ning, the visitors ask to see the parents to take leave of them; 

but the old people send the following word: ‘No, you will not 
see us. We cannot consent to your going away, we have 
hardly seen you. Spend another night with us.” They 
must make up their mind to stay a little longer. In fact it 
is exactly what the young men want and the second night is 
spent as the first. 

The third day they go away. All the young girls accom- 
pany them along the paths, far, far away, and, when they 
part, boys and girls tic together high standing grasses on the 
veldt (ku ba mafundju hi byanyi), a touching symbol of 
their loves ! Seeing these knots during the whole season at a 
crossway, passers-by will know that lovers parted there. On 
taking leave, the young people arrange another meeting. The 
girls will go after a week or two to return the visit. 

In fact, to the tjekela of the boys corresponds the koroka ot the 
girls. ‘‘ They make the betrothal visit to see the husband (ba ya 
ku koroken, ku ya bona nuna)”. They also put on their finest 
attire: red and white cloth; in their curled hair, a small crown 
of blue and red beads looking really pretty; on ankles and 
wrists, bracelets of twisted iron wire. 

On the appointed day, they go and sit outside the village of 
the fiancé and cough to announce their presence. The same 
strange goings on begin, but this time it is the damsels who 
make difficulties and the young men must beg and entreat 
them to enter first the village, then the hut and then to sit on 
the mats and to accept food. Each of the groomsmen is most 
attentive to the girl he chose at the preceeding meeting and, to 
obtain her good will, he generally gives her a fowl or the equi- 
valent in money. In the early morning the visitors rise, go 
and get water, warm it a little and pour it into basins before the 
doors of the huts, so that, on that day, the inhabitants of the 
village will make their ablutions with water fetched by them. 
Then they go and do feminine work, making themselves the 
servants of the fiancé’s parents. Thus they remove the ashes 
from the fire-place and throw them on the ash-heap close by; 
they cut the wood for the young men’s mothers and light’ the 
several fires of the village. They pretend to leave when the 

sun sets, but no one will hear of it and they must spend ano- 
ther night. At last, on the following day, they go home, 
accompanied by the young men and again, at parting, knot 
grasses together. On the day of the koroka decisive arrange- 
ment are made for the wedding. 

3) Tasoos OF THE BETROTHAL PERIOD. 

The two families which enter into relation by marriage must 
observe many taboos (See Part II). Here are some of those 
which are enforced during the visits of tjekela and koroka : 

1) The visitors must not eat all the mealie corn on the spike; 
they must leave a few grains on it. 

2) They must not tear off the leaves which are round the 
spike. When they have eaten all the corn, they rearrange 
those leaves nicely in such a way that the cob seems not to 
have been touched. 

3) They must not ‘‘ make a hole in the pot ” (bobota hotjo), 
viz. they leave a portion of the liquid in the beer pot, they do 
not empty it entirely. 

4) It is forbidden to return home in rain when one has gone 
to tjyekela. One must wait for fine weather, otherwise it is an 
insult to the future father-in-law. 

5) If, during the visit, you eat monkey nuts, you must not 
take off the thin skin which covers the kernel. 

6) The suitor — the owner of the oxen — must not eat 
black fish that day. His friends only have the right to do so. 
These fish, a kind of barbel, are to be found in the lakes (as 
that of Rikatla) and in the Nkomati river. The suitor will not 
partake of them for fear the girl he wishes to marry should slip 
through his hands like a fish. Moreover this fish is black. : it 
might bring darkness, unhappiness. 

7) Neither must he eat honey during his visit, because honey 
like the black fish, slips... Honey flows... 

8) He is also forbidden to eat fowls, because cocks and hens 
scratch the soil with their claws, scattering it about ; thus the 

marriage ‘might be scattered (hangalasa bukati) before it is 
ripe”. In the Tembe clans, formerly, any solid food was taboo, 
as long as the families had not yet killed an ox for the feasts. 

These taboos are not the proper taboos of a marginal period, 
as if the betrothal were considered as one of these periods. They 
are familial taboos, belonging to the category of those dictated 
by mutual distrust of two allied families. 

The wedding’ feast is composed of two parts: the lobola feast 
viz. all the ceremonies connected with the remittance of the 
lobola which takes place at the bride’s village and the i/homa viz, 
the bringing the bride to the bridegroom’s village. Should the 
lobolo have been entirely paid at once, these two ceremonies will 
follow each other without much delay. If the sum of money 
or the number of oxen is not complete, the t/homa will very 
probably be postponed. 

4) LogpoLa FEAST. 
a) Preparations. 

On both sides, the triends are informed that the feast is close 
at hand. Especially the bride’s family. must prepare in good 
time, as they have to get ready the beer which will be consum- 
ed in great quantities. “The brewing requires several days. All 
the relations of the young girl agree on a day to begin oper- 
ations in the several villages they inhabit. First of all the 
grains must be taken out of all the mealie spikes which were 
kept in the small cellar huts (ku hula). The following day 
these mealie seeds are steeped in cold water, in large pots. 
When they have become sufficiently soft, they are pounded (kan- 
dja) in wooden mortars, the yeast of millet is added (kandela) 
and the preparation is then boiled (pseka). On the day of the 
boiling, the family of the fiancé is informed that to-morrow the 
beer will be drained off and that on the following day the wed- 
ding will begin. 

That same day the bridegroom with his friends goes to his 
future parents-in-law. He does not find his sweetheart there ; 
she has wisely been hidden in the neighbourhood. He brings 

with him a goat which will subsequently play an important part 
in the proceedings. The next day the whole family of the fiancé 
assembles and they make sure that the provision of hoes or the 
number of pounds sterling for the lobolo is complete. The 
third day they all start. 

b) The assault of the village. 

Let us describe this most curious feature of the feast as it took 
place forty years ago, when English gold was not yet known in 
the country and when the price of a wife was paid in hoes. 
These hoes, to thenumber of forty or fifty, were distributed among 
the relatives who carried them on their heads. Ina long row, they 
wind along the path. When they approach close to the bride’s 
village, most of them sit down in the shade whilst a few young 
men go on before to make the assault. The bride’s brothers 
guard the doors of the circular thorny fence which generally sur- 
rounds the villages. Provided with their sticks, they mean to pre- 
vent the aggressors from entering. In vain! The assailants 
jump about in the bush, rush over the barriers, are pursued by 
the sentinels, run across the square, try to steal pitchers of beer, 
whilst the boys of the village hit them as hard as they can. 

Taking advantage of this tumult the older men arrive and 
pointing with the finger to the hoes they carry on their heads, 
they murmur the following words: “‘Here is our ox! It does 
not know how to drink! It does not know how to drink! 
(Homu a yi nwi! a yi nwi!)” The others rush towards them, 
try to steal their burdens and to bar the way; all this goes on 
amidst laughter and until one of the old people of the bride’s 
village says : “Let us leave them! (A hi ba tjikene!)” Then 
the company enters, laden with the precious hoes. | 

c) The counting of the lobolo. 

The implements are deposited in the centre of the square and 
fixed into the ground by tens. The hoes used by the Thonga, 
whether of native or European make, are lengthened and poin- 
ted in such a way that they can be introduced into a wooden 
handle, somewhat like the tools of the lake dwellers. ‘They 

~ “EES — 

have a very remote resemblance to an ace of spades with a poin- 
ted Shatt. 

The bride’s family gathers to ascertain if the number agreed 
upon is there. They remark to one another that there are so 
and so many of them. ‘‘ Look, they say, they have paid such 
and sucha lobolo. (Labisan ba lobolile ha kukari.) ” It is very 
important that there should be a large number of witnesses, for 
who knows to how many discussions and quarrels these hoes 
will give rise if the marriage turns out badly ? When this count- 
ing is done, all hearts being gladened by the sight of the wealth 
which will eventually allow the bride’s brother to get married 
himself, the jugs of beer, which were brought the day before 
by the aunts, sisters, and relations of the bride, are fetched in. 
They pass from one hand to another; the old people, the men, 
prefer going into a hut where they talk over the Jatest news 
whilst they quench their thirst. 

d) The wedding procession. 

Whilst the old people rest, a goat is taken for the sacrifice and 
slaughtered at the door of the hut of the bride’s mother. Whilst 
the goat is cut into pieces, the bridegroom’s sisters, the big girls, 
the stout women with strong arms, go and look for the heroine 
of the day who is hidden in a hut in one of the neighbouring 
villages and who has not yet been seen. At last they succeed 
in finding her. She refuses to ,come. The viragos seize her 
and pull her out by force. Everybody assembles. She is 
covered with a large cloth which hides her from the gaze of the 
bystanders. Surrounded on all sides, she sets forward to the vil- 
lage, the crowd forming a kind of procession. ‘‘ Let us accom- 
pany her, then we shall return home” sing the women who 
bring her. (A hi mu tjekekeni, hi ta muka). This song of 
the tjeka, the only one which is peculiar to the wedding day, 
is the prelude to the most strange duel. 

The bridegroom’s family stands on one side, that of the bride 
on the other and then begins the exchange of equivocal com- 
pliments. 

“Ha! ‘‘cry the groomsmen to the bride, ” as your are becom- 

—  lrl — 

ing the wife of our brother and coming into our village, try 
and leave all your vices outside. Do not steal any longer! For- 
sake your bad ways and become a good girl!” 

To this the bride’s relatives shout in return: 

“You have nothing to boast about! Give up wearying the 
people! She is far too good for you! Does not everybody 
know the wild pranks of your son and the dishonour of your 
family !” 

And they go on in that way, joking at first, but often 
speaking seriously. They sometimes go even so far as to bom- 
bard each other with the half ruminated matter which has been 
extracted from the goat’s stomach, but, if anyone goes too far 
and exceeds the recognized limit of insult, the old people will 
tell him to be quiet. These proceedings however are looked 
up6n as a game and are accompanied with a particular dance 
called khana which consists in jumping on one leg then on the 
other, gesticulating at the same time. 

e) The religious act. 

The procession reaches the hut of the bride’s mother, where 
the goat was killed. Mats are stretched outside. The bride and 
groom sit down on the finest. It is now that the father 
performs the. religious rite (hahla). He takes between the index 
and thiimb a small quantity of the half digested grass which has 
been taken from the paunch of the animal, makes a little ~ball 
of it, totches his tongue with it and emits a sound ressembling 
‘“tsu”...as if he were slightly spitting. It is the customary sacra- 
mental act in most of the sacrifices. (See Part VI.) He stands 
behind the wedding pair and, looking towards them straight in 
front of htm, he speaks to the gods, that is to say to the spirits 
of his ancestors, and says: ‘‘My fathers, my grandfathers (he 
calls them by their names) look! To-day my child is leaving 
me. She enters the wedded life (bukatin). Look at her, 
accompany her where she will live. May she also found a vil- 
lage, may she have many children (mu nyikan timbeleko), may 
she be happy, good.and just. May she be on good terms with 
those with whom she will be”. Here it may happen that a 

= Silo 

brother of the bridegroom will interrupt and say: ‘“‘ Yes, 
we will live peacefully with her if she does her duty well and 
does not worry her husband”. The old man goes on with his 
patriarchal prayer without taking any notice of the interruption 
and everybody listens quietly and attentively. This prayer which 
he pronounces with his eyes wide open and in a most natu- 
ral manner is sometimes very long. When the people have 
enough of it and want him to stop, they send a young man to 
cut a piece of meat and to introduce it into the old man’s 
mouth. Thus they “cut” his prayer and he keeps still. The 
one officiating must be the first to partake of the meat of the 
sacrifice. 

f) The symbolical belt. 

The astragalus (nholo) of the right leg of the sacrified goat 
has been carefully kept. All along the belly they cut a strip 
of skin reaching as far as the neck and to the chin which is cut 
so. as to form a kind of pocket at the end of the strip. The 
astragalus is put into this pocket and the father ties the belt around 
the waist of the young woman. He must not look at her face 
to face in doing this. On the contrary, she must turn her back 
to him. This is doubtless done to wish her good luck so that 
she may have many descendants. Natives have a special 
veneration for the astragalus bone which is also used in the 
divinatory system. 

5) ‘THE TLHOMA, STARTING OF THE BRIDE FOR THE 
CONJUGAL DWELLING. 

If the lobolo business has been duly concluded, the bride will 
start on the following day for the conjugal dwelling, accompa- 
nied by her friends. The next day, she will be joined by the 
women of her village who will help her to erect the woodpile 
(ku koroka shigiyane). They will all go together into the bush 
to cut a large quantity of branches and will pile them up be- 
tween two poles covered with ochre in the bride’s village. Each 

of the husband’s relations will take-one of these logs during the 
following months. It is, it seems, a symbolic present from one 
family to the other. 

As for the wood cutters, they take their leave and go home. 
But what a surprise! Here is the bride going with them! Her 
sisters take her home again! The husband entreats! In vain ! 
He pursues the woman who, two days before, became his legal 
wife. To no purpose! He offers her a present to induce her 
to stay with him. She refuses... This was foreseen. She 
must go to her mother to fetch her basket (shihundju), her 
mat, her spoon and other utensils which make up her small 
trousseau. A last lesson must also be given to the husband : 
“If we have given youour daughter, do not believe that we have 
had enough of her! (hi kolile). She is very precious to us 
and we take her back!” 

Patience! To morrow she will come back accompanied by 
one young girl only who helps to carry her furniture. This 
time it is for good! At last! « Ba mu tlhomile! »that is to say: 
her parents have duly settled her in her home. 

In Nondwane this last surprise is spared the bridegroom. The 
bride comes to his home the day of the marriage with her 
two mats accompanied by a young girl only, and some days 
later the mother and female relations bring the rest of her 
trousseau and erect the wood pile. The young bride when she 
has definitely accepted her fate and consented to stay is called 
ntlhonwa (Ro.) nhlomi (Dj.) (the one who has been brought to 
her husband). During the first week, she will fill all the pots 
of the people of the village so that when they awake they will 
find water for their ablutions and say: ‘‘ We have found a 
bride! (He kumi ntlhonwa!)”; she will remove all the ashes 
from the fire places and smear all the huts. 

The first night when she sleeps in the hut with her husband, 
she may refuse to allow him his conjugal rights. The bride- 
groom then goes to his father and asks him what he ought to do 
under the circumstances. The father says: ‘‘ Give her sixpence 
or one shilling.”’ Then she consents! (Mboza). 

f,  

III. Marriage customs in other Ronga clans. 

The description we have just given can be considered as 
typical, but there are many variations to notice amongst the 
clans. 

In the Mapuju country, South of Delagoa Bay, there are two 
informal visits, one of the fiancé, one of the fiancée, to go and 
see each other’s village (ku bona muti). This visit is very short 
and they do not accept any food from their hosts. Then the 
tiekela of the boys (the betrothal visit) takes place. They behave 
in a very dignified manner, do not accept any food the first day 
and consent to eat on the following day only after having been 
entreated with a gift of 10/ or £ 1! During this visit the girls 
put 500 reis or sixpence at the botton of the pots which they 
fill with water for the ablutions of the boys, otherwhise the 
visitors would say: ‘‘ The water is too cold. We cannot use 
it.” Sexual relations between boys and girls during these visits 
were not allowed in former times. Nowadays they are indulged 
in and it may be that the fiancé asks his fiancée to give herself 
to him ‘‘to test her love” (ku kamba lirandju). If she refuses, 
the whole affair may be compromised. 

When the girls go to tjekela in their turn, they also observe 
great formality. Money must be given at least ten times to 
obtain their consent : 

1) They refuse to enter the village. 

2) To leave the square place and go to the hut. 

3) To cross the door of the hut. 

4) To sit down on mats. When the other girls consent, the 

fiancée remains standing. 

5) She consents to sit down when given a shilling. 

6) They refuse to answer the greetings. 

7) When the others have answered, the fiancée still refuses 

to do so. 

8) They do not consent to give news from their home. 

9, 10) They still make difficulties in accepting food. 

It may be that the fiancé goes to work in the mines during 
this period, probably in order to complete his lobolo. When he 
comes back, there isa special ceremony perfomed which is called 
hlomula mutwa, to remove the thorn. The girls pay him a 
visit. He sits down amidst his companions, having planted in 
his hair a long white thorn made of bone. The shangwane of 
the fiancée (chief bridesmaid) approaches him dancing and 
removes it. It.is a way of saluting him on his return. It 
means the removal of the fatigue and the sufferings he has under- 
gone, of the thorns which have wounded him. 

The concluding ceremonies of thloma and of the shigiyane are 
also more developed in the Maputju country and in Nondwane. 

This is the custom in Nondwane: Girls accompany the new 
bride to the conjugal home. They go to the bush where she 
has fled, capture her there, and bring her to her husband with 
songs of mourning (hi ku djila nwana). ‘‘ Where are you 
going? You gotoa husband whose heart is jealous! You will 
bring a basket full of mealies to crush : they will say it is 
but a handful! You will learn to steal and to bewitch (viz. 
they will accuse you of doing it).” The bride covers her head 
with a piece of clothing and weeps. So the sad procession 
reaches the door of the hut of the husband’s mother. The bride 
sits down there. The husband sits near her, but she withdraws 
from him. Then the men of the village insult her and say: 
**Come near him”! The old women, the husband’s aunts, come 
and try to remove the veil from her head: ‘‘’Take it away that 
we may see you” they say! Two days later they will come 
again and give her sixpence to take away the clothing with which 
she was covering her breast and then she will go about the village 
in the ordinary dress or.. undress. 

The building of the wood pile in Maputju is also very 
characteristic. The ceremony takes place on the day of the 

ilhoma. When the procession is heard coming, far away, the 

friends of the new husband go and meet it. But the girls who 
accompany the bride refuse to come near the village. They 
must be enticed by money : money at each crossway, at the door, 
on the village square, at the entrance of the hut, etc., money to 

, ft 

put down the logs they bring, the pots of beer they carry... 
And when all the women have consented to unload themselves, 
the chief bridesmaid still refuses to do soand must be induced by 
a larger sum of money! When they have arranged the wood 
pile, they dance behind it, hiding the bride intheir midst. The 
husband and his friends are sitting on the other side of the pile. 
Three girls come closer to them, always dancing. One of them 
is the shangwane. She puts tobacco in the hand of the bride. 
Then the bride kneels down before her husband at a distance 
and stretches out her hand to offer him a snuff. He rises to 
receive it, but, when he has approached quite close to her and 
has taken a little of the tobacco between his fingers, she 
throws the remainder of the snuff into his eyes; then she 
runs away pursued by the husband’s friends. If she is swift 
enough, she succeeds in taking hold of a tuft of grass outside 
the village. ‘Then no one dares to catch her. It will be neces- 
sary to bring more money to induce her to relinquish her hold 
on the grass. After this, she reenters the village which will be 
her new abode and this is the end of the end! 

IV. Marriage ceremonies in the Northern clans. 

I have succeeded in getting the whole description of the 
Nkuna marriage from a very good and clear-headed informant, 
Simeon Gana. It is somewhat different from the Ronga one. 

Here is the resumé(1) of the whole sequence of these rites: 

The betrothal visit. C&u buta). The suitor arrives with his 
shangwane and an old man who will act as his official represen- 
tative or go-between (ntjumi). He has already made his choice 
and the ntjumi woos the girl at once in his name. Her father 
calls her apart and asks her if she consents. If she is disposed 
to say yes, she begs to speak with the boy. She chooses.a 

(1) I have explained these rites in detail in a novel entitled Fazana, and 
published in La Semaine Littéraire, Geneva, Nov. & Dec. 1910. 

provisionary shangwane. ‘They are both shown into the hut of 
the girl’s mother with their respective shangwane. Let us 
suppose they come to an understanding ;_ the suitor announces 
his success to his ntjumi who goes to the girl’s father and 
informs him that she has consented. But the father refuses to 
accept this notification. He must also choose antjumi. This 
is done the same day. The following day, the two parties meet 
each in a different hut and the first ntjumi again comes and 
repeats the whole story, the second ntjumi being present. 

Then a long discussion takes place (between the grown 
up people) as to the lobolo. This discussion is conducted by the 
two ntjumi who go constantly from one hut to the other, the one 
bringing questions: ‘‘ How many oxen do you claim, etc”, the 
other going in his turn to give an answer. So the two parties 
never see each other during this disagreeable debate about money. 
When they are agreed, the suitors and his friends return home 
and the ntjumi recieves £ 1 for his assistance. ‘There is no 
other fekela than this. The word tjekela is unknown in 
Nkuna. : 

The fiancée's visit. As soon as they have gone, the women 
of the village begin to prepare pots of beer for the lobola feast. 
But before this feast takes place, six days later, the girls and her 
friends go to the young men’s village to return the visit. The 
fiancée has been warned by her mother to be very cautions, not 
to accept the proposals of her suitor too readily. Boys and 
girls enjoy themselves thoroughly. A goat is killed for them, 
a goat called the feather because, for the fiancée, it is as it were 
@ereather in her hair, ‘‘a feather in her cap”! 

The lobola act follows immediately. The gir:s have stayed 
three days and gone home. Six had elapsed before they came. 
This makes nine days, just enough for the brewing of the beer. 
It is prepared in the girl’s village. All the suitor’s family make 
for it, driving the herd of cattle, fifteen head strong, which is 
the lobola money. The sham-fight takes place, some of the 
invaders, the young ones, going steadily forward, the others, the 
adults, hiding behind the oxen and pushing them in under a 
shower of blows. Huts are offered to the visitors. One is 

especially reserved for the great mukonwana, the man who has 
married the fiancé’s sister and whose oxen are used to buy the 
bride of the day. He has come to see where his oxen go. In 
the evening girls choose their shigango. To-morrow morning 
they will fetch water for their ablutions. This is the day when 
the lobolo will be officially remitted by the one family to the 
other. Long discussions take place by the intermediacy of the 
two ntjumi at the end of which the male relations of the bride 
leave their hut to inspectthe cattle and criticise them, the others 
trying to emphasise their beauty. Two oxen have been killed 
for the feast, one brought by the fiancé, another provided by the 
father of the fiancée. Dancing, singing, goes on the whole 
afternoon; the visitors go home at sunset, the girls accompany 
them and tie knots of grass where they part. 

A month after the lobola ceremony, a new feast takes place call- 
ed the beer which washes the hoofs of the oxen. ‘The fiancée together 
with the women of the family, (not only the girls), brings pots 
of beer to the husband’s village. They stay outside. When 
the inhabitants ask them to enter, they run back some distance 
and only consent to enter on being urged to do so... andso on! 
The fiancée does not put down the pot she carries until her 
suitor has brought a goat. Shillings must be given to induce 
her to enter the hut, to sit down, to accept water for washing 
her hands and food to eat. Another ox is killed and the meat 
is divided as follows : the liver and the heart are for the bride’s 
father, the leg for her mother, the nyimba, viz. the womb, which 
includes the ribs, sternum etc. for the maternal uncle. The 
women, when they return home, take all these pieces of meat to 
their several adresses. They have put a skewer through the 
heart and liver and stick it into the ground before the bride’s 
father’s hut saying : ‘* This is the notification of the husband’s 
people. ” 

If the total number of the oxen has been remitted on the 
lobola day, the departure of the new wife for the husband’s kraal 
(tlhoma) will not be long delayed. But should there be some 
oxen wanting, a wise father will not allow her to go until the 
whole lobolo has been paid. The husband works hard to fetch 

the other oxen. He brings them, without ceremony, together 
with one sovereign which he puts before the bride’s father as a 
present, saying : ‘‘ This is my spitting for you, my father!” He 
does the same for the mother. He now feels the right to claim 
his wife. They answer : “Give us time to prepare her trous- 
seau”. The trousseau : two mats, two or three big spoons, 
‘some pots, a wooden platter, a pestle and a mortar, one hoe 
provided by the maternal uncle, make up all the equipment of a 
Nkuna bride. All her female relations meet and, after having 
exhorted(1) her to be obedient, to accept all the hardships she 
will find in her new home, they accompany her to her husband’s 
village. This is the hloma. ‘The men do not go, except the 
ntjumi of the bride’s family. The father, on the morning 
- before they leave, kills a fowl and habla, viz. makesa sacrifice. 
telling his ancestors that his daughter goes to be married and 
praying for her. The ntjumi immediately after his arrival, goes 
to the husband and to his assembled relatives and tells them 
roughly : ‘‘ Here we are; we bring you your dog. Here it is. 
With us, she was reputed to be a good girl. Now we shall 
hear you every day say that she is lazy, does not know how to 
cook, has a host of lovers.... All right! Kill her! Kall your 
dog! Have you not bought it? She is a witch! Let her 
@rmk the magic philter, etc.” The men keep silent... ‘ Yes, 
you are right. We shall beat her. But if her husband is too 
hard on her, we will try to deliver her. We shall do our best 
@) protect her”. 

In the meantime the women cut the logs of the shigiyane, fill 
the pots with water and the feast goes on, another ox having 
been killed by the husband. The married pair sit on a mat 

't) ‘** Hear!” do the old women say to the bride, ‘‘ you have been a good 
girl, so far. Henceforth you will be treated asa slave! You will be accused 
of adultery and of witchcraft. You will have no happiness any more. But 
accept all that! They shall beat you, kill you and we will not be able to. 
deliver you, because we have eaten their oxen”. These exhortations are 
worth reproducing as they show distinctly the conditions under which the 
girl goes to her husband. She is not protected by the lobolo! On the con- 
trary, the lobolo has made her the possession of the husband’s family from 
whom she must now accept any treatment. (See Part II). 

and the women of the two families begin the mutual exchange 
of insults which are never wanting on that day! ‘* You dogs!” 
will say one of the aunts of the girl, ‘‘ people of no consequence! 
You have not even a broken pot to remove the ashes from the 
fireplace. You can congratulate yourselves on getting such a 
good wife as this, a hardworker, a splendid cook, a nice and 
honest girl.” An old woman of the other party answers : 
“Yes! If you have exhorted her sufficiently! Perhaps she 
will give up her bad ways, her laziness, etc...” —‘‘ Bad ways? 
You can well speak about that! Look at yourson! What was~ 
he? <A wild beast! We have come to cut his tail and make a 
mianeot ini)? © 

V. Marriage by abduction. 

The several ceremonies which we have described belong to 
the legal marriage (ku teka, ku lobola). But there exists another 
way of getting a wife, and the miserable (psisiwana), those who 
have no oxen, no pounds sterling for lobola, especially if they 
have no energy, have recourse to this method. It is called ku 
tluba. A young man in such a position, wishing to marry such 
and such a girl, will send a friend to her and propose to her a 
rendez-vous in the bush. If she agrees to become his wife in 
this irregular manner, she goes there and meets him. They 
have relations together and run to one of the relatives of the 
girl’s mother. The family of the mother will be more lenient 
than the family of the father, having no right to the lobolo. 
The transgressors of the law will probably choose the village of 
the maternal uncle and settle’there. The parents look for their 
daughter everywhere and try to get her to return home. If 
she is quite determined to remain with her ravisher, they let 
her go free, deploring their misfortune and their shame. But it 
is rare in the primitive state of the tribe that such a marriage 
should not be regularised. The thief, if he has retained any 
feeling of decency, will try to collect the lobolo. One morning 
he goes to the village of his wife’s parents, deposits a sovereign 

i 

or a goat or a cock on the threshold of the hut of the girl’s 
mother ; or he hangs a half-sovereign to the goat’s neck, rubs 
its lips with salt to prevent it from bleating, and then he 
shouts loudly : ‘‘ We have stolen, we of such and such a 
clan”... People wake from their sleep, not knowing what 
animal has made such a noise, come out from their huts and see 
the culprit standing outside the fence. When he has been duly 
recognised, he runs away. He will perhaps bring some other 
presents till he has definitely ‘‘lobola” his wife. Should he 
not succeed in bringing the regular payment, the first girl born 
from that marriage will be the lobolo. ‘‘Nwana a ta lobola 
mamana wa kwe”’: the child will pay for her mother. In law, 
all the children of such an union belong to the girl’s family : 
a man who has not lobola has no right of property whatever 
im his children. (See Part If.) 

Should the woman who has been stolen by t/huba go at once 
to stay with her irregular husband in his village, her parents will 
arrange matters in another way. They will ‘go as enemies” 
(hi bulala), make a regular descent on the village of the thief, 
kill a pig, threaten to take all the furniture. The men of that 
village will then intercede and, in the course of time, the lobolo 

will be paid. (See App. Ill). 

SOME REMARKS ABOUL THE MARKIAGE CUSTOMS 
OF THE THONGE: 

Though somewhat different in the various clans, the marriage cus- 
toms show a strong resemblance amongst them all and differ only in 
details. There are three great ‘‘moments” to distinguish in the 
sequence of the rites: 1) the bua, betrothal, with the two official visits 
of the fiancé and the fiancée. 2) The Jobola, remittance of the pur- 
chase money on which the two families have agreed and 3) the hloma, 
the ceremony of taking the bride to her husband’s home. Some of 
the customs accompanying these principal acts are very strange and 
seem at first quite incomprehensible. 

1) To understand them, we must notice that marriage in primitive 
or semi-civilised tribes is not an individual affair as it has become with 
us. It isan affair of the community. It is a kind of contract between 

—|—_ 2 — 

two groups, the husband’s family and the wife’s family. What is the 
respective position of the two groups or families 2? One of the groups 
loses a member, the other gains one. Tosave itself from undue dimi- 
nution, the first group claims compensation, and the second grants it 
under the form of the lobolo. This remittance of money, oxen or hoes, 
will allow the first group to acquire a new member in place of the one 
they have lost and so the balance will be kept. This conception of 
the lobola as being a compensation, a means of restoring the equili- 
brium between the two groups, is certainly the right one. 

This need of maintaining the importance of a group, the tendency 
to resist a lessening of that group, accounts also for some of the other 
customs: all the rites which emphasise the value of the bride find their 
explanation there. Her flight when she is about to be taken by her 
husband, her delays, her reserve, all that is calculated to show how pre- 
cious she is toher group. ‘‘A hi sikolaha yene”, ‘‘we are not tired 
of her, we would gladly keep her”, say her parents by means of these 
rites. The reciprocal insults which take place on the day of the 
hloma have the same origin. Relatives of the bride do their best to 
show the immense superiority of their own family over the other and 
of their daughter over her husband. The second group defends itself 
as well as it can: hence these challenges which sometimes end in a 
real fight. 

The sham fight is probably to be explained in the same way. The 
boys, brothers of the bride, heartily thrash the brothers of the husband 
who dare to come and take away one of the girls of the kraal. They 
do not like to see their family impoverished, diminished. The old 
men carry the hoes and show them to the defenders of the kraal saying: 
‘¢ This is our ox!” Or they hide themselves amidst the cattle as claim- 
ing their protection, because this is certainly the only condition upon 
which the bride’s clan would consent to recieve the invaders. Mr. van 
Gennep is right, I think, in rejecting the old explanation of the sham 
fight as being a remnant of the marriage by capture which would have 
been the primitive form of marriage.amongst those tribes. The Thonga 
possess the marriage by abduction, but it is quite another thing as we 
have seen. 

2) We find the explanation of some other ceremonies when we 
apply to them the theory of the Rites of passage. For both bride- 
groom and bride, there is indeed passage to a new condition of life. 
They pass from the position of single persons to that of married peo- 
ple. Hence the part taken by their best friends and bridesmaids from 

whom they separate by their marriage. For the bride there is passage 
from one family to another, from one village to another. Separation 
and aggregation rites will consequently take place. 

The separation rites are, on the part of the bride, her flight to the bush 
or to another village the day before the hloma, when the female relati- 
ves of the husband go and seize her by force (Mpfumo). Then the 
wearing a veil which the aunts of the husband take away from her in 
Nondwane, the song of mourning with which her friends accompany 
her to the conjugal dwelling. 

The aggregation rites are first of all the common participation in the 
flesh of the oxen during the feasts. Nothing makes natives more 
friendly to each other than to eat meat together. Then the building 
of the wood pile, the girl’s acts of civility to the husband’s friends 
during the fjekela and the day after the bloma. These rites being 
collective seem to represent the union of the two families. The new 
wife performs them herself individually during the first week of her 
marriage. 

How is it possible to explain the calculated resistance to acts of po- 
liteness on the part of both male and female visitors during the betro- 
thal ceremonies and even later on? If the girls only were making 
difficulty in entering the village, the hut, in sitting down on mats, in 
drinking, in eating, etc. we should say: This rite is also, on the part 
of the diminished group, a means of asserting its importance, of saving 
its dignity. But the boys do the same thing on their visit. They main- 
tain the same disdainful attitude... I suppose it rather arises from the 
fact that the two social groups look upon each other with some distrust, 
not yet being fully acquainted and consequently observe a mutual 
reserve. 

What will be the fate of all these very picturesque marriage customs 
with the advent of civilisation? Let us notice that amongst Christian 
converts, many of them have been abandoned as a matter of course, 
the bad habits of tjekela, the assault on the village, the preparation of 
beer for instance. The part played by adult go-betweens is sometimes 
taken by the elders of the Church, but often young people do not care 
for interference and conduct their own business. 

The lobola custom is opposed by the missionnaries but natives gene- 
rally fail to see its evil. We shall come back to this great subject later 
on when dealing with thelife of the family. Some otherritesare preserv- 

ed, the feast, of course, and we see boys ruining themselves in order 
to prepare a glorious wedding with splendid costumes and abundance 
of meat. On this point they are rather too conservative! 

The religious act has now become the Christian blessing and has 
taken the place of the heathen sacrifice to the ancestors; it is followed 
generally by a procession of the best men and the bridesmaids who 
sing popular hymns, sometimes very solemnly worded, songs of repen- 
tance for instance, as they march to and fro in the nuptial village, the 
women, even the men, of the two families throwing at each other's 
heads amenities of the same kind as in former times. This is a most 
peculiar mixture of the old and the new elements and often made us 
wonder (See Zidji, p. 212). | think however that these rites are doom- 
ed to fall, because Christian marriage is no longer a collective act, 
but has been individualised as well as the many other acts of the psy- 
chic life. It remains a social act indeed, but an act accomplished by 
two individuals on their own responsibility and by mutual love. 
‘¢ Ceci tueracela”: This, the Christian or Western individualism, will 
kill that, viz. the primitive collectivism and all its rites. However ori- 
ginal and interesting the marriage ceremonies may be amongst the 
Bantu, I do not think they can be as suchassimilated to the new ideal. 
Let that ideal inspire new customs befitting its own nature as well as 
the merry character of the race ! 

Here are some answers to the questions of Professor Frazer on mar- 
riage : 

A man always brings his wife to his own home. This is the élhboma 
and itis a law. Itis taboo for him to go and live with his parents- 
in- law, at any rate when he marries his first wife. In the course of 
time, when the children have grown, when the bukonwana viz. the 
relations with parents-in-law are old, a man can go and live in his 
wife’s village (See Part II). Another case in'which this can be done 
is when a widow refuses to marry the man who legally inherits her 
and gives herself to a stranger, a man of Inhambane, for instance. 
He does not pay the lobolo, lives with her in her village; but the 

children born of that union will belong to the family of the deceased 
husband. 

There is no preparation to the marriage by fasting, bleeding or keep- 
ing awake the night before, amongst the Thonga. No corn, nor rice 
is thrown on the wedding pair. The bride or bridegroom are never 
represented at the marriage by a proxy ora dummy. Conjugal rela- 
tions begin just after marriage (see page 113), but the wife does not | 

possess her home and her kitchen for the first year; during that period: 

she must cook for her mother-in-law. 
There are no occasions on which men exchange their wives. 

ESA TURE AGE: 

l. The Bantu Ideal. 

The married man is called “he who has his home” (a ni le 
kwakwe) in opposition to the single man (nkhwenda). But let 
us say at once that the kind of individual called bachelor does 
not abound amongst the Bantu. The wretched, the invalids, 
the weak-minded only, are deprived of the legal marriage which 
for the black man is and remains the one object in life. It is 
through his wife and children that he becomes somebody in the 
society. This fact does not as yet appear during the first year 
of wedlock, for the newly married.woman must cook at the . 
fireplace of her mother-in-law. She is hardly more than a 
servant during a whole year; she does not possess her own pot, 
and it must be so because she does not yet eat the mealies of her 
own garden, having ploughed her fields in her former domicile 
the previous year. Her husband eats with her. He is not yet 
a lord. But if he is rich, if he is the heir of an important man, 
he will not be long in buying a second and third wife. 

These new marriages will be contracted as the first one but 
with less pomp. It even happens that the feast may be held in 
the husband’s village, if he has become middle aged and is at his 
fifth or sixth wedding. 

For each new wife, he will huild a hut. He has begun his 
village when building the house of his first wife, the great wife, 
(nsati. lwe nkulu) as she is called, she who will remain the 
principal one whatever may happen. (While, without compass, 
he was drawing on the ground with the marvellous instinct of 
the South African native, the circumference of the circle on 

which the patched reed walls of his dwelling were to rise, while 
he was covering this circular wall with a conical roof, he was 
saying to himself: ‘*I establish my home; I inaugurate my vil- 
lage”. During the following years, the aim of his life will be 
to complete little by little another wider circle... When he 
has bought his second wife, he will also build for her a hut of 
the same type. But this second hut, the third, and the fourth 
which may come afterwards, will not be erected in a straight 
row like a street. They will form an arc which will be pro- 
longed so as to constitute first a semi-circle then a complete cir- 
cle, if a sufficient number of buildings are added. This is 
the ideal of the black man: to become the lord and master of a 
complete circular village. Most of the men do not reach this 
ideal. Three or four limts, a wretched quarter of a circle is 
all to which they attain! Some better armed for the struggle 
of life, or more favoured by circumstances close their circle. 
Their cattle, for which they have also built a circular enclo- 
sure, right in the middle of the square of the village, mul- 
tiply and are not carried of by peripneumonia and hematuria 
which, in their countries, decimate so many herds! Every three 
years, theirs wives bear children. If these are boys, it is an 
honour: the village will not lack heirs, neither will the father 
lack arms to help and to defend him! If they are girls, it means 
wealth : oxen will come to the family! Their brothers will 
not lack wives, for the sisters will be sold to provide for the 
brothers! Meanwhile, the huts are erected, large and small, 
the one of the head of the family being the largest, the malao, 
those of the boys, the least well kept. 

Let us look at a Ronga favoured by fate, as was Gidja, of the 
country of Libombo, near Rikatla. His village numbered not 
less than twenty-four huts, with beautiful shady trees behind; 
notice the enclosure for the cattle and for the goats on the cen- 
tral place, that for the pigs behind the houses..... There are cocks 
and hens pecking about everywhere, dogs wandering around 
in search of someting to steal, for they receive hardly any 
food ; a crowd of youngsters leading the cattle, and everywhere 
the noise of the pestles crushing the daily mealies in the large - 

mortars. He walks about proudly in his favoured enclosure, 
looking with pleasure on his prosperity. Young men are ready 
to do the work he will give them to do. He will treat them 
with beer brewed by his wives. And often the people of the 
neighbouring villages will join his people for dances and games 

Phot. H, Gross 
Ndjakandjaka. a headman of Spelonken, with his men. 

on the fine square which is surrounded and enclosed on‘all sides 
by huts. 

And, above all things, in the evening, each of his wives will 
bring him the pot which she has cooked for him. This is the 
essential matrimonial duty of the wife. Not one will fail in it. 
Gidja, the lord of six or seven pots of mealies seasoned with a 
sauce of monkey nuts, will feast and be satiated (shura) every 
day, and that means much, for the inner capacity of a Thonga 
is something wonderful. 

—~ xe — 

He will become large and stout, quite shining, which in 
South Africa is a sure sign of wealth and nobility. The stouter 
he gets the more he will be respected. But it is easy to con- 
ceive that he cannot empty by himself all these pots amidst which 
he is reigning. He treats his children, but others come to pay 
him visits at that evening hour when they know him to be 
surrounded by so many good things! The sycophants are not 
wanting! ‘*Good evening, son of so and so!” do they say. 
‘You are one of the great men of the country”. And to ans- 
wer these and other compliments, the magnanimous Gidja shares 
his feast with his admirers! 

Strangers are crossing the country and inquire where they 
could be recieved ? ‘* Go to Gidja” they are told. “A ni 
tshengwe, a fuya tshengwe” viz. ‘‘he is the possessor of a 
harem!” He is not killed by famine! He has beer to drink 
every day! He can give food to poor people. Even then, some 
of it remains in the plate and is eaten by little boys and dogs 
on the square. There is always abundance there. And the 
travellers come and enter (khuleka) his village, after which they 
will tellin their homes the story of the magnificence of Gidja and 
will extol his hospitality. 

Thus the man who has succeeded in life becomes famous, 
his advice will carry weight in the discussions in which he 
takes part; he will perhaps be even more esteemed than the 
chief himself, though he has not the special prestige which the 
royal family owes to the blood which runs in its veins. 

Conclusion: the greatness of an African is before all a matter 
of pots and the matter of pots is closely connected with poly- 
gamy ! 

During these years of mature age the evolution of a man is not 
marked by special ceremonies. There is one custom however 
which is common to all and which means a progress in their 
social position. It is that of fixing the wax ring. 

Il. Fixing the wax ring. 

With the South Africans, the crown is not the apanage of 
royalty. All men having reached mature age, have the right to 
adorn themselves with it! It is true, it is not a diadem of 
precious stones, but a large ring of wax. This custom seems to 
have a Zulu origin. The Ba-Suto do not know it and the Ba- 
Thonga, who all practise it, have taken it from the conquering 
tribe which owes its fortune to the famous Chaka. This habit has 
spread all over the country from Maputju to the borders of Gaza, 
but only during the last ninety years. This black crown is 
called ngiyana (Ro.) or shidlodlo(Dj.), and the crowning ceremony 
is called khehla. From that verb has come the term makhebla, 
a name given to all those who wear this ornament. 

This ceremony is accomplished in the following way: At a 
given time, the chief informs all the men of a certain age that 
they must prepare their rings. The counsellors and the sons 
of the royal family who belong to this “‘ class” must go to the 
capital. Several oxen are killed; the back tendons are carefully 
kept and made into strings. This being done, the master hair- 
dressers, that is to say those who know how to fix these strange 
appendices, are called in. 

They come, supplied with small sticks (tinhlamalala, the 
nervures of the leaves of the milala palm-tree) which they plait 
together with these strings of tendons so as to form the skele- 
ton, the circular frame of the crown. The strings drawn 
through the curly hair, all around the head, fix the frame of 
the crown securely above the temples. The remaining hair on 
the sides and behind has heen previously shaven. The chief 
possesses a provision of wax: the wax which is preferred is not 
that of the bees but the rosy secretion of certain grubs which 
is found on some bushes and which the young boys of the capital 
go and pick. This wax is mixed with different ingredients to 
make it black. It is fixed on the frame of sticks and shaped into 

a large round or oval ring, 'as black as jet, and which can be 

—— 130 os 

made to shine brightly. When all is done, they eat the flesh 
of the oxen, they enjoy themselves, they dance and solemnize 
this great occasion ! 

The more humble subjects crown themselves in their own 
villages where tonsorial artists come to adorn them. The poor 
go tothe hair dresser and they do not use strings of ten- 
dons (they have no ox to kill), but strings which are made from 
the fibres of a palm-tree; it is cheaper. It is said that nowadays 
the strings of palm-tree (bukuha) have nearly entirely sup- 
planted the others, the more so as they are not spoilt by the was- 
hing of the crown; whilst, if the ngiyana is fixed with tendons, 
no water must fall on it, or it would soften. 

Moreover the crown must be taken care of; it can be spoilt 
and deformed by a blow or when its owner goes through thorny 
bushes. A khehla who has some self-respect will often po- 
lish and repair this valuable ornament, for it is a sign of the 
mature age. He who has been ordered by the chief to wear it 
carries no more burdens on his head: his crown would be 
spoilt! He will be accompanied by a boy who carries his 
parcels ; he himself will only carry his stick or his assagay. 
He will at once be known as one of the mature men of the 
tribe. This is not to say that the mere fact of wearing the 
agiyana gives the right of mixing in the important affairs of the 
country : the cousellors alone possess this right ; but it is amongst 
the ‘* crowned ”, that will be chosen the man who will be sent 
to another chief to treat political questions, for instance. 

When the hair grows (for, though it is curly, it can become 
long), the crown rises with it and becomes more or less unsteady, 
which must be most uncomfortable! The best thing would be 
to cut the ornament off and then replace it. Mr. Mandjia, one 
of our neighbours of Rikatla, was probably too lazy to under- 
take this job so he put a small red handkerchief between his 
skull and the crown to prevent its swaying. 

At a given time all the ngiyana disappeared from the land of 
Nondwane. The chief Mapunga was dead! The mourning, kept 
secret fora year, had been made publicand the law requires all the 
mature men to take off their crowns when the sovereign of the’ 

country is defunct. They take the wax from the frame, make 
a ball of it which they fix on a little stick, and put this stick in 
the roof of their hut above the door. The frame is hung up 
quite close by, and they leave these things remaining there till 
the new chief orders his subjects to remake their crowns. ‘This 
shows clearly that the crowning custom is in close relation 
with the national life of the tribe. The ‘‘ makhehla” form also 
special battalions in the army. 

Nowadays, however, this custom is not kept as religiously 
as in bygone times. Life is harder, one must go and earn 
pounds sterling in the port of Lourenco Marques, or in the gold 
mines, and one can no longer indulge in a lazy life! It may 
therefore happen that a poor man will refuse to wear the crown, 
and say to his chief: ‘* What shall I eat? Will you feed me? 
Must I not carry burdens on my head? I do not know what to 
do with the ngiyana”. — ‘‘Tiko dji bolile,” say the old people 
shaking their heads. “A ke he na nao”, that is to say? “the 
country is falling into decay, going to the dogs. There is no 
law any more’... Oh! the good old times! 

FOLD AGE 

The man however grows older, older. His hair and his beard 
turn white, the wrinkles deepen on his face. He stoops. His 
skin no longer shines with health and corpulence. His wives 
die and his glory fades. His crown loses the lustre of bygone 
times. When a branch scratches it, when a knock spoils it, he 
has not a shilling to pay the repairer! He is forsaken. He is 
less respected and often only a burden unwillingly supported. 
The children laugh at him. If the cook sends them to carry to 
the lonely grandfather his share of food in his leaky old hut, 
the young rascals are capable of eating it on the way and of 
depriving the old man of his food, pretending afterwards that 
they had done what they were told! And when, between two 
huts, under shelter of the hedge of reeds, he warms his round- 

shouldered back in the rays of the setting sun, remaining there 
quite weighed down by his years, lost in some senile dream, 
they point at the decrepit form and say to each other : “‘ He! 
Shikhunkununu! ” — ‘ It is the bogey-man, the ogre!” 

People of mature age show scarcely more consideration for 
old people than do the young ones. Lately in the district of 
Matjolo, an old man and an old woman, Kobole and Minyo- 
kwana, were forsaken by their children who were moving to 
another part of the country. They were left in a miserable 
shed, merely a roof supported by some poles without any reeds 
to close in the wall. Some compassionate souls took pity on 
these poor wretched people, who had fallen into second child- 
hood and did not even know what they were saying! 

In times of war, old people die in great numbers! During the 
moments of panic, they are hidden in the wood, in the swamps 
of palm-trees, while all the able-bodied population run away. 
They are killed by the enemy who spare no one (it is the 
law of war), or they die in their hiding places of misery and 
hunger! 

As may be seen the eve of life is very sad for the poor 
Thonga! There are however children who, to the end, show 
much devotion to their parents. Those who are the most to 
be pitied are they which fall to the charge of remote nephews 
or cousins. They can only repeat in a broken voice the sad 
refrain : ‘‘ Ba hi shanisa! ” — ‘* They treat us very badly!” 

G. DEATH 

lithe last@aays: 

Manyibane, the headman of a big village near Rikatla, is 
dangerously ill. The men of his kraal, his friends, have come 
to inquire about the disease (kamba shinyonga) and have 
jearned that it is serious. They issue this order to all the 

inhabitants : “‘ Tlulan psilawen!” — ‘‘Keep each of you in 
his sleeping place, (viz. the men tothe right of the hut, the 
women to the left) and have no relations anymore. It is 
taboo! The man would die!” Should visitors come, they 
are not allowed to enter the village. They must have kept 
“ure” for two days at least. Two sticks are planted on either 
side of the door of the hut and a.third one put over them so 
as to close the entrance. ‘‘It is the way black people have of 
making their proclamation,” says Mboza. ‘‘ Everybody will 
know that a dying man is there and nobody will come in.” 
Should another man have had relations with the same woman 
as the patient, he is doubly prohibited from seeing him, because 
the patient would break into perspiration and die at once. 
This is the great law of matlulana, as we shall see. 

Of course the nganga (doctor) has been called already. He 
has tried his best. The bone-thrower also! He has discovered 
‘perhaps that the disease was due to a wizard. He has found 
him out by his art! ‘The suspected one is called and solemnly 
ordered to heal the patient. He is shut up in the hut with 
him and he must recall his deadly spells and restore the man 
to health. - But this has not succeeded, any more than the 
doctor's drugs! 

The dying man calls together all his relations and expresses 
his last wishes before them : ‘‘Somebody has not come; go and 
fetch him’? he says. When they are all present, he says to 
them : ‘‘ All right, my brethren, my children. I wanted to 
see you before dying. I wanted you, especially so and so, who 
has been. so good to me. ‘The others hated me; you always 
did show me love. Henceforth I entrust to you the care of 
my people.” He will probably designate his successor, the 
one who is to be the great one (nkulukumba), and recommend 
the others to obey to him. 

Then he reminds them about his debts, those he owes and 
those which are owing to him. “So and so has lobola our 
daughter and has not payed all the oxen...” He reveals to 
them also the place where he has.buried some treasure. ‘‘Go 
to such a place, in such a hut, and you will find it.” He 

does not say a word about his wives and about their future, as 
those questions will be settled according to the laws relating to 
widows which are well known. 

When the breathing becomes shorter, those who watch over 
him begin to bend his limbs (ku khondla psiro (Ro.); ku putja 
(Dj.). This is a very old custom and it is deemed so important 
that the operation begins before death, lest the rigidity of the 
body should prevent it from being accomplished. When the 
bending of the limbs had been too long delayed, it has some- 
times been necessary to break them. To avoid this uncomfor- 
table eventuality, one may see those attending to the dying 
man taking his hands gently and bringing them near to his 
chin, and folding his legs against his body. When asked why 
they do so, they will say: ‘‘It is the law. This is the way of 
caring for the dead (bekisa)”. Or: “It is in order to have 
smaller graves to dig...” But I do not think this utilitarian 
reason to be the true one. Amongst the Ba-Ronga where 
graves are dug in the soft sand, there would be no difficulty at 
all in making a larger hole. 

Some ethnographers have adopted the ‘‘embryonic explanation” to 
account for this custom which is spread all through primitive huma- 
nity, from the Mousterian age down to the first inhabitants of Egypt, 
and amongst a great many uncivilised tribes all over the earth. (1) 
They say: ‘* The primitive man has given the corpse the attittude 
of the child before its birth because they believed that death is but a 
new birth, the begining of a new life...” Tasked Viguet if he thought 
this to be the true original explanation. He told me he did not know, 
he would not deny it. But there is a fact which prevents its accep- 
tance : the Thonga have never made any dissection and ignore the 
position of the foetus in the womb. So do probably all the primitive 
folk. That kind of knowledge has come much later in the evolution 
of mankind, The intention of this rite is more probably to puta 
dying man in the sitting position which a Thonga generally adopts 
when in his hut, as the grave is but a hut in the earth and he is meant 

(1) See my paper in Anthropos Sept. 1910. ‘‘ Two burials at twenty 
thousand years distance.” 

to continue his life in it exactly as before. All the other burial rites 
confirm this explanation, as we shall see. 

Manyibane is dead... In some districts they see that he 
does not die with closed hands. It is taboo because then the 
children of the dead wili quarrel (Viguet). They close his 
eyes, they take away all his clothes. In the Mpfumo clan, they 
wash the body. Afterwards they cover him with an old rug. 
Noone cries. Lamentations are absolutely prohibited before the 
burial is accomplished: it is taboo It would ‘“‘ break the back” 
of the men who have to perform the funeral rites. 

Should there be strangers in the village when the death takes 
place, they will run away quickly to avoid defilement; other- 
wise they would have to take part in all the purifying ceremo- 
nies of the following days. 

Without delay, the fire which was burning in the funeral 
hut is removed and carried on to the square. It must be care- 
fully kept alight. This is a taboo. Should there be rain, it 
must be protected. All the inhabitants must use this fire 
during the next five days. It will be put out by the doctor, 
with sand or water, on the day of the dispersion of the mour- 
ners. He will then light a new one and everyone will take 
from it embers to kindle his own fire in the different huts. It 
is one of the conditions of the purification of the village. 

The same day young people are sent to all the relatives in 
the neighbourhood to announce the death. Even the relations 
who are absent far away, in Johannesburg, must be informed, 
and it is done in this way: Someone takes a handful of grass, 
lights it and, when it is on fire, throws it in the direction of 
the absent one saying: ‘“‘ Your brother, here, is dead. Do 
not fear. Let your enemies (viz. your White employers) have 
consideration and love for you, that you may find sleep and 

health ”. 

oo 136 —= 

Il. The grave. 

The men of the village then go out and dig the grave. They 
choose a place behind the hut of the deceased or somewhere 
further in the little forest which generally surrounds the village ; 
or in the ntimu, the sacred wood, if he were one of the guar- 
dians of the forest, one belonging to the elder branch of the 
family. 

First of all they see that a tree be near the grave on which 
to hang some of the belongings of the deceased (those which 
will be kept but will have to be purified); they dig a hole of 
about six feet in length, four in width, and two and _ half or 
three deep. This first hole can be dug with ordinary hoes. 
Then, at the side of it, they excavate a second hole, more or less 
circular in form, using for this a light wooden board, generally 
the border of an old basket. The sides of this hole are well 
smoothed by means of this instrument. In the Northern clans 
they sometimes smear it with mud taken from the river; they 
also put one reed besides the corpse, and grass, which grew in 
water, is spread the bottom of the grave. (1) So the grave is, 
in a way, double. It presents two levels: the higher one, the 
large hole, which gives access to the smaller one, the circular 
ovoid grave. The first is called the square (hubo) of the deceas- 
ed, the second one is his hut (yindlu or shinyatu). He will 
dwell in the hut, but come out from it and sit on his square 
underground, just as he was doing when living in his village. (2) 
(Elias. ) ; 

When the grave has been duly dug, the diggers call the 
relatives to inspect their work, and show them that their 
deceased relation has been well cared for. The lower grave, 

(1) Compare this custom with the rite of burying little children and twins 
in a wet soil. 

(2) In some clans of the North there is only one hole and no excavation 
on the side. But what I have described here is the rule amongst the Ba- 
Ronga, except when civilisation has already altered the old custom. 

being excavated in the wall of the higher one, forms a kind of 
vault. It seems as if it were considered necessary that the earth 
which will protect the head must not be disturbed. When all 
the mourners have come, at the call of the diggers, it sometimes 
happens that the vault of the grave falls in. It is a very bad 
sign. ‘The cause of the accident is this: either the person who 
has bewitched the deceased is present or, amongst the assis- 
tants, there is one who has been guilty of ‘‘ matlulana” against 
him!(1) The grave is a mondjo, a magical means of divination. 

HI. The burial. 

The diggers can be four in number, but they are generally 
only two : the master of the mourning (nwinyi wa nkosi), who 
is the brother next to the deceased, and another younger near 
relative, for instance a son. Both must be married, because 
married people alone can get rid of the defilement of death by 
the ‘‘lahla khombo ”, which we shall explain later. Should an 
unmarried son be asked to undertake the work of burying, he 
would answer: ‘‘ How can you propose to me suth a thing ? 
Am I not immature (mbisi, properly raw)? Iam not yet ripe ! 
Is defilement of death not there ? With whom could I wash it 
away?” (Viguet). The first digger is also called ‘‘ the one of 
the head”, the second, ‘‘the one of the feet”, because one 
of them will carry the corpse by the head, the other by the 
feet. Women can also bury a corpse occasionally. 

So the grave-diggers go back to the hut an begin to wrap 
the corpse in his rugs and in his mat (ku tjimba). They stitch 

© (1) On this point Mboza and Elias did not agree. Mboza said the falling 
of the grave can only be caused by the presence of the wizard who killed 
the deceased. Elias asserts that the same accident happens if some of the 
assistants has tjemakanya the deceased, viz. crossed his way, that is to say 
has had sexual relations with the same woman as the deceased. (This is 
matlulana). As the hut of the deceased knew this man, so his new hut in 
the ground recognises and reveals him! 

 138  

the mat twice (to prevent it from slipping ?) (Viguet). They 
wait generally till sunset to perform the burial. When the time 
has come, they bore the wall of the hut on the right side, as the 
husband dwells in the right half of the house, the wife in the 
left half. The corpse must not be carried out of the hut by 
the door but by that artificial opening. (1) So he leaves the 
hut, head foremost. (2) They sometimes close their noses with 
leaves of a bush called ngupfana, which has a strong scent, in 
order not to perceive the smell of death (moya wa lifu). They 
march slowly, withouta word, men and women following them 
silently. The ‘‘ one of the head ” goes down into the first level, 
the one of the feet follows him. They have already put at the 
place of the head a piece of wood, a piece of branch of a nkanye, 
their sacred tree, one foot long and three inches broad, to be 
used as a pillow. At the bottom, on the soil, they stretch some 
old rugs. They lay the corpse down (3) on the left side, the 
head on the pillow. The grave has been dug in such a way 
that its long axis is directed towards that cardinal point whence 
the ancestors came, so that the deceased, having the head slightly 
bent backwards, is meant to look in that direction. (4) Now 
they take away from the deceased all those rugs in which they 
had wrapped him, they cut them through the middle with a knife, 
making a large opening in each of them as well as in the mats, also 
in the pieces of clothing which have all been brought and which 

(1) In the Hlabi clans, the corpse is carried through the door, but the plas- 
ter on both sides of the door (marimba) is beaten and falls down. It will be 
repaired later on. In the Northern clans the hut of the deceased is not 
taboed so strongly as amongst the Ba-Ronga When it has been purified it 
will be used again. 

(2) Compared Ethnography : In Switzerland it is a common saying that 
a corpse must leave the house the feet foremost. 

(3) The Ba-Ngoni put their dead in the grave in the sitting position, a 
knife in the hand, as it is a race of murderers! (Viguet). It may be that the 
reclined position given to the corpse by the Ba-Ronga, is the result of an 
evolution. At any rate, this is not the proper sleeping position, as natives 
generally do not bend their limbs when sleeping. 

(4) I attended one day, on December 17th 1908, the burial of one of my 
neighbours of Rikatla, called Sokis, and described the rites which I wit- 
nessed that day in the paper already quoted, published by Anthropos, Septem- 
Peragio. 

must be thrown away in thegrave. 
breath its last, just the same as the deceased, said Spoon. 

taboo”. 

‘* Everything must hefemula, 

eae 

No iron must be put into the grave. Iron, black iron 

Yi 

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tI) ! 

YY 
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+ WS 
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fl 

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Drawn by Cl. Heaton and reproduced from « Anthropos ». 

is ndjoba; it is dangerous for the deceased, because it does not 

decay as quickly as the corpse, the rugs and the mats... 
must not be buried. Copper and brass still less ! 

It 

Because it 

A Ronga in his grave. 

does not even change colour. ‘‘ These would call Death to the 
village because they remain shining ; they would shine for Death 
and point out other people of the kraal saying: Kill!” (Viguet). 
Copper, brass bracelets as well as white snuff boxes are called 
nhlale not ndjoba. (1) 

It is interesting to notice how the different belongings of the 
dead are dealt with, and where they are put. There are two cate- 
gories. Some must disappear with the deceased, some will be kept. 

To the first category belong before all his rugs; they are wrap- 
ped round his body. He sleeps in them; they must not be 
tied however, because it is taboo to tie a corpse; the spirit, shi- 
kwembu, would become angry at being imprisoned and would cause 
evil. (2) The mats are spread in the first hole, as well as the 
old jackets and trousers, because there the deceased will come 
and sit on them, when he gets out of his hut to rest on his square. 
The earthen pots, especially the old ones, are broken on the 
grave afterwards “to show anger against death ” (Elias). 
The mug, which is one of them, may be occasionally put on 
the grave, pierced at the bottom, and offerings of beer will be 
poured into it later on for the dead. All these perishables are 
to die with him. They are called his filth (thyaka ra yena). 
Objects of the first category are sometimes burnt in the Nor- 
thern clans. 

The second category includes the articles which are preser- 
ved as having still some value; they will be hung on the tree, 
or at the foot of the tree near the grave, or in front of the 
abandoned hut, and will be duly purified during the next few 
days, as we shall see. Good baskets, new pots, assagais, (3) 

(1) It is sometimes a matter of discussion to know what is ndjoba and what 
is not. I have seen the digger tear off the buttons from the trousers of Sokis, 
when he was cutting them through, and throw them out of the grave. An 
old woman thinking perhaps that they were not of such an incorruptible 
nature as iron, put them in again and again he threw them out. 

(2) It seems even that no knot must enter a grave. Two bits of skin tied 
together and forming the clothing of Sokis round his loins were first untied 
and then thrown into the grave. 

(3) The blade but not the handle, which is comprised in his ‘‘ filth’ and 
which is broken. ‘‘ The handle is he, the blade is not he”’. 

knives, hoes etc., belong to the second category. They will 
be distributed afterwards amongst the heirs. In the Northern 
clans, seeds taken from the store of the deceased are sometimes 
thrown also in the grave with the words: ‘* Go with your 

> 

seeds ”’. 
But let us return to the burial : the ‘‘ one of the head” 

oe 
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gp ae = Sete z ne 

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Drawn by Cl. Heaton froma phot. of H. A. Junod and 
reproduced from « Anthropos » 

THE GRAVE OF SOKIS, A MAN OF RIKATLA. 

(Sokis, being an exorcist, a little hut has been built on his grave). 

officiates in the grave. Then all the relations help him to fill 
the hole. They push the sandy soil with their hands. With 
great care they remove every piece of root, as if to make the 
sand perfectly clean. It is a taboo dictated by respect for the 
deceased. To do otherwise would mean “‘ to throw him away ” 
(tshukumeta). The head has been covered with a towel and 

the earth is brought near it very gently. Now the digger takes 
two twigs, from the branch of a male nkanye (the nkanye is a 
dioecious vegetable) and puts them into the right hand of the 
deceased, which is seen emerging from the rugs near his cheek. 
When the earth reaches the level of this arm, it is slowly exten- 
ded so as to cause the two twigs to emerge. This process of 
extension goes on as long as it is possible to draw the arm out- 
wards, the hole being gradually filled in. When the arm is 
fully extended, the digger clutches (wutla) one of the twigs and 
gives it to one of his helpers who keeps it; the second one 
remains in the hand of the deceased. Such is, at any rate, the 
regular way of performing the rite of the twig. But often one 
twig only is put in the hand and it is taken away as soon as the 
earth reaches it, without extension of the arm; or it is made to 
emerge from the sand by gently pulling all the time, till the 
grave is filled in, so that, when the tumulus is formed, the end 
of the twig is still to be seen. The younger brother will then 
take it to perform the religious rite. The twig is called the 
mhamba, a word which we translate generally by offering, but 
which designates any object by means of which men enter in- 
to relation with the spirits of the ancestors. The officiating 
sits at the foot of the tumulus. All the people are sitting round 
the grave silently, the men nearer, the women farther off. He 
holds the twig with the right hand and turns it round his head, 
making circular figures in the air. Then he pronounces the 
sacramental syllable Tsz, tsu, tsu, two or three times, prolonging 
the sound ;_ he has called the spirits. He prays: ‘‘ You, my 
ancestors, who are assembled to day... Do you not see this ? 
You have taken him.. [am alone now. I am dead! I pray 
you, who are yonder (kolaho), as he has gone back to you, that 
we may remain in peace. He did not leave us in anger. Let 
us mourn him gently, in peace. Let us help each other to 
mourn him well, even our parents-in-law from amongst whom 
he has taken his wife.” It may be that he forgets to say 
something which ought to be said ; then some of his hearers 
remind him quietly of the omission and he adds the words to his 
prayer. 

SS — 
The wailing (ku djila nkosi). As soon as he has finished 
praying, the assistants commence crying. The wailing begins. 
The women get on their feet and shout loudly, throwing them- 
selves on the ground. ‘The wife of the deceased cries more than 
any one else: ‘‘I have remained alone in the lonely plain 
(libalen). Where did you go? You have left me.” The wail- 
ing generally starts on a very high note and finishes a little 
lower, expressing the pain of the heart in a touching, penetrat- 
ing manner. Here is one of these sentences which can hardly 
be called a song. I heard it in 1893 at the burial of a young 
woman who was found drowned in the lake of Rikatla. 

O my mother! O my mother! You have left me, where did you go ?! (1) 

The parents-in-law lament over their daughter, the new 
widow. Everybody then begins to lament over his own rela- 
tions who have died recently. The brothers weep together with- 
out shouting. They say: ‘‘You have gone first. We shall 
follow you soon, because there is attraction in death”. 

It is during the mourning that pots, handles of assagais etc. 
are broken over the grave. 

Let us stop a little while at this point. 

We have seen enough already to notice that, for the Thonga, death 
(lifu) is not only a sad event, a great cause of pain on account of the 
bereavement, but a fearful contaminating power which puts all objects, 
all people which were in the neighbourhood of the deceased, all his 
relatives, even those dwelling far away, working in Johannesburg for 
instance, in a condition of uncleanness. This uncleanness is very dan- 
gerous indeed. It kills, if not properly treated. All are not affected 
in the same way. There are concentric circles round the deceased : 
the widows are the inner circle and will undergo a very rigorous 
purification ; the grave diggers come next; then the inhabitants of the 
bereaved village, the relations residing in other villages, even the rela- 
tives of the wives of the deceased. All these being unclean are put 
out of the pale of society : ‘¢ Muti wu tjumile”, ‘‘ the village is dark”, 
is the technical expression. This marginal period lasts longer for 

(1) See for the notes of this song: Les Ba-Ronga, p. 50. 

those who are more affected: one year and more for the widows, one 
month for the village, five or six days only for the mourners from out- 
side. But there are many taboos in connexion with this period. Sexual 
relations are severely prohibited amongst married people, but the 
gangisa is not so strongly objected to, at any rate in some districts. 
We shall also meet with the aggregation rites by which reintegration 
into the ordinary way of life will be secured. The funeral rites may 
last for one year and are very complex. There are three great moments 
in the sequence of these rites: 1) The Great Mourning which lasts a few 
davs, just after the burial, generally only five days. Here the purifi-. 
cation is essentially medical and aims at cleansing the persons and the 
objects which were directly in contact with the deceased. 2) The sexual 
rites which tend to purify the collective life of the village by the remo- 
val of its defilement. 3) The familial rites, consisting in gatherings of 
all the relatives and accompanied by religious ceremonies. These seem 
to aim at restoring the life of the family, viz. of the social group, 
which has been diminished by the death of one of its members. 

This general sequence is found in all the clans. But the rites them- 
selves differ greatly ; these differences I shall try to depict clearly. 
My information is more complete as regards the Ronga clans, but I 
owe to Viguet some entirely new and very interesting material regar- 
ding the Hlabi rites. 

IV. The Great Mourning of the first five days. 

1) THE Great MourNING AMONGST THE Ba-RonGa. 

Just after the burial, all the inhabitants of the village go to 
the lake or the river to bathe. The grave-diggers nibble a 
ndjao, the root of a reed which has magical power. Special 
rites will then be performed for the widows. We shall describe 
them in the next chapter. When they come back from the 
pool, one of the men climbs on the hut and removes from its 
top the crown of woven grass, which was its glory during the 
life of its master. The hut participates in the general state of 
uncleanness of all his belongings. ‘This crown will be put before 
the door to close it, and no one will dare to enter any more till 
the day of the crushing of the hut. 

as — 

In the Mpufmo clans, that first evening, the grave diggers 
have some preliminary purification rites to go through: 1) a 
hondla, viz. an ablution with leaves of the nkuhlu tree which 
have been crushed in a mortar with some water. 2) In former 
times they used to make a pipe with the shell of a raw sala, 
place in it an ember and a little hen’s dung, and smoke this 
disgusting mixture. 

From that first day, the grave diggers and the widows, when 
eating, must use special spoons (psthanti) made from old broken 
calabashes. It is taboo for them to take the food with their 
fingers in the common plate during the five days of the Great 
Mourning. 

The night has come. All the widows sleep in the open, their 
huts, which belonged to the deceased, being taboo. If it rains, 
they sleep in the other huts of the village. 

On the following day, the doctor comes and he begins to pro- 
ceed with the medical purification of the widows and of the 
grave-diggers. This will consist in three successive vapour 
bathes, on the first, the third and the fifth day after death. These 
mahungulo are administered in the same way as the one I have 
already described in connection with the infantile rites (p. 52). 
But the drugs boiled in the pot and the pills burnt in the fire are 
considered very powerful, especially those of the first day, so 
much so that the pot in which they have been prepared must 
be broken on the grave. The two grave-diggers and the first 
widow must be exposed together to this particularly powerful 
desinfectant, the widow keeping her old clothing during the 
operation. The second and third bath, those provided for the 
other widows, are not so strong and the pot can bekept. In these 
the widow does not enter together with the grave-diggers. These 
rites as wellas the obligation of using special spoons, refer only 
to the diggers and the widows. 

Other rites must be performed by the whole community. 

First the cutting of the hair, which must be complete for the 
widows and the near relations. Men sometimes cut only one 
strand on each side, women cut from the forehead to the nape 

of the neck. The operation is performed either by the doctor 

 146  

or by anybody who is familiar with it, and the instrument used 
is either an iron razor or a bit of glass. They say this shaving 
is an act of respect for the dead, also a sign of sadness and a 
means of preventing the mayiha, the impression of the hair stan- 
ding on end from fear of death. Should mourners forget to cut 
their hair, they might lose their heads, and become delirious 
(hahama). 

Then they put on malopa, viz, pieces of a dark blue cotton 
cloth which have been used for a long time amongst the 
Ba-Ronga. The first widow must have them before she enters 
the enclosure of the second vapour bath. 

A third general rite is the Juma milomo, the purification of the 
food of the deceased. This is not a medicinal operation, but it 
seems that, by this act, every relative removes for himself the dan- 
ger which is in the contaminated food. The word Juma which we 
shall often find in the Thonga ritual means originally to bite (like 
a dog) or to cause violent, internal pain (colics or pains of labour). 
But in the ritual terminology it means to accomplish certain rites 
in relation with some given food in order to remove the danger 
which is attached to it. The milomo are some seeds of each kind of 
cereal which the deceased had in his storehouses. Some beans, 
grains of maize, kaffircorn, kaffir peas, etc., are cooked and poured 
into one of the baskets (lihlelo) of the deceased. The ntukulu, 
viz. the uterine nephew, the son of the sister of the deceased, is 
first called. It is he who must begin the rite and this is so 
important that, when people go to pay their mourning visit, they 
always take with them a girl or a boy who is a “ ntukulu” of 
the one they mourn. The child stands before the pot, his feet 
together. The master of the mourning, (in this case, the first 
widow) kneels before him, takes a few drops from the pot, some 
of the cooked food which remains at the bottom, and pours this 
between his great toes. He bends his body and rubs the two 
great toes against one another. ‘Then he turns his back to the 
place and goes away. He must not look behind: it is taboo. 
Then the other relatives say: ‘‘Let us all go and Juma milomo.” 
He has given them the right to do so. 

A little of the milomo is carefully kept in a pot for months. 

—a—V = 
When relatives who were absent on the day of the death come 
back from Johannesburg or from elsewhere, they must perform 
thisceremony before entering the village and eating any food in it. 
“Ba yila muti” — ‘‘they are taboo to the village”. The rule 
applies only to relatives. Other people may very well eat from 
the deceased’s store of food without any harm, as its contamina- 
tion is dangerous only for his family. Another variety of this 
rite consists in preparing light beer with the mealies of the dead 
and first taking one mouthful which must be spat out on the 
right side, then a second one on the left side, after which one is 
allowed to drink. 

The gardens of the deceased must also be purified, and this is 
done by the rite called baninga mabele, to give light to the 
mealies. ‘The widows and all the female relatives go to his fields 
holding an old and empty shikutja. The shikutja is the hard shell 
of a sala fruit, the size of an orange, in which has been kept 
the provision of vegetable tihublu fat (see Part IV) and which 
is impregnated with it still. The women set fire to it and 
walk through the gardens holding it up and illuminating the 
fields. This is perhaps in relation to the idea that death means 
darkness, and that its contamination is ‘‘ black” (ntima) so long 
as the cleansing has not taken place. 

During the five days of the great mourning, relatives and 
friends come to pay the official mourning visit.(1) They enter the 
village, the women shouting their lamentations (mikulungwana). 
Some one leads them to the grave and they walk round it utter- 
ing cries of mourning, taking leave of the deceased. At the 
burial of Sokis, I heard a woman saying with a trembling voice: 
‘“‘Good-bye! You have gone! Do not forget us. Remember 
Mulalen”. Mulalen was Sokis’ little daughter. They bring 
with them presents, five hundred reis, a hen, a goat, some light 
beer, perhaps-a mat for the widow because hers has been 
thrown away ora piece of mourning cloth. The inhabitants 
receive them politely, spread mats on the ground for them. 

(1) This visit can be paid one, two, or three months later on, because, as 
they say, “‘ nkosi a psi boli”, — ‘‘ the mourning does not get rotten”.. But 
it is only during the five days that dances take place. 

— 148 _— 

They tell each other the news (djungulisana). Then after having 
Juma, they eat and drink. The Ba-Ronga have their drink all 
prepared: it is the red wine which Banyan merchants sell to 
them all over the country. The visitors get drunk. They dance, 
and the mourning ceremony turns out to be an orgy with 
dances and songs of all kinds. The singing, during this great 
mourning, consists either of war songs executed by the men and 
which are very impressive, or of ordinary dancing songs, the: 
licentious ones being particularly appropriate and being performed 
by women. (Note 7). In fact they are the proper mourning 
songs, the ones which are specially chosen when one wishes 
duly to lament a great man. I have wittnessed these performan- 
ces at a mourning ceremony of the ‘‘ breaking of the hut” and 
shall refer to this subject again. In ‘* Les Ba-Ronga” (p. 53), I 
have quoted some of the mourning songs which have a peculiar 
stoic character. Here are two others from a collection made 
by Mrs Audéoud, the wife of one of our missionaries. They 
were sung at the death of the chief Tshutsha, near Makulane 
in the Maputju country. One of these was a war song accom- 
panied with drums. It sounded as follows: 

The other is a curious apostrophe to the wizards who were 
believed to have bewitched the deceased and means: ‘‘ Good 
bye, wizard! Good bye, wizard! You will kill people. You 
come to kill people, you come during the night. ” 

But the closing day arrives at last, the day of the sprinkling 
(shuba). When the grave-diggers have well perspired in their 
vapour bath, the doctor takes the pot in which the medicine is 
still boiling. All the women sit down with their children on 
their backs, the men stand in a line, holding their assagais and 
sticks in their hands. The doctor sprinkles his decoction over 
them all with a branch covered with leaves. The children cry 
because the burning drops hurt them. The women try to hide 
behind each other. The men gesticulate as if striking enemies 
with their assagais; it is to show that their arms are strong and 
that they can now go to the war, as it would have been taboo 
for them to join the army before this purification had taken place. 
Should a man be absent from home, his sticks are also brought 
to the sprinkling to be purified(1). Then the doctor goes with 
his pot, sprinkling all the village, the huts, the doors, the backs 
of the roofs, the fence, the belongings of the deceased which are 
kept to be distributed amongst the heirs. After this operation, 
the village is pure as far as the material things are concerned. 
The contamination which had fallen on all of them by reason 
of their owner's death, is removed. Before the sprinkling it 
would have been dangerous to remove anything. Now if any 
one may have left anything in the kraal before the decease, he 
can come and recover it. This is the act by which ‘‘the mourn- 
ing is scattered ”’ (hangalasa nkosi). 

Visitors go home, having put on their malopa, if they are Ba- 
Ronga, strings of milala palm leaves round the head, the neck, 
the arms, the legs, if they belong to Northern clans. The custom 
of wearing white handkerchiefs round the head is spreading. 
If a goat is killed, every one wears a bracelet made of its skin 
round the wrist, the widow and the principal grave-digger 
put on strings, made from the same skin over the breast. The 
widow adds new strings when other goats are killed during the 
mourning visits which will take place later on, and until the 

(1) In the Northern clans, says Viguet, a little of this mixture is kept to 
sprinkle the visitors during the following days, because ‘‘ they are taboo for 
the things of the village, having not been cleansed”; (ba yila psa le mutin, 
hikuba a ba basisiwanga. ) 

= io — 

adjudication of the inheritance. It is a sign that her husband 

is dead (a feliwile). 
2) THe Great Mourninc IN THE NORTHERN CLANS. 

The foregoing is the sequence of the rites of the Great Mour- 
ning in the Ronga clans. In the Northern clans, according 
to Viguet, the same elements are found but under another 
form. 

As soon as the mourning lamentations begin, the grave-diggers 
send some men to fetch the fimyele, which are bits of skin taken 
from the soles of elephant’s feet. These are burnt on charcoal, 
together with cock’s dung, and the mourners come and inhale 
thesmoke with reeds, when they are tired of wailing. The tinyele 
are considered to be a poweful medicine. It is taboo to eat, 
even to snuff before having inhaled that smoke. 

That first night, everyone sleeps in the open and the grave- 
diggers are not allowed to use their mats. They must cut grass 
to cover them for fear that their impurity might contaminate 
the mats. As customary, sexual relations are suspended between 
married people but the bugango is not taboo in the Northern 
clans, as girls (psigango) are not wives (basati). When, on the 
following days, visitors come to the mourning, they go straight 
to the grave with a small basket of mealies and spread them over 
it saying. “Go! Die! You have left us”. This spreading of 
mealies is a mhamba, an offering. Then the doctor comes. It 
seems that his operations last only three days. There are no 
vapour baths properly speaking, but the doctor burns his 
powders together with bits of bark in broken pots and all the 
mourners come and inhale the smoke through reeds, as they did 
on the first day. 

The purification of the food is performed by a rite which 
corresponds with the Jumisa milomo of the Ronga. The 
doctor cooks the mealie pap together with a certain drug. 
He prepares ‘‘ bupsa bya muri”’, the medicinal porridge. The 
grave-diggers make a ball of this food, while it is still hot, and 

act as if they were throwing some of it into their mouths, but 
in reality they throw it over their shoulders. Then they put 
some more porridge into their mouths and eat it. The master 
of the mourning then takes the food and goes all over the 
village to perform this ceremony for all present. This is done 
also for the visitors arriving during the following days. Under 
no other condition would they be allowed to eat food in the 
village ! 

As regards the purification of the food for relatives who 
may come for a visit later on, after the Great Mourning, it is 
obtained by the rite called mafularela. ‘‘Fularela” means to 
turn one’s back to another person. The day the absent one 
comes back to the mortuary village, the master of the mourning, 
the woman who has begun the blamba ndjaka (see later on), takes 
one of the big wooden spoons which are used to distribute 
the porridge; she pours water into it and puts salt into the 
water. Then she puts into it a glowing cinder. The water 
partly evaporates. She then kneels down in front of the new 
comer, turning her back to him, passes the spoon round her 
waist from left to right and afterwards gives him to drink; this 
ceremony removes the yila of the food. Should it not be per- 
formed the food would cause disease, even death to the return- 
ing relative. 

he master of Ae mourning, or of the death (nwinyi wa 
rifu), the wife of the deceased or the grave-digger who held the 
head in the burial, accomplishes a second act of purification or 
of strengthening for all the mourners ; it is called the nganganya. 
The doctor takes a bulb of a big Lilliacea called gonwa (Cri- 
num Forbesii), crushes it, adds to it some medecine and warms 
it on a stone which has been heated in the fire. The operation 
then begins on the infants. The grave-digger covers his fin- 
gers with this substance and, standing behind the child, he 
puts the fingers of both hands into its umbilicus and brings 
them round its waist pressing them firmly against the skin until 
they meet again on the spine. Should a child have not yet 
had the string tied round his loins (boha puri, see page-54), the 
strap of its ntehe alone will be anointed with the medicine. 

: 

As regards adults, the operation of maganyo is performed as 
follows: the master of the mourning passes his hand down from 
the knee to the toes. This rite is evidently in connexion 
with the act of walking which is thus purified, and with stan- 
ding upright (yima), which means health and strength. 

Cutting the hair is also a medicinal act, amongst the Hlabi. 
The physician takes a broken pot, pours into it water and a 
purifying powder, washes the head of the deceased’s wife with 
that preparation and cuts her hair with a razor. Everyone 
takes a little of the mixture and washes his own head, and they 
then shave each other. The hair is thrown away into the 
bush, not on the grave. 

The great mourning is concluded by the phunga, the sprin- 
kling, corresponding to the Ronga shuba, which is performed 
exactly in the same way while the water is still boiling. The 
doctor sprinkles a whole potful on the people; then he pours 
fresh water into the pot and sprinkles the doors, the back part 
of the kraals of the oxen and of the goats. — ‘‘ How about 
the pigs? ” asked Viguet. He laughed heartily ! — ‘‘The 
pigs ? They are nothing! They have come from the White 
people. They are so new to the country that lately the Pedi 
were killing them outside the villages and the men only were 
eating their flesh!” The pig has nothing to do with the 
Bantu ritual ! 

V. Sexual rites of purification. 

This is a most curious and mysterious subject and, to 
understand it thoroughly, it is necessary to penetrate deeply 
into the Bantu mind and to forget our own conceptions of 
conjugal life. I hope none of my readers will be shocked by 
ceremonies which are evidently performed with the greatest 
earnestness and are a real aspiration toward purity, purity as it 
is conceived by a tribe still plunged in the dim notions of col- 
lective morality. 

These rites are somewhat different in the Hlabi and 

Ronga clans. They are called in the Northern clans blamba 
ndjaka, in the Southern ones Jahla khombo. 1 will begin 
by the description of the first, as being the most characteristic. 
Viguet who has seen them practised, and who took part in them 
Save, gave me a graphic description of them. 

Ndjaka means two things: firstly, the objects left by the 
deceased and which will pass to his heirs in the course of time. 
The heirs are called badyi ba ndjaka, the eaters of the ndjaka. 
But ndjaka also signifies the frightful malediction accompanying 
death : “‘ it is something which kills a great many men. ” 
Therefore the ndjaka must be washed away; hlamba means 
precisely to wash away. 

This malediction or dangerous impurity contaminates the 
objects which must be cleansed by the sprinkling (phunga) as 
we have seen; but it affects still more deeply the village as a 
whole, the muti, this organism which is at the base of all the 
Thonga society, and which has a life of its own, a collective 
life. That life must be purified. During the whole mourning, 
already during the last days of the deceased, when death was 
threatening, all sexual relations have been forbidden. Why ? 
Because the village was in a state of contamination... ‘ Muti 
wu tjumile ”. It cannot come back to the ordinary course of 
life without a special collective purification. 

Let us see how this is managed on a particularly serious occa- 
sion, when the headman or another great personnage dies. 
Some weeks after the burial, all the married people of the 
village assemble, the men apart, the women apart. They dis- 
cuss in what order the different couples must proceed to the 
purifying act. They question each other to know if each one 
has duly observed the law of continence. Should one of them 
confess that he has sinned (dyoha), he will have to take the 
lead. Should he have sinned and not confess it, he is very 
guilty. But he himself will suffer for his bad action: he has 
stolen the inheritance (a yibe ndjaka), and there will be no 
wonder if he begins to cough, gets thin and dies of consump- 
tion! If there has been no transgression of the law, then the 
master of the mourning will have to commence. He goes out 

of the village with his wife to the bush. There they have 
sexual relations in the ritual fashion, viz. s. n. 1. (See Note 2). 
They come back by separate ways. The woman has taken 
with her a pot full of water ; she goes straight with it toa cer- 
tain spot, which has been decided upon during the discussion, 
either in front of the great door of the village or at the door of 
the hut. There she washes her hands which contain ‘“ their 
impurity” (thyaka ra bona). All the other couples do the 
same, each woman coming in her turn to cleanse her impurity 
at the same place. When it is finished, the men also come to 
this spot and stamp on the ground. Sticks belonging to absent 
young men, a piece of clothing of a gir! who happens to be 
away from home, are brought also to this spot and are purified. 
The same is done to the straps of the ntehe of the infant, as 
we have seen, but he is not allowed to be present as it might 
cause his death. When the purifying act is finished in all its’ 
phases, men and women go to the river and bathe ; the men 
higher up, the women lower down (Note 5). 

Such is the blamba ndjaka amongst the Thonga of the North, 
when the life of the village has been deeply affected by the 
death of an important member of the community. The rite is 
performed with less publicity when a child dies. Then the 
act takes place, not outside, in the bush, but inside the hut, 
as it Is a private mourning. Should the husband have had regu- 
lar intercourse with his wife before this purification has been 
done, it is a very great sin. His wife will go and confess their 
fault to one of the women of the village. This woman will tell 
it to her husband’s mother, who will have to find the remedy. 
The guilty husband must not eat at all... If he eats, he will 
have eaten the contamination of death (u mitile rifu). The 
hlamba ndjaka of the whole village will have to take place 
(Note 6). 

The hlamba ndjaka concerns first of all the inhabitants of 
the mortuary village, but it sometimes extends to the parents of 
the women of that village who dwell, of course, in other places. 
If the first wife of a man dies, his second wife, the one with 
whom the widower has begun the purifying operation at home, 

will have to go to her own parents fo give them water (ku ha 
mati), as they say, viz, to cleanse them. She takes with her 
in a pot a portion of the water used for the purification, arriv- 
ing early inthe morning in the neighbourhood of the paternal 
kraal and calls her mother. ‘Then she washes her hands on the 
spot and all her relatives will come and stamp on the ground. 
This is considered a great duty which a married daughter ought 
never to forget, otherwise she is said to have turned her back 
on her parents (a ba fularelile). ‘They will be angry with her 
and not visit her for at least a year (Note 7). The woman who 
has done this is called ‘‘ the one who has cleansed the inheri- 
tance”? (muhlantsi wa ndjaka). She has taken upon her the 
contamination, but she will not suffer from it, because she 
belongs to another family, and the contamination of death is 
dangerous more especially to the people who are of the same 
blood as the deceased. This woman will assuredly be praised 
and even rewarded with two hoes. When she goes to her 
relatives “‘to give them water’, she will make a present of 
these two hoes to her father who will say: ‘‘ All right! You 
have cleansed those people”. ‘Then she will have the right of 
adorning herself with the bracelets of her deceased co-wife ! 
Old women having no more sexual intercourse, are allowed to 
appropriate the old clothing of a deceased woman. 

The Ba-Ronga do not know the expression hlamba ndjaka. 
They have a corresponding rite, performed in the same manner, 
which they call Jabla khombo. Khombo means misfortune, 
lahla, to throw away. It is the medicine of death (muri wa 
lifu), said Magingi, an old heathen of Rikatla. It is also said 
““to heal the mourning” (daha nkosi) This rite more 
especially concerns the grave-diggers. The one who carried 
the legs of the deceased commences. The sexual relations 
take place very early in the morning. When his wife has 
come back, she washes her hands at the door of her hut, 
and all the inhabitants of the village come and stamp on the 
wet place; then they enter the hut. The doctor comes and 
prepares a steam bath for the man. Then the second grave- 
digger performs his /abla khombo, and the same gathering of 

— 156 a 

all the members of the community takes place before his hut. 
Afterwards the village is pure. But if the grave-diggers are 
cleansed, the widows are not yet purified and we shall see that, 
for them, the Jahla khombo will last much longer. 

A man who trangresses the law of continence before the lahla 
khombo is said in Ronga to have ‘‘crossed the village” (A 
tjemakanya muti). He has taken the mourning (nkosi), the 
misfortune (khombo) upon himself. He will have sores all 
over his body and will begin to cough (consumption). 

Amongst the Ronga, it seems also that the bugango is prohibited 
in mortuary villages during the marginal period. The men even 
prevent boys going to the villages to see their girls, says Mbekwa, 
an old inhabitant of Nondwane. 

VI. Familtal rites. 

After two or three months, a first gathering of the whole 
family of the deceased takes place. Amongst the Ba-Ronga its 
function is to close or break down the mortuary hut. Amongst 
the Northern clans, no relation is established between this family 
gathering and the fate of the hut. But everywhere its principal 
aim seems to be to restore the family whose head has been 
removed by death and which must be reorganised. 

1) AMONGST THE Ba-RonGa. 

For the Ba-Ronga the habitation of the deceased is taboed. 
It is a shira (grave), as well as the place in which he has been 
buried and, for this reason, it must be destroyed. But this 
destruction is not accomplished at once. Some time must 
elapse (1), two, three, nine months, before the family gathering 
takes place. I witnessed it near Rikatla on December 15' 1907 
and can therefore describe this rite in detail. 

(1) At any rate, such is the old law. But nowadays the Ronga sometimes 
crush at once the hut during the five days to save trouble. It was done so in 
the case of Sokis. 

— a — 

Manyibane had died five or six months previously. He was 
the headman of a large village in the Shifimbatlelo district (18 
miles North of Lourengo Marques). His son Mugwanu had been 
chosen to take his place, but Manyibane had a younger brother, 
called Fenis, who had taken care of the village in the meantime. 
All the relatives were assembled. Groups were formed under 
all the trees. At 4% p.m. the men began to gather near the 
old black--roofed hut; one of them, an elderly man, took between 
his teeth a piece of a root of a special juncus, called sungz, bit 
off a little of it and, after having chewed this substance, he rubbed 
his two legs with it (evidently to find courage and strength for 
the work he was undertaking) and penetrated into the old hut. 
He came back bringing with him a dozen beautiful white eggs!.. 
The hen did not know that the habitation of the deceased was 
a taboed grave, and had laid her eggs in this favourable refuge! 
Then all the men came nearer and began to pull out the poles 
of the wall, digging on both sides of each pole; some of them 
were lifting the roof so as to make room enough for the poles 
to be pulled out. This work was accomplished with great care: 
the earth was carefully placed in a pot and slowly poured out 
some distance away; the poles were gently laid down in front 
of the entrance, on the top of the door, which had been previous- 
ly placed there, thus forming a regular heap. These precautions 
are taken out of respect for the deceased. It would be an insult 
to him to do otherwise and a relation guilty of such an offence 
‘¢ would at once be seized by colics, the disease of the wolves 
(masule) ”. Some boys, clad in European dress, threw poles 
violently on the ground. Spoon laughed: ‘‘ They know the 
shilungo, the ways of the White men ”, he said. ‘* They have 
lost their respect! ”’ 

When all the poles were removed and there remained only 
the reeds of the wall, the men jumped on the roof. The roof 
is a big conical basket made of sticks tied together and covered 
with grass. It sank down at once under their weight. But they 
wanted to flatten the cone, to crush it down to the level of the 
soil. Therefore some of the men were pulling the sticks out of 
the roof to lessen the resistance ; some were kicking it in order 

 158  

to breack the sticks. They could not succeed; the cone was 
still there more or less deformed. At the end they brought 
axes and chopped all round, about half way up the cone, and 
with great vociferations brought the destroyed hut to the level 
of the ground. Everything belonging to it will be left there 
to rot. No one dares to remove or to burn this ruin. It is a 
taboo. (1) 

The men were satisfied. They had succeeded: ‘“‘’The mourning 
had not overcome them”, (nkosi a wu ba hlulanga), as would have 
been the case had one of them met with an accident during the ope- 
ration. Some pots full of water were brought and they washed 
their hands and their faces conscientiously. They retired a while 
and all the members of the family, the women included, came 
and settled themselves as shown on the adjoining illustration of 
the scene. In front of the crushed hut(zs), in the space com- 
prised between it and the small hut of the first widow (3), the 
old men sat down (4), near them the batukulu, viz. the uterine 
nephews of the deceased (5), their wives, and a few old 
women (6). The other men (ro) and women of mature age (9) 
took their places between the neighbouring huts, leaving a wide 
place for the dance. The brother of the deceased, Fenis, 
brought on his shoulders a young goat. Two hens and a cock 
were provided, in all two male and two female offerings. Some 
branches covered with leaves were spread before the heaps of 
poles(2), and the datukulu began to kill the victims. One of 
them took the cock by the legs, his brother held the head and 
cut the neck half through. At each cut of the knife, all the 
women were ejaculating their mikulungwana (piercing cries). 
He threw the fowl down, still living and panting. So they did 
with the three fowls, everybody laughing and amused at seeing 
them jump before dying. Then one of the batukulu seized the 
goat by one of the forelegs, lifted it up as high as he could, and 

(1) In a neighbouring district, an evangelist of ours built a nice chapel near 
the ruin of the chief Gwaba. It was impossible for months to remove that 
ugly decaying roof; people on the spot were opposed to it and the chieftainess 
of the Mabota district gave permission only because the evangelist was con- 
nected with White people. 

— a5 — 
planted an assagai under the shoulders, trying to reach the heart. 
The face of the goat was turned towards the North.(1) At once 
more mikulugwane! The animal was crying pitifully ; its agony 
lasted five minutes at least and the whole time the women were 
shouting with pleasure, because it is necessary that a victim 
should cry! In the groups, men and women were discussing 
where and how the sacrificer ought to introduce the blade 

THE CEREMONY OF CRUSHING DOWN THE HUT 

1. Deceased’s hut, crushed down. 2. Heap of poles. 3. Provisional hut ot 
the widow. 4. Sacrificer. 5. Uterine nephews. 6. Wives, of the uterine 
nephews. 7. Dancers. 8. Women clapping their hands. 9. Other women. 
10. Men. 11. Henhouse. 12. Hut of the younger brother. 13. Hut of the 
big woman who danced. 14. A” shigiyane”, wood pile built by her daugter- 
in-law’s relatives. 

in order to kill the goat more quickly. His wife came and 
helped him, and not until after ten minutes, at least, did they 
succeed. 

Then, while the batukulu and the old men were busy with 

(1) I suppose the Manyibane family came from the North, and they wanted 
the goat to cry in this direction to call the spirits of the ancestors to the 
sacrifice. 

the victims, cutting them up, squeezing the psanyi (half digested 
grass) out of the bowels, the other mourners began to sing and 
to dance. First an elderly woman, of a very clear complexion 
and amephjstophelean face, very tall, with a curiously licentious 
smile, came in the middle of the place, opened wide her arms 
and suma, began to sing. ‘Together with her song, she was 
performing a strange mimicry with her thighs. This mimicry 
took a more and more lascivious character: it became a regular 
womb dance, so immoral (Note 3) that the men dropped their 
eyes, as if they feared that she would take off all her clothing. 
But the other women seemed to thoroughly enjoy this horrible 
performance and were encouraging her by clapping their hands 
and beating their drums. The words of her songs were also 
of a very doubtful character. She was describing an adulterous 
woman going during the night from one hut to the other, seeking 
for lovers, knocking on the walls (to attract the notice of the 
men ?). 

The walls of the huts have deceived her fellow-women when she 
goes knocking on them... 

Another old woman, of at least seventy years of age, follo- 
wed her and, running with a mincing gait through the place, 
was uttering words of the same kind. 

This seems very immoral indeed. Let us remember however 
that, in the opinion of the Thonga, these songs which are taboo 
in ordinary life are specially oppropriate to the mourning period. 
“These women have been uncovered by the death of their hus- 
band”, said Mboza. ‘‘ There is no longer any restraint on them. 
They are full of bitterness when they perform those lascivious 
dances”. The reason is perhaps deeper, as it is not only the 
widows who sing these words : we are still in a marginal 
period, the period of mourning, and these phases of life are 
marked for the Bantu by this strange contrast : prohibition of 
sexual intercourse and a shameless overflowing of impure 
words and gesticulations (Note 8). 

But in the meantime, the batukulu had finished their work. 
They had already distributed the various parts of the victim 

according to rule, to the visitors, who will eat them on their 
way home, not in the village; it is taboo. ‘They have put aside 
one shoulder, the lungs and one of the hoofs for the sacrifice. 
Relatives had made a provision of psanyi. An old man then 
took a pill made of the psanyi, that found in the smallest sto- 
mach called shihlakahla. He pressed it against his lips, took in 
his mouth, a little of the liquid squeezed from it and spit it out 
again with the sacrament tsu. Hethen proceeded to pray : ‘‘ You, 
Manyiban, you have left us. People used to say you were a 
wizard (a clever man who could overcome death). In what has 
your witchcraft resulted? Are you not dead! You have leftus 
in peace. Go to Tlotlomane ; let Tlotlomane go to X ; let X 
Bo to Y, etc. (He utters the names of the ancestors). Call 
each other to come here and look. Are we not gathered toge- 
ther? Here is so and so. The batukulu also are here. Ac- 
cept this offering and may we live peacefully together, visit 
each other (Note 4). Even if they do not come to pay me 
visits, let them come to Fenis; he is their father now. And 
you, Mugwano, you remain at the head of the village. You 
are their headman now. Do not scatter your people. Cultivate 
good relations with each other ”’. 

But a woman suddenly stands up and interrupts him : ‘‘ Bring 
everything to the light,” she says!) The old priest stops. She 
goes on: ** They say Iam a Mutchopi” (a woman of dissolute 
manners). The mikulungwane are heard on all sides. It isa 
family drama which we attend! This woman is the daughter of 
the deceased ; Manyibane has sold her to pay off his debts ; he 
has not kept the lobola money to buy a wife for one of her 
brothers : that is the reason why they hate her. They do not 
receive her in the village. She pours out her grievances before 
them in this family gathering, when they are praying to their 
ancestors... It is the favourable time!... She goes on: ‘‘ Is it 
my fault? Did I not obey our father? I have not fled away. 
Now what am Ito do? MHe-alone received me here! You 
despise me. Say everything! Do nothide it!” 

Her interruption has lasted five minutes at least and she goes 

back to her place very angry. Sometimes relatives who have 

serious complaints to make agains ttheir kinsfolk, choose this pre- 
cise moment to vent their anger and leave the gathering with 
violent words. In such a case, it is said:‘‘ The mourning has 
overcome this family ”. 

The old priest is a little disconcerted. Hespeaks at random, 
always calling his Tlotlomane. The whole scene is perfectly 
natural, but the participants do not show the slightest religious 
awe. Suddenly one of the batukulu rises, takes a bottle of 
wine which has been also brought there as an_ offering, pours a 
little of it in a glass and raisesit to the ipsofthe oldman. ‘‘ He 
cuts his prayer” and while all the attention of the public is con- 
centrated upon this act (which belongs also to the ritual, as the 
priest must be the first to partake of the offering), the wives of 
the batukulu rush towards the shoulders, lungs and hoofs of the 
goats and the bottle of wine, seize them and run away towards the 
west. They have stolen the meat of the sacrifice! At onceall 
stand up and follow them laughing, shouting and_pelting them 
with the psanyi, which they had kept for this purpose. The 
thieves hide themselves behind some bush and eat the meat. 
Uterine nephews are representatives of the gods, as weshall see 
later on, and they assert their right by stealing the offering and 
eating it up. 

This ceremony is highly characteristic as it embodies some of 
the principal ideas of the Thonga in the domain of religion, 
social life and taboo. It was worth while describing and we 
shall refer to it later on, when dealing with sacrifices and the posi- 
tion of the uterine nephews in the family. 

The crushing down of the hut is not performed exactly in 
the same manner amongst the Ba-Ronga. In the clans South of 
the Bay, they only close it (pfala yindlu). They dig holes in 
front of the door, into which they insert poles of the bush called 
nhleha, tying thorny branches horizontally to them. The shield 
of the deceased is placed againstthe door. The religiousrite then 
takes place and from the skins of the sacrified goats strips are 
cut which the widows will have to wear en bandouliere during 
the following months of their widowhood. Theastragalus bones 
are kept and hung round the neck. The gall-bladder is also 

—_ 163 = 

preserved and fixed in the hair of the new master of the village 
as a sign of his new position. 

In the district of Makaneta, on the estuary of the Nkomati 
the ceremony comprises two successive acts. First there is 
also a provisory closing of the hut, which can take place one 
month after the death and is accompanied by the family gathe- 
ring and the religious ceremony. One year later, when the 
inheritance is adjudicated, the hut is crushed down, but only 
if it belonged to a headman of the village and if the kraal is 
obliged to move in consequence of the death. If it be the hut 
of one of the subordinates, the roof is simply lifted off and 
thrown away into the bush. 

Another very significant rite in connexion with the closing of 
the hut is accomplished on the death of the master of the vil- 
lage. A branch is cut from the tree of the village, ihe tree 
which was revealed by the divinatory bones as the one near 
which the headman had to build (See Part H): half of the branch 
is placed across the great gate of the village, which is then closed 
and another gate is opened, at some distance, in the fence; the 
other half is put over the door of the crushed hut. 

There seem to be great variances in the performance of these 
ceremonies everywhere. I believe without being able to vouch 
for it that, when two family gatherings take place, during this 
last period of the mourning, the first one is held to proclaim 
the new master of the village and the second to distribute the inhe- 
ritance amongst the heirs at law. At any rate these two impor- 
tant acts take place at the gatherings. As the inheritance con- 
sists mainly in live stock... human stock, the wives of the 
deceased, I shall describe the adjudication when treating of the 
fate of widows. 

2) FAMILIAL RITES IN THE NORTHERN CLANS. 

A month after the burial, there is a first gathering of the 
grave-diggers. They are invited by the widows to a beer feast. 
Seimisepeer is called : “‘the beer of the hyenas”, as the hyenas 
also dig graves! No equivocal compliment is intended, 

a 164 eee, 

the widows merely meaning to thank these men for their 
services. 

In the northern clans, yindlu a yi yili, the hut is not taboo. 
One can sleep in it again after the five days of the! Grease 
Mourning. The plaster of the doorposts is repaired, and a 
new crown is put on the top when the hut again finds an 
owner. (1) The feast of the closing of the hut is therefore re- 
placed by what is called the beer of the mourning (byala bya nkosi). 
All the relatives, brothers, brothers-in-law, nephews, etc., bring 
one goat, or half a sovereign, or one sovereign, to the master of 
the mourning, the heir of the village. That individual must 
give them back as much as he receives from them, one goat for 
one goat, (timbuti ti labana), one sovereign for one sovereign, and 
all the animals are killed according to rule. ‘There were four- 
teen of them at a certain gathering held in the Nkuna capital 
to mourn one of the wives of the chief Shiluvane in 1905. 
A sacrifice is offered; the men sit on one side, the women on 
the other; the kokwane, viz. the maternal uncle of the deceas- 
ed takes the psanyi and squeezes it on them all while praying, 
or rather insulting the gods who have afflicted them with such 
a bereavement. All rub their chests with this green liquid and 
add their insults to those of the priest. 

According to Viguet, it is the first occasion on which the 
deceased is treated as a god and prayed to: “ Look! You have 
left the village without a head to lead it! Keep them! Bless 
them and increase them”. The datukulu then come to take 
that portion of the victim which has been put aside for the 
gods. It does not appear that they steal it, as it is tim 
case amongst the Ba-Ronga. 

Such is the story of the mourning. Here are some technical 
expressions in connexion with it; Hamba nkosi, to conduct the 

(1) The hut of a leper alone is considered irremediably tabooed as the 
sufferer is buried in it. They dig a hole in which he is pushed by means of 
sticks. The roof is crushed down over him. 

—— 165 ee 

mourning. Djyila nkosi, to utter mourning lamentations. Daha 
nkosi, to treat it by purification ceremonies. Kota nkosi, to 
cope with it. Nkosi wu wupfa, it ripens. Nkosi wu hela, it 
comes to anend. A wu boli, it does not get rotten, viz. it is 
always possible to pay a mourning visit. 

The name of the deceased, when quoted is often preceeded 
with the word “‘ Matjuwa ”, exactly as few in French and Jate 

in English. 

VII. Various cases of death. 

So far [have treated specially of the death of a headman, who 
had reached the age of an adult, and who died at home. There 
are a few other cases to describe. 

Should the man have died far away from home, in Johannes- 
burg for instance, no ceremony will take place before the news 
is thoroughly confirmed. Then all the relatives assemble. A 
grave is dug and all his mats and his clothing are buried in it. 
These objects which he was using every day, which have been 
soiled by the exudations from the body, are himself. A sacrifice 
will be made over that grave, not by the means of the nkanye 
twig but with a fowl which is thrown on the grave. Formerly 
the fowl was left on the ground, but nowadays tho uterine 
nephews steal it. The widow will eat with her hands till the 
burial, though death took place long before and was already 
publicly known; she will begin to use a spoon only after the 
burial has taken place. This fact illustrates strangely the ritual- 
istic notion which is at the base of all these mourning customs! 
The steam baths, the sprinkling on the fifth day, the singing, 
dancing and the condolence visits take place just the same as in 

ordinary mourning. 

In the Northern clans, the belongings of a man who dies 
far away (matikwen, in the lands) are burnt. The purifying 
sprinklings are performed. The same is done for relatives 
who die accidentally and whose corpses have not been buried; 

for instance if they were killed by a wild beast or in battle. 

When a stranger dies in a Thonga village, when no one 
knows him, ‘fa nga na ntshumu’’ —‘‘ he does not matter ”, says 
Viguet. The grown-up men will bury him. They dig a hole 
and drag the corpse into it with a rope. They do not touch it. 
There is no contagion, therefore no ceremony of purification. 
Amongst the Maluleke and Hlengwe, such a corpse is burnt. 
They attend to the cremation and do not leave the spot till they 
hearan explosion (bum !), which shows that all danger (khombo) 
has departed. 

When an infant dies, it must, be buried in a broken pot. The 
pot is placed in the earth the opening being half covered with a 
layer of ashes, in such a way that there remains a passage for the 
air. Itis taboo to bury it otherwise, as long as it has not passed 
through the rite of presentation to the moon (page 51). An 
older child is buried in the ordinary way but with very few 
ceremonies. There is no religious act. The mother alone 
attends the funeral. The father digs the grave but he does 
nothing else. He says: ‘‘ We, holders of the assagai, we do not 
bury such little ones. They are but water, they are but a womb, 
(nyimba) they are but a ntele.” A father pays very little atten- 
tion to little children. It is only when they begin to smile that 
he will show them some affection. Then it may be that he will 
press his little one against his breast and kiss its temple, especi- 
ally if he comes back home from a journey. 

In the case of suicide, the corpse is buried according to ordinary 
rules. But the tree to which the man hanged himself is cut 
down. It is taboo: other people might commit suicide at the same 
place. People do not use its wood for fuel. 

If a woman dies during pregnancy, she must be cut open 
to see what is the sex of her child. This must be done inside 
the grave, before the earth is covered in. As Mboza said: 
‘“The air (moya) must come out”. He told me the story of a 
husband in the Mabota country who nearly fainted when 
obliged to perform this painful operation. But it is a great 
taboo, as the woman might become a god of bitterness (shi- 
kwembo sha shibiti), if buried without this precaution (See Part 

— a 

VI). In the Maluleke clan, women who die pregnant, or in 
confinement, are cremated. 

Lepers alone are buried in the hut. In Maputju ordinary people 
are buried in front of the hut, whilst the regular place, in the 
other parts of the Ronga territory is behind the hut, mahosi. The 
members of the reigning family are buried in the ntimu, the 
sacred wood which belongs to them. Every big family can have 
its ntimu and the men are buried there according to their villa- 
ges: each village has its place and the place is called after the 
name of the headman of the village. So in the Lebombo sa- 
cred wood, there was ‘‘the village of Nkolele, southwards, the 
village of Shihubane, northwards, etc. 

The bones of the dead are never disinterred. It is a taboo; 
a grave is respected and women do not dare to till the ground 
over it. Often one comes across a little dense bush in the midst 
of mealie gardens, and one sees broken pots under the bran- 
ches. It is an old grave. Later on, when no one remembers 
who has been buried there, agriculture regains its sway. Ifa 
bush fire has reached the sacred wood and damaged it, the person 
who lit it must atone by sacrificing a fowl in order to ‘‘ quench ” 
(timula) it. 

CONCLUSION ABOUT DEATH AND FUNERAL 

These very complicated funeral rites of the Thonga clearly show the 
existence of three great intuitions in their minds: 

1) Man is immortal and becomes a god through death. 

2) There is extreme danger attached to the defilement which 
accompanies death. The uncleanness contaminates the collectivity 
and can only be removed by collective purification. 

3) The social group, being diminished by death, must be reinforced 
by special means (family gatherings, choice of a successor, etc.) 
Hence three categories of rites: religious, purificatory and social. 

On the other hand some of the rites we have described present un- 
mistakably the character of passage rites, because death also means a 
passage: for the deceased, passage from the world of the living to the 
world of the dead ; for his relations, passage from one phase of life to 
another. 

Separation from the terrestrial life is symbolised for the deceased 
by the rite of piercing the wall of the hut in order to solemnise, as it 
were, his official departure from his former dwelling. I should consi- 
der also as a separation rite the custom of cutting through all his 
garments and mats, in order to make them ‘‘ draw the last breath”. 
To effect aggregation to the new world, the grave-diggers prepare for 
himan underground hut and square place, they put him in the sitting 
position in his new dwelling (if such is the true explanation of the 
folding of the limbs), they direct his eyes towards the cardinal point 
whence his ancestors have come. | have sometimes had the impres- 
sion that even in these rites, the idea of a marginal period, or of a 
period of transition was not wanting: the deceased is not prayed to 
prior to the great family gatherings, which take place three, six, or 
twelve months after the death. Then his hut is crushed or closed. It 
seems that he has gone through an evolution towards deity, as his 
corpse was decaying inthe grave, and the occlusion of his hut, with 
his shield put before the door, might well mean his definite incorpo- 
ration in the world of the dead, and also the means of preventing him 
from returning to this world and bringing misfortune to his relatives. 

As regards the relatives, they separate with the former phase by the 
cutting of the hair, putting out the old fire, leaving off their clothing and 
wearing mourning attire. A very distinct period of margin then begins, 
marked by the sexual taboos accompanying it, and they are aggregated 
again to the ordinary world and to the new phase of their life by all 
the ceremonies which I have explained at length. Here, however, 
as the seclusion was caused by a certain most dreaded defilement, the 
ageregation rites all bear the character of removal of uncleanness: 
uncleanness of the food, of the gardens, of the bereaved, mostly grave- 
diggers and widows, of the whole community which is cleansed by 
the sexual rite of hlamba ndjaka, etc. 

If classifving were equivalent to understanding, we might say that we 
have fairly well understood the complicated Thonga rites which 
accompany death... But who could boast of having fully understood 
such a mysterious and deep subject? Death is the great shadow 
which hovers over life and chills the human heart. Outside of an 
enlightened faith, it is,and remains, the King of Terrors. Never more 
than on the edge of a grave did I pity my poor black brethren, won- 
dering how they tried to calm their hearts and to overcome their 
sorrow. ‘Thereissomething profoundly touching in their most absurd 
rites, because, after all, they all are imposed by a craving for life and 

= 169 — 

purity. Will my readers allow me to conclude this subject by a 
personal reminiscence. ‘The day I attended the burial of Sokis, when 
his relatives had finished filling in the grave, they asked me to lead 
them in worship. Bantu heathenism is so poor, it feels so weak that 
it readily accepts the help of a higher religion. So I tried to turn 
the eyes of my hearers away from the underground hut, and to fix 
them on the eternal dwellings of the Father’s house. Then Sokis 
youngest brother took the nkanye twig and performed the heathen 
religious ceremony, calling his ancestors to come and bless them and 
entreating the deceased to leave them in peace. The contrast bet- 
ween those two prayers made on the same grave was striking indeed. 
And, whatever we may think, even if we had no religious convic- 
tions at all, should we not earnestly desire that, for these people, the 
bright comforting Christian hope may dispel the darkness of their 
thoughts and the sufferings involved in their rites.

bd 

‘THE EVOLUTION OF A WOMAN FROM BirtH To DeEatTH 
Essay of a Ronga girl on the subject. 

In July 1897, the School Inspector gave to the big girls of the 
Swiss Mission school at Lourenco Marques the following subject 
for an examination in composition: ‘‘ The life of a Ronga woman” 
This is the translation of some of the pupils essays on the 
life of one of their country women: 

‘¢ When a girl is born amongst the Ba-Ronga, people come and 
congratulate the mother and say: ‘‘ A ma buyeni mati”, that is 
to say: ‘‘ Let the water come!” When the time is at hand 
when she will come out of the hut, ochre is crushed for her 
and a calabash full of the fat of nkuhlu almond is prepared, and 
the two ingredients are mixed and smeared over her.” 

‘Her curly hairs are stretched out in a corkscrew fashion, ochre 
is puton them to transform them into a kind of rat’s tails. (It is 
the operation called hora ngoya.) The motheralso smears herself 
over with ochre, and puts on her head a crown of small strings 
(shikupu). (1) Then, when the child lets her head fall on 
-account of the weakness of her neck, a plaited string, which is 
just the right size for a necklace, is tied round her throat. Thus, 
they say, her nape will be strengthened.” 

“A small calabash with medicine is given her to drink; they 
also prepare for her a small pot for the medicine and they say it 
is to lessen the dangers of growth (pumba nombo), so that the 

(1) Ihave heard this custom explained as follows: the mothers amuse the 
children by shaking their heads ; the small strings dance about and make the 
babies laugh. This can only be true of infants which are already two or three 
months old. 

sickness should not be too bad. (These are the milombyana, 
see page 46.) After her birth she is carried in the skin of a 

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Phot. 4. Borel. 

GIRLS WITH BABIES AT MAKULANE 

*(Maputju country). 

gazelle (mhunti) which her mother ties round her neck and her 
loins. Whenthatskin has become toosmall, they get one of an 
antelope(mhala). She begins to walk; when her mother sends 
her on an errand she accomplishes it. She also begins to talk, 
to know her father and mother. Then, when she has grown, 
they prepare for her a small pot of pounded and cooked mealies 
so that she should eat of it. After three years she is weaned 
and goes to stay for a time with her grandmother. After that 
she returns home. ” 

“When she has learnt to walk, sheis very fond of playing with 
shells of the sala. Shecooksinthem. Then, whenshe has done 
with them, she takes small pots and cooks little dinners. She 
also gets a small calabash, she goes to the lake to draw water and, 
on coming back she gives it to her father so that he may wash 
his face. Here she is now gathering small bits of wood; she 
makes small bundles of them and brings them home. Later 
on she will make heavier bundles. ” 

“When she has grown up more, she will take charge of the 
work of her mother. Shewill do the work. But if the mother 
sees that she cannot do itall, she will help her. It can however 
be said that the mother needs no longer to crush her mealies, 
neither togo to the well nor tothe fireplace. When sheis quite 
a grown up girl, thesuitorscome. If they are accepted, they bring 
the purchasemoney. They buy her(lobola) and do all they like. 
If she is prolific, she will bear many children. Now and then she 
returns to her parents’ village, then she comes back to her hus- 
band. Her children grow. They go toget water, tocut her wood, 
to plough her fields. She goes with them. When they are grown- 
up, they get married. If amongst them there is ason, he goes 
to buy his wife. Thus she looks for a mother-in-law for her son. 
He will then be truly a man_ because he has got a mother-in- 
law! When her children are married, the mother again begins 
to do all her work. She steeps her mealies, crushes them to 
make flour, she cuts her wood, cooks her beer; she prepares 
the light beer; she smears the floor of her hut ; this is what 
she does till she is quite old. ” 

** When she is quite old, they feed her. Her grand’children are 

—; = 
sent to bring herfood. Whenthey are hungry, they stop on the 
Way and eat it themselves. On their return they say : ‘“‘ We 
have indeed given it to‘her”. In the morning they put a stick 
inher hand and help her to get out of her hut, so that she can 
warm herself in the sun. ” 

“Then when the Ronga woman is quite old she begins to see 
no more and to hear no more. She falls into second childhood. 
All she does is to complain and to say, crying, that she is ill 
Meated. And this is the end!” 

The girl who wrote this essay was but emerging from child- 
hood, and has consequently enlarged more especially upon the 
first phase of the life. The life of a woman is not very diffe- 
rent from that of a man at that stage. Differences however 
come in later on, and we shall have to add some important 
facts relating to the fate of the women before marriage, during 
the conjugal life, and in widowhood. 

A. BEFORE MARRIAGE 

I. The Girls games. 

As we have seen from the essay of the schoolgirl, 
Ronga girls imitate the action of their mothers, their cooking, 
their gathering fuel, etc., just as the boys imitate the fighting, 
the hunting of the men. They play also with do//s nursing 
them as they see the women nursing babies. These dolls are 
called vule. The origin of the play is as follows: a little girl 
asks her mother who is carrying a younger child on her shoul- 
ders: “© Mother where did you find your baby ? — Oh! I 
found itin the bush (ntlhaben). — Please bring me one also, 
mother. — All right!—” Next day the mother plucks a sala 
in the bush, removes all the stones inside, lets it dry and fixes 
it to the end of a stick. She pierces the upper part of the 
sphere, introduces through the holes bits of string to imitate 
hair, smears them over with ochre, ties a little clothing round 

— pe — 
the stick and gives it to the girl! Or if the mother has said : 
“T found the baby in the banana grove ”, the father will cut 
a banana stem, take the heart of the bulb, beat it so as to sepa- 
rate the fibres which will then represent the hair of the baby, 
and the girl will play with it for a time. 

Girls, like boys, have also special games. 

First the nétshengu -ntshengu. A big girl takes the part of the 
mother and all the little ones hide behind her. She stretches 
out her arms to protect them against another girl, who is the 
thief and who tries to take the children away. Notwithstand- 
ing the mother’s efforts, all are taken one by one, and the 
thieving is done whilst they sing : 

Alack ! Mother ! Protect us, protect us! 
the mother answers : 

All my children are taken, all will soon be taken, 
all will soon be taken, there, behind me. 

(Yo! Mamana! ntshengu-ntshengu ! ba hela hi shiruba) 

The capture being effected, all the children sit down in 
a Tow and cross their legs. To their sight and leit they dig 
small holes which represent wells or pots. The mother passes. 
She stretches out their legs and they let her do it. Then she 
pretends to drink water from their pitchers and says : ‘‘ My child, 
where did you find this water?” The child says: “ Oh! 
have drawn it over there, at the spring, under the banana trees, 
in the cool shade.” ‘Then comes the girl who plays the part 
of the thief. She tries to stretch out their legs. But the chil- 
dren refuse ; they stiffen themselves. She tastes their water 
and enquires where they brought it from. — ‘‘I drew it ina 
nasty hole full of frogs, mud and dirt”. They add all the diffe- 
rent sayings they can think of. 

As the boys sing to the transport oxen when a wagon comes 
by the road, sothe girls address a kind of incantation to a big grey 
lizard called galagala, whose head can turn blue at its will. The 
lizard is found lying on a branch, warming itself in the rays 

of the sun. One girl approaches it, claps her hands under its 
nose, singing in a monotonous tone : 

Gala-gala, hana-hana nhloko! 
Big lizard, lift up lift up vour head ! 

It seems that the lizard is so fascinated by the song that he 
stretches his neck and swings his head to and fro during the 
whole time that the girl claps her hands. 

To the crabs, which are very numerous in the slime on the 
sea-shore, and who have only one claw coloured green, violet 
or enamelled blue, they sing : 

Ba ka mphembemunwe, tlakula silawuto ! 
Come along, vou animals with only one claw! Lift it up and bring 
it down again. 

The little girls who go hunting crabs as a condiment for their 
food assured me that, on hearing this song, the crustaceans do 
come out of their holes and that the harvest is then a large 
one. 

When an owl, mistaking the time, comes out of her hiding 
place at noon, she is received with applause and they sing to 
Met: 

Shikotana, gaulela fole ! 
Owl ! flap vour wings ! You will find tobacco ! 

Another girl’s game, which is wide-spread, and in which the 
young Thonga acquire great proficieny is called : ku tha bu- 
hlolo. ‘They take a string tied at both ends so as to form a large 
ring, and make all kinds of complicated figures by twisting it 
with their fingers and even with their lips. I have made a 
drawing of some of them. Girls compete together and try to 
surpass each other in inventing new figures. They teach each 
other this butlolo. 

Another old game, which is found under various forms in a 
great number of countries, is the mathakisana, knuckle bones. 
Girls gather stones of the nkanye fruit (tinfula), dig a hole, 

Drawn by J. Wavre- 

Various forms of buhlolo (string game). 

and put them into it. One of them takes a kind of ball 
(shigungu), perhaps a small fruit of sala, or any other fruit. 
She throws it in the air and, in the meantime, she takes out of 
the hole four or five stones and puts them back leaving only 
one outside. ‘This stone is then put aside. She must be very 
clever and very quick in removing and replacing all the stones 
except one, because the ball will soon fall down and she must catch 
itin her hands. Should she take out of the hole only one stone, 
she has done wrong (a tjongolile) ; should she leave outside of 
it more than one stone, she is wrong also (a hoshile). Should 
the ball fall on the ground, it is taboo. (psa yila) ! She has 
lost her turn. If the ball falls on her body, it is not so bad. 
Her companions will say to her: “* Gangasheta”. Then she 
must throw the ball and receive it two or three times on the 
upper part of her hand, then again in her hand, and if she suc- 
ceeds in this, she is allowed to go on. When she has been 
able to take all the stones from the hole without making any 
mistake, she has beaten her co-players (a ba mphyinshile). 

Natives do not play for stakes as a rule, but, if two of them 
challenge each other, each pretending to be the more clever at 
the game, they may arrange that the one who loses must give 
a fowl to the winner. 

The ordinary word for play is ku tlanga. But there is ano- 
her word ku tha, which is used for the more refined games, the 
buhlolo, the mathakusana, the tshuba, the reciting of tales, riddles 
or proverbs (psitekatekisa) and the guessing (mhumhana). We 
shall describe these four last games when treating of the life of 
the village, and the literary life. 

Il. ‘NUubility customs. 

1) THe KHomsa RITE. 

When a girl comes of age, no special ceremony is performed 
amongst the Ba-Ronga. She is said, just as the boy, to have 

«drunk the nkanye ”’ (page 95). She confesses to her mother 

— 178 == 

that her menses (tinwheti, viz. months) have appeared for the 
first time, and the mother simply answers: ‘‘ Hi ku kula” — 
‘* this means growth. ° 

But in the aeahern clans a characteristic rite has been pre- 
served, or borrowed, from the Suto-Pedi who attach great impor- 
tance to it. It is called khomba, or yisa matin, to lead to the 
water, and is performed in the following manner. The girl, 
when she thinks that the time of nubility is near, chooses an 
adoptive mother, possibly in a neighbouring village. She works 
for her, helps her in gathering her fuel. When the day has 
come, she flies away from her village and goes to that adoptive 
mother ‘“‘ to weep near her” (a rilela ka yena). These are dis- 
tinct separation rites. She says : ‘* Ndji khombile” — “‘lam of 
age”. Then will begin a seclusion period of one month. Three 
of four girls receive the initiation together. ‘They are shut up 
in a hut and when they come outside, they must always wear 
over their face a veil consisting of a of cloth very dirty 
and greasy. Every morning they are led to the pool and their 
whole body is immersed in the water as far as the neck. Other 
initiated girls or women accompany them singing obscene songs, 
driving away with sticks any man who happens to be on the 
road, as no man is allowed to see a girl during this period. If 
aman happens to come near the group, the women ask him 
the secret formulae of the circumcision school, not the long 
ones but the short ones, probably those which contain licen- 
tious words. Should he be unable to answer, they beat 
him. It is said thata man who sees a girl during this month 
becomes blind ! When the cortege of women accompanying the 
initiated has returned home, the nubile girls are imprisoned in 
the hut. They are teased, pinched, scratched by the adoptive 
mothers or by other women; they must also listen to the licen- 
tious songs which are sung for them. Though they are trem- 
bling from cold, being still wet, they are not allowed to come 
near the fire. They are also instructed in sexual matters, and 
told that they must never reveal anything about the blood of 
the menses toa man. ‘They are also exhorted to be very polite 
to every grown up person, and must salute everybody entering 

_ 

op — 
the hut, even those passing before the door, by clapping their 
hands. Sometiems the wind moves some dead leaves ; they 
mistake this noise for the sound of steps and salute reverently ! 

At the end of the month the adoptive mother brings the girl 
home to her true mother. She also presents her with a pot of 
beer. If the initiated has been already bought by lobola, the 
mother goes with her to her future husband and says to him: ‘‘ She 
isgrown up.” He will give her a present of € 1., and the veil will 
be taken away. ‘These last rites distinctly mean the aggregation 
of the girl to the adult society and all this khomba custom is a 
very good example of passage rite, the passage being from the 
asexual to the sexual group. 

The Pedi-Suto clans of the Transvaal also practise this rite, 
which they call khoba. In addition they have the dale, the initia- 
tion school for girls corresponding to the circumcision school of 
the boys. The Nkuna clan of the Thonga is said to have prac- 
tised it also in former times, but the bale has entirely disappear- 
ed all through the Thonga tribe. 

There are three other customs more or less related to nubi- 
lity: the tattooing, the pointing of the teeth and the milebe cus- 
tom. 

2) Tatrooinc (Tlhabela tinhlanga). 

There have been different ways of tattooing amongst the 
Thonga. In former times, in the Northern clans, Ba-Thonga 
used to disfigure themselves by making very big black pim- 
ples on the forehead, the nose, the cheeks. Hence the name 
of Knobneusen which they received from the Boers in Spe- 
lonken. Even the men were tattooed, but they shewed only one 
line of pimples on the median line of the face, from the forehead 
to the chin. Women had, in addition, two horizontal lines on 
the forehead and three on each cheek. It was a custom of the 
primitive population and is still kept by the Ba-Chopi. The 
invaders of the XV" or XVI" century adopted it because 
they were mocked by their subjects, who said: ‘‘ Flat noses are 

not right!” When the Ba-Ngoni of the XIX century came, 
they submitted themselves to the custom, not from fear of being 
mocked, but to hide their Zulu nationality. Chaka had sent 
his impis to kill them and, as they were recognised by the absence 
of pimples, they began to tattoo themselves. When the dan- 
ver was passed, they ceased to perform the operation. They 
began in their turn to mock the Thonga who followed their 
example. 

Amongst the Ba-Ronga it is not certain that the big black 
pimples ever existed. In former times, men used to make two 
lines of small pimples on both sides of the body, begining from 
the nipple and from the shoulders downwards. Now the custom 
is dying out ; it is practised only by women, undoubtedly in 
connection with nubility or with marriage, in order to make them- 
selves prettier... as they think! But the tattooing of the face has _ 
disappeared almost entirely. What remains is the tattooing of 
the shoulders and of the epigastric and hypogastric regions. 

The operation is painful ; girls sometimes cry and must be 
forced to submit to it. The patterns are triangular. Four 
triangles are first drawn on the shoulders on both sides; the 
upper triangles meeting with the lower ones at their apex, so as to 
leave a square place, not tattooed, in the median region of the back. 
This drawing is made with ochre; the skin is caught up and 
lifted with a little iron hook all along the line and slightly cut 
with a razor. All the incisions must be of the same size. The 
blood oozes out and is stopped by the ochre which is profusely 
spread over the small wounds. Tattooing of the back is not 
very painful. It is more so on the anterior part of the body. 
These four triangles are also drawn under the breast leaving a 
square piace of which the navel occupies the exact middle. But 
between the two upper triangles two others are introduced thus 
making a conical shaped pyramid whose point comes between 
the breasts. 

Such is the ordinary disposition of the tattoo pimples in No- 
ndwane, but it varies considerably according to the clans, as the 
two adjoining plates clearly show. The two Nkuna women 
whom I photographed at Shiluvane in 1900, have only two lines 

— sI8r1 — 

ot pimples forming a right angle under their right breast, whilst, 
as regards the two Maputju girls, in the second illustration, the 
four triangles are distinctly seen, but arranged somewhat diffe- 
rently. 

The freshly tattooed girl hides herself for a week, after which 

* he vow 

~ Phot. pf. A. Junod. 

Tattooed women of the Nkuna clan. 

she shows herself to her boy (shigango), who will kill ajfow! for 
her to congratulate her. He says: “‘It is pretty to tattoo yourself. 
Otherwise your belly would be like the belly ofa fish, or ofa white 
person!” The time of healing is considered as a disease (perhaps 
as a marginal period). It is taboo to put salt in the food during 
those “days, or to go to the village to eat the food of other peo- 

ple (just as it is for boys who pierce their ears). Girls prepare 
themselves for the operation by eating ‘a special food which sof- 
tens the skin of the belly (nabyala khuri). All these rules tend 

mead | 
i 
| 
i 

” Pol. A Bee 

Tattooed women of the Maputju clan. 

to show that, in former times, tattooing had a deep meaning, a 
ritual value which has more or less disappeared. Mboza told 
me: ‘‘It is nota regular taboo (yila), but only a custom (shihila) 
of the country.” 

, 183  

3) PoinTinG OF THE TEETH (Ku hleta). 

This custom is also dying out. It used to be incumbent on 
all the girls. Now many do not keep it. They have seen that 
teeth deformed in this way decay more quickly. The operation 
is performed on the incisive teeth, and girls must keep their mouth 
closed for two or three days, not showing their teeth to anybody. 

Near Rikatla, the hleta custom is still in force in the hea- 
then villages. It gives the girls a kind of canine aspect. 

4) ‘THE MILEBE CUSTOM. 

It is very widely spread all over South Africa. Though it has 
disappeared now amongst most of the Ronga clans, it is still 
practised in the Manyisa country, over the whole of Bilen and 
in the Northern clans, amongst the Zulu, the Pedi-Suto, etc. 
It is probably the origin of the famous ‘‘ Hottentot apron ”, 
which some ethnographers thought to be a congenital malfor- 
mation and which is but the result of the custom (Note 9). It 
is a very ugly habit, very immoral from our point of view, fix- 
ing the imagination of the girl on sexual relations, but amongst 
the Thonga it is upheld as being quite the right thing. 

B. MARRIAGE AND CONJUGAL LIFE 
1) ConpiTIons OF MarriaGE. 

In the primitive Bantu tribe every girl gets married, some, 
however sooner than others. Suitors prefer pretty girls to ugly 
ones! But what is their standard of beauty? The ideal is tall 
stature, strong limbs and well developed breasts. A proverb 
says : ‘‘ Nsati wa mabele u nga nabele loko u nge na bukosi”. 
— ‘*Po not covet a woman with large breasts if you have no 
money”... It does not mean that she will cost more, but her 
father, knowing that she will not want suitors, will not consent to 

 “eh  

let her go unless the full lobolo is paid at once. On the other 
hand a girl with an elongated face is admired more than if she 
is too broad-faced. Of the first they say: ‘‘ She is pretty, she 
ressembles an antelope” (a kota mhala); of the second: ‘‘She is 
chubby cheeked, she is like asow”. A light complexion is pre- 
fered to a very dark one, because the white or yellow races are 
considered as superior, and a native laying claim to any European 
or Asiatic blood is proud of it. Parents, who also have their 
say in the question of marriage, insist on two other points: the 
working capacity of the girl, and the absence of any witchcraft 
blot in the family. Should her mother have been convicted of 
being a witch, the girl will be feared. However, every girl finds 
a husband in the land where polygamy flourishes. If he be 
slow in coming, she will apply to her doctor who will prepare 
the love charms, which will make her ‘‘appear’’, so that she will 
be noticed by the boys (See page ror). If even that does not 
succeed, she has other means at her disposal and may go herself 
to make proposals to a man (wopsana). He is seduced by her, 
and constitutes himself,a thief who has thluba, viz. ‘‘ taken in 
marriage by abduction” (See page 120). The parents will claim 
the lobolo and he must pay it. Marriage and chidbearing remain 
the only carreer to which a Thonga woman can look forward. 
Hence a number of special feminine taboos which are very 
curious. 
2) SPECIAL FEMININE TABOOS. 

Some of them concern girls before childbearing and cease after 
parturition. In Tembe and Maputju clans, girls must not eat 
pork because pigs root nervously with their noses: the future child 
would also move its head from one side to the other, when on the 
verge of birth, and this would compromise the delivery. Other 
animals are taboo for girls: The hare because it is too cunning; 
and the antelope nhlengane. ‘This antelope raises the foot when 
hearing a noise. Hence the idea that its leg is hollow and that 
it perceives the sound through it. The child would do the 
same, if its mother were to eat the meat of the nhlengane. It 
would be unable to hear with its ears, only with its hands! 

— 185 ~_ 

The fowls legs (tibias) are also taboo for all women, because 
the hen scatters the sand... So are the hoofs of oxen, pigs feet. 
A woman eating them would walk too much... She would go 
everywhere to look for husbands ! 

It is taboo for girls to walk amongst pumpkins planis (ma- 
ranga), to pluck the fruits. She is only allowed to pluck those 
which can be reached from outside. Were she to transgress 
this law, she would emit a bad odour and no boy would court 
her. Her mother, having no fear of being despised, can walk 
amongst the pumpkins. A second taboo relative to pumpkins 
is this : unmarried women must cut a ‘ pumpkin nose ” 
(nhompfu) viz. the end of the stem and fix it in their waist 
when plucking the pumpkins, lest they get abcesses in certain 
regions of their body. 

It is taboo for them to eat cooked oxen’s blood (bubendje). 

The following taboos apply also to married women. They are 
not allowed to eat what is called nkopfu, viz. some parts of the 
bowels which are cooked together with the stomach of the ox. 
‘“* It would spoil the child inside ”. The testicles, which are 
generally given to the uterine nephew, when the meat is dis- 
tributed according to the laws, and the underlip of any animal 
are also forbidden to them. So is also the tongue... because it 
is reserved for old people as a mark of respect! The rectum 
(gobana) is taboo for women and children. Children might 
make incongruous noises from the rectum! Women must 
abstain from porcupine and monkeys flesh ; all their offspring 
would ressemble these animals... Such cases have happened 
they say! Women must not eat eggs; they would run a dou- 
ble danger : their child might be born bald and remain so ; or 
they might be like a hen which runs in all directions when 
laying an egg. They would have no peace in child bear- 
ing ! 

Nubile girls, during their ‘‘ tiwheti”, must not approach the 
oxen kraal and look at them. The cattle might suffer, be attac- 
ked by a bad cough (muhkulwane), get thin! This taboo is in- 
stituted to protect the oxen, not the human beings, inhabitants 
of the village, as D. Kidd says is the case amongst the Zulus. 

> 

When women have passed the time of child-bearing, most of 
the taboos cease and they can eat monkeys and porcupine if 
they wish to ! 

3) ‘THE FIRST YEAR OF MARRIED LIFE. 

Ido not return to marriage rites which have been fully 
explained in the preceding chapter. Let me say that, though 
a Thonga woman cannot imagine life without marriage (ku 
kandja bukati), she does not enter the new state with any 
enthusiasm. Her parents have warned her that she will be 
illtreated, accused of witchcraft and of adultery, etc. Her sisters 
bewail her fate on her wedding day in song. The fact that she 
has been paid for, though it does not constitute a proper sale, 
puts her in an inferior position (See Part II). 

During the first year, she has no ndangu, viz. no fire place ot 
her own. She cooks for her mother-in-law. During the three 
first weeks the husband eats with her and with the girl who 
accompanied her to her new home. Afterwards, he goes back 
to eat with the men. In some places it seems as if the new 
husband were eating with her the whole year, so long as she 
has not yet her own pot (hlembeto). 

4) HusBanD AND WIFE. 

After the honey-moon what are the relations between hus- 
band and wife ? Of course they vary very much according to 
the character of both. As a rule however, the married people 
show very little intimacy with each other ; the man remains 
with his companions on the ‘‘ bandla ”, the place of the village 
where they meet, and only comes occasionally into the ‘“‘ndangu’’, 
the court of the fire place, which is the proper domain of 
the lady of the hut. The first wife is certainly the most res- 
pected; she is called the “ great one ” (nsati lwe’ nkulu); 
those who are taken in marriage afterwards being the ‘‘ little 
wives”. She is the true wife and acts as such in some old 

aie 187 a 

rites, those which accompany widowhood and the foundation of 
the village, as we shall see. 

When speaking of divorce, we shall notice the principal cau- 
ses of quarrels between married people and how they are dealt 
with. 

As regards conjugal life, the sexual relations between hus- 
band and wife are regulated by many taboos. We have men- 
tioned those following birth and the nursing period. Every 
month during her “‘ tihweti” (hu koka), the woman is taboo (a 
yila), and these days constitute a real marginal period during 
which she is absolutely secluded from her husband. She must 
keep in the left half of the hut and not trepass across the me- 
dian line. If she wants snuff, she is not allowed to go to her 
husband in the part in which he lies ; she must send a child to 
fetch the tobacco she wants! During those days she sleeps on 
a special mat and puts on special clothing, the old ones which 
she had brought with her for this purpose on the day she first 
went to the conjugal domicile. When cooking, she must not 
touch the mealie meal with her hands, but with a spoon. A 
rich man who has plenty of spouses, and therefore plenty of 
food, will not touch the pot of the tabooed wife! At the end 
of the period, she smears the floor of the hut and puts on her 
ordinary clothing (Note ro). This is evidently the aggregation 
rite by which the woman comes back to the everyday life (1). 

5) STERILITY. 

In the Northern clans, when a woman does not conceive, a 
special sacrifice is offered, very similar to the one made by the 
Ronga on the day of the conclusion of the marriage. A goat 
is killed, a long piece, one foot in width, is cut from the skin 
of the animal in the ventral region, and three openings are 
made, one for the head and the two others for the arms. The 

(1) For other details concerning the sexual life see Revue d’études socia- 
les, p. 136-150. 

three openings converge to a point where the astragalus bone 
of the goat is fixed to a strap. The sterile woman puts on this 
skin; the astragalus will be seen of her breast. She will also 
fix the gall-bladder in her hair and wear these ornaments for a 
time. In the intuition of the Thonga, it seems evident that 
children are given by the gods : hence the idea of a sacrifice 
in case of sterility. But in addition to the religious rite, native 
doctors have lots of drugs to militate againts this misfortune (1). 
The special porridge cooked for a sterile woman (mhika, 
shimhiko) is called shiboleko amongst the Ba-Ronga. The poor 
woman is despised. 

Sterility can be a cause of divorce. The husband has the 
right of sending his wife home. But generally the parents of 
the woman find a nhlampsa, viz. a younger girl, and give her to 
the husband as a second wife. 

6) PREGNANCY AND MISCARRIAGE. 

A special treatment is followed for the first pregnancy when 
the breasts begin to swell, a condition which is called munyama 
(darkness). The physician makes small incisions near the breast, 
and on the legs, and draws out a little blood. The pregnant 
woman also drinks a decoction for the same purpose, i. e. for 
removing the blood. The Thonga think that, as the menses 
are suspended, the blood accumulates in the body and must be 
taken away. 

Pregnancy is not considered as a tabooed period. Sexual 
relations are allowed during that time, even recommended as 
favourable to the growth of the child (Note 11). However, in 
view of the impending birth, some special taboos have been 
added to those which apply to all women. 

(1) A Pedi man told me that in his tribe the first thing to do was to ascer- 
tain if sterility were due to the husband or to the wife. For this purpose a 
little bit of the clothing of the husband and of the wife was cut off and put near 
a spider’s nest. This spider ts a kind of mygala of enormus size. If the 
spider took the piece of the husbands clothing down to its nest, it meant that 
he was in fault, and vice versa. 

A pregnant woman must not drink water when standig up. She 
must kneel down, otherwise the water would fall violently on 
the head of the child and hurt it ! 

It is taboo for her to wrap her body in too much clothing. 
She must keep her belly bare and never throw her dress (kapu- 
lane) over her shoulders, lest the baby comes to the light with 
its head covered with the membranes, a complication which is 
very much dreaded by Thonga women. 

She must not take the sauce of her porridge too hot. The 
child may be scalded inside and have black spots when born. 

It is also taboo to prepare the ntehe before the birth, as no one 
knows what will happen. The child might die ! 

The future mother must not eat pigeon’s meat, because 
the pigeons have no blood in the muscles of their breast. 
She would have no milk herself wherewith to nurse the baby. 
Nor must she even /Jook at a monkey, lest she ‘‘ takes to 
herself” (tekela) the form of the animal and the child will 
be like 1c)! 

As regards women dying during pregnancy, see page 166. 

Miscarriages are very much feared amongst South Africans, 
not for themselves, but because they are accompanied with an 
uncontrolled effusion of a blood which is a terrible taboo. The 
discharged foetus must be buried in wet soil, otherwise the rain 
will not fall. The country having been polluted will be dried 
up by hot winds. A strange rite called mbelele is performed in 
times of drought, when all the graves of children born prema- 
turelly and buried on the hill are searched, and their contents 
thrown into the mud, near the river. We shall discuss in our 
Vith Part the origin of this extraordinary idea. A woman who 
has had a miscarriage is impure for three months at least. Men- 
ses must have taken place two or three times, and have cleansed 
her before her husband can have any sexual relation with her. 
_(Compare Note 6, which applies to the transgression of this 
mile. ) 

7) PARTURITION. 

We have described the many taboos which accompany par- 
turition when treating of the birth. The busabana period, from 
the moment of delivery till the fall of the umbilical cord, is very 
much dreaded. When a woman is suftering from shilumi (a 
disease which sometimes follows delivery, probably owing to a 
displacement of the organs) she must not enter the hut of a 
confined mother. The ailment would ‘‘ jump over to her” 
(tlulela). There is however a way of preventing contagion. 
The visitor must take the piece of clothing which she uses as 
a girdle and throw it at the patient, and the patient throws 
back her own girdle to the visitor, hem she cam enter ; 
‘“Vhey have acted according to the law, there is no more yila”’. 

A mother must not drink any milk from the birth of the child 
until its presentation to the moon. Afterwards she is allowed 
to drink only milk from cows which have calved many times. 

8) Loss OF CHILDREN. 

A woman who loses an infant (wa ku felwa) is deeply con-~ 
taminated with the defilement of death. She must bury it 
herself without aid from the husband. Next day, she goes 
behind the hut, kneels down and milks her own milk on the 
ground. She does it until the secretion has stopped. This is 
taboo : her milk is polluted; no drop of it must fall in the 
gardens. She must avoid crossing the fields and going to the 
storehouses to fetch food. As long as she has not been ‘* put 
right again (busetela)”’, she eats with a spoon. To use a spoon 
is a bad omen for a woman, because it reminds her of death. 
It is the reason why men adopt this civilized custom more read- 
ily than women. During her mourning, no sexual relations 
are allowed. When her menses again take place, she first keeps 
silent, and does not tell her husband. The second or third time 
only, she informs him of it. He then can purify her ; this is 

done in the same way as for the widows. He buys new clo- 
thing for her and she resumes the ordinary mode of living. Eve- 
tybody seeing her with this new attire will know that ‘she 
has been repaired”. Should anybody else than the husband 
give her this clothing, the latter will be greatly offended and 
accuse her of having relations with a lover. 

A man does not put on malopa, mourning clothing, for a 
child who was not yet of age. The woman alone does so. 
However a husband is always grieved at the death of his child 
and a sad event like this often leads to dreadful results. He 
will begin to think that his wife is a witch and has eaten her 
own child by her magical power. Such an accusation is almost 
sure to end in a divorce. 

A woman who has Jost many children, three or four, is con- 
sidered as being in a special position, called bovumba, and there 
are many rules to be observed in order to deal with this “ state 
of bereavement”. Shoulda child be born after the death of 
many elder brothers, he must be carried in a ntehe made of a 

. sheep’s skin instead of an antelope or goat skin. To carry him 

inan ordinary ntehe is taboo. Should it bea boy, the mother will 
put girl’s clothing on him, and vice-versa. The mother’s breast 
will be smeared with a special medicine, because they are ‘‘ breasts 

of the dead (mabele ya bafi)”. The child, if he lives, will be 

weaned as early as possible and be taken to his grandmother. 

Two curious rites are also practised to protect it against bad 
luck. The first, the Aunga, isa Ronga one ; the second, rin- 
gela bovumba, seems to belong rather to the Northern clans. 

The kunga rite consists in presenting mother and child with 
gifts. When visitors come to see the new-born, the mother 
keeps silent till they have given her what they brought for it, 
a bracelet for instance. Old women having no means of buy- 
ing a present, take a bit of grass and fix it in her hair. ‘Then 
she consents to speak. She gathers all those bracelets and puts 
them on the ntehe, carrying them everywhere together with 
the child. 7 

The rite of ringela bovumba was described to me by Mankhelu. 
When a woman has lost many children but has yet one alive, 

she can ensure the health of her next offspring by the following 
means : she takes the living child, goes with it to her own 
parents ; there it is buried in the ash-heap up to its neck. 
Then somebody runs to the village, takes grains of maize and 
throws them at the child. Afterwards it is dug up, washed, 
smeared with ochre, and brought home ; this will puta stop 
to the death of children. Ringa means to tempt; ringela bovumba 
to try to bring some influence to bear on the misfortune of the 
bereaved mother. 

9) ADULTERY. 

Amongst the Thonga true adultery for a man, married or 
unmarried (bumbuye), consists in committing sin with a mar- 
ried woman. Should he have relations with a girl, it leads to 
no consequence at all. Nobody will blame him, if the girl does 
not conceive... Should she have a child, he will only be for- 
ced to marry her; she will become his second wife. His first 
wife will not at all resent his bad conduct. Sometimes she will 
herself find him the girl he wants. There is nothingin her heart 
like the jealous dignity of an European spouse! She will keep 
all her capacity of jealousy (bukwele) for the time when the 
second wife comes to the village, and shares with her... the 
affection of the common husband! Adultery with an unmar- 
ried woman is nothing more than ‘ gangisa ”. 

But should a man have abducted a married woman, a woman 
who has a master (nwinyi), who has been paid for, then the 
matter becomes very serious. The husband is very clever in 
discovering her misdoing. As soon as he begins to have doubts 
about the fidelity of his wife, he chooses a friend and asks him 
to watch her. She is very cunning, her lover also; but the 
friend is on the watch and catches them sometimes, perhaps in 
the bush, when she goes to gather fuel, or near the pool, where 
she draws her water. He comes back to thes husband and 
informs him that he has caught them in the very act... Then 
the husband tells his wife that the proof is found and that she 
had better go at once to her lover and take something from his 

“wIs40jatg worl *Joq 
me : 

*[ERASULIT dy] JO UDWOM v 

suoy J, 

hut; she obeys, and comes back with his blanket or anything else. 
It is ‘‘ la piéce 4 conviction”. The husband goes with it to the 
counsellor who is in charge of his village; together they apply 
to the chief. The chief sends the counsellor whois watching the 
village of the lover to summon him. The confrontation takes 
place and the story ofthe case found out. The woman. is ques- 
tioned, confesses when, where, how many times he has sinned 
with her. If he denies, the object taken from the hut is exhi- 
bited. The adulterer is condemned by the chief to pay a whole 
lobolola, £ 15 to 20, asmuch as is necessary to buy a wife... He 
is rebuked before the whole assembly. ‘‘ Should you have 
taken a girl, it would not have mattered at all. Why are you 
abducting a married woman? Do you not know that it breeds 
bad blood (tindaba) 2” 

The counsellor of the deceived husband goes to the counsellor 
of the lover to claim the money. The latter must go to the 
guilty man. Parents of the adulterer insult their son: ‘* You 
see! All this money lost now! If only you had lobolaa wife 
with it!” They must help him to find it at once, because this 
is a law universally recognised: the price of adultery must be 
forthcoming. (Nandju wa bumbuye a wu pfumali). The poor 
man will have to pay; he will even have to add a hoe to “‘ drive 
away ” (hlongola) the counsellor, who keeps it for his reward ! 

Why is adultery so strongly prohibited and punished? Not 
at all from any moral consideration of purity, chastity, but for 
two other reasons. First a social one. Adultery with a mar- 
ried woman is a theft, because she is owned by a master. She 
is not punished herself, except when the watcher finds her out 
and gives himself the pleasure of thrashing her to his heart's 
content. The whole punishment falls on the man : he is the thief. 
But there is also a physical reason for it: the matlulana ! 
Whe have already met with this word. J/uJana means to jump 
over each other, to compete with each other. In the sexual 
domain it is said of two men who have relations with the 
same woman. ‘‘ They have met together in one life through 
the blood of that woman; they have drunk from the same pool ” 
(Viguet). This establishes between them a most curious mutual 

dependence : should one of them be ill, the other must not visit 
him; the patient might die. If he runs a thorn into his foot, the 
other must not help him to extract it. It is taboo. The wound 
would not heal. If he dies, his rival must not assist at his 
mourning or he would die himself (See page 137). Should 
he even be the proper son (sometimes it happens that a son 
commits adultery with one of the younger wives of his father, 
which is considered as biha, very bad), he must not take any 
part in the burial, though he might be the regular ‘‘ master of the 
mourning.” Relatives will drive him away because they have pity on 
him, they know what misfortune threatens him. It is a fright- 
ful taboo! There are medicines to remove this contamina- 
tion: the yila is removed by them; the diha (bad action) 
remains! However in the case of the disease called mpondjo, 
(which is the lupus, I think), medicines are of no avail: should 
a man visit his rival, who suffers from it, he will die. We have 
also seen the terrible complications which are believed to take 
place at the birth of children, when adultery has had something 
toedor with it. (PF. 38.) 

These great taboos show that there is a deep intuition 
amongst the Thonga that promiscuity of any kind is a bad and 
a dangerous thing. Even in the case of gangisa, boys are cen- 
sured when two of them court the same girl. 

10) Divorce. 

Adultery is one of the causes of divorce. The guilty woman, 
instead of obeying her legitimate husband and helping him to 
get his compensation, may choose to go to her lover and live 
with him. This leads to an immediate divorce. The husband 
goes to the parents of the unfaithful wife and claims for his 
lobolo. These have perhaps no money to give. However they 
will try to get it as soon as possible, be it by the dissolution of 
the marriage of their own son; they will perhaps send back his 
young wife to her parents and claim the lobolo payed for her, in 
order to meet the claim of the angry husband (See Part II). 
It seems it would be easier to go to the thief and claim from him 

— 196 mess 

the lobola for the adulteress whom he has stolen (tluba). But 
a thief is not a reliable man! If he hasstolen, it proves that he 
had nothing. (1) (See Appendix III.) 

Divorce frequently takes place for more trivial reasons, for 
mere incompatibility of temper. Heathen men are often hard 
with their wives. They refuse to give them money to buyclothing. 
‘¢ They are stones,” said one of these men to me. ‘Though you 
scratch a stone with your nail, the nail will break and the stone 
will remain! ” On the other hand, women are by no means 
sweet, obedient creatures ; therefore quarrelling often takes place. 
When she thinks she is persecuted (shanisa), the wife runs home. 
It is her great weapon. The husband heaves a sigh of relief... 
But very soon he becomes aware of his misfortune. No food, 
no cooked dish in the evening! His companions share. their 
own food with him for some days, bnt they will not consent to 
feed him long. He will have to go modestly, humbly to his 
parents-in-law and ask his wife to return. Then they examine 
the matter and he perhaps receives a good scolding... It may 
be that the domestic life will improve. Both fear the renewing 
of the conflict. It may be also that the situation will grow worse 
and worse, and then it will lead to divorce, viz. the husband 
will claim for his money and, when he gets it back, the mar- 
riage is dissolved (ku dlawa ka bukati). 

An accusation of witchcraft can also cause divorce, especially 
after the death of a child; so can also sterility as we have seen, 
p. 188. Gross selfishness of the husband can lead to it; many 
tales tell the story ofa man who in the time of famine succeed- 
ed in killing an antelope, kept the meat for himself and did not 
give any to his wife and children. The wife noticed it and, 
when the famine came to an end, she invited all her relatives 
to a beer feast. Then she shewed them the bones of the ante- 
lope, telling them how badly the husband had treated her ; her 
parents took her home together with the children. Sometimes 
the conclusion of the tale is that the man even lost his lobolo 

(1) Women of low morals are called in Ronga gwababana, prostitute. There 
are plenty of them all round Lourengo Marques, where morality has sunk to 
a verv low level; but this is the result of degeneration. 

money, as a punishment for his bad deed! (See Grammaire 
Ronga, page 202. Chants et. Contes des Ba-Ronga, page 260). 

11) WipowxHoop. 

When a man dies all his relatives are contaminated by the 
defilement of death, as we saw (Page 143). There are concen- 
tric circles, around him, some people being more affected than 
others. The wives form the first circle, especially the first wife. 
They have therefore to perform peculiar purifying ceremonies 
which throw a great light on the deep intuitions of the Thonga 
regarding life and nature. On the other hand they are the pro- 
perty. of the husband’s family and they are part of his belongings. 
How are they to be distributed to his heirs? This is a very 
delicate matter. It is more or less regulated by the tribal law. 
Hence two series of rites to consider, in the customs relating to 
widows: 1) The rites of purification, 2) the laws of repartition. 

Let us describe first the fate of the great wife amongst the 
Ronga (See for supplementary details: The fate of the widows 
amongst the Ba-Ronga. S.A.A.A.S. 1909). 

a) The first day. Manyibane is dead! What a sad event for 
his wife. She is called to inspect his grave. She assists silently 
at his funeral. But as soon as the younger brother of the deceas- 
ed has finished praying, she bursts into tears and cries aloud! 
Her parents cry also: ‘‘Our child has fallen into misfortune ! 
Now the cold has come for her! She will learn to know the 
cold water!” It is anallusion to the kind of life which the new 
widow will have to lead. Every morning she must go to the 
lake or the pool, with her companions, to have the whole body 
washed till the days of purification are completed. 

The first of these purifying rites is performed just after the 
_burial. The widow, surrounded by other women goes to the 
pool and there all must wash their bodies. Most of them return 
home at once. But the widow remains there with other widows 
who have lost their husbands in former years. They form a 
secret society which assembles only to receive new members into 

it. Nobody must see the strange rites performed by them. It 
is a Ngoma (the same word as for the circumcision school). 
However the mysterious company takes possession of the great 
road (gondjwen), and everybody must take care not to pass 
along it at that time, for great misfortune might overtake the 
imprudent one who should approach too near and catch a glimpse 
of the proceedings. A wise man, when seeing the suspicious 
group, Mourning women sitting on the main road, prudently 
stops and makes a long detour to avoid the place... What is 
done in this meeting? One of the widows makes an incision 
on the new member of the society, with a knife or a bit of glass 
in the inguinal region on the left side, “‘ where the husband was 
resting”. If the blood flows freely, it is a good sign. The 
women are satisfied; they say there was a good understanding 
between husband and wife; if the blood does not flow it is a 
bad omen. Then one of them lights a little fire with a handful] 
of dry grass; this grass has been torn from the roof of the deceas- 
ed’s hut. A little excrement from a cock (not a hen!) is then 
thrown into the fire, and the widow must expose both hands to 
the smoke. These rites are very similar to the first circumci- 
sion rites, the incision performed recalling the ablation of the 
foreskin, and the exposure to the smoke, the jumping over the 
fire. These are great taboos. Evidently they are initiation 
rites, accompanying the passage from one condition into another. 

After that, the company returns home. The other widows 
take every bit of clothing from their companion, tie a reed ora 
palm thread around her waist with some broad leaves attached 
to it. With this scanty garment, they bring her home. She 
walks surrounded.by them. Somebody warns the men to get 
away from the road as they are not allowed to see the proces- 
sion. They hide themselves in their huts. The widow is fed 
to her hut, the hut of the great wife which has now been 
uncrowned. She must accomplish the last crossing of the hut. 
Entering through the door, she shouts loudly: ‘‘My husband! 
My husband! You have left me alone! What am I to do?” 
Then she goes out, not by the door but by the hole which has 
been made in the wall to carry the corpse to the grave. Behind 

¢ 

 >  
the hut her friends are waiting for her and give her back her 
old clothing, which has been washed in the pool and which she 
will wear again for two days. (1). 

b) The following days of the Great Mourning. Without delay a 
new hut, a small provisional hut, is built in front of the mor- 
tuary one. Here the great wife will stay during the whole 
widowhood; the space between this and the old hut is more 
or less taboo and most of the possessions of the deceased are 
put there, under the roof near the door on the outside. (See 
illustration p. 159). 

The other widows do not leave their huts, but they participate 
in the other purifying acts, the vapour baths and the general 
sprinkling of the fifth day. As regards the vapour baths, howe- 
ver, the first wife is associated with the grave-diggers, viz. she 
must be exposed to the strongest medicinal smoke while the 
inferior wives are cleansed with weaker drugs. They all put on 
the malopa and eat with spoons during the whole year of the 
widowhood. 

c) Provisional decision regarding the fate of the widows. A few 
days after the Great Mourning, a new gathering takes place, not 
in connection with the defilement of death which is now clean- 
sed, but fo fix provisionally the fate of the widows. The sisters of 
the deceased have to play a special part in this gathering. They 
will lead the discussion with the widows about their new hus- 
bands. It is indeed a nice custom to let women decide on the 
subject. Not that they have an unrestricted power in the ques- 
tion. The law has provided a certain rule for the repartition 
and one seldom departs from it. However some liberty is allowed 
in the application, and modifications can better be made if pro- 

(1) The widowers also form a similar society and undergo the same rites ; but 
just as it was only the great wife who was subject to these laws, to the exclu- 
sion of the little wives, so it is only when he has lost his first wife that a 
man is initiated into the widower’s society. After having buried her (he holds 
her head) he goes to the pool, washes himself, and another widower comes 
and makes the incision on him in the inguinal region. Then he throws away 
his shifado (Note 1.)and also accomplishes the same crossing of the hut in tears. 
These three acts constitute the proper widower’s mourning : the vapour baths 
and Jahla khombo are part of his purification as being the principal grave-digger. 

=—- 2a > 

posed by female intermediaries. Should the husband possess a 
harem (tshengwe), that is at least five wives, they will most 
likely be given to the following heirs: the great wife, being 
**the pole of the village”, must remain in it and belongs to the 
younger brother (1) who becomes the master of the kraal. The 
second one goes to the second brother, the third one to the third 
brother, the fourth to the ntukulu, viz. to the son of the sister 
of the deceased. The fifth will then become the wife of one 
of the sons of the deceased. This might seem shocking and is 
really shocking even to the sense of the natives; but let it be 
remembered that she is the youngest of the lot; she has been 
taken when the father was already old, and the first son is per- 
haps older than she. As regards the elder wives, the first and 
the second especially, one would never think of keeping them 
for the son! Incestuous relations are very rare amongst the 
Ba-Ronga. Even in this case, the feelings of both parties are 
more or less respected. The men advise the son to begin to 
play with the young widow, to ask her jocularly for tobacco, 
and he gradually accustoms himself to consider her no longer as 
a mother (mamana) but asa wife (nsati). 

Of course the general rule is apt to be very much altered 
according to circumstances. Should the deceased be the young- 
est of the family, his elder brother can be the heir of the first 
wife. But it is not the regular course. 

The repartition having thus been decided, the sisters of the 
deceased call the widows and say to them: ‘‘ You so and so, you 
shall give food to so and so (phamela manyana).” But then 
begins the fight. One of the widows, being old, might altoge- 
ther refuse to have connection with any of her brothers-in-law. 
She might say: “Iam taking my young son as husband” which 
means: I do not want to be the wife of anybody. Or she will 
say : “‘I choose the big tree of the village where my late hus- 
band has built his hut”. This answer may mean two things. 

(1) Amongst the Ba-Ronga, an elder brother of the deceased cannot inhe- 
rita widow. It is taboo. He is a father to her, not a husband. He some- 

times takes the lead in the discussion, having no personal interest in the matter. 
(See Part II). 

l 

oo 

Either: I do not leave this kraal and I will stay here without - 
husband; or, on the contrary, I consent to be the wife of the 
man who becomes the headman of the village, viz. the elder of 
the younger brothers. Another will say: ‘‘I love my ntukulu 
so and so”. Should, however, the first wife desire to go to a 
man who does not live in the village, the family council will 
certainly object strongly to her wish, as her departure would 
mean the disappearance of the village. But in the case of the 
younger widows it is quite possible that an exception to the 
ordinary law would be allowed if they insisted upon choosing 
another husband. (1) 

After all, this is but a preliminary consultation, and the men 
who are rejoicing at the idea of getting a new wife will perhaps 
be badly deceived later on, as we shall see. However the man 
provisionnally chosen as the future husband of a widow, will at 
once pay visits to her, “‘ march to her” (ku mu fambela), accor- 
ding to the technical expression. 

d) Thecasting away of misfortune. But before any new and happy 
life begins for the widows, they have still to go through a very 
hard trial. They must perform the Jahla khombo, the throwing 
away of the malediction of death, and this is much more difficult 
for them than for the grave-diggers or the other members of the 
village. The main point in this strange act of purification is 
this: before a widow can become the wife of her new husband, 
she must have sexual intercourse with another man whom she 
deceives. Should she succeed in freeing herself from him so 
that the act will keep its ritual character, s. n. i. (see Note 2), 

(1) What would be the case should the widow choose a husband outside 
her husband’s family ? To the mind of a heathen woman the idea would never 
occur. But suppose a Christian widow, having only married suitors, refuses 
to become their wife, her conscience forbidding her to contract a polygamic 
union. Her case would be very hard indeed, as I do not think her wish 
would be taken into consideration by heathen relatives. It would have to be 
brought before the White magistrate who would probably try to help the 
widow. I think that, even if the woman consented to submit such family 
matters to the European court, she would have to give the Jobola or her chil- 
dren back to her brothers-in-law, and that might be an impossibility for her. 
It would be interesting to know how Native Commissioners proceed in such 
cases. 

— 8Oo —_— 

this man will take on himself the malediction of death, and she 
will be purified. Should on the contrary that man accomplish 
the whole act, the widow has failed and will return home with 
shame and in despair! This is the description of this sad expe- 
dition of the widows. It takes place a few days after the gather- 
ing just described. The men of the village send the widows 
away and tell them: ‘* Go and scatter (hangalasa) the maledic- 
tion through the country and get rid of it before some other 
misfortune happens to us”. With their conical baskets on their 
heads, they all go, each accompanied by a friend, who will act as 
witness. They pay a visit to some distant relative and try to 
flirt with the men of the village. Their aim is clearly under- 
stood : morals are so dissolute that it is not difficult for them. 
to attain their desire. (But the purifying act is useless unless 
interrupted abruptly before its completion). If the widow suc- 
ceeds, she isfull of joy, and comes back saying: ‘“‘ I have coped 
with the mourning, I have overcome it.” Should she not suc- 
ceed, she has then been ‘‘ overcome by the mourning”. It is a 
serious condition, which can only be dealt with by special medi- 
cines. The man who has unconsciously purified a widow and 
who becomes aware of it, will also have recourse to the nanga 
to get rid of the pollution of death. The widows try to come 
back all together ; they stand by the main entrance of the village 
and announce their success with the mikulungwana shouts, which 
mean at the same time joy and sorrow. Everybody meets them 
there, and they form a procession to the grave to tell the deceased 
what has happened: ‘‘ You have left us in the open field; we 
have had to go through a painful trial; it would not have 
been so if you had not left us!” But, after all, this is a day 
of rejoicing and the men, the heirs to the widows, are parti- 
cularly pleased. The same day the widows put on new 
undergarment and complete their purification by another steam 
bath. 

At that time the mourning is said to have ripened (wupfile). 
The widow’s hair has grown again. What remains is to fill the 
mourning (dlaya nkosi). It is done by the man who ‘‘ marches 
to” or visits the widow. In the evening, he is allowed in her 

hut: they make a fire in it, put into the fire two pills of a 
purifying medicine, expose their limbs to the smoke. Then 
they put it out with their own water, after which they can 
have sexual relations without harm. A certain time must, 
however, elapse before the adjudication of the inheritance takes 
place. 

The description I have given of the /abla khombo, translating 
exactly the narratives of Mboza, Elias, and an old widower called 
Magingi, refers to the rite as it was performed in the normal 
fashion some twenty years ago amongst the Ba-Ronga. Now 
the customs change. There is, all around the town of Lourenco 
Marques, an agglomeration of natives coming from many tribes. 
Immorality has become dreadful there, owing especially to the 
alcoholic excesses, as a free and enormous sale of adulterated 
wine takes place in this region. ‘The widows are sure to find 
there one hundred men for each one, when they wish to cast 
away their defilement. But in the promiscuity, the poison of 
syphilis makes terrible ravages. According to our medical 
missionary, 90°/, of the natives are contaminated by that dis- 
ease. When the men up country saw that their wives came back 
ritually purified but physically contaminated, they began them- — 
selves to accomplish the necessary act. It has become the 
general custom to such a point that, when a widow goes to Majl- 
angalen, (such is the name of that hell of drunkeness and immo- 
rality), it is now said of her: ‘‘She will refuse to stay with her 
legal heirs!” However the law of the Jahla khombo nhoben, to cast 
away the malediction in the bush, remains inexorable in the 
three cases where the defilement is considered as being of the 
worst kind: when the husband died from phthisis, from leprosy, 
or if the woman has had twins. 

Old widows who can find no lovers may be purified by means 
of drugs. 

e) The year of widowhood. Though the widows have found 
new husbands, they still remain in the old kraal. ‘They must 
accomplish there ‘‘a full hoe”, viz. a whole year of ploughing. 
In their new fields they leave the dry sticks of the mealies of the 
last year, in such a way that everybody passing by will know 

at once that this is the field of a widow. But what they har- 
vest this year will belong to the new husband. They have now 
the right to fambelana, viz. to go to each other. The suitor 
brings clothing to the woman, and the woman pays him visits 
with jars of beer. They belong more or less to each other. But 
the marriage of the inherited woman is not absolutely settled. 
Her final fate is not to be known before the last and most impor- 
tant act: the adjudication of the inheritance. 

f) The day of the adjudication of the inheritance. ‘This isa most 
typical ceremony prepared with great care, because the day is 
full of surprises and dangers. Every precaution is taken to avoid 
misunderstanding, and to bring the mourning toa peaceful and 
satisfactory conclusion. It is winter time; the mealies have 
been collected from the fields of the widows, the small cobs 
called makunula have been set apart carefully, as they have to 
be used especially to prepare the beer of the feast. The council 
of the family is again assembled and decides that the time has come. 
The divinatory bones are consulted. Should they be favourable, 
the ceremony can take place. The bones are asked again a 
number of questions: Who must take the mealies from the 
granary and put them in the pot to soften them in water? (first 
operation of native beer making). A newly married woman 
who has had only one child, is chosen by preference. Then one 
asks how long this softening must continue; who is to shout her 
mikulungwane to accompany the work; who will have to get 
the mealies out; which woman must give the first blow in the 
mortar to pound the softened mealies, etc. 

All the relatives assemble in the mortuary village. One year 
has elapsed since the death, and the bitter feelings of mourning 
have passed. Nobody will miss the feast, certainly not the 
batukulu, viz., the nephews, sons of the sisters of the deceased. 
Some people might be disappointed that day, but one of those 
nephews might return home richer than when he left! Most 
of the relatives arrive before the great day, to help in the pre- 
paration of the beer. When the woman designated by the 
bones has given the first blow, all her companions start at once 
pounding with vigour: ‘‘Ghe-ghe-ghe-ghe”, and they sing songs 

—— 205 =’ ° 

of mourning. This is one of these songs and a very significant 
one: 

Hi rilo, hi rilo! Hi ta ku yini ku we, Hosi ndjina? 
We are weeping, we are weeping | What shall we say to thee, King! 

This king is without doubt Heaven, the more or less personal 
being who kills or gives life, and whom we shall often meet 
with in these pages. 

The first of the ceremonies of that day is the sacrifice on the 
grave. The master of the mourning takes a pot of beer, and 
followed by the crowd, especially by the batukulu, goes to the 
place where the deceased has been buried. He stops there and 
prays : ‘‘ See this jar of beer! We bring it to thee; we have 
gathered to tear to pieces the mourning. We beseech thee that 
this ceremony may be performed in peace and good understand- 
ing”. Then he pours a little of the drink into the cup which 
is on the grave, the same which the deceased used when alive. 
One ntukulu then takes the jar, which is still almost full, and 
he drinks the contents with the other batukulu. ‘This has 
been done calmly. But this act has made the batukulu bold- 
er. They become troublesome. As soon as the crowd 
has come back from the grave, they steal another pot of beer. 
They insult the masters of the village. They say: ‘‘ Why! 
You have never sent us any notice about the decisions concern- 
ing the mourning! We are tired! We will go and take our 
wives with us!” But some of the old men go to them and 
say: ‘Be good! Do not spoil the feast ! ” 

By the end of the afternoon all the relatives assemble near 
the door of the mortuary hut, and bring the goats which they 
have given for the feast. Here the true sacrifice, the living offer- 
ing takes place, very much in the same style as the one described 
when treating of the crushing down of the hut (p. 158). The 
old man who prays, says: ‘‘ See us here! We have come 
together to conclude our mourning. May there be no noise, 
no misunderstanding, no anger amongst the batukulu! This 
is our ox (the goat). It has been provided by so and so. 
Many others have been brought. See! You have died as a 

« 

great chief!” At this very moment a niukulu rises and begins 
to insult the old man who is praying: *‘ You have no con- 
cern for us! Why do you put us apart? You do not give us 
our wives! You are killing us!” And the other batukulu 
join in chorus. The end of the sacrifice and of the prayer is 
always the same in these big, religious, family gatherings : the 
batukulu steal the part of the victim set apart for the gods. 
The throng pursues them laughing, and pelts them with balls 
of psanyi. 

The sun is now setting. All the men go to the central 
place of the village and sit round the fire. The widows re- 
main on the spot, between the deceased’s hut and the new hut 
of the great wife, where all the belongings of the late husband 
have been kept during the whole year. The other widows of 
the family surround them once more ; no other woman is al- 
lowed to approach. The present ceremony isanother secret rite 
of the company of widows. They sing the following mour- 
ning song to recall all the sufferings of the year of widowhood : 

Angoma nkulukumba! Tatana a nga fa, a ba siya 
Na ngomia a nga si ba byela! 

Our secret Jaw is a great law! Our father has gone, he has left them, 
And he had not told them about that law ! 

During that song the old women take away all the clothing of 
the widows, and wash their bodies. Then they lead them into 
the hut of the great wife and put on them new clothing, the 
clothes which their suitors and other relatives have brought for 
them. When they are all seated, the sisters of the deceased 
proceed to the last distribution. They first ask the great wife: 
‘* You, to whom do you belong ?” She answers: ‘‘He! Do 
you not know him? It is the man who has taken care of me, 
who was visiting me! Iam choosing so and so!” She can 
say also: ‘‘ I am killing so and so! ” (Ndji dlaya man). That 
means: “‘ As I have killed my first husband, I might do the 
same for the second one”, a very promising declaration! As 
soon as the widow has given her answer, the women in the 
hut start shouting loudly, and one of them goes out to the 

men, and cries: ‘* So and so says she kills so and so! ” They 
proceed to ask another one: ‘‘ You, whom do you choose?” 
The woman remains silent. ‘‘ What do you mean? I do not 
choose anybody.” — ‘‘How isthat? Be sensible!” — “No! 
I do not want anybody!” — “‘Why?” They begin to press 
her : ‘‘ You know well who has taken care of you, who has visi- 
ted (fambela) you the whole year.” — “I do not want him!” 
“* How is that possible?” — ‘‘No, I donot want him. I want 
the ntukulu so and so.” A frightful noise is heard in the hut. 
They are all crying together. What has happened? Probably 
that widow was not pleased with the man to whom they had 
destined her. Seeing more of him during the year, her affec- 
tion had not increased. On the other hand, she had some li- 
king for one of the batukulu, and she arranged secretly with 
him, and perhaps also with his mother that she would keep 
silent till this day and then choose her nephew. It is quite 
possible that the mother of the ntukulu will say in that case: 
“* Has this widow not been bought with the money which | 
secured for the family by my marriage?” Of course the offi- 
cial suitor objects strongly to this spoliation. He becomes angry. 
During one year he has given clothing to the ungrateful one. 
Things can grow so bad that the mtukulu carries off the fractious 
widow at once and says: ‘* Good-bye! I go with my wife!” 
The old men will then follow him and implore him to come 
back. If they see that the woman is quite decided, they will 
allow her to goto the husband of her choice. They had better 
consent to it at once, because it happens not infrequently that 
the ntukulu, if repulsed that day, will go to the family of the 
woman and there claim the money (J/obola) paid for her by the 
late husband, saying: ‘‘ That Jobola comes from my mother. 
If you do not give us our wife, if you allow her to stay with 
another man, then give us back the money.” Or it might hap- 
pen also that the widow, brought perforce to the house of a 
younger brother-in-law, will run away to the ntukulu, and the 
regular husband will be helpless. ‘There is a saying to this 
effect : ““A woman inherited cannot be forced.” Of course such 
cases of conflicting interests cause a great deal of friction be- 

tween members of the family, and the natives are very sorry 
aboutit; they try to avoid it as much as possible. But the-desire 
of getting one more wife is so strong in the heart of a Ronga 
that such disputes are by no means rare, and the day of the 
adjudication of the inheritance is universally dreaded. How- 
ever, one never goes as far as fighting, and if an uncle and a 
nephew have parted from each other on bad terms, they will 
very likely try to mend matters by the sacrifice of reconcilia- 
tion (hahlelana madjieta), which is one of the nice features of 
the Ronga religion (See Part VI). 

The widows are truly the most important part of the property 
left by a man. When they have been distributed, the minor 
possessions of the deceased are adjudicated. As regards oxen, 
money, they have been already remitted to the younger brother 
or, in his absence, to the sons. ‘The younger brother will use 
them as a family property to buy a wife for his son or for the 
son of the deceased, when he comes of age. In the repartition 
of the implements which have been cleansed, but left lying on 
the ground in front of the hut up to this day, the ntukulu, viz. 
the principal uterine nephew again plays an important part. 
He has the right of tjhumba, viz. of picking out for himself one 
of the assagais of his uncle just as the maternal uncle takes 
(tjhumba) one pound from the lobola money (See Part ID). 
Every warrior possesses at least two assagais, the big one which 
belongs in principle to the chief, and which must be inherited 
by the eldest son. The nephew takes the smaller one, but he 
must precede his cousin in choosing ; in appropriating this wea- 
pon, he surrenders (nyiketa) the inheritance to the true heirs. 
This is a very characteristic expression. It seems as if he want- 
ed to assert his right ; but he takes the less valuable weapon and 
leaves the better one to the son. The explanation of this custom 
is probably to be found in the evolution of the family system 
which must have taken place amongst the Thonga (See Part II). 
In fact all the batukulu stand in a line and receive a portion of 
the property of the deceased, a knife, an axe, a small punch, etc. 
Women never inherit (a ba di pfindla). When no heir exists 
except female ones, they can receive something, but the valuable 

property must be kept by them for their sons, the uterine 
nephews of the deceased. Why? Because, in the intuition of 
the Thonga, a woman is not capable of possessing: she is not 
able to build an oxen kraal and to repair it; how could she poss- 
ess oxen? The only thing she can do is to arrange a pig’s 
kraal. Therefore she can own pigs but nothing else! 

_ The end of the feast of the adjudication of the inheritance is 
the distribution of the flesh ofthe victims. Thecompany breaks 
up, each party having received one of the limbs. They must 
eat it on their way home, somewhere under a tree, on the road, 
neither in the mortuary village, nor in their own kraal. It is 
taboo. Those who have received a wife go home rejoicing. 
When he has reached home, the fortunate husband kills a fowl 
or even a goat to make a fitting reception for his new wife. 
This is the end of the long period of widowhood, in which it 
is easy to discover all the sequence of the passage rites. 

Such is the old normal way of reinstating a widow in society. 
But there are special cases where the rites are slightly different. 
If a widow is old and cannot expect to deceive a man, she sim- 
ply buys medicines which are supposed to cleanse her. 

The case of the wife of Sokis (see page 138, footnote 4) was 
more difficult. She had a baby, and sexual relations were conse- 
quently prohibited. Moreover the man who legally inherited her 
was in Johannesburg and could not provide for her purification. 
One of the grave-diggers took his place and ‘‘ran for her” 
(tjutjumela). This is a different expression for fambela. As 
far as I could understand, this man had ritual relations with his 
own wife in order to Jahla khombo, to be purified himself. Then 
he tied the cotton string (boha nshale) round the waist of the 
widow. A sick widow will also be treated by tjutjumela. The 
erave-digger possesses the means of cleansing them, having gone 
through the mourning together with them. 

These attenuated processes of purification seem the rule 
amongst the Northern clans. According to Viguet, the widows 
must also go to the bush (hula ni nhoba) to meet with a man 
who will free them of the defilement of death. The man who 
performs this act is called the shikomho of the widows. There are 

—0 =_— 

certain individuals who make a real businesss of this. Knowing 
drugs with which to cleanse themselves (ku tirulula), they claim 
a reward for their help... The widows remove their mourning 
attire (bracelets of strings on that occasion), and return home 
adorned with beads. In the Djonga dialect the adjudication of 
the inheritance is called pandja ndjaka. It is not attended with 
a sacrifice. ‘There seem to be some differences in the intuitions 
of the Ronga and of the Northern clans. For the first named 
the defilement of death contaminates the hut to a greater extent. 
It must be destroyed and the widow .has to undergo the very 
hard castingaway of misfortune (lahla khombo). For the second 
the impurity rests more on the village itself, which must accom- 
plish the collective purification of blamba ndjaka. 

I must still mentiona new custom which is spreading amongst 
the Ba-Ronga in the neighbourhood of Lourengo-Marques. 
When a widow objects to become the wife of the legal inheritor, 
she goes home and adopts another husband. ‘There are plenty 
of men of other tribes, coming from Inhambane, Quelimane, 
Mozambique, who have no wife. They accept the proposal of 
the widow and go to live in her village. They are generally 
despised and called by the insulting name of mugomo, a Zulu word 
meaning an empty iron oil tin. They are as hard and unfeel- 
ing as such atin! If children are born, they belong to the 
family of the deceased husband, who paid the lobolo. 

Sometimes also a widow chooses a nephew whois still a child. 
She gives him food as if she were his wife, but she lives with 
another man whom she loves. It even happens that she may 
choose a girl, the daughter of another wife of the deceased. 

C. OLD AGE AND DEATH 

An old woman, having in some way gone out from the sexual 
community, enjoys some privileges which are taboo for her 
sisters still capable of childbearing. She is allowed to put on 
the clothing of the widows: contamination of death is not so 

aoa. — 

dangerous for her. She can proceed to the purification of the 
village, in certain cases of epidemic, and of the weapons of the 
Warriors in war time (Part HI). . After the sacrifice of the black 
ram for rain, old women and small girls alone are allowed to 
eat the flesh of the victim. 

But old and decrepit women are despised. As long as they 
still can till their land, they are treated with consideration, but 
when they have lost all their strength and must be fed by their 
children, they are looked upon as troublesome burdens. I must 
say that, as long as she still has an atom of vigour, a Thonga 
woman goes to her field and tills it. During all her life time 
she has contracted such an intimate union with Mother Earth 
that she cannot conceive existence away from her gardens, and 
she crawls to them with her hoe, by a kind of instinct, till she 
dies. 

The death of the woman is attended with the same rites as 
the death of a man. I must mention, however, the custom of 
mahloko, which takes place when a woman still in her prime dies. 
Mahloko comes from nbhloko, head. The explanation of this 
technical word is this: the parents of the woman say: ‘‘ Our head 
(viz. a person belonging to us) has died; let us go to mourn her.” 

Let us first see how this mourning takes place in the Ronga 
clans. 

If the two families were very friendly, the parents of the 
deceased will probably bring with them a little girl, saying: 
‘This is our little green meat (mbuti), our little orange (rather 
sala, fruit of the nsala tree).”” They offer her to the husband 
to take the place of the deceased wife and a new contract will 
be made. The widower will then at once pay a first part of 
the lobolo, £ 5 for instance, and, in the course of time, he will 
marry his sister-in-law. But generally the visitors are angry, 
and the mahloko ceremony is very unpleasant. It may be that 
the deceased wife had not been entirely paid for. In that case 
her parents will come at the end of the mourning to “‘claim the | 
herd” (ramela ntlhambi). 

But though there may be no difficult lobola matter in the 
Way, uneasiness is felt, because the brothers of the deceased 

= aa — 

cannot help thinking that their sister has been killed by witch- 
craft. It was not yet time for her to die; so she must have 
been bewitched by the husband’s family, probably by her co- 
wives, who were jealous of her. When the Great Mourning 
took piace, they hardly came to the mortuary village. One or 
two went to see their ‘‘ head”, and they mourned her in their 
own kraal. To day, day of mahloko, they assemble, throw 
bones to know who will have to speak, who will receive the 
mahloko money, whether the money has been bewitched ? The 
whole company starts for the mortuary village, driving a goat 
before them. They sit down outside, in the bush with dark 
looks: there is no hut to receive them any more... They have 
been noticed by the inhabitants of the kraal. One of them, the 
salutor (mulosi), goes to meet them and offers them a shilling. 
They keep silence. He tells them the news of the village. They 
do not answer. He leaves them and comes a second time with 
a fresh present. Then they consent to tell the news of their 
home, but they do not enter the village. ‘The same man returns 
fo them 2 third time with £15 they reiuse to accept it. [le 
adds 1o/. (£ 1.10 is considered the normal sum to be paid as a 
kind of fine by the widower to the parents of the deceased.) 
They refuse again: it is an insult ! Happily the ntukulu is 
there; he will act as mediator between the two families. The 
visitors summoned him on their arrival and he has been sitting 
with them the whole time. Is he not the son of their sister ? 
But before he went to them, his father has given him his 
instructions: ‘Tell them that I have not eaten your mother. ” 
The ntukulu, as we shall see, is very free with his maternal 
uncles. He has the right of teasing them, even insulting them. 
Seeing that they do not accept the money, he stands and gives 
vent to his grief, throws sand at them, tries to drive them away, 
weeps. ‘No! Father has not killed mother! He is not a 
wizard! She died a natural death!” They see his tears, and 
then consent to enter the village. 

In front of the mortuary hut, all the belongings of the deceas- 
ed wife have been piled up, together with the straw crown of 
the hut: her pots, plates, baskets, spoons, mortars, etc. The 

brothers break everything. Should there be any new implements 
amongst them, they will perhaps give them to their nieces. 
Then they lift the roof of the hut and throw it into the bush. 
They pick up all the plaster of the walls and throw it away 
where they threw the roof. The sacrifice is then accom- 
plished amidst the ruins of the destroyed hut. Whilst it is being 
prepared, women of both families insult each other. The female 
relatives of the deceased say to the women of the village: ‘‘ You 
have killed her because she was a splinter in your eyes” (shi- 
labi). The others answer: ‘‘ Have you seen us kill her? 
Perhaps people do not die with you?” The bukwele, the special 
jealousy which almost always exists between co-wives, explains 
how it is possible for them to address such amenities to each 
other. But the victim is prepared, all the limbs cut off, the 
portion of the gods set apart. The elder brother of the deceased 
woman prays in these words: ‘‘ My sister, go in peace, be not 
angry; because we love you, we have come to mourn you to- 
day. Do not say: We have not mourned you. Go to so and 
so (father, grandfather etc.), call them here, give us good sleep 
and good health, etc.” The batukulu appropriate the offering 
and the mourning ends in laughter, dancing and drinking. 
The neighbours come and take part in the rejoicings. 

When they return home, the mourners spend all the mahloko 
money in buying wine. They sometimes become quite intox- 
icated. Afterwards both families begin to resume visits. 

This custom of the mahloko fine is so strong that converts 
still adhere to it. But they use to send the money to the 
wife’s family, when informing them of the death, and no other 
ceremony is performed. 

In the Northern clans the mahloko are also paid, but it seems 
that the family of the widower considers that it has the right 
of claiming the repayment of the whole lobolo, when the deceas- 
ed wife has left no child to compensate for the loss. In Nond- 
wane, though we are still in Ronga territory, when the woman 
dies shortly after marriage the lobolo must be repaid. Further 
North the procedure is as follows: the deceased woman is buried 
by her husband according to the ordinary rules; one year elap- 

ses and a special feast is celebrated, similar to the ‘“‘beer of 
mourning” (page 164), in the village of the wife’s parents, where 
both families gather together and provide the necessary victims. 
It commences with a sacrifice in which the father of the deceased 
wife squeezes the psanyi of the goat on the assistants, insulting 
all the time the gods who have killed his child and made trouble 
between the two families. He ends with words addressed to 
the widower’s relations: ‘‘I cleanse you from your misfortune ”’. 
The widower’s father does the same thing, insulting also his 
own gods, and every body rubs his body with the green liquid 
squeezed from the psanyt. Then prayer for new blessings and 
the offering of the sacrifice are made, as customary, and the proper 
juridic discussion takes place. Each family takes possession of a 
hut, the widower’s family assembling as usually in the house of 
the deceased wife’s mother, and the parley takes place through 
the go-between (tintjumi), as in the discussions which precede 
marriage. Let us call the husband’s family A and that of the 
wile’ EB. A sends two lioes to: Boas a notification : “" Your child 
has died with us last year”. B answers “All right! Then pay 
the fine for her head (nhloko). Because you had only bought 
er lees. Her brain, her head; her name was still ours,” 
sends five hoes to B, to pay for the brains of the deceased. B 
takes two of the five and sends them back to A, saying: ‘‘One 
of them is to cleanse you from the misfortune and we shave your 
head with the second one.” <A accepts the two hoes and returns 
home. Should the wife have died childless, there will be a 
second act to the procedure: A has “opened the door of the 
claim” (a pfurile nyangwa wa nandju). He will come back 
shortly to lodge it with B. 

Here he is. Using his go-between (ntjumi) as a mouth 
piece, he says to B: ‘* Look at us! We gather our ashes with 
our own hands and we dig water in small shells of sala, —viz. 
we have no wife to do this feminine work for us!” It means: 
‘* Please give us another wife or repay the money to buy one. ” 
If B happens to have a girl of age, he will say : ‘‘ Do not kill 
us ; we put a log of wood across the road” (hi hingakanya 
ntsandja).. It means: ‘‘ We have put something to prevent 

= 

you from coming to us as enemies. Here is a new wife for 
you.” A understands quite well and goes home satisfied. He 
comes back without delay and brings twenty or thirty hoes, 
which is a beginning of lobola payment. He says : ‘‘ We thank 
you for the wife”. The girl then follows him at once, if she 
is of marriageable age ; if not, she stays at home until she is 
erown up, and during all this time her new husband provides 
her with clothing. When having gone to live with him she 
gives birth toa child, B comes to A and says: ‘‘ Nwombekazi 
a yiambi nandju ”, viz. ‘‘ A cow which has calved is not used 
to pay a debt”, that is to say: she must be paid for herself. This 
technical expression means therefore : As our daughter has given 
you posterity, pay the full lobolo for her! A will certainly 
do it ‘‘ hi bushaka”, on account of the friendly relation exist- 
ing between Band himself. But if B has no girl to give in 
compensation, if he has no money, what will happen? A will 
follow his oxen where they have gone, namely into the family 
of the girl who has been bought by B for one of his sons. This 
woman is for the widower his great mukonwana, the woman he 
fears the most in all the tribe. We shall see what will then 
happen when treating of the extraordinary relations existing 
between these two individuals. This wonderful story of the 
consequences of the death of a wife, so characteristically told by 
Viguet, provides us with an excellent opportunity for transi- 
tion to Part II of this work, which will explain the relations bet- 
ween all the members of the Thonga family. 

SECOND PART 

THE LIFE OF THE FAMILY AND OF THE VILLAGE 

Having followed a man and a woman from the beginning to 
the end of their existence, I now come to the Life of the Family 
and of the Village. Both subjects are in close connexion. As a 
rule, a village is but a family composed of the headman, the 
father, his wives, his children and the old folk which depend upon 
him ; but in many cases his younger brothers live with him, 
sometimes a son-in-law, even a stranger, and all these inmates 
compose the village, muti. (1) In the first chapter we shall 
consider the family in itself, its constitution, the system of rela- 
tionship and in a second, the village, the concrete realisation of 
the family, its foundation, its main laws and the respective occu- 
pations of its members.

‘THE LIFE OF THE FAMILY 

The kinship system of the Thonga and, I suppose, of all the 
Bantu is widely different from ours, and greatly surprises the 
uninitiated student who tries to understand it. It is a very 

(1) Native villages are generally called kraals by South African colonists. This 
expression comes from the Portuguese word curral which means properly 
stable. I shall employ it to designate the enclosure where oxen are kept, 
the cattle-kraal, but it does not seem right to apply it to the muti which is a 
village, however small and poor it may be. Portuguese call native villages 
povoagdo. 

complicated matter indeed. In Les Ba-Ronga I have given 
the genealogy of Tobane and tried to sketch the system, and 
even to explain it. I cannot say this first attempt has entirely 
satisfied me. Therefore I devoted a considerable time to the 
study of the subject since then, working out genealogies of 
Gana, Viguet, Mankhelu, Mboza. I was led to the conclusion 
that there is a very remarquable uniformity in the family con- 
ceptions all over the tribe, but also that the matter is even more 
difficult than I first thought. It is a tangle extraordinarly dif- 
ficult to unravel. I had believed that is was composed of two 
threads only, twisted together and knotted a hundred times : 
the lobola and polygamy customs. But I saw that many other 
threads were entwined with these : remnants of an ancient state 
of society where the mother-right was prevailing, and perhaps 
traces of the old group-marriage system which is still alive 
amongst Australian natives. My aim is more modest to-day. I 
do not pretend to explain everything, but to present a wider, 
more complete statement of facts, which I offer to profession- 
al anthropologists in order that they may fix the place of the 
actual system of relationship of the Thonga in the evolution 
of the human family. 

Ac COMPARISON OF THONGA AND ENGLISH TERMS 
OF KINSHIP 

As an introduction into the mysteries of the system, I will 
first give the native names for the terms of relationship men- 
tioned by professor Frazer in his questions. 

Father, tatana. Mother, mamana. Brother, makwabu (wa matlhari of 
the assagai (1) Sister, makwabu (wa shihundju, of the basket). Husband, 
nuna. Wife, nsati. Son, fiwana (wa wandjisanyana, boy). Daughter, 
wana (wa wanhwana, girl) plur. bana. 

Father’s father, kokwana. Father’s mother, kokwana. Mother’s father, 
kokwana. Mother’s mother, kokwana. 

(1) Wa matlhari, ‘‘of the assagai” means male; ‘‘ wa shihundju ”, ‘‘ of 
the basket ” means female, as these objects are those which characterise each 
Sex. 

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Father’s brother, tatana. Father’s sister, rarana (Ro.), hahana (Dj.). 

Mother’s brother, malume (Ro.), kokwana (Dj.). Mother’s sister, 
mamana. 

Father’s brother’s wife, mamana. Fathers sister’s husband, namu ; 
mukonwana for a man, nuna for a girl. Mother’s brother’s wife, nsati 
for a boy, kokwana for a girl. Mother’s sister’s husband, tatana. 

Father’s brother’s son, makwabu (wa matlhari). Father’s brother’s 
sister, makwabu (wa shihundju), Father’s sister’s son and daughter, 
makwabu. 

Mother’s brother’s son: for a boy, makwabu and fwana; for a girl, 
mamana, makwabu. 

Mother’s sister’s son and daughter, makwabu. 

Son’s son, ntukulu. Son’s daughter, ntukulu. Daughter’s son ntukulu. 
Daughter’s daughter, ntukulu. 

Wife’s father, mukonwana, tatana Wife’s mother, mukonwana, 
mamana. 

Wife's sister: elder sister, mukonwana ; vounger sister, namu. 

Wife’s sister’s husband, makwabu. 

Husband’s father, hwingi. Husband’s mother, iwingi. Husband’s bro- 
ther, if older than the husband, fiwingi, if younger, namu, Husband’s 
sister, nhombe. 

Elder brother, nhondjwa, hosi; younger brother, ndjisana. Elder sis- 
ter, hondjwa, mamana ; younger sister (if married to the same husband) 
nhlantsa. Sister’s son, mupsyana (Ro), ntukulu (Dj.). Sister’s daughter, 
ntukulu. 

Wife’s brother’s wife, mukonwana lo’ nkulu, the great mukonwana. 

Elder brother’s wife, namu. Younger brother’s wife, Nwingi. 

Grammatically speaking, most of the Thonga terms of kinship 
belong to the class mu-ba, the personal class. They make their 
plural in ba (batatana, bana, bamakwabu, batukulu). Some 
however are of the class yin-tin which comprises mostly ani- 
mals, but also names of trades and of family relations: Ndjisana, 
nhondjwa, namu, nhombe, nhlantsa make their plural in t7, The 
five following terms, Tatana, Mamana, Rarana, Malume, Ko- 
kwana, are treated as proper nouns when they are used as such. 
For instance when I say Tatana, it means my father, the one 
to whom this term applies par excellence. In this case Tatana 
is not preceeded by the initial vowel a or e, which is always pre- 
fixed to the common nouns (See Elementary Grammar ot the 
Thonga-Shangaan Language, page 26 § 65). When I want to 
say ‘‘his father”, I should say: Atatana wa kwe (Ro.), or Etata 
wa yena (Dj.) etc. 

= DDT 7 v 

B. EXPLANATION OF THONGA TERMS OF 
RELATIONSHIP 

Let us go deeper into the study of each of these terms, trying 
to ascertain their principal and derivate meanings. We shall 
consult the three adjoined genealogies, those of Tobane (A), of 
Mboza (B) and of his wife Nsabula (C), endeavouring to ascer- 
tain not only the social but also the moral relation existing be- 
tween these several people. There are two kinds of relationship: 
blood relationship or consanguinity and marriage relationship, 
relationship on the wife’s side or affinity. Amongst blood rela- 
tives, there are two categories which differ more from each 
other amongst Bantu than amongst us, relatives on the father’s 
side and on the mother’s side. On the father’s side, the rela- 
tives are called bakweru (Ro.), barikweru (Dj.), those of our 
home; and on the mother’s side, bakokwana, the ancestors. 

We shall consider each of these three relationships separately, 
though it will be found impossible to isolate them entirely from 
each other. In each of them, we shall find two sets of terms: 
terms of correspondence and of reciprocity. We shall see also 
that these appellations are expressive of many different things, 
one of the main considerations dictating them being the right 
of a man to marry his wife’s relatives, or to inherit the women 
belonging to his own family. 

I. Blood relationships. 

The general term to indicate this relationship is bushaka (from 
shaka, mashaka), relatives. 

1) RELATIVES ON THE FATHER'S SIDE. 

(Bakweru: ku, at, eru possessive pronoun of the first person 
plur. means with us, in our home.) 
Let us first consult Tobane, called Tobane II in the genealogy. 

- —_ 22 

He calls Magugu his father, fatana. ‘The relation implies res- 
pect and even fear. The father, though he does not take much 
trouble with his children, is however their instructor, the one 
who scolds and punishes. So do also the father’s brothers who 
are also called ‘‘batatana ba shirare”: his elder brother who is 
a ‘‘oreat father” to Tobane, and his younger brother Nkale, 
‘*tatana lwe’ntjongo“‘, a “‘ little father’. Their wives, Matshini 
for instance, are mothers to him, though he can eventually 
marry them by inheritance. The cousins of the father are also 
fathers (Muhambi for Thakusa, for instance, Gen. B.), as long 
as the father calls them brothers. 

Vhere is another term for father, rara in Djonga, roro in 
Ronga ; roro is only employed with the possessive pronoun 
under the three following forms: rorwa’nga, my father, ror- 
waku, your father, rorwa’bu, their father. The correlative term 
of tatana is nwana, son or daughter. 

Tobane II calls Shitsimbo kokwana, grandfather, ‘Tobane I 
kokwane wa tatana, grandfather of father, and Nkwangana kok- 
wana wa kokwana, grandfather of grandfather. ‘he expression 
tatana wa kokwana, father of grandfather, is never employed. 
The great grandfather and the great great grandfather are 
sometimes designated as follows: he who does not see his 
grandson when he has been sent by the women to carry food ; 
the boy eats it on the way and the old man does not notice it! 
(Page 172). ‘These ancestors call Tobane ntukulu, grandson. 
He is the true ntukulu of Shitsimbo ; for Tobane I, he is the 
ntukulu wa shikandjatjolo, ‘‘the one who sits on the knees” ; 
for Nkwangwam, the ntukulu wo shikandjamirombo, a word which 
seems to mean “the one who sits on the toes.” In Djonga 
there is one more of these curious expressions applied to batu- 
kulu, niukulu wa shinguhe. ‘In pronouncing that name”, says 
Gana, ‘‘ my great grandfather points near ; in saying ntukulu wa 
shikandjatjelo, he points further down.” To understand this 
properly, we must imagine the following patriarchal scene: a 
very, very old man is sitting on the ground, holding his son 
(fiwana) in his arms, putting his grandson (ntukulu) on his 
thigh, his great grandson (wa shikandjatjolo) on his knees and 

his great great grandson on his toes. The fact that these terms 
have become almost obsolete shows that the system of counting 
descent from the father is at any rate very old in our tribe. 
There must even have been a time when the ancestors of the 
paternal line were better known than now. The wives of these 
bakokwana are also bakokwana, just in the same way as their 
husbands. 

The father’s sister is rarana (Ro.) hahane (Dj.). The two 
words are the same as r changes often into 4 in Thonga phone- 
tics ; the prefix of the first class now dropped, mu or n, may 
have caused this change. Rarana approaches very closely rara, 
father. It is employed under this form when it means my aunt. 
When one wants to say your aunt, his aunt, rarana becomes 
rarakati wa ku, rarakati wa kwe. This word means exactly 
female father. (See the value of this suffix ati, page 35, foot 
note.) Tumbane is rarana of Masusule. Masusule, for her, is 
also nwana. He shows her great respect. However she is not 
in any way a mother (mamana). 

Any female being a near relation of my father or of my pater- 
nal ancestors, is also by extension a rarana : the daughter of my 
paternal grand-uncle, for instance, who are sisters for my fa- 
thet, Clee 

The husband of my paternal aunt is neither a father nor an 
uncle, but a mukonwana or namu, brother-in-law, because, as we 
shall see, he has a kind of prior right to marry my sister. 
(Shinkanyana versus Masusule, Gen. A; or Muki versus Muhambi, 
Gen. B. For Madonge, Muki is nkata, husband, on account 
of this eventuality. He is a potential husband for her.) 

Tobane II calls Tumbane makwabu ; this term, which is reci- 
procal, means brothers as well as sisters. If one wants to specify, 
one adds to makwabu: ‘‘ of the assagai ”, or “‘ of the basket. ”’ 
It is never employed except when united with the possessive 
pronoun : makweru means my brother, makwenu your brother, 
makwabu, his brother or sister. The elder brother is called nho- 
ndiwa (plur. tinhondjwa). The nhondjwa is also called host (plur. 
tihosi) chief. The hierarchy of age is very strongly maintained 
amongst the Thonga. The elder brother is treated with great 

respect and gives orders to his younger brothers with almost the 
same authority as the father. It must be noticed also that the 
position of elder brother is not only a matter of age but, in the 
polygamic family, all the children of a first wife, or of the first 
house, are tihosi to the children of secondary or posterior wives 
or houses, though they may have been born after them. They 
take precedence of them. Amongst girls, an elder sister is often 
called mamana, mother, whilst an elder brother is never a tatana 
(father) but a hosi (chief). 

The term makwabu is applied to all my first and second cou- 
sins who have the same paternal grandfather, or great grand- 
father, as I have. Cousins on my mother’s side are also bama- 
kwabu, some of them at least, those who are my maternal aunt’s 
children. But cousins on the father’s side are more fully bama- 
kwabu than those on the mother’s side : Muhambi is more so to 
Hlangabeza than to Mahlobo, because the two former belong to 
the same shibongo, family name; they are men of the Makaneta 
clan and Muhambi could therefore inherit Hlangabeza’s wives ; 
Muhambi and Mahlobo are not of the same clan, and could not 
inherit from each other. In this fact we begin to see that the 
laws of inheritance, and especially the laws of the repartition of 
the widows amongst the family who has bought them, bear an 
intimate relation to the system of relationship. 

The man who has married my wife’s sister is also a makwabu 
for me, a nhondjwa if he has married her elder sister (Phayindi 
for Mboza), a ndjisana if the younger (Magwazizen for Mboza). 
The brother of Phayindi and Magwazizen are also called bro- 
thers by Mboza. 

2) RELATIVES ON THE MOTHER'S SIDE. 

Tobane II calls Mishikombo mamana, mother. She is his 
true mamana and this relation is very deep and tender, combin- 
ing respect and love. Love however generally exceeds respect. 
The proper word for tenderness is tintsalu which comes from 
tsala, to beget, and the mother is often called ntsele (a term which 
is applied also to the female of all animals). It is the word 

which answers best to the feelings of a mother for her children. 
She is generally weak with them and is often accused by the 
father of spoiling them. | 

The mother’s sisters are bamamana in the second degree, 
because, if the true mother dies, one of them will probably take 
care of the children. Their husbands are batatana : Phayindi is 
tatana for Madonge and Muhambi. He calls them dana, sons. 
Mboza is also a tatana for Mahlobo and Mathamba, being a 
makwabu, brother of their father, owing to the fact that he and 
Phayindi have married sisters. 

All the co-wives are also bamamana, mothers by polygamy, 
(Nwashihoni and Mishihari for Tobane). They are bamamana 
ba shitshengwe, harem mothers. I respect them but they are fur- 
ther from me than mother’s sisters. A more familiar term for 
mother, corresponding to roro, father, is Awa, a word always 
used with the possessive pronoun and only in the second and 
third person: fiwaku, your mother, nwakwe, his mother. 
Nwaku is employed in certain insults and oaths, and is to be 
avoided as being vituperative. 

Many other women are mamana: the wife of my paternal 
uncle (Magugu for Muhambi), though I can inherit her in cer- 
tain cases ;-the daughter of my maternal uncle, (Shaputa for 
Misaben), without mentioning those women of my wife’s family 
who can be so called. An elder sister is also mamana to her 
younger sister, and sometimes a husband calls his wife ma- 
mana. (1) 

If the mother’s sister is a mother, the mother’s brother is by 
no means a father. He is called malume or kokwana, and here 
we meet with one of the most characteristic features of the 
Thonga, and even Bantu, system of relationship. The term 

(1) The term mamana is frequently used by an interlocutor, without any idea 
of relationship, when speaking to married women of a more advanced age than 
himself. Such an extended meaning is also frequent with tatana, kokwana 
wana. Any man older than I am can be addressed by me as tatana and will 
answer me calling me fiwana. If the difference of age is greater, we shall 
treat each other as kokwana and ntukulu. Speaking in the third person a 
child will always put tatana before the name of any grown up man, though he 
belong to a totally different clan. Women round Lourenco Marques often 

kokwana means first the paternal grandfather and all the ances- 
tors on the father’s side, and this is its proper essential meaning. 
The bakokwana are also all my mother’s male relatives: her 
brothers, fathers, uncles, etc. They form a group which I 
call ‘ka bakokwana” which means ‘‘my mother’s home’’, just 
as kweru means my father’s home, my official home. Kweru 
comes first; ka bakokwana next. ‘‘ The bushaka on the father’s 
side isthe head; on the mother’s side, only the legs” (Mboza). 
Let us remember that a child lives at his father’s home and only 
goes on a visit to his mother’s village. He may stay there for 
years after the weaning but should he choose to settle there, he 
would be made fun of and severely censured by his father 
and his paternal uncles. ‘* You are stupid, they would say, you 
leave your own village, you go to the village of your bakokwana 
to increase it! This is true folly. Has your mother not been 
bought with money? The children she bore belong to your 
father, just as the calves of his cows.”” (Mboza). But if the 
home of the mother can not become the home of the children, 
the relations they maintain with their bakokwana are of a much 
freer, more agreeable and kindly nature than those with their 
father’s relatives. 

The Zulu designate the relatives on the mother’s side by three 
terms : Gogo, the maternal grandfather or grandmother, malume 
the mother’s brother, and muzwala the son or daughter of the 
maternal uncle. The Pedi-Suto also know malume and muz- 
wala. The Thonga of the North do not make any distinction: 
all of these relations, at any rate the maternal grandfather and 
the maternal uncles, are called indescriminately kokwana and 
this sometimes leads to confusion. (1) The Ronga dialect makes 

call a White man nkata, husband. This shows that kinship terms are employed 
as expressing moral relations as well as blood or family relations, and one 
must not draw hasty conclusions from the way in which these terms are 
applied, and necessarily see therein the traces of a previous social state in which 
every grown up man or woman was considered as true father or mother. 
The Thonga may give to those terms an extended meaning. Nevertheless 
they differentiate perfectly well their technical and their derivate sense. 

(1) For example in ‘t Les Ba-Ronga”, page 394, the ntukulu who steals the 
offering is not the grandson but the uterine nephew. 

a distinction between kokwana, maternal grandfather, and 
malume, mother’s brother; but people often call the malume 
kokwana. In the Northern clans the uterine nephews, viz. the 
sons of my sister, are always called ntukulu which is the term 
corresponding to kokwana, as we have seen; amongst the Ba- 
Ronga, they bear a special name-mupsyana-which seems to be 
becoming obsolete, being often replaced by ntukulu. (1) 

Let us consider these various relatives on the mother’s side. 

The maternal grandfather, is the great, the true kokwana. 
He is respected for his age. However he is more lenient to his 
grandson by his daughter than to his grandson by his son. If 
the first one spoils any thing, he will say: ‘‘hat is no busi- 
ness of mine. Let the father of the child scold him as he does 
harm to his property. I have nothing to do with their affairs. 
It is not my village.” But were it his grandson by his son, 
the question would be totally different, and he would be hard 
on him. However should a child take too much liberty with 
his kokwana, the old man will say to him: ‘‘Go and play with 
your malume”. The malume, indeed, for his uterine nephew, 
is quite different from any other relative. No respect at all is 
necessary towards him! ‘You go to bombela in his village; 
you do what you please. You take all the food you want with- 
out asking permission. If you are ill, he will take special care 
of you and will sacrifice for you” (Viguet). In the Ronga 
dialect this bombela is called nyenyela. ‘*When the mupsyana 
goes to his maternal uncle, accompanied by his comrades 
who scent a good meal, the wives of the malume call him: 
““Come along, husband (nkata)! Look here, your malume 
has hidden some food in the back part of the hut (mfungwe), 
behind the large basket (ngula). Go and take it.” The boy 
steals the food, runs away with it and eats it to the last bite 
with his friends. The malume comes back and is angry. But 
when he hears that the trick has been played by his mupsyana, 
he shrugs his shoulders and says: ‘‘ He! It is all right if this has 

(1) This is one of many proofs that the Ronga clans have preserved some 
old customs better than their Northern compatriots. Their language also pos- 
sesses certain archaic features which are wanting in the Northern dialects. 

been done by the ntukulu! A shi biwi ntukulu! The nephew 
must never be beaten!” When another day the nephew comes 
again, the malume says: ‘‘ You have killed us the other day by 
famine!” — ‘‘Is there any more food handy that I may do it 
again?” answers the boy. 

Sometimes the malume himself points to one of his wives and 
says to the ntukulu: ‘‘ This is your wife. Let her treat you 
well!” This woman much enjoys the situation, which she finds 
quite entertaining. She makes a feast for the ntukulu and calls 
him nkata, husband. It goes so far that sometimies the nephew 
says to the uncle: ‘‘ Please make haste and die that I may have 
your wife!” — “Do you intend killing me with a gun?” 
says the malume... But all this talking is mere joke. The 
nephew can take many liberties with this aunt, especially in the 
Ronga clans. He will never have relations with her during the 
life of her husband. Should he do so, he will have to pay the 
high fine of a true adultery. Possibly he will inherit her when 
the malume dies, but she will not be his full property : she will 
only be given (nyika) to him, and the children will eventually 
belong to the malume’s male relatives. All over the tribe this 
right of inheriting a malume’s wife is recognized. However in 
the Northern clans she is called kokwana; in Ronga territory she 
is called kokwana by her nieces only, but her nephews call her 
nsati (wife), and this term seems also to be an old feature of the 
relationship system. This relation of malume and mupsyana is 
so important that I intend to treat it more fully later on in a 
special paragraph, when considering the. traces of older forms 
of family life amongst the Thonga. 

The true malume is the mother’s true brother. But all her 
half brothers are also bamalume in the second degree ; so are 
also the brothers of the true malume. 

What about the children of the malume, my cousins, sons and 
daughters of my mother’s brothers, viz. Shaputa and Marangen 
versus Madonge and Misaben? The relationship is different for 
Misaben, a boy, and for Madonge, a girl. For Misaben who is 
a boy, Shaputa, his cousin, is mamana and she will call him son, 
wana, because, as we shall see, Shaputa is a potential wife for 

Mboza, father of Misaben, and Mboza calls her nkata, nsati, 
namu. For Madonge who is a girl, Shapute is also a mamana; 
but the term makweru, my sister, is more frequently used. So 
we find this strange fact: Maphunga, the mother of Shaputa is 
a wife for Misaben and Muhambi, while her daughter, Shaputa, 
is a mother for them! 

As regards the son of my malume, he is also a malume or a 
kokwana, though he may be of the same age or even younger 
than his cousin, because he holds a superior position: he has the 
right of offering sacrifices for his ntukulu, as weshallsee. Totally 
different is the relationship between Misaben and Mahlobo and 
Mathamba, children of his mother’s sister. They are bamakwalu, 
as truly as the children of rarana, the paternal aunt, because 
they have suckled from the same breast (ba yanwele bele 
djinwe). | 

At this point of my treatise, | may remark that, if ntukulu is 
the term corresponding to kokwana, there are many kinds of 
batukulu, just as there are many kinds of bakokwana the ntukulu 
wa shinene, grandson by males, my true grandson, son of myson, is 
opposed to the ntukulu wa shisati, grandson by females, viz. the 
nephew, son of my sister. Both are on the same line in the 
native mind and both have an equal right to inherit widows. 

, IFES SIDE (Bukofiwana). 
RELATIONSHIP ON THE WIFE 

I have been fortunate enough to obtain from Mboza a full 
nomenclature of his wife’s relatives. It happens that the Gogwe 
family was very complete indeed. Nsabula has both an elder 
brother and elder sister a younger brother and a younger sister. 
Owing to this, I have been able to study all the possible kinds 
of relationship of Mboza with his wife’s relatives. 

Mboza calles Nsabula nsati (a term which corresponds to nuna, 
husband), or nkata a reciprocal term, or nkosikazi, queen, or 
mamana, mother, or nijibeli, cook, etc. I have already described 
the moral relation which the word implies: no very great ten- 
derness, not much intimacy, but a certain love mingled with 

respect, even fear, because a wife can bring her husband into 
any amount of trouble if she begins to quarrel and runs home; 
then all the bukofiwana relations will be spoilt by endless dis- 
cussions. Hence a peculiar feeling of uneasiness which is always 
allied to this word bukowwana. Bukofiwana means, inan absolute 
sense: the relationship on the wife’s side, and also in a local 
sense (as the prefix bu often does) the village of parents-in-law. 
These are the bakofiwana (sing. mukofiwana). The root of this 
word koiwana is unknown and this is a yreat pity. One often 
says: to go bukonwanen (locative) or under an abbreviated form 
bukwen. 

The term mukofwana is applied : to the wife’s mother, to the 
wife’s father, to her e/der brothers and sisters, to the women 
whom my brother-in-law has lobola by means of the money 
which I gave for my wife. Younger brothers and sisters of my 
wife are balamo or tinamu, and this word implies as much ease 
and liberty in the relations as mukofiwana means respect and 
ev enuicar- 

There are still three other terms of marriage relationship, all 
correlative terms, and they are: Nwingi a word by which my 
father and my mother designate my wife and vice versa. (Masu- 
luke and Nsengamunwe versus Nsabula and vice versa); nhombe, 
aterm by which my wife and my younger sister call each other 
(Mehlakaza and Ndjibari) ; bakhotikulobye, a reciprocal term by 
which parents of a husband and of a wife call each other (base- 
vele in Djonga). But it is necessary to make a more complete 
study of the meaning of these terms. 

The wife's mother seems to be the principal mukofiwana, at 
least during the first years of married life and specially in the 
Northern clans. Let us hear Viguet: ‘‘ By the betrothaljias 
soon as you have been accepted, you enter into a new kind of 
respect and you must remain in it till your death. Should you 
meet your mother-in-law on the road, or your great mukofiwana 
(see later on), or the sister of your mother-in-law, you leave 
the road, you enter the bush on your right side. They do the 
same. Then you sit down according to men’s fashion crossing 
your legs. They sit down also bending their legs, putting one 

knee over the other as women do; then both parties salute each 
other, you, as a man, clapping your hands against each other, 
holding them parallel, and the women holding them at right 
angles. Then you begin to talk... Suppose you reach their 
village without having met them; the girls come; they are 
your balamo; you can play with them; they take your sticks 
and lead you to the hut of your mother-in-law, your wife’s 
mother. Should she have died, the house which will be put 
at your disposal is the hut of your great mukofiwana. There 
they spread mats on the floor. The mother-in-law comes near 
the wall but does not dare toenter. She sits down outside and, 
without seeing you, she salutes you: ‘‘ Good morning son of 
so aiid so... She would mot dare to) pronotnce your name! 
And she goes. Later on, when you have been married for many 
years, she will have less fear and enter the hut to talk with 
you”. 

Amongst the Zulu the respect isstill greater. ‘‘ When you 
see your mother-in-law passing before the hut, should you just 
be taking your meal, you must throw away the mouthful you 
were eating ; and she does the same. A man covers his face 
with his shield when he happens to meet her unexpectedly. 
At any rate you must never pronounce her name. You must 
say: “‘ Daughter of so and so”, because your wife would be 
angry and say: ‘‘ How dare you ? Has she not brought me forth ? 
Rathersay mother!” In fact a son-in-law often calls his mother- 
in-law mamana, especially in later years of married life. 

Why this wonderful respect ? An old Thonga, Abraham 
Mabanyisi, said to me : ‘‘ Because I shall never marry her. Such 
a thing has never been seen”. I mention the explanation 
without comment. 

But the fear is still greater when dealing with the great muko- 
nwana. The woman who bears the title, is the wife of my bro- 
ther-in-law, the one whom he has lobola with my oxen. (For 
Mboza it is Maphunga, bought by Mahangale with the money 
paid by Mboza to buy Nsabula.) This woman stands in a spe- 
cial relation to me and to my sister whose oxen I used to buy 
my wife. These two women are true nhombe to each other. A 

great mukofiwana in the second degree is any of the wives of 
my younger brother in-law. If I meet her on the path, coming 
with other women, she hurries on to avoid me. Her friends” 
remain and chat with me. Should she travel with me and we 
must cross a river, she will not enter the same boat, if she can 
help it. Should no one be there to bring me food, she will do 
it reluctantly, but she will watch my hut and put the dish in- 
side when I am away. As for me, I shall not eat anything while 
she is near. Whyall these strange customs? One of the expla- 
nations, (J will not say it is the only possible one), is this: this 
woman having been obtained with my oxen, there is a relation 
of dependency between her family and mine. Mboza says: 
‘** Should my home be disturbed by quarrels, should my wife 
Nsabula leave me and run away to her parents, or should she die 
without children, I shall go andclaim my oxen... But the oxen 
have been employed to buy a wife for my brother-in-law, Ma- 
phunga for Mahangale. If Gogwe has no other means at his dis- 
posal he must separate the pair Maphunga-Mahangale, cancel 
their marriage, send Maphunga home and claim the money from 
her parents. Or! might myself take Maphunga as my wife and 
in either of these cases the marriage Maphunga-Mahangale will 
be annulled. ” 

Let us suppose the case of my wife dying without children. 
Viguet has told us the first half ofthe story (page 214);I have paid 
the mahloko ; we have finished the mourning ; but her parents 
have no money, no young girl to give us as compensation ! 
WhatamIto do? Here is the second part of the family drama: 
the father of the deceased wife having no other ressource ‘‘ opens 
the way of bukofiwana to his son-in-law, to the widower ”. 
Let us suppose it is Nsabula who died. Gogwe goes, together 
with Mboza and his official go-between, to the father of Maphunga. 
Let us call him Mbekwa. He gives him two hoes and says: 
“We have brought your mukofiwana (Mboza) because we have 
had a sad affair (hi humele)”. Mbekwa asks Mboza: ‘‘ How many 
hoes did you pay for your deceased wife” ? - ‘‘ Fifty ”, says 
Mboza. - ‘‘ Well, we have received from Gogwe only thirty 
as yet for Maphunga” ! Gogwe acknowledges that it is so. 

He must at once find the twenty hoes wanting, gives them back 
to Mboza, who returns to Mbekwa taking them with him, so 
as to complete the lobola. All this was only preparatory. Now 
Gogwe has no further interest in the matter, he returns home. 
It concerns Mboza alone. Mbekwa calls Maphunga and says : 
“Look ! this is your great mukonwana ! Now he is your hus- 
band’. She can say: ‘‘Yes, all right’. Then Mboza fetches a 
goat and a most curious ceremony takes place, which we shall 
describe later on, the rite of killing bukonwana or shikonwana, the 
aim being to kill a certain kind of relationship which must be 
replaced by another. Then Mboza can marry Maphunga. But 
most probably Maphunga will say: ‘‘ No! I fear him too much! 
It is taboo” ! Her feelings cannot accept such achange in their 
relations. Viguet does not say : “‘ She loves her own husband 
too much to go willingly to another ”! This seems to be a 
minor consideration. If she decidedly refuses, Mbekwa will try 
to find another woman. Maphunga perhaps has a daughter: 
she will do. Or Mbekwa has a married son whose daughter 
can also be offered. If the great mukofiwana is only pregnant, 
the child to be born is quite enough ku hingakanya ntjandja, to 
put a log across the road and an end to the claim. But the child 
will perhaps bea boy... not a girl. Never mind ! Mboza will 
wait patiently for a girl; Shaputa will be born; he will wait 
again until she is of age, then he will marry her and she will 
pfnsha yindlu ya rarana, viz raise up the house of her aunt 
Nsabula (1). Naturally if matters follow this course, Gogwe 
will have to pay the loboia of the girl who will have taken the 
place of the deceased. Nowadays it is not very difficult : he 
will work or send one of his sons to work, for the money. 

So, we plainly see that the great mukofiwana stands in a very 
peculiar position towards the man by whose oxen she has been 
bought, and the extreme respect and fear existing between these 
two persons can partly be thus explained. 

There might be another explanation of this mysterious relation 

(1) One more fact. If Mahangale has taken another wife besides Maphunga, 
his daughter born of this second wife could not be used to meet the claim of 
the widower. 

in the following fact: a great mukonwana is also a mamana, be- 
cause her daughters are potential wives for me, being my balamo, 
as we shall see. Perhaps at the very bottom of the Thonga 
soul there exists the strong feeling that it is altogether bad to 
marry a woman and her daughter. I fear my mother-in-law 
because I married her daughter. I fearmy great mukofiwana 
because her daughters are my regular potential wives... 

Another mukofiwana is the wife’s father. Here the respect 
exists, but there is less fear and very soon a son-in-law calls him 
tatana, as well as the brothers of the mother-in-law. Of course 
the term tatana is not used here in its technical sense but only 
by extension. 

We now pass to the wife’s brothers and sisters. Nulandi, the 
elder brother of Nsabula, is a mukofiwvana of Mboza as well as 
his wife Makhube. Mahangale, the younger brother of Nsabula 
is also mukofiwana but can be called namu. There is a diffe- 
rence between Vulandi and Mahangala on account of their posi- 
tion towards Nsabula, the first being older than she is, the second 
younger. “Vhe question of age is very important, especially when 
dealing with. sisters-in-law. Namu, plur. tinamu in Ronga 
balamo in Djonga, comes from the archaic verb yalama which 
means to follow, to come after. My tinamu are those who fol- 
low my wife, who have been born after her, her younger sisters 
particularly. They are my presumptive wives; therefore I can 
play with them with the greatest freedom, I eat together with 
them of the same plate. They go so far as to smear my face 
with ashes (tota hi nkuma) and wash it with water afterwards. 
Nevertheless sexual relations are not allowed. Should a man 
commit this sin, and should his sister-in-law become pregnant, 
he will have to pay a fine, or rather he will go to his father-in- 
law and say: (Viguet) ‘‘ Ndi dlele ku dya” - “‘ I have killed in 
order to eat” which means this: I have committed’a bad action 
but with the intention of repairing my wrong by marrying the 
girl. He brings five hoes when making the notification and will 
remit the remainder of the lobolo later on. A younger sister 
when married to the same husband as her elder, is called nhlantsa 
of the latter. This term comes probably from hlantsa, to wash, 

=-235 — 
because she washes the dishes of her sister and works more or 
less as her servant. 

So Mboza considers Mahazule as his namu. But Shaputa is 
also an official namu ; the daughter of his wife’s brother, whe- 
ther he is an elder or a younger brother, is a presumptive wife 
for him as well as his wife’s younger sister, and she can hlantsela 
rarana, viz. play the part of a nhlantsa for her maternal aunt 
Nsabula. These two women are the true tinamu of Mboza. 
It is easy to understand why Gawana, the wife’s elder sister, is 
-not a namu but a mukofwana for him. When Mboza married 
Nsabula, Gawana had already been taken by Phayindi, accord- 
ing to the law that an elder sister must always marry before 
her younger ones. A father would not consent to give away 
the younger before the elder. Therefore Mboza has never had 
the opportunity of playing with her and considering her as an 
eventual wife. 

On the other hand, if Shapute is a namu and if he can marry 
her, Mathamba and Mandewen, children of his wife’s sisters, are 
bana, daughters, and he would never think of them as wives. 
The relation seems to be the same, but, on the contrary, for 
him it is very different. Shaputa being the daughter of Mahan- 
gala, son of Gogwe, belongs to the Gogwe family. She bears 
this family name (shibongo) just the same as Nsabula ; for that 
reason Mboza can take her. But Mathamba, daughter of 
Phayindi is not a Gogwe at all. She belongs to the shibongo 
of Phayindi, and Mboza has no right over her. She calls him 
father, whilst Shaputa calls him nkata, husband, or namu, though, 
according to our estimate, both are equally his nieces. We see 
therefore that a girl can hlantsela rarana, viz. become a second 
wife by the side of her father’s sister, but never hlantsela mamana, 
take that place beside her mother’s sister. 

Let us remind the reader that the husband of the paternal 
aunt (Muki for Misaben) is also a mukofiwana ; mukoiiwana for 
his nephew and namu for his niece (Madonge) whom he has 
the right of taking. As an uncle my respect for him was but 
small ; but if he becomes my true mukofiwana by marrying my 
sister, the proper mukofiwana relation will set in. I might be 

— 236 =a 

called to interfere in their quarrels! My sister might take refuge 
with me if he ill-treats her. I may eventually have to make him 
pay a fine, as the natural protector of my sister. Therefore my 
feelings towards him will change ! 

So far we have considered the relation of Mboza with his 
wife’s family. But whatabout Nsabula and her position towards 
her husband’s relatives ? Nsabula calls Masuleke and Nsenga- 
munwe “#wingi, and the term is reciprocal. It implies a great 
respect. As we saw, the young bride must work a whole year 
for her mother-in-law. The same respect is shown by Nsabula 
to Djan, Sam, Fos, her husband’s elder brothers. “They are als¢ 
nwing! to each other. ‘‘ Should I send her to call Djan, ” says 
Mboza, ‘“‘ she will kneel down before him and say: ‘‘ My fa- 
ther! Mboza calls you!” or: ‘* Nwamasuluke (Masuluke’s 
son), you are wanted with us.” She will not dare to address 

him by name. This extraordinary respect is reciprocal. Djan_ 

will consider Nsabula as his inferior but never play with her. 
On the other hand, Komatane, Mboza’s younger brother is only 
a namu for Nsabula. Both will joke together and even ocasion- 
ally smear cach other with ashes. So will Sam, Fos, Mboza 
and Komatane do with Mihlakaza, the wife of their elder bro- 
ther. Thus we note this law : a woman will generally respect the 
elder brothers of her husband (bengi), and hold very free inter- 
course with his younger brothers (tinamu), and vice-versa. A 
man will keepaway from his younger brother’s wives (bengi) and 
play with those of his elder brothers (tinamu). Why this dif- 
ference? Because the wife of an elder brother is an eventual 
wife for all his younger brothers, as they are those who have 
the right of inheriting her, should that man die. On the con- 
trary, an elder brother inherits his younger brother’s wife only 
under quite exceptional circumstances. One does not marry a 
iwingi! This would be an insult to one’s wife. Nsabula 
would leave Mboza if Mboza were taking Magugu, Komatane’s 
wife, because they have been accustomed to call each other 
wing. 

For a wife, her husband’s elder sister is also a fiwingi (Ndji- 
bari for Nsabula). The husband’s younger sister is a namu or 

nhombe, and two tinhombe have very free relations, just the 

sameas thetinamu. This freedom exists between female tinamu 
as well as between tinamu of ditferent sexes. 

The study of these terms of relationships and of moral rela- 
tions, subsisting between the members of two allied families, shows 
us that the bukofiwana is dominated by a striking contrast : on 
the one hand a wonderful fear or respect for some of my rela- 
tives-in-law (shitshabu means both), and on the other hand an 
extreme freedom with others. To show to what extent this 
fear is carried, I will briefly mention the special taboos of the buko- 
nwana, which are so characteristic of Bantu family life. They 
will perhaps help us to understand the reason of some of these 
Strange features. | 

We have already seen that, during the betrothal visit, the 
bridegroom must take care to avoid certain acts which are taboo 
(yila). Later on, during the gatherings taking place before mar- 
riage, some other taboos are imposed : 

1. In the discussion about the lobola, when oxen are counted, 
the bridegroom’s parents must never offer eight head of cattle, 
because one of them will be killed for the feast and so eight means 
only seven. Seven is counted in lifting, one after the other the 
five fingers of the left hand and the thumb and index of the 
right one. Lifting up the index, they might point with it at 
the bakofiwana, and this would be a mortal offence. To point 
at anyone with the index is as bad as to bewitch him. It is 
done only in anger and all the preceding discussions might be 
nullified if such an imprudence were committed. 

2. Should one of the oxen be frightened at the shouts of joy 
greeting the arrival of the herd and the sham-fight of the lobola 
day, and should it run away home, it is taboo. The ox has 
seen that something was wrong and has consequently fled. Even 
should one succeed in bringing it back, ‘‘ timpfalo ti tyukile”, 
the conscience (or the diapliragm) has been stirred ! 

 238  

3. If one of the oxen has no horns (homu ya mhulu), or only 
abortive horns, psa yila: bukonwana byi ta pfumala tintsalu, 
viz., the relations with relatives-in-law will have no tenderness. 
Because such an ox moves the head to and fro as it wanders 
in the night; it is abnormal. The bride’s family will not 
AECeEDt It. 

4. Should the lobola consist of hoes, and should the rain fall 
on them while being carried to the bakofiwana, it is taboo. 
The lobolo must not be brought in a wet condition, otherwise 
the new relations will be spoilt (bukofiwana byi ta tshipa), these 
young people will not be able to marry. 

5- Do not bring with you tobacco in the leaf when going 
bukwen as a fiancé, bring only, ground tobacco or misfortune will 
happen. Later on, when you have taken your wife, it is allow- 
able. 

6. Never eat zebra or reedbuck’s meat when staying with you1 
parents-in-law. Should they kill one of these animals while 
you are there, or on the road, have nothing to do with it. 
Zebra is mbalamberi, an animal with two colours; moreover it has 
no horns. The same holds good for the giraffe. It has two 
colours, it has too long bowels. Psa yila! Reedbuck cries : 
‘*Dzoo”. It is a witch : a mukonwana must not eat it. For 
that same reason a sheep, having no horns, is never given to 
bakonwana. 

7. When going with women to the parents of your fiancée 
for a shirwalo, viz., to bring them beer, should one of the jugs 
fall on the ground, psa yila! Return home ! 

8. Do not build the hut for your wife before having married 
her. Hear Mankhelu : ‘‘ Even if you have plenty of money 
to lobola, if you make such a blunder, your wife will be taken 
from you... In the same manner, do not prepare the skin for 
the child before it is born. Your wife would not bring forth 
a human being. Should you transgress this rule, you would 
bring misfortune on yourself (wa tihlolela, wa singita), and on 
your family. If you go to Moneri (the missionary) and ask 
him for a skin for the purpose before the birth of your child, 

he will tell you it is so”. Note the deep-rooted conviction 

= a — 
of the old heathen who appeals to the authority of the mission- 
ary to strengthen the taboo ! 

g. Later on, when you are married, you must avoid eating 
honey with your wife for a whole year, till she has had a 
child. The bride is allowed to eat honey at her parent’s home 
but not in her new domicile and with her husband. The hus- 
band can eat it in the bush, but he must wash his hands coming 
back, lest his wife notices it. She would run home ifshe knew 
it. We have already met with that prohibition in the tjekela 
visit, and heard the reason for it : honey flows; the bride 
would go! The explanation given now is this: honey is too 
sweet and your bride is too sweet also. (Is it not your honey 
moon or honey year? ) Both things do not go together. 
(Psa yalana, they hate each other). A third reason is this : 
Bees, when they have eaten their honey, fly away from the 
hive. So would your wife do... After a year this misfortune 
is no longer to be feared. 

This last idea is very curious. It shows that the bukofiwana 
taboos decrease in severity as the time passes. The strained relations 
between son-in-law and his wife’s mother also become easier. 
He begins to call her mamana and she calls him iiwana. This 
transformation even goes so far that in some cases a mukofiwana 
can go and dwell in his parents-in-law’s village, especially if he 
has children and if the children are grown up. And this fact 
affords the natural explanation of these curious rules: 

Marriage, as we have seen, is not an individual affair, in the 
collective stage of family life. It is a contract passed between 
two groups which enter by it into a special relation towards 
each other. This relation is fraught with dangers, because the 
interests of both groups are involved; a bride and bridegroom 
are inspired with a mutual feeling of fear, knowing that an 
eventual misunderstanding between them will have its ‘‘ contre 
coup” all through the two groups. Both families regard each 
other with mistrust, especially the two married couples who 
depend so closely upon each other, owing to the lobola; but 
when they have become acquainted, when they are assured 
that common life is possible and even agreeable, when a first 

alliance has been strenghtened by others amongst the tinamu, 
then the bukonwana taboos more or less fall off. This is an 
explanation of ‘these strange relations between relatives-in-law ; 
I do not pretend that it is an absolutely sufficient one. There 
may be also in this domain some remants of previous customs 
which have now disappeared, and Comparative Ethnography will 
probably throw more light on this problem in course of time. 

C. MARRIAGE RUEES 

The study of the terms of relationship has shown us the cons- 
titution of the Thonga family. We shall get some important 
sidelights on this mysterious subject when considering the rules 
regulating marriage in our tribe. Generally speaking it may be 
said that the Thonga are endcgamic as regards the tribe and the 
clan, and exogamic as regards the family. They are endogamic, 
as regards the tribe, that is to say they marry within it. Mem- 
bers of clans very remote from each other may find it difficult 
to contract unions, (see later on), but they do it, however, espe- 
cially in Spelonken, where representatives of many different parts 
of the tribe have met by force of historical circumstances. 
In the neighbourhood of Lourengo Marques, you may find 
Thonga women married to men of other tribes and even to 
White people. But this is the result of a new state of things 
which the old Thonga did not foresee ; nor would they have 
approved of it, 1am sure. In Shiluvane, I have been in a very 
favourable position to judge of the real feelings of the Thonga. 
There were two tribes there, living side by side for more than 
seventy years, tribes united by an old friendship and military 
alliance, viz., the Nkuna clan of the Thonga and the Khaha clan 
of the Pedi. I did not see a single case of intermarriage between 
them. ‘The difference of language could not account for the 
fact, because all the men generally could speak both Thonga. 
and Pedi. When asked why they did not contract unions with 
the Pedi, the Nkuna answered: ‘‘ Their customs are too disgust- 

ing for us”. They meant more especially, the freedom with 
which Khaha women commit adultery. Pedi would probably 
have made the same objection to. the immorality of Thonga 
boys and girls. Whatever may be the cause, they have not in- 
termarried up to this day. 

On the other hand the Thonga are exogamic as regards the 
family. To understand properly these exogamic rules, let us 
classify the cases into the four following categories : 

Cases of absolute prohibition of marriage ; of conditional per- 
mission ; of unconditional permission, and cases in which mar- 
riage is recommended. 

I. Cases of absolute prohibition. 

As a rule marriage is prohibited between a tatana, mamana, 
rarana and a fiwana, and between bamakwabu. 

On the father’s side the prohibition is particularly severe. 
Amongst the Ba-Ronga, it is taboo for a boy to marry a girl 
when both can lay claim to a common ancestor in the pa- 
ternal line. - It seems that the rule is not so stringent in the 
Northern clans. According to Mankhelu, marriage is absolutely 
prohibited between all the descendants of a grandfather, viz., 
between first cousins. Between second cousins it is permitted 
conditionally, ‘‘ by killing the family tie ”, and between third 
cousins it is allowed. ‘‘ Third cousins” as Mankhelu says, 
‘are batlandlamani ba tolo; they belong to families which were 
relatives yesterday. We are no longer taboo for them, we can 
go and take a wife amongst them ” 

On the mother’s side, this absolute prohibition extends to 
first cousins when mothers are sisters. ‘They are true bamak- 
wabu; they have been nursed at the same breast. But more 
remote cousins marry more easily when their relationship is on 
the mother’s side. The bakokwana do not marry their batu- 
kulu, owing to their duty of sacrificing for them, but the batu- 

kulu have a kind of preferential right to women related to their 

mother: ‘‘ Where father has married, I may go also to find my 
wife”, said Gana. However the rule remains that bamakwabn 
must not intermarry. 

When asked : “‘Why’’, the Thonga generally say: ‘‘ Because 
it is so. Psa yila. It is our law ”. It is however possible to 
find some more satisfactory reasons : these prohibitions are cer- 
tainly dictated by fear of consanguinity. Natives have probably 
noticed that the offspring of such unions are sometimes weak 
in intellect or altogether wanting. Therefore, in this polygamic 
family system, they make a careful distinction between relatives 
who are of the same mother and of the same father, and those 
whose mothers are different. When a cousin is of another 
grandmother, though she is called makwabu by me just as my’ 
true sister or first cousin, I can think of marrying her. She is 
my half first cousin only. However the fear of consaguinity is 
not the only nor perhaps the strongest, reason for these exogamic 
rules. If it were so, why would relatives on the father’s side be 
more taboo than those on the mother’s side ?: Moreover it is 
strange to see that in the royal families the same prohibitions 
are not maintained. Nwamantibiyana, chief of Mpfumo, married 
Mimalengane, his rarana, his first cousin once removed on the 
father’s side. If one only had in view the physical dangers 
arising from consanguine unions, such marriages ought to be 
doubly feared in the royal family ! 

I find two other reasons: 

In the Thonga mind there is a natural repulsion to confound 
and intermingle bushaka and bukoiwana, relationship by blood 
and by marriage. Bushaka is a kind of relation which they do 
not deem compatible with bukofiwana, as we shall presently see. 
To the Northern clans this is not so repugnant : with them, it 
is a current saying that bukofiwana revives bushaka when 
bushaka becomes weaker in the course of generations. 

A third reason for these strong taboos, a reason which explains 
also why prohibition is stronger on the father’s than on the 
mother’s side, is found in the lobola custom. Should a woman 
who is a relative on my father’s side become my wife and should 
our union be broken by quarrels, I should go to her father to 

= ae — 
claim the lobolo. If her father happens to possess no oxen to 
return to me, he will have to go to his relatives to get them... 
He may have to come to my own father who is his brother and 
belongs to the same family, a consequence which would be 
indeed absurd, because then I should myself pay the debt due 
to me! 

On his wife’s side, a man cannot marry the elder sister of his 
wife who is mukofiwana for him, nor the daughters of his wife’s 
sisters who are bana for him, as we have seen. 

Il. Marriages conditionally permitted. 

In some cases a marriage which ought not to take place, can 
be allowed on the condition that the whole family will perform 
the rite called d/aya shilongo. ‘This is a most curious custom 
and is spread all through the tribe. I know of two cases in 
which it has been resorted to: a certain Mkili, of the Makaneta 
sub-clan (Nondwane) wanted to marry Minsabula, his makwabu. 
Both had a common ancestor Muwayi. Muwayi had by a 
first wife a’son called Basana and by a second wife another son 
called Nsabula. Basana was the father of Mungobo, father of 
Mkili, and Nsabula was the father of Minsabula. Mungobo and 
Nsabula were first cousins or half first cousins (as their grand- 
mothers, wives of Muwayi, were different). ‘Therefore Mkilt 
was first cousin once removed of Minsabula. Both were ba ka 
Makaneta. Another case was that of Michel, son of Gana and , 
Nwashiluvane, who married Djamela, daughter of Mankhelu who 
was Nwashiluvane’s brother. Mankhelu was the malume of 
Michel and Djamela was his mamana, being the eventual wife of 
Gana (See page 243). For a Thonga, to marry her malume’s 
daughter, psa yila, whilst for a Pedi it is the proper thing. ‘This 
is one of the great differences between the law of the two tribes. 
A Pedi has a real right of pre-emption on his mudzwala, whilst 
amongst the Thonga it is the father who possesses that right. 

Possibly this Pedi custom encouraged Michel to entertain an 
? 

— ey = 
idea which is repulsive to the Thonga mind. But the official 
dlaya shilongo took place in his case also. 

I have tried to discover in what other cases such a prohibited 
marriage was made possible by the performance of the rite, and 
I found these : 

Conditional marriage is permissible with the daughter of my 
great-uncle, younger brother of my grandfather; with the daugh- 
ter of my grandfather by a wife other than my grandmother. 
Both are rarana. According to Mankhelu, it can take place also 
between himself and Shiluvane. This Shiluvane (who is not 
the chief Shiluvane, of course, but quite another person), is the 
daughter of the maternal great-uncle of Mankhelu, brother of 
Shidyele, who is his true grandfather, the father of his mother. 
Shiluvane is therefore the first cousin once removed of Mankhe- 
lu on his mother’s side. She is a mamana. 

But what is this rite of dlaya shilongo which has such 
power that it removes the taboo character from such marriages ? 
Shilongo or mulongo is an archaic word retained only in this 
expression and which corresponds to bushaka, blood relationship. 
This root exists also with that sense in the Suto word. seloko. 
The relation by blood must be killed to give way to the rela- 
tion by marriage. 

Let us first see how it is done in the Northern clans. 

A young man who has the courage to think of marrying a 
near relation is a wizard. A lJowa, he bewitches! This 
term, which is applied only to proper witches, is not too 
strong to designate his action! He was not allowed to gan- 
_gisa her and now he will take her as a wife! But this word 
lowa, or loya, is still used here in another way : ‘‘ Bushaka byi 
lowa hi tihomu’’ (the blood relationship is bewitched by the 
oxen). ‘‘Bumamana byi lowa” (the mother relationship is be- 
witched). (Viguet). Those who consent to such an act must 
be prayed for publicly and anointed with psanyi of a sacrificed 
goat ! 

So the young man goes to his uncle, the father of the girl, 
to announce his intention of marrying her; he must le homu, 
beat an-ox, viz. bring an ox with him as a first means®er 

appeasing his uncle. This ox is said to “‘ open the hut”. The 
ox may be only a goat, the goat which will be used for the 
sacrifice, — because a religious ceremony is necessary. All the 
relatives assemble on a certain day in the girl’s_ village. 
The wedding pair are inside the hut, the goat is killed, the 
offering prepared, the psanyi put aside. Then the bridegroom 
and the bride are called outside and made to sit on the same 
mat ; the man’s leg is passed over the girl’s leg ; (this is done 
to ‘‘ kill the shame” (ku dlaya tingana) ; they are both anoint- 
ed with the green liquid of the psanyi; the skin of the goat 
is then taken, a hole cut in its middle and it is put on the head 
of the two cousins. Through the opening, the liver of the 
animal is handed down to them, quite raw. ‘They must tear 
it out with their teeth. It must not be cut with a knife; this 
is taboo. They have to bite it, to pull vigourously on both 
sides so as to really tear it out and then they must eat it. 
Shibindji, liver, means also patience, determination. ‘‘ You, 
have acted with strong determination! Eat the liver now! 
Eat it in the full light “ot-the day, nob im the dark! It 
will be a mhamba, an offering to the gods (Gana)”. The 
priest of the family will then say : ‘‘ You, our gods, so and so, 
look! We have done it in the daylight. It has not been 
done by stealth. Bless them, give them children.” Should this 
sacrifice not be made, misfortune would indeed be them and 
this woman would remain childless. When the prayer is 
finished, the assistants take all the solid psanyi, put it on the 
wife’s head and say to her: ‘‘Go and bear children ”. 

In the Ronga clans the dlaya shilongo is somewhat different. 
The bridegroom must first give £1 to the father; this is over 
and above the lobolo, of course. Both families provide a goat. 
They are killed without the assistance of the uterine nephews, 
in front of the hut of the girl’s mother. The grandfather 
prays to the gods of the girl’s father: ‘* All right! They have 
decided to marry each other; you, gods of the boy and the 
girl, unite them together so that they do not hate each other ; 
let them not remind each other that they are brother and sis- 
ter; let their union not be spoilt by such remembrances, nor 

_ 246 — 

when other people will say to them: ‘* You have bewitched ! 
You have married your relative !” By this prayer, a general noti- 
fication is given to everybody, and the feeling of shame has been 
removed. Afterwards the officiating relative goes on, exhorting the 
new wife, telling her all that she must do for her husband, men- 
tioning all the details of the conjugal duties with such a realism 
that she begins to cry. The bridegroom bows his head in shame. 
The preacher goes on till somebody puts a piece of meat in 
his mouth to stop the exhortation ! 

The whole country has gathered to see the proceedings and 
to eat the meat. The wedding pair do not partake of it, because 
the goats have been sacrificed for them (ba hahlela bone). The 
relatives go home and roast on the road the joint of meat they 
have received so as to eat it before reaching their village. 

The aim of the dlaya shibongo is to lawfully kill one kind of 
relationship and to replace it by another, because the two are 
not compatible. However, ina case of inheritance of a rarana, 
for instance, when a blood relative has to change his relation- 
ship and to becomea relative by marriage, he can inherit without 
any rite being performed, if there is no nearer legal heir ; in 
this case it is said: “‘ Bushaka byi ta pfuka”” — ‘the blood rela- 
tionship will be revived”. It will be strengthened by the new 
marriage relationship. 

In the case of marriage with the great mukofiwana, this rite 
is also performed, as previously mentioned. The wedding pair are 
also covered with the goat’s skin. This goat is called the cat, 
because it is like a cat which is put on their shoulders and scratch- 
es them. It scratches away the bukofiwana which was preven- 
ting their marriage. (Viguet). In this case it is the shikotwana 
which is killed. So the taboo is removed and they can marry. 

Ill. Marriages permitted. 

Relatives from the eighth degree of relationship can marry 
unconditionally (Mankhelu). The choice of a boy is unlimited 
within the clan and even within the tribe. However, marriages 

= > — 
into a too far distant clan are not recommended, according to 
Viguet, for the following reasons: 1) If the marriage becomes 
spoilt, parents-in-law against whom the claim is rowers might 
run away with wife ae oxen, and we should lose our hal 
2) If our oxen multiply in the other clan, we might be tempted 
to go and make war with our parents-in-law to appropriate 
the cattle. So blood would be shed on account of our own 
oxen! This would be a shame for us! Whilst if we marry 
amongst friends, even amongst remote relatives, should a quar- 
rel occur, we should try to settle it peacefully. The people 
are amongst those with whom we discuss in the hut. With 
strangers we discuss outside, on the square, and we occasionally 
fight with them and drive them away. So a difficulty can 
better be dealt with when our bukofiwana are people living 
close by. 

IV. Marriages recomiended. 

Here we must take into account two different cases : some 
marriages are contracted on account of a kind of right of pre- 
emption, others on account of a right of inheritance. 

1) RiGHT OF PRE-EMPTION 

There are amongst the relatives of a man certain women on 
whom he has a kind of proferential claim, or a right of 
pre-emption, and whom he calls spouses, because he would be 
welcomed if he were able to lobola them. ‘They are his pro- 
per tinamu, viz., his wife’s younger sisters or the daughters of 
his wife’s brother. These marriages are considered as pecu- 
liarly appropriate. However this is not an absolute right for 
the man. Should he not prove a good husband, his parents- 
in-law will not let him have their other daughters. 

Other women to whom a man has a special right of pretend- 
ing are his relatives on the mother’s side, as we saw: to 

 248  

take a wife from the family in which the father found the 
mother is recommended, and approved, as long as she is not a 
too near relative.. However there is a reason which militates 
against such marriages If I quarrel with my first wife, who 
might be a particularly troublesome character, and she goes 
home, her younger sisters or nieces, who are her tinhlantsa, 
will certainly follow her, and I should remain quite alone without 
a single dish to eat in the evening. Should the quarrel end in 
a divorce, I should lose all my wives at once. The custom 
of marrying wife’s tinhlantsa is approved of ; however it is not 
very frequently followed in Thonga families. 

2) THE RIGHT OF INHERITANCE 

The second class of cases does not concern unmarried women 
whom I mean to lobola, but widows whom | might inherit 
after the death of their husband. Those whom I can even- 
tual inherit are generally called by me namu or nsati, and I have 
very free relations with them, but this liberty never goes so far 
as to allow sexual intercourse. ““Ndingada 7 viz. “1 can eat, 
inherit by prior right” my elder brother’s widow : she is my regu- 
lar legacy. As regards my young brother’s widow, I can only 
marry her if she is old, no longer able to bear children. But to 
take her, if she is still a childbearing woman, is very much 
against the feelings of the tribe. The reason of the prohibition 
is this, says Viguet: suppose that this widow of my younger 
brother already had children. J take her, I have a child by 
her. The child takes precedence of the first children of its 
mother: he is their host, because I, myself, the father, am the 
elder brother of the deceased. On the other hand, he is ndji- 
sana of his other brothers, because he was born after them from 
the same mother : this is impossible; it destroys the most ele- 
mentary family notions. In exceptional cases, however, when 
no one else can claim my younger brother’s widow, I may 
take her. 

Next to my true tinamu comes the widow of my maternal 

uncle. Ifhe had many, one might be alloted to me in reparti- 
tion. But of course, in this as in all the other cases of inherit- 
ed women, the children which might be born of our union will 
belong to the family who paid the lobolo, and not to me. I 
have, in one sense, only the usufruct of the property. She will 
till the fields for me and serve me with my daily plate of por- 
tidge, but she is not really mine. She is given (nyika) to me 
by favour, and only under specified conditions. I can also inherit 
bakokwana, the widow of my malume’s father (not my true 
grandmother of course, but her co-wife), the widow of my father’s 
brothers. 

Muhambi can inherit Magugu the widow of his cousin Hlangabeza. 
This cousin is a brother (makwabu) and the two fathers are 
brothers. But he could not inherit Debeza, wife of Phusa. Why? 
Because Phusa, being a cousin by the father’s sister, belongs to 
another shibongo, the shibongo of his own father Muki and not of 
his mother. Should Muhamibi lay claim to take Debeza, the men 
of Mashabane (name of Phusa’s clan) would say : ‘‘ We are opposed 
toit, because, doing so would in a fact mean that you eat two herds. 
You have eaten one herd when we have lobola Ndjibari! Ndjibari 
has had two children: we have sold her daughter Nwashidjasa 
to lobolaa wife for Phusa. The oxen were ours. If Phusa dies, 
his wife belongs to us and not to you”. So Muhambi can 
inherit the widow of his cousin, son of his paternal uncle, but 
not the widow of his cousin, son of his paternal aunt. 

A man can inherit also one of his father’s wives, as we saw 
(page 200), but only under certain circumstances. ‘The dlaya 
shilongo is never performed in case of inherited women. . 

A rule on which Viguet insisted, but which is disappearing is 
this: women, when their husband had no younger brothers, 
must be inherited by batukulu and not by bana: batukuln, 
either true grandsons, sons of the son, or uterine nephews, sons 
of the sister of the deceased. The reasons for this law are: 
1) Bana, sons, would take liberties with their father’s wives and 
make balamo of them, if they could regularly inherit them. This 
would spoil the village life. 2) If I, being wana, son, inherit 
my father’s wife and have a child by her, this child is iwana, 

son, for me. On the other hand, this inherited woman might 
have had children by my father, and they are my brothers. So, 
amongst this woman's children, one is my son, the other my 
brother! ‘‘A beleki tinshaka timbiri’’. — ‘‘ She has had children 
of two generations!” That won’t do! 

These marriage regulations show us plainly how the family 
is constitued amongst the Thonga. A glimpse at the system of 
relationship of the primitive tribes will help us to understand 
something more of the strange features of this familial law. 

D> REMNANTS “OF PREVIOUS “SYSTEMS: OF 
RELA TIONSHIC 

Modern ethnographers have tried to make out how the human 
family has evolved through the ages and this is roughly, the 
theory adopted by some of them: the first stage has been mar- 
ked by universal promiscuity. There was no family at first. 
Then, in a second period, restriction began to be enforced as 
regards marriage. Definite groups formed; all the women of 
one group were the regular wives of all the men of another 
eroup. This system still prevails in some Australian tribes. It 
is called group marriage. Ina third phase, the family constitu- 
ted itself round the mother. She was the owner of the children, 
who traced their descent through her and her female ancestors. 
In this form, which is called the uterine family, or matriarchy, the 
mother’s brothers bore a special relation to the children: the 
father being hardly known or without authority, these male 
relatives of the mother had to defend the offspring of their sisters. 
In the end, the uterine family passed into the patriarchal or 
agnatic family. ‘The father became the head and descent was 
traced through the males. Thedevelopment of property seems 
to have favoured this last evolution. ‘The husband, who owned 
the property, became the master of the family and he therefore 
took his wife to himself and made a home. 

Whatever may be the truth of this theory, we must recognise 

the fact that the Thonga have now reached this fourth stage. 
The family is decidedly agnatic. Father’s right is paramount. 
However, there are in this familial system some features which 
appear to be a relic of former periods. 

I. Original promiscuity. 

As regards the idea that promiscuity prevailed originally — a 
supposition which is combated by some scientists (see W. H. R. 
Rivers, ‘‘On the origin of the classificatory system of relation- 
ship,’ Anthropological Essays), I see no trace of it amongst the 
Thonga. Amongst the Pedi, there is one day when free inter- 
course is allowed all through the clans; it is the closing day of 
the second circumcision school. But this custom can be 
explained in a totally different way. 

II. Group marriage. 

As regards group marriage, we may see a remnant of the sys- 
tem in the fact that a man hasaspecial preferential right to cer- 
tain women of his wife’s family, the tinamu. His son will also 
consider it peculiarly appropriate to take a wife from his mother’s 
clan, the one into which his father married. 

The tinamu custom might be explained in that way. However 
there is a very marked difference between the group-marriage 
system and the Thonga familial law. Amongst Australian 
aborigenes, if a man of a group has the right of marrying all 
the women of the other group, a woman of the other group 
fas, the same right to marry all the men of the first one. 
Amongst the Thonga it is absolutely taboo for a married woman 
to have relations with anybody except her own husband. 
Polygamy exists and is approved, but polyandry is strongly 
censured and considered a disgusting custom. ‘The main reason 

for this is no doubt the matlulana superstition, which bears all 
the character of an old, old idea in the Thonga system of 
customs. The story of P. K. which I relate in Appendix IV, 
will show how deeply the sin of polyandry is felt. (1) 

Though laying much stress on this very important difference 
we must notice, however, that there is a certain correspondence 
between the rights of men and women in this respect. A man 
has a preferential right to his wife’s younger sisters, and to the 
daughters of his wife’s brothers, be these men younger or older 
than his wife He is a potential husband for all these tinamu. 
It results from this fact, that, as regards a woman, she is also a 
potential wife for all her husband’s younger brothers. who can 
inherit her and are also called tinamu by her, and for the sons 
of her husband’s sisters, be they older or younger than her hus- 
band. 

Another feature of these early Australian forms of society 
is that all the persons belonging to a given generation call each 
other brothers (or sisters), call the preceding generation fathers 
and mothers and the following one sons indiscriminately. We 
might compare with this classificatory system the Thonga custom 
of calling mothers all the father’s wives, all the mother’s sisters, 
and fathers all the father’s brothers. But this is not necessarily 
a trace of group marriage. As we have seen before, the meaning 
of kinship terms is very often extended to other people as a 
sign of respect or of love; the Thonga, nevertheless, know per- 
fectly well the difference existing between the technical use of 
these terms and their wider connotation. There is something 
natural in these appellations. When we call such and such an 
ecclesiastic Father Norton, Mother Fuller, Brother James or Sister 
Agnes, no one would take this to be a relic of the group marri- 
age phase! On this point my conclusion is therefore : certain 
customs can be considered as traces of this old system, but it is 

(1) It is true that Ba-Pedi who are neighbours of the Thonga, have a kind 
of polyandry (See pagegg). But this has nothing to do with group marriage, 
and the wives of a rich man whom he allows to have intercourse with other 
men, choose their lovers as they like and not according to a law of preferential 
right binding two groups. 

not absolutely necessary to explain them by this hypothesis. 
The preference accorded to a wife’s sisters, or nieces, might very 
well owe its origin to the following cause : when a group has 
ascertained that its women are well treated in another group, 
it welcomes new alliances with that group, thinking that, in 
this dreadful lottery of marriage, one must not despise the 
guarantee given by a previous happy union ! 

UI. Matriarchy. 

But as regards mother-right and the uterine family, I must con- 
fess that I have changed my mind since writing Les Ba-Ronga, 
and would testify my gratitude to Mr. S. Hartland, who encou- 
raged me to study this subject more attentively. I had not 
then gathered all the facts, and the identity of the ntukulu and 
the mupsyana only became clearly apparent to me when stu- 
dying the Northern clans. Now, having inguired with special 
care into this most curious feature of the Thonga system, I 
come to the conclusion that the only possible explanation is that, 
in former and very remote times, our tribe has passed through 
the matriarchal stage. Let us carefully consider the relation 
of a malume with his uterine nephews, recapitulating all the 
facts. 

1) DUTIES AND RIGHTS OF THE MATERNAL UNCLE 

As we have seen, the uterine nephew all through his career 
is the object of special care on the part of his uncle: if he is a 
first born child, the malume prepares his ntehe. (See page 44). 
When weaned, he goes to stay in the village of his mother’s 
relatives for many years, a girl sometimes till she is grown up. 
Later on, when she marries, the maternal uncle claims a right 
called t#jhumba, £ 1. on the total amount of the lobolo. It is 
taboo to refuse it; should a father dare to keep that ¢ |, his 
brothers will say to him: ‘* Do you not fear the gods? The 

mother’s gods will kill you! Your daughter will have no 
children. Have you alone brought her into the world? Did 
these people not help you in bringing her forth? And has your 
wife not grown by the assistance of those gods. Her brother 
must be allowed to have his tjumba” (Mboza). 

On the day of the remittance of the lobolo, the maternal 
uncle and all the mother’s relatives are invited to the feast, and 
for them a special part of the festal ox is reserved, called nyimba, 
viz. the womb, the uterus; it does not consist only of this 
organ, but of all the belly, from, the sternum to the hind legs ; 
the bride’s mother eats the mbata and khondjo, viz. the extremity 
of the spine (Mboza). 

On the day of hlomisa, when the bride is led to her husband’s 
village, her maternal relatives receive a special gift, a young 
cow called mubya wa mana wa yena, the skin in which her 
mother carried her on her shoulders when she was a baby. 
This cow will be sent to the family when the first and the third 
daughter marry. In the case of a second, and a fourth girl, 
the nyimba alone is sent. 

In the equipment of the bride, the mother’s relatives provide 
her hoe, fat to anoint her body, her mat and clothing and 
sometimes bracelets. The paternal aunt (hahana) does not give 
anything, neither does the paternal uncle, the latter only help- 
ing the father occasionally. Should the mother’s relatives not 
fulfil this duty of providing part of the trousseau, next time they 
will not be given the nyimba to which they were entitled 
(Viguet). 

But the most characteristic prerogative of the bamalume or 
bakokwana, is their special right of intercession on behalf of the 
uterine nephews. In fact, as Mankhelu said in his so pictur- 
esque language, ‘‘as regards sacrifices (timhamba), the mother’s 
relatives mostly perform them. They are the stem. My father 
is the stem on account of the oxen. My mother is the true 
stem; she is the god; she makes me grow. Should she die 
when I am an infant, I will not live. At the village of my 
mother it is at the god’s (ka mamana hi ko psikwembyen)”. 
Simeon Gana added : ‘‘ We have the special charge of sacrificing 

5 — 
for our batukulu; our sons also are priests for them, and can 
officiate in our place, even should they be younger than our 
batukulu. This is the reason why we do not marry them. We 
are their elders (bakulu).” The bones will always tell if a sa- 
crifice must be offered to the gods of the mother or to those 
of the father, but a kokwane will preferably be called upon to 
sacrifice for a sick child. 

In the ceremonies following death, especially in the feast of 
the mourning beer (page 164), the malume will be the officiating 
person and squeeze the psanyi over his batukulu to cleanse them. 

A last right possessed by the malume is to raise his village 
(pfusha muti) by means of a ntukulu. Should he see that he 
has no children, that his village is in danger of ‘‘dying”, he 
will take his unmarried sister to his village and refuse to accept 
tie Iobolo ter her. He will’ say to her> “Do not tear! Ur 
you die, I will bury you!” This duty belongs before all to 
the husband ; but the brother is ready to fulfil it. She will 
have lovers, and perhaps give birth to a son. As she has not 
been lobola, this child belongs to the mother’s family, ac- 
cording to the great rule of native law. The uncle will appro- 
priate this male offspring of his family, who will bear the 
shibongo of his kokwana. An uterine nephew, adopted under 
these circumstances, can save the family of his mother from 
disappearing. 

2) RIGHTS OF THE UTERINE NEPHEW. 

The attitude of the ntukulu wa shisati (the uterine nephew) 
to his malume is quite peculiar. ‘‘Ntukulu i hosi, a nyenyela 
hikwapsu ku malume” —- ‘‘The uterine nephew is a chief! 
He takes any liberty he likes with his maternal uncle” (Mboza). 
It seems as if this behaviour were a relic of a primitive state, 
where the strong hand of a father was not yet felt and family 
relations were more free than now. ‘These prerogatives of 
uterine nephews regarding relatives on their mother’s side, 
their bamalume and bakokwana, appear even more clearly in 

: — 256 — 

the religious ceremonies. We have seen the prominent part 
which batukulu take in these rites. ‘‘Ba yima mahlwen ka 
psikwembu” — ‘‘they are standing before the gods, in their 
stead” (Viguet). They must be the servants of the altar, and 
the consumers of the offering. In the great sacrifice for rain, as 
accomplished in the Northern clans, an offering of beer is made 
together with the sacrifice of the black victim. (See Part VI). 
It is the uterine niece of the chief who must fetch the mealies 
from the granary, pour them into the pot, take the first handful 
to crush it in the mortar, give the first blow with the pestle, 
and inaugurate everyone of the complicated acts of the brewing. 
When the black victim is brought, some one puts an assagay 
in her hand and helps her to stab the animal. She is the one 
who ‘‘gives over to the gods” (nyiketa psikwembo). The 
same thing happens in the great family gatherings : one ntukulu 
holds the leg, another the assagay. The batukulu dispose of 
the portion of the limbs offered to the gods. They cut the 
prayer and, at that moment they steal the meat or the beer of 
the sacrifice and run away with them. Why? ‘‘Because a 
ntukulu does not fear the saliva of his malume” (Mboza). 
They are living in such intimacy with them that they can eat 
that which was reserved for the gods(1) (See p. 162). 

The ntukulu also takes precedence in some other rites; in the 
circumcision school the uterine nephew of the chief is at the 
head of the circumcised. In the Juma milomo (page 146) he 
starts the purifying ceremony, and “‘gives to the others” 
(nyiketa) the use of the food of the deceased. 

But it is essentially in the question of the inheritance that he 

(1) Some ethnographers have supposed that ancestral worship only began 
when the father took the family in hand and consequently did not exist in 
the period of mother-right. This seems to me absolutely false. ‘The spirits 
of the mother’s family are invoked as well as the father’s ancestors, and the 
special place of the uterine nephews in worship up to this day can only be 
explained in this way: before the gods of the father were known and prayed 
to, those of the mother were worshipped, and consequently the batukulu held 
a special position in the ritual. When the ancestors on the father’s side made 
their appearance in the Bantu Pantheon, beside those on the mother’s side, or 
after the institution of father’s right, the batukulu preserved that special posi- 
tion which no one can now explain. 

SS — 
shows himself under the characteristic aspect. Father-right has 
set in and is strongly supported by the lobola custom. There- 
fore sons of the deceased have the sole right to the property 
of their father, wives as well asimplements. However, the 
batukulu, the uterine nephews cannot keep quiet! You will 
find them everywhere, trying to get something. They were 
already planning with the malume’s wives to take them as 
spouses after the death of her husband. Look how they teased 
the whole family, on the day of the repartition of the widows 
(page 206). When the implements were distributed, they came 
and claimed their t/humba (a technical expression, it seems, which 
means precisely this kind of claim lodged by a malume or a 
ntukulu). They were given the small assagay, the big one 
remaining tor the son. In this way ba nyiketa pfindla, they give 
over the inheritance to the legal heirs. ‘This is a most vivid repre- 
sentation of a right which no longer exists, having in fact become 
obsolete, but which asserts itself however in virtue of the 
survival of an old custom. I have often been struck by the 
unconscious way in which they act on all these occasions ! 
They give the impression of people who have been hypnotised 
and ordered to do something next day, when no longer in the 
mesmeric sleep. You see them accomplishing the act, con- 
strained by a mysterious necessity and without knowing why. 
The hypnotising factor here is this powerful heredity, the weight 
of all this hoary past, which is past indeed but still influences 
the subliminal life of the tribe... 

As regards the chiefs, I may add that the uterine nephew can 
_ be given the chieftainship over a certain part of the country. 
He is well received at the Court, better than the nephew on 
the brother’s side, because, with these, there is always the 
danger that they may become. usurpers. 

Mother-right has most probably existed amongst the ancestors 
of the Thonga, whatever may be the country where they then 
lived, and the name by which they were called. But everything 
seems to prove that this phase has long ago passed away. No 
one remembers anything of the kind. Genealogies, which are 
the oldest records of the tribe, mention only the ancestors of the 

eae 258 = 

father. ‘They are recalled much better than those of the mother. 
The lobola custom, which is the strongest upholder of the 
paternal right at present, has been practised since time imme- 
morial.(1) See also the special names of the great grandfathers 
in the paternal line (p. 222). 

I have tried to look far away into the past of the Thonga 
familial system. Now [ask: What about its future? The ques- 
tion must be asked, because we do not consider the South 
African tribe only as a subject of scientific study. We are 
deeply interested in its welfare and in its destiny. New forces 
have appeared which act in a new way on the primitive society. 

What will be, what must be the turn of the evolution ? 
How must it be directed by those who have a responsibility in 
the shaping of the future Bantu society ? 

We shall answer this question in considering more closely the 
two great customs which lie at the base of the whole present 
family system of the Thonga: Lobola and Polygamy. 

E. THE LOBOLA CUSTOM 
1. The History of the Custom. How it 1s practised. 

As far back as natives can remember, lobola has always been 
practised. First it consisted in mats and baskets, in those remote 

(1) Lobola is however not incompatible with the uterine form of the family. 
I have been informed by the Rev. Allégret, working in the French Congo, that 
the Mpongwe and Galoa of the Lower Ogowe have still partly preserved the 
mother-right. But lobola exists. The first lobolo is payed indifferently to 
the father or the mother of the bride, and the choice is made according to the 
personal relations existing between the husband’s family and the families of 
the bride’s parents. When a second daughter marries, half the lobolo is given 
to the maternal uncle. The children stay in the father’s village, but they are 
under the guidance of the mother and of her family. They belong to the 
mother’s clan. This system denotes evidently a less advanced stage in the 
evolution. However matriarchy is passing into patriarchy, and the lobola 
custom will probably hasten the process. 

-— a — 
times when White people had not yet made their appearance. 
The large iron rings were procured by barter from sailors who 
anchored off the shore (see Part IV), and were employed for the 
purpose. Later on White traders settled in the country. Beads 
were bought from them (nkarara), especially large ones (muba- 
thwana). A chief used to lobola with ten handfuls of them, a 
subject with only five. Large brass rings were also used in old 
times. Two of them have been found lately in the Mapute 
country, and one came into my possession. It weighs more 
than two pounds. They were called /itlatla and were very 
much sought after. One was enough to buy a wife. 

Oxen have also been used for a very long time for lobola. 
Some say that they were the regular means of getting a wife in 
the 18 century. When Manukosi came, in 1820 he appropriat- 
ed all the cattle, and the Thonga were obliged to use beads and 
hoes for that reason. At any rate the Nkuna when they emi- 
grated into the Transvaal in 1835, were paying lobolo in oxen. 
A father claimed ten for his daughter. The Pedi of the country 
claimed only two or three, and this was one of the reasons why 
the two tribes did not intermarry. Strange to say, I never 
heard goats mentioned as having served for this purpose, though 
the goat is certainly the oldest domestic animal of the South 
African Bantu! Whatever may have been the objects at first 
used, sooner or later oxen, live stock, became the true means 
of lobola. This appears plainly in the technical expressions : 
to go out with a herd (ntlhambi), viz., to go to lobola, — 
to eat the oxen, viz., to accept a lobolo, — the woman of my 
oxen, viz., the one bought with the oxen given by me for my 
wife, etc. 

The scarcity of the oxen, probably caused by the wars with 
the Zulu, was no doubt the reason why they were replaced by 
hoes. Hoes were universally employed from 1840-1870, tog- 
ether with oxen, when available. Ten as the regular price 
forlobola. Later on fathers asked twenty, thirty, fifty. They 
were first of native make; the Bvesha of Speonken, near the 
Iron Mountain, provided the whole tribe for a time with that 
heavy currency, until the Europeans saw that there was a good 

business to be done in supplying them. See (Part 1V). Portu- 
guese traders of Delagoa Bay began to send natives to Gaza 

‘raat nlindepy ayi iw 191eM 0} SuIOs yteg 
« IGNVHTLLN > V 

1d 

410U] “CI 

with guns and powder to hunt elephants, and paid them in 
hoes: twenty, fifty, one hundred hoes for a tusk, according to 
its size. 

But hoes have also been superseded by the universal power 

of the pound sterling. After the death of Manukosi (1858), 
early in the sixties of the past century, some Zulus came to 
Delagoa Bay from Natal, sent by Englishmen to hunt elephants 
in Gaza. They told the people of the country that money 
could be obtained in Pietermaritzburg (Umegundhlovo) by work- 
ing, and the first Ba-Ronga went hu berengen, viz., to serve White 
people there. In 1870, in the year still called Daiman by the 
chroniclers of the tribe, many more went to Kimberley, especially 
from the Transvaal colonies of Thonga, and the gold coin began 
to spread amongst the tribe with all its usefulness and all its 
dangers. It is now becoming more and more current, as 50.000 
to 70.000 natives of the Thonga tribe are workingin the Johan- 
nesburg mines. First of all £€ 1 was worth ten hoes, and the 
lobolo money was fixed at £8 by the chiefs. But this price 
was soon found to be insufficient by the parents. They wanted 
£ 10.10.0, ten guineas! They had already learned that, amongst 
cultivated people and in refined transactions, one speaks of 
guineas and not of pounds! Later on it went so far as £ 20 
for an ordinary girl, £ 30 for a chief's daughter. The average 
round Lourencgo Marques is ¢ 18, and in the Transvaal ¢ 25. 
When a Banyan takes a native wife (or rather a concubine), he 
can get her for ¢ 10 and the father consents to this lower 
price, first because a °° White mans wile is better treated 
and fed than ordinary native women, and secondly because 
the Banyan will soon go home, to India, and this kind of mar- 
riages are tacitly looked upon as temporary. The influx of 
money had also the following unexpected result on the native 
custom : there are two kinds of lobolo, 1) the lobolo which a 
boy obtains from his sister’s marriage, and which he employs 
with the consent of the family to get a wife for himself; this 
is the true old-fashioned way for him to contract a marriage; 
2) the acquired lobolo won by a boy who has worked for 
it, and who has started a herd for himself (tisungulela ntlhamb1). 
This second kind of lobolo became much easier to procure 
under the new conditions, especially when a stay of one year 
or two in Johannesburg was long enough to save the neces- 
sary sum. Boys who had no sister, and who would have 

been destitute in former times, could then dream of a tshenwge 
viz., of marrying three or four wives! And they had this 
advantage that, their wives not having been bought with family 
property (their sister’s oxen), no bakomwana could disturb them 
in their domestic happiness, asmay happen to those who marry 
by the first mentioned lobolo. 

This leads us to consider : 

Il. The original meaning and the consequences of the lobola. 

As we have said previously, the only way of understandig the 
lobola, as well as other similar payments in kind which we meet 
with amongst a great number of uncivilized or half civilized 
nations (1), is to consider it as a compensation given by one group 
to another group, in order to restore the equilibrium between 
the various collective units composing the clan. The first group 
acquires a new member : the second one feels itself diminished, 
and claims something which permits it to reconstitute itself, in 
its turn, by the acquisition of another woman. This collectiv- 
ist conception alone explains all the facts. 

In this way, the acquired wife, though she keeps her shi- 
bongo (clan name), becomes the property of the first group. 
She is aggregated to it by complicated marriage ceremonies, re- 
presenting the passage from one family to another. She 1s 
owned by the new family, herself and the children who will be 
born of her. She is not a slave at all, but she is owned, never- 
theless. She is not the individual property of one man, but 
the collective property of a group. Hence the following facts : 

1) Her whole family take part in the marriage ceremonies, 
especially on the day when the lobola is brought by the bride- 
groom (See page 109). Every male member of the group has 
his say in the matter. 

(1) See A. van Gennep, Les Rites de passage, p. 170. The Kalym of the 
Turk-Mongolians, the Nye of Southern Thibet, etc., correspond to the Bantu 
lobola. 

= 263 —— 

2) Brothers will always be ready to help a poor relative to 
lobola: they work for their group. 

3) The acquired wife, is their presumptive spouse, though 
they cannot have sexual relations with her (matlulana). They 
will inherit her if the husband dies, according to the laws which 
I have explained in the preceding paragraphs. 

4) Children will belong to the father, live with him, bear his 
shibongo (family name), and owe him obedience: boys will 
strengthen this group, girls will be lobota (factitive of lobola — 
sold in marriage) for his account. Father-right rests on the 
lobola. ‘This is so plain that any child being born of a woman 
who has not been paid for, belongs to the mother’s family, 
bears her shibongo name and will live at the malume’s village. 
In Appendix V, I relate the story of Spoon Libombo as an 
instance of this primordial law. This is the reason why, when 
the question is discussed, men insist so much on the preserva- 
tion of the lobola. They say: ‘‘ Who will guarantee to us 
the possession of our children if lobola is suppressed ?” 

So the lobola is by no means a purchase made by the hus- 
band, and still less a present given to the wife's parents. 

1) ADVANTAGES OF THE LOBOLA CUSTOM 

In the primitive collective stage of society the custom had 
certainly great advantages: 1) It strengthens the family, I mean 
the patriarchal family, the right of the father. 2) It marks the 
difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate marriage and, 
in this sense, fills the post of an official register of marriages. 
3) It puts hindrances in the way of breaking the matrimonial 
union, as a wife cannot definitely leave her husband without 
her group returning the lobola- Therefore it obliges the married 
pair to have a certain regard one for the other. 

However these advantages must not be exaggerated. Marriages 
concluded on the lobola base, are frequently broken. The 
tie being purely material, it is easy to cut it. When the 
husband ‘‘ bitana tihomu”, claims his oxen, who could refuse 

= 264 — 

to return them? It is certainly erroneous to say that the 
lobola is a contract made between two families in order 
to guarantee the good treatment of the wife by her hus- 
band and vice versa, to prevent the husband beating his wife 
or the wife deserting the conjugal home from mere caprice. 
It has even been asserted that this sum of money was a pledge, 
a security, claimed by the wife’s parents for the protection of 
their daughter! There is nothing of the kind in this institut- 
ion. The exhortations addressed to the bride on the day of 
her hloma (page 119) prove clearly enough that, on the contrary, 
owing to the lobola, the husband has every right over her, and 
that she has nothing to say if he uses or abuses this right. 

2) BAD CONSEQUENCES OF THE LOBOLA CUSTOM 

1) And this is the first regrettable consequence of the lobolo: the 
woman is certainly reduced to an inferior position by the fact 
that she has been lobola. a) This appears clearly in the fact 
that, though she is not looked upon exactly as a head of cattle, 
a girl to be married is in principle entirely at the mercy of her 
family as regards the choice of her husband. So is a widow 
to be inherited, in the hands of her deceased husband’s family. 
Men are often better than their principles, and we have seen in 
the study of marriage and inheritance customs that the consent 
of a girl, and of a widow, is generally asked before any decision 
takes place. This is done as long as the male masters of the 
woman have no special interest in the choice. But should they 
have reason to impose a certain husband upon her, they will 
not hesitate to force her to accept him; a young girl will be 
given up toa dirty old man, for whom she has no sympathy, on 
account of a lobola debt of twenty years standing! The lobola 
hardens the hearts and the woman is unable to defend herself. 
She can always run away. But where will she hide if all her 
relatives agree on her being sacrificed for the interest of the 
family? Or she can threaten to commit suicide, and she occa- 
sionally does so. 6) She must work for her husband who gives 

ae 265 — 

her very little in return. It is true that she is not a slave. 
However she is owned. c) This is partly the cause of the 
shocking difference established between a husband and his wife. 
The married woman is henceforth absolutely prohibited from 
adulterous relations — which is a very good provision indeed 
— but her husband is quite free in this respect: he has not 
been bought. d) As regards her children, whatever may be her 
love for them, she does not possess them after all. They belong 
to the father. If divorce takes place and the lobolo is not return- 
ed to the husband, he keeps them and the mother will be 
separated from them for ever. (1) 

2) A second series of consequences arising from this custom 
are the strained relations between the two contracting groups. 
We have sufficiently insisted on this subject. What makes 
dealings with parents-in-law so difficult? It is the lobolo, this 
sum of money which has perhaps not been entirely paid, and 
the debt remains as a permanent cause of irritation. If there 
is no reason for friction on that point, the threat of quarrels 
ending in divorce, is always hanging overhead, as the sword of 
Damocles. If this eventuality takes place, the sad event will 
be made ten times more painful by the fearful discussion which 
will arise by reason of the lobola being reclaimed. And the 
quarrelling couple will not suffer alone. It may be that another 
marriage, that of the great mukofwana, which was perhaps a 
happy one, will be destroyed in consequence of that divorce. 
(p.232) ‘‘A ba ruli timbilwin”, remarked Mboza. ‘‘ They don’t 
find peace in their hearts”. 

These complicated relations due to the lobola, poison the 

(1) The Rev. Dieterlen, of Basutoland, in a paper on the lobola, wrote the 
following words which apply to the Thonga as well as to the Ba-Suto: ‘‘A 
woman married under lobola bears children but possesses none. The children 
belong to those who gave the cattle. Whatever may be her own merits, she 
can see her children pass into the hands of the rawest heathen and be given 
over to the cupidity of rapacious and rascally relatives. She can be illtreated, 
driven away, abandoned, repudiated : she will have to live without children ; 
she will resemble a woman who has never had any. She is not supposed to 
have the heart and the feelings of a mother. And her children are treated 
as if they had no filial affection. ” 

whole native life. Life would be easy for South African natives. 
Their wants are few and they have enough to satisfy them under 
their invariably blue sky. They are mild and good-natured 
after all. But the lobola affairs fill the African village with 
hatred and bitterness. The milandju, the debts! Milandju comes 
from landja, to follow, and this etymology is very instructive. 
A husband whose wife has gone away must lJandja his wife or 
rather his money. His whole family will help him in following 
that property until it has been recovered again. Natives will go 
from oneend of the country to the other to follow a few pounds, 
and at least three quarters of the cases which are brought before 
the Courts are lobola cases. 

II]. Altitude to adopt towards the Lobola custom. 

In explaining the advantages, or the evil consequences, of the cus- 
tom in the native life, I have already shown that these latter vastly 
exceed the former. This shows what attitude we ougth to adopt 
towards it. But before concluding on this point, let us go back to the 
first principles of sociology. 

The White Governements and the religious bodies whichare at work 
amongst the South African natives are all Christian ; they belong to 
what is called Western Civilisation. Its conceptions as regards the 
human person are on a totally different levei to that of the native tribe. 
Since the Prophet of Nazareth pronounced these immortal words: 
‘* What would a man give for hissoul ”, the era of individualism has 
setin. The infinite value of a human being has been discovered and 
this new principle has become predominant, not only in the religious, 
but also in the civil sphere. The proclamation during the French revo- 
lution of the ‘* rights of man ”, which is looked upon as the greatest 
progress made by modern politics, is a direct result of this assertion of 
the value of the individual. If every century has to rediscover the 
formula conciliating the rights of the individual with the interests of 
collective Society, we all feel that this proclamation has been one of 
the most precious conquests of humanity. 

The lobola custom, invented by a society which is still in the collec- 
tive, or half collective, stage is incompatible with the enlightened con- 

, 

= 267 — 

ceptions of Western civilisation, with its politics, its ideas of civil life, 
as well as its religion. It is inspired by a conception of the human 
person which belongs to anotherage. Herea wife belongs to her hus- 
band, children belong to their father in a material sense, not in the 
moral sense which we can alone adopt with our conception of the indi- 
vidual. A boy is nothing but a member of the clan, who must perpe- 
tuateits nameand glory. A girl is nothing but the means of acquiring 
a wife for this boy and of so increasing the clan. A wife is nothing 
but a piece of family property, bought by lobola, and which is conse- 
quently inherited by other men when her husband dies. They are 
not moral human beings and free human beings. The opposition 
between the collectivist and the Western conception is absolute and, 
if we believe that we are right, it is the duty of both Colonial Govern- 
ments and Christian Missions to try to amend this state of things in 
native society. 

The obligation however is not the same for both. A civil Govern- 
ment, undertaking to rule a tribe brought into subjection by war or put 
under the Protectorate of a European power, settling amongst natives 
still retaining their primitive way of living, cannot pretend to govern 
them at once according to the laws of civilised nations. It would be 
an impossibility. Such a Colonial Government must respect native 
laws and judge cases according to it, otherwise it would not appear 
to the natives to be just ; and it is indispensable that, in their dealings 
with uncivilised people, White Authorities should always satisfy this 
sense of justice which, is so strong amongst natives. However I do 
not think this respect ought to be pushed too far. 

Native Commissioners are quite right when they aim at a progres- 
sive change of the laws and customs of primitive collectivist people in 
the direction of more individual liberty, so that the principles of native 
society will be amended, and brought to the same base as ours, in course 
of time. The State has not the power of producing that evolution, but 
is must be favourable to it, and it must consider with sympathy every 
effort that is made to elevate and purify the social and familial system 
of the tribe. It has many means at its disposal to collaborate in this 
work, as we shall very soon see. 

The Christian Missions can alone bring about this transformation, 
acting, as they do, on the hearts of the natives, producing individual 
conviction in the consciences, opening a new horizon to the minds, 
creating amongst them a new society. For them the duty of fighting 
lobola is absolute, and I cannot understand how some missionaries 

think it may be tolerated in a Christian church. By them the tollow- 
ing reasons ought to be taken into consideration, in addition to those 
already mentioned : 

1. Thelobola, being a material means of concluding a marriage tends 
to lessen the moral conditions of the foundation of a true Christ- 
ian union, mutual love especially. We know by experience that indi- 
vidual love of a young man fora young girl, love as we conceive it, 
which was scarcely to be met with in the original collective Bantu 
society, is begining to appear amongst the best of our converts. This 
will become the right and powerful tie which will more effectually 
bind conjugal union amongst them. 

2 Lobola is intimately connected with polygamy, asa woman bought 
belongs to the husband's family and must be inherited by his younger 
brothers. If this man is already married, he is bound to become a 
polygamist. So is the only brother of many girls who is doomed by 
the custom to lobola for himself as many wives as the sisters he pos- 
sesses. 

So all the Missions, working amongst the Natives practising the 
lobola, ought to agree upon a decided fight against it with those 
moral weapons which spiritual bodies ought exclusively to use. And 
I would recommend the following rules to be universally adopted : 

1. Lobota is prohibited, viz., any Christian father is not allowed to ask 
for a lobolo when giving his daughter in marriage : he is converted; 
he calls himself a christian ; he cannot be allowed a practice which is 
the negation of the moral character of the human being. 

2. Inthe case of widows, be it well understood that, in christian com- 
munities, they are free as soon as their husband is dead ; that they 
keep their children and that, when they go home with them, no 
money can be claimed by the heirs, whether the woman has been lobola 
or not. 

3. As regards children, the moral right of possession of both father 
and mother in them is maintained to the exclusion of a special right 
arising from the lobola. 

4. In the case of a boy marrying a heathen’s daughter, we cannot 
prevent him from paying a lobolo. The father isthe master and, as 
we have no moral jurisdiction over him, we cannot oppose his claim. 
But, be it well understood, this payment will not give the new hus- 
band, who is a Christian, all the rights which accompany the lobolo 
under native law. It would be wise to ask for a written stipulation 
trom the husband in thiscase, as well as from the Christian father who 

 269  

gives his girl withoutlobolo. Let us be on our guard here ! The lobolo 
being a family property, if the father or the elder brothers do not 
claim it, being Christians, another heathen relative will always appear 
on the scene and say: *‘ If you do not want it, I claim it! The girl 
is ours!” I shall discuss this eventuality later on. 

5. When Christian girls, depending upon a heathen father, wish to 
free themselves from the lobola, which appears to some of them to be 
a degrading sale, they ought to be encouraged to save money in order 
to redeem themselves. We have seen many cases in which this proof 
of energy given by girls has been a blessing for them and for the 
Church. The same applies to a young widow. who wishes to lead a 
pure life and to avoid becoming the wife of a polygamist heir. 

Should all missionaries agree on these points, the practice of lobola 
would soon disappear. But the aid of the State, which I think is desi- 
rable and quite legitimate, if it keeps within the limits of its proper 
domain, could hasten considerably this evolution of native society and 
the disappearance of this objectionable custom. 

How can a Colonial Government collaborate in this transformation ? 

1. By an official registry department, particularly a registry of mar- 
riages, by means of which the legitimacy of unions contracted before 
the Registrar will be established. This will meet one of the wants 
which the lobola custom filled, in the uncivilised state of society : the 
right of the father will not be contested, though lobolo has not been 
paid. Thesé native marriages might be registered in two categories, 
those accompanied with lobolo and those without it. 

2. By lowering as much as possible the sum required for lobolo. 
This is within the province of the tate. Everywhere the native chief 
has fixed the amount, which has varied very much. I heard the Por- 
tuguese Administrator of Manvisa very rightly suggest to fight the 
custom by reducing the price. Should, for instance, the lobola be 
fixed henceforth at £ 5, as money is now so easily found, this would 
in itself ruin the old heathen practice. The value of a wife would 
appear so much superior to that trifle that the whole transaction would 
appear ridiculous. Moreover any woman would be able to redeem 
herself from the servitude of the lobolo. 

3. Native Commissioners could also do much in assisting girls and 
widows who make the courageous attempt to free themselves. It 
could very well be enacted as a law that, any widow can free herself 
of the consequences of lobola by payment of & 5, or less, and that she 
may keep her children. Such a provision would be only just, as a 

Civilised Government cannot allow a heathen to force a Christian 
woman to become the wife of a polygamist. 

4. We would also ask the Authorities to recognise and proclaim the 
following principle : — When the first legal claimant, the father or the 
elder brother, the ‘‘ master of the lobolo”, renounces his right to it, 
no other relative is allowed to claim it for himself. This is very 
important. Indeed as the lobolo is collective property, it frequently 
happens that a heathen relative comes forward and says: ‘‘I want it”. 
Sometumes the Christian parents cannot, or will not, oppose his 
claim, It may even happen that a father has consented to give his 
daughter without lobolo and, when he dies, his heirs who may be 
raw heathen, will lodge their claim for the sum which the man had 
generously foregone. This is the reason why we should recommend 
a statement to be drawn up in each case of renunciation of lobola. 
This paper could always be shown to anybody trying to interfere with 
a lawful marriage, celebrated without lobola. In the same way the 
heathen heirs of a Christian husband, who has paid a lobolo to his 
father-in-law, could not lay claim to the widow. 

The eradication of the lobola will take long, but it must take place 
if native society is to overstep the level of collective social life, and to 
be raised to the status of a civilised community. There will be a tran- 
sition period during which both natives and their civiltsers will have 
to show much patience, tact and ability; many hard cases will 
arise. The story of Fos and Mboza, which I narrate in Appendix VI 
illustrates these difficulties. But, whatever they may be, the reform is 
worth every effort and I will borrow my conclusion from a native 
whom I once heard speak with splendid clearness and conviction on 
the subject. This man, an evangelist called Zebedea, brought an old 
native to me, named Tumben, a Christian who was still very much 
attached to heathen customs. They discussed before me this question : 
Must Tumben claim a lobolo owed to him, in order to pay a lobolo 
which he owes to somebody else ? The old man thought he was 
entitled to make his claim. Zebedea asserted that he was not, and the 
evangelist was right. Christian spirituality required of Tumben that 
he should renounce the lobolo because he wasa convert ; on the 
other hand he could not decline to pay his lobola debt to his creditor 
who was a heathen, and could not consequently accept the Christian 

OT”. — 

point of view. The case was hard. for the old man and the fight be- 
tween his conscience and his interest was sad to witness. Zebe- 
dea found convincing arguments : ‘‘ These lobola debts”,he said, 
‘are ropes which start from the neck of one and go to the neck 
of the other. Though your father dies, this rope still ties you, 
you keep tied to your father’s bones by this cursed rope! Others 
will get drawn into its coils and the strands become entangled round 
you ! Cut it and be free !” 

Pe PORYGAMY 

I. Origin and spread of Polygamy amongst the Thonga. 

Polygamy is uniformally practised all through the tribe. This 
is not to say that every man has many wives; the automatic 
regulation, by which the number of males is always about equi- 
valent to that of females and which has been recognised by 
physiology, has its effect also amongst natives, and, in ordinary 
circumstances, women are not more numerous than men in 
Bantu tribes. Many men are monogamists... not by choice, but 
by force of circumstances. Others are wandering about in 
Johannesburg, or Kimberley, and marry later in life, whilst girls 
marry much earlier. In the villages round Lourenco Marques 
the headman often has two or three wives. Three is already 
an unusual number. The chiefs, of course, take more, and 
Mubvesha, for instance, the chief of Nondwane, had as many as 
thirty. In the Gaza country chiefs go even further, at least 
they used to do so in the good old time, under Gungunyane. 
Bingwane, the chief of the Ba~Tswa, had taken so many wives 
that he hardly knew them and at any rate did not know all 
his children. 

What is the origin of the custom ? It might be assumed that 
it is a remnant of the old system of group marriage, supposing 
that Bantu have also passed through that stage of family evolu- 
tion. At one time all men of a group would have considered 
as their wives all the women of another group, and vice versa. 

It was a state of polygamy and polyandry at the same time. 
The fear of the matlulana (page 133) would have puta stop to 
polyandry, and polygamy would have alone survived. Or it 
might be supposed that monogamy existed first and that poly- 
gamy appeared in latter times, owing to the following reasons: 
1) Wars diminished the number of men. As women were not 
anxious to remain ‘* old maids”, and as the tribe wanted to 
make the anost of thempin order to iinciedse aud strenethen 
itself, the unmarried ones were taken by married men and so 

é¢ 

the polygamic family arose. In fact polygamy was very much 
fostered by the Gungunyane wars, during the historic period. 
Every year the Ngoni chief planned expeditions against his 
Ba-Chopi enemies on the coast, North of the mouth of the 
Limpopo. Men were killed and women enslaved, each of whom 
became the wife of her capturer. The position of these slaves 
was not very bad: however they were called timbloko, heads, (a 
word which has the same meaning as heads of cattle), and could 
be sold by their owner. A great many of these Chopi women 
were bought in and round Lourengo Marques, before the sup- 
pression of slavery. Hundreds of them still live there and are 
recognised by their very broad, coarse features. 2) The Jaws 
of succession which regulate the present agnatic Thonga family 
also lead to polygamy as a necessary consequence. A young 
brother inherits the widow of his elder brother, be he married 
or not. Should polygamy have begun in the second way, its 
increase in later times is not to be wondered at! It answers 
admirably to the Bantu ideal of life. As we saw, a man who 
has a harem, tshengwe (page 128), is a man who has succeeded 
in his career! This is the proper way of becoming a rich man, 
an ideal which is by no means confined to the black race! On 
the other hand sensuality develops very quickly in the polygamic 
family and its very development reacts on the custom and tends 
to foster it. 

Ido not think the origin of polygamy can be traced with 
certitude. However, there are amongst the Thonga some striking 
customs, giving to the “first” or ‘‘ great wife” a special 
position, which seem to confirm the hypothesis of a primitive 

monogamy. The first of these is the ritual incision made by 
the first wife in the inguinal region after the death of the husband; 
it is not performed by the other widows. (p. 198). In the same way 
the widower accomplishes this rite only after the death of the first 
wife and not when “ little wives” die. The second one is met 
with, in the rite of the foundation of the village; as we shall see 
in the next chapter, the first wife has a special part to play in 
these significant customs. When I asked Magingi, an old 
Rikatla heathen, why such a difference was made between the 
first wife and her co-wives, he told me: “‘ The first one is the 
true one and the others are but thieves. That is why it is said 
at the death of the first wife: the house of the husband has been 
crushed (a thhobekelwi hi yindlu ya kwe). When another dies, 
it is only said: he has lost a wife (a felwi hi nsati)”’... 

The kind of sacredness which surrounds the first wife appears 
even more plainly in the case of the marriages of chiefs. The 
principal wife of the chief is in one sense not the actual first 
one, but the woman who has been bought with the money col- 
lected by his subjects and whose son will be the heir to the 
chieftainship (See Part III). Generally the “‘ wife of the coun- 
try” is not the first in date. At her death the chief does not 
perform the incision : the first in date remains the first from the 
ritual point of view. All these facts show that, for the Thonga, 
there is a deeper, more mystical conception of matrimony than 
at first appears, when we consider their present polygamic family. 
For them, true, complete matrimony is the union of two persons, 
not of three or ten, and little wives are not much more than 
concubines. This feeling might very well be explained by the 
supposition that the race has passed through a previous mono- 
gamic phase. 

II. Consequences of polygamy. 

A happy consequence of the custom is that, in the primitive 
Bantu tribe, no disconsolate old maid is to be found. This is an 
advantage no doubt. I fear, however, when monogamy sets 

in, this unblessed singleness will follow in its train. 

oa eo ee 

But the evils of polygamy by far exceed its few advantages ! 

1) The first is the dreadful development of sexual passion 
which occurs amongst polygamists. White people, who have 
lived in close touch with natives in a head kraal where men have 
many wives, can bear testimony to the frightful excesses in 
which they indulge. See Note, 12, the observations of Dr 
Liengme at Gungunyana’s residence. 

2) A second evil, resulting from the custom, is the domestic 
quarrelling which prevails in the villages of polygamists. There 
is a special term which indicates the peculiar jealousy of a wife 
towards her co-wives, bukwele. The prefix du, in Bantu langua- 
ges, designates abstract things, ideas, feelings. It also is an indi-. 
cation of a place. Bukwele therefore also means the special spot 
between the court yards, where wives of one man go to insult 
each other (rukutelana). The story of Leah and Rachel, in the 
book of Genesis, can give some idea of the reason of such quar- 
rels ! Sometimes the husband amuses himself in developing 
these by no means edifying feelings amongst his spouses. 
Tobane says: -He will tell bad things (psitokoro) to one of 
his wives, his favourite, about another one who perhaps is su- 
perior to her. He says to her: ** You are much nicer than so 
and so! She is not like a woman (A nga twali lepsaku i wan- 
sati) ”. ‘The favourite will make haste to report to her superior 
what she has heard. She will make her notice that the husband 
calls at her hut more frequently than at the others... The su- 
perior becomes angry and people will say of the husband: “* A 
ni gudjulisana, a ni bandjisana ”, ‘‘ he makes his wives hit 
against each other”. He himself, after a time, will try to regain 
the goodwill of the despised one (a ta mu batela). She will 
violently repel him. He may even kill a chicken to bring 
about reconciliation! One can easily imagine the jealous scenes 
which occur in the village of a polygamist ! (1) 

(1) Here isa pretty little Nkuna song about bukwele, A despised wife 
sings : 
Rirakara ra mina ri khele hi wanuna, 
Wanuna a nyika dokori ya kwe ! 
My nice little pumpkin has been plucked by my husband ! 
My husband has given it to his favourite ! 

 “875  

3) Polygamy, when practised on a large scale, even causes 
the ruin of the family. ‘Two examples show this clearly. First 
the case of Bingwana, to whom I have already alluded. He had 
a great number of wives and used to place them in his various 
villages, viz., in the capital itself and in all the districts of his 

Phot. A, Bare. 

Chief Mubvesha with some of his wives (Nondwane 1907). 

kingdom, going round from place to place to visit them. But 
they were so numerous that he could not suffice them. So 
they were committing adultery wholesale with the men of those 
villages. The result was that Bingwana had hundreds of chil- 
dren and that, in the end, he married his own daughters with- 
out him knowing it. He died tragically. The Gungunyana’s 
yimpis surrounded his fortress (khokholo). His son, Sipene- 
nyana, fled during the night and he remained alone. Then he 

She sings this song to excite a quarrel... after which she hopes that she will 
obtain her rights. 

= 276 — 

shut himself up in a hut where he had gathered together his 
treasures and his gunpowder. He set fire to it and died in the 
flames. 

The second example is that of Mubvesha who died on 
Nov. 5 th rg9ro, a fellow of little character, whose intrigues cau- 
sed the war of 1894-1896 and who was installed by the Portu- 
euese, as Chief of the Nondwana country at the close of that war. 
(See Appendix VII). Heused to lobola the younger sisters of his 
wives (tinhlantsa) when they were still little girls, and had be- 
tween thirty and fifty spouses. But he was frightfully jealous, 
keeping them in their villages, away from all the world, under 
the supervision of a trustworthy induna. All the men were 
prohibited from crossing the large road which separated this dis- 
trict from the rest of the country. The result is to be seen on 
the photograph taken in 1908, when I paid him a visit in his 
kraal. He was a man of sixty five or seventy. His younger 
wives were over thirty; I saw one child only, called Nwa- 
dambu, after the surname of the Nondwane Portuguese Admi- 
nistrator. One child and thirty wives ! That shows the result 
of polygamy when practised under such conditions. It ruins 
the family. 

UI. Attitude to adopt towards Polygamy. 

Practically, what must be the attitude of the Government and of Mis- 
sions towards this custom ? 

1. As regards civilised Governments, having still to reckon 
with native law, they cannot at once prohibit every form of 
polygamy. 

But when they have established marriage registration, it seems that 
they ought not to allow unions posterior to the first one to be consi- 
dered as legitimate. These marriages ought not to be registered, and 
if this difference were strictly enforced, by and by natives would 
become more aware of the illegitimate character of polygamic mar- 
riages. In the Transvaal, the Native Affairs Department at one time 
tried to fight against the custom directly in the following manner: as 
every man has to pay taxes according to the number of his wives, the 

tax for the first wife was fixed at £ 2, and he had to pay the double of 
that sum for each extra wife. But the provision was abandoned 
later on. The taxation has, however, everywhere the effect of limit- 
ing polygamy. In Portuguese territory natives are taxed according 
to the number of huts they possess, As each wife dwells in a sepa- 
rate house, polygamists are more heavily taxed than others. 

Provisions like these are, I suppose, all that a Government can do. 
It cannot suppress polygamy as long as the tribal system still holds 
good. But whata law cannot effect, moral teaching can and, in fact, 
the Christian Missions have long ago begun to fight against this evil. 

2. All missionaries, who have lived amongst the Bantu and know 
something of native life, agree on one point: Polygamy is incompati- 
ble with the high moral ideal, and with the family ideal which Christ- 
ianity has brought into the world. Therefore they all work against 
it. They all also agree that a polygamist, who wants to become a 
Christian, must by no means be prevented from doing so. He is to be 
accepted as an inquirer and a candidate for baptism. But divergence 
of view begins on the question of receiving a polygamist into full 
churchmembership by baptism. We can distinguish four different 
points of view on this question, corresponding to four different cour- 
ses: the latitudinarian, the idealistic, the extreme and the midway 
course. 

The latitudinarian view taken by Bishop Colenso, for instance, is 
this : (I quote freely from Ten weeks in Natal, pages 139-140). ‘‘ Enforc- 
ing separation on polygamist converts is quite unwarrantable. They 
have been married according to the practice of their land. We have 
no right torequire them to cast off their wives and cause these poor 
creatures in the eyes ofall their people to commit adultery! What 
is to become of their children? And what is the use of our reading 
to them the Bible stories of Abraham, Israel and David with their many 
wives. etc, Let us admit polygamists of old standing to commu- 
nion”. The only difference which Bishop Colenso would admit, be- 
tween polygamists and monogamists, is that the former ought not to 
be admitted to offices in the church. The hope of those who hold 
this opinion is that,as polygamy is not to be allowed to young people, 
it will disappear of its own accord in the next generation. I am afraid, 
on this point, the reasoning might be wrong. Unhappily, natives, 
in the present low state of their moral conscience, are quite cunning 
enough to delay their conversion until they are polygamists, in order 
to enjoy both carnal and spiritual blessings ! 

The idealistic view is taken by those who are satisfied with a promise 
on the part of the husband, and his extra wives to have no conjugal 
relations any more, and allow the separated spouses to remain in the 
husband’s village, and the husband to care for them and their children. 
From an ideal point of view, the provision would be excellent and 
save much difficulty. But practically it is very dangerous, as we can 
hardly expect a native husband to keep such a promise made in order 
to be baptised. Sooner or later, itis to be feared that he will again 
make use of his rights; he will be thus led to deceive his missionary, 
pretending to be monogamist, but leading the life of a polygamist. 
Experience shows that, unhappily, this fear is too well founded. 

The extreme point of view. Insome cases missionaries have required 
not only total separation, a new and far away domicile for the sepa- 
rated wives, but that the husband should reclaim ali the lobola oxen, in 
order to break any tie still existing between him and them. This prac- 
tice may be legitimate when we have reasons to doubt the good faith 
of the converted polygamist. But it ought not to be commended as 
a general rule, as it would make separation almost impossible. Would 
the parents of the separated wife be ready to give back the oxen, when 
the union is broken, not from any fault on the part of their daughter, 
but only for conscience sake on the part of the husband? In this 
vexed question, we must put as few hindrances as possible in the way; 
as regards the husband, he must be ready to lose the lobola money 
which he gave for the separated wives. 

The midway course, which is followed by almost all the Missionary 
Societies, set forth in the regulations of the Berlin Society and in the 
report of the Anglican Conference of Bishops at Lambeth is the follow- 
ing one: Polygamists must not be admitted to baptism, but be accepted 
as candidates and kept under Christian instruction until such a time as 
they shall be in position to accept the law of Christ. (Resolution of the 
Lambeth Conference; See Edinburgh World Missionary Conference 
Report of Com. II). Wives of polygamists, on the other hand, ought 
not to be denied baptism, if they deserve it, as itis not in their power 
to separate from the polygamic family. 

This great principle being admitted, many questions of detail arise 
for which I would recommiend the following solutions: 

1. Which wife should be retained ? Is it the first wife, or the Chris- 
tian wife (supposing that the others are still heathen), or the wife who 
has the greatest number of children? No fixed rule has been adopted 
by any Mission, so far as I know, and each case must be judged on its 

own merits and according to the higher principles of Christianity, the 
husband being exhorted to follow the course which is the most bene- 
ficial, not to himself but to the others. 

2. The cast-off wives ought not to be rejected in any way. They 
ought to return to their parents, and their former husband ought to 
facilitate by all means their remarriage under the best possible condi- 
tions. I even think that he ought occasionally to provide them and 
their children with clothing, so that they should not feel abandoned. 
As regards food, they are not to be pitied, as, amongst the Bantu, it is 
the wife who provides the food for the family ! 

3. The question of the children is the most difficult, and sometimes 
it is impossible to solve it quite satisfactorily. When they are stil] 
young, they naturally follow the mother. Fathers find it very hard 
to part from them. Why? Doubtless on account of their natural 
love for them ; but, if you search deeper into their hearts, you will pro- 
bably find other reasons. Perhaps unconsciously they still think, 
according to the old Bantu law, that children, especially girls, must 
bring a material advantage to their father. When they really adopt the 
spiritual Christian point of view that a father has more duties to per- 
form for the sake of his children than benefits to derive from them, 
the separation is no longer difficult. 

4. Of course no Christian husband must be allowed to inherit a 
widow, nor to claim alobola should this woman be married to another 
man. 7 

‘* The change from. polygamy to monogamy must involve great 
difficulties and even hardships”, said the Bishops at Lambeth... ‘* No 
trouble or cost or self-sacrifice ought to be spared to make any suffer- 
ing which may be caused as light and easy to bear as possible ”... 
However the question at stake is most important. The very fate of 
the Bantu Church, and of the future society, depends on its solution, 
and a strict adherence to principle is necessary during this time of 
transition. |

THE LIFE OF THE VILLAGE. 

The Thonga village (muti) is not a hap-hazard agglomeration 
of people. It is a social organism whose composition is well 
defined and which is regulated by strict laws. After all, it is 
but an enlarged family: the headman and the old people who 
have fallen to his charge, his wives, his younger brothers and 
their wives, his married sons, his unmarried sons and daughters. 
All these people form a community whose life is most interest- 
ing to study. 

Let us describe its outward appearance, the laws of its 
‘“‘foundation” and ‘‘moving”’, its organisation under the head- 
man, the doings of its different members and the rules of eti- 
quette which are observed. If our first chapter has given us an 
insight into the internal constitution of the Thonga family, this 
will show us how their social organism, which is at the base of 
all the tribal life, manifests itself outwardly in the village. 

A. THE THONGA VILLAGE 

We have already caught a glimpse of it, from the inside, 
through the eyes of the headman Gidja (p. 126). Now we enter 
it from outside, as foreigners, with the curiosity of the ethno- 
grapher and the philosophical preoccupation of the sociologist. 

The Thonga villages present a remarquable uniformity all over 
the tribe. The same laws overrule their construction in the 
Ronga as in the Northern clans. Let us suppose we have left 
Lourengo Marques and reached the Mabota and Nondwane 
district, fifteen miles to the North, far enough from the town, 

where the ugly galvanised iron sheds have not yet sup- 
planted the old typical hut. We see, in the bush, on the slope 
of the sandy dune, a little forest of mimosa, minkanye, mi- 
kawakwa (Strychnos). In its midst nestles a village. Thonga 
like to build amongst trees, to protect themselves against the ter- 
rible South winds which very often blow across the plain, and 
perhaps also to shield themselves from the inquisitive eyes of 
people who pass along the road. The little community likes to 
live by itself, as it is entirely self-sufficing. This small wood is 
also used for other purposes... Thonga have not yet learned to 
build the kind of outhouse which is described in English by two 
letters only (W.C.), and they ‘‘go outside” (humela handle) 
in the little copse. The air is not very pure when we cross it; 
so we hasten to reach the village. The adjoined schematic draw- 
ing represents a combination of features observed in many 
Thonga kraals. It is rare that a ‘‘ muti” is as complete as this 
one. 

We first note the external circular fence (/ihlampfu). It is 
made of branches, thorny or not, one and half to two feet high, 
more or less rotten. It is not built asa protection against ene- 
mies. In this tribe, villages are not fortified, and, in cases of 
war, the only ressource is flight. The fence protects against 
spiritual enemies, the witches, as we shall see lateron. The 
path leads us straight to the main entrance (16) the mbarana, 
which is three or four feet wide. But the fence is open at some 
other places for narrower passages called psiruba (17), one for 
about every three huts; these smaller openings lead to the wood 
and are used only by the inhabitants to “‘ humela handle”. Pas- 
sers by, as a rule, do not enter by such back gates. They are 
private. On either side of the large gate is often seen a grow- 
ing tree and some poles, which clearly show the entrance. This 
is never closed during the day. At our righta little court with 
some broken pots which denote a fire-place, is the bandla (21), 
the place where men congregate. In front of us, at the other 
extremity of the circle, is the headman’s hut (1) or rather the 
hut of his principal wife. On the way to it, we cross the hubo 
(22) the central square and pass round the ranga, (Ro.), shibaya 

or shibala (Dj.) (18), the oxen kraal, when the village possesses 
oxen. They are rare now, the plague and Texas-fever hav- 
ing more than decimated the herds. Small enclosures at the 

Schematic representation of the Thonga village. 

1. Hut of the headman’s first wife. 2. Headman’s private hut. 3. Hut of 
the headman’s second wife. 4. of the third one; 5.of the fourth. 7 et 8. 
Huts of the two wives of the headman’s younger-brother. 9. Wife of third 
brother. 10. Wife of fourth brother. 11. Headman’sson. 12. Headman’s 
nephew. 13. Hut ofa stranger. 14. Lao of the boys. 15. Nhangu of the 
girls. 16. Great. entrance. 17. Back gates. 18. Oxen kraal. 19. Goats’ 
kraal. 20. Pigs’ kraal. 21. Square of the men (bandla). 22. Square of the 
village (hubo). 23. Fire places. 24. Ash-heaps. 25. Tree of the village. 
26. Shade-trees of the hubo. 27. Henhouse. 28. Storehouses. 29. Place of 
jealousy. 30. Tobacco-gardens. 

Drawn by J. Wavre. 

. 283  

sides are reserved for the calves, which are kept there when the 
cows go to feed during the afternoon. On the right a small hut, 
a conical roof supported by poles without a wall so as to let the 
air circulate, is the goats’ kraal (19). It may be placed some- 
where else, behind the huts, for instance; or sometimes goats 
are tethered every night by the leg to sticks round the hubo. 
The pigs are never kept on the hubo, but always behind the hut: 
they are newcomers in the Thonga village and have hardly yet 
won their ‘‘droit de cité”. Let us salute, on passing by it, the 
_ tree (25) which is, as we shall see, the mystical stem of the vil- 
lage. We might see, hanging upon it, a piece of clothing offered 
to the gods, or at its base a broken pot which is the gandjelo, the 
altar of the village. The gandjelo is often placed, by preference, 
among the poles of the main entrance on the right. The vil- 
lage tree, which has a ritual significance, is not to be confounded 
with the trees of the hubo (26), which are but mindjuti, shade- 
trees, under which one likes to sit. 

So we reach the main hut which taces the gate. It is the 
proper dwelling of the headman. In hut 3 lives his second 
wife, in 4, his third and in 5 his fourth. 2 is called shilubelo. 
Great personages, men owning a large kraal, like to build 
such a hut which is smaller than the ordinary ones and where 
no woman sleeps. It is his own hut, where people Juda, viz., 
pay their homage to him: a kind of office of the master of the 
village ! He may sleep in it and call his wives to come there. 
But he generally prefers to sleep in his wives’ huts, one month 
in each, according to the polygamic custom. 

Behind 4 and 10 is a mhala,a shed for the implements. It is 
built, as the goats’ kraal, without plaster walls and is smaller 
than ahut. There may be three or four of them in the village. 

The headman and his wives occupy the back of the village. 
On the sides live his younger brothers, one of them, who _ has 
two wives, in 7 and 8, two others, those who have but 
one wife each, in 9 and in 10 respectively. In 11 lives a 
married son; in 12 it may be a nephew, son of the head- 
man’s sister, or a son-in-law ; (see page 239). 13 might be the 
hut of a stranger (mulubeti), who has asked permission to stay 

a 284 =—_ 

with the headman of the village, as he wished to be under his 
protection. ‘The case is not frequent, but this can happen and, 
to be received into the mystic unity of the community, this 
man will have to ‘“‘ hlamba ndjaka” (See page 153), together 
with all the inhabitants of the kraal. The two huts near the 
entrance are, on the left, the Jao, where unmarried boys sleep 
(14) and tothe right (15) the nhangu where girls live. Often 
the nhangu is built behind the huts of the mothers, near the 
mhala; thus the girls are there kept under more effective watch. 
The boys of the Jao have to guard the door which they close 
at night where it is the custom to do so. The hubo and the 
bandla, the squares, are generally kept quite clean. 

In front of each hut is a yard (ndangu pl. mindangu, 23) 
which is also generally well swept. In the centre of each of 
them are some broken pots (mapseko), or pieces of hard clay 
taken from ant-hills (psirubu) ; it is the fireplace (shitiko), where 
the mistress of the hut cooks her food. The enclosure of 
the yard was, as a rule, made of poles or even trunks of trees 
planted near each other and forming a circular wall. Nowadays, 
especially amongst the Ronga, these yards are enclosed with 
reeds and can be built square, a single wall fencing off as many 
as three or four huts. The top of this wall is sometimes crene- 
lated. I rather think this arrangement is modern: the circular 
wall of the ndangu is an old custom and the proof is this: on 
the day of bloma, when the bride’s-maids and female relatives 
bring the bride to her husband, they not only build up the 
woodpile (shigiyane, see page 113), but, in the Northern clans, 
they must also erect a new ndangu which will be called tsa- 
ndana, and so people will know that in the yard there is a nhlomi, 
a bride, working for her mother-in-law! The ndangu is the 
place where women tell the folk-tales of the tribe to the children 
and to each other, whilst they attend to their cooking, or after 
the evening meal. 

If cleanliness prevails on the square and in the yards, the 
same cannot be said of the region between the huts and the 
fence. It is called mahosi or makotini. It is the place where 
old baskets and broken pots are kept. The chicken houses 

= 285 eas 

(shibablu, 27) are built there ; these are generally little huts, 
with reed walls, placed on a floor of palmtree boards, supported 
by four poles forked at their upper extremities. The ash-heaps 
are somewhat further on (24). They are called tala, and play 
apart in certain rites, representing, as it would seem, the place 
of desolation and of sorrow. (Think of Job and see the rite 
of ringela bovumba, page 191). The store houses (psitlanta 

Ae | 
Phot. A. Borel. 
The interior of a Ronga village. (Nondwane). 

(Ro.), psitlati (Dj.), 28) are close by and are built in various 
forms : little huts with reed walls, when made for the mealies, 
with plastered walls, when made to contain ground nuts or 
sorgho (madulu (Dj.). They sometimes are placed on a palm- 
tree floor resting on short poles, or they are suspended to 
the boughs of a tree. Pigs’ kraals (hoko 20) are to be 
found in the same region, sometimes they are placed even 
further in the forest on account of their offensive smell. 

Mealie leaves, heaps of makanye stones, broken mortars and 
out of use pestles lie about behind the huts. If anyone wants 

to keep the place tidy, he can plant pine apples there (30), or 
tobacco, or Chili-pepper (biribiri). Pumpkin plants often creep 
over all this disorder. Flowers of European origin are some- 
times seen on the hubo in the neighbourhood of Lourengo 
Marques, especially ‘‘everlastings”, white or pink which have 
spread all over the coast. 

Having now finished our first general inspection, let us add 
some details about the huts and the places in the village. 

The hut, the construction of which we shall describe later on, 
(Part IV) has an opening (nyangwa) of variable dimensions 
closed by a door. In some parts of the Gaza country it is so 
small that one must positively crawl to enter. Everywhere one 
must at any rate stoop low down (korama). As regards the 
threshhold (ntjandja wa shipfalo), it is not taboo to step over it. 
However the headman’s threshhold is dreaded because it has 
been treated with medicines when the hut was built : so it 1s 
taboo to sit on it; these powerful medicines might hurt and 
even cause death. In the middle of the black clay floor is a 
kind of raised circle, in the centre of which fire is occasionally 
lighted in winter on account of the cold. It is the interior shr- 
tiko. Cooking may be done here if it rains; glowing embers 
sometimes remain on it during the night and numberless babies 
have been burntto death falling into the fire, while their mothers 
were sleeping. At the left, on entering, is the sleeping place 
(shilawo) of the wife, on the right that of the husband. 
However they both generally spread their mats on the right and 
sleep beside each other. It is only during the taboed periods 
(menses, nursing times) that the husband must keep to his own 
particular side (p. 187). 

The back of the hut is generally occupied by the big basket 
(ngula) in which clothing, and seeds are kept. This spot is called 
mfungwe. In the roof (Jwangu) are fixed or hang a number of 
various articles : ears of sorghum or millet, cobs to be used as 
seed at the next sowing, assagais, sticks and knobkerries etc., 
and against the walls one frequently notices rough drawings 
made with white clay, or, in the vicinity of towns, chromos of 
Queen Victoria, Edward VII, or Don Carlos, as the case may be! 

The hubo and the bandla differ from each other. Bandla is 

a Zulu word which has supplanted the Ronga term shisiso, viz., 
“the place where one finds shelter from the wind”. Men light 
a small fire there to warm themselves. They also eat together 
in the bandla, and it is strictly reserved for them. Women are 
allowed to penetrate into it only when they bring the food. 
Boys must remove the ashes from the fireplace not women. 
The hubo, on the contrary, is open to all. Ashed is sometimes 
built. on it to afford shelter during the rainy days. ‘There are 
special acts always performed on the hubo: the cutting up 
(shindla), the slaughtering and butchery of animals and the 
feast of “eating the head”. The head of any slaughtered ox 
belongs to the men, and they eat it together on the hubo (See 
letter C.). It is the proper business of the young men to keep 
the hubo clean, and they sometimes assemble to pull up the 
grass which may have grown on it. In former times it was 
taboo to come to the hubo with sandals. Sandals are used for 
hunting and must be taken off before entering the village. 

Another place to which I have already alluded is the bukwele, 
the ‘‘ place of jealousy”, where angry co-wives insult each other! 
On our diagram it would be located between 5 and 4, for the 
wives of the headman. 

The Thonga village, this closed circle of huts, is a living 
organism. Allits members form a whole whose unity is remark- 
able. This common life never appears in a more striking way 
than at the evening meal. Let uslookat our diagram. In every 
yard the mistress of the hut has cooked her mealies and her 
sauce in different pots, and, when the sun sets, she distributes the 
contents (phamela) in wooden or earthen plates. The largest 
is for the husband. He is sitting on the bandla with his com- 
panions, the other men of the village, and the youths waiting 
for the meal. All these plates, generally carried by small girls 
or boys, converge on the men’s gathering. All do not necess- 
arily contain the ordinary mealies pap; some are filled with 
manioc, some with sweet potatoes, etc. The men attack the 
first one, all of them taking the food with their fingers. They 
pass on to the second plate and so on to the Jast one. Mean- 

while each mother has filled other smaller plates, one for the 
girls, one for the boys, one for herself. She has even sent to 
each of the other women of the village a little of her cooking, 
and the others have done the same for her; so each member of 
the community, when he or she has finished the meal, will have 
eaten a little of all that which has been cooked on all the fires. 
It is impossible to imagine a more perfect communism than this 
as regards food! I myself witnessed this custom of the evening 
meal in Spoon Libombo’s village in Rikatla. Amongst the 
inhabitants of the kraal there were two blind male adults, the 
wife of one of them being half blind herself; the wife of the 
other was an old woman who could hardly till a few square 
yards of mealies and ground nuts, and keep the birds and the 
hens away from them. Spoon’s wife and the wife of another 
man of the village alone were healthy and able to work nor- 
mally. So the whole burden rested on their shoulders, as the 
share the other women could take in the feeding of the men 
was necessarily small. However I never heard Spoon grumble; 
being the headman, he made it a point of honour that all the 
people dwelling with him should have enough to eat. Every- 
body who has lived with South African natives, has admired their 
wonderful readiness to share any food they may have with 
those present. Even children are much superior in this respect 
to White children. I attribute this virtue to the community of 
food which reigns in the Bantu village, and which is certainly 
one of the nicest features of Kafir socialism. The village life 
has not taught bad customs only to the Thonga. 

B. MOVING A VILLAGE AND FOUNDING A NEW ONE 

Large kraals similar to the one shown on our illustration, 
were more numerous in former times than now. It is rare to 
meet with such a number of huts and so many people under 
one headman. Why? Because, say my informants, the 
witchcraft superstition has considerably increased in latter times. 
Suppose the wife of one ofthe younger brothers die: the divina- 

 289  

tory bones have revealed that this death is due to a witch ; 
they have gone so far as to designate one of the wives of the 
headman as being guilty. No common life is any longer poss- 
ible. The widower will move somewhere else and build a 
fence around his own huts to protect them against would-be- 
witches. In this way many villages are dismembered by fear of 
witchcraft. Generally speaking the Thonga village can not long 
remain of any considerable size: it tends to fall to pieces. 

But there are other causes which may destroy the villagé and 
the idyllic life of the small community. Death of the headman, 
and lightning striking the village, are the two main causes which 
may determine this eventuality. 

Death of the headman. ‘There is a mystic tie between this man 
and the social organism which is under him. Should he die, 
the village dies also... It is not abandoned at once. The whole 
year of mourning will elapse before the moving. But as soon 
as the widows and property have been distributed, the successor 
of the deceased will go and found his own village and the old one 
will remain a ruin (rumbi). Should any one else die, his hut 
will merely be thrown into the bush and the village will not 
be abandoned. But should these deaths increase, then the divina- 
tory bones may order the place to be deserted, as it is defiled 
and dangerous. 

If the Jightning strikes the hubo, it is a very bad omen. 
The medicine man who has the power of “ treating the 
place struck by lightning ” is called in. Should he be able 
to exhume from the ground the mysterious bird which 
causes lightning, or at least the coagulated urine which it has 
deposited, and which is called Heaven (See Part VI), the people 
are allowed to stay. But if he does not discover it deep down 
in the soil, the village must move, as the presence of the mys- 
terious power of Heaven inside the circle of huts would bring 
disaster. This is a taboo. 

An other cause of moving is the exhaustion of the gardens. 
When the fields are “‘ tired” (karala) and do not produce suffi- 
cient food for the inhabitants, they leave the place and look for 

pastures new. In this case the bones will be consulted. 

Sometimes, even, the village may be transported somewhere 
else for the unique reason that people are tired of the place 
and want to change. If the bones confirm their wishes, they 
will move. — 

The Foundation of a new village is the occasion of most in- 
teresting and characteristic rites, which afford us a new insight 
into the nature of this social unit, the Tonga muti. 1 shall 
give the sequence of these rites first in the Northern clans, ac- 
cording to the description of Viguet, and secondly amongst the 
Ba-Ronga, according to Mboza. 

I. In the Northern clans. 

t) The headman goes first to examine some spots where he 
would like to build. He breaks small twigs from various trees 
and brings them home. 

2) The bones consulted help to make a choice. The twigs 
are placed on a mat one after the other. When the stone of 
the kanye (see Part VI) falls in a certain way in front of one of 
the twigs, this shows that the tree from which it has been broken 
is the one near which the hut of the headman must be built. 

3) Building material is collected. When everything is ready 
to proceed to the construction of the huts, the headman goes 
with his principal wife to the spot chosen. They leave the old 
village for ever. They must not return to it any more. In 
the evening they have sexual relations in the new place and in 
the morning they tie together some tufts of living grass. Next 
day all the people of the old village must come and step upon 
this grass. This rite is called to tie the village (boha muti). 

4) Then begins the period, of about one month, called bu- 
hlapfa, time of moving, which has its laws. Two great taboos 
dominate it: 1) Sexual relations are absolutely prohibited. 
Should any body transgress this law,’ he has sinned gravely 
against the headman ; he has stolen the village (yiba muti). 
The headman will be ill, perhaps be paralysed. The guilty 

woman will also be punished: she will not be able to bear 
children anymore; she will be “tied by the village” (bohiwa 
hi muti). The culprits have ‘* crossed the way of the master 
of the village” (tjemakanya). Strange to say, the headman 
himself is bound by this law. He must have no relations with 
his younger wives, because the village belongs to the principal 
spouse. Should such a transgression be discovered, the work 
of building will be stopped at once and the little community 
will find another place to which to move! Moreover the 
guilty woman will have to ask the principal wife for forgiv- 
eness. 2) A second great taboo is this: — No one must wash 
his body during the whole ‘‘ buhlapfa”, as this might cause 
the rain to fall and it would interfere with the building opera- 
tions. 

5) The building of the huts begins immediately, each man 
making the circular wall first. When all the walls are ready, 
the roofs are carried from the old village to the new one by all 
the men together. They lift each roof on their shoulders, 
after having removed the old grass, and go out of the village, 
not by the main entrance, but by one of the back gates which 
has been widened for the purpose. A broad road has been 
prepared through the bush. They follow it, marching as fast 
as they can, and singing the obscene songs which are reserved 
for special occasions (see Part VI). In these they insult the 
women who accompany them, carrying the baskets, the mor- 
tars, the pestles. ‘‘ The village is broken in pieces, so are the 
ordinary laws. The insults which are taboo are now allowed ” 
(Mboza). This suspension of morality in speech is only allow- 
ed on the day when roofs are carried to the new village. 
Some days later, again, the women will take their revenge when 
they smear the floor of the huts ; then they will also sing their 
songs insulting the men. But all this is done in fun. It is a 
great day of rejoicing for the ‘‘ tinamu ”, who tease each other 
as much as they like. A man can be wanting in respect even 
to his great mukofwana on those days ! 

6) When the huts are ready, the fence is built. The family 
doctor is summoned. The medicine man throws leaves or 

stones treated with his drugs along the circular line, where the 
headman intends placing the branches which will form the 
future fence of the village. This being done, the men erect 
the tence. 

7) Special precautions are taken for the great entrance. Poles 
are erected on both sides: but before they are put in place, the 
doctor pours medicine into the holes in the ground and also 
smears the poles with it at the bottom and at the top. Ma- 
nkhelu used to bury a black stone, taken out of the river, at the 
gate. ‘This stone had also been smeared with drugs. ‘‘In this 
way, J prevent enemies from entering. ‘Those who come to 
try their charms against us (ku hi ringa hi maringo) will be 
attacked by disease and go and die in their houses”. 

8) The building is finished. Nothing remains to be done 
but to ripen the village (wupfisa muti). Men and women assem- 
ble in two separate groups and ask each other if they have been 
continent during the whole *‘ buhlapfa”. If one of them con- 
fesses to have sinned, he has stolen the village from the head- 
man; the whole work is spoiled and must be recommenced 
somewhere else... If all the members of the community have 
behaved well, they proceed to a purifying ceremony exactly 
similar to the blamba ndjaka which takes place during the mourn- 
ing ceremonies. Each couple has sexual relations according 
to a fixed order of precedence, one every night, and they all 
go to trample on the spot where the women wash their hands. 
The principal wife is the last to perform these rites. 

9) Then comes the drawing to himself of the village by the 
headman (kokotela muti). At dawn, after the night when she 
has had her ritual sexual relations with the headman, his prin- 
cipal wife takes his shield and his assagais and stands at the 
main entrance, everyone being present. Outside is a thorny 
branch prepared for the occasion. In her martial attire, she 
drags this branch to the entrance and closes it. 

10) Having closed the village in that way, she performs a 
sacrifice. She sips a mouthful of water from a tumbler, spit- 
ting out a portion of it (phahla) towards the people ; then she 
washes her hands, and throws a little of the water towards them 

_ 
in order to give them the village. This act is accompanied by the 
following words: ‘‘ Be not tied by the village! Bring forth 
children ; live and be happy and get everything. You gods, 
see! I have no bitterness in my heart. It is pure. I was 
angry because my husband abandoned me, he said I am not 
his wife ; he loved his younger wives. Now, this is finished in 
my heart. We shall have friendly relations together...” The 
prayer being concluded, the headman goes to the main entrance, 
pushes the thorny branch aside, and opens the village. 

11) The last act is the khangula, the inauguration ceremony. 
Beer is prepared, neighbours invited and they all drink together, 
the neighbours coming to see the new village (ku bona mutt). 

As regards the cld one, when the moving has been accomp- 
lished through the back door widened for the purpose, one of 
the inhabitants closes the main entrance with a branch. Hence 
comes the expression which is applied to a village all of whose 
inmates have died, and which has, on that account, disappeared : 
‘Those people have all died and there has not been even one 
left to close the gate ”. 

IJ. In the Ba-Ronga Clans. 

The sequence of the rites for the removal of a village is very 
much the same as in the Northern clans. 

1) The headman examines some spots and consults the 
bones : “‘ Must I built at such and such a tree ?” 

2) When the tree has been designated, he goes to it and 
places at its foot his furniture (nyundju) and his worshipping 
metensil, his altar, (a pot, a jar, see Part VI). ‘The altar may be 
placed at the main entrance later on, ifthe bones so order it. As 
already mentioned, there will be a mystic relation between him 
and that tree. He must never cut it. Should any of the branches 
be troublesome and he wants to remove them, he must ask 
some one else todo it. At the day of his death, or rather when 
his hut is crushed down, a branch of that tree will be put on 

ae a 
the place where was the threshhold, and another one used to 
close the main entrance of the village; a new entrance being 
then made through the fence and used as the gate during the 
rest of the mourning period. 

3) He has sexual relations in the new spot on the first night 
with his principal wife: in this way he will fuya muri, viz. 
“‘ possess this tree”, and also fuya muti, “ possess the village”. 
The Ronga fuya corresponds here also to the boha of the Northern 
clans (Compare boha puri and fuya nwana, page 56). If some- 
one precedes him in sexual intercourse, he is guilty : he has 
“preceded the village” (rangela muti). By this act the head- 
man has definitely left the old village. The other people can 
go back to it to fetch what remains; for him it is taboo. 

4) The same day, all the inhabitants come and move all the 
roofs, if it is possible to do so in one day. One hut is rapidly 
built to afford shelter to the inhabitants, in case of rain. The 
first roof to be transported is that of the hut of the principal 
wife. This is also done with accompaniment of obscene songs. 
These songs are not allowed when only one hut is transported, 
a case which may happen when some one goes to live in another 
village. It is decidedly a custom which goes with the moving 
of a whole village. 

5) The following day two huts are erected, one for the men, 
the other for the women, because they must not sleep together. 
“They are still in the bush; it is buhlapfa; the village is not 
yet firm”. Those who break this law cause havoc to the head- 
man. The bones will soon reveal that ‘“‘ he has been preceded 
as regards the village; (a rangeliwile muti).” All the huts are 
smeared twice; the women begin to sleep in them, but not the 
men. The fence and the main entrance must first be prepared. 

6) The main entrance (mharana). The men pull up the grass 
all the way from the back hut to the place where the main 
entrance must be, so as to make a road all through the village. 
All the dried plants weeded out during this operation are care- 
fully gathered in a heap. The headman, on the advice of the 
medicine man, cuts from certain very vigorous trees two 
branches which can live when transplanted, such as the nkanye 

and the ntjondjo. He digs a hole on both sides of the entrance 
and puts the branches into them. Across the gate, he buries a 
third branch of the ndjopfa tree, that ‘‘ which causes oblivion” : 
this will be smeared with special drugs in order to increase its 
efficacy; it is intended to prevent the baloyi, the witches and 
the people speaking bad words (litt. ‘‘ with bad lips’’), from 
thinking about the village and spoiling it. 

7) On the evening of that day, the headman and his principal 
wife have intercourse in their hut and, at dawn, while it is still 
dark, they go and wash their hands at the main entrance. Mboza 
does not say that all the other couples must do the same, or 
trample on the spot. In Nondwane this is sufficient and the rite 
does not-apply to the other couples. But at Manyisa, midway 
between Lourengo Marques and Khosen, where the Djonga cus- 
toms are sometimes met with, all the couples must have relations, 
one after the other, according toorder of precedence. It is deemed: 
so important to keep the due order in this “‘giving to each 
other the right of resuming sexual life” that, should an elder 
brother have been absent when the village moved, on his return 
he must undergo a special treatment in a neighbouring village, 
during a few days, to avoid any bad consequences resulting from 
having been unlawfully ‘‘ preceded” (rangeliwa). 

8) After the night during which this sexual rite has taken 
place, at daylight, all the dried grass is piled in front of the 
main hut and burnt ritually. The headman throws into the 
fire a special medicinal pill in order to give the village over to his 
people (nyiketa muti). They all warm their bodies at the fire, 
and go and set light to all the other heaps of dried grass which 
they made when clearing the soil. 

9) The medicine man comes on that same day, and sprinkles 
the fence with his drugs, in order to protect the village against 
bush fires, wizards and disease. He walks all round the fence 
saying : “‘ Nice village! May misfortune not enter here! 
These are my drugs!” — He starts from one of the poles of 
the main entrance and finishes his walk at the other one, hanging 
upon it the branch with which he was sprinkling. | 

10) Then he sacrifices with a hen. A young man accompa- 

= 296 _— 

nying him cuts its throat; the doctor plucks some feathers from 
the neck, sacrifices in the ordinary way and invokes his gods : 
“You used to treat villages (daha miti) with these drugs and I 
do the same; I do not act of my own wisdom. You have 
given it to me; bless this place, etc.” Then he plucks a feather 
from the hen’s right wing, and suspends it at the main entrance 
or in the main hut, inside, over the door, according to the 
directions given by the bones. This is the shirungulo (see Part 
V1) and the act is called : ** to tie the village” (tjimba muni: 

Amongst the Ronga, there are some other bublapfa taboos : — 
It is not allowable to light any fire in a village before it is entirely 
built. During the whole building period, cooking is done 
outside the fence; crushing mealies in the mortars and- dancing 
are also prohibited. Whistling (ku ba noti) is forbidden, as it 
might call the wizards inside the village before it has been pro- 
tected by the charms. 

When a man has many wives, he might build a second village 
for himself and establish one of them there. A grown-up son, 
the son of the woman, will represent the headman in that village, 
but the law of “tying the village” will also be observed in this 
case. The headman will perform the act with that woman, and 
preside at the burning of the dried grass and of the medicinal 
pill, by which he gives the village to the inhabitants. 

When a younger brother, or a son, leaves the headman and 
founds a village for himself (tihambela muti), he does it accord- 
ing to the same laws as those observed at the regular moving 
of a village. 

III. Some remarks about the rules of moving. 

Let us now analyse the two parallel sequences of rites which we 
have just described, and whichcomplete each other. It is easy to dis- 
cover amongst them three series of rites, social, protective and pas- 
sage rites. 

1) Social rites. The muti, as we have seen, is a little organised 
community having its own laws, amongst which the most important 

seems to be the law of hierarchy. The elder brother is the uncon- 
tested master and no one can supersede him. He is the owner of the 
village... No one must “steal it” from him. Should any onedo so, 
the whole community would suffer and no children would be born: 
the life of the organism would be deeply affected ; this is the reason 
why the headman must go first with his principal wife to have rela- 
tions with her in the new village, and thus fake possession of it or tte it. 
For this same reason, when the headman dies, the village must move. 
It is taboo to remain in it. As long as the inheritance has not yet 
been distributed, it is still bis home (kwa kwe); but as soon as the 
ceremony has taken place, the villagers must go away, and close the 
door with a thorny branch. The part played by the principal wife in 
all these ceremonies is most remarkable. It is absolutely imperative 
that the headman should ‘‘ tie the village” with her, and not with ano- 
ther of his spouses. Should she be very old, the law must be observed 
all the same; should she be ill, unable to have sexual relations, the 
village can simply not be moved. In the Northern clans we see her 
taking the shield and the assagai, closing the village and ‘< giving it” 
to the inmates, even performing a sacrifice and praying to the gods. 
It is very rare to see a woman presiding at a public religious act: but 
she is the owner of the village as well as the headman. Moving is 
imperative when she dies as well as after the death of the headman. 
The main gate must also be closed and a new entrance made in the 
fence to be used during the year of mourning ; in the case of her 
death, this opening must be made on the left of the regular mharana, 
whilst, when the husband dies, it is made on the right side ; just the 
same as in the hut, when the corpse is removed for burial. (See 
page 138). 

2) Protective rites. ‘These are those which concern the fence. This 
fence does not afford material protection. The branches dry up very 
soon and, in the case of a bushfire, for instance, they would do more 
harm than good. It isa spiritual protection, a barrier of charms, of 
magic influences, to prevent the entrance of wizards and of all the 
hostile powers of the bush. We shall understand this better when 
treating of the witchcraft superstitions. (Part VI). 

3) Passage rites. The reader will have been astonished to notice, 
amongst the ceremonies of the moving of villages, many features 
which we have already met within the circumcision school, or in the 
mourning customs. At first sight there seems'to be no relation what- 
ever between the moving of a village, the initiation of boys and the 

 298  

mourning over the dead. The inner connexion existing between these 
three events is that, in all of them, there is a passage. Hence the 
ressemblance of the rites. This striking similarity is, for me, the best 
proof that the passage rites form a peculiar category. When a head- 
man has decided to move, he leaves his old kraal, he separates from 
it, not by the ordinary gate, but by a special opening made at the back 
of the village. He is not allowed to return to it any more. Then, 
for him and for all his people, begins a marginal period of one month 
or more, the buhlapfa (notice the prefix bu which indicates a 
period here, asin busahana, (page 40). We see, during these few 
weeks, the village put beyond the pale of society. The ordinary) 
laws suspended (licencious songs), and many special taboos enfor- 
ced (prohibition of sexual relations, fire taboo, water taboo, etc.), just 
as in the period of mourning ; at last the village comes back to the 
ordinary course of life by a final act of purification, the mysterious 
hlamba ndjaka, which seems to be the most powerful means of cleansing 
the collective life. This last ceremony shows that, here, the marginal 
period has been instituted on account of the uncleaness, impurity 
of the old village. Let us remember that in most cases the village 
has been moved on account of death! All the adult members of the 
social] organism take part in the cleansing (at least in the Northern 
clans) and so the village begins a new and purified life. No one can 
deny the deep significance of all these rites and the mystic conception 
of the Thonga village. 

C. THE HEADMAN AND THE ORGANISATION 
OF THE VIELAGE 

Each village thus possesses its superior (hosi), its master. He 
is called munumzane or numzane, a curious expression which 1s 
also employed in Zulu; it means owner of a kraal, gentleman, 
and is often used in saluting grown up men. We _ have 
seen the mystic relation between the headman and his muti. 
The village, the muti, is the primitive social organism. The 
clan (tiko), which is the gathering of all the miti, reproduces 
all the features of the village life on a large scale. Sothe numzane 
corresponds to the hosi, chief ofthe tribe. Both certainly possess 

= 39 — 
great authority, but it must not become tyrannical. They must 
govern for the benefit of their subordinates. 

This peculiar position of the numzane amongst his people is 
illustrated, in a striking way, by the laws of distribution of the 
joints of meat on the day when the headman kills an ox to 
feast them. The various portions-must be distributed to the 
relatives according to the place which they occupy in the family. 
The headman, nominal proprietor of the ox, will keep the 
breast (shifuba). This is not only the sternum and the ribs, but 
most of the viscera which are contained in them. The tripe, 
the heart, the kidneys will be put all together inside the stomach, 
and constitute what is catled nkopfu wa homu. The headman will 
probably send the heart and the kidneys to his wives (tinkosi- 
kazi, his queens!). The brother who comes next will receive 
one of the hindlegs. The third in rank one of the forelegs. 
The elder son will eat the second hindleg, and the younger 
son the second foreleg. They will eat this meat with their 
families, or houses (tiyindlu). This custom is very old. (1) 

Let us continue the distribution. To the brothers-in-law, or 
tothe relatives-in-law generally, the tail is sent. It is the portion 
of the sister. But this does not only consist of the tail properly 
speaking ; it comprises all the hind parts of the animal, especially 
the rump (kondjo). The malume (maternal uncle) receives 
part of the loins (muhlubula). The liver is put aside for the 
erandfather and the old people generally, because it is soft and 
they have no teeth to gnaw the bones. The head belongs to all 

(1) This custom is illustrated in a very interesting manner by the relative 
position of the three clans occupying the South of the Bay. ‘They all are 
descended from Tembe (See page 23). Tembe, the ancestor, representing the 
elder branch of the royal family, ate the chest. He was the superior (hosi), 
and this rank is still held by his descendants in the direct line. Sabi or 
Mpanyele, the second brother, or son of the second brother, ate the hindleg ; he 
was established later on in the Mathuthweni district, between Tembe and Ma- 
putju. Maputju, the younger brother, head of the third branch, ate the foreleg. 
But he revolted against his elder brother and carved out for himselfa kingdom 
which very soon became stronger than those of Tembe and Mathuthweni. 
Mathuthweni became more or Jess independant. But when people want to 
remind the Maputju people of their inferior origin, they say to them: ‘‘ Tembe 
ate the breast, Sabi the hindleg and Maputju the foreleg !” 

the men of the village who must eat it on the hubo, as we have 
seen. ‘They may give the tongue (ndjaka) to the old men. It 
is taboo for the women to eatit, or the under lip (See p. 185). 
From each limb a small piece is taken away (tshumbuta) and 
placed on a skewer; it is the portion of the shepherds and of 
the butchers, (makotjo ya babyisi). (See the tale of Piti, Chants 
et Contes des Ba-Ronga, page 152). Sometimes the shepherds 
also receive the lungs and the spleen. 

This way of distributing ox meat is called ‘‘ ku thhaba homu 
ba hamba milao ”’, viz., ‘‘to kill an ox according to rule ”. 
Should a younger brother or a son kill an ox, he will send the 
breast to the master of the village, but he keeps all the limbs and 
does not observe the rules because, as he says: “‘ It is enough 
to pay taxes to the chief of the country”. Often one of the 
legs is sent to the chief of the clan. 

Strange to say when a goat is killed none of these prescribed 
rules are followed as they only concern the oxen. 

These customs show clearly the position of the headman : 
he is the master, but also the father of his subordinates, and 
their provider. 

1) He must watch over the village (basopa, Dutch word passop, 
universally adopted by the natives). During the night, if his 
son is away working in Johannesburg, he takes care that no 
lovers come into the huts of his daughters-in-law, (a langusa 
bumbuye), and if he happens to catch one, he will make him pay 
the Te: | 

2) He isa true justice of peace amongst the inmates of the vil- 
lage, doing his best to maintain good relations amongst them. 
Suppose for instance that the pigs belonging to one of the inha- 
bitants come out of their enclosure and spoil the gardens of ano- 
ther man. This man will go and say to the owner of the 
pigs: ‘‘Such and such a thing has happened, please close the 
pig’s kraal more carefully”. Should the same thing happen a 
second time, he will complain to the numzane. The headman 
will then go to the culprit and say : ‘* You have not taken notice 
of the warning; you must pay compensation (djiha)”. If the 
culprit listens to the ‘‘ voice of the blood” (bushaka), he will’ 

obey and the matter will end smoothly; if not, the headman 
can only keep silent : he has no soldiers, no means of enforc- 
ing his judgment; the plaintiff will then go to the chief of the 
tribe to complain. The case will be judged before the Court, in 
the capital, because the offender has refused to follow the way 
of persuasion, he has ‘‘ mocked the family love” (a yalile bushaka). 
Such misdemeanours are very frequent in the life of the village. 
Most of the natives bear philosophically with these annoyances. 
Should, however, some one be truly wicked, and weary the 
patience (wa ku karata), he will be forced to build a hut for him- 
self, alone, outside the village. If the damage is done by chil- 
dren, if they have stolen sweet potatoes, as we have seen, the 
wronged proprietor gives them a good thrashing but does not 
claim a fine. Occasionally the headman himself thrashes them 
in presence of their own father, and the father will say to them: 
“You see the numzane will beat you if you are not good”’. 
Children who mock cripples are also severely beaten by him, all 
the more so.as, in this case, the offended one has the right of 
claiming a fine. 

3) The headman also possesses the authority over his younger bro- 
thers and his children. He can even confiscate their money if 
one of them be addicted to drinking and ruin his property. 
However his authority in this respect must not be overstepped, 
and the headman must take care how he exercises it, as it is based 
more or less on sufferance. The younger brothers, for instance, 
maintain the right of making contracts, especially lobola con- 
tracts. Should the numzane restrict their liberty too much, they 
will leave him and found their own villages. A successful head- 
man is he who knows how to keep the whole family together 
to the general satisfaction. 

4) The headman has also the right of imposing statute labour, 
especially when the oxen kraal must be rebuilt, or when the 
weeds must be removed from the hubo; he sends his young men 
todo the work. But he must not exact too much from his 
people or forget to feast them, with beer or with meat when the 
work is finished. 

5) Lastly the headman presides over all the discussions which take 

place in the village. He is the master of the hubo. The dis- 
cussion can be conducted in three different places: when it deals 
with a secret matter, the men go inside the hut: they debate the 
matter indoors (ba bulabula ndlwen). The private questions 
affecting the life of the village are generally settled there. Ques- 
tions discussed with strangers and those regarding which there 
is no secrecy, and in which everybody can take part, are dis- 
cussed on the central square, on the ‘‘hubo”. Hubo means the 
square and also the council of men of the village which the head- 
man summons there to settle matters (ku khanela timhaka). 
Should they be able to come to an agreement together or with 
their visitors who have come to bring a claim, the matter is 
“cut” (ba tjema mhaka), viz., ““ended”. In the opposite case, 
when they disagree altogether, the question will be carried to 
a third place, before the bubo of the chief, at the capital. (See 
Part IM): 

Everybody is welcome to take part in the discussions except 
women. Asa rule men speak as little as possible with women on 
these matters. If a husband hasa sensible, discreet wife, he mayask 
her advice. Butif he has agreed with his companions on a point 
and changes his mind after having spoken with his wife, he will 
be severelly blamed and accused of ‘“‘spoiling the village” (hona 
muti). 

The headman is more or less responsible for all the claims 
lodged against his subordinates. Should one of his younger 
brothers be prosecuted for a debt, the creditors will go to the 
numzane and he cannot say: ‘‘ This matter does not concern 
me. He will say to his brother: “‘ Pay your debt”, andjaim 
the brother has no funds, he will help him, if possible, but it 

is only a loan, and the younger brother will pay back the money. » 

As a rule members of the same family help each other in 
these matters. It is so much the custom that children are ex- 
pected to pay the debts of their deceased parents, even if they 
have not inherited anything from them. However this does 
not come from a moral sense of family dignity. They do it 
because the native authorities hold them responsible. They 
might be ‘‘arrested”. In the case of a father who has died still 

= ao; — 
owing some lobola money, the children will try to pay, but they 
will do it in order to obtain possession of the woman. Should 
a father have committed adultery with a married woman, and 
die without having paid the fine, his heirs are not considered 
responsible. On the other hand, if the father has been condem- 
ned as a wizard by the chief, and dies, his heirs must pay the 
compensation claimed. All these rules clearly illustrate the com- 
munism of family life and family property, under the supervi- 
sion of the headman. 

Should a numzane be absolutely unable to govern his village, 
the family council can depose him and put another man in his 
place. This council will be formed of old relatives, especially 
the paternal uncles to whom the younger brothers will go and 
complain of the misbehaviour of their headman. A younger 
brother will then be proclaimed and the elder will be despised. 
Dhey will’say: “Hi singe! “A fahla muti, a hinli hi mun” ! 
" lle is a fool! He breaks the village; he 1s overcome by the 
village ”, viz., not able to keep up his position. 

As regards the Jaw of succession to the headmanship, the se- 
cond brother takes the place of the elder one, and so on. The 
son of the elder cannot become headman before all his paternal 
uncles are dead. We shall find this principle also followed in 
the succession of the chiefs. (Part III). 

D. THE * DAILY IPE IN Ta VILEAGE 

From the oxen kraal to the huts, from the square to the little 
wood, through the doors and in the reed yards, black forms are 
going to and fro. Everybody seems busy. There is talking, 
laughing, playing and working. ‘The expression ‘‘ working like 
a nigger” is hardly applicable, for they do not kill themselves 
with work. It would, however, be quite as much a mistake to 
believe that the natives spend all their time in loafing about. 
Far from it ! 

1. Women’s occupations. 

Women, chiefly, are very busy. When the sun rises, they 
come out of their huts, wash their faces, and light a little fire 

Phot. H. Gres 
Spelonken women preparing the evening meal after their return 
from the fields. 

to warm the mealie pap which was left from the evening meal. 
In a small pot, they prepare a new sauce of monkey nuts to 
season it. The family takes its morning meal (fhlula); then, if 
it is the time of tillage, they go to the fields, the hoe on the should- 
er, the shirundju (conic basket) on the head, and sometimes 
the baby on the back. The whole morning they will dig up 
sweet potatoes, grub up their future plantation, or weed their 
mealies. In the heat of day they come back in order to pre- 
pare the evening meal. Sometimes, if the gardens are far away, 
or when they are employed in scaring the birds from their sor- 

= i 
ghum plantation, they remain the whole day in their fields, cook 
dein evening food there, poe it back quite hot to the vil- 
lage at sunset. (1) 

Many other home duties may oblige the woman to leave the 
fields at noon: her head always laden with her basket, she may 
go to the swamps, near by, and dig out a provision of black 
clay (bompfi). She comes back, mixes it with the fresh dung 
which she has taken from the oxen kraal, and, spreading this 
mixture with her hands, she will smear the floor of the hut. 
This work is called sindja (Ro) or kopola (Dj.\. Dust and ver- 
min will disappear at once under this plaster of black earth, 
which will dry in a few hours time. Woe to the woman who 
has not put enough dung in this novel kind of cement! The 
floor will crack! The clay will shrivel and, when people walk 
on it, it will crumble into dust! The work will have to be 
done over again two or three days later! But if the clay is of 
good quality, it will harden and last at least one week, the 
more so as neither wooden shoes nor nailed boots will spoil it! 

Another woman will go with her primitive axe in search of 
dead wood. She makes a bundle of it which she ties with 
grasses and she strengthens these grasses by entwining them 
with small twigs.(2) On returning to the village, she throws 
her burden on the ground, before the door of her hut, with the 
exclamation: ‘‘Hu!” 

Some others go to their storehouses, those small huts on poles, 
where mealies, monkey nuts in their husks, millet and sorghum 
are kept. They take what they need from these stores (tshaha) 
by lifting up the roof of the little hut, come back and empty 
the mealies in tothe mortar, whilst a friend rubs off the grains 
from the ears of millet or shells the monkey nuts. Two or 

(1) Ihave seen a Rikatla woman coming home under similar conditions, 
carrying her child on her shoulders and the burning monkey-nut sauce in the 
shihundju on her-head. Her foot caught ina root. She tottered: the pot 
fell on the baby who was scalded to death. 

(2) Men, when they fasten a bundle with a string, make a knot (ba fundju) 
whilst women twist with a little stick (sulela hi linhi); when a woman ties a 
knot, the two ends of the string will be at right angles to the string, whilst 
when a man makes it, the ends will be parallel with it. (Mboza). 

—_ 306 ieee 

three women seize their pestles and begin to pound, in measured 
time, the bottom of their mortars: Gu-gu-gu-gu. Quite far 
away, on the other side of the copse, this pestle song is heard 
similar to that of the flails when the corn is threshed in the 
barn. And the busy women stream with perspiration! This 
method of crushing the mealies in an erect position, by a vi- 
gorous uplifting and down bear- 
ing of the pestle in the mortar, 
is a very healthy one and gives 
to the Thonga womena straight 
and slender figure. In the tribes 
where the millet is mostly 
ground between stones, women 
who do this work kneeling are 
shorter and stouter. 

Before putting the mealies on 
the fire, women go down to the 
village well, their round pit- 
chers on their heads, to fetch 
the water they need. In the 
Ronga country these wells are 
simple holes dug in the sand, in 
the centre of the hollows. (1) 
Wells are generally surrounded 
by thorny branches so as to 

Shiluvane girls returning from the Bees the cattle from coming 

well. to drink and fouling the water. 

It must be noticed that it is not 

a spring which feeds the well; it is the underground layer of 

water which has been reached, and which always maintains the 
_ same level except in times of drought. 

The sun goes down on the horizon. The long shadows of the 
trees round the village lengthen on the square. Through the 
leaves, a few rays of sun still reach the fireplaces and pass 

Phot. A. de Meuron. 

(1) In the Transvaal, where there are rivers, water is taken from them, or 
from wells dug near the spruit into which the water leaks through the soil, being 
more or less filtered by this process. 

= 67 
through the smoke which rises peacefully from the various kit- 
chens. Between broken pots, or between the pieces of termitine 
clay which constitute the hearth on which the pots rest, the 
women place some pieces of dead wood and, when these burn 
away in the centre, they push them further under the pot while 
the flour is cooking (ba hlanganyeta ndjilo). Evening has come. 
The men are there. With a large spoon (nkombe) the lady of 
the house places the food (phamela) on plates of the size of 
small basins or dishes (mbenga). We have seen how she dis- 
tributes it amongst the inhabitants of the village. When all 
have finished eating, women wash the plates, put aside the pots 
which contain the food left for the next morning, and tidy up the 
yards. 

Whatever one may say, the day has been a well-filled one 
for the women. They are very rarely seen playing in day time. 
We shall see how they recuperate themselves in the evening. 

II. Men’s occupations. 

As for the men, their life is far from being as active as that 
of the women. They have not, like their diligent wives, the 
regular continuous work of preparing the food, without mention- 
ing the care of the children. The duties which fall on them, 
and which they are willing to perform, only require of them 
isolated efforts from time to time. 

As regards agricultural work, it is generally believed that 
men leave this entirely to the women. This is exaggerated. 
Amongst the Ronga each man possesses his own field which he 
himself tills, and this is an old custom, a special term being 
even applied to the field thus-tilled : it is called mpashu. 
He may sow seeds in it, but he does not weed it, leaving his 
wife to do this troublesome work for him and also to reap it. 
He makes only one exception in the case of the sorghum, con- 
senting to go and cut its ears. But he helps his wife in 
other ways, for instance in the conservation of the food: he 

< 308  

builds the little huts used as storehouses, prepares the tjala, 
viz., the mat stretched on four poles on which ground 
nuts are dried in the field, digs holes for the bukiri, the shelf 
at the back of the hut where the basket containing the seeds 
is placed. His wife does not think him a lazy fellow at all. 
When the harvest is finished, she takes the smaller cobs of 
mealies (makunhula), those which will not be kept, or the 
grains of millet and sorghum which are found on the threshing 
floor after the threshing, and with them she prepares a special 
beer to thank (tlangela) her husband for his kind help! This 
is the way of notifying to him that all the grain has been har- 
vested, as, whatever the collaboration of the man may have 
been, the mealies belong to him. 

The main work of the man is the building and repairing of the 
huts. This is truly an arduous job, but is not of yearly recur- 
rence. Every third or fourth year, they have to re-thatch the 
roof. The huts are built and repaired during the winter, from 
May to September. 

A second domain, which is exclusively man’s, is the care of 
the cattle ; the boys milk the cows, construct and repair the kraal : 
the little boys herd the goats, and the young men the oxen, as 
has already been mentioned. 

It is also the men who make all the utensils and tools used in the 
village, pots and other crockery excepted; mortars, pestles, 
handles for axes or hoes (mimphinyi), wooden platters, carved 
or forged articles, all this work pertains to them. They must 
also make the ntebe for their wives, or sisters, after the birth of 
the babies. This is probably the explanation of the curious fact 
noticed amongst native Christians, namely that they are much 
more clever at needlework than their wives. Big fellows 
are often seen forsaking the hoe to work with the needle, and 
there are fathers who make their own clothing as well as the 
dresses for their wives and children! 

Hunting and fishing are, of course, also men’s work... or pas- 
time. For some of them hunting is a true trade, at least such 
was the case in former times, before the White Governments 
placed strict regulations and levied heavy licences on that 

= oo — 
sport. We shall study, in Part IV,-the curious customs rela- 
ting to these two favourite occupations of the natives. 

A great part of their time is devoted by the men to paying 
visits. "They are very fond of calling on each other, and some- 
times they go great distances to see relatives or friends. They do 
not travel to pay visits only, but they frequently journey to 
claim payment of their debts (milandju). To regain the pos- 
session of a miserable head of cattle they willingly lose whole 
weeks! And what endless discussions in the hubo, when an 
unfortunate visitor comes to ask for his property! What cun- 
ning displayed in confusing the real issue and evading pay- 
ment! (1) 

The discussion of the affairs (ku khanela timhaka) on the 
square of the village fills also many an hour in a man’s life. 

So, on the whole, men have but little to do. One can just- 
ly estimate at three months the time required for the work 
which they have to do for the village and for the community. 
The remaining months are devoted to pastimes and pleasure. 

Il]. Games of adults. 

Having already described boys’ and girls’ games (p. 65 and 
173), I now proceed to those of the adults, as forming an im- 
portant part of the Life of the Village. 

1) Men’s favourite pastime in South Africa is drinking beer. 

(1) One day one of my neighbours, named Mandjia, was arranging to start 
for Bilene to ‘‘ follow his goods ” (landja bukosi ); he came and requested me 
to give hima letter. ‘‘ What for? Your debtors do not know how to read 
and I do not know anything about your affairs.” — ‘‘It does not matter”’, said 
he. The important point is that I should have a paper in hand. They will 
be afraid. They will think that I come from the White people with their 
authority.” I did not like to refuse a small favour to a neighbour; on the 
other hand I was somwhat reluctant to help him in a not too moral plan, so | 
gave him a letter addressed to the Portugese Intendant of these countries in 
which I stated that I knew him. It was a kind of pass .. What use did he 
make of it? The fact is that he came back with his oxen and I believe the 
sight of the mysterious paper was not without influence in ue. transactions 
which ended in the recovery of his property! 

There are no bars on the velt... But every village is from 
time to time a brewery and a drinking place. Beer is prepared 
in large quantities. As we shall see, the brewing lasts about 
nine days. Near Lourenco Marques, natives fill not only pots 
but big casks with it! One of the jugs is put aside for the 

Phot. A. Borel. 
Beer-drinking party in Maputju country. 

headman to try it. He must pour a little of it into the ga- 
ndjelo : this religious act is obligatory. Next day the men of the 
village assemble in the morning to sample it also, and, at noon, 
all the friends from the neigbouring villages arrive. Everybody 
is welcome. Even a leper can take part in the beer-drinking ; 
but he will come with his own calabash and they will fill it 
with a special ladle. As a rule near neighbours also bring their 
calabashes, but people coming from afar are not expected to do 
so. The beer is drunk withgreat haste. Before it is all finish- 
ed, the numzane puts aside a pot for his father-in-law, his 
uterine nephew, and the friend who invited him on a previous 
occasion... Of course after having filled their stomachs, men 

and women dance on the hubo in the afternoon, and especially 
in the evening, when the moon shines : the shouting sometimes 
becomes dreadful when drunkenness has smothered all musical 
instincts. Some days later, another headman invites his neigh- 
bours to another beer-drinking, and so people eat and drink 
together (ba delana, ba nwelana) as long as there is plenty in 
the storehouses. When provisions become scarce, one begins 
to spare the mealies. But the advantage of the poiygamist 
comes to the fore here: his storehouses are many and he can 
feast his friends for many months. 

These beer-drinking customs are essentially demoralising ; 
they are one of the curses of primitive native life. But let us 
remark that, as the making of the beer takes nine days, these 
excesses can not be very frequent, and the habit of drinking 
wine at the White man’s store is ten times more harmful, as, in 
this case alcohol is never wanting. We shall speak later on of 
alcoholism amongst natives. (See Part IV). 

Another pastime, very much appreciated by some, but not so 
general, is hemp smoking and theaccompanying saliva fight. Hemp 
(mbange) has been cultivated for a considerable time amongst 
the Thonga, especially on the coast, not to make ropes, but for 
smoking. The date of its introduction and its origin are 
unknown. The pipe used for smoking it is made of a reed (li- 
hlanga) with a small pierced wooden or stone ball (mbiza) fixed 
at its upper extremity. In the ball the hemp is placed and lit. 
The lower extremity of the reed is introduced into a horn half 
filled with water. The reed soaks in this water. With one 
hand, the smoker closes the horn and leaves only a narrow 
opening through which he sucks vigorously so as to form a 
vacuum. The smoke is thus drawn through the reed and the 
water into the mouth of the smoker. Its passage through the 
water cools it. Without this precaution the smoke would be 
too strong, stop the saliva, and make the man drunk at once. 
It is called shingwandja, when pure, and is not liked,.whilst they 
say that, when it has gone through water, it has an agreeable 
taste. It makes the smoker cough terribly but they thoroughly 
enjoy this exercise. Moreover it excites an abundant ‘saliva- 

tion, which is the chief requisite for their favourite game. They 
take a hollow grass, called shenga, and begin to fight by blowing 
their saliva through it on the ground. The simplest form of 
the game consists in squirting as long streams of saliva as pos- 

Phot. A. Borel. 

Hemp-smoker. 

sible. He who squirts the furthest, wins. But it sometimes ts 
much more complicated. In the adjoining diagram the reader 
can follow the wonderful combinations of this game, called ku 
tjhuma or Mazelana. ‘There are two sides, each with its pipe. 
Three men, A. B. C. oppose three others, D. E. F. First of 
all, each side protects itself by making a saliva fence, line X. Q. 
for the first side, R. U. for the second one. Unhappily for 

D. E. F. the saliva dries up on the point Z. W. and so their 
fence is broken. A. takes his advantages. He begins to squirt 
out his saliva on the line a, 5, c, d..., passes through the open- 
ing Z. W., and, having come back victoriously to e, he has des- 
troyed all the fortifications R. Z. Suppose D. wants to protect 
himself. He tries to close the access to his position by drawing 
the line f, g. But, arrived in g, he comes to the end of his 
saliva (a helela), and A. who started in h, having arrived in /, 

= 
LY 

ems 
e 
Se 

: 

é 
e 
' 
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Drawn by J. Wavre. 
Illustration of the saliva fight of hemp-smokers. ys 

turns round the point g, where his enemy has miserably stopped, 
and, going on, j, k, reaches the opening d and triumphantly 
ends his campaign in e! 

But E. of the opposite camp has noticed a gate in the barrier 
X. Q. The saliva has dried there. He quickly carries his 
blow-pipe across the battle field, squirting all the time, passes 
through the opening Y. He draws the line /, m, », 0 and so 
destroys the part Q. Y. of the fortification X. Q. Should B. be 
quick enough, he might prevent him accomplishing his plan by 
drawing the line p. g.... Andsoon! Young men, even men 
of ripe age, take an immense delight in those saliva battles. 
But the saliva must be blackish... It must be méjutju saliva, viz., 

saliva produced by hemp, and not the ordinary white saliva, called 
matjafula. Should one of the players try to supplement the 
blackish by the white, he would be disqualified... His enemy 
would seize him by the forehead, force him to lift his head and 
to stop his attack. If he goes on, however, the other will say: 
‘““What ? You come to me with matjafula!” This may lead 
to quarrels, even to blows... The hemp-pipe falls down and 
everything concludes in cordial laughter. 

ee ee 3 

'PhoE. A. Borel. 

Men playing tshuba near Rikatla. 

This hemp-smoking custom becomes a passion for many 
young men. To cure them their parents break the pipe, take 
a little of the soot which is found inside, and mix it with his 
food without his being aware of it. When this has been done 
three times, it is said to fill him with disgust for hemp... 
Similia similibus curantur.... We shall often meet with this 
medical principle in the Thonga superstitions. 

The most interesting game played by men, a game which 
fascinates them and which is certainly more refined than hemp- 
smoking, is the éshuba. It is at the same time one of the most 

widespread games of mankind. Mr. Stewart Culin says, in the 
Report of the Smithsonian Institute for 1893 and 1894 that, it 
is played under the same name by the American Negroes, and 
that it is but a variety of the mancala, the national game of 
Africa, which is found in many other countries, Ceylon, Indo- 
China, Bombay, Java, Jerusalem, Liberia, Abyssinia, Cairo, 
Gabon, Angola and amongst the Central African tribes. From 
the ethnographic point of view and for purposes of comparison 
it is, therefore, very interesting to note its rules all over the 
world. I tried (and I think, I succeeded), to discover those of 
the Thonga, which at first seemed to me incomprehensible. 
The adjoining illustration will help to explain them. The 
apparatus required is most simple. Let us imagine it played 
under its most elementary form, when two men only are 
engaged in it. Each of them digs two rows of four little holes, 
behind which he squats. They face each other. So there will 
be sixteen holes, eight belonging to 4 and eight to B. In each 
hole they put two stones, either real stones or fruit stones. 
Those of the kanye fruit are mostly used, but, by preference, 
native play with the nice grey shining seeds of a shrub found 
near the sea, and which resemble the marbles used by European 
boys. . 

N° I shows two players ready to commence, with the sixteen 
holes filled. 4 must always follow the course 4, 3, 2, I, 5, 6, 
7 aor aN Dla) 2.99) ds O97 Os, 5 

I]. Bstarts. He takes the two stones out of ROLE 6 and puts 
one ames, one in 1. 

III. He goes on taking the stones out of one hole and putting 
always, one at a time, in the following holes, till his last stone 
reaches an empty hole. So he chooses three which are in I 
and puts them, one in 2, one in 3, one in 4. 

IV. He chooses the three which are in hole 4 and distributes 
them in 8, 7, 6. The last one having reached an empty hole, 
he has succeeded: he wins and takes the stones of 4 in holes 
6 and 2, which are opposite the hole he has reached. This 
appropriation is called ku tha. Moreover he has the right to 
kill (dlaya) another hole by taking its contents. He chooses 

= 316  

hole 1. I represent the regular appropriation (winning) by a 
black dot, and the supplementary (killing) by a cross in the 
hole. Having beaten (ku ba, such is the technical word 

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Drawn by J. Wavre. 
The tshuba game and its laws. 

employed when a player has succeeded in taking his enemy’s 
stones), he stops and 4 starts. 

V. A starts from hole 5, takes the two stones, puts one in 6, 
one in 7. 

— 

VI. He takes the three stones in 7 and distributes them in 8, 
aoe 3'. 

VII. He takes the three stones of 3 and puts them in 2, 1, 
b. A bile!” —‘“‘He has beaten”. He wins the three stones 
of hole 5 of B, opposite hole 5 which he has reached. Moreover 
he takes and ‘‘ kills” the three which are in hole 8. 

VIII. Btakes his turn. He starts from 2 and reaches with his 
last stone 8: ‘‘A bile”: 8 was empty. So he picks up the three 
stones in his enemy’s hole 8 and the three in hole 4. He kills 
moreover the single stone in 2. 

IX. 4 who has now only three stones left, one in 1, one in 
5 one in 6, starts from 6, puts his single stone in 7 and picks 
up those of holes 7 and 3 of B. He moreover ‘‘kills” 6. 

X. B moves his stone from 8 to hole 7; he picks up 7 and 
in addition he ‘‘kills” 1! 

XI. A starts with his last stone from 5 to 6. But there is 
nothing opposite to him, nothing to pick up, nothing to kill! 

XII. B moves from 7 to 6. He picks up the last stone of 4 
who is thus beaten (a mphile). He has vanquished him! (A 
mu mphyinshile !) 

The rules are clear enough and this game does not seem to 
be very difficult. It is, on the contrary, very complicated, and I 
do not wonder why men sometimes spend half the day, stooping 
down on the ground, talking with animation and sometimes 
fighting when they think one of them has transgressed the 
rules. 

When the tshuba has only four holes in a row, it is called 
shimunana (from mune, four) and is not very exciting. But 
it can: also be played with 8, 10, 16, even 22 holes, and then 
it becomes very complicated. Six holes will not do (a psi thi), 
because successful combinations are impossible. I have also 
learned the tshuba of 16 holes. Let us suppose our two players 
A & B; we number their 16 holes from left to right, the 
outer and inner rows bearing the same numbers. A will 
start from hole 12 outer row, and will follow the prescrib- 
ed course all round his holes, going from left to right, 
until he comes back successfully to the same hole. He will, 

— 318 = 

shout: “‘tsheun!”, imitating the noise of a gun, and pick up his 
enemy’s stone in holes 12 of the outer and inner row, and “‘ kill” 
in B’souter row holes 15 & 13. - B will start from hole 14 of 
the inner row and reach 12 of the same row. He picks up the 
stones in the two holes 12 of A and ‘‘ kills” hole 3 in the outer 
row, etc. etc... Hours will sometimes elapse before one player 
has beaten the other. 

A single stone in a hole is called tshonga. ‘Two stones are 
called mbiri. If the following holes are empty, and if these 
stones cannot lead the players further, mbiri takes the name of 
mpalati. It is bad luck! (Compare N° IX, on the drawing.) 
When you arrive with your last stone opposite two holes full, 
and consequently pick up 4, 5, 6 stones atatime, itis luck! Itis 
malu. When only one hole is occupied and you win oniy one 
or two stones, it is muhaha. You have beaten ina ‘“‘ muhaha”. 
(U bile muhahen). When you do not reach the place you 
wanted, not having had enough stones, you are said “‘to sleep 
on the road”. When you start, full of courage, hoping to 
succeed, you say: I go to kill meat” (ndji ya dlaya nyama), and 
this word shows that the game represents two hunting parties. 
But it evidently also represents a fight as do most of the games ; 
thence the cries of triumph which accompany it. When one of 
the players happens to empty two holes with three stones in 
each, he says: ‘‘The fight is hot! (sha lwa). I have captured 
warriors!”’ If they contain but one stone, a poor tshonga, he 
says: ‘*I have only caught women!” 

Fighting and hunting are great sports for natives. Hence the 
popularity of the tshuba game. It has become such a passion 
with the men that they neglect all their duties to indulge in it, 
and it has been necessary, in certain Christian villages, to prohi- 
bit the tshuba altogether, as the whole male population was aban- 
doning their work for the game ! 

The evening games are happily not so dangerous for the moral 
well-being of the village. Women who have worked the whole 
day now take their innings. This is the tha par excellence, the 
most refined amusement, the story telling. It takes place at 
eventide. It is taboo to tha in the middle of the day. Those 

To — 
who would transgress the law would become bald (!), and persons 
affected with calvities are commonly and jocosely accused of 
having told tales at midday. So, when the moon shines, when 
all the work of the day is ended, all the inhabitants assemble 
at one of the firesides to amuse themselves. They rarely gather 
together on the hubo for that purpose, as the square is reserved 
for the discussion of matters of importance or for dances. The 
rejoicings at first consist in a parlour game, which is also known 
amongst Europeans, the guessing the charcoal piece (mhum- 
hana). ‘Two sides are formed opposite each other, women on 
one side, men on the other. One of the women, holding a 
piece of charcoal, puts it into the hands of one of the other 
partners, saying: “‘Dana, u shura nwanaaaa’nga”’, (eat and be 
satisfied, my child). Then both present their closed hands to the 
other side saying: ‘‘Mhumha!” The man opposite must guess 
in which hand the charcoal is hidden. He flips one of the four 
hands with his finger saying: “‘Give me! Here it is!” If he 
has guessed rightly, he has won, and then proceeds in his turn 
to hide the charcoal in the hand of one his own side. When 
they have had enough of this game and wish to finish it in the 
proper manner, they pull their fingers and make them crack (ku 
ba tindjwati). Each of them pulls a finger in turn. The first 
who is unable to produce a sound is expelled from his side. 
Then those who have been beaten make faces, as ugly or funny 
as they can, at their victors; these must keep serious and not 
laugh. Should they not be able to keep their faces, their vic- 
tory is lost ! 

But these games are only a preliminary. The farther we go, 
the nearer we get to true literature! Now they ask each other 
riddles (psitekatekisa), simple ones and antiphonic ones. We 
shall study this form of folklore later on... Ifthe second side is 
unable to give the right answer to the riddle, it asks permission 
to propose one in its turn and so the intellectual fighting goes on 
until they have exhausted the series of riddles they know. ‘Those 
who have had the worst of the duel must pay the forfeit by 
telling tales (tha psihetana). A woman might be present who is 
a renowned story teller and she keeps the whole company under 

the charm of her tale for half an hour, perhaps longer.... Chil- 
dren shiver when hearing the terrible story of the bogey man! 
They burst into laughter when she describes the funny tricks 
of the Hare, or of the frog Shinana. They approve heartily 
when the younger brother, despised by his elders, becomes their 
saviour and teaches them a good lesson... The Thonga lore ig 
very rich. It is one of the most interesting manifestations of the 
psychic life of the tribe. We shall study it with the attention 
it deserves in Part V of this work. Here it suffices to show 
what a great and happy part it plays in the life of the village. 

E. RULES: OF POLITENESS AND H@sPlraALiry 

The village life is dominated by the respect for hierarchy. I 
do not think this term to be exaggerated. Etymologically hier- 
archy conveys not only a moral but a religious idea. This re- 
ligious feeling is not absent in the fear felt by a younger bro- 
ther for his elder, because the elder member of the family is its 
priest, its only possible intermediary between this family and 
its gods (See Part VI). So no wonder if, in their mutual re- 
lations, though these are extremely free and natural, natives 
follow strict rules of etiquette. 

In addressing an elder person, it is not becoming to call him 
by his name. You willsay to him : ‘‘Tatana”, father, or ‘‘ ma- 
mana”, mother, as the case may be. Or you address him by the 
name of his father preceded by Nwa, if it is a man, Mi, if it 
isa woman. So Mboza was called Nwamasuluke, and Nsa- 
bula Migogwe. You may also say toa counsellor : ‘‘ Nduna ”’, 
to the chief: “‘ Hosi ”, to the headman : “‘ Numzana.”, to any 
grown-up man: *¢ Wa-ka-Manyana”, viz., man of sucha clan, 
or descendant of such aman. Even speaking of an adult, in the 
third person, you will not use his name but employ similar 
respectful expressions. After the birth of her first child, the 
mother is generally called after it, not so universally, however, 
as amongst the Ba-Suto. So Magugu, the wife of Spoon, became 

Mamana wa Modjadju, especially when spoken of in the third 
person. The names which are the most taboo are those of 
the mother-in-law, and of the ‘‘ woman bought with my oxen”. 
Speaking of a deceased person, one puts before his name the 
expression ‘‘ Matjuwa”, which corresponds to our: ‘ late ”’. 
The principle salutations are : ‘‘ Shawan”, — be saluted, said 

; 

by the arriving guest, — to which you reply also: “‘Shawan” ; 
‘* Hamban”, good-bye or 

¢ 

‘salan”, — remain, is said on leav- 
ing, — and you answer : *‘ Famban, — go, or ‘“* Famban kahle 
(Zulu)”, — go happily. Other greetings are employed only at 
certain times of the day: “ Avushen!” a kind of locative, ‘‘ at 
the dawn”, equivalent to ‘‘ good morning ”. (Vusha means 
dawn). “‘ Hi nhlekanhi” — it is midday ! ‘‘ A dji pelen” or ‘‘a dji 
hlwen”, —- at sun set, properly — time when the sun sets. 
When retiring to sleep: ‘‘ Yetlelan (Ro.)”” — sleep! or ‘‘ sibaman 
(Dj.)” — lie on your belly; or ‘‘hi ta pfushana”, — we shall say 
to each other good morning to-morrow! A curious salutation 
addressed to people working is: ‘‘ 4 psi fen (Ro.)”’, — let it die. 
Its origin is as follows : when a man had killed a large animal, 
a hippopotamus or an antelope, his companions used to salute 
him thus, hoping to share the meat with him. Now it is said 
to anybody working in the fields; it then means: ‘let your 
work die.” The word ‘‘ Nkosi”, with which natives salute White 
men, means Chief in Zulu. They lift up the hand when pro- 
nouncing it. It is not as if they were trying to raise their hats, 
as they do not wear any. The explanation of the gesture is 
this, according to a Transvaal native: the Boers taught black 
people to point to heaven, when saluting a White man, with this 
meaning: ‘* I compare you with the One who is above! ” 

In the Northern clans, salutations are generally accompanied 
with a clapping of hands (omba mandla). Men beat their 
hands against each other, putting them parallel to each other ; 
women do the same, putting them crosswise or at right angles. 
Amongst the Ba-Pedi this salutation with the hands is perform- 
ed in a somewhat different manner: when a Pedi enters the . 
hubo, and wants to greet a gathering of men, he claps his hands 

before his breast ; but when he salutes only one person, he 

bows down and claps his hands at the height of his knees, ei- 
ther on the right side or on the left. Amongst the Ba-Ronga, 
clapping the hands is a sign of thankfulness ; they do it saying 
at thesame time: ‘‘ I khani mambo” which probably means: 
“I dance before you, Sir”. (‘* Mambo” means chief imetit 
Djao language). In Djonga the proper word for thanking is 
nkomo The etymology of this word seems to be: “‘I homu”, 
‘itis anox.” Should anyone give me a hen, he presents it to 
me saying : ‘* Take my chick”. When he brings a goat he 
says : ‘* This is my hen”. In both cases I answer: ‘‘Nkomo”, 
“it is an ox! ” The Thonga etiquette requires that the giver 
depreciate his gift and that the receiver magnify it! Another 
less polite way of thanking is this: ‘* Yengetan !”, —‘‘do it again”, 
or ‘‘ ni mundjuku”, — ‘Sand also to-morrow ’”’! 

Thonga used not to shake hands hands in former times. Now- 
adays the civilised natives have adopted the European fashion, 
but this kind of familiarity is not approved of by the old folks, 
especially by the chiefs. Natives, when they shake hands, often 
do it in two movements : first they catch the four fingers and 
then slide on to the thumb. I do not know where they have 
learnt to do this! Kissing was formerly entirely unknown. A 
good mother would occasionally wipe her baby’s nose, but this 
can hardly be calleda kiss. When they saw the custom adopted 
by the Europeans, they said laughingly : ‘‘ Look at these people! 
They suck each other! They eat each other’s saliva and dirt ! ” 
Evena husband never kissed his wife. When coming back from 
a journey, a man would hardly greet his wife ; she would see 
him passing through the village, prepare food for him, aud when 
it was cooked, she would come and salute him by presenting it 
to him. 

Hospitality. When strangers enter a village men sit on the 
bandla, and women go further and sit on the hubo; they 
remain quietly there till the people of the village come and 
salute them (losa). Should the inhabitants delay too long, the 
.passers-by move on, saying: ‘These people are not good. ” 
But this is very rare. Generally the master of the village 
comes to them, inquiring who they are, whence they come, 

where they are going, and asks them: ‘‘ Do you wish to spend 
the night here?” If they say: ‘‘ Yes”, the headman will 
empty one of his huts by putting two of his wives together, 
and will himself sleep with the visitors. Should there still be 
food, he will give them some. If not, he says: ‘* Ndlala!” 
*«Starvation! ” After a little while, a mat is unrolled and the 
official ceremony of ‘‘ djungulisana” takes place. This is a 
very amusing custom. The headman sits together with his 
hosts and enquires about the news of their home. One of the 
visitors begins in a monotonous tone and emits with volubility 
a flow of words with a peculiar cadency and almost without 
taking breath. His interlocutor interrupts him after each sentence, 
with ‘‘ Ahina, hina,” that is to say ‘‘ Indeed, indeed! ” till the 
whole skein is unwound; the two men finish with a longer 
‘* Hina”, the inhabitants of the hut adding an emphatic ‘‘ khani”, 
a heartfelt ‘‘ thank you”; then the master of the village begins 
to relate in the same tone his own news. One cannot imagine 
anything more curious than this ‘‘ mélopée” in two parts. 

This law of hospitality is general all over the tribe ; nowa- 
days, however, customs begin to change ; hundreds of young 
men (magaisa) coming from the towns, having worked there, 
pass through the country, and it would be impossible to put 
them up and feed them all. They sleep on the dandla and 
cook food for themselves, occasionally buying some mealies or 
a hen from the inhabitants. Moreover they have plenty of 
money and they can pay! 2 

It must also be added that, if they dispense hospitality liber- 
ally, the Thonga can be very hard on people who do not 
belong totheir special clan. Feelings of humanity are sometimes 
strangely deficient. I heard of a boy of the Manyisa district 
who had fallen down near the lake of Rikatla, unable to proceed 
further on account of a bad wound received while working at 
the Railway at Lourenco Marques. Nobody took pity on him, 
because he was of another clan and he would have died there 
if a Christian woman, named Lois, had not received him in her 
village and nursed him. Fear of death and its contamination 
can partly explain this want of compassion for strangers. 

= 

As already mentioned, it was taboo formerly to enter the 
village square, wearing boots. These boots consist in sandals 
made by the hunters for their long trips through the thorny 
bush. They were not allowed on the hubo. A subject was not 
permitted to sit on a mortar or on anything else: the chief 
alone could do so, and it was considered a sign of pride to sit 
on anything but the bare ground ! 

The habit of offering a concubine to passers-by is never met 
with amongst the Ronga as it is in other tribes. Nowadays 
dissolute women may Offer themselves. But they have learnt 
rom White men this new kind of immorality. 

Po THE FATE OF THE THONGA VILLAGE 

What will be the fate of the little Bantu community, of the circular 
kraal of huts, well shut in behind its fence, under the shade of its 
symbolical tree, well ‘‘ tied” under the absolute authority of the head- 
man? If we look at the new native settlements, at the modern native 
villages, built under the influence of civilisation and Christianity, we 
shall be struck at once by the fact that they are arranged in regular 
streets. (1) This change is momentous and highly significative. The 
new Thonga village is no longera well defined family. It has become 
an agglomeration of families belonging to different clans, attracted toa 
particular spot by the European town or by the Church and the school. 
The straight line, with its capacity of infinite prolongation, has taken 
the place of the circular one with its forcedly restricted length. Con- 
sidering that the new ideas are now invading the Bantu tribe from all 
parts, it is certain that the old circle will disappear more and more 
and that the regular streets will be more generally adopted. 

From the point of view of the picturesque, it is a great pity. For 
the Ethnographer, the circle of huts, this curious Bantu commune 
with its striking laws, was ten times more interesting than the vulgar 
street of square houses or of galvanised iron sheds, which are a poor 

(1) In many Bantu tribes, those of Central Africa, even in the Ba-Chopi 
tribe, on the South-Eastern boundary of the Thonga country, the natives already 
have straight streets. Is this plan original or not? Isuppose nobody can say. 
For the Thonga, Zulu and Suto kraals, at any rate, the circular arrangement 
is a characteristic feature. 

imitation of European dwellings. However, from the practical point of 
view, this change is unavoidable. It even undoubtedly means progress. 

The native hut is nicely shaped. I prefer the Thonga form, a cir- 
cular wall on which a conical roof is placed, to the Zulu one, a bee- 
hive resting on the ground, or even to the Kaffir one which combines 
the features of both, having also a circular wall but with a cupola roof. 

~ 

ie ties Lee Oe 
Phot. H. A. Junod. 

Christian village of Shiluvane. 

The conical roof is a better protection again the rain. But all these 
forms of dwelling have one great fault: they are not healthy. The 
rays of the sun cannot penetrate into the hut, and, though the top of 
the reeds is sometimes not plastered and allows a certain amount of 
ventilation, the air cannot circulate, because the hut has no window. 
Smoke must make its way through the thatch and it is very difficult 
indeed to obtain any current of air inside. Should a new type of hut 
be adopted, with high walls, goodsized doors and windows, a roof 
slightly overhanging the wall, these faults would be corrected. But 
civilised natives have not tried to follow this plan. They have at once 
copied the European system, the same as with their clothing! How 

 326  

often we have longed to see them adopt some peculiar costume appro- 
priate to the climate and to their occupations! But when they cast 
off their belt of tails, it is to put on long trousers, and they all dream 
of a complete khakhi or serge suit! So they will build square houses 
and this certainly has its advantages : the dwelling can be divided into 
many rooms and the different members of the family can all live under 
the same roof, which, from the educational point of view, is a good 
thing. 

The communism of food is also a splendid feature and may fill with 
joy the most sanguine socialistic dreamers! But this custom has been 
severelly critised from the hygienic point of view. The habit of all 
plunging the fingers in the same plate, fosters tuberculosis and other 
contagious diseases ; but I do not think it is for this reason that the 
custom will die out. In the modern native settlement many different 
families live together. They are not united by any ties of blood. 
Moreover they are sometimes so numerous that such a communism 
would be pratically impossible. The golden age has passed for ever! 

With it has also passed away the merry lazy life of the half 
naked munumzane. The coming of civilisation has already deeply 
changed his mode of living and the transformation will still accentuate 
itself more and more. I have heard Colonists cursing these black 
people who believe that they can escape the law of work under which 
Europeans groan: ‘‘ these niggers who think that they will be allowed 
to remain incorrigibly lazy fellows for all time!” I do not share 
this loudly expressed indignation. First the native doda is by no 
means an idle man. He has his own occupations for the benefit of 
the kraal. Secondly if his wants are few, and if he very soon reaches 
the happy state of a man who is not obliged to work, I see thousands 
of Europeans who enjoy thelife of a ‘‘rentier” as much as he does, and 
without any qualms of conscience. A South African trader who works 
hard to make his fortune, and hopes to leave the country as quickly 
as possible, in order to enjoy all the comforts of a European town, 
theatres, concerts and clubs, has not, after all, a much loftier ideal than 
the native he curses... On the other hand, circumstances themselves 
enforce upon the native this law of working and teach him this “‘ dign- 
ity of labour ” of which we so often hear. A civilised native has 
increased his wants ten fold. He requires the wherewithal to satisfy 
them. This is the only legitimate, the most powerful incentive to 
work. Fifty, sixty thousand Thonga, the elite of our tribe, are 
constantly streaming to Johannesburg, where they are considered as 

being the best mining boys. Many of them go there to earn lobola 
money. But they learn to spend money on other things and those 
who are converts to Christianity become regular purchasers of clothing, 
of better food, of books. The high taxation, to which they are sub- 
jected, also forces them to work. As long as it does not exceed a 
reasonable limit, and as long as the State causes the native community 
to benefit by the high sums taxed on it, it is all right, although this 
way of enforcing labour is not-so normally healthy as the creation ot 
new wants. Another powerful influence which tends to make men 
work more and to relieve women from the toil of tilling the field, is 
this : wishing to make money by selling grain, the Natives begin to 
clear larger fields than before, and we note with pleasure that they 
have adopted the use of the plough instead of the hoe in a great many 
quarters. The consequence of this change is that the men now do 
the work of preparing the fields. As women have nothing to do with 
the cattle and as ploughing is done with oxen, men now perform this 
difficult labour and they have to work hard. Is not this one splendid 
result of the spread of civilisation? The fact cannot be denied that, 
as regards the mode of living and the distribution of work amongst 
men and women, a considerable change has already taken place and 
is being every day accentuated in the Thonga village. What is to be 
the ultimate result ? 

When discussing the native problem, the most difficult of all the 
South African problems, politicians, missionaries, civilised natives and 
newspapers generally ask this question: ‘‘ Must the native tribal life be 
preserved or, on the contrary, be destroyed” ? No clear, satisfactory, 
convincing reply has as yet been made. Tribal life is composed of 
two elements: the communal life and the national life, which ought 
to be considered separately. I am dealing here with the first of these 
elements only. The first remark I venture to make is that it is some- 
what assuming on our partto believe that we can exert any very great 
influence on the solution of this question. Whatever one may hope, 
or fear, the evolution of the Bantu village, which began as soon as 
civilisation entered the land, will goon. Itis not in the power of 
the Pope, of the Minister of Native Affairs, or of Superintendents of 
any large Missionary Societies, to prevent the transformation of the 
primitive patriarchal tribes, which is proceeding on as a matter of 
necessity. Human society evolves continually, and the economical 
and social changes, which have taken place in South Africa are so 
momentous that they will deeply affect and eventually completely 

—— 328 —, 

transform the Bantu community. But(thisis my second remark) what 
we Can strive at is to control, to guide this necessary evolution, and J 
should like to propose, to all those who can collaborate in the shaping 
of the future Bantu society, the two following suggestions : 

1. Though the square house may supplant the round hut, though 
the hubo, the bandla and the absolute authority of the numzane may 
disappear, let us do our best to prevent the future native village from 
being a servile imitation of ourown European settlements. The more 
the Natives remains original, the more will they be interesting and 
worthy to live. The ‘* place of jealousy ” will disappear together with 
polygamy. But let us retain all that is pleasing and moral in the pic- 
turesque circle of huts: the respect for elders, the sense of family 
unity, the habit of helping each other, the readiness to share food with 
others. Cannot these virtues be retained in the Christian village, under 
the direction of the missionary, or in the town location with its council 
of civilised natives? On the other hand, in the closed circle, there was 
no place for strangers. The love and the interest was restricted to mem 
bers of the family. In the new settlement we can hope to create a 
sense of wider humanity, more in harmony with the traditions of 
modern life. 

2. The evolution of native society will certainly be accompanied 
with much suffering and it will not attain a satisfactory result, unless 
much patience is displayed by both Whites and Blacks. Let the con- 
servative Natives and the dreamers of the past admit the necessity for 
these changes. Letthe White men, who too often think that the black 
population has been created for the sole interest of the European, al- 
low the transformation tocome gradually and not unduly hasten it, in 
their eagerness to make of the Natives an asset for the country. I am 
convinced thata moral and religious teaching is of the utmost impor- 
tance in order to spread this spirit of wisdom, of patience and good 
understanding, amongst the South African tribes. I hope that, in the 
future Bantu village the demoralising public house will never be allow- 
ed to develop the inordinate taste of the natives for alcohol. But, 
in the meantime, it isto be hoped that everywhere, amongst the buil- 
dings square and round, will be found the larger and more honoured 
edifices, the Church and the School, in which worship takes place 
and teaching is provided. The very existence of these races depends 
on these conditions. 

THIRD PART 

THE NATIONAL LIFE 

After having sketched the Individual and the Communal life of 
the Thonga, we now consider the National life. We have seen 
what the muti, the Village, is fora Thonga. What is for him 
the Nation, tito? As we first pointed out, what we call nation, 
tiko, is not the big tribe, numbering many hundred thousand 
souls, but the special clan to which this Thonga belongs. There 
is no feeling of national unity in the tribe as a whole. Its 
unity consists only in a language and in certain customs which 
are common to all the clans. So the true national unit is the 
clan.

THE CLAN 

hee HE ACTUAL ORGANISA TION- OF THE CLAN 

Whatever may have been the social system of the Bantu in 
past ages, the actual clan can be directly traced from the patriar- 
chal family. I have particularly studied the composition of two 
of the Thonga clans, the Nkuna of Zoutpansberg and the Maz- 
waya of the estuary of the Nkomati. Let us see how the clan 
is composed in both these instances : 

The Nkuna clan, which migrated from the confluence of the 
Oliphant and the Limpopo to the country round Leydsdorp, in 

or about 1835, is certainly of purer descent than most of the 
other Thonga clans, owing precisely to its disturbed history, to 
its numerous migrations, which prevented other people from join- 
ing it, and strengthened the national tie. The common ances- 
tor is Nkuna who, some centuries ago, left Zululand to settle in 
the plain of the Lower Limpopo. His son was Shitlhelana, his 
grandson Rinono. All the sons of Rinono are still known. 
One of them was the founder of the actual royal family and the 
present hosi, or chief, Muhlaba, descends from him. The des- 
cendants of the others, who call themselves after their names, 
are the Mhuntanyana, the Mashongana, the Mbhalati, the Kulala, 
the Mushwana, etc; they form what is called the doors (tinyan- 
gwa) of the clan, each of these districts being under a petty chief, 
who is hosana (diminutive of hosi). So the nation is but an 
enlarged family, and everybody depends on his hosana and his 
hosi, the members of the royal family alone having only a hosi. 

In the Nondwane country, on either side of the estuary of the 
Nkomati river, the situation is somewhat different. The whole 
land was first occupied in the XII and XIII centuries by 
three independantclans, the Mahlangwan, Hoiiwana and Nkumba, 
which were ona lower scale of civilisation, having no iron weap- 
ons nor oxhide shields. They were scattered as far as the Ma- 
bota country and their numbers must have been very few. A 
first invasion took place before 1500, whena chief of the Lebombo 
hills, called Lebombo, settled almost without fighting on the West- 
ern part of the estuary. It is the chief whom the old Portu- 
guese chronicler Perestrello met in 1554, and who said to him: 
‘“‘Mena Lebombo,” — ‘‘Iam Lebombo.” The original clans sub- 
mitted to the invaders who mixed with them, being of a race 
not very different from them. Then, later on, came the actually 
reigning clan, the Mazwaya, which conquered the whole coun- 
try. According to the custom generally followed, the Mazwaya 
chief placed his relatives and his sons in the various parts of the 
land as petty chiefs (tihosana), retaining the old Lebombo chiefs 
as counsellors (tinduna) to watch over them and to assist them. 
This isa wise way of proceeding : the old deposed chief becomes 
responsible for the welfare of the new one! Thus many doors, 

= 332) — 
or provinces, were formed, and each of the petty chiefs founded 
a house and had his shibongo, his laudatory name. There were 
the Mazwaya Masinga, the main branch, near Morakwen; the 
Mazwaya Tjakame, not far from them; the Mazwaya Hlewane, 
Mazwaya Matinana, Mazwaya Makaneta, etc. As the complicated 
law of succession frequently leads to disorders, as we shall see, 
the main branch lost its paramount power and became second- 
ary. The kingship passed to the Matinana branch. However 
the Masinga retained their authority in their own juridiction, and 
it would be taboo to place a member of a younger branch over 
them. ‘The religious regard for hierarchical order prevents such 
an offence being committed. Lately, as a consequence of the 
war of 1904, the Hlewane branch has in its turn supplanted the 
Matinana one. ‘Thus, from all these facts, it appears that two 
hundred years ago, the population of Nondwane was already 
composed of three different and successive layers. Since then, 
the situation has become even more complex. A great number 
of immigrants settled in the country during the last century, 
coming in groups and asking the Mazwaya chiefs and headmen 
to receive them. This is a very frequent occurrence amongst 
Thonga. They leave their clan, either because they want change, 
or because an accusation of witchcraft has induced them to flee, 
and they settle in another country. When I was living in Ri- 
katla, one of the outside districts of the Mazwaya country, before 
the war of 1894, the hosana was Muzila, a young man of the 
reigning family ; but there were very few Mazwaya under 
him. He had as induna a Tembe man, called Mandjia, whose 
father, Mankhere, had come long ago to Rikatla and was so well 
known that people used to call the district : “‘ Ka Mankhere ”’, 
“at Mankhere’s. ” Another village belonged to Hamunde, a 
Djonga from the Shiburi county. A third one, had been built by 
Manyisa people, Nwamangele being their headman. So the po- 
pulation of the estuary of the Nkomati, which, at that time, had 
reachedthe number of six to eight thousand souls, became 
very much mixed. However the country continued to be 
called : “‘ At Mazwaya’s”. It belongs to the Mazwaya clan. 
Such is the composition of most of the Thongaclans. Though 

— ie — 
their origin is certainly the patriarchal family, they are far from 
being of pure descent. 

‘Tam under the impression that this is the old, the normal 
political state of the Bantu: small tribes of some thousand 
souls with a tendency to breaking up, when they become too 
numerous, as happened in the cases of Tembe-Mapute and also 
with Mpfumo-Matjolo who were first united under Nhlaruti. 
(See p. 33). During the first half of the XIX centurys 
South Africa witnessed the birth of many great native king- 
doms, in which a large number of tribes were amalgamated, 
thus forming much larger political units. This process began 
in the country now called Zululand, in 1800. There were 
then ninety-four different small tribes comparable with our 
Thonga clans, the Zulu one numbering only 2000 souls. They 
were amalgamated from 1818 to 1820, by the well-known mi- 
litary raids of Chaka, to such an extent that, in 1820, this ter- 
rible despot had more than too 000 warriors and had added half 
a million people to his tribe, having deprived three hundred 
clans of their independance. Two Zulu generals followed the 
exemple of Chaka : Moselekatsi amalgamated the tribes of 
Mashonaland, and Manukosi the Thonga clans, without men- 
tioning Songandaba and the Angoni of Nyassa. ‘The same pro- 
cess was accomplished more or less peacefully, for the Bantu of 
Basutoland by Moshesh, for the Ba-Pedi by Sekukuni, so that 
the original state of autonomy of the South African clans was 
generally replaced by large kingdoms in the greater part of South 
viata 

Was this development a natural evolution of the Bantu clan? 
I do not think so. We must not forget that the first idea of 
transforming the clan into a conquering army, the idea which 
inspired Chaka, was brought into Zululand by the Umtetwa 
chief Dingiswayo, and that he conceived it when seeing an 
English regiment in Cape Town. The military spirit of the 
Bantu, which might have remained quiescent for a few more 
centuries, was awakened or impregnated by this sight. The 
seed founda wonderfully well prepared soil, I confess. But with- 
out that seed, this terrible movement of amalgamation would 

——_— ~~ 
not probably have taken place, and I think we may consider the 
clan life, as it is still met with amongst the Ronga, (who were 
never subject to the Ngoni chief), as the typical Bantu political 
state. (1) 

pe TRE"LAUDATORY NAME OF THE CLANS 
AND TOTEMISM 

Each clan is known by the name of the old chief who is 
believed to have been its original ancestor. So the Nkuna clan 
came from Nkuna, who lived four or five hundred years ago, 
and left Zululand for the Bilen country. The Mazwaya clan 
descends from Mazwaya, grandfather of Masinga and ancestor 
of all the heads of the sub-clans, Makaneta, Hlewane, etc. This 
name is a kind of family name for all the members of the 
clan. In the course of time, when sub-clans begin to aspire to 
independency, the first ancestor tends to fall into oblivion and 
is supplanted by the ancestor of the sub-clan. ‘This process 
is easily noticeable at the present moment in Nondwane, 
where Mboza, for instance, calls himself a Makaneta. He says: 
‘¢T am wa ka Makaneta,” — ‘‘a man of the Makaneta house” ; 
but if he wants to precisionise, he will say: ‘‘I am a Mazwaya 
Makaneta”. — ‘‘Shibongo a shi diwe”, “‘the family name is 
never eaten, it is eternal”?! (Mboza). | 

This old name is called shibongo from ku bonga, to laud, to 
praise. It is a laudatory name. People use it as such on two 
different occasions : 1) When they salute each other. A friend 
who meets Mboza on the road will say to him: ‘‘Shawan, 
Makaneta”, ‘‘good morning Makaneta” ! But also : ‘“‘Shawan 
Makhetshe” ! (Makhetshe is the grandfather of Makaneta); 
or : ‘‘Shawan Mazwaya” or ‘‘Shawan Nwamasuluke”. (Masu- 
luke is the proper father of Mboza). 

(1) One might raise the objection that, in former centuries, the celebrated 
Monomotapa already founded a great kingdom. But what it exactly was, 
nobody knows. The descriptions of the chroniclers of those times are not 
very trustworthy, as we shall see from a quotation which will be made later 
on. 

a 

2) When they try to comfort babies. Should Mboza’s son cry, 
his nurse will say : ‘‘ Myela, Makaneta fiwa yindlu ya ntima”, 
“‘keep quiet Makaneta, of the black hut”. It may also be that 
some one wishing to console himself in affliction will do the 
sae. Notice these last words : ‘‘ of the black hut”. They 
mean : ‘You who belong to a village where the huts have had 
time to become black; they have never been destroyed by ene- 
mies, as no enemy dares to attack your clan! So the roofs 
have blackened inside under the action of the smoke and outside 
from that of the rain!” It is customary to add to the name of 
the ancestor words similar to these, in order the more to 
flatter the man you salute, or the baby you console. 

Thus each clan has a laudatory phrase which is sometimes much 
longer than the Makaneta one. Masingais called ‘‘wa le hondjo- 
sin”, ‘‘the one who reigns over the red earth,” (more fertile 
than the sand). The Matinana or Ngomane are lauded thus : 
“* Nkandjetele wa ku woma, ku baleka minambyana” ‘‘ the one 
who tramples on a dry place, and rivers begin to flow ”, because 
he is so heavy, so powerful! (Compare p. 87) A Ngomane 
man will address his paternal aunt with the same words, when 
offering her a present. 

Here are some of the best known shibongo. Their meaning 
is sometimes unknown as they often contain ancient and obso- 
lete expressions : 

The Honwana : Nwahomu ya ntima fiwa mu - Nondjwana, 
— the black ox of Nondjwana (or Nondwane). 

The Shirindja: Mudzunga ntima wa le dzungen, — black 
South of the South ? 

Mpfumo : Ba hlela misaba ba khabuta, — they winnow the 
sand they eat it. (The sand is so white in their country that 
it resembles mealies flour: they are never wanting food.) 

Libombo : Libombola Ndlopfu, — Elephant’s face. 

Nkuna: Bahomu! Ba nyari! ya makhwiri, Nwashitjimba 
buraka, ba mahlwen ka ntima. — Those of the ox! Those of 
the buffalo, the buffalo with the large belly which rolls in the 
mud, the one with a black spot on the forehead! 

Rikotjo : Ba Nyamasi, — those of the nyamari tree. 

a 

Khosa: Ba ripanga ro sheka ba ntsindja, — those of the keen 
edged swordwhich “‘ cuts” disputes brought to the capital. (The 
Khosa chiefs were reputed for their wisdom in deciding judicial 
or political matters. ) 

Hlabi : Ba Nhlabi va ku vengwa, Nhlabi ya Makamu ya 
Mavuse ya nkofiwana, — the Hlabi who are hated, sons of 
Makamu, of Mavuse, of the calf(?) 

Hlengwe : Shikobela sha Matsheme, Tshauke wa Matsheme 
(names of old chiefs). 

Tembe : Mulao Ngolanyama madlaya a nga di makhama a 
nga di, a dlayele bahloti : — Mulao (son of Tembe ?), the lion 
which kills and does not eat, the hawk which kills, it kills for 
the hunters, viz., it isso well fed itself, so rich that it can leave 
the meat for others. Such a sentence was pronounced in for- 
mer times by subjects entering the royal kraal, crawling on 
their knees, when they wanted to receive food from the chief. 

Nhanlganu: Ba ku hlomula fumo, ba renga ndlela: — those 
who unsheath the sword in order to buy the road, (the right of 
passing through a foreign country). (1) 

If we cross the plain of the Sabi and reach the Drakensberg, 
we find that all the Pedi tribes dwelling together with the Thonga 
in the Leydenburg and Zoutpansberg district, possess laudatory 
names which they also call seboko, the same word as shibongo ; 
but most of these names are names of animals, and are called by 
the technical term mutshupu, totem: the animal is the emblem 
or totem of the group. The Pedi clans are totemic. This 

(1) This custom of praising the various tribes in such terms is so familiar 
to the Thonga that they have invented some similar expressions for the White 
people themselves: The Portuguese are: Baka ndofazmalo, — the Sons of 
Never mind, because they seem to the natives to be somewhat careless or 
indifferent. The English are: Bana ba Nhluleki, a hluleka ku hleka, a tiba 
ku lwa, — the sons of the one who cannot, he cannot laugh, he knows how 
to fight! Perhaps natives consider them, on the contrary, somewhat too 
earnest, too keen ! 

means that, not only do they glorify themselves in comparing 
themselves with an animal and taking its name, but they think 
that there is a mysterious relation of life between it and their 
social group. I cannot here relate all the facts I gathered amongst 
them on the subject, and which I intend publishing later on. 
Let me merely mention the following details: the Kaha of the 
Shiluvane valley have the small grey antelope, called duyker, as 
totem. They salute each other in these words: ‘‘Goni! Phudi!” 
Goni is probably the name of an old ancestor, the same as Nkuna 
for the Ba-Nkuna; but phudi means duyker. They consider it 
taboo to make a niehe with its skin for their children. Some of 
them do not eat the flesh of that antelope, fearing lest their 
children become idiotic, or be covered with boils. They will not 
sit near a man of another clan who is manipulating the skin of a 
duyker. The Mashila (Sekukunt’s people), who have the porcu- 
pine astotem, say : ‘‘ Itis taboo even to tread on its dung: the soles 
of the feet would become sore.”” Many clans are afraid to kill 
the animal which is their totem; it is not a law enforced by the 
chiefs; the totem itself punishes them if they trangress it. How- 
ever nowhere did I find the idea that they descend from the totem. 
They say: ‘‘The old people have noticed that the flesh of such 
and such an animal made the people of their clan ill; so they 
proclaimed it taboo. ” 

Nothing of this kind is met with amongst the Thonga. The 
Thonga clans are atotemic. Many men bear the name of animals, 
but it is merely a means of glorifying themselves; there is no 
taboo with regard to the flesh, skin, dung of thatanimal. I have 
come to this conclusion after a careful investigation. Here are 
the only facts which I discovered, which may be said to be in 
touch with totemic custonis. 

The first is that the shibongo sometimes gives an opportunity 
for more or less clever jokes. There is, near Rikatla, a clan called 
Shibindji. Shibindji means liver. When a man of this group 
meets with others who eat liver, they say to him: ‘‘Come 
along, we are going to run this skewer through you and to roast 
you!” Another clan is the Ntcheko and this word means a 
tumbler or a small calabash with an elongated handle used for 

—- 

drinking purposes (p. 48). At the bukanye time, when every- 
body. is getting these calabashes ready for the feast, they say: 
‘Alas! poor creatures that we are! People are going to carry 
us from one end of the country to the other, to dip us into their 
pots and drink out of us!...”. Andsoon. This is no totemism. 
I have however met with four more facts which must be men- 
tioned, and which are very interesting. 

t) In the neighbourhood of Pietersburg a Thonga who be- 
longs to the Rikotcho clan, but whose shibongo is Nwangwenya, 
the son of the crocodile, is said to ‘‘ dance the crocodile” (tshina 
ngwenya). These Thonga words are the expression used by 
the Pedi to indicate their totemic customs, (hu bina kwena), 
not that there is any special dance or song performed in the 
honour of the sacred animal; this may have been the case form- 
erly, but is not so now. 

2) The laudatory name of the Nkuna clan is also said to be a 
nlshupu, though it does not implicate any taboo. This word, 
which is unknown in other parts of Thongaland, corresponds 
to the Pedi mutshupu which indicates totemic animals. The 
Nkuna men like to be saluted by these words: “‘Nkuna! Homu 
(ox)! Nyari (buffalo)!” There are a number of Pedi tribes wno 
“‘dance to the buffalo”. Mankhelu assured me that, as the 
Nkuna have the same totem as these tribes, they have a common 
origin, they have come from the same place in Zululand. This 
assertion is so evidently erroneous that he could not maintain 
it. The old man has not the slightest idea of historical accu- 
racy: he had only unconsciously drawn a conclusion as to a 
common origin from a similarity of totem. Moreover, in his 
set of divinatory bones, he used to represent his own tribe by 
a small piece of ox bone, just in the same way as Pedi diviners 
do for their various tribes, representing them with the astragalus 
of their totems. 

As regards these two incidents, they are easily explained by 
the influence of the Suto tribes amongst which these Thonga 
have been living for a long time. Nothing of the kind is met 
with amongst the Thonga who have remained in their own 

country, and Maaghe, the Pedi-Khaha chief, assured me that 

this appellation of the Nkuna as Nyari, buffalo, is modern and 
borrowed from the Pedi. The Nkuna do not keep any taboo 
in connexion with the ox, and this shows that their totemic 
custom is a mere external imitation of the Suto fashion. I might 
call these two instances: cases of secondary or adopted totemism. 
Considering only the Thonga as compared with the Pedi, we 
might be tempted to conclude that the Thonga have preserved 
the old Bantu custom of naming themselves after their ancestor ; 
just as the Thonga used to add to that name other laudatory 
expressions, we might suppose that the Pedi tribes have adopted 
names of animals to glorify themselves; in the course of time, 
the essentially totemic fears and taboos could have made their 
way into the customs, owing to the importance given to the 
shibongo. This would be a rationalistic explanation of totemism. 
A priori it could not be said to be impossible. Though totemism 
appears to bea very old custom in humanity, it is not necessary, 
per se, that the Bantu tribes should have all passed through that 
phase of primitive belief. 

3) I must, however mention a third instance which shows 
that this notion of a community of life between an animal and 
a human group must have existed also amongst the ancient 
Thonga. ‘There are, in their folklore, tales which seem to have 
been inspired by such old and now lost ideas, especially the tale 
of Titishan, which I have published in ‘Les chants et contes 
des Ba-Ronga’’, page 253. A girl named Titishan marries a 
man. When she goes to her husband’s home, she asks her 
parents to give her their cat. They refuse; they say: “‘ You 
know that our life is attached to it.” She insists and they at 
last consent. She shuts the animal up in a place where nobody 
sees it. Her husband even ignores its existence. One day, 
when she goes to the fields, the cat escapes from its kraal, enters 
the hut, puts on the war ornaments of the husband, dances and 
sings. Children, attracted by the noise, discover it and inform 
the master of the village of the strange dancer they have seen... 
He goes and kills it. At the very moment Titishan falls on the 
ground, in her garden. She says: ‘‘I have been killed at home.” 
She asks her husband to accompany her, with the corpse of the 

i 

cat wrapped in a mat, to her parents’ village. All her relatives 
attend. They severely reproach their daughter for having 
insisted on taking the animal. The mat is unrolled and, as soon 
as they have seen the dead cat, they all fall lifeless one after the 
other. The Clan-of-the-Cat is destroyed and the husband returns 
home after having closed the gate of the village with a branch 
(eee Page 293): “ Their life was in the cat. ” 

Folk-tales are very ancient and this one is by no means unique 
of its kind. (Compare Jacottet’s ‘‘’Treasury of the Ba-Suto Lore”, 
Morija 1908, Masilo punished for having eaten zebra’s meat.) 
It shows that the totemic idea existed in former times, in those 
remote periods of the evolution which some Bantu tribes have 
now outgrown. 

4) A fourth fact tends to show that a mystic relation between 
an animal and a clan has existed in former times. There is, 
in the North of the Transvaal, a kind of antelope called by the 
natives Shidyanaman. It is taboo to kill it: ‘* If a Nkuna does 
so, his family will die during the year, his wife, his children, 
his own head. Should he kill one by mistake, he must cry 
with a loud voice and shout: — Yoo! Shana n’ta da na mane! 
Alack! with whom shall I eat it?” Mankhelu says it is taboo to 
eatits flesh, but the taboo is removed by this formula. The Ba- 
Nkuna do not know how to explain this custom. It may be a 
relic of former totemic ideas. However Mankhelu does not call 
the shidyanaman a mutshupu, a totem, and these customs may 
seem to be in relation with the muru superstition (Comp. Ch. 
IV and Part IV, hunting customs). But even supposing the 
Thonga have gone through the totemic phase, the actual clans 
have entirely forgotten these ancient beliefs. 

* 

My aim in the following chapter is to describe the typical 
Bantu clan, this small collectivity of some hundreds or thous~ 
ands of souls, with its hereditary chief, and not the larger tribe, 
formed by the amalgamation of many clans by a military despot 
(Chaka), or a cunning diplomat (Moshesh). Some of us have 

pad eo 

still seen the court of Gungunyane at Mandlakazi, before this last 
South African military Empire was destroyed by the Portuguese 
in 1895 and 1896. Dr Liengme, one of my colleagues, has 
described some of the striking customs of this court in the 
Report of the S.A.A.A.S of 1904 and in the Bulletin de la 
Société Neuchdteloise de Géograplie, of 1901. I refer the reader 
to these publications and will be satisfied with the more modest, 
but not less interesting life, of the old Thonga clan. 

In this small community the Chief occupies the centre of 
national life. It is by him that the clan becomes conscious of 
itsunity. Without him it loses its bearings; it has lost its head. 
The republican conception is as far as possible from the ideas, 
from the instincts, of these people! So it will he necessary to 
first study the customs relating to the chief. Then we shall see 
the part played by the Counsellors, a second institution which 
strengthens and limits the first one. The political system of 
these tiny kingdoms having been sketched, we shall consider the 
Court and the Army, being the two domains in which the 
national life mostly manifests itself.

ae EVOLUTION OF THE CHIEF 

A. BIRTH AND YOUTH 

(Information received from Tobane, and applying specially to 
Ronga clans). | 

When the principal wife of a reigning chief, she who is called 
‘“*the wife of the country ” (nsati wa tiko) perceives that she 
will in due course present her lord with an heir, she is sent 
away from-the capital into one of the provinces, under pretext 
of illness. It must not be whispered abroad that she is 
pregnant, for, from this moment, every precaution must be taken 
to hide the future chief. Thus, should the event occur in the 
country of Mpfumo, the expectant mother might be sent into 
the province of Pulane. 

The infant comes into the world : should it prove to be a 
boy, the fact is kept a secret. Only the most renowned doctors 
of the country, those attached to the royal family, those who 
are “the strength of the land” Cle’ ti yimisaka tiko), are 
assembled to watch the birth: they prepare, with special care, 
the milombyana (p. 46). When the queen goes out carrying 
her child on her-back, she covers it with a piece of cloth to 
prevent anyone seeing whether it be a boy ora girl! She even 
dresses him in girl’s clothing, because it is dangerous (psa 
henyanya), it is taboo to say in a loud voice : ‘“‘ This child will 
be a chief.” Such an imprudent declaration would. bring him 
bad luck (singita), just in the same manner as would male 
clothing. (Mankhelu). 

The royal offspring grows unrecognised, and is weaned in the 

— 2 = 
same way as other children. The mother returns to the capital, 
the child remaining in the village where he was born. 

However, specially appointed persons watch over him and 
report of his well being to his father. His youthful playmates 
are taught to respect him ; he is surrounded in his games by a 
miniature court, from which he chooses his favourites (tinxe- 
kwa); some of his companions act as counsellors and reprimand 
those who do not treat him with due respect. They play at 
court... also at soldiers ; the juvenile troop wage war with the 
wasps, and also with the boys of the adjoining villages. 

When the child reaches boyhood, the bones are consulted, and 
sacrifices offered in order to ascertain from the gods whether it 
be well to take him to the capital? Should the answer be in 
the negative, there is nothing to do but to wait. When the 
dice declare the propitious time to have arrived, the transfer is 
effected and the boy taken to his father. This is a great feast 
day for the cousellors who have watched over the boy and who 
thenceforward supervise his education. They treat themselves 
well (ba fumisana), kill goats, perhaps even an ox, and offer a 
sacrifice to proclaim to the gods the return to the capital of the 
heir to the throne; to his ankle is tied the astragalus of a 
slaughtered goat, as a protective amulet. 

At puberty the boy undergoes, in the same manner as his 
companions, all the ceremonial rites usual at that period. The 
principal doctors of the country treat him, in order that hence- 
forth he may be a man (ba mu yimisa a ba wanuna), having 
full right to enter into the sexual relations of gangisa (p. 96). 
Care is taken, however, to attach to his person comrades of riper 
age, who will prevent him giving way to excesses, (suka 
banhwanyana la’ bakulu ba ta mu gema, ba mu sibela ku kula), 
which would arrest his growth and render him small and 
feeble. He thus lives in relative continence, participating in the 
play and in the work of boys of his own age, looking after the 
herds. At times he gives a feast, when his father happens to 
have presented him with an ox, with which to make merry. 

Now we see him arrived at manhood, at the age when the 
Blacks take a wife. If his father is still living, the young man 

= 

is not allowed to be married officially. He may certainly lobola, 
viz., contract regular marriage in the usual way, and possibly 
some woman may come and live with him (titlhuba), as in 
cases of elopement — in which case he must go, according to 
the law, early in the morning to the parents of the girl and 
denounce himself as the abductor (p. 120); but no one of 
these women can be his official wife: they may bear him 
children, but these will be makohlwa, those who have no right 
to royalty ; the young chief may not wed his official wife, she 
who is to become the mother of the heir to the throne, until 
after the death of his father. 

There is a saying, a precept of the royal code as follows : 
“*Hosi a yi faneli ku bona ntukulu”, a chief must never see 
his grandson, 1. e. the one who will eventually succeed his son 
in the royal line. The Ba-Ngoni of Gungunyane (in Gaza) 
have the same custom; but with them matters are differently 
arranged. ‘The eldest son of the chief’s principal wife, when at 
the age requisite for marriage, takes a wife and loses the right 
of succession ; it is the youngest son, still young at the time of 
his father’s death, who inherits the throne, because he has no 
children of his own. This leads to jealousy, civil war between 
brothers ; it has brought numberless misfortunes to the royal 
family of Gaza, and it was one of the causes of the downfall of 
Gungunyane. The Thonga custom is much the more simple 
and less dangerous to the maintenance of peace; the chief must 
not see his grandson, therefore his son will not be officially 
married until after his father’s death. Any wives he may pre- 
viously have taken, will be morganatic and their children not 
entitled to inherit. 

I have been told by Mankhelu that when a chief lives to be 
very old and does not like to delay the marriage of his son and 
heir, he can himself pay the lobolo and acquire, for his son, 
the official wife who will be considered as being ‘‘ the wife of 
the country”. But this seems to be an exceptional occurrence. 

— a 

B. CORONATION OF THE CHIEF 

In all Thonga clans the death of a chief is kept secret for 
one year or more, as we shall see. Amongst the Nkuna the 
official mourning for the deceased takes place the same day as 
the coronation of his successor. All the regiments of the army 
are summoned, together with groups of warriors delegated by 
foreign clans. ‘Fhe mourning ceremonies are first performed 
(See later on). Then, at the end of the afternoon, says 
Mankhelu, the great counsellors send a herald to the circle of 
warriors. He shouts: “°Khanla!” viz., “keep silent!” The 
new chief comes out of the hut and stands alone in the midst 

o: the circle. ~ Do you'see Nini; says the herald. “tas 
the chief!” — ‘Who is he?” ask the warriors, who want to 
know his new name. — ‘‘It is Muhlaba Dabuka”, he answered, 

When the actual Nkuna chief was proclaimed. Formerly his 
name was Shikuna. Now he adopted this new name, borrowed 
from one of the Ngoni chiefs of Bilen. ‘‘ He who wants to 
fight, can fight”, he adds. It is an invitation to those who 
protest against the coronation to state it plainly. When 
Muhlaba was proclaimed, the Masakomo family left the capital 
in anger, asthey thought they were deprived of their right. (See 
later on). Such an occurrence is not rare owing to the irregu- 
larities which so frequently take place in the successions. 

If the chief is still a child he is carried on a shield, or put on 
the roof of a hut, so that everybody may see him. 

In the Ronga clans the ceremony takes place as follows. Let 
me describe it with all the details supplied by Tobane. 

First of all sacrifices are made to the gods to ask that this cere- 
mony may pass off quietly, happily, without quarrelling and then 
the date is fixed. Invitations are sent to the surrounding little 
kingdoms, or, at least, to all those who are on friendly relations 
with the tribe. For instance, supposing the installation to be 
that of the chief of Mpfumo, invitations would be sent to Maputju, 
Tembe, Matjolo, Nondwane, Nwamba and Shirinda. Mantysa 

- eS 

and Ntimane are regarded as ‘‘ being of a different mind ” 
(moya munwana), and “‘ good will only reaches as far as the 
river Nkomati”, to give a literal translation of the expression 
used by my informant ; this means that relations with the more 
distant countries are bard those of even ordinary civility. The 
warriors of the invited tribes assemble, in greater or smaller 
numbers ; sometimes only a few delegates attend, but they do 
not proceed at once to the capital. Etiquette requires that each 
one should first go to the Mpfumo Counsellor who acts now:as an 
Agent General for his own tribe ; they are well received by him 
and fed while waiting for the iy of the coronation. 

When it is known that all the foreign military contingents 
have arrived, then the Mpfumo army is also assembled ia all 
together march to the capital. The royal family council, com- 
posed of uncles and the older relatives of the new chief, meets 
in aseparate hut. The presiding member opens the proceedings 
as follows: ‘‘Si hi humeliliki: si hi humililiki, hi fanela ku 
beka hosi kutani! (See! what has happened! This having 
happened to us we must install a new chief!)” The rest 
approve and reply according to etiquette. On an immense 
open space, all the warriors form a circle (biya mukhumbi). 
Battalion after battalion takes up its position within this living 
enclosure. An opening is left in this otherwise perfect circle, 
and through it enters the bodyguard, composed of young men of 
the same age as the new chief, with the chief himself hidden in 
their midst, wearing his full military uniform and accoutrements : 
ostrich feathers on his head, strands of hair from cow’s tails on 
his biceps and the calves of his legs, etc. 

A specially appointed functionary, the bearer of the chiefs 
(mutlakuli wa tihosi), penetrates into the middle of the body- 
guard and raises the young chief on his shoulders in the presence 
ot the assembled armies. The great counsellors, the secondary 
chiefs and all the young men of the Royal Family, then accom- 
pany the bearer of the king and with him march round the 
inner side of the circle of warriors, shouting as they go: _ 

  

Hosi hi leyi! Dlayan ! Dlayan ! 
Behold the chief! Kiil him ! Kill him! 
A ku na yimbeni! _ 
There is no other than he! 
Hi tiba voleyi. 
We recognise none other. 
Dlayan ! Lwa nga ni yimpi! 
Kill him ! if there be any here who can raise an army (to oppose him). 

To those shouts of defiance the several battalions reply con- 
secutively as the procession passes them: ‘‘ Bayete! Bayete ! 
ndjao!” These words form the royal salute, to which all the 
independent chiefs are entitled. (1) The elevation and the pre- 
sentation ended, the next proceeding is the gila or war dance. 
The heroes of the army (batlhabani ba fumo), and the young men 
of blood royal, rush one after the other into the enclosure 
brandishing their weapons, jumping as high as they possibly can, 
imitating acts of prowess on the battle field and simulating the 
transfixion of their enemies. ‘The gi/a continues until the cry 
is heard: ‘‘ Ye-yi, yé-yi, ye-yi. ’ This murmuring sound 
coming from the whole army, marks the end of the jumping 
and all reform into line. All the shields must now touch one 
another, forming an immense unbroken circle, and then comes 

(1) The word Bayete is said to be of Zulu origin and to convey the following 
meaning: bring thine enemies hither and destroy them! Ndjao means lion. 
The warriors employ these terms to extol the power of their chief and, 
at the same time, to express their allegiance to him. There is a modern 
tendency to use this solemn salutation in a more general manner: for instance 
it is addressed to the Whites and not only to those in authority, but more or 
less to every one, even, in certain cases, to missionaries! I always recollect 
my arrival at the village of Shirinda, when I went to call on the chief Mahatlane, 
then unknown to me. I arrived at the gate of the kraal mounted on a most 
unpretentions little donkey and enquired of two young men who were there where 
I could find the chief. ‘* Bayete!” was the salutation I received and there was 
certainly nothing very regal either in my appearance or my ‘‘ mount”. One 
of these young men proved to be Mahatlane himself! Bayeteis also frequently 
used in acknowledging a gift from a superior and wouldthen be merely the equi- 
valent of ‘‘ thank you.” In Gaza, Gungunyane would not allow Bayete to 
be said to any one but himself. All the petty chiefs, of the Ba-Ronga insisted 
on their royal salutation and the Ngoni king could not put a stop toit, as they 
were direct dependencies of the Whites and did not derive their authority 
from him. 

— a 
the guba, the intonation of the solemn chant which is at once 
the principal patriotic song of the tribe, the coronation hymn, 
the dirge of mourning, the war-song, and the sacred melody par 
excellence : 

Sabela ! Sabela nkosi! Ji! Ji! 

Answer us! Answer us, 0 chief! Ji! Ji! 

Si ya ku wela mulambu mkulu wa ka nkosi. 

Yes, we will cross the great river, the river of the chief. 

This chant which is in the Zulu language, is difficult to 
understand. The soloist commences with: ‘ Sabela nkosi ” 
which might be translated ‘‘ Obey the chief” ; but the meaning 
would rather seem to be: “ Keply to us, ‘chiet!~ and, if 
taken in this sense, these words would be a request made by the 
army to the chief, to which he will reply in executing the dance 
which follows. ‘To this exclamation of the soloist the warriors 
respond by striking their shields with their assagais producing 
a hard, sharp sound, which the chant tries to render by the 
syllable “° Ji! ji? Then they stamp the feet, saying : * Vu 
Vu!” and this enigmatic sentence: ‘‘ Yes, we will cross the 
great river, the river of the chief”. What is this river? Can 
it be that which separates the Mpfumo country from Khosen, 
namely the Nkomati? Or the Mitembe, marking the frontier 
between the Northern and the Southern Ba-Ronga ? Or do not 
these mysterious words rather refer to the river of death, which 
the entire host should cross without hesitation if called to do so 
by their chief? Whatever the exact meaning may be, this chant 
must be an assurance of loyalty on the part of the warriors to 
their king and probably also an appeal to his valour. 

The chant ended, no one is allowed to leave the ranks. The 
chief alone rushes into the enclosure; every warrior holds his 
shield in his hand and strikes it with hard sharp blows (ku ba 
ngomana) ; on hearing these, the chief begins to gi/a in his turn. 
He executes the war-dance brandishing his assagai, as if killing 
invisible ennemies. The crowd encourages him, inciting him to 
still further efforts, crying: ‘‘ Silo! Silo! Silo! Beast of the 
fields! Lion!” Volleys are fired. The chief redoubles his 

— x = 

exertions, gesticulating furiously, perspires profusely, is well 
nigh exhausted and finally he stops! All the army sit on the 
ground and the young king is-supplied with a jug of beer to 
quench his thirst. 

When the ceremony has lasted long enough, and the warriors 
have enjoyed at their ease the spectacle of their chief’s prow- 
ess, the Commander in chief dismisses the battalions, one 
after the other. The circle (mukhumbi) breaks up and all 
rush to the residence of their respective counsellors, singing as 
they go the praises of the particular army-corps to which they 
belong. The members of the Royal Family return to the capital 
where they remain. A counsellor presents each group or regi- 
ment with the ox which has been allotted to it; this is accepted 
with shouts of ‘“‘bayete”. The men cut up the animal, divide 
the meat and eat it in their respective quarters. 

It is worthy of notice that no sacrifice is offered on this day, 
neither is any religious ceremony whatsoever performed. The 
coronation appears to be a purely military affair, a sort of oath 
of loyalty taken by the people to their chief and by the chief to 
his people. 

C. THE OFFICIAL MARRIAGE OF THE CHIEF 

The chief being duly installed, the next thing to do is to pro- 
vide him with his officially recognised wife, the wife of the coun- 
try, she who is to become the mother of the future king. This 
wife must be bought with the pennies of the people: a charac- 
teristic custom demonstrating forcibly to how great an extent 
the Royal Family is at once the property and the pride of the 
nation. : ‘i 

One fine day, says Tobane, when the counsellors go to visit 
the new chief, they meet with a very cold reception: ‘* Who do 
you suppose is going to feed you? Who will cook the meat? 
Who is going to brew the beer?” They return quite crestfall- 
en, but having perfectly understood the allusion. The chief 
wishes to remind them that the time has arrived’ for them to 

es 
find him a wife. This roundabout way of coming to the point 
is much in vogue with the Blacks. The matter is at first dis- 
cussed in secret by the brothers and sisters of the deceased ruler, 
a family council who hold conclave ‘‘in the hut”, i.e. privately. 
After due consultation, a messenger 1s dispatched to the principal 
men of the country, to the heads of the younger branches of the 
Royal Family (to Khobo, Pulane, Kupane, if Mpfumo be the 
clan in question) with the following message: ‘‘ Has not the 
moment arrived to set up the chief, to cause him to grow, to 
increase properly ? For the country is sustained by its cock! (1)” 
The great ones discuss the affair, each in his own village, and a 
day is fixed for a visit to the capital where it will be concluded. 

Let us examine the procedure in the case of the marriage of 
Nwamantibyane, the youthful chief of Mpfumo, who has since 
died in exile. The following account of the discussion preparatory 
_ to the marriage is on the authority of Tobane, a witness of the 
proceedings, and will aptly illustrate the etiquette observed on 
such occasions. 

The dignitaries are assembled, one of them, the brother of the 
deceased chief, thus commences: ‘‘ Well you the chiefs of Mpfumo! 
In reality!. If we are assembled here to-day, is it not that we 
have truly seen that we must, in fact, increase the chief, and 
give him the wife of the country? This isall the business, you, 
the chiefs”. One of those addressed replies: ‘“‘In putting the 
matter before us, hast thou been unequal to the task? (No! 
understood). And we, what further words could we add? Noth- 
ing remains to besaid.... You then tell us what we shall have 
to give you, dwellers in the capital!” Then the secondary 
chiefs say: ‘‘ For our part, we will give each one pound sterling 
or an ox, as you may prefer.” The headmen of the villages 
will contribute each ten shillings and each village one shilling 
besides. In former times, before the circulation of money in the 
country, each one gave a hoe. 

(1) Dji yima ni nkuku, a proverbial expression meaning : asthe poultry-yard 
cannot flourish without a cock, so must care be taken of the chief of the coun- 
try, in order that he may be able to perpetuate the race and secure the suc- 
cession. 

« 

= oo 

The secondary chiefs go back to their own districts and get 
together the money or the oxen as the case may be. This done, 
the fact is duly notified to the capital and all the contributions 
are conveyed to the chief. An account is kept of all monies or 
cattle contributed. When Nwamantibyane was married the 
special subscription amounted to thirty pounds sterling and 
twenty oxen. 

The future queen was chosen from the royal family of Matjolo: 
her name was Mimalengane. The young chief had only seen 
her on one occasion, when she was returning from Gaza. Never- 
theless she was his first cousin once removed : Hamule, father 
of Zihlala and grandfather of Nwamantibyane, married the sister 
of Malengane, chief of Matjolo, and his daughter was Mima- 
lengane (the prefix mz signifies daughter of), who was now 
to become Nwamantibyane’s wife. We have already men- 
tioned the fact that marriages between relatives are sanctioned © 
in the royal families. The chiefs of Mpfumo generally marry 
into the reigning families of Mabota and Matjolo, and these 
latter seek their wifes at the court of Maputju. 

All the preliminaries being settled, the purchase money collec- 
ted, the young girl chosen, Matshibi, the Mpfumo counsellor 
acting as Agent General for Matjolo, sent Nwamatshabane, the 
boy who was his messenger, to Sigaolé, chief of Matjolo, to make 
the actual proposals for the marriage. ‘The messenger did not 
address himself directly to the chief but made his entry through 
the Matjolo Counsellor in charge of Mpfumo affairs, whose name 
was Mambene. ‘The request was made thus: ‘‘ We have come 
to ask our kokwana, (that is to say our relative on the mother’s 
side p. 221) in marriage.” — ‘It is well”, replied Sigaole, when 
Mambene has transmitted to him the honourable proposal. — 
““Go home again, thou shalt come for our reply”. A meeting 
of the members of the Matjolo royal family was then convened, 
matters discussed, the demand agreed to and the same envoy, 
flanked by a companion, came, as arranged, to receive the reply. 
The hut was carefully swept and the enquirers renewed their 
message : “‘ Our chief is still celibate... He sleeps in his bachelor’s 
quarters ” (This was not true, as he had already several wives, 

but they did not count!) ‘* He is anxious to get married. 
Make haste to give him Mimalengane”. — ‘‘It is well,” said 
the others, ‘“‘on one of these days we will go and discuss the 
affair at your place. When will you expect us?” 

A day is fixed and the great ones of Matjolo go to see Nwa- 
mantibyane. A gorgeous reception has been prepared for them: 
an ox has been killed in their honour, but they are at first treated 
in a niggardly manner, are given very short commons for break- 
fast: for, before anything else can be done, the tiresome money 
question must be settled. 

In the large hut all these important personages take their places 
with some constraint... The suitor is not present. The real 
business of the purchase money is not immediately referred to; 
endless compliments, all sorts of circumlocutions are indulged 
in, of which the following is a resumé. One of the chief men 
of Matjolo commences by saying: 

‘Tt is all right, as you of Mpfumo, you have desired to renew 
to-day the old ties of relationship... Hamule your grandfather 
took his wife from Matjolo. Well! we are obliged to you. 
Nevertheless Sigaole has sent us to enquire how you intend to 
make payment for her?” 

-—— ‘‘We have thirty pounds sterling” reply the representatives 
of Mpfumo. 

— ‘Ah! Thirty pounds? That means that Mimalengane 
will have to chop her own wood and draw her own water ?” 
(That is to say: thirty pounds suffice for the princess... but 
payment must also be made for two girls, the younger sisters 
(tinhlantsa), who must accompany her, to help her in the house- 
hold duties, as is customary). 

— ‘We will ask Nwamantibyiane, what he has to say to 
this” continues the headman of Mpfumo. 

—‘*How about those twenty oxen?” says the chief to his 
representatives, when the matter is put before him. The envoy 
returns to the hut and announces: ‘‘There are still twenty 
omen!” 

-— “Tt is well”, say the men of Matjolo, “ that will do for 
two girls to help in the work of the household”. 

Thus this delicate business’ is transacted without any great 
difficulty. The feasting then begins in earnest. All eat until 
they shura, that is until satiated, the stomach protruding in a 
gentle curve beneath the sternum, which is the black man’s idea 
of a thoroughly satisfactory meal! 

The betrothal being duly arranged, there still remain the 
betrothal visits to be paid and the wedding to be celebrated. 
Strange to say the chief, in these ceremonies, is conspicuous by 
his absence! His male friends alone go to see the betrothed, 
mainly with a view to reporting on her appearance, etc., to their 
royal master. Moreover when a chief is concerned, the betro- 
thal visit of the suitor’s friends is not paid back by the girls, 
as is the case of ordinary mortals. 

The marriage feast takes place, of course, at the bride’s home. 
In Matjolo quantities of beer have been prepared, and the 
people of Mpfumo are notified when it is sufficiently fermented ; 
the latter then mobilise their military contingent, consisting of 
a picked battalion of youths and men wearing the wax-crown. 
They are magnificently attired in skins of civet-cat and other 
warlike apparel, but carry sticks only and small toy shields 
(mahahu), as the object of the expedition is eminently peaceful 
and entirely actuated by friendship. They go first to the house of 
their Agent General, Mambene, where they are met and conducted 
to the: capital, taking with them the money and oxen which 
must be handed over to the parents of the princess. The curious 
sham-fight, details of which we have already noticed when des- 
cribing ordinary marriages, also takes place on this occasion, the 
Matjolo people trying to carry off the oxen and the Mpfumo 
defending themselves and endeavouring to appropriate the jugs 
of beer which are in the capital. This mock engagement is 
fairly lively, sticks are wielded with some force and the blows 
rain heavily until a few wounds are apparent and a little blood 
is let, when hostilities are at once stopped and friendship reigns 
supreme. 

The money and oxen are given to Sigaole, chief of Matjolo 
in. the présence of witnesses. Mpfumo kills.a bull for Matjolo 
and Matjolo slaughters a cow for Mpfumo, without any kind 

— po > 

of religious ceremony : a sacrifice has previously been offered in 
Matjolo to propitiate their gods in favour of Mimalengane. On 
the other hand the young folks of the two countries execute the 
dances peculiar to each clan, trying to outrival one another, for 
the honour of their country. The guests pass one night at 
the capital of Matjolo and return to their homes the following 
day. 

The relatives of the bride prepare her trousseau, which is not 
much richer than in the case of ordinary people: a ngula, large 
basket, in which are placed some maize and other cereals which 
she will plant in her new home, sundry cooking utensils, sauce- 
pans, winnowing baskets, a hoe, an axe: on the subsequent day, 
all the women accompany her to her husband’s dwelling and 
then go to perform the ceremony of building the wood pile 
(p. 112). They are regaled with a couple of oxen and return 
to their home. 

The chief’s wife is not compelled, as are young married women 
generally, to live with the mother-in-law and to wait upon her 
during the whole of the first year of married life. ‘The chief, 
immediately on the home-coming of his bride, calls together his 
young men, who rapidly build for him a new village, his village, 
which will henceforth become the capital of the country and 
will be given a distinctive name. 

Nwamantibyiane’s royal kraal was known as Hlanzini, and he 
had chosen a site for it on the confines of the Nwamba country 
in order to avoid a too close proximity to the Portuguese 
Commandant living at Hangwana. 

Crowned, married, in his new residence, the chief has now 
nothing to do but to reign. 

Mankhelu relates the proceedings of the official marriage 
amongst the Ba-Nkunain the following manner: — All the prin- 
cipal headmen send an ox to the capital, assemble there, kill one 

of the oxen, eat it and discuss who shall be the ‘‘ wife of the coun- 

try.”(1) They ask the chief: ‘‘ Whom do you love?” He ans- 
wers: “‘The daughter of such and such a chief”. They go to 
the father of that girl and say: ‘‘Eat the lobolo and give your 
daughter to the chief”. This man may refuse. Should he 
consent, this girl will become the wife of the country: ‘‘the 
earth has bought her”; she will give birth to the future 
chief. 

Should a great number of oxen be provided by the country, 
those which are in excess of the lobola price will go with the 
chief and princess to their new village “‘ in order to provide milk 
for them. ” 

The reason why it is not taboo for a chief to marry a near 
relative is this, according to Mankhelu: “‘ Nothing is taboo for 
him because he is the earth (hosii misaba, a yi yili ntshumu). 
He even might take a girl from the houses of his younger bro- 
thers because everything is allowable for him. He has no sin. 
He is the one who makes the laws. Even if they were bad, 
people must accept them...” This identification of the chief 
with the earth is most curious and we will remember it when 
treating of the sacred character of the chief. 

The wife paid for by the money of the country, though she 
be on the one hand the official one, is on the other hand infe- 
rior to the first wife married by the chief. He does not perform 
the rites of widowhood when she dies (See page 199). 

A chief, when he travels always takes his wives with him. 

(1) In the case of Muhlaba, Mankhelu himself received the fifteen oxen of 
the lobolo of the village and kept them for a time. Other subjects had given 
£1, a hoe, a goat or nothing, ifthey could not afford to contribute. Nobody 
refused, but some had nothing to give! Never mind! In the meantime one 
of the oxen broke its leg. The mother of Muhlaba said to Mankhelu: ‘‘ See! 
the oxen of the lobolo die. Take a wife for the chief.” Muhlaba was con- 
sulted and chose a girl from the Makaringe clan. Mankhelu had already taken 
a wife amongst those people who were consequently his bakokwana. He went 
to them with the proposal; they consented. Then Muhlaba accompanied 
Mankhelu on a second visit to the Makaringe who killed an ox for him and 
helped him to eat it! 

=o) 

D. THE REIGN 

I. The sacred character of the Chief. 

Let me say at once that, amongst the Ba-Ronga, the para- 
phernalia of royalty are reduced to a minimum. The chief is 
as scantily attired as are his subjects: possibly jhis belt of tails 
may be more plentifully garnished with these appendages. His 
huts are built on the same lines as the others ; his village may 
be larger but sometimes it is smaller. (1) 

In the old Portuguese documents, and especially in an account 
written by a military commandant to the prelate of Mozambi- 
que, at the end of the XVIII century, the chiefs of the coun- 
tries in the vicinity of the Bay were described in grandiloquent 
terms: ‘‘ They are very powerful, very rich, most honourable, 
generous and respected.” The Chief of Khosen is called the 
Grand Cacha, and is described as ‘‘a kind of Emperor.”” Though 
it is probable that, in former times, the regal paraphernalia of 
the Thonga chiefs were more brillant than now, these are mani- 
fest exaggerations, such as are often met with in the tales of the 
old explorers, but there is nevertheless a good deal of truth in 
these accounts. ‘‘ Royalty ”, inthe mind of the native, is a vene- 
rable and sacred institution ; respect for the Chief, and obedience 
to his commands are universal : his prestige is maintained, not 

(1) One day when taking a walk on the hill of Rikatla, I came to a field 
where, in the shade of a magnificent tree, I found three individuals — the ~ 
three most powerful personages of the country — modestly squatting on their 
haunches and scaring the sparrows from their plantation of sorghum. The 
trio consisted of Muzila, the young chief, his brother and Makhani, his chief 
counsellor, who were devoting themselves to this tiresome occupation in the 
same way as the meanest of their subjects ! 

This same Muzila had several younger brothers, one of whom was engaged 
to look after our oxen, at a salary of ten shillings a month. One day the boy 
was ill. It happened to pour in torrents on that particular day,and whom 
should I see about ten o’clock in the morning, coming along absolutely dren- 
ched through and through, but the chief Muzila! ‘‘I am looking after your 
oxen to-day ”’ said he ‘‘ in place of my brother... Here I am, and I have just 
come to let you know that I am going to water them ! ” 

by a great display of riches and of power, but by the mystical 
idea that, as the body lives by nourishment taken through its 
head, so the life of the nation is sustained through its chief. 

The Thonga do not explain this in abstract words, but by 
images which are very striking. The chief is the Earth, as we 
have seen. He is the cock by which the country is sustained. 
(Tobane). Mankhelu adds: ‘ He is the bull ; without him the 
cows cannot bring forth. He is the husband ; the country with- 
out him is like a woman without husband. He is the man of 
the village. Should a dog bark, if there is no man, nobody 
will dare to go out of the hut and ascertain the danger that 
threatens, nobody will have the courage to chase away the hyena. 
A clan without chief has lost its reason (hungukile). It is dead. 
Because who will call the army together? There is no army 
anymore! The chief is our great warrior (nhena), he is our 
forest where we hide ourselves and from whom we ask for 
laws. The tinduna cannot proclaim laws.” 

Conscious of this position, the chief does his best to maintain 
and to increase his prestige. He must not be too familiar. He 
does not eat with his subjects except with some favourites. 
Sometimes he eats alone in his hut. Or, when he has slaugh- 
tered and ox, he chooses amongs the various joints those he 
prefers, feasts before his subjects who look on respectfully, ‘‘ swal- 
lowing their own saliva”, (viz., their mouths watering the while). 
He sometimes throws a piece of meat to one of his favourites 
who accepts it with both hands, shouting : ‘* Bayete!” In the 
Tembe capital, men crawled on their knees before the chief 
shouting : ‘* Ngolanyama” ‘“‘ Lion!”. Nwangundjuwana, the 
chiefof Nwamba, was known for his more democratic ways. He 
used to eat with his men. 

To shake hands with a chief was also considered as taboo 
before the days of Christianity. Now Muhlaba somewhat reluc- 
tantly accepts the hand which is extended to him by the most 
modest of his subjects, even by children on Christmas Day. 
The idea, which is at the bottom of the fear, is that the chief is 
a magical being. He possesses special medicines with which he 
rubs himself or which he swallows, so that his body is taboo 

—— 7 

(ntjumbu wa hosi wa yila). He is dangerous. ‘‘ When he points 
at you with his finger, you are a dead man” (Mboza). Owing 
to the charms with which he had smeared his body, Maphunga, 
the chief of Nondwane, made those who discussed State affairs 
with him, even White people, unable to answer him or to resist 
his will (Mboza). In order to increase this salutary fear, some 
chiefs had the curious custom of disappearing for a time (tumba) 
‘just the same as a big caterpillar when it enters the ground 
and becomes a chrysalis.”” ‘The same Maphunga used to remain 
invisible during one week each year before the great bukanye 
feast. (1) Weshall see the same rite practised by the great magi- 
cians, who also aspire to create a deep impression on the ima- 
gination ofthe people. (See Part VI). As already mentioned, the 
chief alone must be addressed by the royal salutation ‘‘ Bayete”’ or 
‘“*Baheti”. The hosana has no right to it, legally and must be 
addressed by the term ‘‘ Baba”, ‘‘ Father”. As regards subjects, 
they are called malandja, from the verb ku landja, to follow, 
the followers. The Chief is the one who walks in front, 
whom the malandja, the ordinary folk, follow from motives of 
submission and fidelity, much as a dog follows his master from 
attachment, but is ready to fight for him should occasion arise. 

The name of the chief must not be pronounced on any and 
every occasion. Should it contain a word which designates 
another object, the name of this object must be changed. So 
the Mpfumu chief Nwamantibyane found that his name was too 
similar to ntibu (diminutive ntibyane), a certain antelope. It was 
henceforth taboo to call this animal ntibu in his territory. It 
had to be called nguya. Zihlahla, the father of Nwamanti- 
byane went even further than his son: his counsellors com- 
plained that he gave them no meat to eat, keeping all for him- 
self. ‘* He is a dog ”, they said. The chief overheard the 

(1) This custom is met with amongst the Pedi where old chiefs abandon 
their kraals and go to live in the desert for years, leaving a prince regent in 
their stead. This kind of hermit life gives them a great prestige. The Pedi 
chief Sikororo, near Shiluvane, is the best-known case of such a disappearance. 
Sexual continence, even repugnance for women, was one of his reasons for 
this seclusion which lasted until his death. (1903 or 1904). 

remark and took action in the following decree : ‘‘ Let it be 
know all over the country that mbyana, the dog, is I. When 
you pronounce this word, you will be referring to your 
chief. I therefore command you hereafter to call real dogs kala- 
wana.” And this was done for some time. So, in Nond- 
wane, people proclaimed as taboo the verb ku phunga, to 
sprinkle, and replaced it by ku kweba, which means to 
drink, in order not to offend Maphunga. This custom of 
showing respect, by avoiding to use the name of a chief in con- 
nexion with ordinary objects, is even extended to other men, 
if they are particularly noted. So a great personage of the Ma- 
putju clan having been named Mahlahla, which means small 
branches, these had to be called mavinda. The prohibition to 
pronounce the name of the chief can go so far that even names 
of deceased chiefs are taboo, at least in the Bilen region. So 
the petty chief of Rikatla had been called Muzila after the great 
Ngoni chief, son of Manukosi and father of Gungunyana. But 
people used to call him Moozin fearing lest the warriors of Bi- 
len might say: ‘What is that? Where have you hidden him? 
Show us Muzila. We contend that he died long ago!” 

These are traces of the Alonipha custom, which is, however, 
not so much developed amongst Thongas than amongst Zulus. 

The name of the chiefis sacred in so far as itis generally used 
in oaths. When asked to swear, a Nondwane man will say: 
“ Maphunga!” (1) 

(1) Kidd, in his Kafir Socialism, has asserted that Bantu chiefs are very jea- 
lous and kill their subjects when they become too rich and thus overshadow 
them. This may be the case in other tribes or when a military government 
has taken the place of the old patriarchal system. Amongst the Thonga it is 
not true. My informants could not quote a single instance of a murder com- 
mitted by a chief for that reason alone. I heard about Shiluvane killing a 
subject called Muhluhluni who had acquired too much power ; but Muhluhluni 
had declared that he wanted to usurpe the chieftainship ; so it was a case of 
high treason! A rich nduna, inthe territory of Nhandja (Nondwane), was also 
killed and his oxen taken by the chief because he had tried to abduct one of 
the chief’s wives. But many headmen had as many oxen as Maphunga and 
were not troubled by him on that account: ‘‘ Why should he hate them ? They 
could not harm him, as he was protected by the supernatural powers, and 
they brought him all the more beer as they had plenty of wives and con- 
sequently of mealies! ” 

— - |) 

Il) The Regalia. 

Kings everywhere like to adorn themselves with specially im- 
posing objects, insignia of their office, which differentiate them 
from their subjects. ‘The Thonga chiefs have no peculiar crown 
— the shidlodlo belonging to all adults (p. 129) —, no special 
garment, no sceptre and no throne. We sometimes translate 
by the word throne shilubelo viz., the place where one Juba, pays 
the tax; but it isonly a hut smaller than others and subjects can 
also possess it (See page 282). However there are, in some of 
these small kingdoms, royal objects which can be called regalia 
(bukosi bya hosi). 

Amongst the Nkuna, the chief possesses a large copper brace- 
let called ritlatla, which was bought very long ago, in Lourenco 
Marques, by the Nkuna people in exchange for tusks of 
elephants, says Mankhelu. According to others, the ritlatla was 
made in old times by natives from the copper, or even from the 
gold dug by them. The ritlatla was in the hands of the elder 
branch of the Nkuna clan ; Hoshana was its headman ; but he 
had fled into the Nwamba country during the troubled period 
of 1855 to 1860. When he died, his people brought the 
ritlatla to the chief Shiluvane who belonged to a younger 
branch, thinking that, at his death, the ritlatla together with 
the chieftainship would be given back to them. But they were 
disappointed in their hope : Shiluvane kept both the ritlatla and 
the power and left them to his son, Muhlaba, as we shall see. 
Legends are current about the ritlatla. It is said to be able to 
move of its own will. ‘‘This piece of metal is indeed a 
wonderful thing”, wrote a young Nkuna, to me ‘“‘ because 
when one buries it in the soil, as black people use to do with 
their treasures, one must put inside of it a piece of iron to 
prevent it from going away ; if they do not take this precaution, 
the ritlatla can leave the place where it was and go somewhere 
else. In the lapse of one year, it can reach as far as the 
Masetana spruit (about one mile) ”. 

Another royal property of the Nkuna family was an elephant’s 
tusk, which vanquished enemies had brought as a token of their 
submission. 

In Nondwana, the old chief Papele who preceeded Maphunga 
and lived in the middle of the last century, wore a kind of 
chignon or bun made by plaiting his hair, which was a sign 
of royalty (shifoko). But this custom has fallen off. There 
was also a long stick which was kept exposed to the smoke of 
the royal fire in the sacred hut of nyokwekulu, which I shall 
describe presently, and which was called ntjobo and also 
mbamba, viz., offering, evidently of religious value for the clan, 
and was taken outside when the army assembled. It possessed 
the power of becoming invisible to enemies. Mboza could not 
tell more about this venerated object. It is perhaps a thing 
similar to the mhamba of the Tembe, which consisted in the 
nails and hair of the deceased chiefs fixed together by a kind of 
wax, and which was used as means of propitiation in national 
ealanpities. (see: Part V1). 

These regalia are indeed not very imposing to the eye. 
Thonga royalty had no brilliant insignia... But it had more 
than that! Each clan possessed a special medicine whose 
magical virtues were greatly esteemed ; its possession made 
the chief invincible, the warriors invulnerable, the country 
unconquerable. This powerful charm is called mbhulo (Dj.), 
mphulo (Ro.). 

Amongst the Nkuna, the mbhulo is called Nwantikalala. It 
is kept by the people of the Mushwane house, anda man called 
Papalati is responsible for it. It consists of four calabashes, two 
male and two female (as medicines are considered as having 
sexes, see Part VI) called Madyakakulu, Nwahondyane, 
Mbengatamilomu, Masemane. ‘The bones are always consulted 
to ascertain which calabash (nhungubane) must be employed. 
The uses of this medicine are as follows. Every year it is mixed 
with the first fruits in the ceremony of Juma, which will be 
described later on. In war time the mbhulo is employed to 
*‘fence the country”. Envoys go to all the iris "em ore 
boundary, take stones out of the river, smear them with the 

= 361 aa 

magical powder and put them on the roads, at the crossways; 
should enemies invade the country, they will be deprived of 
their strength. The weapons also are sprinkled with a decoc- 
tion made of this royal medicine, as we shall see, and it is given 
to the chief to prevent disease. The father of Papalati was 
accused of having sold some of this powerful national drug 
to the Pedi chief Sikororo, an act which amounted to high 
treason. 

I have been fortunate enough to be informed of all the rites 
concerning the royal medicine in the Mazwaya clan. There, it 
is called nyokwekulu, a word which derives probably from the 
verb kunyuka, to melt. Let us hear Mboza tell us, with awe and 
profound conviction, the marvels of this wonderful drug. He 
attended its preparation in the year 1893, before the war 
scattered the clan and destroyed its military power. 

Each year the nyokwekulu is renewed. Its exact composition 
is known only to one man, Godlela, the royal magician and 
priest, to whom the care of preparing it is entrusted. This man 
belongs to the house, or sub-clan, of Tlhatlha. He is very much 
feared. Nobody dares to dispute with him and he has the right 
of cursing: even the chief. His function is hereditary. His 
father Malubatilo was in charge of the nyokwekulu before him. 
The law of succession is this: when the elder brother dies, the 
position is held by his younger brother. The headmen of the 
tribe box his ears and say to him: ‘* You will be the master of 
the medicine! Take great care of it”. When all the brothers 
are dead, it passes to the sons. 

So, when the right time of the year has come, the chief 
consults the bones. ‘The first thing to do is to send messengers 
all over the country to fetch a forked branch, a ‘‘ shiphandje ”, to 
which the calabash containing the medicines will be hung. 
When they have chosen it — it must be the stem of a nkonono 
tree — they cut it and bring it back to the capital. In front 
walks the master of the work, Godlela, and behind him four 
men carrying the shiphandje. Those who accompany them 
have the right of entering the villages and stealing fowls. Woe 
to the people who meet with that troop! They will be relieved 

— 362 ae 

of all they carry, ‘‘ because the forked branch of the great medi- 
cine of the chief is taboo”. 

The sacred branch having duly reached the capital, Godlela 
proceeds to the second operation, the burning of the drugs. 
Mboza saw the magician take pieces of skin cut from buffaloes, 
lions, hyenas, elans, panthers, snakes of various kinds and, last 
but not least, from the bodies of men, enemies killed in the 
wars : a part of the skin of the forehead, the heart, the 
diaphragm, the nails, a finger, some ears... All these are roasted 
in a large pot. On some mats are spread various magical roots 
cut into small pieces which are also thrown into the pot. The 
chief and all the sub-chiefs approach and, with hollow reeds, 
inhale and swallow the vapour and the smoke which emanates 
from it. (1) 

The preparation of the great medicine having been sucessfully 
accomplished, the great drum (nhumburi) of the capital was 
brought on the square and everybody danced, even women who 
took assagaies in their hands and sang: ‘‘ We are thankful if we 
die (hi tlangela ku fa)” viz., “‘the country is in security, our invin- 
cible medicine is ready! We shall not be killed by enemies but 
will die a natural death.” Before extinguishing the fire which 
was used to roast the medicines, Godlela takes a little water, 
pours it on the glowing embers and, when it vaporises with the 
accustomed sound, he emits the sacramental tsw and prays to 
his gods, the departed spirits of the Tlhatlha family, as doctors 
always do, in order to obtain their blessing on the nyokwekulu. 

The royal drug, having been burnt, is reduced to powder and 
this powder poured into the calabashes. ‘The forked branch 1s 
planted in the sacred hut, which I shall shortly describe, the cala- 
bashes hung upon it. Each sub-chief receives a calabash and takes 
it to his kraal where it will help the district in which he reigns 

(1) The Hlewane sub-clan, which revolted many a time against the legal chief 
and which succeeded by its intrigues to provoke the war of 1894, after which 
it became the reigning family of Nondwane, used to abstain from participating 
in this ‘swallowing of the smoke.” ; because, in former years, it had been 
defeated by Maphunga’s people and some of its men killed; their flesh had 
been used in the concoction of the nyokwekulu. So they feared to go and 
inhale the odour of their fellow clansmen. 

to perform the Juma ceremony. But the greater part of the pow- 
der remains at the capital. There it will be used not only for 
the luma, for the sprinkling of the warriors (See Chapter IV), 
but also for two other purposes: 1) for the protection of the 
country by means of the wooden pegs; 2) for the filling up of 
the magical horn. 

1) The wooden pegs (timhiko). A certain day is fixed to plant 
the forked branch in the house where the great medicine is kept. 
Then the doctor, accompanied by some members of the royal 
family, steals out secretly during the night and goes to the cross- 
ways,.to the strategic points, on the borders of the Mazwaya 
territory. It is taboo for anyone to meet with the party. He 
plants wooden pegs, smears them with the powder. As soon — 
as they have been smeared, they become invisible. Nobody can 
see them any more, nor tear them out except Godlela. They 
do not rot. White ants do not attack them. The country is 
fenced by them. 

2) The magical horn. The remainder of the powder is mixed 
with a special kind of honey, the honey made by the small black 
bee called mbonga. ‘This bee builds a large spherical nest deep 
in the ground. Natives have a number of superstitions regard- 
ing it. They say the mbonga honey may be eaten by. any- 
body, but it is only members of certain families who can see the 
nest anddig for it For other people it is invisible. (See Part 
VI). The Ngwetsa family, in Rikatla, was one of the favoured 
ones! It must be said that the hole through which the mbonga 
bees penetrate into the soil is indeed very small and escapes the 
notice of most people! This honey comes from below. It is a 
hidden, a mysterious thing. A little of it is added to the drug 
and the mixture is poured into a double horn, viz., two horns 
whose large ends are firmly fixed to each other, the point where 
they meet being carefully covered with dung, which acts as glue. 
A hole has been made in the upper horn and the drug is intro- 
duced through it. It is a great means of divination. When 
war is imminent, the nyokwekulu begins to ferment, and 
it exsudes through the hole: ‘‘It knows all about war’. So 
the country can prepare for it. No wonder if this powerful 

— 3 = 
medicine is kept with a superstitious awe and the greatest 
cane. 

A place of honour is reserved for the magical horn in the 
hut of the first wife of the chief. In the middle of the hearth 
a perpetual fire burns; it must never be allowed to go out: it 
is taboo. ‘The wood used for it must be that of a tree found 
on the sea shore, and called ntjobori. The Makaneta sub-clan 
must provide it regularly. It is taboo to take embers from this 
fireplace which is called the royal fire, the medicinal fire 
(ndjilo wa buhosi, wa muri). Should the principal wife let 
the fire go out, then Godlela must be called to light it again, 
rubbing together two sticks of a shrub called ntjopfa. The 
fire produced by burning that shrub is considered dangerous. 
It is taboo to cut its branches or to use them for the purpose 
of warming oneself; the genitalia are said to swell when that 
law is transgressed (See Part IV). But Godlela does not 
fear that: has he not his drugs to protect himself? He can and 
must use ntjopfa to relight the nyokwekulu fire, and he will 
be given a good reward for his work! The ntjobori, in bur- 
ning, produces an abundant smoke which leaves a deposit on 
the horn, on the forked branch and on all the calabashes contain- 
ing the provision of the powder. 

‘The queen Mimpanyanhoba who was in charge of the nyokwe- 
kulu, had no sexual relations with the chief on that account. 
I do not know if absolute continence is always enforced on the 
keeper of the sacred fire, as was the case for the Roman Vestal 
Virgins. But I have been told by Mboza that this woman pre- 
vented her co-wives from coming near her hut: it was taboo. 
The grass of the roof of this hut must never be removed, though 
it may rot owing to the rains. It is taboo. .One simply puts 
a layer of new grass over the old one, a thing which is rarely 
done in the case of ordinary roofs. 

In case of war, should the clan be obliged to leave the coun- 
try, a special little hut is hastily built in the bush and the pre- 
cious medicine is deposited therein. No fear that the enemy 
will take it, neither Whites nor Natives, because this hut also has 
the attribute of invisibility. This happened during the war of 

a 

1894. (1) For the mbamba of the Tembe and Zihlahla clans 
it is different. The man who keeps it must run away with it 
and with the chief. 

Such are the laws of the mphulo. This great medicine can 
certainly be considered as a part of the regalia and the most 
important part of them. It is, for the chief and sub-chiefs, a 
means of strengthening their authority, as will be seen in the des- 
cription of the luma rite. On the other hand the mphulo is a 
collective property, the powerful magic means by which the 
clan resists its enemies or conquers them. It occupies the very 
centre of national life. 

In some clans, chiefs possess other personal charms which are 
very much dreaded and called psitjemba. So, in the Maluleke 
clan, each of the children of the ancient chief Mashakadzi receiv- 
ed from him one of these psitjemba. It consists of a part of 
the skull of a child, the top of the head, where the pulse is seen 
beating at the fontanella. This has been smeared with the 
vitreous humour taken from the eyes of lions or elephants, and 
powders made from the skins of wild beasts. The possession of 
this charm gives the chief a supernatural power. If, being irri- 
tated with. you, he invokes his gods in sucking it and emits the 
sacramental tsu, he can call any wild beast he likes to kill you... 
He has sacrified with the psitjemba: you will die! 

Some chiefs of the Northern clans used to swallow one of the 
stones found in the stomach of a crocodile. It is said that cro- 
codiles, when cut open, are found to contain a certain number of 
stones, as they are supposed to eat one each year, when the rainy 
season comes on. One of them is chosen and smeared with 
special medicines and swallowed by the chief. Natives firmly 
believe that this stone remains in the body of the chief, and 
that it is ** his head, his life” (Viguet). When it passes in his 
stools a first time, it is a premonitory warning. When a 
second time, it is a clear announcement that the chief is going 
to die. So chiefs can always know when their time is near. 

(1) In the Nondwane, the nyokwekulu is still kept by the heir of Maphunga, 
Magomanyana. The new chief, the usurper, tried to find it, but Godlela 
refused to give it to him. Thus Mubvesha has no mphulo. 

In other clans the crocodile stone is replaced by what is called 
ndjalama. Amongst Nkuna this word designates a kind of bright 
copper button, which the Pedi of the Palaora mine used to make 
andsell. But ndjalama also means large sized beads. Whatever 
it is, some chiefs swallowed the ndjalama and were warned by 
it of their death. This object, as well as the crocodile stone, is 
taboo for subjects to swallow. They would die. It is ‘* buloyi 
bya hosi ” — ‘* the magical power of the chief. ” 

On account of these powerful and dangerous charms possessed 
by them, chiefs of different clans considered it as a taboo to stay 
in each other’s company ; they were afraid lest they might be 
killed by the magical power of their colleagues. Maphunga 
seems to have been particularly feared. He had even bought 
poison from White people and is said to have killed his rival, 
Musongi, chief of the Maputju clan, with whom he fought the 
battle of Malangotiba in 1870. He sent a woman of bad life to 
Maputju. The woman succeeded in winning the confidence of 
the king and poured this poison into his glass. Nowadays the 
Ronga chiefs have been taught by the Authorities to sit in coun- 
cil when discussing matters. 

The two principal prerogatives of the chief are the right of 
Juma and taxation. 

Il. The right of luma, and the first fruits rites. 

We come to a set of rites which might be treated when con- 
sidering the Agricultural life. I prefer describing them here, as 
they provide us with a typical illustration of the constitution of 
the clan ; they are highly characteristic of the Bantu community, 
a community which is essentially agricultural in its pursuits, 
animistic in its beliefs, and hierachic as regards its social and 
national life. 

We have already met with the word /uma and noticed that 
its ordinary meaning is fo bite ; its ritual sense is to remove the 
injurious character of a given food by a certain ceremony. ‘The luma 
is a necessity before eating the flesh of certain wild beasts, as we 

=, — 
shall see when studying the laws of hunting (See Part IV). 
But it is of still more importance, and one of the great laws of 
the clan, that the official luma shall take place before the subjects 
eat the products of the new year. There seem to be two ideas 
at the basis of this strange taboo : 

1) To eat certain kinds of food is dangerous for one’s health, 
and the first mouthful you take must be seasoned with the 
royal drug. 

2) The gods, the chief, the elder brothers have a prior right 
of enjoying the products of the soil. To precede them in doing 
it is a sin which would bring them misfortune. The hierarchy 
must be absolutely respected. 

The law of luma seems to have applied to all kinds of food 
in former times. Nowadays it is not observed for the following 
products: maize, Kafir beans and peas, rice, sorghum, water 
melons (makalabatla) and monkey nuts. It is partly observed 
for the mafureira almonds (tihuhlu), the strychnos paste (fuma) 
and the pumpkin leaves (magawane). It is strongly enforced 
for the black Kafir corn and the bukanye. Such is at any rate 
the case in the four clans of Nondwane, Mabota, Nwamba and 
Tembe. Amongst Zulu and Swazi, on the contrary, I have 
been told people luma maize and do not luma kafir corn. 
Kafir corn is probably the most ancient cereal amongst the 
Ba-Thonga, and bukanye always existed in the country. Thisis 
perhaps the reason why these luma rites, which bear a very old 
character, are still applied to these products to the exclusion of 
other more modern cereals. 

I. The luma without religious act. 

Let us first study the less ritualistic kind of luma, the luma 
of the mafureira almond, for instance. It is practised in each 
sub-chiet’s village, and, though it tends to become obsolete, it is 
still enforced by some “ tihosana”. So my neighbour in 
Rikatla, Habele, hosana placed by Mobvesha over this part of 
the territory, met some time ago a boy who was eating these 
almonds, the description of which I shall give later on. — 

‘“* Who gave them to you?” asked Habele... The child kept 
silent. — ‘‘ Come with me to your parents!” Having found 
their home, the sub-chief scolded them severely : ‘‘ You have 
started sucking (munya) the almonds before us. You wanted 
to kill my head ? Pay a fine!” They answered: ‘“ It is the 
birds which have made them fall from the tree... The children 
were not guilty !”’ However they had to pay 500 reis. 

The luma of almonds, which takes place in December, when 
they are ripe, is performed in the following way. The almonds 
are dipped into a small calabash full of water to soften them. 
Some of the powder of the nyokwekulu is added to them. 
The headman first takes some for himself and then distributes 
them to his people. They suck the almonds, take in their hands 
the part which is not eaten, and rub their faces with it. But 
there is no religious act performed. It is the same for ther fuma, 
a paste made with the contents of the kwakwa fruit, a kind of 
Strychnos very similar to the nsala, but of a different taste. 
The ceremony was even more simple than with the almonds: 
the chief used to send a little of this paste to each village saying: 
“Ler this be the first bite you swallow : new year has come ! 
(Luman, ku tlhese nguba). No powder was used in connexion 
with it. The magical drug was used, on the other hand, when 
the luma of the pumkin leaves took place. 

Il. The luma of the Kafir corn. 

The great, the official luma, amongst the Ronga clans, is the 
one performed for the Kafir corn (mabele). The great wife of 
the chief grinds the first grains of Kafir corn reaped in the 
fields. She cooks the flour in a pot and pours into it some of 
the royal powder kept in the calabash, so as to make a shimhimht 
(See page 40). The chief takes a little of the food and offers 
it to the spirits of his ancestors, at the main entrance of the 
royal kraal. He prays to them in the following terms: ‘‘ Here 
has the new year come! Precede us, you gods, and luma, so 
that, for us also, Kafir corn shall help our body, that we may 
become fat, not thin, that the witches may increase the corn, 

= a69 — 

make it to be plentiful, sothat, even if there is only a small field, 
big baskets may be filled ! (Nguba hi yoleyi! Rangan fiwine, 
mi luma, fiwi Psikwembu! Nahine, mabele ma tjhama amirin 
yeru psinene, hi kuluka hi nga wondji. Abaloyi ba yandjisa, 
psi tala ngopfu, nambi shi shisifiwanyana shi shifiwe, a ku tale 
tingula!)” 

After this religious act everyone luma in turn, the chief first, 
then the sub-chiefs, then the tounsellors, then the warriors who 
have killed enemies in battle, then the headmen of the kraals 
who have all been summoned to the capital. Should one of 
the headmen be prevented from coming by illness, his younger 
brother will not precede him. He will bring him the shimbimbi 
in a leaf; the elder will take it, and, after him, the other brothers. 
Women do not eat the magic powder. Neither do strangers, 
even those who are settled amongst the clan. They have their 
own medicine and luma for themselves, though they must not 
do it before the chief of the country. 

NI. Lhe luma of bukanye and the great national feast. 

The most characteristic of all these ceremonies concerning the 
first fruits is the luma of bukanyi. Tobane has given me a 
circumstantial description of this feast and it deserves to be repro- 
duced in all its details, as being a typical manifestation of Bantu 
national life. 

The nkanye (1) is a large tree, one of the most handsome in 
the country. Its botanical name is Sclerocarya caffra (Sond) ; 
it is vulgarly known amongst the English of Natal as the Kafir 
plum. 

It bears fruit of the size of a prune Reine-Claude, which, when 
ripe is a beautiful golden yellow and has a strong flavour of tur- 
pentine anda penetrating odour. It is a dioecian tree, the male 
bearing bunches of flowers while the female has single flowers. 

(1) Nkanye, plural minkanye, is the tree in question. Kanye, plural 
makanye, is the fruit of this tree ; bukanye is the drink made from this fruit. 
In the same way the wild apricot tree is called mphimbi, plurial mimphimbi. 
The fruit himbi, plural mahimbi ; the drink made from the fruit, buhimbi. 

‘(sanbivp-o5uaimoy jo YON sapntu gr) epeyhy Jo ,, sAULYN 4, OUT, 

(PR Ae” od Ad 

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plants but take care to keep a few in each district to fecundate 

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the female. The fruit — the kanye — begins to ripen in the 
month of January and falls to the ground. The odour is per- 

Sr — 
ceptible everywhere, and it is then that the principal.men of the 
country approach the chief and say to him: ‘‘ The time has 
‘come to luma. ” 

In the luma of the bukanye it is easy to discover four conse- 
cutive acts : 

a) The luma of the gods and of the chief. 

The first ripe makanye are gathered and pressed at the capi- 
tal, and the sour liquor thus obtained is poured out on the tomb 
of the deceased chiefs in the sacred wood ; they are invoked to 
bless this new year and the feast which is about to be cele- 
brated. Nkolele, the sub-chief of Libombo, used on this occa- 
sion to pronounce the following prayer : ‘‘ This is the new year 
Let us not kill each other! Let us eat peacefully! (Hi yo 
nguba! Hi nga dlayane! A hi nwenen ha hombe!)” Here 
is another formula: ‘‘ May this bukanyi do no harm! May 
we not slay each other under its influence. May it cause no 
serious quarrels.’ They are afraid that, during the general 
intoxication which will shortly prevail, quarrels will arise, some 
of which may terminate fatally. During the whole month of 
bukanye drinking, all business is at a standstill, just as with us 
all proceedings in bankruptcy and all prosecutions for debt are 
held in abeyance for two weeks during the New Year holidays! 

The gods having luma first, the bones are consulted. Should 
the throw be propitious, the chief will luma next; thus is the 
opening act of the feast concluded. 

b) The luma of the army. 

The young people are now assembled to clean up the public 
square and all the roads: the ball room must be prepared! The 
women of the capital start out early in the morning, beating the 
psibubutuana, that is to say sounding the call that is produced 
by striking the lips (bu-bu-bu-bu), and they go all over the 
country gathering the golden fruit : this is piled up in an enor- 
mous heap on the public square and the brew is proceeded with 
in the following manner: the makanye are pierced (tshunya) 
with a pointed wooden splinter; the stone falls covered with a 

— a 
transparent white pulp into the jar ; into this jar is also squeezed 
out with the fingers all the juice which remains in the pulp 
adhering to the skin ; this is continued until the jar is half full, 
when the stones are taken out and on the following day the 
pressing is resumed until the jar is full. On the third day the 
beer has sufficiently fermented to be pungent and agreeable to 
the taste and it is ready for consumption. Empty barrels are 
easily procurable in the environs of Lourenco Marques. ‘The 
women of the capital brew ten or fifteen huge casks of the pre- 
cious liquor! This accomplished, the second act commences. 

Aconvocation of the entire male portion of the tribe is held at 
the capital, but the first to respond to the call must be the men, 
the warriors of the army, who come in full array, with all their 
ornaments, and carrying their small play shields. One cask of 
beer is selected, into which is thrown the black powder, the 
great medicine of the land, called in this case bublungu bya 
miluru, the powder of the miluru. The nuru, plur. miluru, is 
the mysterious spiritual influence which a manor a beast killed 
by the assagais can exert on the slayer, making him lose his 
head and commit acts of folly, or, at least, have red eyes (shenga 
mahlo). We shall again meet with this curious conception when 
studying the rites of the army and of hunting. All those who 
are gloriously conscious of having killed a man in war must first 
drink the new beer which has been medicated to keep them 
from killing any of their compatriots during the ensuing weeks 
of the bukanye. ‘They approach one after the other, the chief 
also, if he be aman slayer. Each of them receives a small cala- 
bash, (ntcheko, p. 48) full of the fermented liquid. He jumps 
and runs in the direction of the entrance, drinks a mouthful, 
spits it out with tsw and says: ‘‘ Father and mother! May I 
live! May I hold the calabash! Even to morrow! For ever!” 
People laugh. He is so happy! Others sing and dance the 
war dance : ‘* We drink the bukanye anew! Who would have 
thought that we should drink again in this cup,” viz., “that we 
should have escaped all the dangers of war” (Hi nwa nkany1 

lomu’mpsa! Afa hi nga hlayi epsaku hi ta nwa ntcheko lo 
kambe). 

= 

After this, the casks are distributed to the other warriors who 
drink to their hearts’ content. The addition of the black pow- 
der is not absolutely necessary for them. They can luma with- 
out it. Then the war circle is formed and the principal counsel- 
lors harangue the assembled warriors, giving them the following 
advice : “‘ Drink in peace (ha hombe). Let no one spoil this 

Bukanye drinking near Antioka. {Portuguese East Africa.) Phot. A. Borel. 

bukanye by transfixing his brother with his assagai. Go and 
drink in your villages. Do not pick quarrels with strangers pass- 
ing through the country, etc.” The gathering then disperses. 

c) The luma in the village. 

The preparatory uma is accomplished. The yila has been 
removed. Now comes the third act: the drinking in the vil- 
lages. 

The women who remained at home while the men-slayers 
went to luma at the bidding of the chief, have gathered large 
quantities of makanye. The tree is to be found wide-spread 
all over the country, as no female plant is ever cut down: 

 Vo  
there is one or more -in every field, and every one possesses 
such a tree, as every one owns a field ; when all the trees in 
the gardens have been denuded of fruit, the women pass to the 
trees growing in the bush far from the villages. 

But here also everything must be done in right order of pre- 
cedence ; the petty chief of such district must commence to luma 
in the presence of his subjects, and not until after he has so done 
can the people drink freely in the villages. From this moment, 
however, there is no further restriction. Drinking continues 
day and night, night and day! When the supply is finished in 
one village, they go to the next. These feasts are the saturna- 
lia, the bacchanalia, the carnival of the tribe! During these 
weeks some individuals are in a continuous state of semi-intoxi- 
cation. Orgies on all sides, songs and dances! The younger 
men run along the paths, with a more or less unsteady gait, 
brandishing sticks with pieces of red cloth attached as pen- 
nants. ‘They are in search of full barrels! It must be said 
that the inebriety produced by the bukanye is of a somewhat 
mild type, as this native beer contains very little alcohol ; but 
the quantity absorbed is so enormous that it finishes by going 
to the head: this is more especially so with the bukanye 
brewed from a species of nkanye called nunge, which appears 
to be stronger and more intoxicating. 

How far does the sexual licence go during the bukanye ! Not 
to a general promiscuity as amongst the Ba-Pedi after the cir- 
cumcision school. However many cases of adultery occur. 
Men and women forget the elementary rules of behaviour. 
They make water in the same places, or even more than that, 
which is taboo under ordinary circumstances : ‘‘ Nau a wa ha 
tiyi , —- “the law is no longer im force. 

Still, in the midst of all this carnival, the payment of the tax 
must not be forgotten... This is the time to carry to the chief 
the liquor which is flowing so freely on all sides but of which 
he claims the lion’s share. Each petty chief sends his people 
to the capital with brimming jars. This is termed ‘‘lumisa 
hosi”, supplying the chief with new wine. The women do not 
enter the capital at once, but go to one of the counsellors who 

? 

—is 

promptly abstracts a couple of jars for his own use. The chief 
returns one*or two jars to the carriers, as they have come a long 
way and are doubtless thirsty; the remainder will be kept to 
refresh the very numerous guests at the Court: any coming 
from afar will spend the night and not return until the next 
day. I have seen a company of these women carrying baskets 
tull of makanye to Muzila. How graceful was the the Indian 
file winding its way along the path and singing, amongst others, 
the following chorus: (See for further particulars Chants et 
Contes des Ba-Ronga, page 47). 

Chwe! Chwe! Hi laba shimungu — Leshi ka — Le tilwen! 
Chwe! Cwhe! Shimungu hi mani? — Hi Mzila! — Hi Mzila! 
Hi! Hi! We seek the hawk !— Who soars — In the sky! 

Hi! Hi! Who is the hawk? — It is Mzila! — It is Mzila! 

There is quite a collection of these carriers’ songs praising the 
chiefs. Mzila (or Muzila), whom we saw a short time ago scar- 
ing sparrows, is here compared to the mythical lightning bird, 
to the hawk that swoops down from the clouds. (See Part VI). 
Why does he not once for all annihilate the sparrows which 
pillage his. fields of sorghum? But this is poetry! and there is 
often a wide gap between poetry and reality ! 

d) The feasting of the chief in the villages. 

The fourth and final act of the bukanye feasting in which, as 
we have seen, the chief plays a prominent part, is the nsungi 
which I may call the ‘‘ fin de saison” orgy! The chief now 
returns his subjects visits and casks of beer are prepared for him 
in every village. Dancing and singing are in full swing. He 
is féted andacclaimed ! But the makanye are getting over-ripe: 
a new month, anew moon is at hand, which is called sibandlela 
‘* she who closes the roads” : the paths leading to the foot of 
the trees become almost impassable, owing to the grass which 
grows to an almost incredible height during the rains prevailing 
at this season. The fine weather is over. _ Winter is knocking 
at the door. 

Amongst the Nkuna the luma ceremony called ‘‘ to eat the 

new year” (dyaka nwaka) is performed with a special pumpkin 
(kwembe) cooked at the capital together with the medicine used 
for rain-making. ‘The chief first eats of it in the evening and 
makes the sign of a cross on the big drum, which is then beaten 
to call the people in his village. Then all the men come, bring- 
ing the little horns in which they keep the rain medicine (See 
Part VI). They eat a little and smear the orifice of these horns 
with the medicine : the horns also must “ eat the new year ”. 
Then everybody can enjoy the products of the harvest. Should 
anybody precede the chief, this would be fatal to the latter or 
make him ill.... Such is the testimony of Mankhelu. I suspect 
these rites to have been influenced by the proximity of the Ba- 
Pedi. ‘* Now we have no longer any first fruits’ feast(mulumo)y’, 
says Mankhelu with some melancholy. ‘‘ White people have 
killed it. Everybody eats freely in his house according to his 
good pleasure. Formerly we used to take the oxen of the man 
who had dared to steal the new year ”. 

Conclusion on the Luma Rite. 

All these luma rites of first fruits seem to have primarily a religious 
origin. The Bantu do not think they dare enjoy the products of the 
soil if they have not first given a portion of them to their gods. Are 
these gods not those who make cereals grow ? Have they not the 
power even of controlling the wizards who bewitch the fields ? These 
rites are also evidently dictated by the sense of hierarchy. A subject 
must not precede his chief nor a younger brother his elder one in the 
use of the new harvest, else they would kill those in authority. Such 
an act is against order. We shall see that, even when the seeds are 
sown, the elders must take precedence. But the custom seems also 
to have been actuated by the idea of passage. There is a passage from 
one year to another. For the Thonga, I think the new year begins 
twice every year: it begins when tilling recommences, in July, Au- 
gust, when the heat returns, This isthe hlobo. It begins a second 
time at harvest and then there is passage from the food of the last year 
to the food of this year. This is the nguba (Ro.) or nwaka (Dj.). 
Though the luma rites do not bear all the characters of a true passage 
rite, similar to those of circumcision or moving, we can notice in the 
luma of bukanye a kind of marginal period of general licence, when 

a 
the ordinary laws are more or less suspended. The taking ofa first 
mouthful probably signifies the’ aggregation to the new period, the 

magical powder used on this occasion being a protective which must 
shield from the calamities of this unknown year... And after all, is 
it not this feeling of fear which so easily takes possession of the heart 
of man, when entering a new condition and starting something new, 
which has led the savage to surround the use of the first fruit with so 
many ritual precautions ? 

IV. Taxation 

The chief governs (fuma). Fuma means tocommand, but also 
to live in plenty, to be rich. The subject (nandja, follower) 
obeys; he follows the chief who marches before him just the 
same as the wife in the path follows her husband who walks 
at his ease, with his stick in his hand, whilst she carries his be- 
longings in her basket on her head... Ifthe prerogative of the 
chief is to live in abundance, the duty of the subject is to pay 
taxes! This duty is expressed by the word Juba (D}.), blenga 
(Ro.). It is so true that this is the principal function of the 
subject that, when aman leaves his clan and goes to live in ano- 
ther clan, he comes to the chief and says: ‘‘ I want to Juba or 
nkonza, (word borrowed by the Ronga from the Zulu), to pay 
the tax”... This is the proper way of making his submission. 

The explanation of the rites of the first fruits throws much 
light on the conception of the Bantu regarding the chief’s posi- 
tion in respect to his subjects. For them he is certainly endow- 
ed with the divine right more fully than the King or the Kaiser 
in any European country; he is the son of the gods, not only 
their protegé... The gods are the lords of everything... He 
shares this lordship with them. Hence his right of taxing his 
subjects. On the other hand we saw that he is the soi]! He 
is more that Lewis XIV who could say : “‘ L’Etat c’est moi !” 
The Bantu chief.can say: ‘‘ The earth it is 1! —Le sol c’est 
moi!” Hence, on the part of the subjects, the duty of sharing 
with him the products of the soil and also of their hunting. 

—_ 

The Thonga chief taxes his subjects in four different ways: 
he takes a regular portion of the harvest; he claims a part of 
most of the wild beasts killed ; he makes his people work for him; 
he taxes also the revenue of those who go away to work for 
White folks. A fifth source of revenue for him is found in the 
fines imposed in judicial cases. 

1. As regards taxation of the products of the soil, it consists in 
a basket (shihundju) of mealies contributed by each village at 
harvest time. ‘This is the regular taxation. Moreover those 
who brew a great quantity of beer for a feast always send some 
jars to the chief, especially when the season of tilling the fields 
or threshing the grain has come. This is not a regular tax, at 
least amongst the Ba-Ronga, and is considered as mashobo, an act 
of civility, and not as hlenga proper. Bukanye must be brought 
to the capital in great quantities during the great national feast. 
In the Northern clans it seems that these payments in kind 
called shirwalo (carrying of beer, from ku rwala, to carry), are 
expected from all those who are not hunters and bring no meat 
fo" tlie capital: 

2. The right of the chief over wild beasts killed in hunting is 
not the same on all game. Rhinoceros is not taxed ; it is even 
taboo to bring its meat to the chief. On the contrary when a 
man has killed a wild buffalo, an elan, a giraffe or an antelope, 
he must first cut some joints for the chief. If it is a panther or 
a lion, he must abandon the skin; if an elephant, the tusk 
which scratched the soil when it fell belongs to the chief: it is 
“the tusk of the soil’, and the chief is‘‘ the soil.” The other 
tusk is for the hunter (ndlayi). In the Maputju country, it 
was even forbidden to kill elephants. Ngwanazi, the chief who 
was deported in 1896, had reserved the monopoly of elephant 
hunting to himself and to his warriors. The hippopotamus is 
taxed more heavily than any other beast. The hunter who 
has succeeded in killing one has not the right of cutting it open. 
Should he do so, it would be considered a serious offence. He 
may be put to death. (Mankhelu). He must at once send 
word to the capital and the men of the Court will come imme- 
diately and cut up the animal, taking half the joints to the chief. 

= 
As for the crocodile, it must also be opened by the men of the 
Court, because it contains many things such as marvellous stones 
used in magic, and bracelets of the women whom it has devour- 
ed. The chief appropriates what he pleases amongst those 
objects. 

3. Statute labour is one of the main revenues of the royal 
kraal. In some cases, subjects must come to the capital, led by 
their sub-chiefs, and till a field for the chief or rather for the 
queen who has been bought with the nation’s money. In 
Nondwane, which is a large country, each of the sub-clans must 
till a field for the wives of the chief in its own territory. For 
instance, in each of the districts of Mapulangu, Bandi, Manuel, 
Maghebeza, Malwan, Hlangunyingin, the chief Mubvesha pos- 
sessed a royal field which his subjects weed and harvest everv 
year, and the sub-chief Habele, who is in charge of those dis- 
tricts, had to gather the mealies and carry them to the capi- 
tal. This official tilling is done under the form of a djimo. (See 
Part IV). Moreover the young men are always at the disposal 
of the chief to clean his public square, build his huts, repair the 
thatched roofs of the royal kraal and organise hunting expedi- 
tions for him. 

4. But the greater part of the royal revenue consists now in 
money which the chiefs receives from his subjects. Mubvesha 
taxes each village a sum of 500 reis besides the regular basket of 
‘mealies. At the end of the bukanye feast, each village must 
send him another 500 reis to notify him that the feast is ended. 
When a young man returns from Johannesburg having made 
enough money to lobola a wife, he must leave £ 1.10.0 in the 
hands of the chief. The latter also recruits boys whom he sends 
to the recruiting agents, getting as much as £ 1, or £ 1.10.0 per 
head. When a sub-chief dies, his people inform the paramount 
chief of his death bringing a sum of money (1500 reis). The 
chief, however, does not receive any portion of the inheritance, 
in case of death. There is no taxation on the succession. 

5. A great deal of money comes into the hand’s of the chief 
owing to fines which he imposes when acting as supreme judge. 
When a plaintiff brings a case and the culprit is condemned to pay 

a 380  

him £ 25, Mubvesha keeps £ ro for himself; he retains £ 5 if 
the fine be £ ro. 

Sub-chiefs do not tax their subjects as a rule. They must 
bring to their superior all the products of taxation. They do 
not ‘‘eat” anything. But in some cases the chief gives them 
a part of it. Thus Habele, sub-chief of Rikatla, used to ‘‘ eat” 
half of the taxes brought to him by young men coming back 
from Johannesburg. 

V. Dangers and difficulties of the Chieftainship. 

Endowed with supernatural power which he owes to his magi- 
cal medicines, feared and sometimes loved by his subjects, hav- 
ing plenty to eat and being richer than any of his people who 
readily consent to be taxed, the chief occupies an enviable posi- 
tion. The chieftainship (buhosi), therefore, is very much sought 
after and no one refuses to be a chief. ‘Thonga tales telling the 
story of some one who succeeded wonderfully in life, often con- 
clude by saying that this person was given a territory and became 
a chief... which seems to be the highest reward for virtue or 
wisdom. Nowadays, however, one may meet with cases where 
the heir to the chieftainship, having become a Christian, renoun- 
ces that high position because he feels that there is an incom- 
patibility between the Bantu way of ruling and his new faith. 

But it would bea great error to think that a Thonga chief is, 
or can be, an autocratic despot. This may have been the case 
with Chaka, Lobengula or Gungunyane, when the tribe became 
an amalgamation of clans held together by a military power: in 
order to maintain their usurped authority, those chiefs had to 
be cruel despots. But this is a late development in the Bantu - 
political system. J am only now taking into consideration the 
primitive form of tribal life, which is the clan life. 

For a chief dangers may arise from three sources: from his 
own character, from the Thonga system of government itself 
and from the law of succession. 

_ 381 — 

1) [HE CHARACTER OF THE CHIEF. 

A chief who wants to succeed in his government must have a 
good character. If he imposes taxation, he must not use his 
wealth in a selfish way. For instance when women bring him 
a shirwalo of a dozen pots of beer, he must give them back one 
or two to quench their thirst. Moreover he must distribute 
most of the remaining pots to his men, who are on the bandla, 
always ready to share with him the advantages of his position. 

Should he buy oxen with the product of the fines, he will 
be wise in slaughtering one from time to time for his counsellors 
and for the whole clan. A chief who is good (a ni tintsalu) is 
said to maintain or to save the country (bekisa tiko). If he does 
not do that, he is severely criticised. Mubvesha who used all 
his money to buy wives, who prevented all the men from seeing 
them, whilst he himself was too old to suffice them, was con- 
sidered a bad chief. He did not even allow ‘‘ bandla’’, viz, the 
gathering of men in the capital, because he was full of jealousy 
(mona). If he had not been placed in the chieftainship and 
supported by the White Government, he might have been 
deposed. Cases in which a chief has been deprived of his right 
and replaced by another man are not wanting. (1) I have even 

(1) The annals of the Nkuna tribe provide an instance of the deposal not 
only of a certain chief but of the elder branch of the royal family, owing to 
an act which hurt the human feelings of the clan. We have already met with 
the name of Shithlelana, son of Nkuna who lived at least 300 years ago. His 
principal wife was Nwahubyana. In his old age he was very ill; this woman 
fearing less he should die in her hut, drove him away ; he was obliged to take 
a refuge in the hut of another of his wives, Nwantimba, mother of Rinono, 
and died there. Then the headmen assembled and said: ‘‘ As Nwahubyana 
has driven away her husband from her hut, she has also driven away the chief- 
_ tainship from her son. Heshallnot reign. Rinono shall reign because he is 
- the son of the woman who took care of the sick chief.” This story, where 
we see the sacred law of succession transgressed for a moral reason, is most 
interesting because it provides a good illustration of the conception of the clan 
regarding chieftainship and it proves that, even in ancient times, a feeling of 
humanity could have more weight with the tribe than an article of the royal 
code. . 

heard of a chief in the Shiridja clan who was put to death. 
Deposal is generally proclaimed by a council of the royal family. 

To reign over a Bantu clan requires much tact, ability and 
patience. The chief must be a father to his people and not a 
tyrant. (1) 

2) ‘THE SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT. 

In order to keep in touch with his subjects, a chief generally 
places his wives in the various provinces of his little kingdom 
and he pays them regular visits, staying some days in those 
secondary capitals. 

But a more effective way of holding the country is to place 
his son or his near relatives as sub-chiefs in all these districts. 
Should a son be still young, the chief will send along with him a 
trustworthy counsellor to watch over him. Thus, when he dies, 
and when the elder son is called to the succession, the new 
chief will have his brothers as co-chiefs or sub-chiefs. Should 
they be ambitious, should they have acquired some power dur- 
ing the last years of their father’s government, they may refuse 
to obey and proclaim themselves independent. This has hap- 
pened many times amongst the Ronga. Let me shortly recapi- 
tulate the three instances already mentioned: — In the Tembe 

(1) Two nice Thonga riddles illustrate this disposition to criticise chiefs : 

The first riddle enigmatically describes the characteristics of an unworthy 
chief ; it comes from the banks of the Limpopo : 

Bupsa ga shisule. — Hosi leyi i ni mona... 
Some cyclamen flour. — This chief is full of hatred... 

The shisule — a word which I translate by cyclamen — is a plant which 
grows on the ant-hills, bearing large tubercles ; these can be cooked and ground 
into flour ; but it is only good in appearance, the taste is unpleasant and nau- 
seating. This chief is bad! He is like that flour! Corruptio optimi pessima! 

Here is another riddle which holds the chiefs up to ridicule somewhat wit- 
tly: 

Tinsindji tibiri ti rendjeleka tchuka. — Tihosi tibiri ti hleba nandja. 
Two mice chase one another round an ant-hill (They will never meet) 
— Two chiefs malign a subject. (They will also never meet, i. e. agree). 

Each wants to have the last word and will therefore depreciate the argu- 
ments of his opponent. He will seek to disprove the statements of the other 
chief, making fresh ones which the latter will seek to refute in his turn! 

kingdom Maputju, who “‘ate the foreleg”, made himself king of 
the greater part of the terrority. The separated brothers became 
fierce enemies and often fought against each other, all the more 
as Tembe greatly resented the revolt of Maputju, and Maputju 
knew he had not been fair to his elder brother (p. 299). The 
same thing happened when Matjolo became independent from 
Mpfumo, his elder brother; both were sons of Nhlaruti. The 
origin of the war of 1894-1896 was the same: Mubvesha, 
belonging to the Hlewana branch of the Mazwaya family, 
wanted to become independent .. even to take the chieftainship 
from the elder branch to which Maphunga and _ his successor 
Mahazule belonged. 

So the Thonga clan has a tendency to fall to pieces, just as 
the Thonga village, and it requires a good deal of firmness and 
diplomacy on the part of a chief to keep his kingdom intact. 

3) THE LAW OF SUCCESSION. 

Its main provision is this: when a chief dies, his elder son 
isthe regular heir, butall his younger brothers must reign before 
tlie som, The tmic heir, 1s -crowhed. is “syciem ‘ties “to 
reconcile two principles which we have already met with as 
ruling the family life: 1) the absolute preeminent right of the 
elder branch, 2) the community of property amongst brothers. 
But if they can be reconciled in ordinary life, these two princi- 
ples become antagonistic when transported into politics, and this 
law of succession has been the source of endless disturbances 
amongst the Thonga clans. It is true that the younger brothers 
of the chief, when taking his place, are considered more or less 
as princes regent, holding office on behalf of their nephew, 
who is the lawful heir to the throne. They are said to ‘“‘make 
him grow” (kurisa) to ‘‘keep his tumbler” (hlayisa ndyelo). 

But if the former chief died in his youth, and if his younger 
brother has lived and reigned for a long time, and has become 
very popular, he is very much tempted to appropriate the 
-chieftainship for his own family and to order the tribe to crown 

  

his son, to the exclusion of the son of the first chief, who belonged 
to the elder branch, but who has been more or less forgotten 
during all these years. This leads to conflicts and fighting. 
The lawful heir will contest (banga, a Zulu word) and a mubango 
(civil war) will follow. Or, if he is not able to fight, he will 
keep to himself, full of bitterness, and ready to seize the first 
opportunity of asserting his rights. 

Such an usurpation has taken place twice in the Nkuna tribe. 
It is not easy to know exactly what happened, because there 
are conflicting statements. Those who hold the chieftainship 
do not tell the story in the same way as those who consider 
themselves as having been robbed of their right. This is the 
testimony of one of the latter, Mbokota, son of Madjubane. 
There were three brothers, Hoshana, Mbangwa and Ribye.(1) 
During the disturbances caused by the Ngoni invasion, Hoshana 
fled to the Nwamba country and lost touch with the main body 
of the clan which settled in the Transvaal. He however 
possessed the ritlatla (p. 359). At his death the royal apanage 
was brought to Shiluvane, but it never went back to Hoshana’s 
children who lost their right for ever. Mbangwa had three chil- 
dren: a daughter, Tibatiba, and two sons, Nyantsiri and Shiluvane. 
At his death, his younger brother Ribye reigned. He died and 
then the chieftainship came back to Mbangwa’s children. In 
the meantime Nyantsiri had died, but he had left two children, 
Madyubane and Mapsakomo. Madyubane, the elder one, was still 
achild. So Tibatiba, the elder sister, said to Shiluvane: ‘“Take 

(1) Genealogy of the Nkuna family showing why and how contests arose for the 
succession. 

Hoshana Mbangwa Ribye 
| aa | 
Has many Tibatiba Nyantsiri Shiluvane (reigns at 
pee | | : : the death 
tt fe) 
ss ee ee ae Madyubane Mapsakomo Muhlaba Muholo Shihoza of 
Rea Sees ee eet eo Mbangwa) 
country. Mbokota 

The names of the chiefs who reigned are thus underlined ——---- 
Those of those who were deprived of the chieftainship, thus 

the elephant tusk belonging to the Nkuna Royal Family and 
reign in the place of Nyantsiri; but you have only to ‘“‘keep 
the tumbler” of Madyubane”. Shiluvane sold the tusk and 
bought wives, beads and clothing for himself. Madyubane 
died some years later ; but he had a younger brother, Mapsa- 
komo, and moreover a son called Mbokota. The chieftainship 
ought certainly to have returned to the elder branch. Mbo- 
kota told me himself that Shiluvane, before dying, had ordered 
his counsellors to proclaim him as chief. So, at Shiluvane’s 
death, a great contest arose. ‘The headmen came to the capital 
and asked which son of Shiluvane had been designated by the 
late chief as his successor. No one dared reply because there 
were four men who claimed the chieftainship : Mapsakomo, a 
younger brother cf the legal heir Madyubane, Mbokota the son 
of Madyubane, Muhlaba and Muholo, both sons of Shiluvane. 
The great counsellor Shikhibane then said: ‘‘I heard Shiluvane 
say he wanted Muhlaba to reign”. The headmen accepted this 
statement, but the other pretenders greatly resented it. Seeing 
that many Ba-Nkuna were opposed to Muhlaba, Shikhibane 
assembled the whole tribe inarms to proclaim his protégé. He 
wanted the. army itself to manifest its will. Mbokota, Ma- 
psakomo and Muholo protested. But the warriors took Muhlaba, 
who was still a young man, and brought him to his new resi- 
dence all through the country in an epic march during which 
they sang the war songs. The contest was finally settled by 
the Boer Authorities ; Captain Dahl, then Native Commissioner 
for Zoutpansberg, confirmed the choice of Muhlaba. The Pedi 
queen Magayibia, of the Nyarin clan, asserted also that she had 
heard Shiluvane designate this young man as his successor, 
and the other pretenders were obliged to keep quiet. But they 
remained very discontended. (1) 

(1) Iremember, paying one day a visit to Mbokota, hearing him complain 
bitterly about his fate. He had tried to show his independence by establish- 
ing a separate circumcision school for his people so that they should not go 
to the ‘‘sungi” of Muhlaba. The chief did not prevent him from doing 
this, but he had just sent a messenger to claim the fees paid by the boys. 
Mbokota was much grieved at being obliged to remit them... and, if he had 

I have seen another similar case of the elder branch losing 
its right on account of a younger brother placing his son on the 
throne, to the exclusion of the legal heir. It happened amongst 
the Baloyi who took refuge in the Mudjadji country. The 
sons of Nkami, younger brother of Shitshabe, tried to seize the 
chieftainship to the detriment of Munyamana, son of Shitshabe, 
and this gave rise to a war in consequence of which, however, 
Munyamana regained his right. (See S. A. A. A. S. Report of 
the Meeting of 1905. Vol. III, page 251). 

All these facts tend to show that the position of the chief is 
attended with many dangers and difficulties, without mentioning 
those which arise from the presence of the White Government 
with which I shall deal later on. 

So it must be recognised that the Tlonga have not been able 
to discover a political system guaranteeing the peace of the 
country ina satisfactory way. The habit of dividing the power 
between brothers who soon become rivals, that of allowing the 
younger brothers to reign before the legal heir, both these 
customs tend to destroy the unity of the clan and give rise to 
quarrels and unrest. Another bad consequence of these features 
of the royal right is this : a chief, when he ascends the throne, 
will do his best to get rid of troublesome brothers in order to 
reign alone and to ensure the chieftainship to his son. This 
often happened, especially in the case of Maphunga, chief of 
Nondwane, who killed as many as four brothers or near rela- 
tions : Sitjobela, Nwanambalana, Zulu and Gigiseka. The 
last named was very courageous and the cunning Maphunga 
succeeded in poisoning him treacherously, through the agency of 
a dissolute woman. 

enough men, he would certainly have revolted. But he had but a handful of 
warriors. He was not popular amongst the tribe ; so he did not think it wise to 
‘“banga ” and eventually submitted to Muhlaba. 

E. DEATH 

When a chief has grown very old, he no longer comes out of 
the royal hut. His counsellors take his place in the management 
of affairs and he dies surrounded by mystery. It must be so, as 
his death must remain unknown during a whole year.“ We 
reap and we bow down (korama) ” viz. ‘* we till the ground and 
reap again before the event is made public (palusha) ” says Man- 
khelu. 

So the chief is buried during the night ; no lamentations are 
heard ; his wives and his grave-diggers undergo the purification 
ceremonies and take the vapour baths in secret. It may be 
that the wives who dwell in remote places will not hear a word 
of their husband’s death. The fire of the-royal hut will not be 
kindled in the usual and ritual way, but it will be kept burning 
the whole year. ‘The decease is formally announced to some 
few individuals, to the White Government officials, to the 
heir (who views the corpse), to the counsellors, but the rest of 
the country is supposed to be in ignorance of the occurrence. 
Of course the secret will not be kept absolutely. The truth 
will leak out... But no one will dare to speak openly on the 
subject.(1) <A special hut is set apart into which the coun- 
sellors enter under pretext of discussing matters of state with 
the chief, who is said to be very ill and unable to show him- 
self. As a matter of fact, he has been for some time buried. 

(1)I was staying at Nondwane when Mapunga, the chief who preceeded 
Mahazule, died, aud I heard on several occasions, in June ard July 1891, the 
warriors practising on their antelope horns the airs to be played when the 
mourning would be made public. The death must haveoccurred during 1890, 
but nothing was said about it. After the news had been published, Ma- 
nganyele, a young heathen of the district of Libombo, remarked to me one day: 
«When last season (about Xmas 1890) we saw the miphimbi (trees bearing 
fruit similar to an apricot) so heavily laden with fruit, (there had been an 
exceptionally heavy crop), we felt sure the chief must have died and that he 
had sent us this plentiful supply...” A typical remark, aptly illustrating the 
semi -ignorance in which the tribe is kept on the death of the chief. 

What is the reason for this silence? According to the old 
men I consulted, it is to prevent enemies taking advantage of the 
confusion consequent on the death of the chief to attack the 
country. Undoubtedly this custom is also intended to give the 
principal counsellors time to prepare for the installation of tne 
new chief and to prevent bloody contests. 

The grave of the chief does not differ from those of the sub- 
jects. Having been dug secretely in the sacred wood (ntimu), its 
whereabouts are not known by most of the people. In some 
clans or sub-clans the earth of the tumulus is levelled, so that no 
sign whatever remains to show where the body has been buried. 
This is said to be done in order to prevent enemies from exhum- 
ing the corpse and cutting off its ears, its diaphragm and other 
parts of the body to make powerful war-charms (See Chapter 
IV). The graves of the chiefs of Nondwane are said to be invisi- 
ble, just the same as the hut of the nyokwekulu. They are 
known by Magomanyana alone (Mboza). (Magomanyana is the 
nearest relative of the late Maphunga, the only brother whom 
he spared). 

When the year of secrecy is over, the official proclamation of 
the mourning is made. (Ba palusha nkosi). The people come 
to the capital, clan after clan, sounding their fanfares on trum- 
pets of antelope horns (bunanga, see Chapter HI), and bringing 
with them an ox or a goat. These animals are slaughtered and 
their bladders are presented to the heir who pins them into his 
hair, so that, without any official proclamation having been made, 
every warrior at once recognises the future chief. All heads are 
shaven in sign of mourning, the adult men remove their war 
crown (p. 130) and the people are clothed in malopa (a blue 
cloth) ; but as the decease is not of recent date and has been 
known more or less for some time, the outward manifestations 
of grief are reduced to a minimum and dances follow in their 
train. The delegates from the adjoining countries also come to 
make their condolences. When all have paid their respects, the 
mourning is really ended ((nkosi wu yu !). The King is dead, 
long live the King ! 

As we saw, amongst the Nkuna the proclamation of the death 

= oy 
of a chief is made on the same day as the installation of his 
successor. 

As regards the queens (tinkosikazi, a Zulu word), the chief’s 
wives, there is not much to say labout them. We have seen 
that one of them occupies a particularly honourable position 
having been bought with the people’s money and being “ the 
wife of the country ”, the one whose 
son will be the heir to the chieftain- 
ship. However she is not necessarily 
the great wife. ‘This name is applied 
to the first married who remains the 
real spouse, the one at whose death 

Paot. G. Liengme. 

Ngoni Queens. 

the chief will perform the ceremony of widowhood. Should 
the wife of the country die and should she not be the first 
married, he will not go through that rite on her account. 
Princesses are lobola with more money than ordinary girls. 
Except in this, they do not differ from them. It is not 
common for a woman to be called to the dignity of chieftainship 
amongst Thonga; in this respect they differ from the Ba-Pedi, 
or Transvaal Ba-Suto, who have had many illustrious reigning 
queens: Modjadji, Male etc. I only know one such case amongst 
the Ronga and the queen is still living. Her name is Mida- 

aS 3001 
mbuze, daughter of Dambuze. Dambuze was the chief of a part 
of the Mabota country, northward of Lourengco Marques. At 
his death, his son Gwaba was put in his place. But he was 
deported by the Portuguese and his sister, Midambuze, filled the 
position. Consequently she was not lobola, but she chose a 
husband for herself, a man of common origin (a titlhuba nuna). 
Her son can eventually succeed her ; in this case only can a 
uterine nephew of a chief take his place. 

At Gungunyana’s court queens were playing a great part. 
This seems to be in accordance with the Zulu custom. After 
the death of Chaka’s mother, sexual relations were taboo for the 
whole tribe during one year, and children conceived during that 
time were murdered by the order of the chief! (See Colenso. 
Ten weeks in Natal). 

I know of no case in which a foreigner became chief of a clan 
through having married one of its princesses. He can become 
hosana, but the true hosana will be his wife and he himself 
will be but a prince consort. I have heard of two instances in 
which this happened.

THe Court AND TRIBUNAL 

Although Royalty makes but little display amongst the Ba- 
Ronga, still each Chief is the centre of a court of greater or less 
brilliancy. 

fo THE VILLAGE OF THE Chige 

The village in which he resides is not called muti (as is the 
case with the ordinary hamlets of his subjects), but ntsindja, that 
is ‘the capital.” It is generally larger than the ordinary villa- 
ges, is built by the young: men of the tribe, after the marriage 
of the chief, and is also kept in repair by them, one of their 
principal duties being to keep the public square in a state of 
continual cleanliness and to weed it at certain seasons of the 
year. 

One of my countrymen, D' J. de Montmollin, visited the 
capital of the Tembe clan and took some interesting photo- 
graphs of it in July 1900. The whole village was surrounded 
by a high and thorny circular fence, much stronger than is the 
case with ordinary kraals. The inside of the fence was divided 
into two parts: the front part, to which the main entrance gave 
access, and the back part with the huts of the queens. ‘The front 
part was the square (hubo and bandla) with shady trees, under 
which visitors were sitting ; there was only one hut in it, on the 
left side near the fence ; the back part comprised the huts of 
the queens, which were separated from the square by a high 
wall of reeds, carefully built, and in which only a few narrow 

3 3 = 

‘. aie 
‘Phot. D*® J. de Montmollin, 

Main gate of the Tembe capital. 

Romig 

$5 
Mm 2 Saks sedis a , > 

| 

Phot. D™ J. de Montmollin, 

The ‘‘ hubo ”, square of the Tembe capital 
(The huts of the queens in the background, behind the reed wall). 

- oo 
entrances were left. The traveller was told that the access to 
this kind of gynecium was taboo for all the men. However he 
was allowed to visit it. Behind those huts were two passages 
between poles nicely arranged, one leading to the pig-sties, ano- 
ther to the bush. The photographer was told that is was in- 
tended to secure an exit for the queens in case of war... I sup- 
pose it hada more common and practical use in every day life ! 

Phot. Dr J. de Montmollin. 

Back gate with hen house. 

They are the psiruba of the queens (p. 281). In the royal kraal 
these back entrances are taboo. 

It is on the square that the men of the neighbourhood love 
to meet in the morning, when they come to pay their respects 
to the Chief: they sit down in groups and discuss the news of 
the day: this is called, as we saw, ‘“‘ku ya bandla”, ‘‘ to. go to 
the men’s square”. Everybody is welcome there, not only mem- 
bers of the reigning family, but also those of the clans conquered 
by the actual chiefs, (as the Hofiwana, Mahlangwane etc., in 
Nondwane. Page 330). There is no lack of beer, made from 
maize or millet, when crops have been good, the women fre- 

— We > 
quently bringing brimming jars to the capital; the daily visits 
of the men are not therefore altogether disinterested. 

Phot. D* J]. de Montmollin. 

Back gate. 
B. COURT PERSONAGES 

Amongst those most frequently seen at the Court, we must 
mention the Counsellors, the Favourites, the Herald and the 
Official Vituperator. 

I. The Counsellors. 

The Counsellors, tindjuna,(1) constitute a Cabinet which assists 
the chief in carrying on the functions of Royalty. There are several 
grades of these functionaries ; firstly the Principal Counsellors 

(1) The Zulu word induna is well known and has been more or less adopted 
in current speech in South Africa. The Thonga form is ndjuna, pl. tindjuna. 
I employ both these forms indiscriminately. 

a 
(letikulu) whose province it is to discuss and decide the more 
serious questions which affect the country. These are generally 
the uncles of the chief, or men of riper age from the collateral 
branches of his family, In Nondwane, during the war of 1894, 
it was Magomanyana and Mundulukele, brothers of the late 
Maphunga, uncles of the reigning chief Mahazule, and later on 
Nwakubyele, who had charge of the interests of the eastern 

Sunduza, Chief of the Maluleke clan, with his Counsellors (N. E. Transvaal). 

portion of the country, together with Nwambalane. These 
tindjuna watch over the chief, and have the right of finding 
fault with him if they are not satisfied with his conduct. 

In the second place come the Military Counsellors, the Generals 
of the army (tindjuna ta yimpi) who direct fighting operations, 
(Shitlefiwana in Nondwane, Mpompi and Mahagane in Zih- 
lahla). 

Then there are Counsellors who are especially entrusted with 
the business of the adjoining countries, whom we might call 
Agents General, one being appointed to represent each country. 
We have already seen that these officials form an indispensable 

 oe  
link in the diplomatic, and even in the matrimonial relations, 
between one kingdom and another. 

If these men are intelligent, they acquire great influence with 
the chief and may even be able to impose their will upon him. 
This was the case in September 1894, when the young king 
Nwamantibyane was prevented by his counsellors obeying the 
summons of the Portuguese Government, who claimed his assis- 
tance in fighting Mahazule (See App. VIIL). They often act as 
a useful counterpoise to the autocratic power of the chief. 

Lastly we find another category of Counsellors : those appointed 
by the chief in the various districts, to act as overseers or 
magistrates, to adjudicate the petty differences of the people ; 
they must refer to the capital all important affairs (timhaka), 
the quarrels which the head of the village is unable to settle, 
and all matters which can only be judged by the chief, to whom 
they are of the greatest assistance in his decisions, being past 
masters in the art of Bantu reasoning. 

The tindjuna are thus a complete organisation, as necessary 
to the chief as they are to the orderly development of tribal 

life. 

I]. The Favourites, or Messengers. 

When the chief is crowned while still young, he gathers 
around him a circle of personal friends of his own age who are 
called tinxekwa. This is a Zulu word and it seems that this 
custom has been borrowed from the Zulu court procedure. In 
Ronga they are called tinyumi, which means messengers, and 
they generally build a /ao, viz., a bachelor’s house, near the 
capital, to be ready to answer to any call. ‘They partake in the 
games of their royal comrade and also in his feasts, but they 
have no official authority. 

= Sy 

Ill. The Herald. 

On one occasion I happened to be the guest, with one of my 
colleagues, of the chief Nwamantibyane, long before there was any 
question of the war of Lourenco Marques. Stretched in our 
hammocks, which we had fixed to the roof inside a hut placed 
at our disposal for the night, we were trying to sleep when, 
about 4 a. m., we were awakened by an extraordinary sound : 
it was in a very high key, words sung, shouted, voluble and 
monotonous, in fact a most peculiar and never-to-be-forgotten 
musical production! Further sleep was impossible and for more 
than half an hour, we were obliged to submit to this ear-splitting 
performance : 

** Yethi (Bayete), we hosi, wene shitlangu sho ringana tilo, 
mathathala i tinyeleti, nkungu wa shone ihweti! We ! nkandj1 
wa ku wona, ku baleka minambyana!” — ‘ Bahete ! O chief! 
You shield us as heaven! The marks of this shield are like 
the stars! You who trample dry ground so that rivers at once 
spring forth ! ” 

It was the mbongi wa ku pfusha, the herald sounding the 
reveille; an individual who has ‘‘ the chest well developed ”, as 
they say in Ronga, which does not mean that he is sound in the 
wind and possesses healthy lungs, but that he is a man of great 
eloquence. In our tribe the chest (pectus) is held to be the 
seat of knowledge and of the gift of oratory! Every morning, 
before sunrise, this royal flatterer comes to the door of the chiet’s 
hut and sings the glorious deeds of his ancestors, recalling their 
names and acts of prowess ; to these praises, he adds a general 
disparagement (sandja) of the chief himself, referring to him as 
a coward, a child in comparison with his father, his grandfather 
and all his noble deceased progeniters. ‘‘ Lead us to battle ! 
Show us what youcando!” And the chief must be awakened 
every day by this strange concert, which sometimes lasts for 
hours ! 

The flatterer likes to accompany his chief when he goes to 

visit the Whites. In front of the offices of the Municipal Council 
of Lourengo Marques, I once witnessed the arrival of Sigaole, 
chief of Matjolo, who came thither to look at Gungunyane, who 
had been taken prisoner by the Portuguese in January 1896 ; 
his mbongi was among his following. He was an old man, 
named Mabobo. Dressed upin a jacket, by no means too clean, 
and with a cap on his head, he yelled the praises of the royal 
family of Matjolo ; this was in Zulu and doubtless with a special 
terminology. He worked like a madman and no one took the 
slightest notice of him! 

When the chief kills an ox and some little delay possibly 
occurs in distributing the meat, it appears the mbongi is the 
duly qualified beggar who goes to claim the soldiers’ share. 
He addresses the chief much as follows : “Don’t you see all 
those men in your village? Are they not dogs ? Why do 
you starve us? You only give meat to the women... Is it 
women who will defend you when the enemies attack you? 
etc. etc.’ At the coronation of the chiefs it is this herald who 
sings their praises in the procession I have already described. 
Strange to say, the mbongi is allowed great licence and may 
even insult the chief without provoking his anger: on the 
contrary, the herald is respected and a special portion of .meat 
is reserved for him. Any one can aspire to the office provided 
he be sufficiently garrulous. 

The most eloquent of the Thonga heralds whom J ever met 
is Mawewe, the mbongi of the Nkuna clan. He was an elderly 
man in 1900 and had the record of a long career behind him, 
having been the mbongi of Manukosi. ‘‘I used to praise him 
from morn to night (ndji petadambu) and he gave me a heifer 
as a reward”. As the French writer Buffon used to put on his 
cuffs before writing, so Mawewe, when he intended to praise 
his chief Muhlaba, adorned nimself with the tail of the nsimango 
antelope, with feathers of nkulunkulu (the bird of the chiefs) 
and of eagle, with skins of snakes, of reed buck, of leopard, 
with nails, or teeth, or hair of elephants, rhinoceros and hippo- 
potamus, and then he commenced: 

— ie — 

Muhlaba Shiluvane, (1) you are like the rhinoceros who seizes a 
man, bites him through and through, rolls him over and cuts him in 
two! You are like the crocodile which lives in water; it bites a man! 
You are like its claws ; it seizes a man by his arms and legs, it drags 

' 
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“ 
i 
@ 
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* 
: 

; 

; 

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: 

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: 

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. 

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cs 

Muhlaba, the Chief of the Nkuna clan. Phot. A. Borel. 

him into the deep pool to eat him at sunset; it watches over the en- 
trance to prevent other crocodiles from taking its prey... Muhlaba ! 
You are like the ram; when it butts with its head, it knocks a man 
down; like a goat, like the son of the goat, which is herded by the 
boys, which is very cunning: it pricks up its ears, it prepares itself for 
defence, when attacked ! 

Tail of nsimango, you are like Muhlaba, you are of a great beauty, 

(1) Father of Muhlaba. 

you are shining inside the forest, the black forest, you are sparkling, 
kati-kati-kati (1), a man may truly fears when he sees you! 

Give them meat, that they all may eat! Give your men the fore- 
leg, give them the hindleg, that they all may eat to their hearts’ con- 
tent... Draw their legs (ba koke milenge), so that they fall back in 
terror of you! 

Why do you govern them so mildly! Look at them with terrible 
eyes! You are a coward! The Bvesha want to kill you! Act with 
bravery and defend yourself ! 

Muhlaba Dabuka ! Men are coming, oxen are coming. You are on 
the top of the hills, you are like heaven which roars... The lightning 
is like you, it is full of strength, itis terrible! Your saliva is white, 
your eyes are beaming, your face is elongated, your body is like the 
stone of gold (auriferous quartz); your fingers are long. You are 
known in every country. At Gungunyana, they know you. At 
Newana (Swaziland), they know you. The Zulu know you! At 
Mosilakatse, they know you. You are like the grass on the road ; 
when people trample on it, they crush it to the ground, but when the 
rain come, it grows again and covers the earth. You are like the 
water of the river, how beautiful! The water is clear and pure, 
though impurities may float upon it, they pass away and the water is 
pure again ! 

The Bvesha weep at Sikokoro’s kraal (2)! They weep at Sikhu- 
khunu’s! You have taken their charms! You have sprinkled your 
warriors with them. Muhlaba, you have beaten them with the shaft 
of the assagay, your men crossed the river, they went to kill the ene- 
mies in their own kraal! 

You are like the ostrich feather, the white one, very white, or the 
red one of the bird which cries tswe-tswe, the bird called rivi, which 
adorns the chiefs ! 

At Nyarin (3), they dispute chieftainship (banga buhosi); they are 

(1) Descriptive adverb. 

(2) In 1901, there was a native war in which Muhlaba and the Pedi chief 
Maaghe fought against their neighbour Sikororo and his ally Sikhukhukhu, heir 
of Sekukuni. On the 7th of November a serious battle took place in Shilu- 
vane where the assaillants were repulsed and more than forty of them were 
killed. (See App. VII) 

(3) Here Mawewe makes an allusion to the circumstances in which Mu- 
hlaba took the chieftainship and which have been explained when dealing 
with the law of succession. The capital of the tribe was still at Nyarin, at 
that time, viz., in the hills near New Agatha. (See page 384). 

going to kill each other. Mapsakomo says: ‘‘It is mine!” Muholo 
says: “‘It is mine!” Shirundju (1) took him (Muhlaba) on his 
arms... Mankhelu is like the duiker antelope! They catch him by 
the ear and he escapes from their hands! He is like the water of the 
well: they draw it up... it springs up again and fills up the well. 
(Viz., Mankhelu is never tired when defending the cause of Muhlaba). 

‘¢Run, goand tell Mandlamakulu, Shiluvane’s brother: ‘‘The power 
belongs to me.” Run, go and tell Mpapalati: ‘‘ The power is mine.” 
Run go and tell Mulondjo : ‘‘The power is mine ” (2) ! 

Such is the landatory song of Mawewe, one of the great men 
at the Nkuna court. No doubt this is one of the best exam- 
ples of Thonga poetry and a characteristic piece of primitive lite- 
rature. In the savage tribe the mbongi is the prototype of the 
poet laureate of civilised Courts. But there is yet another func- 
tionary to be considered whose duties are still more strange than 
those of the herald; he is called: 

IV. The Public Vituperator. 
(Shitale sha tiko.) 

He is a kind of Court Jester who has the right of casting the 
vilest insults, the most disgraceful accusations in the teeth of 
any and all the natives of the country. He never abuses strang- 
ers, but as long as he confines his vituperations to his own coun- 
trymen, he enjoys perfect immunity. 

The chief even is not safe from his attacks; he dares to say 
anything! ‘Just see him arriving in your village”, said Tobane 
to me, in his picturesque language. ‘‘ He begins shouting out 
the most frightful things. He accuses you of incest, of taking 
your own sisters as wives! Even if he sees you talking to your 

(1) One of the great counsellors who took the part of Muhlaba as did also 
Mankhelu and Shikhibane. 

(2) Quotation of words of Muhlaba himself who sent messengers to all 
his uncles, to all the petty chiefs under him, to announce officially that he 
has taken the chieftainship. 

‘great sister-in law”, whom your wife’s brother married with 
your oxen, whom you treat with the greatest respect, he will 
not hesitate to pass remarks which will make you blush with 
shame! He will go and take the food you are cooking, will 
even snatch from the chief’s 
hands the meat he is eating... 
So, when you see him com- 
ing to your village, you 
hasten to meet him and take 
him a present to try and avoid 
having to listen to his horri- 
ble insults. Sometimes the 
shitale of the country behaves 
himself quite nicely, stays in 
his own village and attends 
the national assemblies as 
quietly as any other person, 
but, once he begins to rattle 
off his vituperations, beware ! 
Nothing will stop him! He 
respects nothing, human or 
divine!” The Court Jester is 
of undoubted Thonga origin, 
asold as the tribe itself, accord- 
ing to Tobane. The position 
is official and even hereditary. 
At Zihlahla it was Nwacha- 
pane who held the extraordi- 
nary post of Public Vitupe- 
rator. In Nondwane it was 
Mutjunkwa of the Shibindji family. He insulted the chief with 
this word: ‘‘Musathanyoko”. There was also a woman who 
dared to do the same to Maphunga. 

It is difficult to understand the raison d’étre of this strange 
institution. Is the shitale a public censor, to whom the tribe 
entrusts the privilege of calling attention to facts which others 
would not dare to bring to light? Is there some analogy be- 

Phot P. Berthoud, 
Molwele, the dwarf. 

tween this ‘‘ fool” of an African Court and Triboulet ? (1) I 
could not say. 

C. SUNDRY COURT CUSTOMS 

The paraphernalia of royalty are very modest in the Thonga 
courts. However there are some to be mentioned in addition 
to the regalia which I have described. 

I. The Big Drum (muntshintshi). 

It is found in every capital, even sometimes in the sub-chief’s 
villages. It is made of a hollowed stem, somewhat like an ordin- 
ary mortar; or it may be rounded, even provided with three 
legs, as in Nondwane; a piece of skin is stretched over the open- 
ing. It may be the skin of an elephant’s ear, of a buffalo, of an 
ox or of an.antelope mangulwe. This instrument is subject to 
some taboos: when the skin cracks, it is prohibited to look 
inside. There is something mysterious about it and nobody must 
disclose that mystery. People say that a bullet is introduced 
into it when made. In Shiluvane they pretended that the skull 
of the hostile chief, Sikororo, killed in the battle of Nov. 1901, 
had been put into the big drum! Atany rate, there is a special 
individual who is summoned to repair it and he receives a fowl 
as reward. 

(1) In this connection I reproduce from a photograph, taken at Shiluvane in 
1885, the portrait of a remarkable personage who is not a Thonga but a Pedi, 
a subject of the chief Maaghe. Although this extraordinary dwarf does not 
act officially as the Vituperator, he was widely famed for his witty sayings 
and his incomparable mimicry. The Native Commissioner took him to Pre- 
toria and Johannesburg some years agoas a curiosity, and it seems that he was 
exhibited for money! The name of this little man is Molwele, a veritable 
ethnographic phenomenon, although he is not precisely the Public Vituperator 
of the country. 

— te = 

The big drum is beaten on various occasions: 

a) To announce a great fatality, especially the death of a chief, 
or the day of the publication of the mourning ; also the approach 
of the inundation, when the Nkomati river rises, in January, 
February, and threatens to cover the whole land; again when 
the bush fire threatens to destroy the capital. 

b) To summon warriors to the capital in case of imminent 
war. 

c) To execute various musical performances. The big drum 
leads a special dance (nkino), which takes place at the capital 
during the winter, when the harvest is finished, and the country 
happy and prosperous. It is accompanied by a smaller drum 
(shikolombane) which is called the “‘son” of the big one. The 
shikolombane is more elongated and has no legs. Its sound is 
high and piercing, while the tone of the muntshirtshi is deep and 
low. The music properly speaking of this dance is provided by 
the bunanga. 

I]. The Bunanga. 

is the regular band, which is met with in every royal clan. This 
word comes from nanga trumpet (pl. tinanga). But the trum- 
pets composing the bunanga are not those vulgar pierced tibias 
of goats used by the herdboys. They are larger horns of the 
mhalambhala (Hippotragus Niger), or of the mhala (Zulu impala), 
pierced at their base in such a way that they produce different 
tones. These instruments are made by specialists, (it was Nwa- 
matshomane in Nondwane), so as to forma kind of orchestra (simo) 
composed of ten instruments. To play themisa veritableart. The 
players are standing round the two drumbeaters. The big drum 
gives the time: when it beats slowly, ‘‘tu-tu-tu”, the ten 
musicians must dance jn a ring, viz., they must march after 
each other, playing, making certain grimaces and gesticulations. 
When the drum beats more slowly and more softly, they must 
retire in a line and march slowly. The drum accelerates the 
time: then they come to the centre once more and dance in a 

= woe 
ring, quicker and quicker. The executants follow each other 
in a given order: the largest and deepest horn being in front, 
the smallest and highest toned one at the end of the group. 
Sometimes three or four orchestras perform at the same 
time. (1) 

The bunanga is an old Ronga custom and is very picturesque 

indeed. As for its musical importance, I shall refer to it again 
m Pare V. 

Ill. The shipalapala. 

Speaking of musical instruments of the Court, I must also 
mention the trumpet of assembly, shipalapala, which is the proper 
means of summoning the subjects to the capital. The sound 
of the big drum, though heard very far, cannot reach the end 
of the country. So, when the chief wants his men to assemble 
at once, he uses the shipalapala. It isa horn of mhalamhala, or 
of nyala or of phifa antelope, the sound of which is like mpu-t-u 
(with an accent on the second syllable). The envoy of the 
chief runs to the capital of a sub-chief, blowing all the time. 
When he has reached that village, he transmits his message and 
a young man starts at once with the shipalapala of the sub-chief 
to another district. So, in a short time, notice is given to the 
whole tribe to assemble. 

IV. Visttors. 

When a stranger passes through the capital, he must sit down 
outside the central square and at some little distance from it. 

(1) I remember having heard the bunanga practising in the various sub- 
clans of Nondwane in 1891, as each sub-chief had his own. They were pre 
paring to go to the capital to mourn Maphunga whose death had just been 
announced ; I saw the bunanga performing its best melodies before Lord Sel- 
borne, when he came to pay a visit to the Portuguese settlement of Mora- 
kwen in 1908. The Administrator had organised for him a ‘‘ batuque” 
(name given by the Portuguese to those native dances), and the warriors of 
Nondwane did their best to interest the White Chiefs ! 

— ae — 

Some one will come and inquire what he wants; he replies : 
** T come from such and such a country, and I wish to pay my 
respects to the chief.” Then the counsellor or ‘‘ Agent Gene- 
ral” charged with the affairs of the travellers’ country will 
come and converse with him and announce him (bika) to the 
chief, who will receive him affably and possibly assign him a hut 
to sleep in, in case he wishes to stay the night, at the same time 
providing him with food. Should the chief be particularly well 
disposed towards his guest, he will kill a calf or even an ox for 
him; and he, on his return, will speak in praise of the hospi- 
tality he has received, saying; ‘‘ The chief made me share his 
reion , literally: “*He made me reion, (a ndji fumisile).% 
Such is the procedure when the respective countries of guest and 
host are neighbouring and the tribes on good and friendly terms. 
Should relations between them be at all strained, or should war 
be imminent, all the roads would be closed and no one allowed 
to enter the Capital. 

V. The Kondza custom. 

The chief is also approached by those who may wish to be- 
come subject to him, to be naturalized ; this is called kondza, 
from a Zulu word conveying this meaning. The chief will 
assign to the new nandja a dwelling place, and he will be incor- 
porated in the nation without further ceremony. By this 
kondza, he binds himself to pay the taxes (See the story of 
Mutipi. Les chants et les contes de Ba-Ronga, page 164). 

Naturalised strangers, however, do not eat the first fruits (lu- 
ma) with the same drug as the people of the country. They 
have their own medicine amd take it according to their own 
rules. However they are forbidden to luma before the chief 
of their adopted land (p. 369). 

VI. Diplomatic relations. 

We have seen that they are very carefully conducted, each 
of the neighbouring clans having one counsellor entrusted with 
the care of its affairs. In case of war, friendly clans frequently 
make alliances (shinakulobye). They send messages to each 
other, or they have special means of communicating news in 
case of war. Supposing, for instance, Nwamba and Nondwane 
should fight against Matjolo. They put two traps at their com- 
mon boundary, on the side of the road, one on the territory of 
Nwamba and one on that of Nondwane. These traps consist 
in a rod bent by a string fastened to the ground. Should the 
army of Matjolo have made an invasion during the night into 
Nwamba and caused them to fly, men of Nwamba will at once 
go and undo the trap which is on their side ; in the morning, 
the people of Nondwane will know that they must also fly. 

‘De THe TRIBUNAL OP THE CHIEF 

In the Thonga Court there is no separation of powers. The 
legislative executive and judicial powers are all in the hands of 
the chief aided by his counsellors. ‘The chief is the supreme au- 
thority and his decisions are without appeal. 

I. Legislative affairs. 

The chief makes the laws (p. 354) and presides at discussions 
which end in a resolution. But his counsellors assist him. 

Here is an example of such a decision taken at Maphunga's 
court. There was no uniformity as to the money to be paid 
for a lobolo, and some fathers claimed as much as £ 20 or £ 30 
for their daughters. The great counsellors of the capital decided 

— = 

(tjimba mhaka, viz., to tie the matter) that a lobolo should be 
£15.10 at the maximum. They “tied the matter” with the 
assent of the chief. Then all the sub-chiefs and counsellors 
were summoned to the capital. The chief called the roll to 
ascertain if they were all present. The great counsellor then 
said to the assembly : ‘‘The herds which people claim are too 
large. Have you gold mines and’do you know how to cast 
coins? Henceforth do not lobola with too much money. 
£ 15-10 is quite enough! ” Every sub-chief, on his return 
home, called his men and informed them of the decision: ‘‘ Hi 
to timhaka! Such are the matters! ” said they. Men were 
disappointed. They wept! But they had to accept the deci- 
sion. ‘To oppose itis taboo! ‘‘ Psa yila!” 

A native debate or discussion is conducted on very different lines 
from those to which we are generally accustomed, nothing ever 
being put to the vote. The chief presi- 
des. A proposition is put forward in 
short sentences, generally interrogative, 
by one of the counsellors. The as- 
sembly listens in silence until the mover 
concludes with an energetic ‘‘ Ahina”, 
being the equivalent of “ that’s all 
right”. (See p. 35). Another indivi- 
dual elaborates the matter proposed, 
saying: ‘“‘ Have you not heard what 
he said? He said so and so”. This 
is the way of seconding the motion. 
The debate proceeds, and, little by little, 
the objections are brought forward and 
the assembly comes to a decision. 

It often happens that the chief does 
not say a word: when he see that the 
counsellors are agreed and he has no 
objection, he merely shows his assent 
by nodding the head. So the decision 
is arrived at without his intervention 
and without any vote being taken. 

Phot. A. Borel. 
An habitué of the Nkuna Court. 

= 

The voice of the majority has not been ascertained by any 
show of hands but it is generally perceived by intuition in a 
very remarkable way, and grave counsellors, who have been 
squatting in a circle all through the discussion, jump to their 
feet and disperse, knowing perfectly well what has been decided. 
If however the counsellors do not agree, they put the matter in 
the hand of the chief, and the chief, after having listened to 
the arguments pro and con, ‘‘cuts the matter” (tjema mhaka) 
by some short sentences, after which everybody must shout the 
royal salutation : ‘‘ Bayete ! ” 

When there are two parties present the debate is conducted 
according to other rules. For instance, if a stranger wants to 
have speech with a chief or to proffer some request, he is gene- 
rally accompanied bya counsellor. The chief, together with some 
of his men, receives him either in the hut, if the matter must 
be secret, or on the square, if there is no objection to make it 
public. The chief and his men sit on one side, the visitor on 
the other; if he wishes to conform strictly to all the laws of 
etiquette, he will first explain the matter to his own Agent Gene- 
ral, who will communicate with the chief’s special counsellor, 
repeating the words of the visitor, sentence by sentence; the 
counsellor will, in his turn, communicate with the chief, again 
telling him the whole story, as if he had not heard a word of 
it before. The affair will thus have passed through three hands 
and the answer should, in due formality, be sent through the 
same channels. These precautions, which seem eminently 
superfluous, even somewhat ridiculous, to a person unacquainted 
with Bantu etiquette, evidently proceed from the fact that there 
are no stenographers, or secretaries, to furnish any written record 
of the proceeding, so that it is necessary to have as many wit- 
nesses as possible and that these thoroughly understand the mat- 
ter under consideration. 

Il. Judicial Cases. 

1) SENSE OF JUSTICE 

As has often been remarked, the Bantu possess a strong sense 
of justice. They believe in social order and in the observance 
of the laws and, though these laws are not written, they are 
universal and perfectly well known. The law is the custom, 
that which has always been done. The old men, the counsel- 
lors and more particularly the counsellors of the capital, are those 
who can speak authoritatively. But everybody is welcome in 
the hubo, where matters are discussed; even a stranger can take 
part in the discussion. ‘‘ No one is excluded, if he speaks 
rightly: fools only, those who do not know anything” (Man- 
khelu). 

This participation in the discussion of the hubo has developed 
the juridical sense to a wonderful extent amongst the Bantu. 
They are all born advocates and judges, and take a great interest 
in this business! No wonder therefore that the Thonga voca- 
bulary possesses a rich set of judicial expressions. Here are the 
most common: Naw (pl. milau) means law, custom. Ku tlula 
nau, to jump over the law, means the transgression. Nandju 
(pl. milandju) means the fault resulting from the transgression. 
This interesting word comes from ku landja, to follow. It 
applies in the first instance to cases which lead toa prosecution, 
but secondly to any fault. Ku doha, is to be wrong and ku 
dohela mbunu, the applicative derivative, to wrong another. Ku 
da, to eat somebody, or dela, is also a picturesque expression 
employed for injury to property. Ku ramba (Dj.), ku rjamela 
hosin (Ro.) is the technical expression to designate a complaint 
lodged before the chief. Ku riba (Dj.), djiba (Ro.) means to 
pay a fine, and rihisa, djihisa (the factitive derivate), to impose a 
fine. 

This strong sense of justice however differs from the European 
one on certain points. Owing to their collectivist notions, the 

Bantu consider relatives as responsible for the debts of their own 
kin, as we already saw (p. 302) Another case in which they 
entertain ideas which seem very strange to us is this: when 
anyone has lent you an implement and you make a bad use of 
it, the fault is as much the lender’s as the borrower’s. I remem- 
ber a queer story which took place in my school in Rikatla. 
Some boys had to go in the afternoon to work in the vegetable 
garden under the supervision of their overseer. On the way 
one of them happened to injure his foot by walking ona thorn. 
So, when he arrived in the garden, he borrowed a knife from 
the overseer and began to make sandals of palm-leaf pith. 
The elder boy entreated him to work. He refused to obey, so 
the overseer denounced him publicly, when the weekly inquiry 
into the conduct of the boys was made, on the following Fri- 
day. But the occasional shoemaker did not admit being 
guilty of anything at all, and his last argument was this: ‘‘ I 
cannot understand how Mr. overseer can accuse me whilst he 
himself lent me the knife which I used to carve my sandals”! 
D. Kidd tells similar stories about Pondos in his ‘‘ Essential 
Kai, 

So there are differences between Native and European concep- 
tions of justice, and Bantu do not always draw the same conclu- 
sions as we do from given premises. Native Commissioners 
must remember this and, in order to enlighten the native mind, 
they must try to find where these differences lie. But these 
are minor ones, and the sense of justice is nevertheless one of 
the most striking and promising features of the Bantu. 

Before enumerating the various cases: which can be brought 
before the Native Court, let me remark that, after all, Bantu 
are very peaceful, law-abiding people, when in normal condi- 
tions; when protected against alcoholic excesses they are little 
addicted to crime. In the Blue Book for Native Affairs of Cape 
Colony, 1908, the Chief Magistrate of the Transkeian Territory 
comments on ‘the general docility of the Natives, the perfect 
immunity from crimes of violence, which the European popula- 
tion male and female, enjoys amongst them, and the cheapness 
of police administration.” He adds: “The policing of the 

Territories, including the Detective Force, costs only 7d. per 
head ofthe territorial population, or, counting Chiefs and 
Headmen whose functions are mainly administrative, 1od. 
against 6s. 3d. per head for policing the Colony proper. Re- 
ports from twenty districts comment on the paucity or absence 
of crime. Kentani, with a population of 34,000 did not fur- 
nish a single case for the Circuit Court. The Magistrates of 
four districts remark on ‘‘the peaceable and law-abiding cha- 
racter of the Native”, the Magistrate of Kentani adding: “‘ when 
kept away from the drink curse”. (Christ. Express, Aug. 1908.) 

I think the same report might be made in most of the dis- 
tricts of South Africa where natives still live by themselves. 

The state of affairs would be very different in the Town loca- 
tions, where we meet with a great number of men and women 
of dissolute morals. They often are backsliders who have 
left the Mission Stations because they did not like to submit to 
the Christian rule of morality. So they have freed themselves 
from all restraints, tribal as well as Christian, and, if they have 
not entirely lost all sense of justice they, at any rate, do not 
walk ‘‘in the paths of righteousness”. [I am only here con- 
cerned with clan Natives. 

2) CIvIL CASES 

I will not pretend that Thonga exactly know the difference 
between civil and criminal cases, the same tribunal judging 
them both and all being called by the same name, milandju. 

If any distinction is made, it would be between private and 
official cases: private cases being those which are settled by the 
two parties concerned alone, without the intervention of the 
chief; whilst official cases are those in which the matter (mhaka) 
has been brought to the capital. As already explained, the 
headmen of the village try to settle the difficulties themselves ; 
if they succeed, all the better, as the fine will be reduced to its 
minimum, whilst, before the Court, the fine would be doubled 
and the chief would keep half of it! 

= ay — 
' Ninety per cent of the civil cases are in connection with 
lobola. ‘They are sometimes most. intricate and I refer to the 
description already given of some of them (p. 266 and Appen- 
dix Ill). 

Divorce cases are also common. When a woman has definite- 
ly left her husband, her relatives must return the lobolo mon- 

- ey. ‘*You must abandon to them ¢ 5 or an ox”, says Man- 

khelu. The chief Mubvesha who was known for his avarice 
used to arrest the husband and make him pay ¢ 25 ; he return- 
ed ¢15 to the wife’s relatives and kept ¢ ro for himself. 

When money is returned, the children belong to the mother 
(Seepage 263). 

Many cases can happen in connection with cattle. The case of 
redhibition is foreseen: when I buy an ox and it dies on my 
hands froma disease which was not known at the date of my 
purchase but which, however, then existed, I have the right to 
go and ask for another one in its place. ButI bring the skin 
of the dead ox with me and one hoe inside for the meat which 
I have eaten. If the seller refuses to accept my claim, I go 
to the chief and complain. He will call the refractory person 
and say to him: “‘ Did not this man act nicely when he put a 
hoe inside the skin? Give him another ox!” (Mankhelu). 

When goats have damaged somebody’s garden, there is no 
fine to pay. The shepherds are whipped and thus the matter 
is concluded. Should however the father of the boys take their 
part and protect them with his weapons, he will be summoned 
to the tribunal of the chief and have to pay a fine of £ 5 or 
two or three goats. 

Thonga Natives, who have but a few head of cattle, are accus- 
tomed to entrust them to the care of neighbours who possess 
a large herd, in order to spare themselves the trouble of finding 
herding boys. There are some laws regulating this business. 
If the owner of the cow, or the pig, or the goat, gives mo- 
ney in advance to the master of the large herd, all the calves, 
pigs, kids, which may be born, reverttohim. But if he has not 
paid anything, the master of the herd is entitled to choose one 
pig in the first litter; or he can keep the third or fourth calf or 

— 7” = 
kid. If it be a hen, one of its chickens will belong to the 
man who took care of her. Should the owner forget to remit 
the due reward, there will be trouble (pongwe). When he 
goes to take his cattle back, the master of the herd will keep 
one head for himself, and, if a dispute arises, both will go to 
the chief, at least if the matter is important, the animal in ques- 
tion, for instance, being an ox. 

If an ox incorporated with another man’s herd dies, the 
master of the herd will inform the owner in order that he may 
go and dispose of the meat. Should he be living too far off, 
the ox will be eaten on the spot and the skin will be sent to 
the owner. Supposing the master of the herd pretends that 
the ox is dead, but has only put it with another herd, sending 
a skin to the owner to deceive him? This is a case of theft 
which will be judged as such. 

3.) CRIMINAL CASES. 

Adultery. Our tribe punishes adultery very severely indeed, 
at least when the woman is married. The fine isa full lobolo. 
(See page 194). Amongst the Nkuna if the accused man denies 
his guilt, when questioned indoors, the bones are consulted, or 
even the magicians who practise the ‘“‘ vumisa”’ divination. (Part 
VI). If found guilty, he will have to pay an extra fine of two 
Oxene (1 } 

When the abducted woman is an unmarried girl, the matter 
is not serious. No trouble is entailed, provided she does not 
become pregnant. In the latter case, the seductor can say: 
“*Ndji dlele ku dya, I have killed to eat”, viz. “1 am readyite 
lobola the girl” (p. 97). Should the girl not consent, the man 
is free. But if the man does not like to marry the girl by 
paying a full lobolo, whilst the girl and her relatives want him 
to do so, he will have to pay as much as £ 30 and an ox. 

(1) The neighbouring Chopi tribe, on the contrary, leaves the husband to 
arrange matters as he likes. Formerly he used to kill the adulterer. But 
cases of adultery are never brought before the chief. 

‘He has spoilt his cause!” His own relatives will be arrested 
and forced to pay. They are reponsible for him and will scold 
him severely (Mankhelu). 

Fighting ending in blows. Vhe wounded man runs to the 
square of the capital and shows himself. The assailants will 
have to pay a fine of £ 8, three for the chief and five for the 
victim, or of two oxen, one for the chief and one for the plain- 
tiff. (Mankhelu). 

Murder. A distinction is made between involuntary murder, 
which is an accident (mhango, Dj.), and a deliberate assassina- 
tion. 

As for involuntary murder, Mankhelu describes the proceedings 
in the case as follows: — Should you have killed a man by acci- 
dent ina hunting trip, for instance, you will try to arrange mat- 
ters directly with his relatives, if you were good friends; your 
relatives will give them a girl. You dare not offer your own 
daughter, because they may refuse her, on account of their bad 
feelings!’ The same objection will not be made, if your peo- 
ple provide the girl. They will accompany her with ten hoes 
and one «ox, saying; ~° his is fat to: smear our ‘daughter: ~ 
The notion which lies at the bottom of this custom is not that 
a human person is the natural compensation for another human 
person, but that you give the diminished family a means of recupe- 
rating its loss. In fact as soon as this girl has born a child to 
the relatives of the deceased, she is free. If these men like to 
keep her as their wife, they must lobola. Viguet explains that 
this is done according to the old saying of native law: ‘‘ Nwom- 
bekazi a yi ambi nandju” viz. ‘‘a cow which has calved is not 
Hieed to pay a fine: the calf pays it.” (See page 215). He 
adds that the ten hoes sent with the girl pay for the ribs of the 
murdered man. (The Ba-Thonga believe that the human body 
has but ten ribs!) A case of involuntary homicide generally is 
not brought before the chief, as the law is well known and no 
one would try to evade his duty. Should however the mur- 
derer not have been on good terms with the deceased, the mat- 
ter will be discussed before the Court. 

If the murder has been deliberate, it is punished by death. 

—= 416 _s 

At least such was the law in former times, when Natives still 
possessed the power of condemning to death. Now the fine is 
also the remittance of a woman. But owing to the existing 
hatred, and from fear of being obliged to lobola the relative of 
the murderer, the family of the deceased does not take the girl. 
She is sold by her parents and only the money is remitted to 
the plaintiff. (Mankhelu). 

Amongst the Ba-Ronga, when a near relative of the murdered 
man wants to avenge himself by killing the assassin, his people 
prevent him from doing so, in order to bring the matter before the 
chief. When a man called Mashabe was killed by the son of 
Gigiseka, Maphunga’s brother, the murderer, had to pay £ 20. 
The fine can go to£ 25, but the idea is also to help the bereaved 
family to acquire a new spouse and, by her, new members. As 
for the murderer, he is regarded with scorn, and despised by 
the whole community. For a whole week, he must eat apart. 
He is unclean. So, at the time of luma bukanye, (page 372), 
he must also take miluru medicine together with warriors who 
have killed enemies ; but he does not drink it boastfully, extoll- 
ing his deed! People say of him: ‘‘ Look at the murderer !” 
(Mboza). 

The vendetta, the savage custom which makes it incumbent 
on the relations of a murdered man to avenge his deatht them- 
selves at all costs and by any means, is absolutely absent trom 
the Thonga practice. It can be said that, as regards punishment 
of murder, they have reached quite a civilised stage in their 
judicial institutions. They are in advance of many tribes. The 
same cannot be asserted when dealing with witchcraft ! | 

Witchcraft (Buloyi). For the Thonga mind this is one of the 
greatest crimes which a man can commit. It is equivalent to 
assassination, even worse than murder, as a dim idea of anthro- 
pophagy is added to the mere accusation of killing. A wizard 
kills human beings to eat their flesh. We shall study the con- 
ceptions of buloyi later on (Part VI) from a psychological point 
of view. Here we mention it only as far as it gives rise to 
judicial cases. This special crime being committed in great 
secrecy during the night, in most instances even unconsciously, 

—a 
the Bantu tribunal uses two or three magical means for discov- 
ering it. These means of inquiry which civilised nations have 
long ago abandoned are: 

1) The divination by casting lots. ‘The objects used in our 
tribe for this purpose are the marvellous bones, astragalus of 
goats, antelopes, etc, and shells, which I intend studying in a 
special chapter. When they have designated (ku ba, to beat) 
the wizard or witch (noi) who has killed such and such a 
person, they are consulted a second time. If they confirm their 
verdict, the relatives of the deceased go to the chief and lodge 
their complaint. The accusation becomes official and is now 
in the hands of the tribunal. 

2) The chief sends the plaintiff and accused to the magician 
who proceeds to the divination by questioning them and working 
himself up into an extatic condition (vumisa). 

3) Should the accused be again designated and should he 
deny his crime, he may ask to pass through the ordeal, viz, the 
trial by the solaneous plant called mondjo. If the drug intoxi- 
cates him, his guilt is confirmed for the third time and the tri- 
bunal willcondemn him. The punishment for buloyi is death, 
either by hanging, or by empaling, or by drowning in the river, 
if the wizard used to perpetrate his murders by sending croco- 
diles to kill his victims. 

Nowadays Native chiefs dare not put to death suspected wit- 
ches. Since the Ba-Ronga have been under the jurisdiction 
of the Whites, the death penalty has been abolished. On the 
other hand, under Gungunyane, executions were of frequent 
occurrence. When the chief had condemned a man to death, he 
merely made a sign to one of his executioners who followed 
the unfortunate individual, as he went away into the bush, pos- 
sibly quite unconscious of the fate awaiting him, and dealt him 
a heavy blow from behind with either club or assagay, killing 
him on the spot. Chiefs now only expel wizards or witches 
from the country, accompanying them to the boundary, or 
impose a high fine on them, keeping half of the amount. 
However there are still individuals who avenge themselves for 

the death of a relative on the suspected murderer by killing him. 

= 418 — 

Such cases are not infrequently brought before the Courts of 
Pretoria and Johannesburg. 

What is the duty of the civilised tribunal in such instances ? White 
judges generally condemn to death a man who has killed a ‘‘ noyi”. 
I know of cases in which even an induna who has hanged a “‘ noyi”, 
duly condemned by the Native Court, was himselfconsidered a crimi- 
nal and condemned as such. It was our friend Mankhelu, one of the 
pillars of the Nkuna tribe, the General of the army... He only escaped 
death owing to petitions sent to the Boer Authorites by both Blacks 
and Whites. This happened, I think, in 1888. Are European judges 
right in pronouncing the capital punishment in such cases? This is 
questionable. It is certainly erroneous to assimilate Mankhelu’s act 
which, in his own eyes, is an act of justice, with an ordinary murderer, 
and to punish him as an assassin. He did what he thought to be right 
according to his knowledge. The husband of a bewitched woman 
who kills the murderer of his wife is more blamable, because his act 
is not sanctioned by the authority of a regular Court. However neither 
one nor the other deserve death. 

I fully recognise that such doings of the Native tribunals must be 
stopped. <A chief who accepts accusations of witchcraft ought to be 
punished, especially if it has been duly explained to him that a White 
Government does not allow any such case to be judged in the country. 
In the course of time Natives will understand this and the witchcraft 
superstition will dwindle away. But let us be patient with them, 
remembering that our forefathers of 300 years ago did exactly the same 
and burnt hundreds of suspected witches after having made them 
undergo horrible tortures. 

In a essay on the subject published in the S.A.A.A.S Report of 
1906, I ventured to suggest certain means of checking the buloyi super- 
stition. The Department of Native Affairs might give the following 
directions to its subordinates, the Native chiefs : 

1) The crime of buloyi it not recognised under penal law. 

2) The Native chiefs are prohibited from trying any buloyi case. 

3) The plaintiff must be reprimanded as disturbing the peace of the 
country. 

4) The witch doctor or mungoma (magician), who pretends to have 
smelt out a wizard, must be fined as using his authority to deceive peo- 
ple and foster hatred amongst them. 

5) No evidence based on the use of divinatory bones must be accepted. 

These rules if strictly enforced and combined with Christian 

teaching and the progress of civilisation, will soon put an end to the 
scourge of witchcraft. 

Insulis. Ku rukana or ruketela, to throw insults at each 
other's head, is very frequent amongst Thonga and does not 
lead to any judicial case, if not accompanied with assault and 
bruises. There are however insulting deeds which are consi- 
dered as crimes. To take human blood, or spittle, or excrement 
with a stick and to push it to the mouth of a child, for ins- 
tance, is considered a very serious insult which must be judged 
before Courts. A man who committed such an offence would 
have to pay a fine amounting to a whole lobola. I heard of a 
woman who gave a child a butterfly to eat. The parents of 
the little one were very angry. She denied having done such 
a thing. ‘They said to her: ‘‘ Confess your sin and pay a fine 
of 5/.” She refused and offered to undergo the ordeal, viz., to 
drink the mondjo philtre. ‘‘ If you insist” said they, ‘‘ you 
will have to pay g10”. However she persisted and became 
intoxicated ; it was a proof of her culpability. She was fined 
{0 the amotnt of £40, ¢ 26 for the child and 20 for the 
chief ! 

To point at any one with the index finger is also a grave 
insult which can have judicial consequences, because this action 
is put in close relation with buloyr. 

Theft (ku yiba) is universally condemned, not so much for 
its immoral character as for the fact that it renders a normal 
social life impossible. The notion of individual property, though 
it is not developed as in more civilised nations, is however at 
the base of the whole Bantu system. ‘The Bantu are agricul- 
turists. They believe that the products of their labour belong 
to them and that no one else is entitled to appropriate them. 
The notion of property is in direct relation to work accomplished. 
(Compare Part IV). 

To steal growing mealies is not usual. A thief breaks off 
the cob, whilst the master of the field first uproots the stalk 
and then takes the cobs. Ifa friend of his who happens to 

be travelling, passes through his gardens and wants to eat a 
cob, he is quite welcome to do so. He also uproots the 
stalk, puts it on one side of the road or leans it against a tree 
and draws a line on the ground from the place where the stalk 
grew to the spot where he has put it. Perhaps the owner of 
the field will discover the uprooted stalk after a whole month. 
If he inquires who has helped himself to his mealies, his friend 
will say to him: “ Did you not see the line?” And they will 
laugh over it (hlekelelana). A thief working hastily would’ 
not have had time enough to draw the line ! 

There are certain eral drugs with which people smear 
some mealie stalks and hea pretend that, if somebody tries to 
penetrate into their garden to steal, he will have his hand 
caught and will not be able to get rid of the plant! For some 
reason or another, these magical means do not always operate. 
So the injured person has recourse to the tribunal. 

Should the thief be caught in the very fact, there is no diffi- 
culty! His own field will be taken by the owner of the sto- 
len mealies and he will have to pay a fine of one ox, else the 
matter will be brought before the Court and the only difference 
will be that the fine will be of two or three oxen, one of 
which will remain in the hands of the chief. (Mankhelu). If 
the thief has been clever enough to avoid being caught, if he 
has stolen from a store hut, natives are clever detectives and he 
will probably be discovered. These store huts are generally 
built in the middle of the field, or in the little bush which sur- 
rounds the village ; the grass all around has been pulled up and 
the sand nicely smoothed down, so that any traces of a thief 
would easily be seen. He will possibly be at once recognised 
by the trackers, owing to some peculiarity in the marks on the 
sand, the foot-print of each individual being more or less known: 
clever detectives can even ascertain the size and bearing of a 
man from the length of his stride! If there are no peculiar 
marks in the foot-prints, the trackers will follow them and 
reach the village where the thief lives. They will perhaps take 
him by suprise in his hut. If the matter cannot be settled by - 
the headman of the village and has to be brought before the 

chief, the guilty party will be fined as much as two, three or 
even five pounds sterling (Tobane). (1) 

When detectives have been unable to trace a thief, they 
assume a philosophical attitude and say : ‘‘ Only wait. A man 
who has stolen will steal again, and you will catch him another 
Gare! * 

Revolt against the decisions of the chief's hubo is very rare. Should 
any person take the part of a condemmmed man and encourage 
him to oppose the decision of the Court, he will be beaten with 
a shambock on the square of the capital. ‘‘ U onhi hubo”, ‘‘ he 
has spoilt the Court” ! Moreover he may have to pay a fine 
of ¢ 2. (Mankhelu). 

Answer to some of Professor Frazer's questions on Government. 
There are no separate chiefs for war and peace. But in time 
of war the great induna, who is the Commander-in-chief of the 
army, directs all military operations. — The chief is never re- 
quired to marry his own sister or daughter. The only similar 
case of which I have heard, is that of a hunter who must 
have sexual relations with his daughter before going on a 
hunting trip (Part IV). — The king’s mother does not hold 
any special office. — 

The chief does not keep any portion of his deceased prede- 
cessor excepting the nails and hair used for the mhamba (See 
page 360 and Part VI). — To protect and to prolong his life, 
diviners sometimes call together the whole clan in order to 
discover and eventually arrest those who might bewitch and 
kill the chief. The gathering is called nyiwa (See Part VI). — 
The chief has generally no religious functions to perform as 
these are conducted by his elders. — As for rain making, it 
is in the hands of the proper rain doctors (Nkuna) or is obtain- 
ed by the ceremonies of mbelele (Part VI). — He is not held 

(1) The following nice couplet in two sentences aptly describes the thief : 

Shishlungwa rendjeletane ? — The crown on the hut nicely rounded ? 

Mangatlu a psha ritiho... — The hawk burns his claws... 

The thief, he is like a crown on the top of a hut. He is a lazy person, 
he attitudinises and will not work. Evil will befall him as to a hawk who 
tries to snatch the meat that is roasting and burns his claws ! 

responsible for public calamities. — If his bodily or mental po- 
wers fail, the tinduna discuss matters in his stead and he is not 
deposed. 

Chiefs are never worshipped during life time. After death, 
they are deified for their own family — who worship them, but 
not for their subjects. — They are not supposed to turn into 
wild beasts after their death. — The custom of appointing mock 
kings does not exist. Only at the death of a chief can one of 
his relatives be nominated to take his place, and watch over his 
property until the adjudication of the inheritance.

THe ARMY 

A. WAR-LIKE PROCLIVITIES OF THE THONGA 

As mentioned in the preliminary chapter (p. 32), in former 
times the war-like spirit seems to have been little developed 
amongst Thonga. The primitive population possessed no iron 
weapons, and the invasions which took place from the XVth 
to the XVIIIth century seem to have been peaceful. Con- 
querors and subjects soon intermarried and no recollection of 
bloody contests remained. When clans fought against each 
other, in those remote times, namely before the arrival of the 
Zulu (1820), they thought to have done doughty deeds when 
two of three warriors had been killed and the vanquishers 
returned home saying : ‘‘ None of the enemy is left!!” The army 
used to form in straight line, not in circle, as was the case later 
on under Zulu influence. 

When the cruel hordes of Manukosi subjugated the plain of 
Delagoa, all that was changed. Of course the Thonga yimpis 
were defeated very easily. First of all, those of Maputju and 
Tembe; in the country of Matjolo, which was afterwards invaded, 
the chief Mashekane was so stout that he had been surnamed 
““Mitahomu ni timhondjo” - ‘‘the one who swallows an ox, 
horns and all”... He fought bravely but was also defeated. In 
Khosen, says Hendrick, an old man who stayed for years in 
Rikatla and who was then a child, the aborigines were deceived 
by the perpendicular sticks which the Ba-Ngoni invaders had 
fixed to their ox-hide shields: they mistook them for reeds and 
thought they could break them easily; but their three united 
yimpis, that of Khosen under Mbanyele, of Rikotsho under 

—_ = 
Makwakwa, and of Shiburi under Shitlhama, were repulsed, 
broken through by the Zulu phalanx. 

These Zulus or Ngonis taught the tribes of the plain a system 
of war much more cruel then the old one: “kill everything”, 
— such is the rule. No exception is made except in the came 
of women who are taken prisoners. The Thonga clans readily 
accepted this new mode of fighting. They adopted the Zulu 
system wholesale and the proof of it is that all their military 
terminology is pure Zulu. Their apprenticeship already began 
during the invasion: the Ba-Ngoni seeing that the Thonga had 
a certain aptness for war, incorporated them with their own 
regiments and used to send them forward to the attack, as pre- 
viously mentioned. They praised them by calling them the 
Mabuyandlela — those who prepare the way, — a kind of nick- 
name which Thonga have kept to this date and of which they 
were very proud. 

However I do-not think it would be unfair to the Thonga 
to assert that the old peaceful basis of their character is. still 
preserved, notwithstanding this influence. We have had the 
opportunity of judging of their warlike capabilities during the 
war of 1894-1896 with the Portuguese. (See Appendix VII, 
Short account of two South African wars.) The Natives 
did not fight from choice. If some of them gave proof of great 
endurance, if the army fought in some cases with a certain tena- 
city, Thongas and especially Ba-Ronga, did not show them- 
selves to be very able warriors. Want of discipline, mutual 
distrust, timidity resulting in frequent retreats, inability to follow 
up their successes, such were the main causes of their defeat. 
The wild soldiers of Maputju, who considered themselves the 
equals of the genuine Zulu, showed their courage only when 
there was no danger ! 

B. WAR COSTUME AND WEAPONS 

One day when we were comfortably seated under the beauti- 
ful tree at our station of Rikatla, a strange looking monster 

suddenly appeared on the scene, running towards us! The 
children fled and the women hid themselves... It was Charley, 
our milk-man, who, with some other warriors was going to 
a military review, to be held by his chief Mahazule. He ap- 
proached us, a giant of 6 ft. in height, decked out in a costume 
which was certainly grotesque, but of which I, at once, caught 
the general idea: he had evidently tried to look like a wild ani- 
mal and had succeeded admirably in the attempt. Such is most 
likely the origin of the war costume in mankind! As for 
Charley, he was thoroughly delighted to note the terrorising 
effect produced by his appearance on the youngsters and folks 
of weak nerves. 

He was, admittedly, the handsomest warrior in our locality, 
and condescended on one occasion to allow us to photograph 
him, when he explained in detail the several component parts 
of his costume, which, as a whole, was certainly formidable! 
The photograph was a failure but the get-up has remained 
imprinted on my memory. 

To commence with the top: the head was decorated with 
three plumes of long slender feathers, taken from a bird called 
sakabonyi, the widow bird, which is only to be found in the 
mountains; sometimes the feathers ot other birds are added 
(magalu, mafukwana); one of these plumes is worn in the centre, 
the others one on each side and are all three fixed on to aconi- 
cal helmet (shintlontlo) trimmed with ostrich feathers. This 
helmet is set on a kind of toque of other skin, which is held in 
place by a chin-strap. This style of head gear makes the head 
look about twice the natural size, and, to give it a still more 
ferocious appearance, it is adorned here and there with porcu- 
pine quills. 

Round his neck Charley wore a necklace of plaited thongs 
of black calf skin (tinkocho). Armlets of long white ox hairs, 
carefully selected from the tail, ornamented his biceps, and gar- 
ters of a similar make were on the calves of his legs. 

The belt around his loins was very rich, the beautiful skin af 
a civet cat (nsimba), with its fine yellow stripes, hanging down in 
front to the middle of his thighs, and small antelopes’skins be- 

te 426 ==s 

hind (madjobo ya nhlengane). Finally, to complete the wild 
animal appearance, calves and ankles were covered with brace- 
lets of large black seeds, which come from the North (timbavu), 
each seed being as large as a cherry. The size of the legs is 
thus considerably increased and conveys the idea of a pachy- 
derm; when he jumped heavily or stamped his feet on the 
ground, it sounded like the tread of an elephant. 

This costume is a warm one, and the warrior carries a sort of 
bone curry-comb, made of the rib of an ox, shaped and sharp- 
ened, which he uses to scrape the perspiration from his face and 
body, when taking violent exercice or indulging in the dances 
descriptive if his prowess. Such is the native pocket-handker- 
chief! 

The several component parts of the war-dress are kept in a 
little hut raised on poles, near the owner’s dwelling, and are 
carefully looked after, being frequently dusted and exposed to 
the sun to preserve them from moths and weevils. A com- 
plete uniform is worth several pounds sterling ! 

Arms, among the Ba-Ronga are ofa very primitive kind, those 
of most ancient date being doubtless the club (nhonga) and the 
knobkerrie (gungwe) (1) of which two specimens are given in the 
accompanying illustration (N° 4). The native never journeys 
without his stick using it to kill snakes, should any cross his 
paths and, should fortune smile on him, to knock over any 
quail that may rise at his feet. In quarrels or in war time 
this nhonga can be a dangerous weapon. The stick with the 
fluted head comes, I am told, from Bilen, and it seems that this 
style is in much favour in Gaza. It may have a phallic signi- . 
fication. 

But the most formidable weapon of the South African Black 
is the assagai (tlhari, fumo (N° 2), of which there are two kinds; 
the larger (likhalo) consisting ofasharp, pointed, double edged steel 
blade, fixed on to a stick with iron or brass wire, and the smal- 
ler (tindjombi) with a blade of the size of our arrow-head, fas- 

(1) These sticks were given to me as dentistry fees for extractions of decay 
ed teeth ! 

tened to the handle with strips of bark or of palm leaves. 
The former is for hand-to-hand combat and the warrior never 

rE dae +S 

Wid) Wy \} 

re 

ATVNGLR. Sh 

M Borel ef. 

THONGA WEAPONS 
1. Shield ; 2. Assagais ; 3. Battle axes ; 

4. Knobkerries ; 5. Dagger ; 6 and 7. Necklace 
and little horn worn by men slayers. 

releases his hold of it, while the latter — of which three or 
four may be held in the hand when entering the fight — are 

& 

 428  

thrown at the enemy from a distance. (1) The length of the 
large assagai on the right of the illustration is as follows: 
Blade 14 inches ; binding of iron wire, 41/2 inches and handle 
34 1/2 inches. ‘The small one, on the left, measures : blade" ig 
iron stem adjoining blade 7 in., binding of palm leaves 5 in. 
and handle 35 !/2 inches. As previously mentioned, the handle 
of the large sized assagai is broken at the warriors’ death, 
being ‘‘ he ”, or his defilement ; but the blade ‘‘ never dies ”. 
It belongs to the chief, as does also the shield, and the son. will 

inherit it. During the warrior’s life, it is kept in the hut of 
his first wife. She is called the owner (nwingi) of the assagai. 

It is taboo for the other wives to touch it: another fact which 

shows the special position of the first wife. (Comp. p. 273). 

Another weapon, in more restricted use and which can also 
be employed for cutting wood, is the axe or hatchet, of which I 
have met with two descriptions (N° 3): the blade (mbimbi) can 
be narrow and elongated -— it is then called shingwatane, — or 
broad and rounded, — when it isthe shiyema. These hatchets 
are firmly inserted in their wooden handles like the axes of the 
lake-dwellers. European manufacturers now export a considera- 
ble number of semicircular hatchets, similar to the one on the 
right in my illustration, to Delagoa. The one here portrayed 
will be at once recognised as being of Native make. I may also 
mention the big knives (mikwa), a sort of sword : one some- 
times meets brawny fellows, walking about the paths armed 
with these dangerous looking implements! However they are 
quite inoffensive. 

I managed to obtain from a traveller a beautiful dagger which . 
he was carrying slung across his breast ; it is a rare specimen 
and comes, I am told, from the Ba-Ndjao tribe (N° 5). The 
sheath is made of two pieces of wood, artistically carved and 

(1) I once had an opportunity to observe the effects of the assagai. A 
young evangelist of our Mission was suprised on the railway line by some 
Zihlahla warriors in ambush during the 1894 war, and was transfixed at one © 
blow. (7 th January 1895). He had fallen on his knees and the wretches 
struck him in the back: the assagai was only prevented from going right 
through his body by a note book which he was carrying in the breast pocket 
of his coat. 

a 

= 2 — 
fastened together with a plait of iron wire ; it is slightly hollow- 
ed out to allow the blade to enter : this is firmly fixed in the 
handle through which it passes from end to end, coming out 
at the extremity, where it is bent back and thus held tightly in 
place. Ba-Pedi in the Zoutpansberg, also make similar knives. 

Finally, when the warrior holds in one hand his large assa- 
gai, in the other will he found his shield (shitlhangu) (N° 1), 
which he grasps by the stick around which this piece of defen- 
sive armour pivots. The Thonga shield is made like that of 
the Zulu, of a piece of ox-hide, oval in shape and of varying 
size, sometimes all of one colour and sometimes variegated. 
(The several battalions in the Chaka army were distinguished 
by differently coloured shields). On either side of the central 
line, from top to bottom, two parallel rows of small square 
incisions are made (magabela) through which are run strips 
of hide of a different colour, the effect being a series of ob- 
longs. By an ingenious device the ends of these strips are so 
tied at the back of the shield as to form several sheath-like noo- 
ses into which is inserted the stick by which it is held. The 
space between the two lines of oblongs is called the back (nhlana) 
of the shield. ‘The nooses or sheaths are four or six in number : 
two or three at the top, and two or three at the bottom, a space 
being left in the middle, where the warrior grasps the stick. 
This stick tends to strengthen the shield, but, being merely pass- 
ed through the nooses, it acts also as a pivot around which it 
can turn; it is this pivoting action which gives to the shield 
its chief value as a protection. An assagai (usually thrown 
with considerable strength) would easily penetrate the ox-hide, 
but when it strikes the shield, the force of the impact causes it 
to pivot and the weapon is deflected to one side: should it 
strike exactly in the middle, it would hit the stick, break it and 
lose all further impetus. It is hardly necessary to add that the 
shitlangu of the South African Black is absolutely useless when 
opposed to bullets; it was invented to protect the warrior 
against the dreaded assagai, at a time when firearms were not 
yet thought of ! 

During the last century the Ba-Ronga have begun to use 

— eo = 

guns for hunting and also for war. Although the sale of fire- 
arms to the natives has been often prohibited, the Ba-Ronga 
were reported to possess several hundreds of rifles at the com- 
mencement of the 1894 war, and also to have been fairly pro- 
ficient in their use... very different from the Madagascans who 
removed the sights from the guns on the score that they were 
in the way when taking aim ! 

C. THE MOBILISATION OF THE ARMY 

In the Zihlahla country, when the chief wanted to muster his 
forces, he did so by means of the shipalapala, this rudimentary 
trumpet which I described in the preceding chapter. A swift 
messenger (shigidjimi) ran from village to village, blowing this 
instrument ; when he was tired he passed it on to some other 
good runner, who carried the summons further afield ; he ran 
and ran until he was exhausted, when he handed the trumpet 
to a third, and so on until the whole country had been reached. 

At the sound of the well-known call of the shipalapala, the 
warriors shout: ‘“‘ A hi hlomen!” — ‘‘to arms!” They at 
once put on their war costumes and repair to the capital. 

In Nondwane all the sub-chiefs possessed their shipalapala, 
and each of them summoned his own people. There the shi- 
palapala mostly sounded to call for dances and for feasts. When 
the army was mobilised merely to discuss matters quietly, mes- 
sengers ran through the country shouting : ‘‘ Mayivonoule! ” 
~—- **take the shields!”..., to which the warriors answered : 
‘*A hi hlomen !”’ — ‘‘ to arms!” The messenger had to go 
quickly. ‘‘ He did not lose time in grinding tobacco”: he only 
indicated the time when the army was expected in the capital. 

Should matters have been more serious, should an _hos- 
tile yimpi have invaded the territory, every one can give the 
alarm (tlhabela mukhosi), shouting: ‘* Yi ngeeneeeeeee!” “It 
has entered!” (viz., the hostile army has invaded our territory). 
All the women flee away and the men run to the capital. 

— a 

D. THE MUKHUMBI, THE CIRCLE OF WARRIORS 

Dressed out like wild animals, the warriors hasten with all 
speed to the chief’s village, where the regiments muster. The 
army(1) is divided into a certain number of battalions, mabotshu, 
or meboko, all men of about the same age forming a botshu. The 
botshu itself is made up of several companies, mitlawa or mabandla, 
and can therefore vary very much in numbers. 

In the army of Matjolo there were nine battalions commen- 
cing with that composed of youths from sixteen to twenty years 
old, up to that of ‘“‘crown men” (makehla) and the grey-head 
who where still capable of handling an assagai; for every able- 
bodied man is a soldier and makes it a point of honour to join 
the army when it is mobilised. In the Zihlahla clan, the battali- 
ons of young men were called Megajlela and also Ndumakazulu, 
‘*the one who is celebrated as far as Zululand”, surname of 
the chief Nwamantibyane. After them came the Nyonibovu, 
Giva, Malwabo, Djanungwana. 

Mankhelu, the Commander of the Nkuna yimpi, gave me the 
names of his battalions and the explanation of them. The old 
men formed the regiment called Mamphondo, those of the horns. 
Some of them used to tie a horn on their forehead ; they 
imitated the rhinoceros or the buffalo. The following regiment 
was the Mamphisi (timhisi), the hyenas; then the Machoni, the 
sea- birds, a kind of duck, very swift; then the Timbulwane, a 
sort kind of lynx, the Mafakubi, representing the Ndakazi ante- 
lope and, lastly, the most numerous regiment, the Dhlanazo, 
“those who eat with others (dya na bu)”. Each regiment has, 
as we shall see, its own war-cry, in which it imitates the animal 
whose name it bears. 

When all have reached the capital the first procedure is the 
“formation of the circle”, in Thonga: diya mukhumbi, to fence 

(1) Yimpi (pl. tiyimpi) in Thonga corresponds to impi in Zulu. 

— i= 

the circle or aka mukkumbi, to build the circle. This is accom- 
plished in the Zihlahla army by a special summons which I 
might call ‘‘ the order to fall in”. Heralds scatter in all direc- 
tions, enter the huts, approach the groups encamped around the 
capital, and-shout in a high and monotonous key the following 
Zulu words. It will be noticed that the formula given is that 
which was made use of by the heralds in the Mpfumo clan during 
the war of 1894. 

Izwana! Otyo ndjalo, Muvelu, (1) 

Be nga m’thandi ba ka Nkupane, 

Umta’ka Sihlahla esikulu si ka Hamule, 
Malobola ge dyoze e bulandin ka Mbukwana. 

Listen! This is what Nwamantibyane says, 

He whom the people of Nkupane do not love, (2) 

The son of the Great Forest (Sihlahla) of Hamule, (3) 

He who took a wife and used the sword in the country of 
his parents-in-law, in Mbukwane’s country. 

Gwalagwala a libuvu, 
lihlengo ngo kubekeka, 
Umpathi we sibamo, 
U za ku debula Mangole ni Maputukizi. 

(1) Muvelu, the Zulu surname for Nwamantibyane. 

(2) The people of Nkupane are one of the younger branches of the royal 
family of Mpfumo. They lived close to Lourenso Marques, on the other 
slope of the hill, to the West of thetown. They would have liked undoubt- 
edly, in common with many others, to have asserted their independance by 
throwing off the yoke of the elder branch, and even attempted to do so when 
Mahombole tried, in 1867 or in 1869, to overthrow Zihlahla. But the elder 
branch, whose chiefs were energetic men, succeeded in maintaining its au- 
thority over the whole clan. The fact the that people of Nkupane ‘‘ do not 
love” Nwamantibyane resounds rather to the credit of the latter. 

(3) Nwamantibyane’s father was Zihlahla, his grandfather was Hamule. 
Sihlahla, or Zihlahla, in Zulu, means forest, hencethe herald’s play on the word. 
The reign of Zihlahla, which we may place at from 1867 to 1883, Was very 
troubled, at least during its first few years. The young chief, on his return 
from Natal, at the death of his father Hamule, married Mbilwana, a princess 
of the royal family of Mabota. During the bloody wars then raging, Zi- 
hlahla was angry with Mabota (whose chief was Mbukwana), for playing him 
false, and, one fine day, he made a raid into the country of his parents-in-law, 
killing many people. To have thus treated his ‘‘ bakofiwana’’, who are ordi- 
narily held in such great respect, (see Part IJ) wasa proof of valour which is 
remembered to this day, niore than thirty years after the event. It must be 
said that, after this exploit, Zihlahla left his residence near the town and took 

i 

The royal bird with red plumage (1), 

Magnificent to contemplate, 

He who holds in his hand a gun 

With which he will fire on the Angolese and the Portuguese. 

Nduma kuti, lo wa khiti, 
Mo nga ngesilwana, 
U ti ka: a yi funule! 

He whose fame spreads afar, our chief, 
Who is as a wild beast, 
It is he who says: “To arms!”’. 

This final exclamation, prolonged and finishing abruptly on 
the last syllable, carries a long distance : all the warriors 
jump to their feet and, brandishing their assagais and shields, run 
to the chief’s village, where the circle is to be formed. Each 
regiment, with its counsellors at its head, 1s called in turn by 
the organisers of the army; (at Zihlahla they were Mahagane, 
the chief’s uncle, and Mpompi), and the several companies of 
the regiments form ranks one behind the other. I have already 
described this imposing circle, when treating of the coronation 
of the chiel. Every warior can take tat a glance the cite 
assemblage. Seen from the interior, it is an unbroken circle 
of shields, resting perpendicularly on the ground, and all in 
touch; behind, a crowd of men; the greater the number, the 
deeper the ranks: a forest of feathers waving above the heads. 

The mukhumbi is not however a perfect circle. It is rather 
like a horse shoe, as there remains an opening (nyangwa or sang- 
wa), which gives access into it. On either side of this door 
the regiment of the young men takes up position: the Dhlanazo 
‘in the Nkuna mukhumbi and the Ndumakazulu in that of Zih- 
lahla. At the opposite end, facing the entrance, 1s the chest of the 
army (shifuba sha yimpi), where the chief stands surrounded by 

refuge in the Nwamba territory ; the Whites with whom he was fighting, put 
a certain Nwayeye in his place whose name we shall find in a war song to 
which we shall have occasion to refer later on. 

(1) The nkulunkulu is a bird which is shot in the forest on the borders of 
the Nkomati; its feathers are red, and only chiefs are allowed to wear 
them. 

\ 
— 

the men of riper age, the strongest of whom act as a body guard. 
Between the chest and the opening, on both sides, the middle- 
aged warriors occupy the wings, the elder ones nearer the chest, 
the younger ones nearer the entrance. This disposition is 
highly significative: notice that it is exactly the same as that of 
the village itself: a large door (mharana); on both sides of the 
entrance, the huts of unmarried inhabitants (lao and nhanga) ; 
at the back, the huts of the headman, and, on the sides, those 
of his younger brothers. The idea of age and of hierarchy 
entirely dominates both these social manifestations! 

As regards the numerical strength of the mukhumbi, one 
of my informants who belonged to the Ndumakazulu regiment 
— young men from 19 to 25 years old — told me that he 
estimated the war strength of his regiment at about 500 men: 
the entire Zihlahla circle might be put at 2000 strong. 

I have often seen the Nkuna mukhumbi assembled. I had 
even the opportunity of addressing its warriors during the Siko- 
roro war of 1901. They were between five and six hundred 
in all. But this clan is very much scattered and many warriors 
were not present. 

Before going into battle, certain rites have to be accomplished. 
In order to stimulate a war-like courage and to imbue the warri- 
ors minds with a certainty of victory, it is necessary to proceed 
to the performance of the war-songs (guba), of the war dances 
(gila), and to administer the medicine which will render the 
soldiers invulnerable. 

E. WAR SONGS 

The performance of war songs is called guba. I have already 
fully described the Zihlahla national song, which would seem to 
be more adapted to celebrate a coronation than to serve as an 
incentive to battle: it is however used indiscriminately for both 
purposes. 

Another war-song which is very popular in the Mpfumo clan 
is the following: 

= 25 — 
Zulu: U ngwa si mu thini, Mayeye? 
U banga muhlaba, u bulala bantu! 
Ronga: U ta ku mu yini, Nwvyeye? 
U banga ntlhaba, u dlaya bhanu! 
What will you succeed in doing to him. Nwayeye ? 
You take the country and slay the people ! 

This is a question addressed to Nwayeye, the rival of the 
chief Zihlahla; Nwayeye was put in his place near Lourenco 
Marques by the Portuguese between 1860 and 1870. He accept- 
ed the position but was unable to retain it any length of time, 
and the recollection of his failure is perpetuated in this song 
which is intended to extol the royal family of Mpfumo. 

A third song, also in vogue with the Mpfumo warriors, runs 
thus : 

Zulu: Zi nv thini? A ba ze zi ba bona. abantu bezizwe ! 
Ronga: Hi ta ku yini? A ba te hi ba bona, bhanu ba matiko! 
What shall we say? Let them come and let us see them, the 
people of the enemy’s country ! 

This is a defiance hurled at the adversaries. 
In Nondwane, they also sing this last song ; another runs as 
follows : 

Zulu: Ngambala! ngi file...O..0..0.. Zinkomo zito ! 
Ronga : Nwamboten, ndji file! O..o..0.. Tihomu teru ! 
My friend! Iam killed. Oh! oh! oh! Our oxen! 

The warriors doubtless refer to the ruin which would be 
entailed, were the enemy to carry off their cattle, and thus they 
encourage one another to fight stubbornly! 

Another Ronga song performed in the guba ceremony 1s 
ins « 

Zia yi khalelo muhlu ya se mananga 
We are weeping for the giraffe of the desert. 

The, giraffe may be the chief of the clan whom the warriors 
are determined to protect, or the enemy’s chief whom they will 
go and kill? 

This song is also one of the great guba songs of the Nkuna 

— = 
clan, but the words are slightly different. I have collected two 
others : 
Hi yi kwa makhosi! 
Si phuma ka makhosi, Si gambuza! 

U mkhonto use sandhleni, Eji! Eji! 
U mkhonto usao gobee.... 

War comes from the chiefs ! 

It is ordered by the chiefs! We go and kill! 
The spear is in our hands! Eji! Eji! 

The spear kills and bends in the wound! 

The oldest of the Nkuna guba songs, which was already in 
use before the arrival of Manukosi, in the begining of the XIXth 
century, when the army still formed in line and not in circle, 
runs as follows: 

Hi bo yima, hi bo yima! 
Mi teka burena mi nyika tinuba (?) ta mbabe. 

Let us stand fast, let us stand fast! 
Do not let your strength go, it would help the enemy to conquer. 

The words of this song are Thonga, as the Zulu had not yet 
imposed their terminology on the Thonga yimpi. 

One of the finest war songs is that sung in the armies of 
Maputju and Tembe, an antiphon seemingly very ancient, which 
changes from the minor to the major, producing a truly grandiose 
eflect: 

"At break of day”, sings the solist,.... 
‘*Who was it that crowned thee, Muwai, king of Maputju ?” reply 
the warriors. 

Muwai is the great great grandfather of the chief Mabai deposed 
in 1896. He reigned at the close of the XVIIth century, his 
son Makasana having been chief from 1800 to 1850. Muwai 
is compared to the rising sun, or at least the song recalls his 
coronation which must have taken place very early in the morn- 
ing, at daybreak. It is evidently in praise of the royal family 
that the entire army chants this glorious souvenir. | 

e 

Loko ku ti qa, loko ku ti qa 
U bekwe ngubane Muwai ? 

= eS fe 
Muwai ka Mabudu! Muwaika Mabudu ! 
U bekwe ngubane? 

At day break — At day break 

Who was it that crwoned thee, Muwai? 

Muwai, king of Mapute ! Muwai, king See 
Who was it that crowned thee ? 

As one sees, the war songs are tolerably short: a declama- 
tion of three or four words by a solist (musimi) who dances in 
the middle of the circle, and a chorus sung by all the w arriors, 
stamping their feet on the ground and striking their shields with 
their assagais. (Hence the exclamation “‘Eji” found at the close 
of some sentences). Or sometimes the whole throng brandish 
the assagai in a rythmical fashion, raising it first to the right, 
then to the left, afterwards elias it to the side, and lastly 
downwards as if to pierce.. 

When the great Sonia wants the song to stop, he gives 
a signal. At once all the shields are elevated and a sibilant 
murmur runs through the ranks: shi-shi-shi-shi, or a special 
click : nqu-nqu-nqu. Hence the verb ngunguzela, to stop a 
war song. 

And then the war dance will take place. 

Po tne WA DANCE 

The guba is already a kind of war dance, as dancing does not 
mean a change in the dancer’s position. Nodding with the 
heads, gesticulation of the hands and slow motions of the feet 
are already a dance (kina). In some guba songs, there may be 
a going and coming of all the warriors who widen or narrow 
their circle. I have even seen men crossing the mukhumbi, two 
by two, or three by three, during the guba. 

But the true war-dance is the gila (Ro.) or giya (Dj.) the 
representation of deeds of valour by warriors who have killed 
an enemy in battle. The massed chorus of the guba is most 
imposing, but still more deeply does the gila impress one by 
its wildness. Look at this elderly man who suddenly detaches 

= 

himself from the circle, stamping with all his might on the 
ground. His feet beat the earth in cadence, one blow being 
long, the three follawing ones short: — vv v.He goes on, ma- 
king the ground shake, brandishing his weapons with all his 
strength, perspiring from his efforts and pronouncing Zulu words 
which the throng interrupts by wild shoutings, as if to encou- 
rage him... Then he returns to his place and the whole army 
prolonged on a high and piercing note, which suddenly des- 
cends to a deep and outtural tone: inaadaa_..... He has hardly 
resumed his place in the ranks when a young man springs into 
the circle, jumping like an antelope, holding his assagai and 
gesticulating all the while, as if transfixing an invisible enemy. 
His eyes are glaring as if he were a wild beast, and immediately 
the army entones a song, his song, the one which has been 
composed to glorify his deed. Possibly his return to the ranks 
will be greeted by another shout: I..a...Nda-u! — Lion!, com- 
paring him to a lion returning to his forest and which nobody 
will dare to attack. The encouragement given by the warriors 
to the bagili and their great final cry are called khuza or khun- 
zela. 

‘At that very moment”, says Mankhelu, ‘the hearts of the 
young men tremble in their breasts! Their hair stands on end... 
An extraordinary war spirit comes over them all”... And every 
one having witnessed those performances in the Thonga or Zulu 
mukhumbi will confess that they are wonderfully impressive. 
It is a mixture of dramatic, epic and lyric poetry, three literary 
genres which are still confounded, the whole being enhanced by 
a deep, wild music and subject to the laws of a certain artistic 
style. 

The fighting instincts are excited to the highest pitch by these 
patriotic choruses and dramatic representations. Thus should 
the troops be slow in making a start, the young men go dancing 
to the chief and beg him to ‘‘grant them permission” to go 
forth and slay, or rather to ‘‘give them men” to slaughter (ku 
nyika). The native idea appears to be that the chief holds the 
lives of the enemies in his hands: without his permission they 

— io 
cannot go forward, but, this once given, they rush enthusiastic- 
ally to the fray. They even go so far as to taunt him with 
being an old woman, a coward, because he will not let them 20 
at once. (1) 

When the excitement has reached the culminating point, and 
it has been definitely decided to fight, the time has arrived for - 
the magic treatment by which the warriors will be rendered 
invulnerable. 

G. Administering the war-medicine. 

This custom is probably of ancient origin, but I have reason 
to believe that, amongst the Ba-Ronga, it was practised without 
any great formality until the advent of the Zulu influence when 
it was brought into much greater prominence and invested with 
more solemnity. “ Drinking the war-medicine” took place on 
several occasions during the revolt of 1894 to 1895. At Zi- 
hlahla this potion was administered to all warriors before the 
rebel attack on the town of the 14 th October 1894 ; also prior 
to the ambuscade in the outskirts of Lourenco Marques, on the 
7th January 1895, and before the battle of Morakwen, the 
2nd February following. According to my informant, the 
chief doctor of the army prepared the medicine in a huge dish 
with leaves and roots cut into slices. These ingredients possess- 
ed an effervescent quality; the medicine-man stirred up the 
decoction and with it sprinkled the whole army formed in a 
circle. After this every warrior was fully persuaded that he was 
invulnerable, that the bullets would be deflected on either side 
of him, or, even should they hit him, they would flatten 
against his body and fall harmless to the ground. The charm 
could only be broken by the warrior turning his back to the 
foe. Then the bullets might pass through him. I have met 

(1) Gungunyana, on one occasion, when his warriors were importuning him 
with similar requests, sent the more ardent spirits to wage war unarmed 
against the wild beasts, and I was told they actually succeeded in capturing a 
leopard alive and brought it back to the chief! 

with very intelligent natives who were perfectly convinced of 
this fact, although open to reasonable argument on all other 
points. ‘They told me that certain natives who were bowled 
over by grapeshot, picked themselves up after the fight, came to 
life again, or rather regained consciousness and then, with their 
fingers, extracted the bullets which had all remained imbedded 
in the skin ! 

A Nondwane warrior described to me, in the following terms, 
the administering of the magic potion, as it was done on the 
7th January 1895 before the battle of Morakwene. The whole 
army was assembled at Nkanyen, on the bank of the Nkomati. 
It was there that the magician prepared the medicine, with two 
young girls as assistants. While he was brewing the mixture 
and making it froth, the soldiers formed ina semi-circle, looked 
on standing erect, poising their assagais on a level with their 
heads. Then a ntshopfa was cut down (the shrub of obliv- 
ion, often employed by Native doctors and of which we have 
already noted the use in other ceremonials) and a branch laid 
across the road. The several battalions were called up, one 
after the other, and every man had to jump over the branch 
and take a mouthful of the medicine which he spat out again, 
pronouncing the sacramental fsa which accompanies the offer- 
ings made to the gods : he subsequently went off, running and 
dancing and getting ready to go forth and kill. When each 
one had taken his share of the medicine and it was all finished, 
the doctor said to them: ‘‘ Now I have given you all my 
strength; go and slay’. They crossed the river at night and 
having reached the left bank, at a point about ten kilometers 
from the Portuguese camp at Morakwene, they were made to 
observe the strictest silence for a lone time. Then they felt 
that valour (burena) had taken possession of them ! 

Amongst the Ba-Nkuna the war-medicine is also administered 
under the form of sprinkling. This sprinkling may take place 
in time of peace, when danger threatens. The chief kills a black 
ox, the army summoned to the capital is sprinkled and eats the 
flesh of the ox. This will make the country ready for any 
eventuality. But the ceremony is much more serious when 

war is at hand. Then the “ great medicine of the country”, 
carefully kept in the calabashes of the Court magicians, is mixed 
with psanyi of slaughtered sheep and with white sand taken 
from the river. During the nignt, the mukhumbi is formed 
and all the men sit down, their heads bowed over their knees, 
their eyes closed, in perfect silence. Then one of the queens, 
an old woman who has no longer any sexual relations, enters 
the circle, absolutely naked. She dips a leafy branch into the 
magical infusion and marches all round, inside and outside, 
sprinkling all the warriors and muttering the following words : 
**Kill them, break their pots, kill their dogs, catch their chief, 
bring him here, bring so-and-so and so-and-so”. ‘The warriors 
tremble with emotion. They pray to their gods in a low 
fone: “Save=me! Help me! But mone of them dares to 
raise his eyes! They know quite well that they would die ! 

It is extremely important that the officiating woman should 
be old and have had no sexual relations for a long time, or 
** the assagais would loose their strength; the masculine wea- 
pons would become blind and the feminine weapons alone 

would see... The woman would have untied the knot of the 
assagai; she would cross the way (tjemakanya) of the great 
medicine...” She must be a quiet woman (a rula) ” (Man- 
khelu). 

Similar customs exist in Maputju where the medicine is 
called “the medicine of hatred ”, — that which dispels all natur- 
al feeling and makes a man capable of killing his fellow-man ! 
I give the particulars of this curious medicament as I have them 
from one of the natives of the country : no fewer than seven 
acts in this grand performance of ‘‘ preparation for battle ”. 

a) In the first place when the chief foresees that a cam- 
paign is imminent, he has water drawn, and all the necessary 
ingredients gathered together : then he goes into retirement for 
one month, during which he is busy preparing the medicine 
with the magician who knows all about the recipe. 

b) At the end of this time the entire army is summoned to 
the capital. A bull is brought out before the assembled sol- 
diers and the chief strikes it on the head with a stick: this 

infuriates the animal which must be caught and thrown down by 
the men unarmed ; the chief then approaches and kills it with an 
axe. They dismember the carcase, cutting off the flesh in strips. 
which they cook in a large battered pot, stirring it with their 
assagais and pouring into it at the same time “‘ the medicine of 
hatred ” 

c) On this day the army is mustered and formed in the cir- 
cle. The Commander-in-Chief takes the meat, cuts it into 
small pieces and mixes with it certain human ingredients : a 
finger, taken from a hostile petty chief killed in battle has. 
been carefully preserved; the dried up phalange is scraped and 
the bone dust thus obtained is mixed with the medicine. ‘This 
additional ingredient is to prevent any feeling of remorse, any 
prickings of conscience: ‘* ku susa lipfalo”’, literally ‘‘ to remove 
the diaphragm”, the seat of the conscience, in the Ronga idea. 
(See later on a more probable explanation of this rite). The 
Commander-in-Chief takes the pieces of meat thus seasoned 
and throws them into the mouths of the soldiers, who must not 
touch them with their hands. ‘The food must be recieved be- 
tween the teeth ; any meat falling on the ground is picked up 
by the children. 

d) On the following day, the whole army proceeds to a 
large lake (the lake of Shika, near the village of Nhlampfukazi) 
to be treated with another medicine, an emetic. ‘This is placed 
ona skin in the middle of the lake : the skin is withdrawn,. 
leaving the particles of the drug floating on the water; each 
Warrior must stoop down and swallow a mouthful of the emet- 
ic. He will vomit yesterday's meat: ‘‘ fear will be thrown . 
up and valour will remain ” (ku hlantiwile butoya, ku sele 
burena). The chief having meanwhile taken up his position 
on a neighbouring hill, the several regiments rush towards. 
him, surround him and beg now to be sent as soon as possi- 
ble to fight and to slay. 

e) But, before this can be done, the chief returns to the capi- 
tal, the army following him. A double trial must still be 
undergone. A large broom is made of small branches of trees 
soaked in fat from sheep’s tails and fire is then put to it. The 

> «47> 

chief walks round carrying his flaming torch, passing it rapidly 
before the faces of the warriors formed in a circle. Some of 
the helmets catch fire and the wearers are promptly ordered to 
fall out of ranks. The chief addresses them in angry tones : 
© Deliver up to me ”, he says, “ the charms you are conceal- 
ing! Tis only I, the chief, who may possess enchanted drugs. 
You certainly have some, as your plumes took fire... Look at 
the other warriors ; the feathers on their heads are not burnt!” 
This trial is probably -a means of frightening suspected traitors 
or of expelling wizards (baloyi). 

f) All shields are now ‘‘ presented ” all round the circle. 
The chief bends back the point of an assagai and with it strikes 
each shield, but not with sufficient force to pierce it... This 
‘* consecration ” of the shields will doubtless make them a 
more secure protection against the enemy’s weapons. 

g) Lastly the series is closed by the “ aspersion ”. A mor- 
tar is produced in which are soaking some leaves; these are 
stirred round in water and the chief sprinkles the whole army. 
This is the last act. The chief remains at home: the warriors 
thus fortified and protected against all dangers start on their 
expedition. 

This last act only is performed in the clans of Shirindja, 
Nwamba and Zihlahla. 

HeON THE WARPATH. THE BATTLE. SIRATEGY. 
PANICS. RETURN HOME. 

The mukbumbi has been “ built ” for the last time.  Pro- 
clamations have all been issued. Nothing remains but to 
start. 

This starting of the army (ku thethwa) is also made accord- 
ing to prescribed rites. I once witnessed it, when the Nkuna 
army went to Sikororo’s country on a kind of punitive 
expedition. The great ndjuna of the army, the Commander- 
in-Chief, Mankhelu, his stern face more crabbed than ever, 
holding a hyena’s tail in his hand, clad in a white shirt which 

— a 

was very little in keeping with the whole appearance of the 
mukhumbi, stepped inside the large circle and raised his 
tail... Then the Dhlanayo, the young bloods, ran towards him 
shouting: ‘* Kwe-kwe-kwe!” Their cry is the same as that 
of the Timbulwana (lynx), their eldeis, who came next. Man- 
khelu pointed the tail in a certain direction and these two 
regiments started. “The Mafakubi came in their turn, imitating 
the galop of the antelopes : ‘‘ tshwi-tshwi-tshwi! gwu gwu... 
hwu, hwu !... eka-ka-ka-ka ”... and finally shouting: ‘* N’ta dya 
na man” — ‘“‘with whom shall I eat it 2?” — a strange sentence 
which might be, as previously mentioned, a reminiscence of a 
totemic period ! (See page 339)... The Matsyoni, the sea- 
birds, followed shouting ‘‘ tswe-tswe-tswe ”, the Mamphondo, 
those of the horn, came shouting “‘ tshuba-tshuba-tshuba ” and 
imitating buffalos and rhinoceroses. The Maphisi started last 
howling wildly like hyenas: ‘* hum-hum-hum... ” 

If the field of battle is far away, if there is a long march to 
be made, special marching songs are sung on the road. The 
most impressive is the following one : a solist sings in a very 
hich Key: 

Abafo! — The enemy ! 
and the whole army answers in a rich and melodious melody : 

Enena-a-a ! a-a! — Here they are ! 

All the shields are held straight, ready to meet the foe. 
Here are two other niarching songs : 

Nangu moya wa tshisizwe ! - 
We are the fire which burns the country ? 

Inkonyana va ndlopfu inhlezio baen... 
The calf of the elephant is exposed on the plain... 

This means the chief who is in danger! Let us protect and 
deliver him. 

As regards the order of the march, the battalions of the young 
men, stationed on either side of the entrance, go first: they 
form the advanced guard, the post of greatest danger. The 

: a 

scouts, tinhlori (Dj.) tinhloli (Ro.), go in front; each com- 
pany has its leader to whom these scouts bring reports. It is 
the duty of the young men to surround the position to be 
carried and to make the assault. The two sides of the circle 
then follow, and lastly the chest of the army, forming the 
rear guard. The chief thus brings up the rear, protected by the 
battalions of veterans. But generally the chief does not go 
to battle ; he remains at home. 

During the campaign, the whole clan is subjected to many taboos. 
Those who remain at home must keep quiet (rula). No noise 
must be heard in the villages. The women must not close the 
doors of the huts. It is taboo: their husbands might meet with 
misfortune (shibiti). They might want strength to run away. 
Fire must be lit in the huts in the evening, in order that the 
watriors may ‘“‘have light” where they are. It is taboo to 
omit this precaution. Work in the fields must be more or less 
suspended ; women may attend to it in the morning only, before 
the heat of the day, while the air is sull fresh. “* Then, it a 
warrior has stepped on athorn, the thorn will be cool (titimeta) ; 
if he has knocked against a stump, the stump will be quiet and 
not hurt him. .(Mboza).”” Old men who remain home must 
keep watch, and if they see a messenger coming, they follow 
him to the chief. Should he bring bad news, they do not 
inform women, as it is taboo to mourn over warriors killed 
in war before the return of the army. A fine is imposed upon 
those who contravene this law. It is taboo also to have sexual 
relations, as long as the army is on the war-path. This would 
cause thorns to hurt the warriors and they would be defeated. 
(Mankhelu). 

According to Mankhelu, the mukhumbi may be again formed 
when arriving in the proximity of the hostile army. The batta- 
lions will be sent one after the other by the great ndjuna who 
will watch the progress of the fight If he sees his men giving 
way, he ‘‘pours”’ (tshelela) new companies to help those who 
are fighting until they rush the position (gwabula) and put the 
enemy to flight. ‘Then the pursuit begins. The dust flies up- 
to heaven! The vanquishers follow their enemies until they 

=— a 

reach their villages. As a rule, they kill every one, women, child- 
ren, old men and tired warriors who have been unable to run 
away. They take the oxen and burn the huts. However 
exceptions are made in some instances: Sigaole, the ally of the 
Whites, ordered his warriors to spare the lives of the people of 
Zihlahla, during the expedition of February 1895 and to take 
them prisoners instead. “If you find any inhabitants remaining 
in the villages ” said he ‘go into them. Let some one draw a 
line on the ground around the village and forbid the soldiers to 
cross it and to massacre the people”. Generally speaking, 
however, the only lives spared are those of the younger women 
and girls of whom they can hope to make some profit, either 
by taking them as wives or selling them to others for matri- 
monial purposes. ‘These prisoners are called ‘‘ heads ” (ti- 
nhloko) (1). It is the only kind of slavery practised by our 
tribe. Such wives are not ill treated, as a rule. 

So far I have described war-customs of the Natives when 
fighting with each other. Let me add some particulars borrowed 
from the Thonga- Portuguese war of 1894-1896 (App. VII.) 
which throw some light on the Native ways of fighting against 
White people. 

When opposed to White troops, the attack en masse would be too 
dangerous: regiments advancing in serried ranks would offer too 
vood a target to the European artillery. From information I have 
gathered with reference to the battle of Makupe or Magule (Sept. 8 
1895), it would appear that the Ba-Ronga advanced in skirmishing 
order, those provided with guns approaching very close to the lines of 
the Whites. During this fight, one of the most important of the 
whole campaign, the Portuguese. Commanding Officer, M.-F. 
d’Andrade, shewed great presence of mind: the Zihlahla and No- 
ndwane warriors came into almost actual contact with the Portuguese 

(1) Two women, members of our Church, were carried off in this way by 
some of the Zihlahla men (6th October 1894), and we had the greatest 
- trouble in finding them. They were seized close to the town, while going to 
their food-stores and their captors had duly married them with the acquies- 
cence of their chief. 

~~ 

square, whilst the Gaza regiments, which were in greatly superior force, 
remained at a distance and then retreated. They had been told by 
Gungunyane that they were not 
to kill White men, so their pres- a 
ence was a mere parade. The we Garaland battalions 
Ba-Ronga finding themselves “V —- 
thus Farsitee Allowed the same IWIN WN NIWIVIN 
tactics! One of the warriors 
present on this occasion drew 
mea plan of the engagement on 
fe loor of a hut! (See the 
adjoining sketch). 

On the whole it must be ad- 
mitted that the Natives of these 
parts seem greatly to prefer sur- 
prise attacks, sudden descents 
upon peaceful and unsuspecting 
folk, to any kind of regular 
pitched battle. 

The Swazi used to arrive in 

a 

the Delagoa plain very early in 
the morning, surrounded the 
villages and massacred indiscri- 
minately all the inhabitants, in 
the years 1860-1870. The Ngoni 
of Gungunyane adopted the same method. The Matjolo warriors, 
whom the Portuguese sent against Zihlahla in February 1895, encamped 
in perfect silence within one hour’s march of the spot where Nwaman- 
tibyane had taken refuge (Nhlalalene) and attacked his people when 
they least expected them. They indulged in the pleasure of killing 
numbers of women and children, whilst their male enemies fled into 
the palm marshes shouting vociferously : ‘‘ Make ready your rope to 
climb up to heaven... There will be no more rest on earth for you! 
Cook three meals: you may eat two but never a third”. Empty 
threats! The greater part of the Native fights during this war consisted 
+in ambuscades and treacherous slaughterings: lots of noise, plenty of 
bluster, but not much real bravery. 
We shall arrive at the same estimate of native valour if we consider 
the great campaign planned by Gungunyane in concert with Zihlahla 
and Mahazule, who hadtaken refuge in Gaza, during July-August 1895. 

Sguare 

J of Portuguese troops 

— er — 

Nine regiments, representing a large effective force, were to start from 
Manzimehlope, the country beyond the Nkomati River; three of 
these were to ascend the left bank of the river, to cross it in the neigh- 
bourhood of Komati-Poort and to enter Swaziland. the Ngoni chief 
having made alliance with the Swazis. The other regiments were to 
cross the Nkomati to the West of the Sabie, and thence to go south- 
ward by Moveni. The remaining three, with whom were incorporated 
Zihlahla and Mahazule, were to ravage Shirindja, Ntimane and Nond- 
wane, passing about one hour’s march to the West of Lourenco Mar- 
ques, exterminating the inhabitants of Matjolo (allies of the Whites), 
whose retreat on the town would be thus cut off... The nine regiment 
were to effect a junction at a place called Nkobotlwene, tothe South of 
the Bay, where the forces of Gungunyane would fraternise withthose of 
Maputju, with whom they were on good terms. For the space of seven 
months, tens of thousands of those warriors were to overrun the coun- 
try and to annihilate all the tribes opposed to Gungunyane. The chiet 
would not massacre the Whites, nor would he attack their town: he 
calculated on rendering them powerless by depriving them of the assist- 
ance of their Black allies, and expected them thus to sue for peace on 
honourable terms! Such, at least, was the plan of campaign which 
transpired after Gungunyane had been made prisoner, in the centre of 
his own country of Gaza, by a party of about forty white soldiers! 
The whole thing culminated ina single day’s skirmish in the Ntimane 
country. ‘The petty chiefs quarrelled amongst themselves ; only a few 
hardy warriors dared to cross the Nkomati and slaughtered some 
women ata short distance from the outpost of Chinabane. Finding 
themselves discovered, they at once recrossed the river and made off to: 
the Northward. 

The principal causes of the incapacity in military matters, so noti- 
ceable amongst the Blacks during the war of 1894-1896, are doubtless 
the internal jealousies between the tribes and also, it must be said, the 
mysterious dread inspired by the White race, their artillery and their 
superior discipline. . 

The feeling of mistrust existing between Matjolo and Nwamba, No- 
ndwane, Zihlahla and Shirindja, also explains the terrible panics which 
occured during the military operations. On several occasions the 
Native forces were subject to panics which might have entailed the 
most serious results. Asan instance, I relate the following which 
nearly led to the partial destruction of the Matjolo army. The Ma- 
tjolo warriors, as also those of Nwamba, had received orders from the 

| 

Whites, at the end of January 1895, to attack Zihlahla and Mahazule. 
One of the young men of Matjolo, who was present during the opera- 
tions, told me this story: ‘*‘ We were to have joined the men of Nwamba 
at a village called Mukapan, but did not find them at the rendez-vous. 
As they had made common cause with Zihlahla, at the begining of the 
revolt, we had not much confidence in them. It looked as if they 
were in hiding and intended to attack us treacherously and kill us 
At this time two panics occured. The first was at Hukwen, when a 
man dreamt that he was being killed, and cried out : ‘*‘ Yo! Uwe! 
There are people who are killing me ”! It was pitch dark. Every 
one jumped to his feet. Some ran to hide in the forest, but others 
shouted : ‘*‘ The enemies are there! ” Fighting began in the regiment 
of Geba, (composed of men of the same age as Sigaole, the chief), but 
no one was killed A few individuals who kept their presence of 
mind restored order, but we came very nearly exterminating each other ! 
The next night a Chopi of our troop had a fright, and cried out: 
— Why do you want to kill me, you men of Matjolo? I will tell 
Sigaole’s mother”. He was promptly secured and forced to keep quiet 
for fear that he would rouse the Nondwane people, etc.” A similar 
panic seized the troops of Mahazule, when they went to lay waste the 
country round Lourenco Marques (October 1894). 

To avoid, as much as possible, these panics the Ba-Ronga arrange a 
password before starting on an expedition. I was able to learn two of 
these countersigns, after the war, by questioning some young men 
who had taken part in certain military operations. On one occa- 
sion the pass-word was as folllows: ‘‘Be ge pi”? These are Zulu 
words signifying : ‘‘ What are you looking at”? The requisite an- 
swer being : ‘‘ Be ge pezulu” — ‘‘ We are looking at the sky”. In the 
famous attack made by the Zihlahla warriors on the town of Lourengo 
Marques, on 14t October 1894, the word was: ‘‘U landu bane?” 
— ‘**With whom have you a quarrel ? ”—and the reply: ‘* Ngi landa 
Mlungu !” — ‘* I have a quarrel with the White man”! 

Return from the batile. When a yimpi has been defeated in 
battle, but is not pursued by the enemy, it returns silently and 
disperses before reaching the capital, each warrior going back 
ashamed to his village. Mourning takes place in the village of 
the deceased. But much lamenting is not allowed. It may be 
that the chief will prohibit any mourning if many have been 

killed, ‘‘ because the whole country would mourn : — they have 

ee 
not been killed by the mat (likuku) at home, but by the assagai 
on the battle-field army! They are men!! If any one weeps 
he will have to pay £2”. (Mboza). 

When the Maputju yimpis fought against Nondwane in 1876, 
in the battle which took place near Malangotiba. (3 km west of 
Rikatla). they were decimated and eventually repulsed. Their 
chief Musongi sent them back to fight again. They refused. 
Then he chastised them in the following way: he condemned 
them to go and fetch water with pots, as women, but they had 
to go on their knees to the pool, saying: ‘‘It is the result of 
our cowardice” — (Negi ndaba ya bugwala). Afterwards they 
had to extinguish a bush fire with their hands, and came home 
very much scorched and burnt. 

When the yimpi is victorious, the return is marked by import- 
ant songs called bubu (cl. djirma). The regiments follow each 
other, each singing his own hubu and they at once build the 
mukhumbi when they reach the village of the chief. They 
dance, dance their doughty deeds. Suddenly silence is required ; 
the counsellors narrate to the chief how the fighting has pro- 
ceeded and tell him the names of those who have killed enemies, 
thase who have struck the first blow and their bablomuri, viz., 
those who transfixed the leg and the arm. After which the 
heroes ‘‘ gila” to their heart’s content, together with the ba- 
hlomuri. They are proud! They are applauded! They are 
the great men of the day, the tingwaza, the saviours of the 
chief! 

This leads me to consider the very curious customs connected 
with the slayers and the slain on the battle-field. 

I. THE FATE OF THE SLAIN AND THE TREATMENG 
OF TE Se aelsS 

I. The fate of the slain. 

When a man has slain an enemy, he has covered himself with 
the most enviable glory: he has the right to perform the war 

 a  

dance before the chief. He takes away all the garments from 
the dead body which remains quite nude; should the slain be 
a Pedi wearing the piece of skin called nsindo round his geni- 
talia, the slayer takes it with him as a proof that he has killed 
a man. A second warrior passing the enemy dying, or dead 
will transfix (hlomula) his arm. A third passing will pierce his 
leg. These two last will not have done so meritorious a deed 
as the first one: they have not slain but merely finished off 
(huhula) the enemy. They act as witnesses to the first man, 
who is the actual possessor of the corpse; they acquire, 
however, an equal right to dance: they are the bahblomuri of 
the real slayer. Shouid a fourth man pass by and again stab 
the dead, he is credited with no glory at all. 

Besides the stabbing in the arm and leg, the dead bodies of 
enemies are subjected to still further mutilations ; they are ripped 
open and eventually disembowelled, an operation designated by 
the Zulu word “‘qanza”. This revolting custom seems to be 
carried out in a more complete way amongst the Ba-Pedi than 
amongst the Thonga. In the battle of Nov. 6 1901, when the 
Sikororo and Sekukuni forces were repulsed by Maaghe and 
Muhlaba at Shiluvane, when forty foes were killed (App. VII), 
their corpses disappeared entirely, cut into pieces by the medicine 
men of the victorious clan; magicians from all Zoutpansberg came 
and asked to buy parts of the slain in order to prepare their 
powerful charms. In fact, in their opinion, the flesh and blood 
of an enemy killed in battle is the most efficacious of all charms 
and makes a first rate drug called murumelo. This medicine is 
also used for other purposes: with it the seeds are smeared in 
order to ensure a good harvest. When the mealies are two 
feet high, the magician ties together leaves on stems at the four 
corners of the field, after having treated them with the drug; 
the blacksmiths from the Iron Mountain of Zoutpansberg buy it 
and mix it with their mineral ore, in order to strengthen the iron 
which they melt in their furnaces (nonisa nsimbi). Without — 
this help they would obtain but slag. The hunters inoculate 
themselves with the powder obtained from the tendons and the 
bones in the following way: they make incisions in the skin 

= 5. 
of their wrists and elbows, draw a little blood, mix it with the 
drug, cook both in a pot, expose their arrows, assagais to the 
smoke, and rub the incisions with the powder. They will then 
be able to aim straight (See also Note 13.) The powder specially 
prepared from the tendons of slain enemies will be spread on 
the paths during future wars; foes marching on it unknowingly 
will suddenly become unable to walk and will easily be killed. 

The Zulu are said to have the same customs as the Pedi 

I cannot guarantee that all the Thonga clans follow all these 
customs. The Nkuna magicians, in old times, before they were 
influenced by their Pedi neighbours, used to dissect the tendons 
of the back (riringa) of the slain enemy, which they smeared 
with his medulla and hung it to the shields of the warriors... 
Enemies seing those shields would ‘‘tjemeka nhlana” — ‘‘have 
their backs broken”, a figurative expression which means to be 
terror stricken. Apart of the body was also preserved and 
mixed with the war-medicine; the idea which underlies this 
custom being evidently this: when you have eaten the flesh o 
your enemies, you have absorbed all their strength and they are 
unable to do you any further harm.(1) We have seen 
that the ‘‘mbhulo”, the “nyokwekulu”, all these powerful 
‘“medicines of the country” carefully kept in each clan, contain 
a little human flesh. These drugs are used as protective war 
medicines: it is most probably owing to the same principle. 

(1) This custom is the only remnant of anthropophagy remaining amongst 
the Thonga, and I wonder if this superstition is not the true expianation of the 
origin of cannibalism. Where cannibalism still prevails, as amongst the Fan 
of the Congo. I am told that the bodies eaten are generally those of hostile 
clans, or occasionally that of a wife (who belongs to another clan according 
to ne laws of exogamy). Is it not probable that, in the beginning, these 
feasts had a ritual and military value similar to that which we find in the 
administering of the war-medicine in South African tribes. In the course of 
time, the Fan acquired taste for human flesh and ate it for their own pleasure. 
Dealing with anthropophagy, I must not forget that it occured in several ins- 
tances in South Africa after the devastation brought about by the Zulu expedi- 
tions of 1820-1830. In Zoutpansberg, in the mountains of Drakensberg, Na 
tives reduced to starvation began to eat their fellow men. This also happened- 
in the Bokhakha during the reign of Queen Male. (See Part IV.) 

= > 
Il. The treatment of the slayers. 

To have killed an enemy on the battle-field entails an immense 
glory for the slayers ; but that glory is fraught with great 
danger. They have killed....So they are exposed to the myster- 
ious and deadly influence of the nuru and must consequently 
undergo a medical treatment. What is the nuru ? Nuru, the 
spirit of the slain which. tries to take its revenge on the 
slayer. It haunts him and may drive him into insanity: 
his eyes swell, protrude and become inflamed. He will lose 
his head, be attacked by giddiness (ndzululwan) and the thirst 
for blood may lead him to fall upon members of his own 
family and to stab them with his assagay. To prevent such 
misfortunes, a special medication is required: the slayers must 
lurulula tiyimpi ta bu, take away the nuru of their sanguinary 
expedition. (Lurulula comes from ruru, plur. miluru or vice- 
Wersay (1) 

1) We have met for the first time with the notion of nuru a propos of the 
rite of luma (p. 372); weshall find it again when dealing with hunting customs 
(Part IV). It isone of the few typically animistic ideas of the Thonga. The 
nuru is to be feared not only in slain enemies but in connexion with any hu- 
man corpse and even with dead animals. As a proof, I may quote the follow- 
ing curious story which Spoon told me and of the truth of which he was 
fully convinced: A traveller died under the great fig-tree of Libombo (near 
Rikatla) . Hehad climbed on the tree and fallen on his own stick, which he 
had planted in the ground He was not buried, as no one knew him. So 
his corpse fell into decomposition on the spot; his skull became white. Later 
on a bush fire burnt all the grass and the skull was seen for years “* saying 
mpha” (it was shining), the teeth ‘‘ saving bva ” (descriptive adverb, same 
meaning). One day the bovs of Libombo wentto pick wild figs from the tree 
and again saw the skull: the fire had just passed again; Spoon was one of them. 
‘We beat it with our sticks and amused ourselves by rolling it over as a 
ball. We did not know it was a human skull.. Having gone home. we 
began to be seized by the drunkenness of nuru, the disease of those who have 
killed a man. During the night we were delirious (hanta-hanteka), our eves 
swelled and were full of exudations (malanga), the four of us, Tsukela, Tlabin, 
Sibakuze and myself. Next morning my uncle went to the fig-tree and saw 
we had killed a man there! The medicine-man who understands the treat- 
ment of nuru, Dudela, who had been a slaver in war. called us to his village. 

—  — 

In what consists this treatment? The slayers must remain for 
some days at the capital. They are taboo. They put on old 
clothes, eat with special spoons, because their hands are “hot” 
and off special plates (mireko) and broken pots. They are for- 
bidden to drink water. Their food must be cold. The chief 
kills oxen for them (yi ba lumisa hi tihomu); but if the meat 
were hot it would make them swell internally ‘‘ because they 
are hot themselves, they are defiled (ba na nsila)’. If they eat 
hot food, the defilement would enter into them. ‘‘ They are black 
(ntima). This black must be removed» (Mankhelu). During 
all this time sexual relations are absolutely forbidden to them. 
They must not go home, to their wives. In former times the 
Ba-Ronga used to tatoo them with special marks from one eye- 
brow to the other. Dreadful medicines were inoculated in the 
incisions and there remained pimples ‘‘which gave them the 
appearance of a buffulo when it frowns”. (1) 

After some days a medicine-man comes to purify them 
(ku ba phutula), ‘‘to remove their black”. There seem to 
be various means of doing it, according to Mankhelu. Seeds 
of all kinds are put into a broken pot and roasted, together 
with drugs and psanyi of a goat. he slayers inhale the 
smoke which emanates from the pot. They put their hands 
into the mixture and rub their limbs with it, (ba tilula) especially 
the joints. 

Viguet describes this last act thus :— Pieces of medicinal roots 

We stood ina line before him ; he poured a little of his powder in the hands 
of each one of us, took a little in his mouth, rubbed his forehead. Then he 
insulted us saying: ‘ You will die! Who began beating that skull?” Each 
of us denied having given the first blow. Then he said : ‘Take care! Do 
not go any more there neither near that nkuhlu tree where another corpse 
has been burnt under the leaves! Go away”. 

When a man has murdered another inascuffle, he can replace this nuru 
medicine by his own urine. He must drink a little of it and rub his forehead 
with it. The giddines will pass away. Ifthe murder has been committed 
from a distance, as with a gun, the nuru is not so much to be feared, as the 
enemy was far away. A little of the medicine will be sufficient to treat the 
murderer. Spoon is ignorant of the composition of the nuru drug. 

(1) Hencean expression which is still of common use. When a Ronga wants 
to defy some one he says to him : ‘You are a coward! If you say you can 
tackle me come and kiss my forehead”. 

=o 

are put in the broken pot and roasted. They inhale the smoké. 
Then cow’s milk is poured into the pot on the embers and, 
when it boils, they have to put their fingers into it, one hand 
after the other, and pass them across their lips emitting the 
sacramental : ‘‘tsu”’ (which proves that it is a sacrifice to the gods, 
a religious act). Afterwards they say: ‘“‘ Phee! phee!” — viz., 
phephela phansi, (Dj. tikela hansi), ‘‘ go down, sink ”. This 
means: ‘‘ May you go deep into theearth, ycu, my enemy and 
not come back to torment me ”. The last part of the treat- 
ment consists in rubbing the biceps, the legs, and the whole 
body with this milk. The medicinal embers are carefully col- 
lected, and reduced to a powder; this will be put into small 
bags of skin called tintebe which the slayer will wear round his 
neck. They contain the medicine of the slayers of men. At 
bukanye time they can use it to /uma, viz., to season the first 
calabash they drink (See page 372). For this purpose it is as 
good as the great mbhulo, ‘“‘ the medicine of the country”, 
provided by the chief, and it will prevent them attacking 
their own people under the influence of drink. The tintebe 
will also be helpful in future battles. Insanity threatening 
those who shed blood might begin early. So, already on the 
battle field, just after their deed, warriors are given a preven- 
tive dose of the medicine by those who have killed on previous 
occasions and who wear tintebe. 

The period of seclusion having been concluded by the final 
purification, all the implements (mizilo) used by the slayers 
during these days, and their old garments, are tied together and 
hung by a string to a tree, at some distance from the capital, 
where they are left to rot. (1) 

Having reached their homes, the slayers have stil] to com- 
plete the cure by chewing a piece of root called monungwane 
every morning and evening, and spitting it out in the direction 
of the rising or the setting sun with the same exclamation : 

(1) I had the good luck to find those which were used for the purification 
of the slayers after the Mooudi fight during the Sikororo war and they are 
now. in the Ethnographical Museum of Neuchatel. They consists of half a dozen 
old calabashes, a pair of sandals, etc. 

— oy — 

“ Phee ! phee!” — ‘*Go down, sink !” The piece of root is — 
tied to the assagay (1). 

* * 

During the weeks following the battle heroes do not only 
wear the tintebe ; besides these miluru amulets, the conquerors 
have the right to wear certain trophies. These are in the 
first place antelope or even goat’s horns which they pierce at 
the base ; they thread a string through the hole thus made and 
tie them round the neck Gee illustrations, p. 32 and 427). They 
also make necklaces of small pieces of wood, notched in a pe- 
culiar manner and burnt in the fire; a hole is made through 
these and they are strung together like beads and worn round 
the neck. Sometimes these necklaces are lengthened to such 
an extent that they are worn as a bandoleer. I recollect seeing 
the Matjolo warriors returning from their expedition of February 
1895 : they came to show themselves off to the Whites at Lou- 
renco Marques, gloriously proud of having massacred defence- 
less women and children whom they had suprised in the early 
hours of the morning! People threw them pieces of silver and 
they converted them into brandy ! 

J. SOME REMARKS ABOUT WAR RITES. 

The war rites of the Thonga, whatever may be their origin and 
though they seem to be a mixture of old Thonga and of new Zulu 
customs, form a very interesting and complete whole. 

(1) Purification customs for the warriors are somewhat different amongst 
the Pedi. After the Mooudi battle, the slayers of Maaghe’s yimpi had to un- 
dergo the following medication: the heart of the slain having been torn out, 
the muscles of their faces sliced off, their limbs amputated, all these portions 
of human flesh mixed with drugs and ox-flesh were cooked in a pot, the assa- 
gais being used to stir the horrible broth. This was poured intoa flat basket 
which it is taboo to touch: somebody draws it with a curved assagay as far 
as the middle of the square. Then theslayershaving been previously white- 
washed with clay, came on their knees, and, with vociferations or crivs imi- 
tating vultures, they caught a piece of meat in their teeth, not touching it 
with their hands. Their wives are said to participate in this meal as being 
also contaminated by the defilement of their glorious husbands. 

i aan 

The most noticeable are the national rites. In war time, the wery 
existence of the clan is threatened, because the Chief, the central and 
vital cell of this organism, is in danger. Hence the readiness of all 
the warriors to answer to the first call of the shipalapala, and to gather 
round him, ‘‘ building the circle ”, which protects him, the whole 
clan forming a single village and binding itself by the striking ceremo- 
nies of guba, by patriotic songs, to die for him. Notice that most of 
the guba songs extol the chief. All these customs in which the indi- 
vidual or the collective courage exalts itself, the guba and the gila, are 
national or social rites by which the clan works towards its own sal- 
vation. They owe their origin to the national idea. 

But war also brings dangers to each warrior. Hence the protective 
rites of sprinkling the mukhumbi with the war-medicine of the clan, 
or of giving each man some of it to swallow. The rite is inspired by 
the notion similia similibus curantur, its idea being that the warrior 
having eaten a little of the enemy will become invulnerable to his 
blows. 

But some other rites, especially the war taboos, seem to owe their 
origin to the tdea of passage. 

The whole clan enters a special phase as soon as war has been deci- 
ded upon by the chief, ‘* who gives it” to his warriors. Hence the 
taboos observed at home, many of which are exactly the same as 
those of the circumcision school and of the period of mourning. We 
notice the same contrast already so often mentioned : certain sexual 
interdictions are removed (e. g. a queen will enter quite naked into 
the mukhumbi!) On the other hand sexual relations, allowed in 
ordinary life, become taboo. This period of fighting seems really to 
be considered as a marginal period for the whole tribe. 

It is so par excellence for the warriors and | think many of the rites 
imposed upon them find their explanation in that way. As we saw, 
the period of margin is generally preceded by separation rites. (See 
page 74). Some very characteristic ones are performed when the army 
starts: the leave-taking from the General with wild shouts, the custom 
of swallowing a piece of meat without touching it with the hands and 
taking an emetic afterwards, that of jumping over the ntchopfa branch, 
the medicine of oblivion! etc The glorious return, the participa- 
tion in the meat of oxen which have been taken, may be the aggrega- 
tion ceremonies, viz., the acts by which the warriors return to their 
ordinary life. 

Passage rites are still more distinct in the case of the slayers; but 

— 

their condition is worse, as it implies the idea of defilement following 
upon murder and is attended with the danger coming from the nuru. 
They are ‘* hot” (an expression which also applies to the tabooed 
woman during her menses) ; they are ‘‘ black ” (an epithet which also: 
designates the grave-diggers, the bereaved mother, etc.). Hence a 
seclusion much more complete, a true period of margin with many 
alimentary and sexual (1) taboos. Possibly the incisions on the brow 
are an old kind of tatocing in connexion with that marginal period, 
similar to the inguinal incision of the widows (p. 198). The purifica- 
tion rites are of the same kind as those of the nrourners, especially 
of the grave-diggers. The aggregation to society, after their seclusion, 
is marked by rites of separation from the marginal period, which no: 
doubt aim at getting rid of the defilement connected therewith. 
(Exposure of the mizilo outside the village in the bush). Is it not 
striking te notice the correspondence between these rites in their 
peculiar sequence and those of the circumcision school, of the mour- 
ning, of moving a village ?

The new era, and the future of the South African tribe. 

The great philosopher Aristoteles gave the following definition of 
man: ‘* Man isa political animal” —§éov noditrxov, by which words 
he rightly observed that man is not made to live alone, but in society. 
This definition is applicable to the Bantu as well as to any other hu- 
man race: the family is the first of these social aggregates; the clan is 
the second. The Bantu are essentially a political race and no one 
could deny that they have invented a very interesting and practical 
political system, a system which wonderfully combines two oppo- + 
site principles ; the autocracy of the chief and the democratic spirit 
of the subjects. The Bantu citizens are truly citizens. They can sit 
on the hubo and give their advice in all the questions at stake, be 
they of a legislative, of a political, or of a judicial character. This 
age-old participation in the discussion of the affairs of the country 

(1) The sexual taboos are so severe that, after the Mooudi battle, one of 
the slayers took great offence at a man who dared to touch his food, as the 
man was living in his home and had relations with his wife. The slayer was 
afraid that this contact might cause his own death or bring misfortune to his 
family. 

— i 
has given them a sense of their importance, a gravity of speech and a 
airy of manners which greatly mupiess an European visiting a 
typical Bantu village. 

But this state of ae is being modified very rapidly by the all pow- 
erful civilisation which invades South Africa from all parts as an 
irresistible tide. My description of the national life of the tribe, or 
clan, still applies to some parts of Thongaland; but the changes are 
coming so fast that soon it will have nothing more than an historic 
value. In some other parts of South Africa the old clan life has 
already totally disappeared. 

If we have tried to foresee the future of the Bantu village, how much 
more serious is the question of the fate of the Bantu tribe? I do not 
think I can now pass it by without consideration, whatever may be 
the difficulties and the delicacy of what has been called the ‘‘ Native 
problem ”. 

Trying to find the direction in which the present evolution of the 
South African tribes tends, we must first consider what has thus far 
been the influence of European civilisation on the Native political life. 
We are here dealing with past and well ascertained facts. 

THE RESULT OF THE MEETING OF CIVILISATION AND THE BANTU 
TRIBAL LIFE UP TO JHE PRESENT DAY. 

a) Civilisation bas destroyed the mililary power of the South African 
Bantu, Thirty years ago they could still fight against White people 
with some hope of success. Now their fighting power has been bro- 
ken. They will always be able to killa few White women, a few 
colonists settled amongst them, far away from the centres; they might 
obtain some occasional victories against a badly conducted reconnoi- 
tring party: they cannot withstand an European Commando provided 
with Maxime quick firing rifles and all the implements of modern war- 
fare, be they ten times superior in numbers. The last Zulu rebellion 
has given a striking demonstration of this fact. The Zulu impi, with 
wonderful courage, rushed at the Whites with its assagais and its war 
songs. But six hundred of the natives were shot dead by the mitrail- 
leuses before they could approach near enough to throw an assagay ! 
As long as the Black race cannot fight with the White man on equal 
footing as regards weapons, it cannot hope to regain its military 
power, whatever may be its valour or its patriotism. 

b) Having conquered the territory of South Africa, the White Go- 

a 460 — 

vernments have everywhere placed Native Commissioners to watch 
over their coloured subjects. This has put an end to the tribal wars. 
Natives are no longer allowed to indulge in their old fighting customs. 
They may avail themselves of a war between Europeans to square up 
old accounts witheach other, as happened during the Anglo-Boer war, 
but they are forbidden to follow the war-path any more. In many 
parts of South Africa they have even been disarmed. This change, 
as a whole, is a favourable one. Native wars never brought 
blessings to the race. However it tends to destroy one of the springs 
of patriotism and, in this way, it impoverishes the Native mind, 

c) These Native Commissioners have put a very effective check, 
not only upon the military tendencies of the tribe, but upon the power 
of its chiefs. Yhe authority of the chief in the midst of the clan has 
certainly been diminished. In some instances he has been deposed, 
banished in consequence of war, and the tribe has remained without 
head and without force, emasculated as it were, unable to guide itself. 
As Mankhelu said : ** Our chief is the forest into which we retreat ! 
Without him we are but women!” This was sadly noticeable in the 
case of the Zihlahla or Mpfumo clan, which was perhaps the most 
developed of all the Ronga kingdoms and which suffered most from 
the 1894-96 war. Its young chief Nwamantibyane was caught, de- 
ported to some spot in Eastern Africa where he died, and the clan 
was dismembered, a great number of men emigrating to the Trans- 
vaal; the others remained dissatisfied but powerless in their old ter- 
ritory and were incorporated with Matjolo or Mabota. 

Even when the Native chief is maintained in his position by the 
Whites, his power is curtailed. Asa judge, he is no longer allowed 
to inflict capital punishment, His tribunal only judges minor cases 
and, besides and beyond him, there is a further appeal, the Court of 
the White Commissioner, which is ready to consider every important 
case, Should the Native chief be unjust or selfish in his decisions, 
the subjects will go more and more to the White tribunal. It may be 
their claims will not be so well understood as in. their own bubo, but 
they will perhaps meet with fairer treatment. Shrewd and clever 
Native Commissioners thus succeed in attracting more applicants to 
their residences than the chief to his capital (1). This dual control 
leads to a progressive loosening of the tribal tie. 

(1) This was the case, for instance in Nondwane. The unjust and egois- 
tic tule of Mubvesha compelled many of his subjects to go ‘‘ shikanekisen ”, 
viz., to the Portuguese Administrator of Morakwen. 

 Ar  

d) Mission work, now so wide-spread all over the country, leads to 
the same result. It infuses a new moral and religious ideal into the 
minds of the people. The old customs, the sacred superstitions, 
many articles of the native code, are rejected by the converts. They 
generally remain very submissive to the authority of their chief, pay 
their taxes, join the army, but, should the Authorities summon a 
“‘nyiwa’”’, a gathering of the clan to smell out the witches, should 
statute labour be ordered for a Sunday, etc., their conscience does not 
allow them to obey. On the other hand Native converts, under their 
White missionary, generally form a Church which sometimes becomes 
a kind of tmpertum in imperio, subject to its own laws. This is 
the necessary consequence of bad, or immoral, heathen customs (beer- 
drinking, lobola, polygamy) ot which the Christian ideal cannot 
approve. <A deep gulf is thus created between Christians and hea- 
thens and this also weakens the tribal life. 

The causes which have brought about this change will probably 
increase in power in the course of time. The process of indivi- 
dualism will go on; so will consequently this process of destruc- 
tion of the tribal tie, and we may confidently look forward to a 
moment when the clan will have lost its political cohesion and its 
members have become independent of any Native Authority. 

e) Loss of the political sense. How must this eventuality be consi- 
dered. It may present certain advantages over the old state of things, 
but, to my mind, it entails a distinct and most regrettable loss for the 
Natives. The political sense with the sense of responsibility, will have 
disappeared, and this sense is one of the most precious aids towards 
the building of character. Look to a gathering of old fashioned in- 
dunas discussing a question affecting the welfare of the tribe under 
the guidance of their chief ; compare it with an assembly of half civi- 
lised natives in a Town location, a low class tea-meeting, for instance, 
of men with no respect for any one, addicted to drink and immora- 
lity, having rejected the authority of White missionaries because they 
believe themselves to be so much better informed! There was in the 
first gathering a dignity, a sense of duty, which you will hardly find 
in the second one... 

It is no use, for us, White men, to curse the degenerate Native or 
to weep over the disappearance of the old restraints. Let us rather 
confess that we are in a great measure responsible for these results. 
We have interfered with the Bantu clan by taking away its indepen- 
dence ; we havé deprived it of one of its character building features, 

=. 462 ——e 

~ 
political responsibility. This must not be forgotten in the discussion 
of the Native problem. We have caused a loss and it is our duty to 
try to restore to the Native’s mind that which we have unconsciously, 
perhaps inconsiderately, taken from it. 

We can never be contented with having obtained unpaid labourers 
to work our farms or paid miners to dig our gold. It is a question 
of dignity on our part that our interference in the affairs of the Na- 
tives should never result in a deterioration of their moral status. 

I know that 1am here approaching the most difficult, the most 
contested, the most delicate of all the questions connected with the 
Native problem, viz., the question of political rights of the Natives, and 
I feel all my incompetence to deal with it Should I be asked to sug- 
gest a solution of this vexed question, I would certainly refuse to do 
so. But I here consider it notas a political theoriser but as an ethno- 
grapher, who has come to the conclusion that the present state of 
things has impaired the character of a race and who honestly searches 
for a remedy. 

2. How CAN WE PRESERVE THE SENSE OF POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY 

AMONGST SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVES ? 

I am looking for a remedy... Is this remedy the universal bestow- 
al of the franchise to every male native of twenty one years of age, who 
is a British subject and has been six months resident in the coun- 
nye 

a) The Native franchise. For many decades the Native population of 
Cape Colony has been offered the right of voting for members of 
Parliament. Any Native possessing a certain education (able to write 
his own name), and a certain amount of property, or of revenue, can- 
apply for the franchise. What has been the result of this generous 
policy ? Of the whole Native Cape population, only 8000 Bantu 
availed themselves of this opportunity. ‘* They have exercised their pri- 
vilege creditably and profitably ”, says the Christian Express of August 
1908. They have fused into the two great political parties. No harm 
seems to have resulted for the country from the bestowal of this 
right on its Black population. <A distinct progress has even been 
made. Travelling through Cape Colony, after Natal and the Trans- 
vaal, I have been struck by the difference in the manners and the 
demeanour of the Natives and in the way in which they were treated. 

= io — 
They look much more like citizens, actual citizens or virtual citizens, 
and the White men show them a consideration which they halt 
meet with in other Colonies. 

However the granting of the franchise is not the panacea for the 
evil which I am now considering. See how comparatively few Natives 
have availed themselves of it in the most advanced of the South 
African states! .We know that statesmen from the other Colonies are 
very little disposed to follow the example of the Cape. Supposing 
however they should offer the franchise to coloured people all over 
the land, the great bulk of the Native population would be little help- 
ed by it. Qualifications required would probably be high and only 
a few would be able to avail themselves of the opportunity. More- 
over the uncivilised men, who are still the great majority, could not make 
any use of it. How could they form an opinion as regards railway 
and mining questions, educational and economic problems which so 
greatly perplex our statesmen ? How would they be able to decide 
between the attitude of progressists and conservatives and cast a rea- 
soned and independent vote when electing members of Parliament ? 
I could say the same ofhundreds and thousands of superficially educated 
Natives. They know more or less how to read and write, but are 
absolutely unable to understand the tenth part of what is published 
in the ‘‘ Star” or the ‘“‘ Argus”, because their horizon is totally differ- 
ent from that ‘of the White man, although they are perhaps not much 
inferior in intelligence to many European voters. To be able to write 
one’s own name is not a sufficient qualification for taking part in the 
politics of the South African Union. 

The Black race is now in a period of transition and nobody can fore- 
tell in which way and how far it will evolve. It is possible that, after 
one hundred or two hundred years, the South African Bantu will have 
reached such a level of education as will enable them to exercise nor- 
mally full political rights. For the present it seems to me that the 
franchise must remain the privilege of the few of thase thoroughly 
educated Zulus, Sutos, Thongas, who have reached the requisite level 
morally and intellectually. I think it would be a good and wise 
provision to offer it to them, subject to as high qualifications as may 
be deemed necessary: the franchise would be kept before them as an 
ideal accessible to the best representatives of the race all through South 
Africa. It would have its elevating effect on the whole Native popu- 
lation through them. But some other provisions must be made for 
the masses who cannot yet rise to such a high level, and who must 

— ja = 
however cultivate political interests and discharge political duties for 
the sake of their character. 

I think this provision ought to be twofold. To strengthen the tri- 
bal system where it is still working satisfactorily, and to grant them 
a sort of representation which would be able to protect Native interests 
in the South African Commonwealth. 

b) Strengthening the tribal system. The great majority of South Afri- 
can Natives still live under the old tribal system, more or less amended 
by the dominating White government. In the Protectorates, which 
contain 700 000 souls, in Zululand etc., it is still in full force. In 
other countries chiefs have lost more of their power and the political 
activity of their subjects has diminished accordingly. Some dreamers 
would like tribalism to be absolutely abolished and the duality of 
control disappear at once by the absorption of the Chief in the Native 
Commissioner. This would be a mistake. As long as he is not an 
enfranchised citizen of the State, let the uncivilised Native remain a 
responsible member of his clan. Therefore let us not hasten the 
death of clan life. If it must die, let it die a natural death... Indi- 
vidualism is growing every day. Moreover who knows if the Bantu 
tribe will not find means of adapting itself to the new condition of 
things? It will be very interesting to watch the evolution of politi- 
cal life in the Protectorates, in Basutoland for mnstance, where the soil 
belongs to Natives and is inalienable, where the dangerous contact 
with White people is reduced to a minimum, but where civilisation 
and Christianity penetrate by leaps and bounds. Some chiefs have 
already been converted to Christianity, such as Khama in Bechuana- 
land ; and many others in the various tribes ; amongst them, in the 
Thonga tribe, Muhlaba, chief of the Nkuna clan. They generally 
adopt civilised customs, build good houses, buy mules and carriages. 
Let us suppose a certain number of these becoming thoroughly chang- 
ed and being followed by the bulk of their subjects under the gui- 
dance of thoughtful White missionaries : could not the Bantu clan 
then evolve into some new, original, interesting political organism in 
which the blots of heathenism would have disappeared and a healthy 
national life would prevail? The Bantu are not republicans but they 
are democrats. Why could their tribal system not get rid of its objec- 
tionable features, preserving only those which are compatible with 
Christian morals and civilisation ? 

These are only questions which I put, and not definite opinions to 
which I commit myself. At any rate, if the tribal system must and 

can be maintained for an unknown time, the Government ought to 
take some steps to ameliorate it, or at least to prevent its deterioration, 
It ought to pay a special attention first of all to the character of the 
chiefs. They are Government servants after all, ruling to a certain 
extent over British or Portuguese subjects. Moral qualifications ought 
to be required of them as well as of any other civil or judicial employee. 
Their conduct ought to be the more watched as the new conditions 

‘ Tudea 

Muhlaba’s house (in the Thabina Location, N. E. Transvaal.) 

under which they are placed are eminently dangerous for their morale. 
Under the old tribal law, their power was checked by the indunas ; 
they could even be deposed by a family council. Now the chief 
feels himself supported by the White Authorities and is tempted to 
take less care of the interests of his people. Many of them have 
become desperate drunkards. In some places they are allowed 
to get drink, which is absolutely refused to their subjects, and they 
sink deeply, morally speaking. ‘This is a lamentable result indeed, 
and it kills the political life of the clan more surely than would the 
disappearance of the chief. If the tribal system is to be preserved 
at all, a strong and careful supervision must be exercised on the chiefs, 
and care taken that the indunas, and the people, retain that share of 
authority which original tribalism entrusted to them. 

— $66 — 

c) Native representation. It will not be sufficient, however, to create 
a fence, as high and strong as possible, round the Bantu clan in order 
to keep it alive until the native population is able to be enfranchised. 
Though South Africa is a country conquered and ruled by the White 
man, there are a great number of questions which equally concern 
both races. Natives pay taxes, high taxes, they contribute to the eco-, 
nomic progress of the land, they provide the mines and agriculture. 
with the indispensable manual labour. There are topics on which 
they ought to havea say and upon which the White Government ought 
not to decide without having heard their voice. In all legisla- 
tion affecting them directly, or the use of the money levied on them, 
they ought to be consulted. They are not able yet to form a sound 
judgment on the politics of White South Africa, but they understand 
very well what concerns them, and so it would be but fair to give 
them means of expressing their opinion. This truth has been recog-. 
nised to a certain extent. The Transkei has its Native Council and 
Natal has recently established a similar organisation. Lord Selborne, 
in his admirable address delivered before the Congregation of the 
University of the Cape on 27th February 1909, strongly insisted on 
the necessity of creating such Councils in all the districts, and we are 
glad to see that this idea, which was for a long time in the minds of 
many friends of the Natives, has been distinctly voiced by such a high 
authority. 

These Councils ought to act, first, as Consultative bodies giving their 
advice each time that Parliament is proceeding to pass laws affecting 
the Natives. They might even be given the permission of express- 
ing their views, eventually their complaints, in connection with the 
Native administration and their wishes for the welfare of their folk. 
Such Councils would act as a safety valve. Natives, when dissatisfied, 
are often contented if they have the opportunity of giving vent to 
their grievance, whatever may be the result of theirremontrances. But 
this provision would render a still greater service : it would develop 
the political sense of the tribal natives, educate them on questions of 
general interest which concern the whole of the coloured population, 
and not only their own petty clan. So they would be gradually 
prepared fora time when the duality of authority will have disappeared, 
and when they will eventually become full citizens of the South 
African Commonwealth 

If we open the way to the franchise to the fully educated and civili- 
sed members of the race, if we wisely control the uncivilised masses 

 io  
still under tribal law, taking special care of the chiefs, educating their 
sons, fostering material, moral and intellectual progress amongst the 
clans, if we create everywhere Native Councils to afford them the oppor- 
tunity of studying questions affecting the Native population, and of 
bringing Native opinion before Parliament, then we shall have done 
our best to restore that sense of political responsibility which we are 
now gradually destroying... We shall have done our duty in regard 
to the future of the South African Tribe. 

What this future will be, no one can tell. It depends mostly on 
the Natives themselves... Everyone knows that the Act of Union 
contains a clause which greatly hurt the feelings of the educated Bantu 
of South Africa. When news reached their shores that the Act had 
been ratified by the House of Commons, without amendment, the 
colour-bar included, they expressed their deep sorrow, thinking that 
their race had been unjustly treated... But one of their papers 
published the following comment : ‘‘ The Natives, men, women, and 
children, must bend their energies to the advancement of themselves. 
in all that civilisation and true Christianity means, so that their claim 
to equality of treatment for all civilised British subjects may be irresis- 
tible...” Let this manly advice be followed by the whole Native 
population and there is still hope for the South African Tribe, what- 
ever may be the modifications which it will undergo during the 
coming generations. 

— ie =

Characteristics of the stx dialects of the Thonga language. 

In the adjoining table 1 have compiled a list of characteristic words 
in the six main dialects of the Thonga language. The Ronga and 
Djonga lists have been made by myself, and represent those dialects as 
spoken in the Mpfumo and Nkunaclans. The population South of 
Delagoa Bay speaks a kind of sub-dialect of the Ronga, the Lwandle 
or Maputju. (Abbr. Map.). lowe tothe Rev. Perrin the peculiar forms 
found in that district. The Rev. P. Loze of Lourengo Marques 
compiled for me the list of the Hlanganu equivalents, as they are met 
with in the Nwamba clans. They are not very different from the 
Djonga ones. Probably the dialect of Hlanganu proper, in the Le- 
bombo Hills, would show greater differences. The Rev. H. Guye, 
who resided in Khosen and in Shikumbane (Lower Limpopo Valley), 
provided me with a Djonga-Khosa list, very similar to the Nkuna 
one, and with the characteristic forms of the Bila dialect (Station of 
Shikumbane, 15 miles West of Chai-Chai), also of the Hlengwe as 
spoken in the Khambana District, on the Eastern border of the Lower 
Limpopo (Kh.). The Hlengwe, being so extensively spoken, pos- 
sesses many sub-dialects. The Rev. S. Malale, a native minister, 
compiled the characteristic forms of the Tshauke (Tsh.) region and 
those of the Madzibi people (Madz.) dwelling in the hinterland of 
Inhambane. The American missionaries have already published + 
many books in the Tswa sub-dialect spoken in the vicinity of 
Inhambane; so I have also been able to mention a few Tswa forms. 
Lastly I owe to the same Rev. S. Malale the Nwalungu forms, those 
of Maluleke as well as those of the Ba-ka-Baloyi (Bal.) proper, and, in 
addition, those of the Hlabi(HI.), which are very similar to the Djonga. 

The orthography employed in these lists is that which the Swiss 
missionaries adopted for the Vocabulary and. Grammar of the Thonga- 
Shangaan language. (Bridel, Lausanne 1908). For our missionary 
books, we have always used the excellent and scientific system of 
Lepsius, with its two main principles : a letter must always have the 

same value, and a single sound must be represented by a single letter. 
Unhappily this system implies the use of special signs which are not 
found in the ordinary printing offices, so we have had to adopt 
another conversational orthography for outside publications. 

The j added to #, d, r and sh is not exactly the French 7, but means 
a cerebralisation of the preceding sound. Tj is at pronounced with 
the tip of the tongue bent somewhat backward, behind the palatal and 
towards the cerebral point. It is different from tsh which is ¢ + sh, 
sh being the palatal sh, as in shore. Dj is not very different from the 
English 7 in just. Rj is a very much rolled r, tending towards the 
French j (as in jour); sij is a further deformation of r where all 
guttural element has disappeared : a palatal sh cerebralised. These 
four sounds are not the pure cerebral sounds mentioned by Lepsius. I 
prefer describing them as cerebralised. However, in Maluleke, dj 
sometimes becomes dh, as in the word mundhuku, and then it is pure 
cerebral. Besides the lateral sounds bl, dl, il, very frequent in 
Thonga, there also occurs in Bila the Zulu dhl, which would perhaps 
be more correctly written j/. 

Two peculiar sibilant sounds, ps and bz, (sw and zw inthe Grammar) 
are accompanied by a special whistling. The v is not a proper v,. 
which is very rare in Thonga and is only met with in the combination 
bv, and in the Hlengwe ngovu, vuna, etc. It is a soft b, a fricative 
labial. A strong b is rare in all the dialects, except after m or before 
y. In the Maputju sub-dialect alone it is frequently used instead of 
the soft b. N is the nasal guttural » pronounced as ng in singing ; it 
is the same sound as 1. 

The following comparison bears on three different subjects : the 
sounds, the grammatical forms and some characteristic words of the 
vocabulary. As regards sounds, notice especially the very interesting 
permutations of r, which find their explanation in the hypothesis of 
Meinhof on the Ur-Bantu. (Compare Meinhof, Grundrisse einer 
Lautlehre der Bantu Sprachen). This table will provide colonists. 
with a shibboleth for the Thonga tribe, viz., with ameans ofascertaining 
the origin of any Thonga with whom they may meet. They will be 
able to diagnose the clan to which he belongs. To understand it 
fully, it will be necessary to study the Ronga or Thonga grammars, to. 
which I must refer the reader. 

oquivs 
vs 

vzpuos 

asiu (“Yy) 
vuas]u 

euuns}ns} 
nynzpunw 
Izpu 
vULIZpu 
vars 

vynd 
1yNITw 
Enzpurca 
TansyuIw 
ynzpu 

ns 

runny (“zpey) 
TWIpUun 

Tey 

TLUT3] 

euuld 

nivi 

asi (*zpry) 
oAqti 

aM sua 

“pura | 

epuodp 
vuasiu 
vuunsyns} 

nynypusw 
nynypunuu 

ie 
eWwIpu 
BASU 
varysyu 

vynysy 

INpuIL 
pelapaiee 

inpu 
rere 
Weare 
TUILI9] 
vu 
nivd 
dAQII 

nsunjemy 

vuekqui 
SEP 

FIP 
vezpuodp 

osu 

vurnsjnsy 

Izpu 
eluizpu 
BAvYIU 

rynd 

yNzpurw 
nzpu 
TUL] 

rua] 
PUTA 

nivl 
Aq 

ele 

suoneinued s0u04g | 

euvéqui 
nqureAp 
vAp 

[IAGO] 
° 

v[puoAp 
vuatu (1qeTpy) 
vuas]uU 
vunflinty 
nyn{punw 

(pu 

vuilpu 
egry au 
rynyl 

yn{puru 
yn 

nnlpu 
tu[pury 

TUILILI 
vUuULI 

navi 
DAI 

esuolq 

TAQOT TAUUBAQ 

vuvdqui 
nquivAp 
eAp 
vlpuoAp 
vuas]u 
vuuntin 
nynipuntui 
pu 

{pu 
vuui[pu 
vAryu 
vyni 
Iyapurw 
nnf{purut 
napu 
nnf{pu 

TUL, 

WW 
vud 

navi 

aAqu 

nuvsurel py 

vuvAqlu 
nqurep 
vp 
epuop (-dvy) 
e{puop 

vuosdu (*dey) 
vuasyu 

euunysynys3 ( dv) 
vuuntynty 

nynpunur (dep) 
nynl[punyy 

vulpu 

vAeyu 

eynlys (dey) 
eynta 

pnyhuru 
ynyhu 
turfpun 

puarlpy 

cuulp 

nlysvlyg (-deyy) 
nflaela 

arqil (dey) 
aAqila 

esuory 

uns 
vd OT, 

Ulva] OT. 
ATUQ 
unl OF 

AOLIOUL OT, 

iv 

yy 

SMOPeYs 
Mopeys 
sansuo J, 

ansuo 7 
1 1G 

JIL 

aquois | 

) 
: 

VAAN YIU 
rAurAydun 

nyuva 
nyunw 

BAY 

vuna (*ysJ) 
vunjd 

naosu (“Ys T) 
njdosu 
vUuoy 

euUot[y 
ee 
eps 
eyunu 
vyizpueu 
(nquin.) 
BIA 
BnAryea (*zpey) 
PINARINA 
vuvsuryy} 
eypunureAu 

noayy 
CIO. (V\. 

PAN YIU 

LAUTYqUu 
tuou ‘TUdAAU 
nyura 
nyunw 

vunyd 

njdosu 
vuUloy 

ewoyd 

episyu (-[ eq) 
eprysiu 

vyIpuru 

IMT 

UNALTNA 
vuesueyyy 
vursurly 

ryyunuieAu 
ens 
v.10 

PAAN YIU 
rAuaqtu 

nyura 
nyunw 

SUIIOF [BOHN ewuetr) 

PAUY 
vunyd 

njdosu 
vtuoy 

BUoyy 
epIysyu 
ryunu 
vyifpuru 
eel 
vYIA 

vpNarpna 

eypunwedu 
Denar 
vIOM 

———— 

eANYIU 
LAUTQUI 
udu 
nyura 
nyuntu 

vAyd 

vunjd 
njdosu 
vwoy 

vwuayy (*TH) 
vuuoyd 
eps 
vayunu 

eyllpucu 

LILA 

EYIA- 

ENArNA 

ruesuryy 
eypuntuedu (*1H) 
ryyunweu 
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APPENDIX II (See p. 38) 

About Thonga names, nicknames and sirnames. 

As an illustration of the way in which the Thongas change their 
names, here is the story of those of Mboza and Elias. 

Mboza was called at his birth ‘*‘ Mulamule ”, after his paternal uncle. 
The whole name was, in Zulu: ‘* Mulamula nkwinzi izilwako ”, viz., 
‘“the man who calms the bull which fights.” At the age of about 
sixteen, he changed it to Mahubula. At that time he was trying to 
gather divinatory bones in order to become a diviner. He had called 
one of these bones ‘* Hubula ”, and his comrades began to apply the 
name to him, after that; he was seized by the ‘‘ folly of gods” (Part. 
VI). When he was cured of this pretended possession, the spirit 
which made itself known called itself Mboza. This was the name 
ofa man of his village, his own nephew, who had gone to Johan- 
nesburg and had died there. When he became a Christian, and was 
baptised, Mboza kept his name. Most of the Natives like to obtain 
another one on that occasion, the name of a disciple or ofa pro- 
phet. We are not very ready to comply with their wish, as we 
have already too many Daniels, Jonas and Petros, and Mboza_proba- 
bly accepted this argument. 

Elias was called ‘‘Shifenyo” on the day of his birth, aftera man who 
happened to pass through the village. This visitor was a kind of beg- 
-gar who used to follow people carrying food to the chief, hoping to get 
something to eat. The child was of a good family, but’ they gave 
him the name of this low and despised individual, a democratic act 
indeed ! When he was older, one of his friends said to him: ‘* Your 
name does not suit you. Call yourself Spoon.” He adopted the 
new appellation, and the women of his village used to make fun of 
him saying: ‘* Come along, we will distribute the food with this 
spoon !” When baptised a Christian he became Elias, aname which is 
somewhat onerous, especially as our Elias is not as perfect and strong 
as a prophet ought to be... But Natives never shrink from assuming 
great names. They always feel themselves equal to them! 

The names adopted at puberty by boys are very often European 
ones. There are scores of Jims, Sams, Bobs, etc. They also adopt as 
names European words or words of European origin, as: Spoon, 

— a 
Neglazi (glass) Komitshi (cup), Djass (jacket), Fulitshi (fourrage), Fif- 
teen, etc. 

The really Native names very often begin with the prefix mu which 
is the personal singular prefix, (Musongi, Muzila, Mungutana, Mu- 

_kentshe), or Nwa conveying the idea of ‘‘ son of ” (Nwamitwa, Nwa- 
mashwele. Nwatjubula), or Nya used in the same sense, (Nyakubasa, 
Nyanise, Nyathi, probably of Zulu origin), or Ma which is also a per- 
sonal prefix, (Manabe, Matende, Mathandana, Makhangala, Makasana, 
etc.). The prefix Mi means ‘ daughter of”, and is frequently met 
with (Misilana, Mintlohen, Mindinyana, etc.). Asarule it is em- 
ployed only in names of women. 

The prefix Shi which generally denotes things, objects, and has a 
neutral meaning, is very often found in Ronga names. It is also a 
diminutive prefix especially when the word endsin ana. So Shiri- 
byana, a very common name, means asmall stone (ribye); Shigidana, 
Shirombe, Shindjubi, etc. belong to the same class. 

Some very curious names begin with the prefix ba, the pronoun of 
the third person plural. ‘These are common amongst girls, generally 
of Chopi origin, who were slaves of the great woman of Lourengo 
Marques and sold by them as concubines. For instance Bamuyeyisa 
means ‘‘ they defy her”, Bamusonda (Zulu), ‘‘ they hate her”, Bat- 
jhamahayena ‘“‘ they gossip about her”. etc. In calling themselves 
by these names the girls express their bitterness. 

But a great number of names have no prefix at all and often no 
meaning. 

Nicknames are frequent amongst the Thonga and often altogether 
supplant the regular name. There was in Rikatla an old Mbekwa 
whom everyone called Nxoko... Inquiring into the origin of this curious 
name I was told the following story: one day Mbekwa was very hap- 
py and expressed his contentment by the exclamation ; ‘‘Nxoko” 
(x here denotes a peculiar click of the tongue against the cheek). This 
interjection was received with favour and he employed it henceforth 
to manifest his pleasure on other occasions. He even made a regular 
verb of it, saying : ** I go to nxokela in such and such a place”, viz. 
** to enjoy myself there’. The word was so taking that he was na- 

-med after it, and I should not be surprised if it were incorporated into 
the current language, which is enriched every day by new descrtptive 
adverbs like nxoko. (See my Thonga Grammar, p. 84 and vol, II). 

Nicknames are more especially applied to White people, as natives fail 
to catch their true names. These are very cleverly chosen, being 

ae 

often a verbal description of the chief physical or mental characteris- 
tic of the White man. M. Torre do Valle has given a list of nick- 
names of the merchants and other inhabitants of Lourenco Marquesin 
his Diccionario Shironga-Portuguez. It is well worth consulting, 
and the only thing wanting is the photograph of the White man and 
the explanation of the name ; it would be a splendid illustration of 
Native wit ! 

So far we have spoken only of personai names and nicknames. 
But, beside these, every man possesses his clan name, or sirname, 
viz., the name of the first of his known ancestors. Grown up men 
prefer being addressed by this name, which is shibongo, viz. the name 
by which they are “ glorified ”. This subject is treated in Part [IM 

(p. 333): 

APPENDIX III (See p. 265) 

The story of Gidhlana Ngwetsa of Rikatla; atypical case illustrating lobola, 
divorce, and leper customs of the Ba-Ronga. 

Gudhlana was the sister of a man called Mubene. Both were the 
children of a nice old Ronga called Newetsa and of one of his wives. 
Gidhlana was bought with lobola by aman called Khandlela (candle), 
son of Nwamanghele, a man of the Manyisa clan settled near Rikatla. 
The marriage took place probably in 1893. The new pair did not 
live in peace. Gidhlana quarrelled with her husband. ‘* Why? 
Nobody knows! Are matters ofthe huts and of the villages known 
to outsiders ?” She returned home to her father Ngwetsa. The hus- 
band waited a while. Then he followed her (landjela) and asked her 
to come back to the conjugal home. Her parents told her to obey. 
She went. But quarrelling soon recommenced. She fled a second 
time ; her husband, her parents-in-law did their best to induce her to 
go back. She refused. An uncle of hers took a stick and thrashed 
her. Nothing could persuade her. She stayed in her parents’ vil- 
lage. Ina neighbouring village dwelt a young man named Muzila, 
who was the chief of the Rikatla district (Page 355). He belonged to the 
Mazwaya clan, to the reigning family. He had two brothers, one of 
whom, called Gudu, was still a boy. This girl, Gidhlana, began 
to make friends with the boys of Muzila’s village. Gudu sent a wo- 
man from the village of Ngwetsa to make proposals to Gidhlana (ku 

mu wopseta). This woman made proposals on behalf of Gudu (a 
wopsetela Gudu). The girl agreed. But, in the meantime, Gudu 
started for Johannesburg and Gidhlana was abducted by the other bro- 
ther, who took her to the village of Muzila; it was a case ofmarriage by 
theft (tlhuba)(Seep.120). Muzila was grieved at the conduct of these 
young men, and sent the girl to one of his counsellors to be watched by 
himand, going to Ngwetsa, her father, he said: ‘‘ We have stolen your 
pot. Look for it in our village, the village of Mazwaya’s people ”. 
Ngwetsa was greatly puzzled. The first husband had not yet claimed 
his money back ; it was still in the hands of Newetsa and lo! the girl 
had already been taken by others! This was not right at all! They 
might have waited a little! All the men of Ngwetsa armed themselves 
and started as enemies (hi bulala) for the village of the thief. They 
killed a pig, entered the hut of the thief, took all his implements 
and made a heap of them on the square. The inhabitants all fled into 
the bush. But one of them came back with 1o/. and said: ‘‘ Have 
pity on us, please! We seize your legs ! (khoma milenge, viz., ask 
for forgiveness). You know? To steal is a very old thing on earth!” 
‘Yes, we know. The thief trusted his throat! (This is a proverb : 
he did not fear to swallow a large stone, thinking that his throat 
would be wide enough to let it pass!) He knew that he would have 
to pay this fine! All right! You are saved! Take the implements 
back into the hut ”’. 

The Ngwetsa people took away with them the flesh of the pig, but 
they sent one joint to the thief, so that he might eat it with his new 
wife. In this way they gave their consent to the marriage. ‘‘ They 

_gave him his wife ”. 

But very soon afterwards the first husband, Khandlela, came to 
Ngwetsa to claim the lobola money, as the wife had gone. Gudu had 
gone to Johannesburg. Nothing was to be found in that quarter, 
The discussion began. Nowetsa said: <* All right; but 10/ of the 
lobola money must remain with us, for the fence of our village 
(lihlampfu) ”. This is generally done when a woman has been driv- 
en away by her husband. Sometimes he must forego as much as 
£1.or £2 of the lobolo, because he has not brought the woman 
back in peace. He has spoilt the fence of the village by ill-treating a 
girl coming from it. He must repair it with that money... Khandlela 
refused saying : ‘‘ We have not driven her away ! She went back of her 
own accord ; you have even found a new husband for her! ” What 
could the Ngwetsa people do? They had just used the lobolo of 

— 4 = 

Gidhlana to buy a wife for Mubene, her brother. The money had 
been already given tothe Moyane clan from whom a girl had been 
chosen by Mubene. They consequently went to the Moyane people 
and asked them to return the money. But the Moyane said : ‘* Your 
money has already gone further. We have used it to buy a girl of 
Madjieta for our son. We will go and fetch it”. So two projected 
marriages were prevented; they would have been annulled, broken, 
had they been already concluded! In this way Khandlela found his 
money ! 

Later on Gudu came back from Johannesburg and took Gidhlana 
as his wife. Hoping he had earned some money, the Nwgetsa went to 
him and said: ‘* You have spoilt our flock (ntlhambi) ” viz., the oxen 
which we hoped to get by the sale of our daughter. ‘‘ Pay now”! 
Muzila said to them. ‘* Look at Shaputa; we trust in her! ” Sha- 
puta was a little girl, the sister of Gudu. Muzila proposed to 
Negwetsa’s people to consider her as theirs: ‘* They would find 
money through her ”. They consented to wait till she was of age. 
Some years elapsed. Muzila moved to the Mabota country with 
Gudu. Gidhlana was suddenly taken ill with leprosy and the disease 
made rapid progress. She died. Muzila, the master of the village, 
informed Newetsa Ngwetsa did not come to the burial, neither 
did any member of the family attend the funeral. Was it not leprosy? 
Is not the contagion terrible for the members of the family ?... Other 
people can bury a leper. Hisrelatives never. However they allowed 
their fear to go too far, for decency required that, in such a case, 
some relatives at least should go and witness the burial, even though 
they keep far away from the grave. Their behaviour greatly grieved 
Muzila and it entailed unexpected consequences ! 

Shaputa grew to be a young woman and a suiter, of the Hohwana 
clan, came and bought her. TheNgwetsa heard of itand at once put in 
their claim. Muzila informed Gudu who was then staying near 
Lourengo Marques: ‘‘ He fell on his back from the shock! ” (og gaa hi 
le ntjhaku !) and refused to pay. Muzila said to Ngwetsa: ‘* You 
have foregone your claim, as you did not attend the funerals More- 
over the chief of our Mazwaya family, Magomanyama, says thatno claim 
is accept d fora leper, for one drowned a the river, for anyone who 
dies from small pox or from the assagay. 

Of course the Ngwetsa did not accept such an answer, but this is a 
typical Bantu aftait (nandju), showing the many nee of the lobola 
custom. The matter will have to be decided by the chief, or rather 

ar ww 
by the Portuguese Administrator, who must take a good deal of trou- 

ble, if he wishes to understand it rightly and to deliver an equitable 
judgment ! . 

APRENDIX IY (See 252) 

The story of Paulus K., illustrating the matlulana superstition and 
the horror of the Thongas for polyandry. 

One of my pupils, who was already a married man of, say, thirty- 
two years of age, once came to me, very much distressed, to confess 
a fault which seemed to weigh very heavily on his conscience. On 
a day of feasting he had drunk too freely and had commited adultery 
with the wife of his elder brotherGuga. He fought with himself for 
years, not daring to avow an action which seemed to him not only an 
ordinary adultery but an incestuous act. He finally wrote to his 
brother: ‘* Though I know that we will not be able to love each 
other any more as before, though it pains me so much to separate from 
you, I will confess! Please forgive me, as I intended to commit sui- 
cide on account of my fault” ! 

The special gravity of the fault consisted in two circumstances: 

1) She was his brother’s wife and he was now unable to visit his bro- 
ther when sick, to take part in his burial, or to maintain friendly rela- 
tions with him. 2) Guga was his elder brother, This made the case 
still worse: (P.23.4). 

The letter of Paulus to his fellow evangelists is touching: ‘‘ I have 
no right to stay in your assembly, because I have been overcome by 
the Enemy and committed adultery with my elder brother’s wife. | 
have been long prevented (from confessing) by the Enemy’s power. 
Now I have wept before Jesus that He may help me to pierce the ab- 
cess... Satan came and said to me: ‘‘ Will you not be ashamed to 
confess such a thing before men?” Inearly retreated. But at sunrise 
I made haste to write to you, and now I feel peace and joy. It seems 
to me that I am going to receive the Spirit of God”. 

SS 

APPENDIX V (See p. 263) 

Te story of Spoon Libombo showing that, when the lobolo has not been paid 
or has been returned, the children belong to the mother’s and 
not to the father’s family. 

Spoon was the son of Shibaninge, a woman of the Libombo family, 
and of Khobete of the Mazwaya family, who had lobola Shibaninge. 
This man died during a war with the Portuguese having been killed 
on Mbengelen island. The widow was ‘ fambeliwa ” (chosen) by 
Nsiki, Khobete’s brother, who was to inherit her. But Nsiki did not 
properly care for the widow. He did not preparea nlebe for the baby 
nor provide the mother with ochre, Seeing this, Shibaninge went 
back to her relatives. When the time of the weaning of the little one 
arrived, a man named Mbobobo had irregular relations with the wo- 
man in order to ‘‘lumula” the child (See page 58). Mbobobo went 
so far as to take her to his home, upon which Nsiki claimed the lobolo 
paid by the Mazwaya and the Libombo gave it back to them. Since 
then Spoon lived in his mother’s family and was called: ‘* wa ka Li- 
bombo ”, ‘‘ man of Libombo”. But he had no real home (a nga na 
kwakwe). Being on the spot he always was chosen to help in the 
sacrifices : drinking the beer which remained in the pot after the liba- 
tions to the gods in the gandelo, near the gate, stealing the offerings 
when the victims were killed in the sacred bush, etc. He was the 
‘‘ oreat ntukulu”, because his mother belonged to the elder branch or 
first house of the family. So he took precedence of the other uterine 
nephews when they had to take part in the sacrifices. 

APPENDIX Vii(Seep, 279) 

The story of Mboza and Mubambi and of the women inherited by them, 
illustrating the consequences of lobola and of its suppression. 

Compare the genealogy of the Masuluke family (page 219). 

Mboza had four brothers, three elder and a younger one; Sam, the 
elder one, hadason, Hlangabeza, who married by lobola a first wife and 
by abduction a second one Bukutjer1. Fos, the second brother, mar- 

= ar 

ried Bukutje | and had four children’: three girls, Tshakaza, Estelle, 
Nwanin, and one boy, Muhambi. Sam and Fos both died, so Bukutje I 
was inherited by Mboza and her four children went to stay in his 
village. In the meantime Mboza became a Christian, so did also Mu- 
hambi and the three girls. Wishing to lead a Christian life, he sepa- 
rated from Bukutje I, who, being still a heathen, committed herself 
with ‘“‘ an empty tin of oil ’(p. 210), viz., a man of Inhambane who 
became her servant-husband. In 1904 Christian young man, Moses, 
wooed the elder of the three girls and brought £ 20 to lobola her. 
This money was naturally due to Muhambi in order to allow him to 
lobola a wife for himself, and indeed Muhambi was betrothed to 
Ntshelebeti, daughter of Phulan Ngwetsa. This man was stil] a heathen 
and consequently wished his daughter to be paid for. 

Having been told that it is not right for a Christian to accept lobolo 
money, Mboza and Muhambi, actuated by a most praiseworthy scruple, 
decided to return the money to Moses, and Muhambi started for Johan- 
nesburg in order to earn the lobolo due to Phulan. But this was not 
the end of this famous ‘* bukosi”! The younger brother, Komatan, 
a consistent heathen, came to Mboza, very angry with him for his fool- 
ishness. ‘‘ This is family property’, said he, ‘‘and I do not con- 
sent to it being lost”. So he claimed the £ 20 which were given to 
him, and out of which Mboza did not get a penny. Komatan himself 
did not mean‘to use it for his own benefit, as we shall see presently. 

The following year, whilst Muhambi was still working in Johan- 
nesburg, Hlangabeza died. Muhambi was his heir, being his makwabu, 
first cousin on the paternal side. He was informed of his good luck, 
but answered that it was taboo for him (yila), as a Christian, to accept 
this inheritance. So Komatan took the first of Hlangabeza’s wives, not 
as a wife, however, but because she had children and he wanted them to 
remain in the Masuluke’s family. ‘The woman herself also took ‘* an 
empty tin of oil ”, under the form of another Inhanibane man. The 
second of Hlangabeza’s wives, having been married by him by abduc- 
tion, was not really the property of the Masuluke. But she had one 
child ; so Komatan took the lobolo money of Moses and remitted it to 
Denisa, that woman’s father, and, in this way, he secured the property 
of both mother and child to the Masuluke. The woman, however, 
went to live with a Chopi in an irregular manner and had a second child 
by him. On January 29th. 1909, this woman of the Denisa family came 
to Muhambi. Her child had to be weaned, which is done by means 
of a rite in which the husband must take part. She had no proper hus- 

—— 482 a= 

band, so she vented all her anger before Mboza and Muhambi saving: 
‘< T have no husband, nobody to give me clothing, to pay my hut-tax, 
to repair my house. Have you indeed forsaken me ” ? —‘* Yes ” answer- 
ed Muhambi, ‘* you cannot be my wife. I have married Ntshelebeti 
and, for us Christians, it is not allowable to take many wives”. — ‘‘Then 
do not be surprised if I go and take another husband, and do not go 
and accuse me shikanekiswen, before the Portuguese Administrator, 
saving I have spoilt your property ”. — ‘* We shall not follow you”, 
said Muhambi, ‘‘ you are free ”. —‘‘ But” added Mboza, ‘‘ we are not 
sending you to commit sin! Go and think the matter over”. 

This was the end of the discussion. Mboza’s answer isno answer at 
all. It only shows the great complexity and difficulty of the position. 
The whole story fitly illustrates how utterly bad the custom of lobola 
is, and what immense difficulties its suppression entails. Let me, ho- 
wever, remark that these difficulties would not have arisen had thére 
not been a heathen relative (Komatan) to uphold the claim which the 
Christians had foregone. During the stage of transition many hard 
cases such as this must unfortunately happen ! 

APPRENDI 21 

Short Account of two South African wars. 

As regards war customs, | not only possess the information obtain- 
ed from my ordinary sources, Mankhelu, Tobane, Mboza, Viguet, 
etc., but a certain amount of personal experiences. 1 had indeed the 
good, or the bad luck, to witness two South African wars: the Ronga- 
Portuguese war of 1894-1896 and the Sikororo war in 1901. As many 
allusions are made to these wars in these pages, my readers may be 
interested to have a short account of them. 

1) The Ronga-Porluguese war, of 1894-1896, was caused by the sub- 
chief Mubvesha when he tried to make himself independent of his 
young suzerain, Mahazule, who had just succeeded his father Maphunga 
as legitimate heir of Nondwane (See page 383). Mubvesha succeed- 
ed in interesting the Portuguese Administrator in his cause, but the 
whole clan remained loyal to Mahazule, and, a dispute having arisen, 
on the 27th August 1894, at Hangwana (the seat of the Administrator), 
the Mazwaya army assembled and prepared to defend its chief. The 

Government then successively asked Nwamantibyane, chief of Mpfumu, 
and Ngwanazi, chief of Maputju, to help against the rebels. Nwamanti- 
byane, after long hesitation, refused the call (See Appendix VIII). 
‘The Maputju warriors came as far asthe Tembe shore, but, when ask- 
ed to cross the bay, they decamped. For some weeks the Native 
yimpis were the masters of the whole country, up to the boundary of 
the town of Lourengo Marques. But Portuguese troops soon arrived 
from Lisbon and retook Hangwana, (10 milesfrom town), in December. 
The Royal Commissioner, M. A. Ennes, with his aide de camp, Major 
(then Captain) F. d’Andrade, having taken command of the campaign, 
a forward move was made. The Portuguese camped near Morakwen, 
on the Nkomati River, where a serious battle took place at daybreak 
on the 2nd February 1895. The yimpis of Mahazule and Nwamanti- 
byane attacked the Portuguese troops while it was still dark and nearly 
invaded their camp. But the White soldiers did not lose their heads ; 
they rapidly formed square and repulsed the enemy with great le 
At the same time native allies of Matjolo, and Mabota, were driving 
the rebels from their retreats, so that they fled to the East of the Nko- 
mati River into Gungunyana’s territory: these Captain F. d’Andrade 
followed into the Khosen country and defeated them on the 8th Sep- 
tember 1895, at the battle of Magule (See page 447). 

The Ngoni king, Gungunyana, had more or less encouraged the 
rebels to rise. When asked to give them up to the Portuguese he re- 
fused todo so. So the war had to be carried up to his stronghold 
of Mandlakazi. During many weeks the whole of Gungunyana’s army, 
which was estimated at 25 000 to 30 000 men, camped near its king, 
ready tofight. But, for some unknown reason, the Portuguese, army 
was delayed and the Thonga battalions, having nothing to eat, disband- 
ed. However, a strong bodyguard, the flower ofthe great king’s troops, 
consisting principally of Bangoni, remained at the headquarters. When 
‘at last the Portuguese arrived in the neighbourhood of Mandlakazi, a 
sharp fight took place. The Ngoni warriors gallantly attacked the Portu- 
guese square but were driven back with great loss, (305 killed, accord- 
ing to the official report). The royal kraal, Mandlakazi, was taken 
and destroyed and Gungunyana fled to Tshayimiti, the sacred wood 
where his ancestors were buried. Some weeks later, Captain Mu- 
sinho d'Albuquerque, after a forced march, took him prisoner without 
any fighting, and brought him to Lourengo Marques, whence he was 
depor ted to Alster n Africa. 

The Ba-Ngoni considered they had been taken by surprise and not 

- ee ) 
properly defeated ; so, in 1897, a serious revolt broke out, headed by 
Magigwane, the Commander in Chief of Gungunyana’s yimpi. But it 
was soon successfully put down by the Portuguese forces, who divided 
up the country into a certain number of military circumscriptions, and 
the districts of Lourengo Marques and Inhambane have been perfectly 
quiet ever since. 

2. The Sikororo war took place, in 1901, in the Shiluvane country, 
during the Anglo-Boer war, when the North of the Transvaal, was as 
it were, without White rulers. The successor of the famous Seku- 
kuni, reigning in the Leydensburg district, Sekhukhukhu, tried to avail 
himself of the unsettled state of the ‘country to realise an old political 
dream, viz., to become the paramount chief of the whole country. 
He interfered with the Maharimane clan, which inhabited the Dra- 
kenbere ranges, where the Oliphant crosses it before reaching the 
plain. This clan was divided into two: the legitimate heir was 
under the tutelage of a woman named Nwanamohube, but his brother, 
Maphephe, wanted to get rid of her, pretending she was exercising her 
authority against the interests of the country. Sekhukhukhu assured 
the queen-regent thathe would help herif she joined him. He entreat- 
ed the Pedi chiefs dwelling on the Northern side of the range, viz., 
Sikororo and Maaghe, to espouse his cause. Sikororo was a very 
strange old man who had retired into the mountain, faraway from his 
villages, and a regent, named Rios, was carrying on the government 
in his stead. Rios agreed with Sekhukhukhu’s proposals; so did 
some of the subjects of Maaghe, the Masume people. But Maaghe 
himself refused to do so and he was supported by Muhlaba, the Nkuna 
chief, who was an old ally of his. 

A first fight took place in the Maharimane valley, where Maphephe 
was defeated by the united yimpis of Sekhukhukhu and Nwanamohube. 
He fled. Inthe meantime another foe, cailed by the Natives ‘‘ Fighter- 
by-night ”, had opposed Sekhukhukhu in the Leydenburg district, 
invaded his territory, and defeated his troops. It seemed that this 
would put an end to the ambitious plans of the great Pedi chief... 
Butsuch was notthe case. Hearing of his enemy’s defeat, Maphephe 
again took courage. Chased from his country, he sought a refuge 
with Maaghe, who was imprudent enough to welcome him and all his 
people in the Bokhaha valley. We witnessed the curious spectacle 
of a whole clan moving into our district of Shiluvane. The young 
chief was breathing vengeance. He soon began to make mischief, 
andorganised araid into Masume’s territory, This put a match to the 

train. Rios avenged his friends by burning some villages of Muhlaba, 
and killing the pigs. A regular battle took place, on the 15th Oc- 
tober 1901, between the armies of Maaghe and Muhlaba and those of 
Sikororo and Masume. The first had to retreat, but they suffered no 
loss, whilst they pretended to have killed 20 of the enemy. The 
situation was bad for them, as other chiefs threatened to join Sikororo 
and to deal summarily with them and their missionaries! I then 
went to ask for help at Leydsdorp, where the remainder of the Boer 
Commandoes were just passing, coming from Komati Poort on the way 
to Pietersburg. I had the good luck to meet there with a party of 
Hollanders, who at once volunteered to come and save women and 
children in danger! They stayed for two days at the Shiluvane sta- 
tion, where their presence caused great sensation... But they had to 
look after their own affairs, and we were soon obliged to revert to the 
same dangerous situation! On the 6th November 1901, the Sikororo 
yimpi,strengthened by troops of Sekhukhukhu, Mabulanen, Masumeetc., 
areal confederation of yimpis, numbering 700 warriors (as it was esti- 
mated), invaded the peaceful Shiluvane valley at dawn, burning the 
huts, firing their rifles, and shouting wildly : ‘Moya! Moya!” (Wind! 
Wind! viz., projectiles of the enemy are but wind!) They went so 
far as to cross the Moudi rivulet, less than one mile from the Shiluvane 
Mission Station. The two allied chiefs were not on their guard and 
had very few.men with them. However, they rushed to meet the 
invaders with such courage that these were suprised. Seing the Christ- 
jan Natives clad like Europeans, they believed the Hollanders were still 
there, and they fled ignominously, leaving some 40 of their warriors 
dead on the field of battle. These are the men whose flesh provided 
all the Zoutpansberg magicians with their powerful charms! Rios was 
killed, and it issaid that his corpse was redeemed for the price of ten 
guineas by the old Sikororo. Others pretend his skull was put by 
Maaghe in the great drum of his capital. This defeat definitely broke 
the power of Sikororo, who made his submission, and was the last 
clash of arms worth mentioning in the war. 

= APPENDIX VIII 

The position of Nwamantibyane when the 1894 war broke out. 

When the Portuguese asked Nwamantibyane to help them against 
Mahazule, (August-September 1894), this young chief, of twenty years. 
of age at the most, assembled his army. An irrestible spirit of war 
was in the air. Held back by his counsellors, who were unwilling to 
fight against their rebellious compatriots, Nwamantibyane hesitated to: 
respond to the appeal of the Whites. He was seated, perplexed, in 
his camp, his demeanour morose and preoccupied, surrounded on the 
one hand by his ‘* great ones”’, on the other by his young men who 
addressed him thus: ‘‘ Give us, give us men to slaughter! Thou art 
nothing but a coward! Sendus!” Those were tragic times ! 

He allowed a small contingent to go into the neighbourhood of 
Lourengo Marques, in order to reconnoitre (Nov. 6. 1894). This 
yimpi made several prisoners and stole the oxen of the Swiss Mission, 
which were grazing in the vicinity of the town. One of our young 
men, named Tandane, was taken prisoner by a man of Nwamba. A 
passer-by, belonging to the Mabota clan, was also caught. All these 
captives were taken to the chief Nwamantibyane, to whom the spoil 
belonged, his men having been the spoilers. The man who had cap- 
tured the passer-by from Mabota begged the chief’s permission to kill 
him, which was accorded ; this warrior, radiant with joy, immediately 
retired with his victim, slew him in cold blood and returned to dance 
before the chief. The Nwamba man requested a like privilege. But 
Nwamantibyane had other ends in view; he wanted to make use of 
our young man, to senda message to the Portuguese Governor, and so 
he refused the permission asked, The man, a prey toan insatiable long- 
ing to shed blood, insisted. He was offered as compensation one, , 
and even two, of the stolen oxen, but could not thus be satisfied. 
‘*[ want my man”, said he, ‘‘to kill him so that I can daiieemie 
Nwamantibyane had to employ force to silence him. Two oxen, 
twelve pounds sterling, counted as nothing to this black warrior com- 
pared with the fiendish delight he would derive from the gila ! 

As regards the conclusion of the story of Tandane, he came back 
with a letter from the chief asking why the Whites wanted to kill him, 
and begging for an interview. When the letter, written in Zulu by 
some of his boys, had been despatched, the young chief said : “* Now 
Icanbreathe! When I eat something, it can pass through my throat!’ 

The Portuguese Governor consented to the interview, but the letter 
sent back to Nwamantibyane,in answer to his, was intercepted and so 
the war continued. See in the preceding Appendix how it spread to 
Gungunyana’s country, and ended in the capture of this despot and 
the destruction of the Ngoni kingdom. 

LATIN NOTES 

FOR MEDICAL MEN AND ETHNOGRAPHERS 

Annolatio prima (P. 39). — ‘*Shifado” quo quisque Thonga extre- 
mum penem vestit, spheroides excavataque res est; quod tegimentum 
ex lis, qua ad pudorem ct munditiem pertinent, postulatur. Si quis 
schifado suum amisit, ei dedecori est. 

Olim apud Thonga, qui a populo Zulu illum morem acceperunt, 
viri, quod lingua ipsorum ‘‘ mbayi” id est fistulam quandam ex foliis 
textis palmx, que ‘‘ milala”’ dicitur, ferre solebant. 

Ultima ‘ mbayi” anno 1895 vel 1896 post Christum natum 
visa sunt. Quod shifado ex parve cucurbite cortice aut duro et 
excavato accurateque polito ligno factum, summo veretro afixum, 
minime incommode ferre videntur. 

Annotatio secunda (P. 55). S. n. 1, sc. semine non immisso. Ad 
hoc, marito sperma foras spargendum est (a nga mu weleri): hic est 
coitus rite factus et quasi lustralis. Inde, uxor in manus utriusque 
sordes (thyaka ra bona) sumit, quibus umbilicum illinit. 

Annolatio tertia (P. 160). Faciebat dum « Khunye khunye»; quibus 
verbis significatur coitus (khunyeta). 

Aunnotatio quarta (P. 161). Hic, mulier paulo dilutiore colore magna- 
que statura addit : « Hi kundjana » id est: coeamus ! 

Annoltatio quinta (P. 154). Seuquis per ztatem iam provectam imbe- 
cillior factus erit, sive qualibet de causa tam impotens ut sperma 
emittere non possit (a nga kumi mati), ceteri viri quid fiat sciscitabun- 
tur. Quod si utique parum procedit, tota inhibetur carimonia. Qui 
vero se invicem eodem ritu miscere debebant, iis ritum conficere non 
fas est. Ille jejunio, per quinque dies, prout res postulat, artissime 
utetur, cui medicine ad rem accommodate exquirentur. 

Annoltalio sexta (P. 154). Nocens maritus uxorque sui purgandi causa 

alium ritum peragent. Uxor mariti suaque pudenda veste intima et 
inquinatissima tergebit, quam postea comburet. 

Ambo, ad ignem accedentes, caput.manusque calefacient. Inde 
cinerem collectum mulier adipe miscet, quo mariti artus illinit, digitis 
bracchiis cruribusque tractis, quod ‘‘lula” dicitur. Postea, noctibus 
duabus sequentibus, coibunt. Si maritus, non cum uxore sua, sed 
cum puella quadamex alio vico, stupri consuetudinem junxerit, huic fos- 
sorium donabitur, ut ritum ‘‘ lula” perfectum veniat. 

Quo modo illos ritus interpretemur, paucis verbis ostendemus. Si 
quis morte inquinatus est, spermatis prima ejaculatio etiam inquinata 
est; itaque foras semen spargendum est (Cf. Revue des Etudes socio- 
logiques, p. 149). Pater maximo periculo obnoxius videtur, nisi res 
rite confecta est; sed omnia ea quam occultissima videntur imprimis ei 
qui haec praecepta cum legibus quae sunt de viduis conferre velit. 

Annotatio septima (P. 155). Simulieris parentes procul habitant, mari- 
tus elus comes itineris erit, quacum superiore nocte coibit, ad aqua 
lustrali vim novam dandam. 

Annotatio octava (P. 160). Carminum, morum temporis marginalis 
natura eo obscenior est quo nobilior defunctus fuit. Viguetus narrat: 
‘¢Duce vel uno ex principibus mortuo, luctuque consueto preterito, 
luctum privatum, ad quem boves immolentur, celebrari. Carnem ad 
baculos humi fixos alligari; homines inde mulierem vocare, eamque 
posteriorem vestem exuere juberi, neque ullam vestem nisi anteriorem 
habere quam, si velit, exuere ei liceat. Eam, postea, divaricaturam 
esse ad unam ex carnis particulis dentibus apprehendendam ita promi- 
nentem ut omnes viri eius pudenda videant, quod plerumque ‘‘ taboo” 
(id est nefas) sit”. | 

Annotatio nona (P. 183). Externorum genitalium minora labra verbo 
milebe (singul. nebe) designantur, que puellz adeo trahere solent ut ea 
usque ad quinque, decem, etiam quindecim centimetra extendant. 
Que labra nonnunquam parvis baculis metiuntur, eorum longitudine, 
apud comites suas, immo apud sponsos, gloriantes. _Istis pravis mori- 
bus enim nihil aliud puellz sequuntur nisi futuri mariti gratiam, cul 
apud Ba-Pedi, si sponsam suam labra non satis extendisse arbitratur, 
eam domum dimittere et boves suos reposcere licet. 

Annotatio decima (P. 187). Hac sunt ipsissima verba, quibus 
Makhelu mulieris menstruansis taboo (id est nefas) describit. Multer 
menstruans est res, que imprimis ‘“‘yila” est. Per sex dies ‘‘ yila”, 
id est, nefasest. Septimo die transit flumen ad se lavandam. Octavo 
ei nondum licet cum marito suo coire; forte enim sanguis pudendis ad 

—. 490 — 

hwret, ca insciente. Magis ‘“ refrigescit”. (Verbo phula menstruans 
mulier comparatur cum aula a foco remota). 

Si, ante id tempus, maritus cum uxore coeat, egrotus fiat, veretrum 
retro ita recedat ut vir urinam reddere non possit et, brevi tempore, 
moriatur. Talem vite exitum multi habuerunt. Radicibus arboris cui 
nomen est mayilana vel mulieris nenstruantis vestis particula, a ‘medico 
ad levem pulverem redacta, qu xgro bibenda est, morbus sanari potest. 
Aegrotus multum sanguinis reddet, et veretro exeunte, salvus est. 

Annotatio undecima (P. 188). Adulescens Manyisa ortus aliquando ad 
me venit questum quod amita se fascinavisset et ‘quod sibi esset” eri- 
puisset (scilicet facultatem cum muliere sua cceundi). Que mulier 
pregnans.erat ; itaque juvenis affirmavit maleficia ad nocendum con- 
ceptui pertinere et pro certo habebat’ fore ut foetus in anguem, vel in 
cuniculum, immo in antilopam mutaretur, 

Annotatio duodecima. (P. 274). Doctori G. Liengmei, nostro me- 
dico, cum sawpe curaret vires qui medicinam petebant qua infantes 
procrearent, fassi sunt se singulis noctibus cum tribus vel quatuor 
uxoribus coire. (A monogamis quibusdam audivimus uxorem adeo 
fatigari ut noctu exiret laboratum ut a marito evaderet.) Cum medi- 
cus eos hortaretur ut quingue dies concubitu omnino abstinerent, 
nunquam id concedere potuerunt. Volebant enim facultatem gene- 
randi recuperare libidine non omissa. Dicuntur etiam cum vires 
cupiditatibus nondum pares esse videantur, remedia quedam adhibere 
sive ut venerem excitent sive ut uxores praegnantes fant. Duplex fit 
medicatio. Primum secti testiculi hirci -— (quod animal fatigari nega- 
tur, mbuti a vi karali) — cum plurimis herbis mixti coquuntur et a 
viro eduntur. Deinde alias herbas collectas in cerevisiam injicit. Tan- 
tum aiunt esse eflectum ut viro qui non amplius duas uxores habeat, 
non sitea re utendum, ne, illis non sufficientibus, cum aliorum uxoribus 
stuprum committat, quod ei sit offensioni. 

Viri casti,. ut in loco Mpfumo videre licct, in sua casa dorn- 
miunt et interdum uxorem quam cupiunt ad se vocant. Plerique 
tamen, lege sibi imposita, ne discordia inter uxores erumpat, men- 
sem unum in casa singularum uxorum Vicissim agunt. 

Annolatio lertia decima (P. 452). Veretro fabricatur pulvis, cuius ef- 
fectus mirabilis est. Qui, bellatorum carpis iniectus, lis tantam soller- 
tiam attert ut nullum frustra telum mittant. Quo pulvere tela quoque 
illinuntur quz assagaies appellantur. 

THE LIFE 
OF A SOUTH AFRICAN TRIBE 

The Catholic 
Theological Union 
LIBRARY 
Chicago, III. 

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COPYRIGHT 

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The Life of a 
South African Tribe 

BY 

HENRI A. JUNOD 
OFSTHE 

Swiss Romande Mission 

[le THE PSYCHIC LIFE 

WITHDRAW: 

{/ The Catholic 
Theological Union \\ 
LIBRARY 

Chicago, IIf. 

NEUCHATEL (Swirzer.anp) 
IMPRIMERIE ATTINGER FRERES 

“AS CRTIW 

FOURTH PART 

THE AGRICULTURAL AND INDUSTRIAL LIFE 

In the first volume of this work, I have tried to give a des- 
cription of the Social Life of the tribe by depicting its customs 
in relation with the individual, communal and national life. In 
the second volume I shall consider its Psychic Life, its Literature 
and Music, its Religion, Magic and Morality. The Agricultural 
and Industrial Life will afford a transition from the one to the 
other of these subjects; this belongs primarily to the social mani- 
festations of the tribal life, but the imagination displayed by 
sculptors, weavers, potters (or rather ‘‘ potteresses ”) brings it 
also into relation with the psychic. Ido not however pretend to 

draw a sharp line of distinction between these two domains, as 
the psychic life is reflected in the social customs, and the social 
idea strongly dominates the psychic life of the tribe.

THe AGRICURTURAL LIFE 

A. THE LAND AND THE NATIVE SYSTEM OF LAND 
| TENURE 

I. The nature of the soil. 

Considering that the Thonga dwell in the South of Africa, a 
part of the world which is generally rocky and sterile, Nature 

ae pp — 

has favoured them to no inconsiderable extent as regards the 
soil of their own country. 

The coast belt is an ancient ocean-bed, and consists of dunes 
of white and reddish-brown sand, extending from the South- 
West to the North-East; between these dunes are basin shaped 
hollows, at the bottom of which are ponds of stagnant water. 

The pond in the hollow. 

The hillocks rarely reach a greater elevation than 150 feet 
above the sea level (120 feet above the level of the lakes). The 
sand on the dunes is naturally quite unproductive, but the vege- 
tation, which has managed to develop there during past cen- 
turies, and the forests, which are fairly dense in certain spots, 
have gradually deposited a thin layer of soil, which, when 
mixed with the sand and watered in due season by the rains, 
is capable of producing abundant crops. The hollows (nhlangwa, 
mu-mi) (1) are hardly more fertile than the dunes, although 

(1) For linguists, I indicate the class to which native nouns belong. See the 
explanation of classes or genders Part V. Chap. I. Mu-mi are the prefixes of 

their continuous moisture is favourable to the growth of cer- 
tain plants. But by the side of the sand (pfunye) of the 
hillocks (shitshunga), here and there, is found a sort of black 
earth, containing a large proportion of vegetable detritus, in 
which maize, sweet potatoes, sugar cane etc. thrive splendidly. 
Nyaka is the name given to this black soil: it is found at the 
foot of the hills which run from Lourenco Marques in the direc- 
tion of Morakwen, and extends for a distance of some fourteen 
to eighteen miles. Several small springs rise at the bottom of 
this gentle slope, and tend to form a curious marsh, covered with 
beautiful tropical growths, of which gigantic . palms (mimale) 
are the most striking. These are seen in forests covering hun- 
dreds of acres, with an impenetrable undergrowth of ferns, enor- 
mous rushes and evergreen shrubs: magnificent palm groves, 
where apes, wild boar and large storks find a safe retreat. 

Between this marsh of phenomenal mud and the hills extends 
the arable tract of nyaka. There the fields are lovely ; maize can 
be grown all the year round. In other places the nyaka is parch- 
ed and dry, as in the valley of the Lower Nkomati, from the 
point where it leaves the Libombo to the elbow of Magule. 
Here the annual overflow of the river deposits on the low-lying 
plains a fertilising slime, as is the case in Egypt. It is strange 
to see, during the winter, tufts of grass which were carried 
down by the stream, months before, caught in the branches of 
the trees and suspended some 15 to 20 feet above the ground ! 

The sand of the coast belt is replaced in the hinterland of 
Matjolo, in the low level between the Nkomati and the Bila plain, 
etc. by another kind of soil called hundjusi. It is a reddish earth 
containing much sand but much finer and more fertile than the 
sand proper. 

On leaving the coast belt we reach the Lebombo and Longwe 
hills, which are composed of a hard reddish porphyraceous stone. 
Further West, a broad plain extends from the Lebombo to the 
Drakensberg Mountains, in some places consisting of a greyish 

singular and plural of Cl. I. When a noun begins with shi, it belongs to Cl. 
shi-psi, with /i to Cl. li-tin, with bu to the Class bu-ma. Asa rule nouns will 
be given under their singular form. 

Seen oS 

Phot, P, Berthoud, 
Mimale palmtrees in the marshes near Lourengo Marques. 

or brownish clay, in other regions very dry and_ stony. 
The foot of the Drakensberg is. very fertile, as water flows 
abundantly from the mountain gorges. Some rivers, however, 

when reaching the Low Country, dry up entirely, at least during 
the winter time. 

The soil of Spelonken is of a similar nature and very well 
watered. So the Thonga, who settled in Zoutpansberg, found 
there a soil which was, in certain respects, more favourable to 
agriculture than their sandy dunes or their hundjusi on the Coast. 

Such is Mother Earth for the Thonga. They call it misaba, 
the plural form of nsaba, grains of sand. This word plainly 
shows that they come from sandy regions. For them the earth 
is a collection of grains of sand. 

Il. Native System of Land Tenure. 

The native population, taken as a whole, is a very sparse one ; 
let us consider the Ronga territory, for instance: 100 000 souls 
in a territory which may be estimated at 5000 square miles ; 
this gives a population of only 20 per square mile. The country 
is, however, very unequally peopled. Natives will only settle 
in spots where water is found, and, the sand dunes to which 
I have previously referred being exceedingly dry, they mainly 
inhabit the slopes of the hills and the immediate neighbourhood 
of the marshes already described. 

To confine myself, amongst the Ronga, to the region in which 
I have principally itinerated, that is to say the environs of 
Rikatla, the villages of Nondwane, which extend along a 
somewhat narrow strip (800 yards wide by 5 miles in length), 
stretching from the border of Mabota as far as Morakwen, con- 
tained in 1880 a population which I should estimate at about 1100 
souls (1). This gives over 350 inhabitants to the square mile. 
Taking everything therefore into consideration, it may be con- 
fidently asserted that the country can easily support its popu- 
lation ; in fact it could support one three or four times as large. 

It is important to bear in mind all these circumstances in 

(1) This population has very much diminished since the Ronga Portuguese 
war in 1894. 

= Gare 

order to be able properly to appreciate the Ba-Ronga laws relat- 
ing to landed property. 

By law the soil belongs to the Chief, but only that, through 
him, it may become general property. No one can buy land. 
It is gratuitously assigned to any and all who wish to settle in the 
country. The mere fact of kondza, viz., making submission to 
the chief (Vol. I, p. 406), entitles the native to as much land as 
may be necessary for his subsistence. 

It will be easily understood, however, that the supreme Chief, 
however small his territory may be, can hardly assume the duty 
of marking out the various small allotments for his subjects. In 
ordinary practice this is done by the headmen of the villages 
(numzane), the important men of the country, (I will call them 
A), who obtain the grant of considerable tracts of land, which 
they apportion amongst those under their jurisdiction. They and 
their near relatives cultivate the most fertile parts of these 
tracts, or districts, and when any one (say B) wishes to settle 
on their reserve, they ‘‘cut the bush” for him, ‘‘tshemela 
nhoba”, to use the technical expression; they accompany the 
would-be-settler to an uncultivated piece of land and together 
they fix the boundaries of a plot of ground which is then 
assigned to him. A tree, the corner of a lake, a well, or an ant- 
hill, may be used as ]andmarks in this primitive surveying 
operation. The new-comer will clear as much of the land as 
he can, will till it, and the fields, together with the trees they 
contain, become thenceforth his property. Should any of his 
relatives wish to settle near him, he will, in his turn, assign to 
them a portion of his land, which they may clear and cultivate ; 
and so the distribution continues. Supposing B is not satisfied 
with his allotment, or is unable to live on neighbourly terms 
with A, and builds his hut in some other spot, he cannot sell, 
or otherwise dispose of his land, as it must revert to A, the ori- 
ginal owner. On the other hand, should B die, his wife would 
inherit his gardens. Should father or mother die, the property 
would naturally pass to the sons, who would divide the fields 
between their wives. Thus we see that real estate is hereditary, 
but cannot be sold. A similar state of affairs would result should 

A, the numzane who ranks almost as a petty chief, leave the 
country: all his rights in connection with the tract that he may 
have occupied for the last fifty years will cease with his departure. 

It might be supposed that the title to real estate being gratui- 
tously given, is not a very secure one. Quite the contrary! 
Once having assigned a plot of ground to B, A has no further 
interest in it; Bis the absolute master of his land and of all that 
it produces. I recollect one day, at Rikatla, being almost dumb- 
founded when our own petty chief, Muzila, came to me and 
humbly asked permission to pick up some of the nkanye fruit, 
which [had left to rot on the ground! The land at the station 
(about 5 acres in extent) was granted to us by Maphunga, chief 
of Nondwane, and here was his relative and representative, 
coming to me, requesting permission to make use of the produce 
of a tree which was useless to me! And he would, moreover, 
have made a like polite request to the meanest of his subjects, 
had he been desirous of making use of anything growing in 
that man’s fields, I must admit that I have often admired the 
practical character of the native law in this connection, and, 
still more so, the respect paid by the original proprietor to the 
individual to whom he has voluntarily assigned a portion of his 
land. It is, of course, entirely to the interest of the numzane 
to keep his protégé on his land, for he adds considerably to its 
value by cultivating an otherwise useless bush (nhoba). He also 
helps to people his protector’s tract of country, and thus to 
increase his strength; finally he makes certain payments in kind 
or rather in labour. The Chief gladly welcomes new-comers, 
as they will assist in the tilling of his fields each year, and the 
more labourers he has, the better for him! As for the 
headman of the village, the possessor of a ‘‘ small country” 
(tikwana, dji-ma), his protégés will be always ready to do him 
a good turn on occasions, and he is therefore quite content to 
assign to them portions of his domain. Human nature is, 
however, much the same everywhere, and this system which 
appears so perfect at first sight has also its drawbacks. A num- 
zane, or even a Chief, will give to his favourites the best pieces 
of land. A clever flatterer, or one knowing how to regale the 

eg Be 

great man with beer in fit season, and thus to gain his good 
graces, will be apt to receive an allotment of good, fertile forest 
land, while a less fortunate individual, out of favour at Court, 
will only get a piece of barren hill-side which has already been 
tilled and abandoned as exhausted. I have noticed this at Rikatla. 
Muzila favoured his pagan subjects, who joined him in his 
drinking bouts, and invited him to orgies in their villages, at 
the expense of the Christians who no longer brew the byala 
beer. Thus interest at Court works here as elsewhere, al- 
though it be based on nothing nobler than pots of beer! 

The difficulties of this system also become apparent in the 
more thickly populated parts of the country, where all the land 
has been assigned and taken up. The women look round for 
fresh arable land and may, wittingly or unwittingly, encroach on 
the ground ofanothernumzane. There is, indeed, a neutral zone, 
vaguely defined, of which no one has as yet taken possession, as it 
has not been needed: the wild fruits growing there are common 
property; any one who likes can gather them. When the popu- 
lation increases, the folk from the more congested districts go 
and appropriate this land without any kind of formality. Such 
was the case when the people of Libombo, dwelling on the edge 
of the palm-marsh, (to the East of Rikatla), sent their women to 
the hill-side to clear a piece of land which Muzila considered to 
be his property. This petty chief sent remonstrances to Nkolele, 
his colleague, headman of the village of Libombo; but these 
were not heeded. Then the men of Rikatla hid themselves in the 
bushes surrounding the spot in question, and, when the women 
commenced to hoe the ground, rushed out upon them, seized 
their hoes, and drove them off. This was the ‘‘ fait patent’, the 
actionable proceeding, which was necessary in order to have the 
matter brought before the Chief’s tribunal. This incident doubt- 
less led the parties interested to define their respective bound- 
aries more carefully. 

To go and till another’s land would be quite impossible, even 
taboo, between people of different clans. In the present case, the 
Rikatla and Libombo men belonged to the same Nondwane 
country. There was good understanding between them. The 

Sod) == 
Rikatla men would not have dared to plough a field without 
permission on Mabota’s ground, the boundary of which was 
on the other side of the big water-tree (muhlu). 

As regards boundary marks between the different clans, they 
consist in natural objects such as rivers, big trees, etc. To define 
the boundaries of their gardens, Natives dig an ordinary ditch 
(ndjilekana, mu-mi) round the field, of about one foot in depth, 
which can plainly be traced even after the lapse of several years, 
when the field may have become fallow land and overgrown 
with vegetation. 

The question of roads is a somewhat difficult, and often a 
thorny one to settle. Where has one the right to go? And if, 
after having used a certain path for years, you suddenly find it 
blocked by some individual whose field it skirts, and who has 
taken the fancy to hoe it up, what isto be done? Totry tocome 
to some friendly agreement is always the most practical course ! 
How often have we not experienced this difficulty with our cart ! 
The agriculturists were the more annoyed because we required a 
road three or four yards wide, while the native footpaths are only 
little tracks of 15 to 20 inches in width. Being the only ‘‘carriage 
folk” in the district, we often bad to ask permission to be allowed 
to pass, and have rarely met with any kind of refusal, for the 
Black is a reasonable being and quite appreciates the fact that roads 
are a necessity. If they see that a road is “‘ ripening” (wupfile), 
viz., that it is more and more frequently used, they bow before 
the facts; here, as everywhere else, the custom makes the law. 

At the present moment matters have been made much more 
simple as the Portuguese Government has constructed wide 
highways in all the more frequented parts of the country. 

Ber RODUCUS OPT HE. SOL 

1. Cereals. 

“‘ Hosi ya psone i psithiama” — ‘“‘ Their king is the maize”, 
says Mboza. This cereal is indeed the most widely cultivated in 

Thongaland. It is called psifake in Djonga. In the more fertile 
regions of the North, the size of the cobs and of the grains 
(nhleke, yin-tin) is much larger than on the sandy dunes of the 
Ba-Ronga. So the people of Khosen make fun of the Ba-Thonga 
and compare their mealies with the small pimples of their 
tattooing (tinhleke ta Ba-Ronga). If the maize is the most 
appreciated cereal, itis certainly not the most ancient known to 
the tribe. Owing to its modernity, no doubt, it is not subject to 
any taboo. It is sown and harvested without any rite. At 
Christmas time, when the first cobs are edible, people joyfully 
feast on the new crop. They cook some of them in the ashes, 
but they allow the rest to ripen and dry upon the stalks. 
Although no taboo prevents any owner of a field from eating 
the first mealies whenever it suits him, Mboza asserts that 
people who have obtained green mealies before the other 
inhabitants of the village, do not precede them in the enjoyment 
of this much appreciated food: ‘‘It would cause. jealousy 
amongst them”. This reason is perhaps at the bottom of the 
luma taboo (I, p. 367). Moreover they fear lest they would 
have to share their good luck with all their friends ! 

Next in importance comes the mabele (plur. of bele, dji-ma 
(Ro.), fwahuba (Dj.)), the mallet or Kafir corn. It is the well- 
known millet which we give to birds in cages, small, round, 
blackish grains which grow on a stem 3 to 5 feet high, in 
elongated cylindrical ears. Kafir corn is pounded, or ground, 
and may be eaten in the form of flour. But its main use is to 
provide the yeast for the Kafir beer. As already pointed out 
(I. p. 40) the mabele is one of the oldest cereals known to the 
Thonga.  Itisthe ritual cereal, the one used for the ‘‘shimhimbi”, 
the dish offered to the confined mother or prepared for the lama 
ceremony. Its seeds undergo a certain treatment before being 
sown : the sub-chief blows upon them after having taken a small 
piece of a certain root in his mouth; this root, a kind of ndjao 
found in the mountains, is supposed to have the power of keeping 
the ants away from the seeds. He distributes the treated seeds 
amongst his people, and every one mixes some of them with 
his own supply. Men of the reigning family alone possess that 

— I nf of 

root. Later on, when the time for sowing has come, it is taboo 
for subjects to precede their chiefs or sub-chiefs, in sowing 
mabele. ‘The bones are consulted. Should the ‘‘ madjuma” 
fall showing their mouths (see Part VI), it is the answer of the 
gods. They say: ‘‘Yes! this is the proper time! The mabele 
will do well!” The horoscope is all the more satisfactory if the 
astragalus of the sheep is in the positive position, showing that 
the chiefs are happy and prosperous. At harvest time, the Kafir 
corn is subject to the luma taboo, as explained in detail in 
a preceding chapter. All these rites prove the antiquity of the 
cereal. 

The sorghum, (maphila, plur. of phila, dji-ma), is also exten- 
sively cultivated all through Thongaland. There are many kinds 
of sorghum: the phila proper, with reddish and white grains, 
the timba, whose stem has a sweet taste and is enjoyed almost 
as much as sugar cane, the shikombe, whose ears are curved, the 
ntjyaka, with a particularly elongated ear and the djabana with 
white seeds. he last has a somewhat bitter taste and is conse- 
quently. spared by the birds which are so fond of the other kinds 
of cereals that people have to stay in their gardens for months 
to scare them away. 

Rice (mpunga, mu-mi) is met with in a few districts only, 
notably on the Lower Nkomati where the tide provides a natural 
irrigation and in some depressions of the coast belt, especially 
near Rikatla. I could not say when it was introduced amongst 
the Thonga. In Shiluvane, its cultivation was entirely unknown 
in 1890, when it was brought thither by Lourenco Marques 
Natives. However a storekeeper told me that rice had been 
extensively cultivated in the country between 1870 and 1880. 
As it is subject to certain taboos (see later on) it may be that it 
is older than one would at first suspect. 

II. Vegetables. 

Three Leguminosae play a considerable part in the alimentation 
of the tribe : the ground nut, Kafir pea and the Kafir bean. 

a) The ground-nut, (Arachis hypogea), (rumane plur. maru- 
mane or tinumane.(1) (Ro.), timanga (Dj.)), is extensively 
cultivated, being of every day use in the Thonga culinary art 
which it provides with the fatty principles. This curious Papil- 
lonacea, after having blossomed, elongates the peduncle of the 
flower which enters the ground and the seed grows in the soil, 
well protected against the rays of the sun. _ Its taste is delicious, 
either prepared as a sauce to season mealie flour, or roasted. 
When the nuts are wanting inside the shells, which often 
happens, Thonga call the empty shells mabvobo. They say: 
“The ground nuts have refused” — ‘‘ Ma yalile marumane”. 
But this is an euphemism. They mean that the baloyi, the 
wizards, have refused to let them grow or, rather, have stolen 
them from their shells during the night (See Part VI). 

b) Another Leguminosa frequently cultivated is the mywme 
(yi-tin (Ro.), ndlowu, yi-tin, (Dj.)), the Kafir pea. It also grows 
in the earth, like the ground nut. It is much coarser than the 
European pea, but is twice or thrice as large and very nourishing. 
This vegetable is subject to very curious taboos amongst the 
Rongas. Whilst all other seeds are sown in one and the same 
garden, this must be planted in a separate patch, and the tinyume 
field must be shut off from the others by a fence of thorns. 
Men are allowed to plant them, but, as soon as they have grown 
a little, women only can enter the field. Should a man impru- 
dently do so, he would transgress a severe taboo. The danger 
is twofold: firstly the man himself would be punished ; he 
would get a hydrocele. But the owners of the field would also 
suffer: the crops would fail. They would reproach the trans- 
gressor with these words: ‘‘ You have taken away (hungula) 
the strength of our peas!” In order to prevent any such 
mischance, the husband of the woman who owns the field goes 
and treats (daha) it in the following manner: he throws his 
assagay across the field, in the direction of the four cardinal 
points. Then the danger is removed and men can pass through 

(1) Rumane (cl. dji-ma) can make its plural either by prefixing ma which 

is the regular way, or by prefixing ¢in, which is exceptional. In the second 
case, the n of the prefix causes the initial + to permute into n. 

the plot. One might suppose that this taboo is of the same kind 
as that which rested on bananas, for instance, when they were 
still new in the country and feared on that account. But it does 
not seem that the Kafir pea is a recent innovation in Thonga 
agriculture. It has been known fora long time. Another taboo 
in connection with Kafir peas is this: during the first year of 
her married life a woman is not allowed to plant them. 

Amongst Ba-Pedi of the Transvaal the planting of Kafir peas 
is taboo. They are said to prevent rain falling and to cause 
intense and injurious heat. 

c) The Kafir bean (mbawen, yi-tin, (Ro.), nyawa, yi-tin, 
(Dj.)) is a small round brownish seed, with a nice flavour, 
eaten either green or dry. Ido not know of any taboo in 
regard to it. 

Vegetables of other families also contribute to the alimentation 
of the Thongas. 

Sweet potatoes (nhlata, mu-mi) cultivated either in the sand of 
the hills or in the richer nyaka of the marshes, are a great 
resource, especially when they are farinaceous and not too 
watery. Their leaves (matsimbo) are also used as a vegetable. 

Pumpkins also constitute one of the chief resources of the 
Blacks, from one end of Africa to the other. They are of several 
kinds: the ranga (dji-ma) and gawana (dji-ma) of medium size, 
the shilutana, small, sometimes pear-shaped, the khalabatla (dji- 
ma), huge water melons, with white or rosy meat and black 
pips, which are eaten both cooked and uncooked. Pumpkins are 
not grown for their fruit alone, as the leaves of certain kinds, 
especially the ranga, are excellent eating, and make a very good 
substitute for spinach. The flowers also are greatly appreciated 
by the Natives. Some kinds of pumpkins are used to make 
gourds and calabashes. 

There are some taboos to be mentioned in connection with 
the ranga which seem to be the oldest kind of pumpkin known 
to the Bantu (1). We have seen (I. p. 185) that girls are not 

(1) See in Meinhof, Grundriss einer Lautlehre der Bantusprachen, p. 183, 
the different forms of this word, which was tanga in Ur-Bantu. Compare 
Torrend, Comparative Grammar of the South African Languages, p. 89. 

allowed to walk amongst the leaves and must take special pre- 
cautions when plucking them. It is taboo to plant any kind of 
pumpkin, before the Chief and the sub-chief. They are subject 
to the law of hierarchy in the same way as Kafir corn. The 
prohibition is so conscientiously believed in that, should an old 
man keep the people waiting and be too slow in planting his 
pumpkins, another will go to the field and plant some seeds in 
it without the old man’s knowledge; then people will dare to 
plant in their own gardens. Transgression of this taboo is said 
to be punished by lumbago. 

There are, besides, many wild plants which the housewives 
collect and of which they make delectable dishes: the tscheke, a 
kind of Chenopodiacea, which is also used as a medicine to 
induce forgetfulness; the nkakana a pretty plant of the Cucur- 
bitacea, which climbs up the dried stems of maize after the harv- 
est, and of which they eat the leaves and also the pretty little 
oval pointed fruit. 

Tomatoes (shimati) are also found growing round the villages, 
where they propagate themselves, and seem to prosper the better 
the less they are cared for: the Natives take them to Lourenco 
Marques for sale in very original baskets made of a single palm 
leaf, with the follicles artistically twisted. I could not say when 
they were introduced. There is a nice kind of small tomato 
which grows wild in Khosen, about the size of a cherry. 

Natives also cultivate a kind of onion (myala, yi-tin), smaller 
than the European ones and they very much appreciate it in 
their sauces. 

The sugar cane (moba, mu-mi) is never grown in large plan- 
tations, but you find it on the Coast, as well as in Zoutpans- 
berg, cultivated on a small scale, either for eating, or for pre- 
paring the strong shiwayawaya drink, which I shall describe 
later on. i. 

The pine-apple (lalasi, dji-ma) has spread as far as the Bilene 
country and must be of ancient date; it differs considerably from 
the Natal pine-apple, being longer, coarser and not so sweet. 
In many villages large plantations are to be seen. 

Tobacco (fole, dji-ma) is also wide-spread and seems to have 

been cultivated fora long time. A curious fact is that its cultiva- 
tion is the business of the men, and women have nothing to 
do with it. Amongst the Ba-Ronga it is sown first in a damp 
spot in the marsh, in a special little garden called shibibi, and, 
when it has grown a little, is planted out (simeka) on the hill, 
near the villages. When nearly ripe the lower leaves are first 
cut, dried and ground ‘‘ku djinga’”’, as a foretaste! Then the 
other leaves are cut, covered with nkuhlu foliage and left for 
three days to mature (ku pfundja); a string is then passed 
through them and they are hung to a tree to dry. Before they 
have become brittle, they are rolled up together so as to form 
the ‘‘mfunge”, a bunch of tobacco leaves which is sometimes 
three or four feet long by 4 to 6 inches thick. This bunch is 
exposed to the sun on the roof for one day. When the process 
of desiccation is finished, the leaves are put once more outside 
in the evening so as to get a little damp, and are then finally 
rolled up together. The bunch of tobacco is kept inside the 
house and often used for barter. 

The manioc (ntjumbulu, mu-mi) is extensively cultivated both 
in the sand of the hills and near the marshes. The root, dried, 
and eaten either whole or ground, is very good food but some 
plants have a bitter taste. But manioc can hardly be called a 
vegetable and borders on the domain of trees. 

Il. Trees and frutts. 

Fruits play an important part in the alimentation of the 
Thonga, but wild fruit alone, the fruit with which Mother 
Earth presents them. They neither plant nor cultivate the trees; 
when clearing the ground, they simply spare the fruit-bearing 
kinds which grow naturally. It may be that a man will sow some 
seeds of a particularly good nkuhlu, or nkanye, in his garden, if 
that garden happens to be devoid of trees: this is all they do to 
improve the quality of the fruit. No wonder, after all, that tree 
cultivation is almost entirely absent in Thonga agriculture : 
villages move so frequently, owing to death contamination, 

accusations of witchcraft, or exhaustion of the soil, that nobody 
takes the trouble to plant trees which he will not be able to 
carry away with him to his new residence. 

As regards the indigenous fruits, they are varied and numerous. 

Phot, A. Borel. 
oe The nsala tree bearing the sala fruits. 

Natives systematically spare every fruit tree when clearing their 
fields and, thanks to this wise. precaution, the fructiferous 
erowths have increased enormously ; and wherever the land is 
cultivated it presents the appearance of a huge orchard. 

One of the best of the native fruits is the sa/a (dji-ma), which 
takes a leading place in the alimentation of the Ba-Ronga ; it is 

a large shining, green ball, taking on a yellowish tint when 
ripening, consisting of a thin shell, easily broken, containing 
some twenty flat oval stones, covered with a yellowish colour- 
ed pulp, very sweet and delicate in flavour, buta little nauseat- 
ing to the European taste. The sala is very invigorating and 
is a great and precious resource in times of shortage of crops. 

Its first cousin, the kwakwa (dji-ma), is of the same shape 
and size, but, when ripening, becomes quite an orange yellow; 
it is never eaten uncooked. The pulp surrounding the stones is 
prepared in a certain way and made into strips (nhasa, yi-tin), 
which are hung on the trees to dry or over the fire to be 
smoked; this is what is called nfuma. Once the nfuma is dried, 
it can be pounded and made into a flour much valued when 
the storehouses are empty, and the new season has not yet 
commenced. 

The sala and the kwakwa are two species of the genus 
Strychnos (perhaps one of them is the Strychnos spinosa) which 
furnishes chemists and poisoners with the well-known drug 
strychnine. Does the fruit contain any proportion of this sub- 
stance ? Ido not know. It has never been known to kill any one, 
although it may be the cause of many intestinal troubles which 
naturally result when the Natives, having no more maize or 
sweet potatoes, live on nothing but this particular fruit. Strange 
to say, the kwakwa stones are credited with the power of 
attracting lightning; the old women say that, when making 
nfuma, these large white stones must never be allowed to lie in 
a heap in the open air: lightning would surely strike the vil- 
lage were any such imprudence committed. It is a taboo. 

I have already described the nkanye (mu-mi), (Sclerocarya 
caffra, Kafir plum), which is certainly the most highly valued 
of all the trees in Thongaland (I. p- 369). The fruit is used 
primarily and essentially for the brewing of bukanye, by press- 
ing the pulp of the fruit, but the kernels of the stones of the 
nkanye are also much appreciated ; they are very oleaginous and 
a modicum of oil may be obtained by merely squeezing them 
between the fingers! They are called mongo, and the saying is 
that they are food for kings, for the stones are very hard, the 

ax OPE Se ee 

kernels very small and it is hard work to obtain even a small 
quantity! Not that there is any lack of stones! Heaps, which 
have been thrown away at the time of the famous bukanye 
brewing, are to be found in the vicinity of all the villages, but 
the cracking is the difficulty. For this a stone must be sought, 
far and wide, and small hollows must be made in it of a size to 
fit the circular nkanye stones; these are then inserted in the 
sockets and cracked by a sharp skilful blow with another stone, 
great care being taken to avoid crushing the small tender kernel, 
the royal delicacy! In times of famine the mongo is in great 
request, in spite of the trouble involved in obtaining it. 

Another very valuable tree is the nkuh/u (mu-mi) (I. p. 366) 
whose nuts are the tihublu (yin-tin) (1). the mafureira. This is 
acurious fruit, the nut itself being of a greenish black colour, bitter 
and very oily; on this grows white pulp (bululu), covered with a 
beautiful skin of a bright orange, which, however, only covers 
about three quarters of the central black nut. The Natives pick 
this fruit in November and December, and stuff their cheeks 
with it; the saliva softens the pulp, which melts gradually in 
the mouth giving them a prolonged enjoyment of its exquisite 
flavour. One sees children, and also folks of mature age, with 
their cheeks puffed out as if they were badly swollen and throats 
contracting with the effort of sucking down the delicious pulp ; 
when nothing remains but the black nut which is called nkampf, 
viz., the product of suction, it is carefully put aside and will be 
used for making vegetable fat; or it will be sold to the Whites 
who export them to Marseilles where, it appears, they are used 
for making really good oil. Let us hope these nuts, so sucked 
clean by the Blacks, have never supplied any portion of our 
salad dressing! But there is no occasion to be alarmed as they 
are only used for making machine oil. The Blacks themselves 
do not use the tihuhlu oil for culinary purposes but for outward 
application only. 

The bululu can also be made into an edible fat by the following 

(1) A certain number of fruits instead of belonging to the dji-ma class, as 

is the rule, are incorporated with the yin-tin class, the tihuhlu, the tihlu 
(fruit of the muhlu tree), the tindjole (fruit of the ndjole), etc. 

process: whole fruits of nkuhlu are first dried, then softened 
in water ; when quite soft, they are pressed between the fin- 
gers sO as to separate the white pulp, which is then called 
munyantst, from the black nuts (nkampfi). This munyantsi is 
cooked and the fat is skimmed off (wungula) with spoons as 
it melts and comes to the surface. This edible fat, as well as 
that used for smearing the body, is preserved either in calabashes 
or in sala shells (shikutja). The preparation of nkampfi fat 
takes place as follows: the nuts are thoroughly dried (womisa), 
and slightly pounded in a mortar so as to remove the thin peel 
which covers them; they are then winnowed, and ground into 
a kind of flour; this flour is put into a pot with a little water 
and cooked; the fat is then collected in a big shell of Achatina 
and kept for external use. The residue is called bubindje. 

I do not mention all the other fruits, more or less succulent, 
which serve the Natives for food. One must be terribly famished 
to enjoy them. I may just specify the pfilu (dji-ma), a kind of 
insipid medlar; the tjhopfa (dji-ma), fruit of the ntjhopfa tree, 
which I could never muster courage enough to taste, and the 
bungu (dji-ma) sometimes dignified with the title of the Kafir 
orange. This latter is the fruit of one of the varieties of the 
india-rubber tree, which grows along the shores of Delagoa Bay.. 
(Landolphia Kirkii). In the Morakwen forest grow the ntjhole 
shrubs from which the tintjole berries are picked during the 
summer. 

The muhlu or water tree bears a berry called tihlu, which has 
an agreeable taste. The mphimbi bears the mahimbi, a large 
round fruits similar in form to an apricot with a double stone. 
Both these fruit are used to prepare a drink, and we shall mention 
them when treating of Thonga drinks. 

* 
* * 

There are a few taboos to mention in connection with trees. 
It is considered dangerous to cut the trunk of any large tree. 
Should you wish to make a mortar of a nkanye, first smear 
some of the bark with certain drugs and also burn them at the 

——s QO —— 

foot of the tree before cutting it down. Should you want to cut 
a nkwenga or a mahogany-tree (nhlapfuta (Ro.), shene (Dj.)), 
to make a canoe, the master of the forest must first offer a 
sacrifice to the spirits of his ancestors who have been buried 
there. If you omit this precaution, you will be unable to find 
again the tree you have chosen. 

C. AGRICULTURAL @USTOMS 
I. The Agricultural Year. 

At the season which is called shimumu, the little heat, that 
isto say in July, when the warm weather begins, the nkuhlu puts 
forth new shoots. Though rain is still far off, the mahogany 
and sala trees become covered with leaves of a wonderfully 
delicate green. A kind of Composita (the Helychrisum_ par- 
viflorum, shirimbyati), which is wide-spread - on the sandy 
dunes, blossoms all over the country; a beautiful lily (Crinum 
Forbesii) will expand its splendid white and pink flowers : the 
winter (bushika) has passed away : soon the blobo (summer) 
will come. 

When the Ronga woman notices these signs, she picks up 
her hoe (shikomo) and starts for the hills, or for the marshes. 
Her husband has already repaired the implement for her, at 
home. If the handle was worn out, he has cut a branch of 
nkonono, (a species of willow?), which is the wood invariably 
used for the purpose, and has shaped it so that one end is 
thicker than the other; in this thick end a hole is bored while 
the iron hoe head is heated in the fire: the head has, at its 
base, a long iron point which is inserted nearly red-hot into the 
hole, burning its way in, and thus solidly fixing the two parts 
together. This method of putting on the handle is called ku 
lumela shikomo. The Ronga hoe has a very short handle, 
sometimes not more than two feet in length. The Transvaal 

honga use handles three to four feet long. ‘The woman has 

now nothing to do but to work hard, her lord and master having 
duly accomplished his share of the labour. 

It is the end of August. Two or three months must still 
elapse before the rainy season sets in. This period of the year 
is devoted to a two-fold work: the clearing of fresh land and 
the cultivation of marshes. 

Phot, D, Lenoir. 
Tilling the fields near Makulane (Maputju country). 

The clearing of fresh land (ku tlhaba lisindje (Ro.), ku khatsha 
(Dj.), in the bush which has never yet been cultivated, or has 
been lying fallow for a long time, is very hard work indeed ! 
Beginning in the early morning the woman cuts down the 
small trees with her axe (khaula, dji-ma); if the stems are too 
large she lights a fire at their base and leaves them to burn until 
they fall. Natives have not the slightest idea of the value of 
trees, if those trees do not bear edible fruit, and destroy whole 
forests without any compunction. As previously mentioned, 
the labourer only spares the nkanye, mphimbi, nkuhlu, etc., 

ase DO — 

and sometimes the mimosa parasol (gowane) which provides a 
beneficial shade for the maize. Then she breaks the soil with 
her hoe and piles up in heaps the weeds (bibi, dji-ma) and 
bushes which she has uprooted, leaving them to dry before 
burning them. This is a long job and requires great patience. 
The old adage says very truly: 

U nga bone bibi u ku ndji rimele. (Don’t waste your time in 
looking at your heaps of rubbish, and fancying that your work is 
done ! ) 

This work continues all through the months of August, Sept- 
ember and October. 

Cultivation of Marshes (tchobo, dji-ma). If the woman has 
already tilled plenty of ground on the hill, during the previous 
years, she will devote these three spring months to the cultivation 
of the wet hollows near the lakes, between the dunes. The 
gardens in the marsh are called shiramba or mashamba and are 
very different from those on the hills called masimo. (1) 

I will now describe those which I saw in the Rikatla de- 
pression. The middle of the hollow is a marsh filled with 
long Papyrus (bungu), slender Typha (papala, dji-ma) or reeds 
(lihlanga). They are cut, uprooted; small canals are dug in 
which the water collects. The roots and stems are piled in 
heaps, some three feet high, called psibibi, but they are not 
burnt: They are left to decay and shilutane pumpkin seeds are 
sown in them, high enough to avoid putrefaction in the water. 
The soil is a wet black mud very favourable to the cultivation 
of rice. So a small plot a few square feet is sown, a shingubya, 
and, when the seeds have sprouted, they will be planted out all 
round. It seems that planting out has been known and practised 
for a long time by the Makaneta people who have large plant- 
ations of rice. Mealies are also sown in this region, in the 
spots where it is somewhat less wet: they will ripen one month 
earlier than those on the hill. The great pity is that the papy- 

(1) Nsimu, cl. yi-tin, makes its plural in masimu, cl. dji-ma; it is one of 
the few exceptions met with in Thonga grammar. 

rus marsh is full of small birds called nkapa (mu-mi), which 
pluck out the tiny sprouts of mealies as soon as they appear and 
-eat the half rotted grain at the roots. So children and women 
must scare away these marsh birds during these months, as 
they will the sparrows of the hills later on. 

On the raised edge of the canals sweet potatoes are planted, 
not the tuber, but growing stems, which will bear fruit much 
earlier than those on the hill. Where water has entirely dis- 
appeared, manioc is also planted in the hollows and seems to 
prosper well. In early November the pumpkins of the psibibi 
will be fully developed and their leaves will provide the mistress 
of the garden with a good vegetable until the first-fruits 
themselves ripen and furnish a more substantial food. 

When the rains commence, sometimes as early as September, 
but generally later, it is the time to begin the regular sowing. Every- 
body then starts for himself, because, although the fields tilled 
by the mother are the largest, every member of the family has 
tilled his own: the husband has his mpashu (I. p. 307) and 
each girl has her plot. 

The native idea is that every owner of a field must sow all 
principal cereals and vegetables in his garden, except peas, on 
account of their taboo. So, in a line on the border, are plan- 
ted sweet potatoes and manioc. Mealie seeds are sown ata 
given distance from each other, alternating with Kafir corn and 
sorghum, and in between are planted ground nuts and beans. 
Look how the mistress of the field proceeds to sow her maize: 
she walks along with short steps, at each one digging up a 
shovelful of well tilled earth, and planting in the hollows three or 
four grains of maize which she carefully covers over. The 
work is done in haste so as to take advantage of the last rains. 
The Jisindje is first sown ; then begins the hasty tilling of the 
old fallow fields (pula, dji-ma). The crop is not likely to be 
so plentiful as that obtained from virgin soil, but the same fields 
can be used for three or four consecutive years before they 
become exhausted. 

Natives have no idea of fertilising the ground in any way 
whatever ; at the most they may take advantage of the manure 

= pe 
which has accumulated in some disused oxen kraal, to plant 
thereon a few gourds or some tobacco. 

The operation of hastily tilling the fallow fields is often car- 
ried on by a djimo (dji-ma). Knowing that her fallows are 
very large and that she can hardly cope with them by herself, 
the owner calls all her neighbours to a djimo, viz., a working 
party, having wisely prepared a number of large jugs of beer. 
Neighbours will certainly accept the invitation as they may have 
to ask for similar help later on. So they come in the morn- 
ing, attack the fields with energy, singing, shouting all the time. 
There are special djimo songs, especially amongst the Ba-Suto. 
One may see them, some fifty black bodies toiling vigorously, 
making the sand fly, their hoes working with marvellous rapidity! 
What excitement, what strenuous work, each one urging the 
other to still greater exertion and all hurrying to finish the job! 
They know that, there in the hut, ten big jars of beer brewed to 
a nicety, wait for them and that they will have a good time at 
midday, when the heat will be unbearable and the work done. 

The maize grows and the weeds grow with it; after the till- 
ing comes the weeding; this is the work for November, Decem- 
ber and January. 

It is done twice or thrice for the mealies. . The first weeding 
is called t/utja, and is done when the mealie stems have reached 
a height of about one foot. The second one is called hlakula. 
By this time the ground nuts and beans have grown, and this 
weeding is intended to be for their benefit also. 

In January it is the nwebo, the time for the first ears of maize 
to ripen: it is also at that time that the fields of maize are apt 
to be ravaged by a species of coleoptera, called the nunu, of 
which I shall have more to say when treating of the superstitions 
of the tribe. 

In January also the sorghum and millet attain their full 
growth, and the grain begins to form. Sparrows, finches, and 
other chattering birds take up their residence in the fields and 
begin to plunder them. Then women and children camp out 
from morning to night, in their plantations, and spend three 
whole months shouting, yelling and making a most infernal 

hullabaloo, with tin cans and other musical instruments, in 
their endeavour to scare the thieves. This is what they call 
psaya or rindja tinyanyana. ‘The flocks of sparrows, etc., 
move on at a single flight to the acacias or mimosas, close by, 
whence they make a descent on the fields of the next neighbour. 
This proprietress is also on guard, and, in her turn, drives off 
the birds with a frightful uproar; thus the duel between birds 
‘and human beings goes on for weeks. The mother and children 
prevail upon the father to build them a little hut (ntjonga, mu- 
mi) right in the middle of the field, to enable them to protect 
their sorghum against the feathered enemy, and there they take 
up their quarters until the cereals have ripened and are ready 
to be harvested. Poor cereals! Many grains are wanting ! 
Those mischievous sparrows have taken more than a tithe! In 
the marshy lands of Lebombo I have noticed the people scaring 
the birds in a somewhat original manner. A cord was stretched 
right.across the field, for a distance of at least thirty or forty 
yards, supported at intervals by poles, and on it were strung 
large snail shells (Achatina lamarkiana) as big as the fist ; when 
the watchers heard the sparrows chirping on the other side of 
the field, instead of getting up and running after them, yelling 
and shouting to scare them away, they merely pulled the cord 
which made the shells jingle against one another, the move- 
ment and noise frightening the birds and sending them off to 
attack the crops of some less ingenious neighbour! I have also 
seen scarecrows set up in some places, the ordinary stuffed 
figure. During these months of bird scaring it is impossible to 
get the caretakers to do anything else but guard their plantations! 
The little maidservants scamper away to join in the work and 
the Christian girls no longer come to the school! I can well 
imagine that the husbands often find empty larders at home! 

The attraction of the plantation does not however hinder the 
labourers from doing full justice to the national beer, the bu- 
kanye, which is consumed from the middle of January to the end 
of February! Besides, it is principally after the bukanye that 
it is necessary to protect the sorghum from the beaks of these 
winged destroyers. 

Oe NG 

The agricultural year ends with the harvest. Every one har- 
vests his own fields and keeps, as far as possible, his pro- 
duct separate in his own store house. The ears of maize which 
have been left to dry on the stalks are broken off (tshobela) 
and are carefully piled in conical baskets in such a manner as 
to make them hold large quantities. The precious burden is 
at once deposited in the storehouse. After this the beans are 
picked (khaya): these do not ripen much before May, after all 
the other produce, at a season which is called ‘the time of 
beans” (nkama wa timbawen). The ground-nuts are unearthed 
by pounding on the ground all round the stem, and pulling 
up the whole plant by the roots. It is curious to see the 
stalks coming out of the earth with their well filled double pods 
attached to their extremities. 

The men then construct drying floors (tshalu, dji-ma): a mat 
made of reeds, or of the wood of the palm-tree, is placed in the 
middle of the field, and supported by four poles ; and on .it are 
laid (yaneka) ground-nuts, and peas, to remain there exposed 
to the sun until they are completely desiccated. 

The next operation is the threshing, or separating the grain 
from the ears (hula) This is done with sorghum, and Kafir 
corn, but not with maize, of which the cobs are generally kept 
entire in the storehouse until wanted. The Aula is done on a spe- 
cially prepared threshing floor in the middle of the field. The 
floor has been hardened by means of nkanye stones, and smear- 
ed over with clay. The sorghum and corn stems are brought 
thither, and the ears are beaten with small sticks. Or the ears 
are cut, put in mortars and slightly pounded to liberate the 
grains. The best have been preserved for seed When the 
threshing is finished, the grains are collected (wolela or hlakula) 
in the /iblelo basket and winnowed (tjutjsha, hehera).  Kafir 
corn and sorghum are then stored in the big ngula basket. (1) 

(1) It is taboo to weave the ngula before harvest, just as it is to prepare the 
ntehe before the birth of the baby. Before harvest Kafir corn is still nyimba, 
viz., a child not yet born. Who knows if the hail or the locusts will not 
destroy it? Wait till you have harvested, then you will see what size your 
basket must be ! 

As regards maize, it is kept in the storehouses properly 
speaking (shitlanta), little huts built of reeds with a movy- 
eable roof and raised on piles. All the shitlanta belong to 
the husband, though most of the tilling and all the weeding 
has been done by the wife, as already explained (I. p. 307). 

The storehouses of Sokis (Rikatla). Phot. H. A. Junod. 

In the Transvaal beans, peas and ground nuts, are packed in 
the dula (dji-ma), which are smeared outside with clay, or in 
small storehouses hung to the branches of trees (mfunge). 
When the harvest has been plentiful and all the storehouses 
have been filled, then begins the happy time of winter, of 
beer drinking, bunanga playing, (I. p. 404) paying visits, etc. 

= eas 

Il. Agricultural taboos. 

The first category of agricultural taboos are those previously 
mentioned, which spring from the idea of hierarchy: prohi- 
bition of sowing pumpkin seeds before the elder members or 

Dula storehuts in the Shiluvane village Phot. H. A. Junod. 
(The personage sitting on the right is Viguet, my faithful informant). 

the family, prohibition of enjoying the first-fruits (Kafir corn, 
bukanye, etc,) before the gods, the chief, the headman, and 
the elder brothers have Juma (I, p. 367). Others belong to 
the special feminine taboos, (girls not allowed to walk amongst 
the pumpkins, to pluck their fruit or to pick their leaves without 
certain precautions, I. p. 184). Another category is that of 
shimust. Certain days are proclaimed by the chief, or fixed by 
custom, as sabbath days, on which no one is allowed to till 

feceeso? 29 st 

the soil. In Nwamba, when there has been a little rain, it is 
taboo for the people of the clan to work in the fields; they 
must remain at home. Amongst the Nkuna the day on which 
the new moon appears is also shimusi. The moon must be 
left to “‘become firm” (tiyela, hola); to cut roots while it is 
still ‘‘soft” is taboo: it would cause strong winds and_ hail. 
Complete rest is also customary the day following the birth of 
twins in Khosen. (See Part VI. Chap. II). Some other taboos 
are actuated by the fear of wizards: it is forbidden to whistle in 
the fields after having sown or until the mealies are grown. This 
would call the ‘‘baloyi” and compromise the harvest. 

But the most stringent taboos are connected with the thresh- 
ing of the cereals. Vhis work is exclusively done by women, 
and it is taboo for the men to approach the threshing floor. 
The Makaneta people, who cultivate rice extensively, used to 
cut the ears and pile them into heaps in their own huts and not 
on the threshing floor. When the grain is dry, they thresh it 
by trampling on it. Should any woman pass by, it is taboo to 
speak to her. If she enters the hut and helps for a little while 
with the work, then the taboo is removed and you, owners of 
the rice, can talk to her. — “‘Should you do so without that 
condition being fulfilled, this person would take your rice and 
leave you nothing but the husks (mataha). Should a relative, 
dwelling in the neighbouring district, come and see you whilst 
you are threshing rice, don’t give her any part of your harvest: 
let her crush it in the mortar and take-it away husked, lest you 
lose all your grain and keep the husks only! The husks of the 
rice which you give to your relative must remain with you.” 
(Mboza). The same applies to Kafir corn. To allow a relative 
from outside to pluck some ears from your garden, to thresh 
them and take them home means to ‘‘spoil your corn” (onha 
mabele). When you are threshing Kafir corn, let the visitor 
first take the pestle and help you before you speak to her. 

As regards tree culture, it was formerly considered a taboo 
to plant foreign kinds, such as bananas, oranges, etc. When 
Mboza planted the first mango trees in Morakwen, people told 
him: ‘‘ You will die! You have called misfortune on yourself 

(u tiblolele), and other people will eat your fruit!” I heard 
this taboo explained as follows in Shiluvane: When, having 
been obliged to move, a man leaves trees planted by him in his 
old village, people passing near the ruins shake their heads and 
say : ‘‘Look at those trees! They have chased away the mas- 
ter of the village”. ‘These two testimonies are interesting, and 
fitly illustrate the origin of a taboo. The desolation of a ruin 
has been connected with the presence of new trees, as they have 
often been noticed together. Hence the idea that the trees are 
the cause of the desolation. Planting new trees is consequently 
a taboo! Nowadays however this superstition has died out, 
and one may see a great number of mango, orange, lemon, (1) 
pho-pho trees in Thonga fields, on the Coast as well as in Zout- 
pansberg. 

Answers to some of Professor Frazer’s questions on Agricul- 
ture. 

There are no special ceremonies at the clearance of land for 
cultivation, no grafting, nor artificial fertilisation of fruit trees 
practised. (They think that trees fecundate each other by means 
of their roots. See, later on, paragraph on Thonga Botany). 
They do not admit that a deity animates the crops, only that 
baloyi (wizards) can increase or diminish the product of the 
fields (See Part VI). As regards the rite of driving away the 
vermin from the fields, we shall describe it in Part VI. There 
are no superstitions about the last corn cut, and no special cere- 
mony practised on the harvest field. Except the rule of silence 
which must be kept by women threshing rice and Kafir corn, 
there is no special regulation for persons engaged in agricul- 
tural operations, no sexual taboos. The plough, the hoe, the 

(1) The lemon tree is called mbomu (mu-mi). This seems to be a Native 
word and the tree also might be indigenous in the country. It grows wild 
on the banks of the Lower Nkomati to such an extent that there is an island 
in the river, some distance above Morakwen, which is called Ilha dos Limées, 
Lemons’ Island. The lemons are of large size and their rind resembles that 
of the orange. 

pestle and the winnowing basket are not used in ceremonial 
purifications or to avoid dangers. 

As regards Agriculture, it cannot be said that the Thonga 
tribe is in a very backward stage. Thonga, as well as most of 
the South African Natives, are essentially agriculturists, and 
they succeed in obtaining their food in abundance from the soil 
which is not very rich. The variety of their cereals is indeed 
remarkable, but they never developed their cultivation to any 
great extent, because they did not want to harvest more than 
was necessary for their immediate needs : there would have 
been no market for a surplus. Moreover they never invented 
the plough, or thought of the use of irrigation, or of manure, 
those three great means of intensive production which civilised 
people have so long possessed. As regards irrigation, the Maka- 
neta people made use of the tide, which pushes back the Nko- 
mati River, to water their rice plantations, but they never dug 
channels for the purpose. 

Civilisation having brought these means of progress within 
their reach, they show themselves quite ready to take advantage 
of them. Ploughs are wide-spread amongst Transvaal Thonga, 
where missionaries have taught them their use (I. p. 327). 
There is no doubt that, having been initiated into civilised ways 
of cultivation, South African Natives, who have such a strong 
natural taste for agriculture, will in future considerably develop 
the resources of their soil. 

But two conditions are necessary for that purpose: 

1) European Agencies who have at heart the welfare of the 
Natives, Colonial Governments, or Missionary Societies, must 
help them to acquire some technical knowledge, better seeds 
and implements. 

2) The laws of the country must be amended in such a way 
that the Natives will be encouraged to buy land. As long as 
they are only tenants of big Land Companies, or provisional 
occupants, squatters on Crown land, always threatened with 

‘the possibility of their gardens being turned into farms, and sold 
to White people without any compensation, how can they be 
expected to devote much time and interest to the betterment of 
the soil? Individual land tenure will be the best incentive to 
agricultural progress. The Portuguese of Lourenco Marques 
have understood this, and decided to release from statute labour, 
and from forced conscription those Natives who have become 
land owners. If I am well informed, they are also exempted 
from the hut tax for ten years. These are undoubtedly excel- 
lent and highly commendable regulations! 

D. PREPARATION OF FOOD AND DRINK 

Bantu of South Africa being mostly agriculturists are also 
vegetarians, not however vegetarians on principle, as they eat 
meat as often as they have the opportunity; but these opportu- 
nities are rare, so that. as a matter of fact, their diet is essen- 
tially vegetable. I shall later on describe the two ways in which 
they procure meat, viz., cattle-breeding and hunting. Having 
seen what are the products of their fields, we can confidently 
proceed to the study of their kitchen, as meat seldom makes its 

appearance in the ‘‘ pots on the fireplace! ” 

1. Fire and salt. 

Thonga do not remember a time when they did not possess 
these two most important elements of the culinary art. 

As regards fire (ndjilo, mu-mi), the Hofwana knew it already 
before the XV" or XVI century. The tradition of Shoki-sha- 
humba (I. p. 23) shows that, amongst the Hlengwe, there was 
a time when food was not cooked. 

There are four trees used to produce fire by friction (tsika): 

1) The dulolo, a kind of Hibiscus growing in the estuary 
of the Nkomati, in the region regularly watered by the tide, is 

the best nisiko or wooden flint. It is avery light and soft wood 
and is still used near the Coast, though matches are now to be 
found everywhere. 

2) The mpahla (mu-mi), a bush of the Compositae family, 
whose wood is very hard and used to make handles for hoes. 
It grows all over Thengaland, in the plain as well as in moun- 
tainous regions. 

3) The nkuwa (mu-mi), the large wild fig-tree, which covers 
the banks of the Nkomati and the Maputju rivers, and is com- 
mon in the low lands. 

4) The ntjopfa (mu-mi), the wild custard tree, employed to 
light the sacred fire of nyokwekulu (I. p. 364). It is taboo 
to use it for ordinary purposes, or to warm oneself at its embers. 
Medicine-men only are allowed to make ntjopfa fire, having 
drugs to prevent the disease caused by its use. 

Dealing with fire taboos, I may add that it is taboo to use 
branches of a tree which has been struck by lightning; taboo 
also to keep alight the fire of a deceased person after the con- 
clusion of the great mourning. It must be ritually extinguished, 
the idea being that it participates in the general contamination 
of death (I. p. 135). 

Gungunyane used to levy a tax on fire: he ordered all the 
fires of his kingdom to be extinguished at a certain time, and 
sent messengers to relight them by means of embers procured 
from the royal kraal. Each village had to pay a tax for the new 
fire. It seems that this kind of royal right was exercised in the 
old times by the famous Monomotapa king. Nothing of the 
kind is met with amongst the more modest Thonga chiefs. 

The manner of producing fire with the wooden flint is as 
follows. A dry branch of the tree is secured, from half an inch 
to an inch thick, and- cut into two pieces, each of about 18 
inches in length ; one half is called the wife (nsati), the other 
half, the husband (nuna). The first piece, the female, is laid 
on the ground and a notch is made in it with a knife; the 
notch is cut in two movements : first on the upper part of the 
wood, secondly on the side of it. The male is then somewhat 
rounded, inserted perpendicularly in the notch, held firmly 

a 
between the palms of the hand and made to revolve by a rapid 
motion of the hands rubbing it from top to bottom. The oper- 
ator having reached the bottom of the male at once starts 
again from the top ; so the frictions follows each other imme- 
diately. The motion widens the notch in the female to such 
an extent that the male penetrates and begins to burn it : the 
ashes find their way out by the lateral notch ; a little dry grass 

Phot. P. Rosset, 
Salt manufacture, Northern Transvaal. 

has been placed there and soon begins to smoulder. An expert 
obtains fire after six or seven consecutive frictions, especially 
when using bulolo. 

Embers are kept burning as much as possible the whole night 
on the fire place. Should they however have been allowed to 
go out, the mistress of the kitchen will send her daughter to 
the neighbouring hut or village to fetch a glowing cinder. This 
is called ku woka.(1) The ember will be carefully brought on a 
sala shell or occasionally in a big snail shell. 

Salt, also an object of first necessity in culinary art, has 
always been known to the Thonga, as far back as one can 

(1) Woka, coming from the same root as wora, to warm oneself at the fire 
and wosha, to roast meat. 

remember ; the name munyu (mu-mi) is a genuine Bantu word. 
Natives can procure it in three different ways: either by gather- 
ing dried salt on the lagoons near the sea (wolela sole), and in 
the pans (salt pans) on the mountains (Zoutpansberg), or, when 
salt is not deposited on the soil, they take salted earth, put it 
into a conical basket and slowly pour water upon it : this per- 
colates through into a pot, carrying the salt with it and the 
solution thus obtained is evaporated. See the adjoining repro- 
duction ofa photograph, taken in the extreme North East of the 
Transvaal, by the Rev. P. Rosset; a third way of obtaining salt is 
from a certain Composita plant which is wide-spread in the plains 
of the Low Country. It is burnt and its ashes washed in order 
to extract the small amount of salt it contains! This is a long 
process attended with very unsatisfactorily results. During the 
Anglo-Boer war, Natives round Leydsdorp reverted to it, as all 
the stores were closed and no salt was procurable. 

Nowadays Native manufacture of salt has entirely ceased. 
The beautiful glistening white article has advantageously re- 
placed the greyish, blackish mixture of former times. 

II. Food. 

It is not an exaggeration to speak of a culinary art amongst 
the Thonga. They give great attention to cooking. Of a 
woman who knows how to cook well, it is said: “Awa hisa ” 
“she burns ”; not that she lets the sauce burn, but this expres- 
sion corresponds to the French “cordon bleu”. A girl who 
‘“hisa” will have more chance of being ‘‘lobola” than another. 

This importance given to cooking explains the great wealth of 
the culinary vocabulary. Every variety of dish or of culinary 
process has its particular name, and to master all these terms, 
one ought to serve a special apprenticeship to one of the 
queens of the kitchen. I cannot boast of having gone so far as 
that ! 

As a rule women cook only once a day, towards the end of 
the afternoon. The great meal is eaten in the evening when 

everybody is expected to become satiated (shura), and what 
remains of it is generally finished the next day in the morning 
(fiblula). This evening meal consists of two component parts: 
the cooked cereals, and the sauces seasoning them. But the 
menu can be greatly varied. In most cases the cereals are pre- 
pared as bupsa (flour), or mapa, and the sauce, muru (Ro.), she- 
shebo (Dj.), is made of monkey nuts, ground and boiled in water, 
vegetables, India-pepper, tomatoes, shrimps, etc. Or the cereals, 
maize, millet or sorghum, may be only husked (tlhokola) and 
cooked whole ; then they are called tihobe (plur. of hobe, the 
central part of the grain), and the monkey nut sauce is often 
replaced by beans or peas cooked together with the tihobe. All 
these courses are very tasty and many White people readily eat 
the Thonga food, which seems to me superior to the Suto. 
However, I never very much appreciated the bupsa which the 
Thonga consider superior to the tihobe and which takes a longer 
time to prepare. The grains must first be soaked for several 
hours in water (lobeka) to soften them ; then they are crushed, 
the husks being carefully removed by the winnowing process 
(hehera) in the Jiblelo basket, which is spasmodically shaken by 
sudden jerky movements; the interior of the grain is then 
pounded until it forms a very fine flour, as light as the best 
Australian flour ; the small round particles remaining are called 
buse, and eaten as tihobe, as the bupsa must be perfectly homo- 
geneous. When it boils in the pot, the cook stirs it the whole 
time with a stick provided at the bottom with small cross bars, 
two to three inches in length ; she twirls the stick with her 
hands in the same way as a man lighting a fire with the wood- 
en flint, and this operation prevents the flour from forming 
lumps. The lobeka process gives a somewhat nauseating taste 
to the bupsa; that is why Europeans do not care for it, but 
Natives like it precisely for that reason. The preparation of 
tibobe is not so complicated, as no preliminary softening is necess- 
ary. But it is a somewhat coarse food which, however, answers 
admirably to the wants and capacities of the Native stomach ! 
When the bupsa of the previous day has undergone too much 
fermentation during the night, it is given to the dogs. A little 

ae. 
supplementary meal is often cooked at midday : a plate of vege- 
tables, for instance. Or, if the pangs of hunger are too keenly 
felt, one eats a little nfuma meal (p. 17) with honey. Any 
addition of this kind to the ordinary every day fare is wel- 
come ! 

There are a few other preparations made of cereals : the mbila, 
raw meal mixed with water, the m¢/atu, a lighter kind of maize 
flour used for invalids, the shimhbimbi made of Kafir corn and 
which is the special dish for women who are more or less fast- 
ing during the confinement period (I. p. 40). 

Thonga also know how to cook by steaming. They put a 
large plate (mbenga, mu-mi) on top of the pot and hermetically 
seal it with ox dung. This prevents the steam from escaping. 
Dung is by no means to be avoided in the culinary art. They 
look upon it as quite a clean thing. (1) 

Men have now become accustomed to ordinary ground mealie 
meal (mugayo) which Europeans extensively use as porridge in 
South Africa. They eat it in the mines and in the schools; but 
women do not touch it and think it vastly inferior to their own 
bupsa, 

As regards the husks they are called budangwana, a word which 
might mean : ‘‘ that which is eaten by the dogs.” They are 
given to the dogs, the pigs, and the fowls. 

We shall see in the next paragraph how milk and meat are 
dealt with. 

Ill. Drink. 

Natives are fond of the fresh clear water (mati) running in 
the spruits of the Transvaal, but they also accommodate them- 
selves to the whitish, greyish mixture found in the pools, in 

(1) I remember on one of the Transvaal roads, meeting two converts of a 
German colleague returning from an evangelisation tour. I offered them a 
piece of bread, for which they were very thankful and they moved on some 
distance to eat it by themselves. I was much struck to see them, after having 
said grace, pick up a large piece of dried ox dung which was lying there and 
place their’ bread upon it before eating: they evidently thought it was much 
cleaner than the bare ground ! 

= Be ses 

the midst of the sandy hollows, or in the neighbourhood of the 
lakes, in the Delagoa plain. To drink from a pot, or from a 
river, lying on your belly, or kneeling down, is ku nwa. But 
there is another word, ku kapitela, which describes the manner 
of drinking adopted in olden times by the warriors of Gideon, 
and of which the Thonga have not lost the secret. The Book 
of Judges tells the story of the 500 ‘‘ who lapped, putting their 
hand to their mouths” (VU, 6). When crossing a spruit, you 
will often see Thonga drinking by throwing water into their 
mouths by a rapid upward motion of the hand. I had never 
properly understood Gideon’s story before seing a Thonga drink- 
ing by kapitela. 

But the Thonga kitchen provides the tribe with many other 
drinks. ‘They can be divided into 3 categories: drinks made 
from cereals, from fruits or from other ingredients. From 
cereals are made the buputju, madleko, byala and mpheka ; from 
fruits, the bukanye, buhimbi ; the busura, made from the sap 
of the palm tree also belongs to this group. In the third cate- 
gory, I mention the shiwayawaya and shikokiyane. 

1) Drinks made from cereals. Under the name of Kafir beer 
are generally comprised all the varieties of the intoxicating drinks 
prepared from mealies, millet, sorghum. But these varieties 
differ greatly, according to the proportion of alcohol they con- 
tain, There is a light beer called buputju and madleko and a 
strong beer, the byala proper and mpheka. 

The buputju (corresponding to the Suto /eting) is brewed in 
the following manner: a little bupsa of mealies is cooked and 
ground (sila) in a plate together with Kafir corn yeast. Water 
is poured on the mixture and fermentation soon sets in. After 
one day it can be consumed; its taste is agreeable and it is 
hardly intoxicating (Mboza). This was the old-fashioned way of 
preparing buputju, and it is probably what the Ba-Ronga called 
madleko. Maize madleko looks like a thick oatmeal soup. The 
recipe in Shiluvane is somewhat different : mealie flour is placed 
in a pot, with cold water, and stirred. This mixture is poured 
into another pot of hot water and boiled. It is then left to cool 
and some Kafir corn yeast is mixed with it in the evening. 

ae 
Next day it is sufficiently fermented to be drunk. It must be 
finished the same day for it would become sour, if kept longer, 
not having been boiled long enough to keep for any length of 
time. Nowadays the craving for alcohol having greatly increas- 
ed, Natives do not content themselves with the original madleko. 
They follow more or less the Shiluvane recipe, but obtain more 
alcohol by mixing yeast twice with the flour, before and after 
boiling. 

The brewing (yenga) of byala (Ro.), byalwa (Dj.), is much 
more complicated. It lasts nine days (I. p. 108) and this is the 
order of the procedure amongst the Nkuna : the five first days 
are devoted to the preparation of the yeast ; Kafir corn is soaked 
inswater, and left to soften for one day in a pot. On the 
second day, the breweress pours away (minya) the water, and 
covers the Kafir corn with leaves to keep it moist (pfhimba) ; 
this favours the growth (mila) of the germs which are left to 
sprout on the third, fourth and fifth day. On the sixth day the 
yeast (handjelo (Ro.), tshomela (Dj.)) so obtained is dried and 
ground. Mealies are then threshed in great quantities and 
soaked in water ; in the evening all the women and their rela- 
tives pound them in the mortars and make flour, but they do 
not remove the husks. Next day they fetch water in jars and 
boil it; their mealie flour is distributed in other pots with a 
handful of yeast added to each of them ; boiling water is then 
poured over and stirred to mix well with the flour. When this 
has cooled down, they add a little yeast (kandjela). On the 
eighth day, at dawn, they put all these pots on the fire: the beer 
must be kept boiling for a long time. In the afternoon, they 
remove the pots from the fire (phula) and pour the beer into 
other jars to let it cooldown. Afterwards they add all the yeast 
which remain. During the night, the beer must ferment 
(kukumuka, literally “‘swell”). If they find it in this condi- 
tion on the morning of the ninth day, it shows that the time 
has come to strain it off (hluta) which is done by means of a 
Native sieve. (See illustration in next chapter). All the husks 
in suspension are thus removed and the beer is poured into the 
best pots to await the guests of the beer party. In the hut it 

i 

can keep its flavour for two days, after which it loses both 
strength and taste, and turns into vinegar (ntjubi). 

Amongst the Ba-Ronga a very similar process is followed. 
They call mbila the flour and yeast on which boiling water has 
been poured on the seventh day, the name of the operation 
being ku bandjekela mbila. They let it remain in a cask for three 
days before boiling it, collecting in the meantime all the necess- 
ary fuel for the cooking. After the boiling, it is called phiriho, 
byala busila. Empty wine barrels being everywhere available, 
beer can be brewed in greater quantities than was formerly the case. 

When they took refuge in Bilen, during the war of 1894-96, 
the Ba-Ronga there learned to boil the beer a second time: the 
flour is cooked twice with the yeast and this increases very 
much the strength of the byala, which is then called mpheka. 
From the innocent madleko, full of husks, which are as much 
food as drink, up to the very strong mpheka, passing through 
the different kinds of buputju and byala all the different percent- 
ages of alcohol are met with. The quantity of yeast mixed 
with the flour and the length of the boiling are the two main 
elements to be considered, and it is very difficult to say where 
buputju finishes and where byala begins! However the follow- 
ing rule may be adopted to differentiate them: beer is byala 
when yeast has been added more than once, when the boiling 
has been prolonged, when the liquid has been strained and 
when the amount of alcohol it contains is sufficient to keep it 
in good condition for more than one day. 

2) Drinks made with fruits or other tree products. The bukanye 
is the most famous, being the great drink at the national feast 
(I. p. 369). But another very strong and much appreciated 
drink of that category is the buhimbi. The tree mphimbi (Ro), 
mbimbi (Dj), has an impenetrable mass of branches on which 
grows a very nice fruit of an orange colour with a double stone 
inside, externally very much like an apricot. When ripe in 
December, it is very juicy and sweet and produces a very alco- 
holic beverage. The fruit is pressed between the hands (pha- 
masa), the liquid thus obtained is mixed with water and 
boiled. Any scum rising to the surface is removed (wungula) 

and the drink left to ferment for five days. It is so alcoholic 
that it can keep in good condition for a year and is said to be 
more intoxicating than wine. The mphimbi tree is spread all 
over the Delagoa dunes. 

The milala or palm tree from which is made palm wine, 
busura, grows in forests at various places, especially in Nwamba, 
the North of Nondwane, Maluleke, etc. and in some regions 

i 

Milala palmtrees. 

Natives devote considerable time to its brewing. The people of 
Phesen (Pessene Station on the Komati Poort Railway) are 
said even to neglect their agricultural duties and to indulge in 
busura to a great excess. The preparation of palm wine is made 
according to rule. The forest is divided by the chief amongst 
the headmen, in the same way as the ordinary bush. Each 
headman exploits the milala of the region which has been 
apportioned to him and which is called fashi. He may take 
partners from other villages. The stem of the palm tree is cut 
to a point (batla) at its upper extremity, where the top shoot 

is growing. After four days this extremity is cut on the slant 
and a sala shell is tied on with a string and placed in a position 
to receive the exudation which oozes from the cut. This shell 
(shikutja) is soon filled up; the owner of the tree unties it, 
pours the liquid into his calabash and drinks it at home. When 

Collecting the palm wine. Phot. A. Borel. 

there is plenty of it, it is stored in a big pot called gandjelo, 
which is hidden somewhere in the bush. Gandjelo means altar, 
the utensil in which offerings are placed for the ancestor gods. 
(Part VI) But it does not seem that the busura gandjelo has 
any religious meaning. If a traveller happens to find it, it is 
good luck; he will say: ‘My god has blessed me and shown 
me this gandjelo”, and he is quite welcome to help himself 
to the wine. On the other hand, it is prohibited to touch the 
shell and to drink from it. It is taboo. A stranger doing so 
would be addressed as follows: ‘‘ Are you a bee, are you a 

=e 
butterfly to go and help yourself from a ‘shikutja’ which does 
not belong to you?” He would be tied up, arms and legs, and 
left to sleep in the open for the whole night. On leaving him 
they will taunt him, saying: ‘‘ Go and drink from the shikutja. ” 
He may even be condemned to pay a fine, a goat, or a hoe. This 
palm wine has a very sweet and agreeable taste. 

According to the Native idea, honey (bulombe) is also a drink! 
The prefix bw classifies this product amongst liquids. It is very 
much appreciated and Natives readily submit to be stung in 
order to collect it (hakula) from the holes in old trees or rocks. 
They generally burn some grass which they hold in one hand, 
keeping the bees away with the smoke and the flame, and 
gathering the honey combs into a pot with the other hand. 
Thonga frequently secure honey in an artificial way by placing 
a broken pot upside-down in the bush. Bees are attracted 
and a swarm will occasionally make its home in the pots. “In 
the Nwambukota region (near Morakwen) I saw a Ronga who 
even had bee hives of his own invention and succeeded in secur- 
ing plenty of honey. Native honey is of a brownish, blackish 
hue. When eating it, Thonga do not at all despise the larvae : 
are they not meat ?! 

3) The Shiwayawaya and Shikokiyane drinks. The various 
kinds of beer and drinks made from fruit were not, however, 
enough for the Thonga. They saw that White people used 
sugar-cane to distil rum and they tried to do the same. The 
result of their attempt is called Shiwayawaya. Inhambane 
Natives seem to have been the first to brew it; their kinsmen 
of the Lourengo Marques district soon followed their example. 
They crush the sugar-cane in a mortar, after having poured 
some water into it; then they collect the crushed cane in a 
sack, press it, and extract all the liquid they can in one or two 
barrels. During the night a fire is lighted in a hut, near the 
barrels, to warm them, and someone must keep watch all the 
night, removing the scum and preventing the liquid from rising 
or overflowing. It then ferments and becomes very alcoholic. 
Where shiwayawaya is drunk, quarrels and blows are sure to 
follow. The adjoining plate from a photograph, taken near 

= fe ee 
Antioka (Khosen), shows a primitive Native press used for the 
preparation of sugar-cane drink. The crushing operation takes 
place in the large hollowed trunk of a tree and the liquid flows 
out, through a pipe fixed in its lower extremity, into a pot. 
The shikokiyane is prepared from Golden Syrup bought from 
the stores. A large quantity of the tins of this innocent 

Sugar-cane press, Magule (Khosen country). Phot. A, Clere. 

“missionary jam”, at it is called in South Africa, imported in 
Johannesburg, is used not by missionaries but by Natives of the 
Compounds who brew shikokiyane in big empty oil cans. Some 
of the more civilised do quite a trade in this strong drink, 
selling it illicitly on Sundays to their unsophisticated brethren, 
who thus reach the happy state of drunkenness in which they 
so much delight, and which is not allowed by the regulations 
of the Compounds. 

A number of other drinks have been invented by the South 
African Natives, but the foregoing are the principal ones. 

ALCOHOLISM AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN TRIBE. 

The craving of the Bantu of South Africa for alcohol is by no means 
a result of civilisation. The race, being of a weak character, always 
gave way to drunkenness. Deprived of true religious and moral 
principles, it was exposed, as all primitive races are, to the excesses of 
that dangerous passion. The beer-drinking parties are as old as the 
tribe itself, or at any rate, as ancient as the introduction of cereals ! 

But it must be confessed that civilisation has terribly developed this 
natural instinct. In former times, Natives could get intoxicated from 
time to time, the chiefs more frequently than their subjects, owing to 
the shirwalo taxation (I. p. 377). But the brewing took nine days! 
In the meantime the inmates of the village were obliged to keep sober. 
Now all that is changed. Where the law does not prohibit the sale 
of liquor to Natives, they can buy as much as they like every day ; so 
we see some of them constantly under the influence of drink as long 
as they have money wherewith to purchase it, and we can already 
notice the progressive alcoholisation of the entire population. I lived 
for many years in a Colony where there is no liquor law. Formerly 
German rum was sold all over the country by thousands of flagons, 
and I saw even children drinking it with avidity, although they shi- 
vered whilst swallowing the deadly drug! Later on it was prohibited 
and replaced by what is called ‘* Vinho colonial”, which, however, 
was no great improvement. According to the late E. Torre do Valle, 
a great friend of the Ba-Ronga, and a man who strongly deprecated 
that liquor trade, this is an adulterated mixture in which tobacco, 
India-pepper, etc. are used to give pungency to the taste, and where but 
little natural wine is to be found. When a White man enters an up- 
country store and wants something to drink, the Banyan who retails 
this mixture from three barrels standing on the end of the counter, 
refuses to give him any of it, saying: ‘‘ This is for Natives and not 
for White men”. Round Lourenco Marques there are hundreds of 
such bars, and although the Authorities have tried to diminish their 
number, drunkenness in the Native Location is something dreadful and 
almost incredible, Let the visitor go on Saturday night or on Sunday, 
along the avenues of Majlanganen (I. p. 203), where the galvanised 
iron stores stretch without interruption in all directions ; let him see 
women, men, youngsters dancing on the road in front of the bar, 
falling on the ground, spending their last penny to get drink under the 

ag 

eyes of the amused storekeeper, and he will see what an unrestricted 
sale of drink to the Blacks means. It is simply horrible to contemplate ; 
morally it is a most reprehensible, economically a most deplorable, 
physically a most dangerous state of things. I will not deal here with 
the moral side of the question ; let us merely consider what is the result 
of this liquor trade on the health and on the economic future of the 
Black race: 

1) That it kills hundreds of Natives, there is no doubt. Whatever 
stamina the race may possess, can it long resist the deadly effects of 
an inferior, unwholesome kind of drink absorbed in such enormous 
quantities ? Coffee must be kweba, drunk in sips, but wine according 
to Natives, must be nwa, viz., drunk ‘a plein gosier”’ like water! We 
saw the young chief Shongele, heir of the Khosen clan, son of Magudju, 
die miserably from delirium tremens, and many other chiefs and sub- 
chiefs followed his example. For years they led a disgusting life, 
being half drunk all the time, no longer able to preside over the tribal 
court, or to govern their people, having entirely lost the dignity of 
manner and the sense of position which was so remarkable amongst 
Bantu rulers, clapping their hands and abjectly entreating the White 
visitor to give them sope (Native name for brandy). 

Hand in hand with drunkenness goes immorality, and immorality as 
practised in that hell, means the unchecked propagation of syphilis. 
According to medical authority, ninety per cent of the Natives 
round the town of Lourenco Marques are now contaminated. The 
girls who come on Saturday to sell their produce on the market and 
who sleep two nights in the Native town, giving themselves, for a few 
pence, to one of the hundreds of boys working on the wharf, propagate 
the disease in the interior, and all this means the rapid destruction of 
a race which was made to live, and had great possibilities before it. 

During the war of 1894, a merchant in the town of Lourenco 
Marques said to me cynically: ‘* The Natives are troublesome! Let 
them be given as much alcohol as they like and we shall soon get rid 
of them. ” 

2) Alcohol will kill the Black race in the long run, It is already 
ruining the kafir trade, Those who uphold the liquor traffic, in order 
to increase the Revenue of the Colony, ought to obtain the opinion of 
the traders who do not deal in liquor. These merchants, who try to 
create new wants, to develop a healthy and useful trade amongst 
Natives, in a word to civilise them, would testify that selling strong 
drink to the Natives means preventing their buying anything else. 

Sy ee 
The craving for alcohol is such that all the money is spent on it and 
clothing, better food, ploughs, live stock, etc., are no longer cared for. 
The consuming power of the Black race for European goods which 
might become enormous, is thus curtailed; and at the same time its 
capacity for work is destroyed! When drink was allowed to be sold 
in the Compounds of Johannesburg, the Mine Managers soon found 
thata third of their Black workers were constantly in a state of intox- 
ication and unfit to go down into the mine. So the sale was happily 
stopped. not so much for moral as for purely practical reasons ! 

So, if the question is seriously studied, one is forced to come to the 
conclusion that total prohibition of European liquor, and of any 
similar product, is the only chance of salvation for the Natives. I 
know of only two classes of people who would contravene this con- 
clusion: the liquor traders, — but their judgment is not disinterested, — 
and some educated Natives, and negrophiles, who resent any colour 
legislation and think such prohibition is an insult to the Black race. 
‘To the former, there is no need to reply. Let them only consider the 
heavy responsibility they incur in enriching themselves by slowly 
killing a primitive, childish race which has not enough moral force to 
resist the danger! To the second I would say: ‘‘ Even if some of 
you have truly reached that moral status where you can use and not 
abuse, you must confess that your race, as a whole, has not yet 
attained to it. A great number of the best Native Christians have 
fallen deplorably and been lost owing to the passion for drink ; how 
much more defenceless are the rank and file, raw heathen or weak 
Christians! Accept the testimony of facts and recognize that the 
Black race, just emerging from savagery, is still in a state of infancy 
morally speaking and must be treated with great care. Later on, let 
us hope, the time will come when it will have grown in strength and 
moral vigour and no legal restriction will be any longer necessary. 

As regards Native drinks, the use of byala, strong beer, is generally 
prohibited in Christian Congregations. Some Missions also exclude 
light beer, buputju, whilst some (amongst them the Swiss Romande 
Mission) allow it. Buputju proper, the Suto leting, is not very objec- 
tionable, containing but little alcohol ; but I have already pointed out 
the great difficulty of establishing a clear line of demarcation between 
buputju and byala. Our experience is that Native Christians readily 
approve the prohibition of byala... but, after a while, they begin- to 
brew a buputju which is almost the equivalent of it, and the morality 
of their congregations sinks in proportion to the increase of alcohol in 

SS 
their drink. So, ina Synod held in Shiluvane in 1908, the question 
was earnestly discussed during a whole day. These were the confes- 
sions made by the delegates ‘‘ We have deceived our leaders! What 
we drink is byala, and not buputju! We are drinking ourselves, 
the elders, and leading the others into temptation ; thus we give 
strength to the beer. The beer is the hyena. It kills the soul! It kills 
the work of salvation! Let it die once for all, the wild beast. Leta 
knife be provided to cut the throat of the wild beast ”, viz., let strict 
regulations be adopted to prevent drunkenness in the Church. 

When Natives arrive at such a conviction of the danger of alcohol 
for their race, and take up sucha position in regard to their own beer, 
should not we, White people, be greatly to blame if we increased 
their difficulties by providing them with European drinks which are 
ten times more dangerous for them! 

E. LIVE STOCK BREEDING. 
I. Oxen. 

Oxen were plentiful in Thongaland before the Zulu invasion. 
The Ba-Ngoni warriors stole and killed them wholesale ; they 
have never been so numerous since then and to-day they are 
fewer than ever, owing to cattle plague and to Texas Fever 
which has destroyed the herdsin the Transvaal and in the great- 
er part of the Lourenco Marques district. Oxen are not the pro- 
perty of chiefs only. Any numzane can possess a kraal, ranga 
dji-ma (Ko.), shibaya (Dj ), where he keeps not only his own 
cattle but those entrusted to his care. Having plenty of boys to 
herd them, he readily accepts the cows which his neighbours 
ask him to look after, all the more so as the milk will be his, 
and he will be given one of the calves, according to custom 
(I. p. 413). Much care is taken of the welfare of the cattle : 
the herding-boys are expected to lead them to pasture in the 
morning, when the dew is still on the grass ; during the five 
or six winter months hardly any rain falls, but heavy morning 
dew replaces it, moistening the grass, and Natives firmly believe 
that it makes the cattle fat. So it is said that the oxen must 

SNS 
go out early and ‘ eat the dew”. (Compare the tale of Piti. 
Chants et Contes des Ba-Ronga, p. 156.) Moreover the best 
kinds of grass, those which are the most nourishing, are well 
known, and boys are sent to the places where they grow. 
Parts of the bush are also burnt as soon as the grass dries up, 
so as to obtain fresh grass as early as possible in the spring. In 
autumn, after the harvest, oxen are allowed to wander about 
in the gardens, where they eat the mealies and millet and sor- 
ghum stems, and find better grass. 

The Thonga castrate most of their bulls; however they keep 
one or two in each herd for breeding purposes. Strange to say, 
these beasts are generally very tame; they are hardly any 
wilder than the castrated oxen. However, boys sharpen their 
horns and excite the bulls of different herds to fioht hey 
pour live ants on their forehead to irritate them. They give 
them names ; e. g. Makonyama, the one who threatens on both 
sides, — Mombomakhele, the one who has curly hair on the 
head, the terrible one, — Ntlhontlha-ba-tsha, shisa-sha-munga, 
the one who beats the fire... people are burnt by the sparks as 
by embers of the mimosa tree, — Mabala-ya-tilo, the “* stripes 
of heaven”, — Mabata-bata, the one with many spots, etc. 
Many of these names are suggested by the colouring of the ani- 
mals (1). I never heard songs in praise of the cattle similar to 
those found amongst the Ba-Suto for instance. It does not seem 
that oxen have at any time played such an important part in 
the tribal life of the Thonga as is the case amongst Zulus or 
Sutos. 

Women, especially those of the childbearing age and having 
sexual relations, are not allowed to take care of oxen. It is 
taboo. When they require dung to smear the huts, they send 
little children or girls free as yet from menses or at any rate 

(1) Native cattle are by no means of pure breed. There are many races 
which have been crossed: a small race with short horns and another with 
large lyre-shaped horns, probably brought from the Transvaal to the coast of 
Delagoa Bay. Madagascar oxen, with their strange prominence on the back, 
resembling zebus, have also been imported in great numbers into Lourenco 
Marques for butcher’s purposes. Possibly some have been used for breeding. 

unmarried, to fetch it in the oxen kraal. When oxen are sick, 
they are entrusted to the care of little girls who sometimes must 
stay with them as long as two months without returning home. 
We have already met with these feminine taboos concerning 
oxen, I. p. 185 and 190. 

The object of oxen-breeding is not milk but the acquisition 
of wealth... as oxen mean wealth to the Native, a means of 
purchasing girls and of thus increasing his family. Oxen are also 
bred for food, the meat being highly appreciated and divided 
amongst all the members of the family according to the strict 
rules previously explained (I. p. 299). The slaughtering is 
done by piercing the heart with an assagai, a painful and 
sometimes very protracted operation. This occurs at marriage 
feasts, at other family and national gatherings, at the sacrifice 
for the rain (Part VI), and on special occasions, once a year 
for instance, when a headman wants to feast his people. All, 
even neighbours who are not relatives, and travellers are wel- 
come to the feast. Natives have wonderful olfactory powers. 
They seem to smell out the Jiswna, viz., the peculiar odour of 
the meat, a mile off, and when an ox has been killed you see 
them emerging from the bush on all sides! 

As regards milk, it certainly plays a part in the alimentation 
of the villages which are fortunate enough to possess a well 
filled oxen kraal. The milking of the cows presents difficulties 
unknown in Europe! African cows have not yet learned to 
submit tamely to this operation! The calf must always be 
allowed to suck a few mouthfuls, then a boy pulls it away from 
the teat and the cow consents to be milked. Should a cow be 
too wild, they pass a string through its nostrils and so keep it 
quiet during the whole operation. The milk is generally receiv- 
ed in a large wooden bowl. It is very seldom consumed as a 
liquid, but is eaten when thickened by coagulation. The fresh 
milk is poured into a calabash with an opening at the bottom 
closed by a cork: a certain quantity of whey has been kept in 
the calabash and this causes the fresh milk to curdle at once. 
When curdled but not yet firm, it is called shitjubi and is 
eaten with spoons by men and women. But it is left to decom- 

pose: the whey (mulaza) soon separates from the thick part 
which becomes entirely solid and is then called nijlwamba. The 
cork at the bottom of the calabash is removed, the mulaza flows 
out freely and is drunk by the men and herd boys. The ntjh- 
wamba is put into a plate and each man or woman, not having 
her tihweti (I. p. 187), approaches and takes a spoonful of 
it. A woman during menstruation must never drink milk, nor 
during her confinement or until her child has been presented 
to the moon (I. p. 51). 

The milk of the first week after a cow has calved js taboo. It 
must not be mixed with other cows’ milk, because the umbilical] 
cord of the calf has not yet fallen. It’can, however, be boiled 
and consumed by children as they do not count! After that 
milk is never boiled: not that there is any taboo to fear, but it 
is not customary. Natives do not give any clear reason for 
these milk taboos. They have no objection to selling their milk 
to strangers ; on the contrary, they are so eager to make money 
out of it that they often add water to it, and any European 
having had dealings with them in milk matters would have his 
story to tell ! 

Goat’s milk is left for the herd boys ; men do not taste it. 

Il. Other domestic animals. 

Besides oxen, the Ba-Ronga breed goats (mbuti, yin-tin), the 
care of which is relegated to the small boys (I. p. 61). Every 
one, so to speak, possesses one or more goats, whilst oxen are 
much more rarely met with. 

Native goats are very small and frequently attacked by a 
disease called ndlwabane which decimates whole herds. They 
are not tended with enough care, although a special hut (mhala) 
is sometimes built to protect them from the rain. 

Goats are killed by piercing the heart : this is at any rate the 
ritual way of killing them (1. p. 158). The officiating person 
stands on the right of the animal and stabs it in the left side, 
holding the left leg. The animal suffers acutely ; but goats are 

often slaughtered by cutting the throat, not from any feelings 
of compassion, but in order to prevent them crying too long, 
as “this would surely bring many people on the spot and you 
would have to share the meat with them!” (Mboza). 

If the ox plays an important part in the social life, the goat 
seems to be specially reserved for the sacrifices, that is to say 
for religious usages. This ritual use authorises us to suppose 
that, as millet seems to be the oldest cereal, the goat is the most 
ancient domestic animal amongst the Thonga, and, no doubt, 
amongst all South African Bantu. 

The gall bladder, the astragalus, the half digested grass found 
in its intestines, strips made of its skin, all play a special part 
in the ceremonies and superstitious practices of the tribe previ- 
ously mentioned. The gall bladder (nyongwa) is fixed in 
the hair of the person in whose honour the goat was slaugh- 
tered. The astragalus (nhlolo) is tied to the wrist, at the ankle 
or the waist asa means of protection. The psanyi (haif digested 
grass) is taken from the shihlakahla stomach and is used in 
connection with the invocation to the gods in the sacrifices. 
(See Part VI, Compare also L p. rr1, 160-162). 

Sheep, hamba, yin-tin, (Ro.) nyimpfu, yin-tin, (Dj.) are scarce 
in our tribe, and are mostly without wool. The wool sheep is 
called shitlapu. It is not taboo for subjects to possess sheep, 
but this animal is connected in a special manner with the chiets. 
Its astragalus designates royal personages in the set of divina- 
tory bones. It is used in the national sacrifices, those offered to 
the chief’s ancestors at the capital. (See Part VI). Let us re- 
mind the reader that its skin is used to carry a child in case of 
bovumba (I. p. 191). 

The pig, as previously mentioned, is a new comer in the 
Bantu village. Its name, mgu/uve, means the wild pig. However 
most villages possess one or two of them. They are never 
slaughtered in connection with sacrifices. 

Poultry (tihuku) is the most common of all live stock. Not a 
village is without its fowl house (shihahlu); these are generally 
fashioned like a small hut and perched on piles to protect the poul- 
try during the night from snakes. (See illustration I. p. 282). 

ee 

When a hen and her brood of young chickens have to be 
cared for, a much smaller hut is made on the ground, but the 
utmost precaution is taken to keep it almost hermetically sealed, 
as the mhamba (a long green snake, very venomous) and the 
shipyahla (Echnida arietans, large viper resembling the pufi- 
adder) do great execution amongst fowls! As cows are not 
bred for milking purposes, neither are chickens raised for the 
sake of their eggs. In fact Thonga consider it sheer waste to 
eat eggs and always allow the hens to hatch them out. Hens 
are more wild than they are with us and often make their nests 
in the open country, returning some fine day with a flourishing 
young family. The breed is of very small size and the eggs are 
tiny: it would require at least two to equal the weight of one 
ordinary egg such as are for sale in the European markets ; it is 
therefore evidently more advantageous to hatch eggs than to 
eat them! If, by any chance, a hen dies on the nest from the 
bite of a snake, the Natives will willingly devour the half 
hatched or three quarters addled eggs; the more the chicken is 
formed, the greater the appreciation of the delicacy, for, says 
the Thonga, ‘fi nyama!” — “this is meat!” Fowls are 
extensively used as timhamba, viz., sacrificial offerings. The 
throat is cut; a little of the down plucked off the neck is dip- 
ped into the blood, approached to the mouth for the perfomance 
of the tsu rite, one of the smaller feathers of the wing (shih- 
luwa), one of the claws and the beak are tied together and fixed 
to the wrist, or the ankle or to the neck, of the person for the 
sake of whom the offering has been made. (Part VI). 

Thonga assert that they have always possessed fowls. ‘‘ They 
have made their appearance together with men” — “ti tumbu- 
lukile ni banhu”’, they say. But we know that the critical sense 
is absent from their minds, so we cannot rely on any such 
absolute dictum. ‘‘ The Hofitwana had them” they add; and 
this we can believe, as the Hofiwana have still kept more or 
less apart from the invaders of the XVth or XVIth century (I. 
p- 330) and can have preserved their traditions. This shows that 
poultry was known in Delagoa Bay 300 or 400 years ago. Not 
having seen the Portuguese chronicles of 1550-1600, I cannot 

say whether they make any allusion to the presence of fowls at 
that date (1). 

F. HUNTING AND FISHING. 

Whatever may be the antiquity of cattle breeding amongst 
South African Natives, there has been a time when they had no 
domestic animals at all. Then, however, there were plenty of 
antelopes, elephants, hippopotami in the country and they 
satisfied their craving for meat by hunting. Hunting was 
undoubtedly more developed in those remote times than now, 
and it was accompanied with customs and rites which are still 
to be found in some places, though rapidly disappearing, and 
in which are embodied some of the most curious animistic ideas 
of the tribe. 

I. Big Game Hunting. 

Big game is plentiful in Thonga territory, of course more so 
in the remote places (mananga) than in the populated areas. 
Elephants are still found in the desert, in Hlengweland and 
Maputju; hippopotami swarm in the Nkomati and Limpopo ; 
antelopes of subtropical Africa still abound North of Khosen 
and in the low plains of Zoutpansberg: the sable antelope, 
(mhalamhala), water buck (mhetlwa), koedee, gnu (hongonyi), 
red buck (nhlangu), etc. The duyker (mhunti) is met with 
everywhere. The smaller antelopes are the shipeya, mangulwe, 
etc. The giraffe (nhutlwa) and the buffalo (nyari) are still found 
North of Khosen, but are decreasing in number (2). 

The most ancient way of killing game was the marindji trap, 
viz., a large hole dug in the earth covered with branches and full 
of pointed poles upon which the animal fell and impaled itself. 

(1) As regards Pedi-Suto of Zoutpansberg, the introduction of fowls amongst 
them is quite modern and they admit that they owe them to the Malemba who 
brought them into the country about 150 years ago. See my paper in 
‘* Folklore ” Sept, 1908. 

(2) See Part VI, Chap. I for the scientific names of the animals which are 
alluded to in this paragraph. 

ee WS ee 
This was already known to the Hofiwana, three or four centuries 
ago, before they possessed any iron weapon. They used to kill 
elephants in that way and, being unable to dismember them, 
they made a fire all round the beast to cook it on the spot ! 

In order “‘ to make the game forget”, viz., to circumvent its 
wariness (djibata), certain magical charms are used in connection 
with the trap. The fence which surrounds it is smeared over 
with a powder made from a human placenta. A hunter's wife 
carefully preserves the afterbirth of her children; she bakes it 
on the evening of the day of delivery, hides it during the follow- 
ing day, dries it the next evening, puts it between two pieces 
of a broken pot, and hangs it to the roof. When the father 
returns from his hunting trip, he makes a powder of it, mixes 
it with other drugs, and uses it to smear the fence of the trap, 
also his arrows, or his gun. Should an antelope be wounded 
by a projectile covered with this drug, it is sure to fall at once! 
This powerful medicine is called ndzedzena and it is deemed so 
important that a hunter’s wife who loses the afterbirth must 
pay a fine of one hoe: the hunter will try to obtain the pla- 
centa of another woman: so it is not necessary that the after- 
birth be that of his own wife (Viguet). 

The marindji traps are rarely met with in Thongaland; they 
are still used in the South of Maputju country, and in the 
Hlengwe territory. I never came across any myself. Generally 
Natives use iron traps which they buy in the European stores, 
some of which are quite sufficiently strong to catch a duyker or 
a wild pig. They smear them with another charm, the buriba, 
a kind of brownish moss growing on the roots of a tree called 
shivumbunkanye. It also is said to have the power of ‘‘ making 
the game forget”. 

I have described some other traps when dealing with boys’ 
games. 

But the great means of securing game are the hunting trips 
undertaken by the men who are regular hunters. Any one can 
be an ordinary hunter (muhloti, mu-ba), but there are men 
who are called phisa (dji-ma). It seems that certain individuals 
particularly deserve this title, having made of hunting a kind 

of trade. I do not know of any special ceremony of initiation 
being necessary in order to become a regular hunter. However, 
as we shall see, the phisa form a class by themselves, having 
their own medicines and their special way of living. They 
sometimes live in particular villages, especially the hunters of 
hippopotami, and partake more or less of the nature of magici- 
ans. One of them was Mubandane, a relation of Mboza who 
lived in Nondwana. As is customary with many Natives of 
the neighbourhood of Lourengo Marques, he was hunting 
elephants for a Portuguese trader, named Fonseca, who provided 
him with guns and powder. When ready to undertake his 
hunting trip to the North of Gazaland (Mosapa), he had to 
undergo a purification (hlambo). His medicine-man cooked a 
pot full of his drugs, washed him with the froth and poured 
the contents of the pot on the roof, over the entrance of the 
hunter’s hut. Mubandane had then to stoop and enter his hut, 
the water leaking through the grass and falling on his shoulders. 
These words were pronounced by the medicine-man, during 
this ritual entry into the hut: ‘‘Go and be happy! Though 
the rain fall on you, though the dew make you wet, when you 
sleep, you will be everywhere as in a hut; everywhere it will 
be like home (kaya). You will have taken your hut with you, 
you will enter it ina wet state!” This ceremony of purification 
is a protection against the dangers of the bush. After having 
undergone it, the hunters start with their rattles and singing 
special songs, the hunters’ songs (Part V). The sacrifice of a 
fowl is sometimes made before starting. It is taboo for adults 
to eat the meat of that fowl: this might compromise the 
success of the expedition. Leet little children eat it: they are 
quiet (viz., they have no sexual relations), and so the hunting 
will not be spoilt. 

Hunters carry their charms with them, especially their ndjao, 
the root of a certain juncus, which enable them to overcome 
the dangers of the bush. They also inoculate their wrists 
with the mysterious tintjebe powder (I. p. 451). 

During his expedition the phisa is subject to special taboos. 
Firstly to those applying to travellers in general, especially the 

eg 
salt taboo. (See later on). Should he take salt with him, this 
would ‘‘ precede him” —- “‘rangela”, and he would kill no 
game. It will be soon enough to look for salt after having 
killed! Moreover he must not have sexual relations with any 
woman, be it his own wife or other women. ‘‘ We have seen 
it”, says Mboza, ‘‘many hunters who had transgressed that 
law were killed by the wild animals!” He adds: ‘* The 
hunter must forget everything about home. Were he to have 
relations with women, his charms would get heated, whilst 
they must remain cool (titimeta). Himself he must become a 
man of the bush (wa nhoba), similar to the animals which are 
found there. In this way, they will not fear him, nor will he 
fear them. If he sees a lion devouring an antelope, he will 
dare to approach it, kneel before it, clasp his hands and say: 
“You, lion! give me some meat, that I may eat; [am hungry!’ 
The lion slowly goes away and leaves the antelope to him!” 
So the maphisa kill game, cut the meat into strips which they 
take home. When returning they stop at the great entrance of 
the village, shouting their ‘‘mikulungwane”, and camp outside. 
The headman comes to them, greets them and offers a hen in 
sacrifice on their behalf, to thank his gods for having saved 
them from death. Should the ‘phisa have stayed very long 
away from home, he may find that his wives have had children 
by other men during his absence. But this does not matter, 
as his wives are not subject to the same law of continence as 
he is during his long trip. 

Let us now see what rules are enforced when big game has 
been successfully killed. 

The eland is a splendid beast, highly coveted but dangerous 
to kill. Hear Viguet: ‘It possesses the nuru. When you kill 
it, it is taboo to walk round its body. Go straight to its head, 
and there, in the hair of the forehead, you will find a louse ; 
take it. Then dig the earth where the head has fallen: you 
will find a root there; cut it and bring it home together with 
the louse. You are safe! Having reached home, you ask the 
medicine-man to prepare a charm with the root and the louse : 
he will Jurulula you, viz., free you from the nuru. Should you 

omit this treatment you may lose your head, be unable to find 
the way home or, when you are back, you may forget every- 
thing about your hunting trip. People willsay to you: ‘U ni 
nyanyunyu’, — “you are cracked’; you act as if you had 
killed an eland and had not been Jurulula, delivered from its 
nuru !”’ — Another rule in connection with the eland is this ; 
should one of these animals have been killed whilst you were 
bringing your wife home, you must cut off a piece of its skin 
and make a bracelet of it, which you tie round your wrist. 
Then you can eat your meal with your wife. To-morrow go 
with her to an ant-hill and fix this piece of skin to it with two 
wooden pegs, one on either side. In the middle between the 
two pegs, set fire to the skin by means ofa burning brand. You 
are then saved. You have lurulula yourselves. If you do not 
take that precaution, your child will be miserable : it will dry 
up, viz., be so thin that all his tendons will become visible. — 
Never let your children eat eland’s meat, before they have been 
inoculated with a preventative drug! Everything connected 
with that beast is dangerous : when you follow its tracks, if you 
see that it is tired and that saliva has fallen from its mouth, 
take care not to tread on it. It is taboo: you will be seized 
by an invincible sleep. The reason of these dangers is that the 
eland has a pouch of fat round its heart called bufu (same root 
as mhofu, yin-tin, name of the eland). This fat is something 
very remarkable! Hence all these rules! On the other hand, 
should an eland be found dead, transfixed, no nuru need be 
feared. 

We have already met with the ndakazi antelope taboos. This 
ndakazi, or shidyanaman, must not be killed intentionally 
amongst the Nkuna (1. p. 339) lest the hunter and his whole 
family should shortly die. We have seen how the danger can 
be avoided where the antelope has been unintentionally killed. 
Shouting: *f Alack! my mother! with whom shall I eat it?” 
can overcome the nurw. Clever hunters know a second way ot 
attaining the same end; it is to dig the soil near its nose (the 
same way as for the eland) and cut the root you find there: 
“This root has received the nuru (or the spirit, breath) of the 

— = 59 — 

animal. When you have finished cutting off the limbs of the 
antelope, you arrange the dung (psanyi) found in the bowels, 
handling it with this root. In former times- hunters used to 
throw its limbs on all sides: this would ‘spread (hangalasa) 
the nuru” (Mankhelu). Amongst the Hlabi, the ndakazi is 
called hingakaya, viz., closing the way home. It is not taboo to 
kill it, but the hunter must cry, when throwing the assagai : 
“ Kaya! Mawako!” — “ May I return home!” If the antelope 
is swifter than the man and runs away (with a sound like 
kha!) the hunter will be lost in the bush: the animal will have 
hinga kaya viz., closed the way home. It will be necessary to 
lurulula the hunter, whether he has killed the antelope or not. 

Some other animals also possess the wonderful nuru, espe- 
cially the elephant, the duyker antelope and the hippopotamus. 
Let us see how the lurulula is performed in these three cases. 

In former times the lurulula was practised in the following 
way as regards the elephant: the hunter used to take a little of 
the tintjebe powder (the charm of the slayers), pierce the eye 
of the beast, mix the powder with the vitreous humour, add 
drugs prepared with the end of the trunk and of the tail, and 
this was used to overcome the nuru. Nowadays elephants are 
kalled with guns, and no lurulula is deemed necessary any 
more (Viguet). 

As for duykers the operation consists in blowing chewed ndjao 
(root of juncus) over it; you blow pieces of the root over the 
head, the forehead, the anus, and the sides of the body. Should 
the hunter have killed the antelope after a Jong pursuit, the 
dog who started the chase must also be lurulula. The hunter 
cuts off one of the hoofs of the duyker, makes a notch in the 
cleft of the hoof and blows. the ndjao into it : then he buries 
the hoof, calls the dog and shows it the place where it has 
been buried. The dog will then scratch, find the hoof and 
run away with it. This lurulula will help both the hunter 
and the dog to become greater adepts in hunting, the dog 
learning to follow the trail and the hunter identifying himself 
so much with bush life and bush animals that these will not 
be afraid of him and he will be able to approach them. 

ts) es 

I owe to Mboza the graphic description of the rules of hippo- 
potamus hunting. ‘There are a few villages, near the Nkomati 
or other rivers, whose inhabitants are regular hippopotamus 
hunters, and possess the special science, or art, called butimba ; 
the hunters themselves are called batimba. This science is he- 
reditary : it is taught by the father to his sons. These men 
possess a peculiar drug, the mbangulwa, by which, when the 
hunter is inoculated, he acquires a special power over the 
hippopotami: should he wound one of them, the beast will 
not be able to go very far, and it will be possible to follow it 
and soon to find it. But these inoculations make that man 
very dangerous for his fellow men: should he beat any one, 
that person will be at once seized by a disease which will pre- 
vent him passing water or evacuating stools. 

This is the manner in which these batimba hunt. During 
the day, the hunter fishes, watching the movements of the 
hippopotami all the time. When he sees that the propitious 
season has come and when he is ready to undertake a hunting 
expedition of one month, he first calls his own daughter to his 
hut and has sexual relations with her. This incestuous act, 
which is strongly taboo in ordinary life, has made of him a 
‘““ murderer” : he has killed something at home; he has 
acquired the courage for doing great deeds on the river ! 
Henceforth he will have no sexual relations with his wives 
during the whole campaign. On the same night, immediately 
after the act, he starts with his sons ; they close the drift where 
the beasts leave the river by putting a canoe across the track. 
The hippopotami are in the neighbouring forest, busy pastur- 
ing, and perhaps ravaging fields. When they return to the 
river, they stop in front of the canoe which obstructs their 
retreat: then a first assagai is thrown at them. It has been 
smeared over with Strophantus powder (ntjulu) (1) which is 
a great poison. The animal rushes to the water; when it 
reappears on the other side, it is pierced by a second assagai. 
These assagais are arranged in such a way that the blade is 

(1) The ntjulu, Strophantus petersianus, is a shrub with drooping branches 
which grows abundantly in the Morakwen forest. 

aor, Gp 

not firmly fixed to the handle; moreover a long string is 
twined round the handle connecting the blade with it. So, 
when the hippopotamus enters the river, the assagai which 
is planted in its skin, separates from the handle which remains 
floating and acts as a buoy, the string unwinding and the handle 
following the animal in its retreat, showing in what direction 
it has gone. 

As soon as the assagai is thrown, the hunter runs to his 
village to inform his wife. The woman must at once shut 
herself up in the hut and remain perfectly quiet. She must 
neither eat nor drink, nor crush her mealies : this would induce 
the hippopotamus to fight, and might cause the death of her hus- 
band, whilst, if she keeps quiet (rula), the beast also will be 
quiet. Then all the hunters of the village are called, they enter 
the canoe and follow the beast. To facilitate the pursuit, they 
replace the floating handle of the assagai by a male, viz., the 
big nervule of the leaf of the mimale palm tree, similar to a board 
of 30 feet in length. As soon as this kind of pole is fixed, 
somebody informs the woman at home that she can come out 
of the hut. But let her be prudent, as victory is not yet won. 
The hippopotamus will come to the surface to breathe: an 
assagai will be thrown into his nostrils, a second one later on, 
and it will be no longer able to close its nose when plunging : so 
it will be drowned. But it may attack the hunters furiously, led 
by spirits of baloyi (wizards) which are riding on it “ just as 
men ona horse”?! The fight will perhaps last long ! 

When the hippopotamus has been dragged on to the sand of 
the bank, the principal hunter proceeds to the lurulula. The 
beast is laid on its back, its legs pulled on both sides, so as to 
separate them from each other, and the hero introduces himself 
between them, from behind, and creeps along the belly and the 
chest as far as the teeth. Then he goes away. The object of 
the lurulula is this: “‘ By this operation the hunter takes on 
himself the defilement of the animal (its smell, its nature ?) so 
that the other hippopotami, when seing him, do notnotice him; 
they mistake him for one of themselves and this man will have 
great courage and not run away when they come to him, urged 

 62) = 

on by the baloyi who have enslaved them and who are like 
flames of fire on their backs! ” (Mboza). 

The information concerning the hippopotamus and the duyker 
comes from a Ronga of the Coast, that regarding the eland and the 
ndakazi from Mankhelu and Viguet, belonging to the Northern clans. 
It seems as if there were a difference of ideas between these different 
parts of the tribe. The primitive conception seems to me to be that 
of the Northern clans. Some animals possess a vital principle, a kind 
of spiritual entity, which escapes from their body after they have been 
pierced and causes danger to the hunter who killed them, just as the 
nuru of the slain persecutes their slayers (I. p. 453). Hence these 
strange protective rites of lurulula, a word which evidently derivates 
from the root Juru (which becomes nuru by the addition of the pre- 
fix mu. of the mu-mi class, see my Thonga-Shangaan Grammar § 35). 
Lurulula is a doubly reversive derivate (Grammar § 208) which means 
precisely to take away, to wash away. The aim of the rite is to free 
the hunters from the vengeance of the slain animal. For the Ronga, 
the lurulula seems to be, rather, a means of identification of the hunter 
with the animal world, so that he will be able to live in its midst 
without being noticed. This might be a first development of the pri- 
mitive notion. This notion seems to have undergone a further alter- 
ation in the explanation just given with regard to the hippopotamus : 
the object of the lurulula is no longer to protect against the nuru 
itself, viz., the vital principle of the animal, its ‘‘ double ” which 
remains living after its death, but to quiet (rulisa) the other hippo- 
potami, and to overcome the baloyi spirits, viz., wizards who en- 
slave beasts and use them as mounts for their criminal nightly expe- 
ditions. I could not say whether this is a confusion of two animistic 
notions, or an evolution in the superstition. 

The lurulula is the great hunter’s rite. There is a second to 
be performed before they can enjoy the flesh of their victim, 
the Juma. The luma is the removal of a food taboo by a rite 
which must accompany the first mouthful taken. It is obliga- 
tory for the first fruits, for the food left by a deceased person, 
etc. (I. p. 146, 366.) This precaution is also necessary in the 
case of game. The hunter who transfixed the hippopotamus is 
the first to luma. He takes the diaphragm of the animal (map- 

falo, same word which also designates the conscience, the inter- 
nal troubles of the mind), and puts a piece of it into his mouth 
then he plunges into the river, and eats this meat while under 
the water, “‘ as if he were a fish”. Having accomplished the 
feat, he emerges triumphant. His sons and the inmates of his 
village, Juma after him. They take a portion of the flesh of 
the neck, called shipelo, from the place where the hippopotamus 
pushes the mud in front of it, and which is supposed to be the 
seat of its strength. This they mix with the mbangulwa medi- 
cine and, standing in a line, they all eat a little of it, men, 
women, and children. All the neighbours assemble : they have 
smelled out the meat! ‘The portion for the chief is put aside 
(I. p. 378), as the hippopotamus is very heavily taxed, and must 
even be cut open by the men of the capital. Then every one 
receives a piece of the flesh, and luma, either by smearing the 
sole of the foot with it, or by taking a small live ember and 
mixing it with the meat. The object of the luma rite is to 
remove the danger of eating meat to which you are not accus- 
tomed: it might ‘‘ hate you (benga)” and cause colics. The 
taboo is not very strict, as there is only danger of colics and not 
of death. Luma is necessary for elephants, when eating the meat 
for the first time, but not for lions or panthers. For elephants 
it is performed by smearing the soles of the feet with the meat. 
Another custom of Bantu hunters is the thokoza or shimemo. 
It consists in this : when a big animal has been killed, the hun. 
ter gives aloud shout. It is a call addressed by him to his 
fellow clansmen to come and help him to master the beast, ot 
which they will partake. This is also intended to exclude men 
of other clans, and to prevent fighting or any dispute about the 
possession of the animal. The cry therefore differs in each 
clan. For the Ba-Nkuna, 
it is : Nyandlaleyo. For 
the Tsungu : Hi nhlanga ! 
For the Manukosi people : 
Muyamba ngwenya ya nam- 
bu wa tingwenya |! — Cro- 
codile of the river of cro- 

ce 

Buffalo hunter with his victim. 

= “Ge 

codiles! For the Mavundja : Kahlaniba ntjhaba yo nonoha |! — 
the big mountain, difficult to climb! (1) 

I]. Psinyama-nyamana. Small meats. 

This word which comes from the well-known Bantu word 
nyama, meat, is a triple diminutive, obtained by the redupliv 
cation of the stem, the prefix ps7, and the suffix ana! It means 
all kinds of lesser meats, viz., of animals of small size, of which 
Thonga are very fond. 

Anything in any way resembling meat is welcome to them. 
Amongst Mammalia they specially enjoy certain kinds of rodents, 
not the domestic rats, but field mice called maphephe and mabuti 
which boys catch in their traps. Civet cats (nsimba, yi-tin) and 
wild cats (goya, dji-ma) are not frequently seen near the villages. 

As regards birds, they eat them all with the few exceptions 
which I will shortly mention, from the tiniest sparrow to ducks 
and Guinea fowls which they manage to snare. They have no 
aversion to the lower animals: they gather the matomane, large 
caterpillars belonging to a species of Saturnidae called Urota 
Sinope, which are found in families on the nkanye tree, during 
October. By exercising a gentle pressure on the hideous crea- 
tures, the inwards are squeezed out, and the rest is thrown into 
a saucepan and boiled, making a nameless broth of a blackish 
colour. To see it is quite sufficient... and they enjoy it! 
Several other kinds of Saturnidae also figure at their feasts : the 
matomane of nyamari (Anthoaera caffraria), others of a brick 
red colour (A. menippe), those of the nhlangula shrub (A. Zam- 
bezina), etc. When the cooks go out to split the trunks of 
old half decayed nkanye trees, whence they get their kindlings, 

(1) The Pedi have the same custom. The Bakhaha cry : ‘‘ Haratsha! 
Mugoni! We”! This expression comes from the verb rutsha, to cross a 
river on a tree trunk, as the Khaha clan is said to have been arrested by a 
swollen river in its ancient migrations and to have ratsha it successfully. The 
remembrance of this feat of their ancestors has remained and has given rise to 
this rallying cry. Other Pedi say : ‘* Sivandja khomo”, viz., ‘* the killer will 
be given an ox for his reward.” 

they are most careful to put on one side the big white larvae 
of two large Cerambycidae coleoptera (Mallodon Downesii and 
Plocoederus :frenatus, etc.) These enormous white worms 
(shipungu) will be fried in their own fat, and served up as a 
titbit for these ladies on their return to the village. 

The insect world does great harm to the gardens through the 
agency of its winged members, the Jocusts, and Natives avenge 
themselves by eating them wholesale. When a swarm of these 
destructive creatures has alighted somewhere in the evening, and 
is benumbed by the cool air of the night, the villagers go and 
collect them in bags or baskets in great quantities. The heads, 
the wings and the legs are torn off and the bodies roasted on 
the embers, or boiled and used as seasoning. When plentiful, 
the locusts are dried and crushed in mortars to make a very 
much appreciated flour. To our taste, locusts are essentially 
nauseating. 

Another treat, the secret of which the Nkuna learnt from 
their Pedi neighbours, is provided by the males of white ants. 
At Christmas time, these insects come out by thousands from 
the ant-hills of that region. Some are of small size : the boys 
introduce grasses, smeared with glue, into the holes from which 
these insects emerge and catch plenty of them by this kind of 
fishing. They eat the head, which can be heard cracking be 
tween their teeth, and throw the bodies into a calabash to season 
the evening meal. But there is a larger kind which is even more 
appreciated. The body is whitish, as large as an almond. A hole 
in the ant-hill, three feet wide by two feet deep, is dug at the 
place where the insects are most likely to come out. An old 
pot is placed in the clay of the ant-hill at the bottom of this 
hole. The hole itself-is covered with green branches. These 
curious male termites, as soon as they have emerged from their 
retreat, try to fly; but they soon fall to the ground and you see 
them running towards each other and shedding their slender 
transparent wings, so that they remain on the spot, like worms, 
creeping slowly along, unable to defend themselves, an easy 
prey for the birds and the shinana toads, which have a grand feast 
on the happy day when male termites appear! Those which 

THONGASDREB Es Ii = 

roe 

happen to emerge where the hole has been dug, try to escape 
by flying, but are prevented from so doing by the covering ot 
leaves. They at once fall heavily to the bottom and roll into 
the pot which may become quite full in afew hours. The owner 
of the trap then comes and makes a splendid sauce with its con- 
tents! This kind of termite is not met with on the Coast. 

I cannot enter into the details of all these more or less doubt- 
ful meats. (See I, p. 65, the mention of the Shitambela beetle). 

Although the caterpillars, coleoptera, larvae, and locusts are 
universally appreciated, there are other ‘‘ meats” which ap- 
peal to certain individuals or clans, but are disdainfully eschewed 
by others. For instance the boa is eaten with great gusto by the 
Ronga and disliked by the Nkuna. The same with the big varan 
lizard. The tortoise is generally eaten, but the Mpfumu boys, 
who esteem themselves more civilised, reject it. Inquiring why 
some persons or some clans exclude certain kinds of meats which 
other people or clans consider delectable, we find that there are 
two different reasons for it which it is important to differentiate : 
The exclusion is due either to a myenya, viz., a disgust, or to 
a yila, viz., a taboo. 

1) Owing to disgust, some people refuse to eat pork : “ their 
hearts fear it”, probably because pigs are modern and some peo- 
ple are not yet accustomed to eat their flesh. Zulus reject every 
kind of fish (nhlampfi) from the same feeling of disgust. Snails 
are despised by all the Thonga; it is true that the snail of the 
country is not very tempting, its shell being of a transparent 
green and its flesh reddish; moreover it is said to ‘* singita”, 
viz., to bring bad luck to any one meeting with it on the way. 

But the flesh of some other animals is abstained from, even 
dreaded, because they yila, they are taboo. Thonga have no to- 
tems, and do not exclude certain meats from their diet on ac- 
count of totemic fears. But they proclaim as taboo some animals : 
amongst them four kinds of birds, the hawk, the vulture, the 
crow and the stork, because they are used by magicians to pre- 
pare powerful charms; the toad, because when teased its ‘‘ urine” 
(murundju) oozes out and is dangerous, causing itch, as it is 
generally believed; a kind of Tenebrionida beetle (Psammodes 

Bertoloni), called shifufunu sha baribarr, because it beats the 
ground with its abdomen making a noise represented : by the 
word baribarr. I could not discover the particular danger that 
Natives fear in connection with this beetle, but there must be 
one: hence the yila. We have already met with the special 
feminine taboos as regards food (I. p. 184). Women abstain 
from certain animals, or parts of animals, fearing a bad effect 
on parturition. Amongst the Nkuna, women are also afraid 
of the meat of the panther, the civet-cat, of any animal with 
paws (psa marubo) ; they only eat animals which have hoofs 
(psa masondjo). ‘‘ The former are wild beasts, things of the 
hubo, with a bad smell, meat for the men ” (Mankhelu). 

The comparison of nyenya and yila is interesting, as it may help 
to explain the origin of certain taboos, which is a very Important 
subject indeed. The nyenya is the feeling of disgust which induces a 
person to abstain froma given food; in the yila there is, in addition, 
the dread of a supposed danger connected with the consumption of 
this food. Thus there is a great difference between the two : the idea 
of danger does not exist in the nyenya. Howeverit is quite possible 
that that, which was merely a nyenya, has evolved, in the course of 
time, into a real yila or taboo, when the disgust is no longer the mere 
individual repulsion for a distasteful food, but has become a social mat- 
ter, a characteristic custom ofa clan, or of a group. 

Let me quote two instances which came under my personal notice. 
Amongst my servants was a young man belonging to the Ngoni clan, 
The Ba-Ngoni, being of Zulu origin, do not eat fish. Sometimes the 
cook put shrimps into the ground nut sauce : this was a treat forall 
the boys, as they are very fond of shrimps and the addition greatly im- 
proved the flavour of the dish. But our Ngoni boy, having smelt the 
‘‘lisuna ”’, used to inquire about the sauce, and if he heard that there 
were shrimps in it he disdainfully refused to take his share. — ‘‘ We 
are Ba-Ngoni! We do not eat fish”, said he with disgust. Firstly, 
shrimps are not fish; he was ‘‘ plus royaliste queleroi”! Secondly, 
he did not abstain from the sauce because it had a bad flavour : it was 
more tasty than ever! But the social idea dictated his attitude! He 
boasted of belonging to a superior race! He was not like these 
wretched Ba-Thonga who eat fish! It would be lowering himself to 
partake of sucha meal, so he preferred to fast ! 

gs 

I witnessed the same scene when we were distributing cakes to our 
school children in Lourenco Marques. One of the girls was the daugh- 
ter of apure Ronga woman, and ofanIndian Mussulman. She inguir- 
ed if the cakes had been cooked with lard. The cakes were excellent, 
and she found them so, nevertheless she refused to eat if they con- 
tained any lard, because her father was not allowed to eat pork. Itis 
evident that from this clan repulsion, which is still a nyenya, to a 
distinct taboo, there is but one step. _ Let the boy or the girl fear that 
some evil will happen to them, because they have transgressed a sa- 
cred rule, and the nyenya will have become a yila. Let it be admitted 
by them that the transgression of the rule may bring death to the fa- 
mily or to the clan, the primitive individual feeling of disgust will be 
transformed into the most severe totemic taboo. Ihave no instance to 
quote in order to prove this evolution, as we have no knowledge of 
the past history of the taboos. From the psychological point of view, 
however, this process is quite within the range of possibilities. 

Ill. Fishing. 

There are no particular restrictions so long as fishing is car- 
ried on by hooks. Any one can go with his boat on the river, 
the lake, or the sea, and throw his line into the water. The 
fisherman will then say : ‘‘ Thu! (not the sacramental tsu, but 
only an onomatopoeia describing the fall of the hook into the 
water). You! my hook! they eat to their heart’s content, 
people who dwell yonder, where they pound their mealies kneel- 
ing down (bugimamusi), there where the khwekhwe and the 
mhulu are, etc. (names of different kinds of fish).” Afterwards. 
the fisher throws a pinch of tobacco on the spot where his hook 
fell, not as an offering to the gods, but in order to help his 
hook to see (hanyanyisa), to awaken it and “ give it eyes to 
catch.” This sentence referring to the place ‘f where people 
pound their mealies standing, or kneeling down ”, is an allu- 
sion to a curious cosmographic notion, which we shall explain 
later on (Part VI. Chapt. I). Seeing the sky reflected in the water, 
the fisherman thinks of the ends of the earth, where heaven 
rests on the ground, and where women are obliged to kneek 

= 

down when crushing their mealies, lest their pestles hit the 
sky ! 

There are three other principal methods of fishing, and, as they 
are more or less of a collective nature, they are regulated by 
laws and attended with taboos : the nhangu, the shibaba and 
the tjeba. 

The nhangu is a triangular enclosure made of sticks planted in 
the sand on the seashore. This enclosure has an opening looking 
seaward. The tide covers the nhangu, bringing with it all kinds 
of sea denizens, big lobsters, shrimps of all sizes, fish, etc; when 
it retires, all these things are imprisoned in the nhangu, and 
try to find their way out through the opening : but this is clo- 
sed and the fishers collect their catch which is sometimes consi- 
derable. A man who wants to build a nhangu must pay a tax 
to the chief of the country. Moreover, on the day of inaugura- 
tion, (khangula), all the inhabitants have the right of coming 
and partaking of the result of the first fishing. This is a Juma, 
the luma of the nhangu. The owner of the trap is not allowed 
to take a single fish home that day. Everything must be con- 
sumed on the spot. 

The shibaba is another kind of trap, made of woven reeds, 
which is placed along the banks of a river, of the Nkomati, for 
instance, near the sea, where the tide reaches; when the tide is 
low, the fish is imprisoned between the reeds and the bank. 
The construction of this trap is governed by strict laws : no 
sexual relation is allowed during the five or six weeks of the 
fishing. The owner of the shibaba must cutthe first reed. Wo- 
men must not approach the spot. On the day of inauguration 
there is also a lama ceremony similar to that for the nhangu. 

But the most curious fishing custom is the tjeba. ‘‘ Ku tjeba” 
means to kill fish in company in lakes which are drying up. 
At the end of the winter most of the small lakes, scattered all 
over Thongaland, diminish on account of the drought, and the 
fish they contain, consisting mostly of carp and barbel, are obli- 
ged to congregate in much smaller spaces. Natives take advan- 
tage of this and the whole country side is summoned to go and 
tjeba, on a certain day, as it is important to be as numerous 

as possible in order ensure success. The Chief orders all his men 
to make the shiranga, a kind of conical basket, one foot and 
half high, whose upper end is open and wide enough to admit 
the hand. The shiranga must be very strong and the tree used 
for the purpose is called ntjangari. When the shiranga are ready, 
a messenger is sent to all the villages, crying : 

Kho! Khoooo ! Hobe ! Hobeee! U yala nsateeee ! Na nsatia randja 
nyamooo! A randja mihlubeee! Kho! Hobe ! 

You hate your wife! Your wife also is fond of meat! She is fond 
of the meat of the tail of fishes ! 

Every male member of the tribe must answer to this sum- 
mons by going to the shore. Should he refuse the call, he is 
blamed and despised, and his companions will sing to him a 
mocking song : 

U yala ku tjeba, nyanwako ! 
You refuse to fish, nyaiwako. (1) 

In the evening his wife will scold him, seeing that he 
does not bring any fish home! She will punish him by giving 
him mealie pap without any sauce ! 

Before the throng enters the lake, someone must make an offer- 
ing; it must be a descendant of the inhabitants of the country, 
not necessarily a member of the reigning family. He does not 
perform the full sacramental tsw; he merely spits without having 
put anything into his rmouth, and says : ‘‘ Let fish abound! Let 
them not hide in the mud! Let there be enough of them to 
satisfy everyone.” Then all the men, quite nude, throw them- 
selves into the lake, which is only one or two feet deep ; they 
put their shiranga into the water and hold it firmly on the bot- 
tom : a fish has perhaps been imprisoned ; it is heard flapping 
about inside the basket. The fortunate fisher catches it through 
the opening; he carries a wooden pin to which a string is attached. 
This string is called by the technical name of nijungwa. He 
passes the pin through the gills of the fish and ties it on his 

(1) Nyanwako is a formula of insult. 

i - 
string. Then he goes on. All his companions do the same. 
The frightened fish scatter in all directions : but on all sides the 
shiranga fall over them, and the men have soon made a good 
haul. When they have reached the extremity of the lake, they 
come back shouting, the following words: ‘‘ Phindu-naye ! ” 
— **Come back, following them! ” They are allowed to 
come out of the water and rest in the rays of the sun when 
tired. The more pertinacious, however, remain in as long as 

The tjeba fishing. Phot. A, Borel. 

they like. When the fishing is finished, they all sit down and 
compare their catches. Perhaps an enormous barbel has been 
caught, ‘‘ the king of the lake’, as these fish sometimes attain 
a very large size. ‘‘ Woo! a dle fwakwe!” — ‘Oh! he has 
killed his mother”, say the men, making fun of the fortunate 
fisherman! But the Chief sends an induna who levies the tax. 
Each fisherman unties one fish from his string and gives it to 
him. 

The tjeba fishing is practised all over Thongaland, in Ronga 
territory where such ponds are numerous in the sandy hollows, 
amongst the Hlabi, and in the neighbourhood of rivers where 
there are lagoons which dry up, as far as the Maluleke country. 

—— 79 ts 
[2 

Should there be crocodiles in the pond, acase which might very 
well happen, when the lake is connected with the Limpopo or 
the Nkomati, the religious act is more important on account 
of the dangerincurred. Then the bonesare thrown and designate 
who must make the offering in order to secure adequate pro- 
tection from the gods. The officiator enters the lake first, and, 
plunging his shiranga into the water, hesays : ‘‘If you are here, 
crocodile, go away! you hyena, do not bite”. Amongst the 
Maluleke, it is a man of the Ba-Nyai tribe who must perform 
the religious act, as the Ba-Nyai were in the country before the 
Thonga. He must go first and catch a fish, bring it out alive, 
and offer it to his gods, surrounded by his Ba-Nyai fellows. 
Then he throws it back into the water. The Thonga chief then, 
having ordered his men to keep silence, makes the following 
proclamation in a loud voice : ‘‘ Let the fish abound, and kill 
them all, but do not bewitch each other ! ” 

The Hlengwe have a very curious custom when they jeba. 
They take a little boy and a little girl, lay them down together 
under a lion’s skin, as if they were husband and wife, during 
all the time they are fishing. The children keep quiet, — so the 
fish will also keep quiet and not swim away. When the fish- 
ing is concluded, these children are “awakened”, and are given 
a part of the catch: they are praised and thanked as they 
are supposed to have secured the fish by their action... or ra- 
ther by their inaction! This very significative rite might explain 
why sexual relations are prohibited during all the important 
hunting and fishing operations : with the animistic conception 
of Natives, Bantu do not separate the domain of man from the 
animal world ; human actions have their immediate repercus- 
sion amongst animals. So if men and women keep a severe con- 
trol over themselves, hippopotami, fish or elephants will not be 
so wild, and hunters will have more success ! 

Meat is either boiled (pseka), or roasted (wosha). When 
boiled, the broth is called muru, (Ro.) or sheshebo, (Dj.) the same 

name that is given to monkey nut sauce or any other seasoning. 
When roasted, it is either placed on the embers, or skewered 
on sticks (lihanga) and exposed to the heat of the fire. 

The blood of animals (bubendje) is also eaten by most men. 
However, many fear it (tshaba), not for a yila reason, as if it 
were taboo, but rather from individual loathing. There are no 
special laws to be observed, as regards bones. The meat of sa- 
crifices, offered in the funeral rites, must be eaten on the road, 
not in the mortuary nor in the guests’ villages, as we have al- 
ready seen. 

Meat is welcome, and eagerly sought after in time of famine 
(ndlala). Should the October rains fail, or the crops be des- 
troyed by grasshoppers, as has been, alas, frequently the case 
since the first appearance of these pests in August 1894 (1), 
the Natives are bereft of every resource (2). They dig up all 
the borders of the lakes, to find the tuber of the nenuphars 
(Nymphea stellata), and cook these indigestible roots (matibu). 
They have also gone so far as to make flour of the pith of the 
palm trees (mimale). They disinter the bodies of dead animals, 
or cram themselves with masala, which often engenders serious 
sicknesses. Some eat big Copris beetles. 

Such famines were frequent in former times, and special years 
are still known as having been years of ndlala. So, in the 
chronology of Shinangana (Part IV) the year 1875 (?) was 

(1) Just at the commencement of the war between the Natives and the 
Portuguese, grasshoppers arrived in thick clouds in the district of Lourenco 
Marques They had not been seen for a great number of years: old folk only 
recollected having seen them in bygone times. Since then the scourge has 
never entirely disappeared. The coincidence of their coming and the begin- 
ning of hostilities struck the Blacks very forcibly; they often said. at the sight 
of the grasshoppers: ” They announce the armies of Gungunyane. » 

(2) Here is a pretty couplet with reference to famine : 

Nkondjo wa nhlengana shipopokwana ? 

— Lembe ra ndlala a he ngume kusuhe ! 

The traces of the little antelope (nhlengana) (which one sees in the desert 
a long way from its lair) recall the year of famine, when oue does not stay 
near home; (one must go a long way to search food). See also the several 
allusions to the vear of famine in Les Chants et Contes des Ba-Ronga. pages 158, 
160 and the following. 

ee 
called “the year of the Magadingele famine”. On the Coast the 
Gonhwen famine is still remembered (1). The proximity of a 
seaport easily provisioned, and the possibility of earning money 
wherewith to buy rice and maize constitute a real advantage, 
which they are the first to recognise. In this respect civilisation 
has rendered signal service to the Thonga commissariat ! 

(1) It does not appear that starvation ever induced Thonga to practise 
cannibalism on any considerable scale. Cases are known when this happened: 
as when, during the war of 1895. a Ronga killed a man and ate his lungs and 
kidneys quite raw. He was prosecuted and deported to Mozambique. In the 
mountains Ba-Pedi and Ba-Suto began to consume human flesh after the raids 
of Chaka and his generals. They first ate the corpses; then, having acquired 
a taste for that food, they began to attack travellers, springing out from the 
caves in the mountains, where they were hiding ; they even made organised 
expeditions in search of men to devour. These cannibals are known under 
the name of Makhema and caused the Queen of the Bokhaha, Male, to change 
her residence (I. p. 452). 

GHA EER

Industry, in the human race, is born of necessity. Man feels 
the need of protection and shelter from wind and weather ; this 
need leads him to make something for a covering (clothing) 
and to build a dwelling (1 eineiten), The necessity of procur- 
ing food, of preparing it, of keeping it, suggests to him the idea 
of fashioning weapons for killing game, and utensils of various 
kinds for tillage, and for cooking the products of the soil. 

But Nature must also provide the wherewithal to be turned 
to account by man’s intelligence. The development of human 
industry depends therefore on a variety of circumstances. We 
will now study the inventions of the Thonga, what they have 
been able to evolve in the matters of clothing, habitation and 
utensils : we will also take into consideration their wood-carv- 
ings, and their exceedingly primitive commerce, and will endea- 
vour to find a solution of the several questions which will 
naturally be suggested by the extremely slow industrial develop- 
ment of these tribes. 

A. CLOTHING AND ORNAMENTS 

I. The Evolution of Costume. 

As regards women, Mboza asserts that, in remote times, 
Ronga women wore well tanned and softened skins, to which 
they hung pieces of brass, as the Pedi women actually do. For 
the present, amongst the Ronga, they areall clothed with pieces 
of material, in the rough, which they call kapulane ; the piece 

6 ee 

of stuff is fixed round the waist, whence falling down it forms 
a skirt, with which most women in the interior are satisfied. 
They do not cover the upper part of the body. The under- 
garment, on the genitalia, is called nt/homo in front, (a word 

So AO 

Phot. P. Berthoud. 

Camilla, a Lourenco Marques woman. 

which is taboo), and mphela at the back, (this term is less 
taboo than the first one). 

In the Transvaal, Thonga or Shangaan women haye also from 
time immemorial adopted European materials, of which they make 
double pleated skirts adorned with beads, as seen in the illustra- 
tion J. p. 193. This is the typical heathen costume. The Pedi 

or Suto women are at once distinguishable from their Ronga 
sisters by the fact that they have preserved their ancient skin 
dress. In the environs of Lourenco Marques, a further devel- 
opment has taken place, as women there wear a large plaid 
which they knot over the breast and which hangs down behind 
as far as their heels, a costume by no means wanting in the 
picturesque. They cover their breast and shoulders with a bodice 

Phot. |, Bennett. 
Christian girls of the Training Institution of Lemana (Northern Transvaal). 

(kimao), generally very close-fitting, especially in the sleeves. 
The pattern is said to have been borrowed from India. (See 
on opposite page the portrait of Camilla, an old resident of 
Lourengo Marques, wearing the costume adopted by the women 
in the town and suburbs.) 

Regular frocks are preferred by Christian converts, and so the 
European fashion tends to supplant the Indian, or the heathen. 

As regards men’s costume it was little else than the traditional 
smile among the Ba-Ronga! It consisted, in fact, of a small 
article made of narrow strips of palm leaf, plaited together, 
and could hardly be termed ‘‘clothing”. It was called mbaya 

a BRS 

and it bears a great resemblance to the “ libyan sheath ” 
which is seen on the old Egyptian monuments (Note J). 
The last mbaya were seen in the neighbourhood of Rikatla, 
when the war of 1894 broke out. In the Northern clans 
they were still commonly used by the generation which 
preceded Viguet, by the Nkuna who fled before Manukosi in 
1835. (See Introduction to the Grammaire Ronga, page 17). 
The Kafirs of Cape Colony were still in 1903, at this stage of 
dress... or rather undress, andthe Pedi of ‘the Transvaal: 
with their musindu (a mere piece of skin protecting the genita- 
lia), are not much in advance of the mbaya stage even now. 
This state of affairs arose in the first place from the fact that, as 
yet, any sentiment of modesty had bardly been conceived. It 
must not be supposed, however, that morals were the more 
depraved for that reason; on the contrary, they were much 
purer, and innocency far more general, judging from the reports 
of those who remember those days. 

But a second fact which allowed the Thonga to go about 
without clothing, ‘in puris naturalibus’ or nearly so, is the warmth 
of the climate ; the temperature rarely drops below 44° Fahren- 
heit and frequently rises to 113° F., the annual mean near Lou- 
renco Marques being about 74° F. according to our observations 
extending over seven years. One can thus easily dispense with 
a jacket in that part of the world, and it is by no means a rare 
occurrence to see children in the interior absolutely naked. (2) 

” 

(1) The ” phallic sheath ” of the earliest Egyptian statuettes which is. also 
noticed on the engravings of the XIXth dynasty, as belonging to African 
populations, is not exactly of the same pattern as the Thonga mbaya or the 
Suto musindu. However there is a real similarity between all these primitive 
dresses; many of the customs of the actual Bantu seem to have existed 
amongst the early Egyptians and this fact shows that the origin of Egyptian 
civilisation is partially African. 

(2) The Chopi tribe which is very industrious, dwelling in the neighbour- 
hood of the Thonga, N.E. of the mouth of the Limpopo, has succeeded in 
obtaining a very superior kind of dress by beating the bark of the mphama, a 
kind of fig-tree which is wide spread in the country, and which the Ba-Chopi 
even planted for this purpose. The pieces of bark become very soft and can 
be strung together. They are called ntjalu. Several samples of this curious 
stuff can be seen in the Neuchatel Museum, Thonga used to buy the article 
from their Chopi neighbours, but never knew how to manufacture it. 

Zulu costume. Phot, Natal. 

This very primitive article of attire has, however, been sup- 
planted by one designed by the Zulus, and now worn by men 
from one end to the other of the Thonga tribe (except, I am told, 

ee eal 

in some retired spots:in the Hlengwe country). It consists of a 
belt to which are hung tails of animals, or strips of skin (djobo, 
dji-ma), covered with hair or fur, or even the entire skin of a civet 
cat, or an antelope. The nsimba skins are in great demand, 
but are rather expensive, and the majority of the Ba-Ronga men 
wear merely two pieces of ox hide (mabebe), one in front and 
the other behind. The small boys often content themselves 
with one only in front. The young men prefer to wear them 
rather full, something like a petticoat! The shifado (Vol. I. 
Note I) is worn with the belt of tails. This ‘‘ sphaerula” is 
‘made either of carved wood or plaited, milala leaves, or of a 
small calabash just the size required. When it is fixed in its 
place, raw Natives believe that they have satisfied all the exi- 
gences of decency. Although much more decent than the 
mbaya, this garment of tails, or pieces of skins, is still a trifle 
incomplete... 

Sandals of ox hide (tintango) are also an old article of dress: 
they were used by hunters and travellers. They are a thing of 
the bush and it is taboo to bring them in the hubo (1. pe 324): 

At the present time European costume is tending to supplant 
the belt of tails. The first step consists in adopting the /adula, a 
piece of stuff hanging down from the loins as far as to the knees. 
This style of garment is now worn by most of the young hea- 
then round Lourenco Marques ; it is sometimes combined with 
the madjobo which are still in use. But men, and especially 
youngsters, soon aspire to something better : trousers and 
jackets! (1) However ungainly the Native may appear when 
duly arrayed in coat and trousers, there is nothing he covets 
more than these garments. As they cannot all afford complete 
suits of ‘dittos”, they often have to be satisfied with such odds 
and ends as they can get from the Banyans, or pick up from 

(1) The taste for European fabrics is said by thoughtful Natives to have 
been the cause of the loss of their independence. This is how they support 
this somewhat astonishing theory: ‘* Without this”, said one of them to me, 
pulling the flap of my coat, ‘the Whites would never have conquered us ! 
nour wars with them there have always been some folks who would not 
give up the stuffs, and so made alliance with the Europeans. We were 
divided, and thus our power of resistance was broken”. 

Se ee 

their European masters. One sees them gravely walking about 
in worn-out long frock coats, the trousers being conspicuous 
by their absence. Others think themselves very fortunate if 
they can manage to get hold of a very much patched waistcoat, 
with which to adorn themselves: the rest of the body remaining 
stark naked... except, of course, for the indispensable belt of tails, 
One day a Rikatla lad came to see me with an eye glass fixed 
triumphantly on his forehead, and when I asked him what was 
the use of that article he replied, really meaning what he said : 
“Ndji yambalile” — ‘I have dressed.” - He intended to do- me 
honour. The same lad came, on another occasion, wearing 
coquettishly on his head a lady’s black lace hat, which he seemed 
to consider very ‘‘chic”. I much preferred the get-up of an indi- 
vidual, by name Glas, who put a red lily in his crispy hair, and 
made a chin strap of a flexible reed which he passed through 
the holes in his ears on either sides, thus framing his face. 
Every Thonga has already learned to know a buluky (trousers), 
a djansi (jacket), a fascikoti (apron, a corruption of the word 
waistcoat), a hembe (shirt), masokisi and memeya (stockings) and 
shilembe (hat). The majority of these words have doubtless 
come from the Boer dialect, and have changed somewhat in pass- 
ing into the language of the Natives. 

The “civilised” attain the height of bliss when they are able 
to procure an irreproachable suit of clothes, and it is a sight to 
behold these young men returning direct from Johannesburg, 
dressed in the latest style, with a white starched shirt, a silk 
cummerbund, and jacket and trousers to match. They think 
themselves handsome! We do not share their illusion! How 
often have we not longed to see them adopt some costume that 
would tone with their colour, their customs, their occupations, 
their climate! They want to be like us! What can be done? (1) 

(1) I have heard it asserted that the adoption of European clothing by the 
Blacks tends to enfeeble them, even to the extent of rendering them: liable to 
new diseases. Some one assured me that the introduction of tuberculosis 
amongst them is due to their clothes. This assertion is at least very much 
exaggerated. However it is certain that the exposure of their skin to the rays 
of the sun was highly healthy. On the other hand, they do not know that 

==, ee 

Their idea of costume is evidently different from ours: they 
consider it as an adornment rather than as a real protection 
against cold or heat. If it rains, if it is cold, they much prefer 
to wrap themselves in the big rug (ngubo, mpisi-mpisi), which 
they all buy to sleep under at night. The end of the evolution 
will certainly be that they will adopt exactly the same dress as 
their European masters : the whole suit for the men, frocks, hats 
and boots for the women; as soon as the majority of them get 
enough money to buy these, they will do so, and seeing how 
particular most of them are as regards their external appearance, 
it may be safely anticipated that Bantu beauties will submit to 
the tyranny of the London or Paris fashions as readily as our 
European élégantes ! 

It will be easy to see the evolution of dress in the Bantu 
tribe by comparing the illustration of the South African woman 
(a Suto, I. p. 44) representing the first stage, those of the 
Thonga women (I. p. 181 et 193) and the Maputju girls (lop: 
182) representing the second stage, Camilla, depicting a third 
stage, and the ordinary European frock forming the fourth 
one. 

As for men, I unfortunately possess no picture of the primi- 
tive mbaya. But the following stages are illustrated by the two 
Zulu boys (p. 79) by the habitué of the Nkuna Court (I. p. 408), 
and by Tobane (I. p. 4) and Muhlaba (I. p. 399). 

Il. Ornaments. 

The taste for decoration, for ornament, is innate with the 
Black. Ages ago, before he took to fixing a flower in his 
hair, he used to tatoo himself. We have already described 
(I. p. 179) the various patterns of tattooing of men and wo- 

wet clothing must be changed, (they perhaps have no second suit to Wear), So 
they catch cold, and pneumonia or pleurisy sets in... I have also heard it 
stated that the second-hand, cast-off garments which traders sell them 
often infect them with syphilis (especially after circumcision), or other poi- 
sons, 

men, and have pointed out that this custom has probably had 
a social signification in former times, though for the present it 
is practised as an adornment. 

As regards hair (nsisi, mu-mi), women often cut it, men 
less frequently. A man only cuts it when his wife dies, as a 
sign of mourning: it is a taboo (I. p. 146). In former times 
they never shaved their beards. People made fun of those 
who did so saying: ‘Are you an Angolese ?” (Angolese, who 
are numerous in the neighbourhood of Lourengo-Marques, 
used to shave their beards). Young nen sometimes let two or 
three of their curls grow on their forehead like horns! Others 
elongate their curls and smear them with a gluey substance, 
obtained from the nkanye tree. This is called ku hoba misisi. 
As regards women, those who are nursing babies regularly 
turn their hair into an ornament: the small curls are pulled 
and elongated, smeared with fat and made to fall on the tem- 
ples, and on the occiput; they are then covered with ochre. 
This operation is called : ku hora misisi, and the rat tails thus 
produced are the tingoya ; they are the characteristic ornament 
of women during the nursing period. Nurses certainly think 
the tingoya improve their appearance. ‘Look! She has hora 
musist! How this suits her!” people will say of a woman 
who has succeeded in transforming her hair in this way. But 
this custom has also a ritual value. (1) 

Nursing women cover all their body, their clothing, their tebe 
1. p. 44) with ochre. The habit of anointing (tota) or smearing 
with ochre (tshumane) goes hand in hand with that of tingoya. 
This rather disgusting custom classifies them as nursing, and is 
a protection (shisibelo) against the husband: So long as a 
woman covers herself with ochre, it is a sign that she will not 
cohabit with him. They also say that ochre prevents the bad 
smell resulting from children being dirty, and that it softens 

(1) The Ngoni taught the Northern Thonga another and more elaborate 
way of curling the hair » the queens, wives of Gungunyane, transform their 
“thatch ” into regular cylindrical chignons (shifoko), standing up like towers 
{I. p. 389). The Ba-Ronga have not adopted this custom, except, in some 
cases, the chiefs. (I. p. 360). 

ai a 

the ntehe and makés the’ baby grow. (1) The skin of chil- 
dren is also covered with a coating of this pigment; some 
say it is not so much with the object of beautifying as of hiding 
the dirt which mothers are too ey to remove! No onder 
if, in these conditions, it has been found that this smearing 
with ochre fosters conjunctivitis and other diseases ! 

The use of ochre is, however, not restricted to nursing 
mothers or magicians : it is the special province of young mar- 
riageable girls, wishing to attract attention: their brilliant skin 
reflecting like mirrors, and setting off to perfection the white 
of their eyes and the black of their hair, which is sometimes 
made flossy by means of antimony or ground charcoal. A quaint 
saying puts it thus: 

Shindzingeri pundjene ? -Banhwanyana tolan |.. 
What says the pretty bird with the coral neck ee sings in the grass ? 

It says : Girls, anoint yourselves with ochre ! (if you want to be as beau- 
tiful as it is), 

Another ornament, of ancient date, is the bracelet. There 
are several kinds: 1) the big heavy copper rings, called masindana, 
which greatly resemble those of the lake- dwellers, having a 
similar rather oval shape with an opening to slip them over the 
wrist ; 2) the modern bracelets, called busenga, which the 
Ronga first bought in Natal, and which the Malemba introduced 
in the Northern clans. They are made of iron wire twined 
round a ring of hide ; 3) the mafowa are more ancient, being 
made of seeds strung on thongs of skins, and are wound 
several times round the leg. This is an ornament for either 
dance or war. The mafowa are sometimes made of silvery 
cocoons of ‘Tropaea Mimosae, the Queen Moth, which are foond 

(1) It is very curious to notice that these two feminine ways of adorning 
themselves, the tingoya and the ochre, have been adopted by the magicians : 
those who pretend to have a supernatural power in smelling out witches and 
treating possessed people (Part VI). They like to assume the appearance of 
women, People suf flering from the Ba-Ndjao possession especially use ochre. 
‘Their spirits order them to do so: they would torment their victims should 
hese not obey. 

mes 

MEBorel deff 

APTA Mger. FC, 

Ornaments, calabashes, pottery. 

se Sr eee 

on nkanye trees, emptied of the chrysalis which is inside and 
filled with grains of millet which rattle when dancing ! 

Beads (nkarara) are evidently of later date ; they were intro- 
duced by the Whites in the XVIt century, when the Portu- 
guese were already in regular communication with Delagoa 
Bay and trafficked with the Natives, exchanging glassware for 
gold and ivory. Glass fascinated the Blacks : its brightness and 
transparency pleased them immensely. An old song echoes 
their simple transports of delight : 

E! Bashabi! Batatana ba shabile ; ba buya ni shintshirimana sha balun- 
goooo |... 

Hi ! Here come the buyers ! Our fathers return with their purchases - 
they bring back with them the beautiful glittering things which the 
Whites sell !... 

“A few years ago an ordinary glass bottle was thought to be 
a wonder by the people in the interior ”, said Timoteo Mand- 
lati to me. (He was a Nkuna from Shiluvane). It is not 
strange therefore that they became enamoured of beads. They 
give them special names, according to colour and size, and suc- 
ceedin making very good use of them. The chief ornament the 
women make, (beadwork is exclusively done by the women), 
is the mugangu (N° 2), used in love-making (gangisa); it is a 
kind of crown of blue beads with red chevrons, worn by girls 
when they want to beautify themselves, Some are wide and 
some narrow; the beads are strung on threads which are 
crossed and knotted as the work proceeds : no canvas founda- 
tion is used. The bead necklace is called shihekisana. Bead 
bracelets on the wrist are shibolisa, and on the ankles maluzwada. 
Beads are also used in making large and heavy belts (mugadzi), 
weighing one to two pounds, and very much appreciated as an 
ornament when dancing. In the same way calabashes (N° 5) 
are covered with beads, bags made of hide (N° 4), bottles and 
even baskets. This bead work calls for a good deal of patience. 
One of the things which the Ronga most dearly loves to have 
decorated with beads is his tobacco pouch, (ngulana, Ne 3), 
which is for him not only a means of satisfying his passion 

for taking snuff, but also one of his most prized ornaments. 
I do not now refer to the carved ebony tobacco box, worn en 
bandouliére, but to the article which consists of eight or nine 
large seeds, hollowed out, in which is kept the powder which 
stimulates the brain. Each of these seeds (which come from 
another country) is closed witha small piece of reed ; when one 
is walking they rattle against each other, producing a most 
charming sound! The first thing a man will say to a friend on 
meeting him, will be: “ Fole ?” — ‘* Tobacco?” and before 
anything further is said, each will indulge in a pinch. The same 
act of politeness is essential before beginning any discussion. 
The Thonga does not smoke the calumet of peace, but uses 
for a like purpose the many receptacled tobacco pouch, all 
decorated with beads, which hangs from his belt at his hip. 
He takes from it a pinch of snuff, which he offers to his oppo- 
nent; the latter takes another pinch himself and proceedings then 
commence under the happiest auspices. Hearts are not far from 
concord... when noses have already fraternised ! 

Beads are nothing but an ornament and have no ritual value, 
except the large white ones used by people possessed by the 
Ba-Ndjao spirits. (Part VI). 

B. HABITATION 

If there has been such a rapid change in Thonga customs 
regarding dress, —- so rapid that in these last fifty years they 
have changed more in that respect than during the fifty preceding 
centuries —, in the field of architecture the tribe appears to have 
stood still ; their huts are built precisely as they were in ancient 
times. It is true that-it is easier to put on a jacket, and trou- 
sers, than to alter the style of one’s house : besides it must be 
admitted that the Thonga hut possesses several advantages. It 
is comparatively easy to construct, cool in the hot weather, per- 
fectly watertight in the rainy season and is fairly ingeniously 
contrived. 

That which is called yind/u (yin-tin) properly speaking, 1s 

2 208 ee 

more especially the roof of the hut (lwango, dji-ma) ; tor it is 
the roof which is the most troublesome to make. Also, a 
strange fact, and one which appears paradoxical, is that, in the 
construction (ku yaka) of the house, they begin at the roof! 

The Thonga architect — and every man is his own in that 
country — gathers together a few hundred straight sticks, one 
to one and half inches in width and from three to ten feet in 
length. He digs a hole in the ground, a yard and a half in 
diameter and 16 inches deep, in which he arranges his sticks 
in a circle, points downwards, in the bottom of the hole, and 
supported in such a manner that they lie at an angle of 45 
degrees with the ground. Any one of these sticks will thus 
be at about a right angle with the Opposite one, and all toge- 
ther they form, as it were, a huge conical basket with its point 
in the hole. To fasten all the sticks together, he ties them to 
round hoops (something like cask hoops) made of bent branches. 
These hoops (balelo, dji-ma) are concentric, very small at the 
bottom, and getting gradually larger as the work progresses. 
Any spaces which remain between the sticks first arranged are 
filled up, one after the other, with shorter sticks, which are 
pushed in here and there as the building proceeds, and the archi- 
tect finishes by obtaining a sort of enormous pointed hat lying 
on its apex, all the branches and sticks composing it being solidly 
tied together with strips of a very resistant bark, that of the 
bulolo Hibiscus (p. 32) or of other trees. It is now only necess- 
ary to turn the big cone over, to place it on a wall, and there 
you have the typical Thonga hut. 

The wall is built with stakes, about four feet in length above 
the ground, planted at intervals on the circumference of a circle 
which the architect traces with wonderful accuracy on the sand. 
He then takes two flexible branches and fastens them to the 
stakes, at a height of one foot above the ground, the whole way 
round the wall: one on the inside, the other on the outside. 
Between these branches and in the spaces from stake to stake are 
inserted reeds of the same height, completing the wall: the reeds 
are firmly fastened to the supporting branches by a band pass- 
ing alternately over and underneath them. The same opera- 

65) 

tion is repeated half way up the wall (two feet above the 
ground), and again at three quarters of the height (three feet). 
The wall is now ready to put on its large conical hat, which 
will fit it perfectly: a cone on a cylinder! 

Placing the roof in position (ku tlakula yindlu), the next 
procedure requires the display of considerable muscular energy. 
All the men of the village are convened for the job: their strong 
arms raise the monumental basket and place it triumphantly on 
the wall. Beer is then given to the helpers, and a little jollifi- 
cation ensues: the equivalent of the ‘‘féte du petit sapin enru- 
banné” which the carpenters celebrate in Switzerland when they 
have completed the roof of a house. 

The roof must now be covered (fulela) with a thatch (byanyi) 
to make it impermeable to the heavy rains of the wet season, 
and it is here that considerable ingenuity is displayed in the 
method adopted. The Thonga pulls up by the roots, in the 
low lands, at the borders of the lakes, a kind of very wide grass 
(luhlwa), which attains a height of one and half to two feet: 
this he separates into small bunches which he lays side by side 
on the ground and ties them together, one by one, with his 
string made of bark, fastening them with a special knot. The 
result is a series of hundreds of contiguous bunches seemingly 
sewn together with a regular seam, at about 6 inches above the 
roots. ‘This can be rolled up like a mat, forming a beautiful 
sheaf, and carried away on the workman’s shoulder to be placed 
on the roof. Once there, it is unrolled and fastened to the 
hoop of branches forming the outer circle at the base of the cone. 
One man runs a huge needle, threaded with a long string, 
through the thatch, taking care to do se just above the seam 
which unites the bunches of grass ; another man, who is inside 
the hut, catches the needle and pushes it back again through 
the thatch, but, in his case, just underneath the seam: the two 
thus continue sewing the thatch, with long stitches, all round, 
so that the seam itself is securely fixed to the outer hoop at the 
base of the roof. When they have completed the circle and 
provided the hut with a first belt of thatch, they fetch another 
sheaf of grass and unroll it on the next hoop above. Now a 

certain proportion is to be observed between the distance separ- 
ating the two hoops (A B) and that of the seam from the roots 
of the grass (C D); that is to say if, for instance, the space bet- 
ween the concentric hoops is five inches, the seam will he six 
inches above the roots; whence the following result: the roots 
of the thatch fixed to the lower hoop (A E) reach as far as the 
second hoop (B .F) and even overlap slightly. The fresh 
sheaf which will be 
sewn on to the second 
hoop will thus be im- 
bricated on the first 
sheaf in such a way 
that its seam will be 
tied practically on the 
top of the roots of the 
lower ‘sheaf. On-the 
second hoop there will 
therefore be a double 
thickness of thatch (at 
Construction of the Thonga root. point G) all round the 
hut. As the /uhlwa is 
about 24 inches in length, it follows that the third and fourth 
sheaves or layers of thatch will also lie over the second hoop ; 
the thickness of the thatch at this point will thus be fourfold, 
as also all over the hut. A well built roof of this description is 
perfectly rain-proof. As the work goes on, it becomes more and 
more encouraging, as the hoops diminish in size and the apex is 
reached almost unexpectedly. 
On the top of the cone is fastened a circular crown (shi- 
hlungwa) of very carefully plaited grass; the architect doubt- 

less had a double object in view in thus crowning the huts : 
firstly to keep the rain from percolating through at the 
top, and secondly to impart to the building, by means of 
this richly ornamental addition, a degree of finish, an air of 
beauty, ease and opulence which it certainly would never 
have possessed had it terminated in an ordinary common 
point. It is, no doubt, owing to the fact that the crown is 

— QI eed 

the glory of the house that it is removed as soon as the occu- 
pant dies ! 

There are still two more operations to be performed before 
the hut is finished : the plastering (bama (Ro), phama (Dj) and 
the making of the door. But these two jobs can be undertaken 
at the same time for the very good reason that plastering is the 
work of the wives, while making the door is that of the hus- 
band ! Accompanied by other women of the village, the future 
mistress of the hut starts out for the marshes to collect some 
black clay (bompfi). If the marshes be too far off, she will 
content herself with digging in one of the ants’nests on the 
hillside. These terrible ants, which destroy everything, collect 
large quantities of hard earth, with which to build their nests, 
which differs largely from the sand of the surroundings. (Per- 
haps it may be simply sand hardened and changed by the acid 
secretions of the termites ?) The shirondjo, the conical basket 
which women carry on their heads, will be used to take home 
clods of red or black clay, and, using the same baskets, they will 
fetch from the cattle kraal some fresh dung which they mix 
with the clay, inside the new hut, pouring water on the mix- 
ture to reduce it to the proper consistency. They tread the 
unsavoury mud with their feet, and, with this semi-liquid 
mortar, plaster the wall on the inside, introducing the mud be- 
tween the reeds and spreading it out with the palms of their 
hands until it forms a smooth layer all round the interior. 
Not a ray of light can now enter the hut, except through some 
small open spaces to be seen, here and there, between the roof 
and the top of the wall. The air circulates more or less 
through those small vents, which, however, were not included 
in the original plan of the hut. The remainder of the clay 
makes a hard even flooring which will be recovered from time 
to time with a fresh coating of black plaster (I. p. 187). 

As regards the door, the Ba-Ronga in the country round 
Rikatla generally make it of the wood of the mimale palm 
(Rufia rafiae See page 4). They cut down one or two of 
the giant leaves of this tree, which grows in the marshes. The 
leaf itself is one enormous central stalk with narrow folioles 

on either side ; these are cut off and the nerve remains : a sort 
of gigantic switch, twenty to thirty feet in length, about four to 
six inches wide at the base and tapering gradually to its point, 
convex on one side, and concave on the other. Once dried, it 
turns a grey colour. The interior is a fibrous pith, of extraor- 
dinarily light weight, whilst the exterior bark is very thin, hard 
ana shiny as though it had been varnished with copal. It is 
impossible to imagine a lighter wood. _ Comfortably established 
under the shady trees of the square, our joiner cuts the nerve 
into several pieces of a given length (say 
about four feet, the height of the wall). 
This is not difficult, for it is only necess- 
ary to cut through the thin outer bark, 
when the knife slips through the inner 
pith, like so much butter! These lengths 
are then bored through from front to back 
in three places, say at one, two and three 
feet from the bottom, and three stout sticks 
are passed through the holes, firmly hold- 

ing the several pieces of the nerve toge- 
ther : this makes the door. The ends of 
the transverse sticks are fixed into a pole 
Door of a Ronga hut. which is pointed top and bottom, thus 
forming pivots or hinges. 

The sill consists simply of a piece of wood (ntjandja wa 
shipfalo) laid flat on the ground, with one edge raised so that 
the door cannot be opened ‘outwards. It must always open 

inwards, doubtless with a view to facilitate the exclusion of 
unwelcome visitors by the simple expedient of sitting with 
one’s back against it. The threshold is not attended with 
taboos, excepting that of the principal hut of the master of the 
village, as protective drugs have been placed under it at the 
foundation of his village. It is taboo to sit on it (this may 
cause a disease), but not to tread on it. Most huts are now 
fitted with padlocks which are, of course, of European origin. 
The palm wood doors are only seen in the districts where the 
mimale palm grows. 

 gy  

A number of small sticks are set in the straw crown at the 
top of the hut, and certainly add to the picturesque appearance 
of these constructions. It seems they are put there to hinder 
birds from perching on the huts, and more especially to avoid 
any chance visit during the night from screech-owls (man- 
kungunu) and other nocturnal fowl, which might alight on 
the hut and terrify the occupants by their lugubrious cries. 

te 

The Thonga hut. Phot. A. Borel. 

I might mention another advantage of the Thonga hut. 
Between the sticks and the hoops of the roof, small interstices,. 
of a few square inches, are left when the thatch is in place; in 
these small lockers all kinds of things are stowed away : ears 
of sorghum, or of millet, kept for seed, sticks, spoons or knives ; 
baskets can be hung up, by hitching the string by which 
they are usually carried across the shoulder, over the end of 
the spoon sticking out of the thatch. On entering a hut the 
roof looks like a regular museum ; it is useful as cupboard or 
hanging wardrobe ! 

The Thonga hut, formed of two distinct parts, wall and. 

a 
roof, is far superior to that of the Zulu which looks like a bee 
hive, and consists only of a semi-circular roof. Our tribe know 
how to build this kind of huts, but they are generally made 
quite small (six feet in diameter) and used as shelters for the 
boys who look after the goats. They are called mitjhonga. 
The Ba-Ngoni adopted their system of building from the 
Thonga of the plain, and Gungunyane constructed huge conical 

The Native tin town near Pretoria Station. Phot, A. Borel. 

huts, but the entrances were still smaller than those of the 
Ba-Ronga. To get in, it was necessary to wriggle, or at least 
to go on all fours (1). 

(1) L have previously described the shitlanta, storehouses of various sizes, 
made for storing maize and other field produce, and have given (p. 27) an 
illustration of two of them, especially interesting as they contain the food of 
Sokis, who died from a sudden attack of pulmonary tuberculosis (lifuba). The 
provisions which are in the large storehouse must be sold as they are contam- 
inated and dangerous to members of his family ; the small one contains 
mealies bought from other people for his widows, who are not allowed to 
consume the food of the deceased. whilst strangers have nothing to fear from 
it. (See on the notions of contagion, Part VI.) 

oe ER 

Dealing only with the architectural side of the subject, I do 
not revert to its social side. Let me merely state that the hut 
is divided in two parts, the right half belonging to the hus- 
band and the left to the wife (I. p. 138, 187), that it is conta- 
minated by the death of its owner, and, being considered as a 
rumbi, a ruin, must be pierced through (I. p. 138), deprived ot 
its crown (I. p. 144), ritually crushed fe MCL) pers Gor 
closed (I. p. 162, 164). 

Nol will deny that the conical roofed Thonga hut is 
charming to see, and is in wonderful keeping with the African 
scenery. To judge how ‘‘ Civilisation” improves the condition 
of things for the Natives of South Africa, let my readers con- 
template the Native village as it was a few years ago, in the 
vicinity of the Pretoria Station. Boys working at the Railway 
had built a horrible mass of tiny sheds of old paraffin tins, cut 
and flattened for the purpose. There is no lack of imagina- 
tion in those constructions, but they are a perfect illustration 
of what the raw Native becomes when plunged suddenly into 
our XX" ceniury civilisation and tries in his poverty and igno- 
rance to adapt himself to it. Iam glad to say that, in the 
Missionary Stations, where Native Christians are directed by 
their missionaries, they build much better houses, having learnt 
to mould clay into bricks, and to build ovens. Some of them 
are good masons and know the use of the level and of the 
square, 

CeOrENSIUS 

Nature, which has provided the Ba-Ronga with skins of ani- 
mals for clothing, and with poles, reeds, grasses and fibrous 
barks for their habitations, has also favoured them with several 
exceedingly useful trees of which they have not been slow to 
take advantage. Of these the most valuable is the milala palm, 
used for nearly all basket-work ; then the nkublu whose wood is 
particularly serviceable for all descriptions of carving. She has 
also deposited in their plains beds of clay, of more or less desi- 

eet 

rable quality, which they use for making pottery. I shall begin 
with the latter. 

I. Pottery. 

An excellent clay is to be found at Shibindji, in the environs 
of Lourengo Marques, a district close to Morakwen, and the 

Fashioning the pots. Phot. A. Borel. 
people of this place — they are those who abstain from 
eating any animal liver (I. p. 336) — are the potters who 

supply the whole country. They are said to be the masters 
(benyi) of the art. But clay is found in many other places, 
in Shifukundju, Mpatshiki, ete. It is said that the clay of 
Muweri, near the Lemons’ Island, on the Lower Nkomati, is 
even better than that of Shibindji. So the art of potter does not 
belong to a single family, and is not hereditary. .Any one 
may learn it and practise it. Pottery amongst the Thonga, 
is essentially woman’s province. Is it because earthenware 
utensils are principally used in the kitchen, where ‘woman’s 

oi = 
Sway is paramount and_ indisputed ? Possibly ; anyway 
thus it is. 

Let us suppose then that the mother of a family wants to 
renew, or to add to her stocks of pots, large and small. She 
starts out for the marshes, picks up in the well known hollow 
several clods of clay and returns to the village carrying them on 
her head. No one salutes her: everyone pretends not to see her, 

Constructing the furnace. Phot. A. Borel. 

doubtless to avoid bringing any ill luck to the venture! She 
buries the clay at the foot of a tree to keep it moist, and only 
takes it out of her hiding place the day on which she has decided 
to start the work. 

Let us see by means of some photographs, taken by the much 
regretted A. Borel, how Meta, a Shibindji girl, married in Rika- 
tla, proceeds in her work. Placing a broken piece of an old 
pot in the mortar, she pounds it until it is reduced to small 
fragments, the size of a grain of maize: these she mixes with 
her clay, adding water and sand, and kneads the whole toge- 
ther until she has made it into a very soft ball. She makes a 

aoe == 

hole in it, a wide opening which she enlarges by degrees, hol- 
lowing it out more and more and gradually giving it the shape 
she wishes. I have already alluded to the clever way in which 
the Blacks trace the circumference of a circle on the ground 
(I. p. 125) ; the same natural instinct enables them to model 
perfect spheres. It is astonishing to see the beautiful symme- 
try of these utensils, although these pots are fashioned without 

The furnace ready. Phot. A. Borel, 

the aid of wheel or measuring instrument of any kind. The 
jar, still soft and wet, is put on one side. ‘Then is the time for 
decoration with very simple designs, generally triangular, after 
which the industrious worker leaves it to dry for a few hours, 
taking care to cover the opening with a thin piece of wood to 
prevent the wind from putting it out of shape. As soon as she 
dares to lift it without danger, she turns it over, smooths the 
bottom (tshaku), which will harden in its turn, and places the 
pot in a hut where it continues to dry in the shade. On the 
day she chooses for the firing, she digs a hole in the sand, 
arranges the various pieces of pottery in it and covers them 

Jeo) 
with a heap of small pieces of wood or with palm pith ; this 
she sets alight, and | keeps a quick clear fire burning ee she 
considers the firing is finished, when she leaves her well ted- 
dened utensils to cool down (hola). The cooling accomplished, 
she commences to inspect the result of her work. This is the 
psychological moment! How many have cracked, how many 
have withstood the testing 2? The worthless ones are smashed, 

Result of the firing. Phot. A. Borel. 

and the perfect ones reserved to be painted a brilliant brown, 
which is done with a decoction of the bark of the mangrove 
co and of the nkanye, boiled with a kind of creeper (mahl- 
ehlwa), which has a sticky sap. Such is the primitive method 
followed in the manufacture of all Native pottery. 

The process of firing being often unsuccessful, taboos are 
plentiful in the manufacture. When women collect the clay, 
only one of them digs and gives it to the others; should each 
one make haste to dig for herself, this would bring mishap : 
the pots would break. If no accident happens and the firing is 
successful, these women will say: ‘She who dug the other day 

SSS e LOOk Ma 

has a lucky hand (a ni boko dja hombe). Let her dig again 
another time ”. When the clay has been hidden in the 
ground, at the foot of a tree, it is also taboo to tread on the 
place, when walking through the village. When the heap of 
wood is ready, the potteress will call a little child, an inno- 
cent one, to set fire to the furnace. She shows it where to 
put the glowing ember, and, if the result of the firing is good, 
she will always call the same child on future occasions. 

Should all these precautions be useless, and the woman see 
that she does not succeed, she will go so far as to consult the 
bones, and, if they so order, she will make an offering to her 
gods, gods of the father, gods of the mother, or possessing 
gods (Part VI), if she is a spirit-possessed woman, as the bones 
may declare. People will say to her: ‘* You manufacture pots 
and sell them and do not give anything to your gods : that will 
not do!” So she will offer a piece of clothing, a coin, etc., at 
the altar (gandjelo). 

Another taboo in connection with the making of a pot is 
this : when a pot has been fired, it must still be tested ; this ope- 
ration is called ku khangula, or kwangula, and is performed in 
the following way: a little water is poured into it and the pot- 
teress washes it thoroughly ; then some grains of maize are 
cooked in it and thrown away. This must remove the 
nkwangu, or nkhangu, viz., the danger attending the use of an 
untested, unpurified pot : people using such an implement 
would suffer from an eruption on the 
arms, and even on the whole body. 
To give some one food to eat from a 
pot which has not been khangula is 
considered as an act of hatred. 

The pot, or boiler, used for cook- 
ing is called nhlambeto (yin-tin, Ro.) 
or mbita (yin-tin Dj.); it has a very 
wide opening. Smaller boilers are 
also. made, even quite diminutive 

ones called shihlembetwana or 
shimbitana, The beerjar (khu- 

Phot. D. Lenoir. 

Pots used to draw water, 

= WOM i 

wana, dji-ma), illustration on page 85, N° 13) is of the same 
size as the boiler, but can be easily recognised by its straighter 
neck Enormous beer jars are sometimes manufactured, per- 
fect amphoras (hotjo, yin-tin), but they rarely stand the firing 
and are therefore scarce and expensive, fetching as much as ten 
shillings each : they may be two feet high; the ordinary 

Sana. Geneve 

A young Spelonken artist and his work. Phot, Dentan, 

cooking pot does not cost more than sixpence. The porrin- 
gers, or large plates, are called mbenga (mu, mi; N° 12). (1) 

Shibindji clay is also used for making some very short pipes 
(shipana), prettily shaped, probably in imitation of the European 
cutty. Smoking does not seem to be an indigenous habit ; in 
the;interior one rarely sees a Native with a pipe in his mouth, 
tobacco being almost exclusively used in the form of snuff. 
The only smokers in the country are the old women of Lou- 

(1) No rt, on page 85, shows a small vase modelled by a young Native girl, 
an invalid from Natal (Station of Inanda). 

—- -}02 == 

renco Marques, and the youthful dandies who try to imitate the 
Transvaal Boers! 

Clay modelling is perhaps the art for which South Africans 
are best gifted. In all the tribes children amuse themselves by 
modelling oxen, human beings, wheels, even waggons, some- 
times very cleverly. I knew a boy in Shiluvane who was a 
true artist and could imitate everything he saw, for instance a 
white lady with her hat. (1) The adjoining plate shows one of 
these young artists, from Spelonken, with his modellings ! 

Il. Basket-work. 

The milala palm, whose sap supplies the tipplers of Pesene with 
their famous busura(p. 41), isa very valuable tree for the Ba-Ronga, 
as it is of its leaves that the greater part of the baskets in use by 
this tribe are made. The basket-maker gathers the most perfect 
leaves. These are not like the mimale folioles, growing oppo- 
site one another on a central nerve. The milala (plur. of nala) 
are true palms, the leaves consisting of folioles of a half to one 
inch in width radiating from a common centre, which itself 
grows on the end ofa long peduncle. 

These trees are found in the woods of Mabota, Nondwane, 
Tembe, Nondwane, on the Coast, and in the low plains of the 
North Eastern Zoutpansberg, etc., sometimes in large numbers. 
Returning home, the workman (here we employ the mascu- 
line, as basket-making is essentially man’s work) spreads out the 
leaves in the sun to dry, having previously straightened the fo- 
lioles somewhat, separating (hangela) them one from the other ; 
when they dry, they turn a light grey colour with a shining 
polished surface, and are then hung up in the hut where they 
will be sheltered from the dew and ready for use. When the 

(1) The same boy, without having received any special training, knew how 
to cut out a frock, and used to make the dresses of all the brides of the con- 
eregation. He had a wonderful eye for form and would have made his mark, 
had he received a professional training. But he died from consumption contracted 
in the towns ! 

work is to be started, the folioles are torn (phatlula) from their 
peduncle, and, with a sharp pointed instrument, are split longi- 
tudinally into strips or straws of 1/8 or 2/8 of an inch wide, 
the ribs of the leaves (nhlamalala, yin-tin) being carefully kept; 
these delicate wands have their special use. 

The Ronga basket makers are very fond of decorating their 
baskets with designs in black. These triangular and square pat- 
terns are produced by artistically plaiting dark and light colour- 
ed straws, and are not painted on after the baskets are manu- 
factured. The straw is dyed black in the following manner : 
it is soaked in the black ooze (ntjhaka) of the marshes for two 
weeks, and then laid out to dry, which gives it a brownish- 
reddish colour. This hue is deepened by a second treatment. 
The leaves of a shrub called mpsabutimu are gathered and_pla- 
ced in a pot with the brown red milala in alternate layers, 
until the utensil is full : water is then poured over them and 
the whole put on to boil ; very soon the straw becomes a bril- 
liant black. The basket-maker has now only to pull up some 
of the grass growing in the hollow near the lake, dry it, and 
he is ready to commence work. 

In the adjoining plates illustrations will be found of the prin- 
cipal specimens of this art, sterotyped shapes which have passed 
on from generation to generation, doubtless from prehistoric 
times, and are called respectively: ngula, lwama, shihundju, 
lihlelo and nhluto. 

The ngula (yin-tin) (p. 26) takes the place of honour, and 
is the most prized of all the Ronga baskets. It requires days 
or even weeks of continuous work to make one, but the re- 
sult is worthy of the time and labour bestowed upon it; I 
brought with me to Europe several ngula of various sizes. The 
particular one, shown below, is oval and measures six feet two 
inches in circumference ; but there are many much larger, 
both spheroid and ovoid. This is how they make or, to use 
the technical Native term, “ tlhaba”’ — “ pierce ” this basket. 
The workman takes his dried grass and plaits it, lengthening 
the plait according to requirements, as he goes along : this 
plait is bound round, and entirely hidden, by a special binding 

of palm leaf straw, thus forming a thickish cord of about half 
an inch in diameter, the cord is soon doubled back upon itself, 
and constitutes a centre, around which are fixed several concen- 
tric rings ; each inner ring is pierced with a kind of awl and the 
straw of the outer ring pushed into the hole, thus fixing them 
securely together. Hence the expression thlaba ngula, to pierce 
a ngula. The bottom is soon finished, and differs but little in 
appearance from an ordinary straw-mat, such as is used to 
prevent hot dishes spoiling the polish of the European dining 
table. The sides are made in the same manner by superposing 
rings of the straw cord, giving the basket a well rounded convex 

shape, after which two or three rings are superimposed perpen- 
dicularly, making the opening, the mouth of the chef d’ceuvre. 
The cover, made in the same way, must fit exactly over the 
mouth of the basket ; in fact it should require to be slightly 
forced over it: the fastening will then hold better. On the 
upper part of the basket, as also on the cover, the manufacturer 
has carefully plaited four handles, two corresponding pairs, those 
on the basket pointing upward while those on the cover point 
downward, so that they meet. Two rings also plaited, are 
passed round through each pair of handles, forming simple, but 
solid hinges round which the cover can turn without ever being 
separated from the basket, of which it is henceforward an inte- 
gral part. A well made ngula is perfectly impermeable, and 

not the smallest hole can be found in it. I think it would 
even hold water. Surely such a basket is a work of art! 

The ngula is the Native’s Savings Bank. In it he keeps all 
his riches, the best grains of maize, or the best grown monkey 
nuts, reserved for seed at the next rainy season ; also the stuff 

Manufacturing a ngula in Spelonken. Phot, P. Rosset. 

with which the women will deck themselves on grand occa- 
sions, etc. [he enormous basket reposes at the far end of the 
hut, on a low table-(buhiri) specially designed for the purpose. 
The ngula of the Northern clans, where palm leaves are not to 
be found, is more rounded and the palm straws replaced by solid 
dry grass. (See the adjoining illustration). 

If the ngula is enthroned in the hut, and never moves out 
of it, the hwama (yin-tin, Ro.) or funeko (Dj.) (N° 4 and 6), on 
the contrary, is the wallet of the traveller. It is a square bag 
made of plaited palm straw. The cover is about as large as 

—— 106 = 

the bag itself and, so that it should not be lost’ (which might 
easily happen while travelling), it is secured by the string used 
as a shoulder strap for carrying the hwama, being passed through 
it. The bag can thus be opened by sliding the cover right 
along the string, but it cannot be entirely separated from it. 
These bags are of different sizes, and some more ornamental 
than others. A round variety is also made by a certain basket- 
maker of Masana. He makes three or four projecting horns to 
his hwama, which then takes a cylindrical shape, and has the 
advantage of being able to stand up when placed on the 
ground. This bag or basket, is called shiraba or baki (N° 2); 
it is the kind used by the magicians for carrying their medi- 
cines, and bones. 

The third classic shape of Ronga basket-ware (N° 3) is the 
slihundju (Ro.) shirundju (Dj.), the conical basket employed by 
the women for transporting maize, clay and manure. (It is by 
no means certain that the shihundju is cleaned out between 
these several loads!) It is made much in the same way as the 
roof of a hut, point downwards, ribs of folioles taking the 
place of sticks. This basket may be said to be the special 
property of the women (I. p. 217): they are very clever at 
balancing it on their heads; it is very rarely that a woman, old 
or young, lets her shihundju fall. When empty it is turned 
upside down and serves asa hat. It is a really pretty sight to 
see the young girls starting out for the fields with their conical 
baskets standing straight on their fuzzy locks. When they are 
travelling and arrive at a friendly village, holding themselves 
perfectly upright, shooting g'ances here and there without 
stooping or turning their heads, their friends rush out to meet 
them, seize their shihundju and place them on the ground, in 
small holes which they hastily make in the sand. This is the 
first duty of hospitality amongst women ! 

The liblelo (N° 8) is used by cooks for winnowing the 
maize. Palm leaves not being sufficiently strong for this pur- 
pose, the lihlelo is made of the roots, cut into strips, of a 
tree called nukanhlelo (a kind of mimosa), and is coated with a 
reddish brown varnish prepared from mangrove bark. It is the 

Thonga weaving. 

A Borel der 

(One sixth of the natural size.) 

lihlelo, or rather a smaller basket of the same sort called 
ndjewane, that the house-wife takes with her when picking 
little wild cucumbers, or gathering the various herbs which 
serve for the supplementary noontide luncheon. 

In the Northern clans one often meets with a spherical bas- 
ket made of the same material as the winnowing basket and 
covered with a regular lihlelo. 

Besides the foregoing, the Ba-Ronga have two or three bas- 

* 3 4 
~ eS Sponoloe rece 

Phot. A. Borel. 
Carrying lihlelo baskets, grinding and pounding mealies. 

kets which are not in such general use: the nblaba, a kind ot 
plaited bag with interstices between the palm straws, for car- 
rying fish, the ntjaba, etc. 

Another article, which might, at first sight, be taken for a 
basket, but which serves quite a different purpose, is the nbluto, 
the strainer. (N° 1). This strainer of unusual shape, is a sort 
of long bag of plaited straw into which is poured the beer made 
from maize: the particles in suspension in this liquor are caught 
by the straws overlapping the top, or accumulate at the bottom, 
whilst the liquid filters through the interstices of the plait. The 

thick sediment remaining in the strainer can then be squeezed 
so as to extract all the beer. This straining and squeezing has 
the effect of rendering the drink much more alcoholic (p. 40). 

The art of basket-making is by no means commonplace. 
Practised by men only, it is, in certain families, in certain vil- 
lages, handed down from father to son. Children with a natu- 
ral taste for this sort of work are initiated into its mysteries by 
their parents. But no young man is ever forced to take up the 
profession of a basket-maker. His heart (mbilu) must be in 
it! Amongst primitive peoples art, and even industry, always 
remains a matter of individual genius. It never becomes a 
mechanical output, as is the case in the factories of the civilised 
world : this is why it retains a character of individuality, since- 
rity and natural beauty, not always to be met with in the pro- 
ducts of the XX* century European industry ! 

In the environs of Lourenco Marques, in our sub-station of 
Masana, lived the family of Tumbene (I. p. 270), famous for its 
ngula. -One of the sons inherited the father’s talent. He was 
an evangelist in our Mission, and, when he was but a lad, peo- 
ple came to him, from far and wide, to have their old baskets or 
broken lihlelo repaired. 

Although basket-making is confined to certain families who 
more or less monopolise the business, without, however, pre- 
venting any one from practising the art, the manufacture of 
straw mats, or matting (Jikuku, li-tin (Ro.), rikuku (Dj.)), is 
very wide-spread. Many men know how to “‘tlhaba likuku’” — 
“‘ pierce a mat”. For this the Ba-Ronga collect a quantity of 
solid rushes of at least 3 feet in length, (myriads of them grow 
in the plains,) and pierce holes through them, all along the 
rush, at intervals of 3 inches, passing strings through the holes. 
A net work of string, half an inch wide, is run down the two 
sides at the edges to prevent fraying. When new, these mats 
are ofa beautiful golden yellow, but the smoke in the huts soon 
turns them brown. Every Native possesses his own mat, on 
which he sleeps rolled up in his rug. Women possess two, the 
old one, used during the menses, and the better one on which 

she sleeps ordinarily (I. p. 187). 

cect, GIO ly Sa 

The string (ngoti, yin-tin) used for these mats is made as 
follows: the leaves of the nala palm are picked when very young 
and tender (nshunya): a knife is passed all along the folioles, 
in order to remove the green fleshy covering; the parenchyma, 
composed of very light but tough fibres, (nkwampa), then 
remains. The workman takes two small bundles ot these fibres 
and rolls them (yahliya) together with the palm of his hand 
along his thigh, twisting, intertwining, firmly uniting them, con- 
tinually adding fresh fibres, as he goes along : in this way he can 
make a string as long and as thick as he likes. 

The following are the technical expressions employed for dif 
ferent kinds of basket-work. 

Luka (plaiting) for ntjaba, shihundju, lihlelo, ndjewana, 
hwama nhalaba, tshala (drying floor), shitlanta (store house). 

Tlhaba (piercing) for ngula and likuku. 

Betsha (tying) for the ‘small brooms also made of palm straws 
(mpsayelo, No 5), and the reed walls (khumbi, dji-ma). 

Bangela (making) for the bunana, a sort of hammock, made 
of plaited milala which is hung to the branches of the trees and, 
sometimes, in summer used for sleeping in, to escape the mos- 
quitoes which swarm inside the huts. 

Runga (sewing) for the boats (byatsho, dji-ma). The ancient 
Native boats built before the appearance of nails, hammers and 
saws, were made of pieces of wood securely tied together. 
Some of these antiquitated craft are still to be seen on the 
Maputju river. 

On the rivers up country, boats are frequently made of a large 
piece of curved bark, bent on both sides, allowing two or three 
persons to sit together. I crossed the great Letaba on a boat 
of this description. Such boats are also used for storing water. 
Where mimale branches (or nervules) are procurable, they are 
tied together so as to form a raft called shikhakhafu. These are 
used on the Nkomati River, and on the lakes in Ronga terri- 
tory. Big rafts made of trunks of trees fastened together, and 
called magudhlwana, were used in former times on the sea, when 
going to meet the White men, the Ba-Godji. (See later.) 
They are out of use now and there is scarcely one to be found. 

Bart. ef iq At, myer FC. 

Thonga car vings. 

(One seventh of the natural size.) 

== (102 ee 

In the neighbourhood of Lourenco Marques the Natives now 
build their boats on the European model. The fishermen cut 
down forked branches, which do duty for ribs, on which they 
nail planks. They are wonderfully clever at this work, one 
man, Sam Matlombe, nicknamed the “ King of the Bay ”, being 
particularly expert at it. 

The sewn boats of olden times might well be included under 
the heading of basket-ware. Those of to-day belong decidedly 
to another branch of industry, and will afford us a natural point 
of transition from basket to wooden-ware. 

Il. Wood-carving. 

It is the nkuhlu, mafureira tree, as we have already seen, 
that the Natives of these parts use for their wood-carving. It 
the name of this tree be very hard to pronounce, its wood is, 
to the same extent, soft and possesses the great advantage of not 
easily splitting or cracking, when being dried. If Nature had 
not bestowed on the Thonga this excellent tree, who knows if 
they would have ever thought of executing the works of art 
which are depicted inthe adjoining illustration ! 

However before thinking of art, they began by cutting, or 
fashioning, with their small knives, articles of every day use: 
spoons (nkombe, mu mi) for instance, (see illustrations of carv- 
ings, N° 1), made in several sizes: the big one is used for serv- 
ing out the potful of maize amongst the rightful claimants, 
and the small one for conveying food to the mouth when hands 
are ritually soiled (I. p: 145, 190). One often fnds really 
well carved spoons, I give drawings of two of them, particu- 
larly interesting ; the first shows a sort of spiral, or catherine- 
wheel decoration at the top of the handle (N° 4); the other, 
brought by D" Audeoud from Maputju country, has a carved 
snake as ornamental motive. Spoons are all ornamented, even 
the plainest, with designs in black, burnt into the wood with a 
red-hot iron. For beer, ladles are used, made of a single piece 
of wood and are generally decorated with large black triangles 

(Ne 2). In Inhambane and Quelimane, the Natives make 
them of cocoa nut shells, on which they carve curious geome- 
trical figures (N° 5). Goblets (ntcheko, mu-mi) are generally 
made with a handle. 
(N° 6). 

In the adjoining plate, 
(p. 114), two spoons 
are seen hanging to a 
chain made of links 
carved from nkvhlu | 
wood. This is a won- 
derful product of Na- . 
tive art. These chains | 
are often met with, es- | 
pecially in the Nor- 
thern clans, some with 
links of six inches in 
length, the whole thing 
attaining many yards in | 
length. The one here | 
shown is six feet long, 
with links of only three 
inches. The _ special 
point to be noted in 
pais “* objet d’art 3M is 
that it has been carved 

from one piece of wood 

only and the artist had Carved spoon from Maputju country. 

to succeed from the 

first : a single mistake, a single slip of the knife, would have 
broken the whole chain and made it useless. European joiners 
told me they doubted whether an ordinary work-man would be 
able to carve such a chain. I was told that these spoon-chains 
were used by two individuals wanting to make an alliance : they 
passed the chain over their shoulders and, so united, ate from the 
same plate. However this is mere play and has no ritual value. 

Between the two spoons, a kind of bowl is seen, almost per- 

fectly round and prettily decorated. It was used by a man who 
had been possessed, and washed his face in it every day to cool 
his head and appease the spirits. Thonga also carve large dishes, 

rc =f 

Carved chain and bowl. (Environs of Lourengo Marques). 

(One fifth of the natural size.) 

sometimes nicely decorated, though not so nicely as those from 
the Ba-Rotse of the Zambezi. I possess one of two feet in 
length, by ro inches in width. These are used for serving meat. 

I must not forget the mortars (tshuri, dji-ma) usually made 

“Se 
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‘H 
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C 

2) 
I 
2A 
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Toyo 
DY 

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SU 
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~ iG = 

ot mahagony, or of nkanye, and the pestles (musi, mu-m1i) 
made of nkonono. The former are often adorned with trian- 
gular carvings. 

The same style of decoration is to be seen on the calabashes 
which Natives use as bottles. The calabash, as every one 
knows, is a sort of gourd composed of two spheres of unequal 
size with a narrow connection between them. By an ingenious 
system of supports, placed under the gourd during its growth, 
Natives succeed in imparting to the upper sphere the shape of 
an elongated neck. There are many varieties of calabash, some 
small, furnished with a long projection and used for drawing 
the bukanye from the large jars. ‘They are specially kept for 
this use! (See p. 85, N° 7, and also I. p. 373). In Vol. I. p. 48, 
[have given an illustration, of these bukanye calabashes, called 
ntjeko (mu-mi), very nicely decorated by a Tembe artist. The 
black designs are burnt in and represent huts, birds, palm trees 
and, last but not least, two warriors fighting! The white dots 
ate beads inserted in the soft bark of the calabash. The largest 
calabash on this plate measures 21 inches in length and7 in width. 

Some plainer calabashes are N* 7, 8, 9 of the illustration of 
ornaments. Others are simply shells of sala (shikutja), (p- 16), 
with a good sized hole cut in them for an opening (N° 6 and 
10); a circular piece, say one third of the other, makes a capital 
cover; a string passes through the bottom of the calabash and 
the middle of the cover, fastening the two together. When 
knotted on top of the latter the /ard tin is securely closed. We 
generally thus designate this kind of calabash, for it is in these 
round balls that is kept the mafureira grease, to which I have 
previously referred (p. 19). They are hung up in the roof 
of the hut where they swing to and fro in the smoke and become 
well browned. The young folks amuse themselves by carving 
designs on these shells. 

The artistic touch is still more striking in the snuff boxes 
(ngulana, yin-tin), carved in ebony, which the chiefs are fond of 
carrying; the one depicted(p. 111, N°9) came to me from Mavabaze 
who was, for a time, chief of the Khosa clan. It is also con- 
spicuous in the strange pillows (shidamu) on which the Ba-Ronga 

——— iy —- 

rest their heads at night. Let us contemplate this article (N° 8) 
with the respect it deserves! It is probably on this description 
of pillow that primitive humanity in all parts of the world have 
dreamed their dreams! We see it sculptured on the Egyptian 
monuments, above or by the side of , 
princely couches. We find also among 
the relics of the lake-dwellers stone ob- 
jects of a similar shape, which were 
doubtless used for the same purpose. 
The Bantu has adhered to this piece 
of prehistoric furniture all through the 
ages. The specimen in the illustra- 
tion was bought from a young man, a 
traveller, on the road : the bird’s claws, 
beads and other articles tied all round it, 
doubtless hunting trophies, are plainly 
to be seen. He had the advantage of 
literally resting on his laurels, and naive- 
ly believed they would bring him good 
luck while sleeping. 

The Thonga artist has even dared to 
portray the human form and the result 
of his audacity, however grotesque it 
may be, is not without originality, or 
even a certain marked style, which 
may be recognised in all their statu- Manitieli anche 
ettes. More often they content them- 
selves with carving a man’s head, with his crown, at the 
top of their walking sticks I here give an illustration of 
Mankhelu’s stick, which was a very old one, dating from 
1850, at least, which shows the primitive style without any 
European influence. Sometimes they carve the whole body 
from head to foot ; (as grapes do not grow in their country the 
use of the classic vine-leaf is quite unknown). N?° 3 represents 
a stick with a man and a woman, the one standing on the other's 
head, the stronger sex treading the weaker under foot! Large 
statuettes, of at least one and a half to two feet in height 

= ii = 

and broad in proportion, are to be seen in the Neuchatel Ethno- 
graphical Museum, which no doubt contains the largest collec- 
tion of Thonga implements in the world, having been plenti- 
fully provided with them by missionaries of French Switzerland. 
Ne 7 is smaller, and represents a woman having on her head 

Thonga statuettes. 

(One third of the natural size.) 

the typical conical basket, the pride of the workers in the fields, 
and of the cooks. The five small figures on the adjoining plate 
are very amusing indeed. ‘They were carved by an artist of 
Movumbi (near Rikatla), who pretended that the man on the 
right was a Banyan. The other figures are Natives, men with 
their wax crowns, and the ladula garment (p. 80) adorned with 
inserted beads; one is a woman carrying a child ! 

The finest specimen of Native art that I ever saw is the carv- 

ing of a huge panther about to devour a human being, the work of 
Muhlati, a sculptor living in the environs of Lourenco Marques. 
This artist, who was very proud of his work, and asked a tol- 
erably high price for it, claimed to be able to carve anything 
and everything : birds, four footed beasts, or man. He was 
famous throughout the land, for his talent. Nothing more 
quaint than this large spotted creature, (the spots being obtained 
as usual by burning with a hot iron), planting his claws in the 
flesh of a man, (an Englishman, as I was told by the inspired 
author of this group!), and glaring at him with two great round 
eyes, not very symmetrical! With touching forethought, this 

A panther devouring an Englishman. 

(One twelfth of the nature] size.) 

modern Phidias has renderéd{ the pesterior half of the tail quite 
independent of the rest of the animal. A tenon and a circular 
socket allow the caudal appendage to be so neatly adjusted that 
the joint is hardly visible. Muhlati told me how the idea ofa 
removable tail had cccurred to him. He thought that if ever his 
masterpicce h d to te packed up, and cross the ocean, it would 
be more easily cased. This can hardly be called the notion of 
a savage ! Besides, the work itself would never have been 
accomplished had there been no Whites in the country. Evi- 
dently the sculptor, indolent like all his race, would not have 
worked day in and day out, at carving such an animal for a 
play-thing for his children. He concluded that his talent might 
wel ‘ring him in scme money; it wasthe mercenary consider 
ation that urged him on to the execution of the work, and no 

ee LO = 

mere love of art; nevertheless I do not believe any foreign 
influence. was exercised in the conception of the idea. His 
group is absolutely original, and, as such, shews us to what 
length the Ba-Ronga scuptural ability can go. This group is 
now in the Neuchatel Museum. 

If statuettes are the most elaborate products of Native sclup- 

ture, the canoes (shene (Dj.)) are the largest I have already 

Thonga canoe. Phot. A. Borel. 

mentioned the taboos connected with the cutting of the maha- 
gony and nkwenge trees when used for this purpose (p. 20). 
Other trees, the mpfubu and the muhlu, can be cut without 
these precautions being taken. 

IV. Metallurgy. 

When and how did iron reach the Ba-Ronga? Probably we 
shall never be able to find out. Tradition has it that the pri- 
mitive inhabitants of Nondwane, the Hofiwana, who cooked 
elephants in order to tear them in pieces, knew no iron imple- 
ments. Some authorities tell us that the hoe in use in olden 

a ee 

times was of an exceedingly hard wood, wrenched I know not 
how, from a species of teak tree called ntshiba. The Natives of 
these parts must have passed directly from the age of wood to 
the iron age. There has certainly been a stone age, comparable 
to that of the lake dwellers, in Cape Colony where a great quan- 
tity of silex, and of polished stones have been found. I never 
heard ofany such implements having been used by the Thonga, 
nor found within their territory. As regards the bronze age, 
they have known copper for along time, but it cannot be prov- 
ed that they knew it before iron. 

Iron and other metals seem to have been first introduced in 
Delagoa Bay by the ‘‘ Godji ” traders, and whale fishers, of 
whom I shall shortly speak and who were the first White visi- 
tors whom Natives now remember. The Ba-Ronga were ex- 
changing fowls and other domestic animals for hoes, brass brace- 
lets, copper brought by the strangers, and they had found 
the way of making copper wire by forging (fula) the pieces 
bought from the ‘‘ Godji”. Later on wrecked boats provided 
Native smiths with iron to make hoes, axes, etc. In certain 
villages there were regular forges, (Matlharin, near Mbengelen 
Island, Matjolo etc.). The hoes were in the well-known form 
of an ace of spades and were fixed into a wooden handle, as are 
also the axes, and battle axes (I. p. 427). But the principal sup- 
ply of ironcame from the Transvaal Mountains, especially from 
the Northern Zoutpansberg, where the Bvesha have practised 
the art of mining iron ore for an unknown time. These Suto 
hoes have played a great part in the history of the Thonga tribe, 
having been extensively used as currency for lobolo purposes. 

These Bvesha — this word is said to be a Thonga corruption 
of Venda — built their furnaces in ant-hills, as shewn in the 
adjoining illustration taken by M. H. Gros, near Iron Moun- 
tain, East of the Spelonken district. They excavated three 
holes under the furnace, and blew into it by means of bellows 
made of a skin, the air being expelled through an antelope horn. 
The ore, broken in small pieces and mixed with charcoal, was 
melted, crushed, melted a second time, crushed again and made 
into hoes and axes, etc. Who had taught the Venda their art? 

= VAR = 

Did they learn it from the Malemba, that curious tribe, halt 
Semitic in its customs, who invaded the Northern Transvaal 
during the XVIII century 2? Nobody knows for certain. I 
am under the impression that this art is older than that, as the 
Lebombo Natives, who invaded the Nondwane in the XVI* 
century, seem to have possessed iron weapons. The origin of 
iron and the date of its introduction in South Africa is still a 
mystery. 

Among the ornaments illustrated will be found a very pretty 
belt (Ne 1). It is the work of a young man named Philemon, 
living in the outskirts of Lourenco Marques, who employed his 
leisure moments in making objects of this description with twist- 
ed wires of iron, brass and copper, bent in festoons and fastened 
with small tongues of metal. European suggestion is doubtless 
very marked in these belts, but still they possess a certain ca- 
chet. Amongst Zulus as in our tribe, large cups of various 
descriptions, egg-cups are manufactured, and it is evident 
that, in this branch, Native art is capable of considerable 
development. Their method of fastening blades of assagais to 
their handles with iron wire is also very ingenious. Some- 
times they cover their ebony sticks from top to bottom with a 
delicate network of steel and brass wire. A Native expert in 
wire work once mended the stock of my sporting gun, which 
was broken, and made a wonderful job of it. This wire, that 
is so largely used for bracelets, was formerly made by Native 
blacksmiths, but now they buy it at Lourenco Marques or from 
the Hindu traders 

D. COMMERCE 

Thonga have a natal inclination for trade and have always 
been addicted to it. Before there was question of any cur- 
rency, when hoes were not yet procurable, nor the rit/atla brace- 
let brought from the Whites (I. p. 359), or the copper stick 
called lirale (1) melted by the Palaora Ba-Suto, they knew 

(1) Compare my article in Folklore, 24 June 1903. 

on 
N 

SOLD) "HE "104g 

diaqsurdnoz ut Aipunojuoay 

JANE) 

how to buy (shaba) and to sell (shabisa), viz., to exchange their 
primitive produce. A mat was bartered for a fowl and the 
thrifty savage thought : “‘ This is good business : the hen will 
lay eggs, and hatch chickens and this will bring me a profit 
(bindjula) ’. A shihundju basket was also exchanged for a 
hen. Another way of buying was adopted when dealing with 
pots : the pot was filled with mealies by the buyer and the 
contents left to the potter as corresponding to the value of the 
pot. For monkey-nuts, not husked, the pot had to be filled 
twice ; or for more precious products, such as sorghum and 
Kafir corn, half of it only was measured out. I have still seen 
some transactions of this kind amongst Shiluvane people. 
Should the pot break when first used, the potter had to give 
another one in its place. 

But this primitive trade became much more serious when 
the Whites made their appearance. Delagoa Bay has been one 
of the first spots visited and occupied by Europeans in South 
Africa, and a considerable Native trade developed there in the 
XVI" century, according to Portuguese documents. These 
Portuguese records show that, as far back as 1545, Lourenco 
Marques and Antonio Caldeira made a commercial exploration 
of the Bay and tried to establish regular exchanges with the 
Natives. These relations were not continuous, but in 1650 
there were five factories in the vicinity of Delagoa, on the 
island of Inyak, at Sheffin, on the Nkomati (Manhissa) and on 
both sides of the Bay. In 1721 the Dutch settled there and 
remained for fourteen years. The Austrians also stationed a 
garrison on Inyak Island in 1781, but this stronghold was des- 
troyed by a Portuguese frigate. Since the beginning of the 
XIX century the Portuguese occupation has been more con- 
tinuous. The only reason for Whites settling at Delagoa was, 
of course, the opportunity of traffic with the Natives, and the 
presence of foreigners has doubtless stimulated a certain com- 
mercial development among the Ba-Ronga and the tribes of the 
interior. This is, at any rate, asserted by a Portuguese who 
visited Lourengo Marques at the end of the XVII" century, 
and wrote an account of his impressions to Don F. Amaro de 

San Thomé, Prelate of Mozambique. His descriptions may 
appear somewhat highly coloured, to those who know the 
localities, but I quote the following passages which bear upon 
our subject: 

‘© On the Southern shore of the Bay resides King Capella (a sir- 
name bestowed by the Portuguese on the Royal family of Tembe) 
who is now knownas Antonio, (perhaps the Muhari of the Natives). 
He is very powerful, and has always with him a merchant who trades 
in ivory... Tothe North of the river is our factory, where we have a 
fort and as many as 170 soldiers. The King of Matolla (Matjolo) is 
very powerful, and well supplied with all necessaries. His village 
consists of over 400 huts. (This probably means all the villages of 
the country collectively). It is here that the inhabitants of the moun- 
tains bring for sale gold and copper and ivory, for which they have to 
pay dues. This Monarch ownsa province called Cherinda (Shirindja). 
He obtains from it quantities of ivory... I saw in the house of the 
King of Maouote (Mabota) two large chests full of amber. About 
thirty or forty days journey up the river (Nkomati) dwells the Grand 
Caxa (Cacha, doubtless Khosa, in the country of Khosene), who is a 
kind of emperor. It is here that all trading vessels come. (1) He 
dispenses hospitality to all the merchants who wish to buy ivory, gold, 
rhinoceros horns, hippopotamus’ teeth, or copper, articles which they 
obtain very particularly cheaply. A great number of negroes from 
the kingdom of Quitéve (not far from Beira) come down from the 
mountains to this village for purposes of barter. They bring a large 
quantity of gold... The Grand Caxa and his people are in continual 
relations with the Imperialists (the Austrians who occupied the Bay 
in 1781), who make large profits out of them. Every month two or 
three vessels, laden with black clothing and glass ware, arrive here for 
traffic with the Natives. These two rivers (the Maputju and the Nko- 
mati) can supply each year, from my observation, sufficient ivory, 
gold, rhinoceros horns and hippopotamus’ teeth to load more than 
twelve ships... All the shore of the Bay is thickly inhabited with 
people who transact a large business in amber, and go to sell it to 
the King Matolla, Maouote and to the Grand Caxa. ” 

(1) These ships, it must be understood, were in all probability, very small 
craft carrying at the most about five tons of merchandise. During the greater 
part of the year it is impossible to ascend the Nkomati higher than Magule 
(where the river forms an elbow) with anything drawing two feet of water. 

This description, perhaps somewhat extravagant, proves that 
in the XVIIIth century the Ba-Ronga were doing a considerable 
trade. 

It is interesting, in view of these White records, to note 
what Natives themselves remember regarding their trade in 
former times. According to them, the first White people they 
dealt with did not dare come to the shore. They were whale- 
fishers and gave the Makaneta people whale flesh to eat. The 
Ba-Ronga used to go and meet them in the Bay, on rafts built 
with stems of trees tied together (p. tro). They said: ‘“We go 
to Godji ” ; Godji meant that kind of trade. Blacks and Whites 
could not understand each other. However, the trade was not 
‘* silent trade’, as has been the case in.other quarters. -They 
managed to communicate by gestures, and Natives obtained 
mainly metals from these sailors, the brass ritlatla, iron hoes, 
pieces of copper which they made into wire, etc. Who were 
these strangers ? Natives cannot say for certain, but think that 
they were Englishmen, as the name Ba-Goadji is still commonly 
applied by them to English people. After these Whites, Natives 
remember the arrival of the Moslems, who came with their 
“vessels with an elevated tail”, (even to-day Arab dhows 
have a raised stern answering this description), called mapa- 
ngayi and were the first to land and to undertake a regular com- 
mercial exploitation of the country. They soon learnt to 
speak with the Natives, and to make use of them in their trade, 
sending them far away in the interior to barter ivory and skins 
against hoes, beads, clothing, and, later on, powder and bul- 
lets. 

Whatever may have been the order of arrival of these strang- 
ers, one fact is certain: the Ba Ronga of Delagoa Bay have 
acted as intermediaries between the Whites and the tribes in 
the interior for a considerable time, the Mpfumo-Nondwane, 
Mabota and Hlanganu (1) Natives being particularly engaged 

(1) The people of Hlanganu, neighbours of Nwamba, were renowned as 
commercial travellers. Hence their nickname: ‘* Ba ku hlomula fumo ba 
tlhaba misaba. ” — ‘* Those who take the assagai and pierce the earth. ” 
They used their weapon not for fighting but for pacific purposes : the assagai 

in this trade, and going as far as Mosapa (Ba-Ndjao country) 
and Bvesha (Ba-Venda country), to exchange goods. 

The commercial journeyings, though they are now a thing of 
the past, are well remembered by the old people, with ail the 
particular customs accompanying them. The Ba-Suto called 
these travellers Makwapa (Thonga pronunciation of Ma- 
gwamba), perhaps from the name of a Thonga chief who dwelt 
on the Oliphant (see Grammaire Ronga, p. 21), or near Inham- 
bane. The company, called mpfhumba, was generally led by a 
ndjilashi, viz, ‘‘the master of the expedition”, to whom the 
Banyan entrusted goods for barter. This man had to find a 
certain number of carriers, who would share in the profits of 
the venture. The Banyans estimated the value of the goods 
in pounds sterling. Should the whole be worth £ 60, for in- 
stance, he put 60 mealie cobs into a trunk and the ndjilashi did 
the same in his own hut; on reaching home again, he had to 
deliver to the Banyan money or skins or whatever he had sold 
the goods for, to the value of £ 60; and, in case of disagree- 
ment, the 60 cobs were counted again in corroboration of the 
contract made. Should he bring an elephant’s tusk, the Banyan 
gave him the value of a full lobolo. Carriers received two pieces 
of calico as reward. 

After having visited Kimberley, in 1870, some Thonga, hay- 
ing begun to better understand the advantages of trading, tried 
to undertake such expeditions on their own account. But they 
soon gave up the experiment as the Ngoni of Muzila often robbed 
them of all their goods. When they were working for White 
men, the Ngoni were afraid to pillage the company; on the 
other hand, if perchance there was loss, it concerned the White 
merchant. So they preferred the system of trading for the 
White men. 

These travelling companies had to observe many taboos in order 
to succeed in their expeditions. First of all the travellers’ taboos. 
There are three curious taboos to mention in connection with 

served as a walking stick in their commercial journeyings, Another version 
is this: ‘* Ba shaba ndlela”, — ‘‘ they buy the road ”, they do not fight, 
they would rather pay to be allowed to pass (I. p. 335). 

any journeyings : a traveller must not take sa/t with him when 
he goes, either to pay a visit, or to hunt, or on a business trip, 
else he will not succeed in his object; he must avoid sharpening 
assagais on the road; this would rouse his enemies and ‘‘ awaken 
thorns” on the path; he must take care not to pluck milala 
leaves, those used for weaving baskets: it would be an insult to 
the people on whom he is calling. Let him cut those leaves when 
returning, or else he will find trouble in the village to which he 
goes, lamentations, shoutings, disgusting sights. 

Morover, in order ‘‘to keep the road clean” (basisa ndlela) the 
traveller must also beware of the mampfana bird, a kind of crane 
called ‘‘the preventer of the voyage” (sibaliyendjo (Ro.), shi- 
tshinyariendjo (Dj.). Should that bird fly across the road, open- 
ing wide its wings, this would be enough to make the party 
return home: there was danger of death before them! The 
flesh of this bird is used in the preparation of the charms taken 
by travellers. This is why it comes to warn them if the road 
is not ‘‘clean”. (Viguet). 

There are several popular songs which the traders used to 
sing on the road, or which weresung about them. One of these 
has been already quoted (p. 86). Here is another in which 
the tired carriers ask their leader to allow them to return home: 

Hoho! hoho ! maringele wa mamano ! 
Hoho! hoho! dla nkambana hi muka ! 
Hulukati ya ndlopfu yi nga sivi Nwana! 

Oho! Oho! Thou who leadest us as a mother! 
Oho! Oho! Break the platter and let us go home ! 
The female-elephant never forsakes her young ! 

The company generally consisted of men only. However the 
allusion to the female elephant might mean that there were 
sometimes also women amongst them, They address the leader 
of the expedition, asking him to destroy the platter so that 
no utensils be left in which to prepare food, thus necessitating 
a return home. Besides they are thinking of their little ones 
left behind in the village, as it is unnatural to be separated so 
long. ‘The mother elephant never forsakes her little one! 

On their way back, they had carefully to watch a certain bird 
called /xvati, fish-eater ; if that bird flew away in the right direc- 
tion, homeward, it was a hopeful sign. If it emitted its cry 
Kwe-kweru-kweru, (kweru means at home), if it settled on the 
crown of a hut, then the travellers were happy and shouted 
their joyful mikulungwane. On the contrary, should any mem- 
ber of the company have died on the road, another bird would 
come and perch on the crown, the magudjwana, with a tired 
look, letting its head fall forward... Then there were tears in- 
stead of shouts of joy ! 

These great commercial expeditions were superseded later on 
by the trade in skins which the Ba-Ronga conducted, bartering 
them in the interior for powder or other European produce. 
I knew one Native who organised regular expeditions to Bilene, 
where he bought skins of civet-cats with which the Zulu war- 
riors delight to deck themselves. Thence he went into the hill 
country of the Swazis, or Zulus, to sell his merchandise. It 
was reported that he obtained scores of oxen in exchange for 
his precious nsimba skins. The last time, however, the ven- 
ture did not turn out well, and it has not been attempted again. 

Native trade, thirty years ago, consisted also in selling wax, 
and rubber, and tons of nkampfi (mafureira almonds) to the 
business houses at Delagoa, (the supply of ivory was exhausted 
years ago), but this trade has fallen off almost entirely. My 
impression is that Native commerce has greatly diminished dur- 
ing the last thirty years. So the fact is evident that civilisa- 
tion, which had at first given a real impetus to the commercial 
spirit of the Thonga, has latterly almost entirely destroyed their 
trade. How has this been done ? 

A first reason for this decrease in Native commerce may be 
found in the advent of a large number of Asiatics, Banyans from 
Goa and Bombay, who are past masters in the art of shop- 
keeping, and who set up in business wherever they consider 
there is a sufficient population to warrant the venture. Living 
very cheaply (tice and curry being their staple food), in any 
kind of shanty, selling at enormous profits, keen at making 
bargains, these people monopolise the retail trade throughout 

the country and the Natives are quite unable to meet the com- 
petition : they have consequently almost entirely given up all 
their earlier attempts at business transactions! (1) 

A second reason explaining why the trade of former days has 
almost entirely disappeared is to be found in the great economic 
changes resulting from the fact that Lourenco Marques has 
become an important seaport, in close relation with the miners 
of Johannesburg who receive their supplies in transit via Dela- 
goa Bay. ‘Thousands of Natives are employed in discharging the 
large steamers which arrive by hundreds in the roadstead. At 
this work a Native can earn fifteen shillings a week; in a short 
time he has made ample provision for the wants of his family 

(1) I made, on one occasion, in 1892, a list of various articles displayed for 
sale, in and around a Banyan shop, in the district of Mahazule (to the North 
of Nondwane). This is what Mr. Nala, a Hindu from Goa established for 
many years amongst the Ronga, offered to the Natives living in the neigh- 
bourhood of his primitive store. 

Stuffs. These are sold by measurement taken on the individual; say, by 
the shikumba, length of one arm, or by the nkuwmba or bemba (two arms), or 
by the peca, the entire piece, the equivalent of two bemba. The materials 
most in demand are called ; tingidao (white), mashita (black with white stripes), 
shilandana (all red), shinwakana (red and black), mempana (a special red 
stuff worn as mourning) and malopa (a navy blue material still more frequent- 
ly worn as mourning). Besides these are handkerchiefs (minturu) of various 
colours, principally red, a large proportion coming from manufacturers of 
East Switzerland; white blankets (gampongo, meaning snow), for three or 
four shillings ; coloured blankets, thicker, varying from five to seven shillings; 
towels, called ¢hawula (an adaptation of the English word) and even some 
articles of ready-made clothing such as djansi (overcoats) at fifteen shillings! 
Amongst the stuffs Ishould more particularly note the gangisa nftombi, that is 
‘* for use when courting the girls ”,dark blue with a white flower pattern. 

Beads, There are at least a dozen kinds to be found at Nala’s ; djiridja 
black) mbanda (white), shingazana, shimuzana, nkankana, habo, matshimbarole, 
bafa, tshambo. 

Sundries. Rings, fish-hooks, buttons (masowa), thread, needles, snuff 
boxes to be carried in the ears (tinhlanga), knives, spoons, balls of string, 
padlocks (makandjate) with key attached ; little chains, to be hung from the 
belt, which tinkle when walking; bracelets (busenga, ten for a shilling); wood- 
en spoons, combs, coils of fine iron wire; skins ; a large trap for catching 
hyenas or other wild animals; small brass petroleum lamps; sardines at six- 
pence a tin, English biscuits, and finally, last but not least, a cask of German 
brandy diluted (tempora) with 509/o of water! This would now be replaced 
by three casks of Vinho colonial, one of white wine, one of red wine and 
one of I do not know what colour ! 

and no longer finds it necessary to go to Bilene, to Zulu land 
or Swaziland to make a living. ‘The women too can make 
money by selling tomatoes and sweet potatoes to an ever increas- 
ing White population. All this is much easier than collecting 
mafureira, wax or tapping trees for rubber. (1) 

Moreover the fashion of going to the Transvaal mines, to earn 
money, has become so universal that a Thonga would think he 
Was wanting in something if he had not made a stay in town 
(shilungu). There, in Johannesburg, they earn £ 3 in the 
mines, € 4 or 5 monthly as kitchen boys; so they despise the old 
primitive trading expeditions which brought less money and 
were attended with more danger. 

These new economic circumstances not only discourage Na- 
tives to trade on their own account, reducing them more and 
more to the condition of mere hired labourers, but are rapidly 
destroying their so picturesque and interesting industry. For 
a few shillings they can buy European utensils. Their nicely 
carved spoons are replaced by ugly tin ones; their wooden 
tumblers by less artistic enamelled ones, their primitive plates 
by European ware decorated with doubtful taste. Instead of 
the piece of reed which they carried in the ear as a snuff box, 
they now buy brass cartridges, and the Thonga beauties, dis- 
carding the tihublu fat, now anoint themselves with a scented 
oil imported from Europe. There may be certain advantages 

(1) There are at least two species of shrubs whose sap, when hardened, 
produces excellent rubber. These are fairly wide-spread and M. Dewévre, a 
Belgian botanist, who has made a special study of the rubber plants, and to 
whom I sent leaves and fruits of the trees, has classified them with the Lan- 
dolphia. One is said to be a Landolphia Petersiana, and the other a variety 
of the Landolphia Kirki (Dyer) called by others Landolphia Monteiroi. Na- 
tives make an incision in the bark of the tree, and a milky sap exudes, which 
soon thickens and the somewhat sticky filaments are then wound round small 
sticks. A good yield of rubber could undoubtedly be obtained in this country 
if the trees were cultivated and tapped in an intelligent manner. 

(With regard to the name of the rubber tree compare Delagoa Bay, its 
Natives and Natural History, London, Philip and Son, 1891, written by Mrs 
Monteiro, an Englishwoman who spent several years in Lourenco Marques 
and published interesting observations on the country. Without claiming 
any great scientific accuracy, this volume affords much interesting infor- 
mation. ) 

in these changes, but the picturesqueness of Bantu life promptly 
disappears, together with the incentive to develop their Native 
arts and crafts ! 

E. GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON NATIVE INDUSTRY 

It is a strange destiny, that of these African races amongst whom 
the civilisation of the XIXt» century has appeared, effecting the most 
radical changes in mind and manners of people who, for centuries, 
perhaps for tens of centuries, have remained in the same primitive 
condition, marking time, so to speak, on the same spot, or, at most, 
progressing almost imperceptibly. The transformation would seem 
to be as rapid as the previous immobility was fixed. 

Let us try to discover the causes which may account for this extraor- 
dinary stagnation. 

All are agreed in bearing witness to the fact that the state of civili- 
sation, in which Europeans found the Bantu tribes of South Africa, 
is of extremely ancient date. It is true that we have but little histo- 
rical data to go upon as regards the development of these people, but, 
nevertheless, it seems to me highly probable that the shape of their 
ngula, their hwama, their shirundju, their pillows, the construction 
of their huts, date from a very remote antiquity, and have been hand- 
ed down unchanged from generation to generation. How to account 
for their absence of development, whilst the Indo-European races, 
starting probably from similar primitive conditions, have advanced to 
so high a degree of civilisation as that of the Greeks and Romans, and 
ultimately to that of modern times ? 

The reply given by many casual observers to this question is that 
the Bantu races are incapable of progress. They are condemned, by 
reason of their psychical constitution, to vegetate in perpetual barba- 
rism or to make themselves ridiculous by a servile imitation of the 
superior races. This thesis is not justified by the facts of the case. 
We recognise a relatively mental inferiority in the Thonga, as in their 
congeneric Bantu, but nevertheless their minds possess, in a more or 
less rudimentary state, all those faculties of which we are wont to 
boast. During the several years I have passed in close contact with 
these intelligences, supposed to be so limited, I have been more often 
struck with the points of analogy between the Africans and ourselves 
than by the differences which separate us. Besides, it is an error to 

—133  
assert that they have not progressed. Their inventive genius is fully 
proved by the various ways in which the several tribes have taken 
advantage of the materials with which Nature has supplied them. 
The Ba-Ronga do not make their baskets as do the Zulus, or the 
Ba-Suto. Again, in many separate instances, we can note a distinct 
forward movement in their industry : the arrival of glass beads, one 
or two hundred years ago, gave birth to an entirely new and original 
decorative art ; during the last century, the contest with a tribe better 

Phot. Dentan. 
Manual work at the Lemana Training School (Northern Transvaal). 

clothed than themselves led them to adopt another anda more decent, 
costume. (Compare «Introduction a la Grammaire ronga» § XXXI). 
When copper and brass wire became procurable, they not only made 
pretty bracelets, but they invented quite a new art, weaving belts 
(p. 85, N°1), egg-cups, cups of various forms very different from those 
of European make. 

The ability of the Native to progress in industry cannot be doubted 
when one sees the results of the industrial teaching they receive in 

many Missionary Institutions. The Swiss Romande Missionaries have 

as oy ee 
introduced, in their schools, the manufacture of. baskets and mats 
with the materials found in the country, and the experiment was alto- 
gether in favour of the intelligence of the Natives, as shown in the 
adjoining illustration. One of the pupils of Shiluvane even invented 
a new form of basket, made with a single leaf of a big palm tree 
(mpfurwana) growing in the Leydsdorp plain. In those institutions 
where carpentering and wageon building are scientifically taught, 
results are very satisfactory, and I myself saw in Lovedale, a splendid 
American desk, which had been made entirely by a Native, and was 
as perfect as if it had been manufactured by an European craftsman. 
So the industrial stagnation of the South African tribes must not be 
put down to an innate incapacity for progress. I think we must look 
elsewhere for its causes, and, without pretending to exhaust the ques- 
tion, I will proceed to enumerate the reasons, which, to my mind, 
explain the exceedingly slow development of those tribes. 

Their political system, social and religious, is one of the chief causes 
of this state of things. The deceased chiefs are the gods of the nation. 
That which they did is that which should be done now : their lives 
are the supreme examples to be followed : the traditions bequeathed 
by ancestors are the only religious and moral light which these people 
possess. Customs, handed down from prehistoric times, are law. 
No one would think of emancipation therefrom. To dootherwise than 
others do, psa yila, is forbidden. It would be a denial of the divine 
authority of the ancestors, and a danger to thetribe. This principle 
is the most strictly maintained in such tribe as is the most free from 
foreign admixture and the least exposed to outside influences. In the 
Khosen country, for example, when an evangelist trained in Spelon- 
ken, Yosefa, wanted to build a square house, he was hindered from 
doing so. It was against the law. How could he expect to live ina 
hut of a different shape to those his forefathers had inhabited 2? Had 
there been no Whites in the country, Yosefa would have found it 
impossible to build a house to his liking! This is a typical case of 
the immobility of Native industry. (1) 

But in giving as a reason for this immobility the all-powerful sway 

(1) The lack of imagination in these races seems specially noticeable in 
mechanics, and it has been remarked that South African Natives have not yet 
invented a single machine. This may be true. However, I heard attested by 
a Johannesburg technician that Thonga had a real aptitude for running engines 
and a real bent for mechanics. As not one of them ever studied advanced 
mathematics, no wonder they have not invented new machines. 

of customs, supported and maintained by the national authorities, we 
have only pushed the difficulty further back. How has it been pos- 
sible to maintain such a system of oppression? How is it that no 
stronger minded individuals have arisen to throw off this yoke and 
gain liberty of action, stirring up, in spite of itself, the tribe dormant, 
like an organism with blood congealed! Amongst our own races, 
men of genius, great thinkers, have, from earliest times, known how 
to impress their new ideas upon the masses, and lead them eventually, 
however recalcitrant, upon the march of progress. We will have to 
content ourselves with two considerations which may help to solve 
the problem. 

Our civilisation is the result of a combination of millions of minds 
and hundreds of peoples. The lake-dweller, of the stone-age, was not 
much more developed than the actual Black of South Africa: in some 
respects he was less so. But he inhabited Europe, and, to the South 
of that Continent, stretched an inland sea, a Mediterranean, which 
spreads out its many arms, gulfs and bays, reaching to the very hearts 
of the countries on its shores, and thus facilitating access between 
Nation and Nation. Every new discovery by one soon became the 
property of its neighbour. Rome inherited from Greece, and Greece 
from Egypt and Abyssinia, and these international relations, favoured 
by the geographical conditions of the Old World, explain the deve- 
lopment, the arithmetical progression shall we call it? of our Indo-Euro- 
pean civilisation. In Africa, nothing of the sort. Few, if any, gulfs 
or bays in this Continent, whose coasts are hopelessly unbroken and 
inhospitable. -Many a long stretch of river, otherwise navigable, is 
closed to navigation by impassable cataracts. Deserts of burning sand 
separate the tribes one from another, and sometimes they are isolated 
by veritable ramparts of lofty mountains. Communications are almost 
impossible, and the Black tribe, left to its own resources, amidst natu- 
ral surroundings of an enervating description, remains stationary and 
content with the elementary industry to which it has attained. Out- 
side influence is wanting to stimulate the intellectual energy, the inven- 
tive faculty of which they possess the germs. 

Beyond all this a second factor is noticeable in the course of human 
development, and this, while all in favour of the Indo-European races, 
accentuates still more forcibly the differences between the several 
branches of the human family. Through the centuries the Egyptian 
hieroglyphs slowly evolved into ideographic signs, which eventually 
gave place to the phonetic alphabet of the Phenicians. This alphabet 

ee 136 = 

goes forth to conquer the world, and to put a fresh aspect on things 
generally. These twenty to thirty letters of which the Blacks had not 
the slightest notion, these signs, thanks to which stone, wood and 
paper have been made to speak, will henceforward allow great minds 
to transmit their thoughts direct to their fellow-men. The knowledge 
of one epoch will then be passed on intact to following generations, 
whilst, formerly, ideas were frequently lost or distorted by popular 
tradition; progression will henceforth be not merely arithmetical but 
geometrical. The book willbe the accumulator in which the intellectual 
forces of the race will be stored, for the future transmission, without 
wastage, prolific of light and incentive, to every sphere of human acti- 
vity. The Blacks of South Africa have never invented any system 
of writing. The idea of representing an object, a number, a thought, 
ora sound by any conventional sign, seems never to have occurred to 
them. Makhani, Muzila’s old ioiasaide did not know his own age. 
He probably thought, in common with many of his contemporaries, 
that he was, at least, ten yearsold. One day, I said to him : ‘“* Why 
didn’t you go each year, when the leaves begin to appear on the trees, 
and make some kind of a mark on the bark of a nkuhlu? Then. to- 
day, you might have counted all the marks and you would know how 
old you are!” He laughed and considered the idea futile, absurd ! 
The absence of any system of writing is, doubtless, the proof of a 
certain intellectual inferiority, but environment may easily account 
for the illiterate condition of Natives. In fact itisenvironment which 
is the chief cause of their centuries-long stagnation. 

It would, however, be doing a wrong to these people, were we to 
judge them solely by the absence of industrial progress. Mental acti- 
vity is not only manifested in the manufacture of machinery or in 
transactions of high finance. Man is a being endowed with thought 
and speech. Speech and literature, reflecting thoughts, are pnecee of 
human activity more essential than industrial undertakings. The 
Thonga, in common with their neighbours the Ba-Suto and the 
Zulus, do surely possess a literature, although they have no system of 
writing and may be classed as illiterates ; of this fact I shall furnish 
abundant proof when treating of their lilerary and artistic life. 

BE PART 

THE LITERARY AND ARTISTIC LIFE 

Ethnography does not merely consist in the description of cus- 
toms and rites. Under the manifold manifestations of the Life 
of the Tribe, the ethnographer tries to discover its soul... The 
more we proceed in our study, the nearer we approach the mys- 
tery of its psychic life. 

The psychic life reveals itself in two great sets of spiritual 
facts, those relating to the intellectual and those relating to the 
religious and moral side of life; in other words, the mind of a 
nation can be considered under two different aspects : the intel- 
lectual, and the moral and religious. We have not yet gone far 
enough to come to any conclusion as regards the Religion and 
Morality of the Native soul, but we can already attempt to de- 
scribe the main characteristics of the Native intellect.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BANTU INTELLECT 

I intend here, briefly, to give the results of the study of the 
language : the language of a nation being one of the most trust- 
worthy and complete manifestations of its mind. 

I have had the audacity to speak of the Bantu, and not only 
of the Thonga intellect, because the grammatical features of all 
the Bantu languages are so similar that conclusions drawn from 

aos 138 oo 

one of them apply to most of the tribes, mutatis mutandis. At 
any rate Suto, Zulu, Chopi, Venda, Thonga are very much akin, 
as regards their structure, forming as they do the South Eastern 
group of Bantu languages; and, though the Central or Western 
groups differ on certain points, it may be asserted that the Bantu 
dialects present a remarkable uniformity. 

My aim is not, by any means, to go into a grammatical 
study. This has been done for most of our South African lan- 
guages, and the linguist who wishes to learn Thonga can use 
the Grammaire Ronga, or the Elementary Thonga-Shangaan 
Grammar already referred to. Leaving aside any technicali- 
ties, IT now only wish to show what the language reveals as 
regards the Bantu intellect. Let us, on this important question, 
take the testimony of the Noun, the Verb, the Syntax and the 

Adverb. 

A. THE NOUN. THE POWER OF CLASSIFICA TION 

The Bantu system of Nouns shows that the Bantu intellect 
possesses the Power of classification. All the nouns are distri- 
buted in a certain number of classes or genders, seven or eight 
in the South Eastern group, as many as ten in the Central groups; 
these classes are known by their singular and plural prefixes 
which are very similar in all dialects. What is the system of 
classification which these Genders denote? The Indo-German 
languages divide the objects of Nature into two categories, male 
and female, and, in most cases, add a third category, the neuter. 
These are sex-denoting languages, as Bleek used to call them. 
Nothing of the kind is met with amongst the Bantu. (1) They 
follow an entirely different system, As a matter of fact, it is very 

(1) The Thonga, however, possesses a feminine suffix att (eti, etsi) corres- 
ponding to a feminine prefix mi (I. p. 15.). This suffix is found in nsati. 
wile, rarakati, paternal aunt, hulukati, female elephant, hweti, moon, nyeleti. 
star, mati_(?) water, ete. It appears in many names of rivers : Nkomati, 
Nwebeti, Nwanetsi, Selati, Nfoloti, Shingwedzi, etc. Other names of rivers 
belong to the littin class: Limbelule (Oliphant) Limpopo, Lisuthu, Letsitele 
(Ritshindjele), Ritabi (Great Tabie), etc, 

difficult to understand it fully. These languages have already 
undergone a long evolution, and, just as it is impossible to state 
why a French word like ‘‘chemin” is masculine and another 
word like route is feminine, so the reason why such and sucha 
noun belongs to such and such a class is not always apparent. 
However, as a whole, the Bantu system of classification is much 
more reasonable than the Indo-German one. I do not study it 
etymologically, viz., by searching the original meaning of pre- 
fixes, a work which is very delicate and which has been accom- 
plished by Prof. Meinhof, who had at his disposal an enormous 
quantity of material for comparison. I only consider it in its 
broad features, as it presents itself now, in the living language, 
and I assert that it reveals a true power of classification. 

The Bantu mind distributes the objects of Nature into seven 
or eight categories : 

1) The Personal beings, which are classified by the prefixion of 
mu (n) in the singular and da in the plural, thus forming a first 
class, the class mu-ba ; munhu, man, nuna, husband, nsati, wife, 
etc. This class is so clearly defined in the Bantu mind that new 
objects bearing the character of persons are immediately incor- 
porated with it: e. g. mulungu, White man, muhanu, White 
woman (from an Indian word). Animals acting as sensible 
beings in folk tales are also transported from their class into the 
mu-ba class by prefixing Niwa before their names, and number- 
less verbal nouns are formed by prefixing mu to the verbal stem, 
if they designate persons (e. g. ku fa, to die, mufi, the dead 
man). 

2) The second class, mu-mi, designates trees ; almost all the 
trees belong to it (I. p. 369), and those recently introduced 
into the country have been named according to that rule, e. g. 
manga, mimanga, the mango tree. It is true that we find a 
number of other things with the prefix of the tree-class: the 
wind (moya), and similar objects (mumu, heat, ndjilo, fire, 
mpfuka, space,-nkari, time), the body (miri) and some of its 
organs (nomo, the lip, nenge, the leg). But trees are the cha- 
racteristic element of this class. 

3) The third class, yin-tin (Zulu in-izin, Suto (n)-li) is evi- 

dently that of the animals. Ninety per cent belong to it; and 
though a number of other objects have these prefixes (different 
degrees of affinity for instance : namu, ndjisana, etc., I, p. 220), 
this is certainly the animal class. 

4) The fourth class (dji-ma (Ro.), ri-ma (Dj.), Zulu : ili-ama, 
Suto: le-ma) is that of fruits, and new fruits are constantly 
incorporated in it (e. g. malalandji, oranges). Many other cate- 
gories of objects are found in this class: natural objects, hard, 
shining (pala, skull; rambu, bone; fumu, thlari, assagai; dambu, 
sun) and things grouped together. It may be that the prefix 
ma originally applied to objects conveying the idea of duality 
(mahlo, eyes; mabele, breasts; maboko, arms; mahahla, twins); 
but in the present state of the language the fruits seem to me 
to be the characteristic feature of this class. . 

5) The fifth class (lin-tin (Ro.), ri-tin (Dj.), ulu-izi (Zulu) 
is most difficult to define and seems to have a tendency to 
become obsolete : it is wanting in Suto, and nearly so in Djonga. 
I call it the class of organs, at any rate of organs of an elongated 
form (lidjimi, tongue; libambo, rib; likhongotlo, spine, etc.). 
The primitive idea may be that of length. 

6.7.8) The sixth, seventh and eighth classes bear a strong neu- 
ter character: the sixth (du-ma, Zulu ubu-ama, Suto bo-ma) 
designates abstract notions derived from adjectives or verbs 
(bukulu, greatness), the seventh (shi-psi, Zulu isi-izi, Suto se-li) 
instruments and the eighth (ku, Zulu uku, Suto hu) actions. This 
is the verbal class, the infinitive of the verb, ku famba meaning 
the march as well as to march. 

The class bu-ma might also be called the class of liquids, as 
most liquids belong to it (bukanyi, buputju, etc. See I. p. 369): 

Considering the principal meaning of these eight classes, we 
can state that, whatever may be the origin of the prefixes, the 
actual Bantu, at any rate the Thonga, classify the objects of 
Nature into: Personal beings, trees, animals, fruits, organs, 
liquids, abstract notions, instruments, actions, other objects being 
incorporated with one or another of these classes in a more or 
less arbitrary way. 

That this is a true classificatory system, every one speaking 

one of those languages will be able to testify : instinctively one 
incorporates new objects into the fitting class, or one uses the 
prefixes in the formation of new words according to their clas- 
sifying value. The power of classification of the Bantu mind is 
certainly not inferior to that of the Aryans. 

B. THE VERB AND THE POWER OF COMBINATION 

The Bantu verb has no inflexion ; Bantu languages belong to 
the agglutinative variety, viz., they express the various tenses, 
and moods of the verb not by a change of the root, but by the 
addition of verbal elements, either prefixed or suffixed. But 
these additions are so rich, they can express such delicate ideas, 
that the student of Bantu languages stands amazed at the powers 
of combination which they reveal. It is impossible here to 
prove this assertion by technical examples, but I can declare 
that any one conversant with the use of these verbal principles 
is able to express all ideas which are conveyed by the conjuga- 
tion of inflective verbs and a good many more. It is no exag- 
geration to speak of the thousands of combinations of the Bantu 
conjugation. 

To illustrate the power of combination of the Bantu mind, I 
need only refer the linguist to the wonderful set of verbal deriv-- 
atives which are to be found. Take the simple form ku bona, 
to see. You can derive from it the passive boniwa, to be seen; 
two qualificatives, boneka and bonakala, to be visible; the appli- 
cative bonela, to see for somebody else, to take care of; the cau- 
sative, bonisa, to cause somebody to see; the intensive, bonisisa, 
to see perfectly well; the reciprocal, Lonana, to see each other; 
the reflexive, tibona, to see one self. There is still to be men- 
tioned the reversive, as pakula, to unload (from pakela, to load). 
All these various derivations can combine according to given 
laws, each adding its own meaning to the others. So, from ku 
tira, to work, you can form tirelana, the applicative reciprocal, 
to serve each other, tireriwa, applicative passive, to be served, 
tirisiwa, to be made to work, etc. An endless number of com- 
binations is thus rendered possible. 

C. SYNTAX AND THE POWER OF CO-ORDINATION 

The Bantu mind proceeds by co-ordinating ideas rather then 
subordinating them to each other. 

This appears clearly when studying conjunctions. There are 
very few subordinative conjunctions. For instance, our “in 
order to” is rendered by Jetsaku, that is to say, or akuba, to be. 
Ex.: Mu nyike mali Jetsaku a tishabela psa-ku-da, give him 
money that is to say or to be he buys food for himself. Ifand when 
are both rendered by Joko, which is but a demonstrative pronoun 
of the neuter class ku. But this power of co-ordination is 
extremely large and gives the language a remarkable clearness. 
Its main feature is this achievement: the prefix of the noun 
is used to form all the adjectives and pronouns in connection 
with it, as will be clearly seen from the following sentence: 

Yindlopfu lefinyingi ta  tiko tt khalutile : hi fone 

The elephants numerous of the land they have passed: It is they, 

hifolet?, le’ti_ — bonekaka mutywen wa fone. 
itis these which are visible in the forest of them. 

This is what grammarians have called the Euphonic concord. 
It is certainly ewphonic bringing about frequent alliterations which 
are pleasing to the ear, and at any rate prevent miscomprehen- 
sion, helping to understand, at once, to which noun the pro- 
nouns and adjectives refer. 

D. ADVERBS AND THE POWER OF DESCRIPTION 

Adverbs of place, of manner, of time, etc., are very interest- 
ing to study; they show the presence of remnants of the three 
locative classes, pa, mu and ku, which are still flourishing in Cen- 
tral African languages, and have become obsolete in those of 
South Africa (handle, outside; hansi, on the ground; hase, on 
the other border; mundjuku, to morrow ; kaya, at home ; etc.) 
and this seems to prove that our dialects represent a further 
development of the old Bantu languages. But I here especially 

a3 = 
consider what I have called the Descriptive Adverbs, a category 
of very curious words which have not been sufficiently noticed 
and which disclose a wonderful power of description in the 
Thonga mind. 

These words, hundreds and even thousands of which are 
employed by the Natives, consist in monosyllables or polysyl- 
lables, often repeated twice or thrice, and generally following 
the verb ku. This verb ku, which is also one of the curious fea- 
tures of Thonga grammar, a very primitive verb indeed, desig- 
nates any manifestation of self, either in action, speech, or thought, 
and can be translated accordingly by to do, to say, or to think. 
Now, for the wonderfully acute senses of the sons of the bush, 
everything — man, beasts, objects of Nature —- speaks and 
thinks, and these adverbs try to express in picturesque words 
these actions, this language of the things, sounds as well as 
movements, attitudes, feelings, etc. 

Let us begin by the sound. The Hare, in one of the Thonga 
tale, is represented as sleeping, when it suddenly awakens 
having heard a sala, the fruit of the nsala tree (p. 16), fall- 
ing from the branch and saying: katla-katla, katla-katla, be ! 
Katla-katla evidently translates the noise made by the hard shell 
of the fruit knocking against the branches on its way down 
until it reaches the ground and abruptly finishes its journey, the 
end of which is rendered by the short monosyllable be!.... The 
Hare frightened by the noise, runs away and arouses all the 
beasts of the bush, one after the other, saying: ‘‘I have heard a 
noise of katla-katla, katla-katla, be” or, -— here he changes the 
word, probably to avoid a tiresome repetition : “ ngaya-ngaya, 
ngaya-ngaya, be!” This can be called an onomatopoeia and is 
met with in a great many languages. A certain number of the 
adverbs descriptive of sound are universally known and used. 
Birds say: pse/ tswi! tsiri! The wind says: wotshyu-wotshyu... 
A man says go-go-go, he knocks at the door; mpfaaa, he tears a 
cloth; pfotlo, he breaks a stick, etc. There are hundreds of 
them in Thonga, and any one having enough imagination can 
still invent new ones; I remember hearing a Native describing 
a waggon rolling along a stony road: you could recognise the 

sound of the wheels, of the chain, of the frame, grinding, ratt- 
ling, creaking! 

Sometimes the descriptive adverb is very different from the 
sound it is intended to imitate: thus, when the dog is said to 
say : ndo-ndo-ndo, the mouse : tlulu-tlulu, the duyker: rurururu, 
the hare : thwa-tlwa-tlwa. Here the character of the movement, 
or of the gait, is described as well as the sound. We find 
indeed that a considerable number of these adverbs are descrip- 
tive of movements, viz., of phenomena perceived by the eyes, 
and not by the ear. They translate the impression made on 
the brain by objects, motions seen and not heard, phenomena of 
vision. 

Movements of all kinds, of animate or inanimate beings, are 
vividly reproduced by the descriptive adverbs. Movements of the 
whole body: a man says gaa, he falls on his back; dlomu, 
nyupe, he plunges into the water ; retemuku, he slips ; ngiri-ngiri- 
ngiri, he walks down; khaga, he climbs; buumbuluku, he rises 
briskly. Movements of one limb: wme, he lifts the arm to threa- 
ten; ntshuki, he shakes his head to deny; kutje, he nods in 
assent; tope-tjope, he twinkles. Movements which entail defi- 
mite actions : ntswi, mpsi, he ties; nkwaa, he opens a door; 
petlu, he breaks something ; dli, he pierces; buonyu, he spoils; 
Clee tc: 

The various kinds of gait can also be described in this primitive 
way : ntu-ntu-ntu, the elephant, a bulky thing, advancing slowly; 
kwanyi-kwanyi, the lion walking heavily ; pha-pha-pha, the jerky 
flight of the butterfly ; kwe-kwe, a man walking with diffi- 
culty: tsere-tsere, walking deliberately ; kwiti, limping; gutsele- 
gutsele, a lame man; nyantsa-nyantsa, spying out. The frog 
jumping on the ground, and later on into the water says: nwe... 
nwe...nwe... djiama! (this last word describing the plunge into 
the water). A man running slowly says wable; with small steps: 
nyakwi-nyakwi ; with rapidity: phene-mene-mene, or nyu-nyu, or 
kwaru-kwaru ; sprinting, nana-nana, or nwana-nwana. 

The various attitudes are expressed by words, sometimes in a 
very amusing way: aman says phavava, or nhabalala, or barat- 
jatja, he lies on his belly; he says wololoko, he stands erect ; 

aoe, ae 
khempfa, he sits down very tired; yinti, he stands listening atten- 
tively, etc. 

The facial expressions are minutely described by a great 
wealth of such words: a man says: /angu, he looks at some- 
thing ; Jori, with attention ; di/oto, intently, and for a long 
time; par?, with anger ; dlanya, with kindness. 

Let us take another step forward and we shall find another 
category describing the state of mind, the feelings of the heart, 
which are also phenomena of vision as far as they correspond 
to given attitudes of the body or to certain expressions of the 
features. A man says gee, he is happy ; kono, he fears; nkwi- 
nkwisi, he is in bad humour; doko-doko, he covets; punavuna, 
he has pity. 

By means of such adverbs phenomena of Nature and even abstract 
ideas can be described. Heaven says, mphu, it becomes dark; 
dzunu, the day breaks ; the smoke says tobi-tobi, it ascends to hea- 
ven; the water, or the rays of the sun, say Jululu, they begin to 
feel warm; the fire says Jasi-/asi, it is seen flickering far away. 

Abstract ideas. Men say i or kutlu, they are all killed, to the 
last one (total destruction) ; somebody says kwemetelo, he does 
not attain his end, etc. 

The list of the descriptive adverbs which I have collected 
comprises more than 250 of them. Most of them were obtained 
in the following way. Teaching my pupils the Bukhaneli, viz., 
the Grammar of their own language — which I always found 
a very interesting and useful subject of study for them — I asked 
each of them to write down at once 50 of these strange words. 
Without hesitation they compiied with my demand, one of 
them writing as many as 70. Almost all of them were diffe- 
rent. This shows the extreme wealth of the language, in this 
respect. It is no exaggeration to say that, in Thonga, there are 
ten, perhaps twenty times more descriptive adverbs than those 
quoted by my pupils. Dealing with characteristics of the 
Thonga or Bantu (1) mind, I think they are worth every 

(1) Thonga or Bantu? i, e. are these words peculiar to Thonga, or also present 
in other Bantu dialects? That they exist everywhere is proved by the com- 
parative Grammar of Torrend, who calls them: onomatopoetic substantives 

E= 146 asst 

consideration. These thousands of words, instinctively formed 
to express the impression made on the brain by any kind 
of phenomena, prove the existence of a wonderful power 
of description. The Bantu mind vibrates with an astonishing 
intensity at any shock from the outside, and it finds a 
way of expressing this vibration by picturesque words which 
give an extraordinary interest and colour to speech. (1) Bantu 

and quotes some of them from Kafir and Senna. He refers to the whole list 
of such onomatopoetic words compiled by the Rev. A. Hetherwick in his Yao 
Grammar, and Rebmann in Kinyassa Dictionary. Colenso gives a good many 
of them in his Zulu-English Dictionary, and Grout only briefly mentions five of 
them in his chapter on Zulu interjections. Endeman, in the first edition of his 
Sotho Grammatik, recognises their existence (page 170), and classes them also 
as interjections, but adds: ‘‘ Most of the interjections of this kind do not 
belong to the written language(gelangen nicht zur schriftlichen Darstellung).” 
It is most probable that descriptive adverbs are spread in all Bantu languages, 
and so the conclusions which I draw from them as to the mind of the Thonga 
tribe, apply equaily to the Bantu as a race. 

As regards the name given to them, I would object to the term interjec- 
tion. If some of them can be used as such, i. e. ‘* thrown amongst” other 
words without syntactic connection, they generally follow the verb ku ku (or 
li or ti) just as ‘* yes” or “‘ no” follow the verb to say. So they are rather 
adverbs than interjections. Nor can I approve of the term employed by 
Torrend : onomatopoetic substantives. Substantives they are certainly not, 
as they pertain to none of the eight classes and have nothing of the nature of 
nouns. On the other hand, only a part of them are real onomatopoeiae, i. e. 
words resembling the sound made by the thing of which they are the names. 
So the term descriptive adverbs seems to me the best, and should professional 
grammarians not like to adopt it, I would only suggest that they should be 
considered as words which have no true equivalents in our more polished 
European languages and which form a new category, a new species to add 
to the classical eight parts of speech! After all the language is not made 
for the Grammar, but the Grammar is made for the language! And we, 
Europeans, cannot pretend to have found all the ways of expression of which 
the human mind is capable. Should the Bantu have discovered another class 
of words which render them spendid service, why should we proclaim them 
not worthy of consideration and exclude them from the written language ? 

(1) For the linguists, I add a few particulars concerning the grammatical 
nature of these words and the importance they may have had in the evolution 
of human speech. The intonation, the gesture, accompanying these adverbs of 
course greatly help to understand their meaning. Sometimes the word is short, 
ends sharply, as gi, a blow on a pole to drive itin the ground; or it is pro- 
longed as ra-a-a, the unrolling of a mat which drags along the ground ; or repeat- 
ed many times, when the action consists in a series of repeated motions : 
ngiri-ngiri-ngiri, walking down to the spruit. From the etymological point of 
view, some adverbs may be termed primitive and some others derivate. Primitive 

are far superior to us in this respect, and this is why so few 
Europeans can really learn, and properly use, these descriptive 

are, for instance, dzi, act of planting (hence the verb ku dzima), nyupe ; nuupe, 
act of plunging (hence ku nyupela), etc. But others are distinctly derivate, for 
instance : humelelo, impression caused by somebody who suddenly appears. It 
certainly derives from the verb ku humelela, which is itself the double 
applicative derivate of ku huma, to come out; ku humelela means, according 
to the law of verbal derivation, to be produced, to happen, to arrive, to 
appear. Hence the descriptive adverb. Other instances of such derivations 
are: relemuku, rendjeleku, tlheriso, woloko, khabutelo. They are generally 
long words (though all the long ones are not derivate by any means). A 
regular means of derivation even seems to consist in the addition of the suffix 
‘yant to the infinite of the verb; so a man ““says” yetleliyani, he sleeps, 
(from ku etlela, to sleep) ; y/misiyani, he stands erect (from ku yima, to stand). 
It seems as if people had found so much pleasure in expressing their ideas by 
these picturesque means that they even convert regular verbs into descriptive 
adverbs ! 

I must still mention that some of these adverbs, placed between the verb 
ku and the adverb, as shown in the following examples, have a real transitive 
nature and can be preceded by a direct object, especially those which express 
actions. Ex.: A ku shi wuyuwuyu, he throws /hat away ; a ku ma mpsi, he 
makes him mpsi, le binds him; even the verbal reflective prefix #7 (which is a 
kind of invariable pronoun) can be used in this connexion. Ex.: A ku fi 
mpsi, he ties himself. Some are at the same time transitive and intransitive, 
according to the sense. Ex.: A ku kwe-kwe, he drags his leg; (it is a kind 
of gait) ; a ku yivkwe, he drags it (the pole) ; (it is a transitive action). 

The fact that many of these words give birth to regular verbs is highly 
interesting and would alone vindicate my contention that they must be care- 
fully studied. They correspond to a phase of human development when lan- 
guage is still living and creating new expressions, enriching itself by means of 
vocables invented on all sides. Let me remind the reader of what I narrated 
in Vol. I, Appendix I about nxoko. This expression was invented by an old 
Thonga of Rikatla, a blind man of 70 or 80, who expressed by this exclama- 
tion his satisfaction in finding himself in a good company. The word seem- 
ed so much to the point that it made its fortune. The inventor was sirna- 
med Nxoko and he formed the verb ku nxoku, to be happy, even to nxokela, 
the relative derivate, to be happy in a certain place. Certainly such linguistic 
phenomena can do much to explain the origin of language. Even grand spi- 
ritual words have been derived from those exclamations of the childish mind 
of the Natives. So phati-phati, the shining of a fat ox, has given ku phatima 
and kwetsi-kwetsi, the brilliancy of a bottle, ku kwetsima, both verbs which 
were found the best to express the idea of sanctity or purity (in its positive 
sense). Has not Max Muller supposed that the root of Deus, a word which 
played such a great part in the evolution of mankind, originally came from 
the exclamation Devar to which our Aryan forefathers gave vent when con- 
templating the sky ? Devar was probably nothing but a descriptive adverb. 

It is to be feared that books and book language will destroy this most 

adverbs (without mentioning those who look*upon them with 
contempt!) And this is one of the signs of that which Iam not 
ashamed to call the literary sense of the Bantu mind ! 

E. THE NUMERALS, AND THE WANT OF 
ARITHMETICAL SENSE 

Compared to the thousands of descriptive adverbs, Numer- 
als make a poor show indeed in the Thonga Grammar! The 
Thonga possess only seven of them: wwe, one; biri, two; raru, 
three ; which are constructed as adjectives ; mune, four ; nt/hanu, 
five, khume, ten ; dyana, hundred, which are nouns. With 
those seven words they must express all the numbers. The pro- 
cess is very complicated indeed. Nine hundred and eighty seven 
will have to be rendered as follows: five hundred, and four hun- 
dred, and five tens, and three tens, and five, andtwo. ‘This sys- 
tem of numeration is evidently decimal, and is in direct relation 
with the ten fingers of the hands; this is proved by the fact 
that, when counting, Natives generally use their fingers. They 
start with the little finger of the left hand, one;-then the little 
finger and the- third finger, two; these two and the second, 
three ; these three and the index, four; these four and the thumb, 
five ; then they add the fingers of the right hand beginning with 
the thumb: five plus one, five plus two, five plus three, five 
plus four. Ten is shown by clapping both hands ; notice 
that five, the left hand with the thumb separated from the four 
other fingers, imitates the Roman sign of V, and ten, the two 
hands united, fingers crossing each other, make an X, the 
Roman sign for 10! ‘This shows that our numeration, of which 
we are justly proud, probably began in the same way as it did 
amongst most of the Bantu! 

On the other hand it must be said that, if this system did 

interesting way of speaking, so much used by those Natives who are truly 
Bantu, and the genius of the race will certainly suffer from this loss. Let 
Europeans, in this as in so many other domains, try to wrderstind the Native 
in order not to spoil him ! 

Ee SS 
not reach a higher development, the cause lies in the fact that 
Thonga do not want, or do not take the trouble to deal with high 
figures. They very soon declare that a number is: “ tjandja 
bahlayi (Dj.) or hlulabakonti (Ro.)” viz., ‘the one which pass- 
es the capacity of reckoners.” When Gungunyane made a 
raid into the Ntimane district and stole the oxen there, his men 
tried to count the cattle, but, having experienced much diffi- 
culty in the operation, they said to their king: ‘It is tjandja- 
bahlayi! ” — ‘‘They are innumerable !” There were a few hun- 
dreds of them. (1) 

More than that! Bantu have not reached any precision in 
counting the hours of the day, for instance, because there was 
no necessity for doing so in the primitive state. Think how 
much our habit of always consulting our watches has contri- 
buted to create the sense of precision in us and to introduce it 
into our lives. For the Bantu, the sun is the only watch, and 
that great time-keeper is all sufficient for them. Do they want 
to fix a rendez-vous for the following day? They point to a 
place in the sky, and say: ‘‘ We shall meet when the sun has 
reached that spot”. It may be in the morning, at the time “‘ when 
the rays of the sun begin to pierce” (tlhaba-sana); at noon, 
nhlekanhin ‘“‘ when the sun is in the middle of its course” ; 
in the afternoon, /i mfenya, say the Ronga, ‘‘ when the sea 
breeze comes up”, as is the case almost every day; or “when 
the sun is going down ” (ndjenga). (2) It must be added that 
the sun is rarely hidden in these lands of light. 

(1) As regards counting men, in former times, this was positively prohibited. 
If any one, seeing a throng assembled on the hubo, wanted to know the num- 
ber of people present, they would say to him: ‘* What! You are counting us ? 
Whom do you want to do away with?” (Shana wa hi nkonta, u ta hi pumba 
na ?) 

(2) If this use of the sun as a means of fixing the time unavoidably leads to 
a want of precision, on the other hand, it has created a wonderful sense of 
orientation amongst the Natives. They never lose sight of the North, they 
always know where the sun rises and sets, and this is no doubt the secret of 
their instinct. When travelling with them, we need not consult the compass ; 
I would rather put my fate in their hands, knowing that they will not make 
any mistakes as regards the direction, (they will certainly make many as 
regards distance). as they say their hearts (timbilu, same word employed for 

As regards the counting of days, they have special names for 
to -morrow (mundjuku), hte day after to-morrow (mundlwana), 
and the three following ones; for the third day, pambari; the 
fourth, wo dlankambane, viz. can one when the travellers going 
on a cominercial journey breeds the plate in order to be obliged 
to come home (p. 128); for the fifth, wa tiki- tiki. Tolo, is 
yesterday ; tolwen, the day before yesterday ; tolwen wa hase, 
the day preceding the day before yesterday ; fianwaka, this year; 
hashau, next year; nweshemu, last year; fitwaka lowo, the year 
before last. One hardly counts days, or years, further than 
these. (1) 

One occasion on which arithmetical skill, or at least the 
faculty of addition, is specially required, is the counting of the 
lobolo, when this consists in hoes. Then the tens are carefully 
piled up separately, the whole family w itnessing the operation, 
but this can hardly be called a mathematical achievement. 

So, on the whole, the Opportunities of making use of the arith- 
metical faculty are very few in the primitive Native life, and we 
ought not to be astonished that this faculty has remained unde- 
veloped. To pretend however that it is altogether wanting would 
be erroneous. I can give many proofs that it exists, and some- 
times manifests itself in an interesting way. 

First in the game called nyengeli-nyengeli mune. The players 
place a number of fruit stones on the ground two by two. One 
turns his back, and the other player, pointing at the first group 
of two, asks: Nyengeli nyengeli mune?” i.e: “‘ How many 
stones are there? (Nyingi leyi mune)”. The one whose back 
is turned replies: ‘‘Take one away and place it elsewhere ” 

> 

genius and instinct), viz., their subconscious powers, help them better than 
our instruments in the midst of the African bush: without mentioning their 
knowledge of Native paths These powers have been cultivated by the con- 
stant observation of the sun. 

(1) In my Gramnaaire Ronga, another list of names of the days following 
to-day is given, containing as many as 7. This seems to be the Rong: a version, 
whilst the one here given is the Djonga one. How ever, in neither case is 
the list in constant and common use. It is known only to certain individuals 
who consider it more or less as a curiosity. To count days further than the 
day after to-morrow is quite unusual. 

specifying where. This same thing is done with the second, 
andso on. Certain groups have eventually more stones than 
others. When a group is entirely scattered, the guesser says : 
‘“‘Makua ntsikitane ”, meaning “‘There are no more”. The 
questioner then passes rapidly from group to group, over and over 
again, and the guesser must state how many stones each group 
contains. The game requires a considerable effort of memory. 

Second proof: Shinangana! Shinangana is a man living in 
Spelonken, near Elim Station, a raw Native who ignores the art 
of reading and writing, who never went to school, but who 
has, however, created a chronology embracing the past 70 years. 
He knows what has happened in each year since 1859, and has 
arrived by himself at the conception of an era. His era starts 
from the emigration of the Thonga tribes into the Transvaal, when 
they fled before Manukosi, at the return of the Ngoni chief from 
Mosapa or Gaza country (I p. 27). The Nkuna, Mavundja, 
Tsungu and other Hlabi clans were obliged to take refuge in 
Spelonken, and this is the beginning of the era. Most of the 
years after that great event, have their special designation. I had 
the good fortune to have an interview with Shinangana in 1905 
and could note the details of his chronology, as he dictated them 
to me. After having detailed all these years, he concluded in a 
triumphant tone with the exclamation: “‘All these years since the 
return of Manukosi make five hundred, and three hundred, and 
four months!” This is a most curious piece of Native histo- 
riography, and something which I think is quite unique in the 
whole Thonga tribe. Having a remarkable bent for this work, 
he developed his gift, acquired fame, and was consulted by all 
those who wanted to know their age, or the date of some event. 
This increased his powers. He took a great delight in these 
consultations and working at his subject every day, owing to 
his wonderful memory, he could recite all the chronology with- 
out the slightest hesitation. I give it in Appendix I, and it is 
worth being published, not only asa proof of the possibility of 
an arithmetical development amongst raw Natives, but also for 
its contents, as a contribution to the knowledge of the history 
of the Northern Transvaal. 

We come to the same conclusion when teaching our pupils 
arithmetic in our missionary schools. This is certainly the 
branch of study in which they are the least proficient, and their 
teachers will all confess having sometimes despaired of their 
mathematical faculty. However, when taught European numer- 
ation, English or Portuguese, most of them learn the four rules, 
and many attain to the Weights and Measures, and the Rule 
of Three. I saw a class of young Natives successfully studying 
Algebra in Lovedale, and they are not altogether incapable of 
Arithmetic. However they succeed better when the effort is one 
of memory, and this explains why they are much more at their 
ease when learning the English Weights and Measures, those 
complicated operations of reductions, than when put to the 
metric system which seems so much more simple and rational. 
The English system requires a perfect committal to memory of 
the relation between the various measures, yards, feet and inches, 
gallons, pints, gills, pounds, ounces and grains, and, these being 
once mastered, all work becomes purely mechanical. This is 
what Natives like, whilst in the metric system there is one idea 
pervading the whole and a minimum of reasoning is necessary 
for its use: the necessity for this very minimum explains the 
unpopularity of the metric system amongst the Native pupils ; 
and the difficulty increases ten times when they come to pro- 
blems, and have to solve them without having been told whe- 
ther addition or substraction is necessary! So arithmetic, when 
workable by the agency of memory, seems to them an easy and 
agreeable study. When requiring reasoning, it is a painful occu- 
pation. Had Shinangana been trained, would he also have been 
a genius in that kind of mathematics where the power of rea- 
soning is at work? No one knows, but what I notice is that 
all his achievements were, after all, but masterpieces of memory, 
and that reasoning had very little to do with them. 

The conclusion of our observations is then the following : 
in the Bantu mind the literary sense infinitely exceeds the 
mathematical. This is probably the case in all uncivilised or 
half civilised races, but amongst the South Africans it is strikingly 
apparent. 

F. THE LITERARY SENSE OF THE THONGA 

Let us look more closely into this literary faculty which the 
Thonga grammar has already revealed to us. It not only con- 
sists in the possession of a well constructed language, denoting 
powers of classification, of combination, of co-ordination and of 
graphic description, but it also shows itself in the presence of 
real powers of dignified exaltation and of comparison, and in a 
rich folklore. 

The facility of elocution, amongst the Thongas, is very great. 
Any one, man or woman, is at any time ready to speak, and 
speaks correctly with the greatest ease. On this point, this race is 
perhaps more advanced than many civilised ones. Nothing like 
the timidity you so often meet with amongst peasants or workmen 
of our own lands, who, though they have had a full course of 
primary education, would be totally unable to deliver an address. 
A Native can always stand up and say what he thinks on any given 
question. Even if he has not thought much about it, he can 
speak! Finding words is no difficulty for him. The know- 
ledge will perhaps be wanting, but fluency of speech never! This 
ease of elocution has evidently been acquired through a long 
experience in the discussion of public affairs on the hubo, where, 
as we saw (I, p. 410), every one has the right of expressing his 
opinion. This habit has developed the literary ability, and the 
Bantu, as a whole, deserve the compliment once paid to the 
pupils of the Lovedale Institute by the Rev. Henderson, when 
he said to them: “ Your race has certainly received the gift of 
eloquence !” (1) 

(1) This power of elocution is very useful in Mission work, when evange- 
lising the heathen villages all over Thongaland, the converts being always 
willing to make a speech or deliver an exhortation. They generally do it in 
a very lively fashion, and although the thinking is often poor, and does not 
show much sequence, they at least are never at a loss for words. I only once 
witnessed such a sad occurrence! One of my pupils had prepared a sermon 
and was delivering it, when suddenly he stopped and could not proceed. He 
had lost the thread. Then a good natured smile appeared on his features and 
all his companions laughed heartily. This was the first time they had seen 

he ees 

As regards the subject matter of their speeches, it does not 
always show much reflection, or many new ideas. Nor is there 
much order of sequence in their discourses. This would require 
proportion, measure, forethought, and all these virtues rather 
belong to the arithmetical sense which is so sadly deficient in 
the Bantu mind. What makes a Bantu address especially inte- 
resting is rather the power of comparison exhibited by Bantu speak- 
ers. ‘They excel in discovering spiritual truths in material facts, 
or rather in perceiving the relations between the spiritual and 
the external world. This is one of the features of the poetical 
faculty, and these so-called savages certainly have some sense of 
poetry in their minds. Most of the antithetic riddles, which 
will be quoted shortly, are instances of this power of compari- 
son. When developed by proper training, this faculty will cer- 
tainly become productive of valuable work. 

So far, the training of Natives has been mostly in religious 
subjects, and I beg to give my readers some examples of their 
mode of comparison which I noted while hearing evangelists 
preaching, examples which strongly bear the impress of Bantu 
character. Sometimes the imagination is so subtle that it be- 
comes almost incoherent. For them it is enough ifthe point 
which the two things compared have in common, that which 
grammarians call the ‘tertium comparationis”, is almost 
infinitesimal, 

For instance a Tembe Christian exhorting his hearers to fight 
against evil, says: 

Let us, in this fight,‘take the shield which has been made from the 
skin of this ox ‘slaughtered for our sake, Jesus Christ. 

A moment of reflection is required to find the logical tie 
which unites all these images. The Bantu shield being made 
of ox-hide, the scriptural image of the slaughtered lamb had to 
be transformed into that of an ox, for the sake of comparison ! 

one of their countrymen in this predicament! The student had prepared a plan 
for his allocution, and had indeed lost the thread! In former times plans 
were altogether wanting and consequently there were no threads to lose! 

a ote 

Another evangelist, whose discourses were specially interesting 
because he was a master in this art, one day spoke for more 
than half an hour on the text ‘¢ Charity which is the bond of 
perfectness”. In Thonga, bond, string, or rope is expressed by 
the same word (ngoti). So he showed how a string could be 
compared to charity by a great number of images, of which I 
remember at least the two following ones: 

This rope, charity, is the rope which attaches the donkey to the 
trunk ofa tree. In the evening you tie up the donkey. It can graze 
the whole night all round the tree without any fear of being lose, “SC 
when we remain in connection with our Saviour, who is the tree, 
then we are happy and protected against any danger. 

He evidently remembered the words of Christ: I am the 
vine. And he added: 

Charity is the string, the string which ties up a parcel. You have 
plenty of precious things in your parcel... But if you possess no 
string to tie up all these things, they will be lost on the way, one after 
the other, and you will reach the end of your journey (or of your life) 
having kept none of your spiritual advantages, etc. 

Hear how Simeon Gana tried to explain what conscience is: 

Conscience resembles two companions who have made an arrange- 
ment to plunder, with impunity, another man’s field of sweet pota- 
toes. One of them climbs a tree, the other takes the hoe and digs up 
the potatoes. As soon as the owner of the field appears, the one on 
the tree whistles and the other promptly runs away, so that he is never 
caught. But one day, the climber ran a thorn in his foot and he was 
obliged to sit down and extract it, as he could not climb to his post of 
observation in that condition. In the meantime his companion was 
stealing the potatoes in perfect assurance, thinking his companion was 
on watch. The owner arrived on the scene and caught him. Now 
you clearly see that conscience is the man who limbed on the tree. 
As long as he was doing his duty, success attended their plan. Assoon 
as he does not work, man falls into disgrace. So let our conscience 
always be awake and warning us! 

aoe 156 = 

We, Europeans, would never have dreamt of such a simile! 
Conscience represented by a thief helping another one to steal! 
Bantu hearers were perfectly satisfied... 

Another comparison bearing on a similar subject : 

The words of God are powerful and they stir up the heart. 
They are like intestinal worms (many okwana) which for a long time 
remain quiet in the body, But one fine night they awake th man 
cries from pain, and says: “I am ill!” a years the man used to 
mock the word of God, but that day he has felt its power ! 

Hundreds of such comparisons, not always denoting a very 
refined taste, but always picturesque, might be collected from 
the creak of Native Christians. I only add this one which 
is deeper and more significant than many others, and which 
occurred to the imagination of one of my pupils 

We, preachers of the Gospel, are messengers of mourning. We 
have been sent to inform people of the great mourning of Jesus- 
Christ by which He saved the world. Let us not yecnnle that mes- 
senger who had to go to another country to deliver his errand. On 
the way he passed a village where people were drinking beer. He 
heard the songs, looked at the dance, entered and did not deliver his 
message. Such would we be, if distracted by worldly amusements, 
we were to neglect our sacred duty of preaching the cross. 

Besides this undeniable power of comparison, Native addresses 
often reveal another curious feature : Natives are fond of present- 
ing ideas in a round-about manner. This is called ku pamba. 
Under expressions apparently harmless they hide other meanings 
in a manner so ingenious and delicate that some of their hear- 
ers often fail to understand them. This literary procedure is 
often apparent in their riddles, or proverbs. 

The literary proclivity of the Natives, finally, manifests itself 
in the very interesting and rich folklore which will form the 
subject of our second chapter.

Tue THONGA FOLKLORE 

It may be said that Thonga folklore exhibits three different 
styles: didactic and sometimes sententious poetry, in its proverbs 
and riddles, narrative poetry in its manifold tales, and /yric poe- 
try in its songs. The two first descriptions may be called toa 
certain extent collective or traditional: all the riddles or tales 
are ancient products of the literary activity of the tribe, handed 
down to the Thonga of to-day by oral tradition. New songs, 
onthe contrary, are continually being composed, and bear a much 
more personal or individual character. I havegiven a great many 
examples of tales, and songs, in my ‘Chants et Contes des Ba- 
Ronga ” (324 p-), as wellas in ‘‘ Les Ba-Ronga (ps.2537363,). 

My present object is not to compile all the material at hand, 
as this would be far too long a process, but to give a general idea 
of Thonga folklore, and to complete my previous study by the 
publication of some new tales and riddles chosen from those 
collected since the two preceding works were published. The 
source is almost inexhaustible, and would suffice for the com- 
pilation of two or three volumes. The examples here given will 
be representative enough to convey a true idea of this rich folk- 
lore, and I refer the reader to the two books previously quoted 
if he wishes for more information. 

A. PROVERBIAL SAYINGS AND ENIGMAS 

The enigmas. certainly furnish us with a very precious means 
of gaining an insight into the secret workings of the Native mind, 
as they form doubtless the quaintest part of their literature, and 
that which bears the least resemblance to any portion of our 

ee 158 a 

own! I have already quoted some examples of riddles in my 
first volume, and the obscurity of these sayings has been suf- 
ficiently obvious. Without special explanation it would be 
difficult indeed to discover their meaning. 

I. Proverbial sayings. 

As regards proverbs, the Ba-Ronga possess a few which con- 
tain one single proposition, as for example : 

1) Mumiti wa nhengele a dumba nkolo wa kwe. 
He who swallows a large stone has confidence in the size of his throat. 

This might be said in any country and will be recognised, at 
once, as applying to bumptious and pretentious folk ! 

2) U nga hlaule matjhuna ya mhangela. 
One must not choose the male of the guinea-fowl. 

Guinea fowls are all alike, male and female. So do not point 
to one and say : “ This is a male.’ You would be liable to 
make a mistake, and to be made fun of ! This proverb is said 
to a young husband who might be tempted to prepare the ntebe 
before the birth of his child, which is taboo. (I. p. 44). Com- 
pare this with the proverb: Don’t count your chickens before 
they are hatched. 

3) Tinhlange ta le ntjhaku ti tibyiwa hi mutlhabi. 
The tattooing marks made on the back are known by the tattooer (not 
by the tattooed !). 

You do not know what may happen when you have turned 
your back. This warning was given by one of the Church 
elders, of Lourenco Marques, to a missionary who was leaving 
on furlough ! 

4) Matimba ya ngwenya i mati, 

The strength of the crocodile is water. ie 

When you are in your own domain you can succeed; do not 
try to fight outside it. You would be like ‘a fish out of water ”. 

5) Unga nwe mati, u seletela nhlobo ; mundjuku u ta nwa kwini 2 
Do not close the well after having drunk. Where would you drink 
to-morrow ? 

Here the sense is at once apparent. 

6) Mbuti ya shihaha a yi belekeli ntlhambin. 
A good goat does not bring forth in the midst of the flock. 

I heard this proverb in one of our Synods. One of the 
Native members wanted to exhort his co-delegates to abstain 
from giving their advice, and voting precipitately on a certain 
subject : let us rather go outside, discuss amongst ourselves, 
and when we have come to an understanding we shall come 
back and vote as one man ! 

This last example shows how such proverbs are used... They 
sometimes are quoted in a low voice, so as to be heard only by 
those whom it is desired to warn. It is an instance of the 
phamba just referred to. 

Compare also the proverb quoted (p. 22) in connection with 
tilling the fields : 

Do not look at the weeds and think: Now! I have tilled a large 
field ! 

Be not satisfied by mere external appearances! Weeds may 
be plentiful, yet the field be small ! 

Hundreds of such sayings might be collected, (1) though I do 
not think they are so extensively used as, for instance, in the 
Suto tribe, where M. Jacottet told me he collected one thousand 
of them. The Thonga replace them by riddles, which seem to 
be more developed amongst this people than in the neighbour- 
ing tribes. i 

(1) We might also consider as proverbs, and include under this heading, 
the figurative terminology used to express the principles of right and justice, 
which are, as it were, a first codification of the common Jaw, and to which I 
have previously referred — as for instance the curious sentence: A cow 
which has calved is not used for paying a debt. (I. p. 215). 

Il. Riddles. 

[have already described (I. p. 319) the part riddles play in 
the games of the Thonga village. The riddle, mbumhana, con- 
sists first in guessing where the charcoal piece is hidden, and then 
it is merely a matter of guess work. But it may have a more 
literary character, when it consists in a more or less witty ques- 
tion which requires a given reply. The answer, here, is in 
one word ; so these riddles may be called riddles in one sentence. 

Leshi u nga khandjiyiki nsinya ya shone, n’shini ?— Hi ndjulu. 

What is the thing up the trunk of which one cannot climb? It is the 
juncus. 

Leshi nhaka nenge wa shone u nga rwali hi ku bindja u ya tlhasa 
shilungwin, n’shini ? — Hi nsuna. 

What is the animal whose leg is so heavy that you could not carry it 
to Lourengo Marques ? — The mosquito (which is so very light !) 

Leshi shi nga heta hubo ya ka Machakene, shi ndjundja, shi kwala 
hubyen ?— Hi nhwala ! 

What is it that is all over the square at Machakene, that creeps and 
crawls about on it ? It is the louse ! 

This is a malicious one! The village of Machakene, for- 
merly in the immediate vicinity of Lourenco Marques, where 
the fashionable European quarter is now situated, was the place 
where men, arriving from the interior to find work at the sea- 
port, usually passed the night. They appear to have been 
somewhat annoyed with unwelcome attentions ! Hence the 
riddle. 

Here is a rather more difficult one : 

Tiban leshi, nambi mamana wa nwana a ku mu randja ngopfu, loko a 
thhasa kaya a nga hluleka ka ku mu yamukela ? — Hi nyimba, 

Guess what is it that a mother dearly loves but which could not run 
to meet her on her return home? — It is the unborn babe in her womb. 

Another riddle of the same kind is this : 

Tiba leshi, nambi shi shongile, afaka u nga ti wopsana na ye ? — Hi 
makwenu. 

Do you know the person to whom you would not make an improper 
proposal, however handsome she may be? — It is your sister. 

Leshi nsinya ya shone yi nga bonekiki ntshini ? — Yendje-yendje. 

The thing of which the stem is invisible, what is it 2— The cuscuta. 

This plant makes Natives wonder, because its root and stem 
are so rarely seen. One knows that it grows from a root, but 
when it has developed, the stem dies and the plant lives as a 
parasite. 

Leshi, nambi wa ba, ntonsi wa kone wu nga boneki ?— I mati. 
The thing which you can beat without leaving a scar ? -——- Water. 

One more which has a more philosophical appearance and 
which might be of later origin. 

Leshi nga hamba Tilo ni Misaba, hi tshini ? — Ntumbuluko ! 
The thing which made Heaven and Earth, what is it >— Nature ! 

Ntumbuluko comes from ku tumbuluka, to be created, to 
appear, and is well translated by the word Nature (See Part VI 
Chapter J). 

The Thonga possess a plentiful supply of enigmas in two pro- 
positions, which they call psitekatekisana and of which I have 
collected about a hundred. I could easily have found ten times 
as many. One of our female neighbours (Lishanyi) knew a 
great number of these and could pour them forth without stop- 
ping well on towards the middle of the night. 

Whoever may be the most expert at asking the questions 
takes the lead, and commences with a kind of invocation of 
which I have not been able to discover the meaning : Nwa- 
nyanga mintjuti, lit. son of the moon, shadows. Then address- 
ing one of the other players, and speaking very rapidly, he 
(or she) will say : “Teka, teka, teka (take, guess) heeee...!”, 
following this up with the question to be asked, which 
forms the first part of the enigma; the person addressed must 
immediately reply with the phrase forming the second part. 
If he is unable to answer, or gives a wrong reply, the questio- 
ner says: ‘Psi ku hlulile” — ‘“ you are beaten”, and passes 

on to another player, again beginning with ‘‘teka, teka, teka ” 
and asking the same question until some one is able to give 
the correct rejoinder. Hence the name of this game, psiteka- 
tekisana, i. e. things which you make others guess. 

It will be seen that we are not dealing with enigmas in the 
proper sense of the word, with solutions only to be obtained by 
keenness of thought and reflection; the answers to these must 
be learnt by heart, and it only requires a good memory to 
become an adept in the game. The ancestors, however, who 
composed the enigmas, and handed them down to posterity, 
were by no means lacking in wit and ingenuity. The exam- 
ples given below I owe mostly to Timotheo Mandlati, a Nkuna 
of Shiluvane, who wrote them down for me in the dialect of 
his own tribe; some of them are in Hlengwe. I also obtained 
a good many from my Ronga informants, Spoon and Galu of 
Libombo, Titus, and Shilati, a blind man who thought himself 
very learned in the ‘‘ enigmatic art”, but who understood very 
little of what he was talking about, and, in any case, was quite 
unable to give any explanation of his enigmas. Some are the 
common property of both Ba-Ronga and Ba-Nkuna; they seem 
to be very popular throughout the Thonga tribe. 

To begin with, here are some examples of which the inner 
meaning is not difficult to discover : 

Teka-teka-teka-he !_ Tiba ro pshya matlelo? — Ndlopfu yi fa hi 
tshembeti. 

The lake dries up at the edges? — The elephant is killed by a small 
arrow, 

A great result (the drying up of a lake, the death of an ele- 
phant) is often produced by a very small cause (the gradual 
evaporation of water at the edges, a little arrow). The idea 
approximates that expressed in the proverb: ‘Il ne faut pas 
mépriser les petits commencements ”, or ‘‘small beginnings make 
great endings”. 

Ndja ha batla mpalala ? — Ndja ha hleketela... 
I am still carving an iron wood stick 2 — I am still thinking about it. 

e163 = 

An undecided man could thus reply to those urging him to 
immediate action. The wood of the mpalala is extremely hard. 
“Tt is a long business to carve a figure of this wood” says the 
cunning fellow; “I am not going to make up my mind about 
it in a hurry !” 

Ndji pfumala tshati; nha ndji ya tjhema nhonga? 

— Ndji pfumala ntlambi; nha ndji ya lobola munhu lweyo. 
I have no axe, or I would go and cut a stick? 

— I have no oxen, or I would go and lobola this girl. 

This is the sigh of the impecunious lover. By the first phrase 
he laments the want of an ordinary every-day object (an axe) 
which prevents him obtaining something he wishes for (a stick); 
he leaves it to be understood that a much more precious article 
is lacking (oxen, money, a lobolo) which would enable him 
to obtain something infinitely more to be desired (the girl he 
loves). 

Ndji tshukumetele kwakwa, dji ya wa ngolongolo ? 

— Ndji yamukele psikomo psi pfa ni Ba-Nhlabi. 

l have thrown away my kwakwa; it has rolled away to the ends of 
the earth (into distant lands) ? 

I have accepted the hoes which come from the Ba-Hlabi. 

I have sold my daughter in marriage to the people of Hlabi 
(on the other side of the Limpopo, further up than Bilene, in 
Gaza); by so doing I have lost my child for ever. She has 
disappeared like a round fruit (kwakwa) which, when thrown 
a long distance, rolls and rolls away until it can never again be 
found. — Moral : Don’t let your girls marry foreigners (Com- 

pacer, p.. 247). 

Shiyindlwana mpfontsho ? — Mundjuku milandju. 
The little hut falls down ? — To morrow, debts. 

If you don’t keep your house in good order, you will soon 
find yourself in difficulties. A disorderly life leads to debt. 

In other enigmas the meaning is not so self-evident as in the 
preceding examples. There are some which are simply a com- 

= Oe 

parison of two objects or of an object and an idea which resem- 
bles it in some one particular. With the rapidity of perception 
characteristic of the Native mind, some clever individual has 
been struck with the resemblance, and has therefore composed 
an enigma of which the obscurity is in direct proportion to its 

conciseness. 
Rihondjo ra ndlopfu ku mpfara ? — Munhu wa ndlala tihanyi ¢ 
The sound of a cracked elephant-tusk ? — The anger of a hungry 
man, 

Both have a false ring. 
This Nkuna enigma is met with amongst the Ronga in the 
following form : 

Litimbo la phila ku mbvetshe ? — Amunhu wa ndlala mahlundju. 

The creaking of the dried sorghum stalk? — The anger of a hungry 
man 

Sikisiki dja mbangwe 2? — Longoloko dja Ba-Tschwa. 

The stem of hemp? — The Zulu formation (when on the march, 
following one another). 

There is in the way the leaves grow on the hemp stalks a 
suggestion of the formation, or rather of the forest of plumes, 
of Zulu warriors on the march... 

Ntshiba ukulu wa mpfafati ? — Ndjeko yikulu ya balungu. 
The tall ntshiba ? — The long tumblers of the Whites. 

The ntshiba is the tallest tree on the Ronga hills, and gives 
a beautiful shade. The long tumblers used by the Whites 
answer the same purpose. Both conduce to refreshment for the 
weary ! 

Tihuku ta ka Manyisa ta ka nhingena he psisuka ¢ 

— Banwhanyana ba ka Manyisa ba ku kandja ba khisamile. 
The fowls of Manyisa enter the fowl-house tails first ? 

— The Manyisa girls pound maize sitting down. 

This is probably a sly hit at the girls of the Manyisa country, 
who are reported to seat themselves when crushing maize; 

aus 165 mee 

everywhere else this operation is performed standing erect. 
They don’t do things like other people. — Chickens also some- 
times do things the wrong way ! 

Enigmas which refer to some historical event may be classed 
as a third category. The best known is the enigma con- 
cerning Tembe and his sons. (See I, p. 22). Here is ano- 
ther : 

Ndji fambi nhlangwa lokulu ndji heketa Mimaleyane ¢ 

— Ndji djimi nsimo leyikulu, ndji byala ndlowu yinwe. 

I walked all across a big plain to accompany Memaleyane ? 
— I hoed a large field and only planted a single pea. 

This is doubtless the story of a rejected lover who thus wit- 
tily relates his discomfiture. He took all the trouble to accom- 
pany Mimaleyane a long way, right to her home, and received 
no reward for his gallantry. As well hoe a whole field and 
only plant one pea! Lots of trouble for nothing ! 

A fourth category of enigmas comprises those in which it 
would seem that no real similarity of ideas exists, but merely a 
similitude in sound, a sort of graceful alliteration which is pleas- 
ing to the ear. The two following examples are very popular 
and very pretty as regards pronunciation : 

He kumi nkuhlu, u wupfa-wupfa, ka ku sala huhlu yinwe ? 

— He kumi reulonen! a wondja- -wondja, ka ku sala ndjepfu yinwe. 

We found a nkuhlu segue ripens, which ripens ; only one nut is left ? 

— We found a White man who gets thinner, thinner : nothing left but 
a hair of his beard. 

The comparison of ideas is not difficult to perceive, but what 
conclusion, or moral can the author mean to convey ? None! 
He has been led away by the musical charm of the words, and 
nothing else. 

Lastly I would class in a final category the enigmas which are 
altogether incomprehensible, of which there are quite a large 
number. 

Be khumbi? — Mayo! Ku fa. 
The people against the wall? — Ah! ifonly I should die! 

Zebedea, a very intelligent man, who gave me this enigma, 
could not tell me what it meant. Possibly the words may 
have been altered in course of transmission from generation to 
generation ? I could not say. In any case the following fact 
does not encourage us to expend our energy in trying to discover 
meanings to the psitekatekisana when they are too obscure : 
several of these questions, or primary phrases, can be answered 
in different ways; the answer, or second phrase, varies with 
the informant. Suppose for instance, that the following ques- 
tion be put : 

Makhoi ya nyari yinga-yinga ? 
The horns of the Badals wander hither and thither ? 

The answer may be the well-known proverb (p. 22). 

Unga bone bibi u ku ndji rimele. 
Do not contemplate the heaps of weeds saying to thyself : I have 
finished hoeing. 

Orit may be. 

Barara ba bambe ndji nabela 
I covet the fathers of other girls. 

It may be that, in the parlour game previously described, 
when some one fails to give the right answer, he quotes the 
second sentence of another enigma on the spur of the moment, 
and so wrong connections are established between sentences 
which have no common meaning. 

Are these psitekatekisana peculiar to our tribe, or are they to 
be met with elsewhere? I cannot be certain on this point, but 
I have not heard anything like them quoted trom other places. 
Some bear a strong resemblance to the antithetic proverbs of 
Sclomon. But it must be confessed that they entirely miss the 
deep religious or moral meaning of most of the Jewish pro- 
verbs ! 

B. THONGA SONGS. 
I. Thonga poetry and Thonga poets. 

Bantu poetry widely differs from our own! So do Bantu 
poets from our ‘‘literary men”. I had the good fortune to 
make the acquaintance of one of them on the same day that I 
witnessed the crushing down of Mayibane’s hut(, p. 156). Attract- 
ed by the big gathering, and knowing that he would have plenty of 
hearers, and meat to his heart’s content, this poet had come to 
adorn the occasion with his presence. He was on a literary 
journey, going from one village to another, singing his songs 
and dancing from one end of the land to the other. Tall, his 
face absolutely clean shaven, his eves had a kind of absent, semi- 
conscious look ; at the same time he seemed to be most con- 
temptuous and to remain in an olympic calm, as if he were a 
very superior kind of being. He-was a man of the Manyisa 
clan, and every one seemed to show him much consideration. 
When the officiants at the sacrifice were busy cutting open the 
victim (I. p. 159), he appeared in the circle formed by the 
assistants ee illustration I. p. 159, No. 7), and began his 
performance. He had put on a skirt of milala palm-leaves and 
imitated a lame man, assuming an air of intense suffering. 
Suddenly, with wonderful strength, he began to trample the 
ground with his feet. He had an assagai in his hand, and 
feigned to pierce his own side, and his thigh. Then, lifting 
the weapon, he cast an authoritative look on the throng and 
people who were laughing, stopped and kept perfectly quiet. 
He remained immovable regarding them with an air of supreme 
contempt, impassible..:. And then he commenced his song 
(suma). 

(Chorus) Oho! Oho! (Solist) Where are you going, mother (See 
tune No. 1 in the collection of Thonga tunes.) 

The throng joined with him in the chorus, which was really 
very effective. The women clapped their hands in cadence 

A Thonga 

minstrel. 

Phot. 

A. 

Borel. 

= 169 pa, 

(wombela) to encourage him. Thinking they did not do it 
with sufficient vigour, he dug in the sand, took a handful and 
threatened to throw it into their eyes. They clapped with 
renewed ardour. One of them, the tall, light coloured one who 
had sung the obscene songs referred to I. p. 158, came, and 
with a weird smile wrapped a yellow piece of cloth round his 
loins. He sang other songs, trampling again furiously on the 
grouhd until the sacrificers had finished their work; then he 
was made to stop, and the prayer to Manyibane began. 

This performance was wonderful, indeed, and its interest was 
in no wise inferior to the funeral ceremonies themselves. It is 
a typical example of Thonga poetry, where three elements are 
generally present : the music, the dance and the words which 
are more or less poetical. 

This Manyisa bard is by no means an unique specimen. I 
remember having heard, many years ago, just such a poet, of 
Bilene, who visited the Ronga clans, singing ewerywhere and 
asking for old rags as his reward. There are poets, professio- 
nal poets, who earn they livelihood by their art. There are 
also a number of occasional poets, who compose new songs and 
execute them in their own villages, not aspiring to a world- 
wide fame. If their tunes are pleasing, they are reported upon 
by others, and so reach the end of the land, carried on the 
strength of their own merit. Thus songs become popular and 
there is a great number of them constantly sung at beer-parties, 
after harvest, in the feasts, some gradually falling into oblivion 
and being replaced by new ones at each new season. 

In this chapter I do not treat of the musical character of the 
songs ; that will be considered in the next chapter, when I intend 
publishing the forty-two tunes of my collection. Here I only 
consider them as literary products, and in trying to classify 
them, I notice that, though most of them cannot be said to be 
very elaborate compositions, they pertain to many different 
styles, lyric, elegiac, epic, dramatic, etc. and, in addition, there 
are those which are sung to accompany work, as well as the 
incantations to animals and spirits. 1 will give some examples of 
each of these categories. 

I. Lyric poetry. 

Thonga, like most human beings, have felt the need of 
chanting their joys and sorrows, joining words and music in 
order to better express their feelings. These feelings are not 
very deep, as a rule, and their lyrics are a petty play rather than 
a painful cry of the heart. Hear for instance the complaint “of the 
childless woman, who ardently longs for a baby. She went to 
other people and asked them to lend her one. But they refused 
and only consented to lend her a mortar anda plate. She then 
sings to a charming melody (Tune 7). 

A ba boleki htwana! — Ba boleka tshuri ni nkambana! 

Ngi ndji mangatlu! — Ngi ndji shimungwe ! — Negi n’ta ku utla! 
They won’t lend me a baby ee hey Sond me but a mortar and a 
plate! Were I an eagle! — Were Ia bird of prey! — I would carry 

thee away ! 

Those thousands of young Thonga who go to the mines of 
Johannesburg, to extract the precious auriferous quartz, seer to be 
quite contented with their fate. They, however, chant their 
misfortune to a very melodious tune (N° 8) which I once 
heard, in Rikatla repeated ten times by children’s voices along 

the bushy paths. The words were in Zulu and were said to 
mean : 

Stones are very hard to break 
Far from home, in foreign land. 

The tune is so catching that it has become quite popular 
even in French Switzerland, where I had the opportunity of 
singing it on many occasions. 

I am afraid Bantu lyrics have more than once had occasion 
to celebrate the selfishness and rudeness of the White race! I 
remember travelling through the desert with three Zoutpans- 
berg colonists, and some of their black servants. The White 
masters were not precisely gentle with their boys. A road had 
to be cut through the bush and it was hard work to remove 

the stones, and to cut down the trees. The shambock was 
sometimes resorted to in order to stimulate the Natives. I 
once heard one of them, who had just been castigated, mur- 
muring in a low tone his monotonous complaint, whilst he was 
chopping at a stem. I caught the following words : (Tune 9) 

Ba hi shanisa! They treat us badly! 

Ba hi hlupa! They are hard on us! 
Ba nwa makhofi! They drink their coffee! 
Ba nga hi nyike! And they give us none! 

Of course the colonists, who only knew “Kitchen Kafir”, 
could not understand the complaint of the Nkuna boy! 

The song of the crab is more earnest! (Tune N°? 10) Ina deep 
minor key a man cries for help! He went to hunt the big 
crabs which dwell in the mud of the mangrove forest, or on 
the sea-shore. He followed one ; the animal hastily hid itself in 
its hole. The imprudent hunter tried to catch it there. He put 
his arm into the hole and wanted to pull the crab out. But the 
crustacean seized his finger betwen its claws so firmly that the 
man could not get free. He remained tightly held down, fixed 
to the ground. The tide is rising; soon it will cover him! And 
he cries : 

Yo-o! Lomo tjukeni ku na mani? — Hala yi khomi litiho! 
Alas! - On the shore is there some one? — The crab has caught me by 
the finger! 

This is almost dramatic poetry and the scene is worthy of a 
truly literary description. 

The erotic style is not very generally cultivated. Love plays 
but a little part in Thonga life. However I have heard this 
lovesong, probably composed by a girl who was not allowed 
to marry the boy of her choice : 

To-morrow, to-morrow, my mother, I will start, 
To-morrow, father, I will start, 

I will start with an axe; 

With this axe I will cut the stump, 

The stump at which my friend has hurt his leg, 

My friend whose belt of tails hangs from his waist, 
The one for whom | draw my leg out of the way. (1) 

The stump is perhaps some ill-disposed person whose oppo- 
sition the energetic maid is determined to overcome ! 

As a counterpart, here is the complaint of a jilted lover, who 
gives vent to his annoyance with the girl and her family : 

Refuse me if you will, girl ! 

The grains of maize you eat in your village are human eyes! 
The tumblers from which you drink are human skulls ! 

The manioc roots you eat are human tibia ! 

The sweet potatoes are human fingers ! 

Refuse me, if you will, girl ! 

The vexation of a jilted lover is of short duration. He has 
the money, he is sure to find a girl! But it would be erro- 
neous to think Native lovers or husbands are not capable of 
deep and lasting affection. I know a case, near Shiluvane, 
when a Nkuna committed suicide because his wife had deceived 
him, and had relations with another man. 

See I. p. 274, the song in which the despised wife gives vent 
to her anger : her husband has plucked her little pumpkin and 
has given it to the wife he preferred. No doubt the bukwele, 
the special feeling of jealousy existing between co-wives, has 
inspired more than one song which could have no equivalent in 
our own literature ! 

The mourning songs are many, and are sung just after the 
burial. They are touching; thus the simple cry : 

Mamane! You have left us! whither have you gone ? 

The tune (N° 14) is striking : a very high and prolonged 
note, followed by double crochets sounded very rapidly and 
ending in another long note with a short sharp conclusion, as 
a cry of anguish. 

(1) Perhaps an allusion to the fact that it is taboo to pass over any one’s 
outstretched legs. She draws in her legs to give him means of passing and 
coming to sit near her. 

One of the assistants rises and sings, as if he were playing 
the part of the bereaved one : 

A ba ndji yalange-ke lepsi ? 
Have they not hated me treating me in this way ? 

All the throng of the mourners answer : 

Ba ku yalile, wene, wa ka manyana ! 
They have hated you, son of so and so! 

He answers : 

Ba tekile nkhao ! 
They have taken my intimate friend ! 

This is no doubt an allusion to the wizards, who are suppos- 
ed to cause most of the deaths. They are cursed in another 

very curious song, half Zulu, noted by Mrs Audéoud in Maputju. 
(Tune 16.) . 

Hamban, Muthakati! Bulela bantu! — U teka b’si kwin ! 
Go away, wizard ! Killer of men! — You take them during the night ! 

Or the mourning song may be a complaint, in which the 
family bewails its bereavement, like the old Nkuna song. 

(Tune 15): 

Hi bana ba Nhumba ya ntima! Hi bana ba Malala ni ngobe. 
We are the sons of the black house (the house of misfortune and defi- 
lement). 

The following one is strangely stoic : 

A libeni mombo! A li beni mombo ! 

Ku tshubuka, ku baba ka psone! 

Let it beat the face! Let it beat the face! 
To run away, what a bitter thing ! 

Death is like a foe. Look at it face to face! Do not lose 
your courage in this last fight. 
I quote in Part VI another mourning song, a very curious 

one, where an allusion is made to Heaven, this inysterious 
power which kills and gives life, and which we already heard 
mentioned in the song of the widows (I, p. 205), when they 
lament their bereavement. 

This stoic song is also a war song ; it is customary to sing the 
war songs at the death of any important personage. The 
following one belongs to the same category, and is used on 
both occasions : 

Ketle-ketle, ntlubane! Fumo dji wile! a dlawa hi nomo, Tatana ! 
Hear this noise of weapons! The assagai has fallen, he has been 
killed on account of his words, father ! 

The chief has been killed in a fight which had been caused 
by his imprudent words : he wanted to free himself from his 
suzerain (the Ngoni chief?); war ensued and he was put to 
death! So the sorrow caused by death has certainly inspired 
the Thonga poets to compose touching themes. 

The heart of the whole tribe was also stirred, at the close of 
the mentioned war of 1894-1896, when the young chief Nwa- 
mantibyane, only 18 or 20 years of age, was caught and de- 
ported to West Africa. The lament of the child was then com- 
posed by an unknown author; but he had so well understood 
the feelings of the Black nation that it at once became popular ; 
and it was heard everywhere on the wharf, hummed by hun- 
dreds of boys who carried loads or pushed trucks, chanting the 
sad fate of the child; in the villages, far and wide, they were 
singing the recital of Nwamantibyane’s sufferings : 

Ndumakazulu! The glorious! Known as far as Zululand ! 

He fought bravely! He was obliged to fly ! 
He was caught and deported... etc. 

And always again came the chorus, on a sad, resigned tone : 

(Tune rr). 

Hi fwanao ! hi Nwana ba dlele ! Nwaniantibyane ! 
It is the child! the child they have killed ! Nwamantibyane ! 

Eleven years later travelling far away in the Manyisa district, 

I heard a tall, thin boy, playing on his unicord harp in a 
Banyan store, and muttering some words, which he accompa- 
nied by beating his instrument. This was still the lament of 
the child : 

It is the child, the child whom they have killed ! 
He was not yet grown up! 

The melody had greatly changed (tune 12) and the pain had 
passed. But the national song had not yet entirely died away. 

This is a kind of elegy, and in it we find a transition to the 
patriotic and epic songs. 

Ill. Epic poetry. 

The war songs have been already quoted when dealing with 
the Army (J. p. 435), those perfomed in the mukhumbi, at 
the coronation of the chief (I. p. 347) when preparing to go to 
fight, when returned from battle, as well as those sung during 
the march of the troop. I give the striking music of some of 
these in the next chapter. Tune 24 is the ‘‘Sabela nkosi”’, the 
great Mpfumo song, also adopted by other clans. Tune 25, 
with its splendid change from the minor to the major key, is 
the Tembe and Maputju classical war song. N° 29 is an old 
Nkuna war song, dating as far back as 1820, before the Zulu 
invasion; N° 27 is the principal modern Nkuna song, and 
Ne 28 the Nkuna equivalent to the Ronga Giraffe song. These 
old chants are sung to the accompaniment of the military 
dance, which consits in trampling on the ground in some pla- 
ces, rhythmically brandishing the assagais, lifting them to the 
right, to the left, inclining them to the side, then downwards, 
as if to pierce (I. p. 437). They are certainly grand compo- 
sitions. 

I include in the same category the laudatory song of the mbongi 
(I: p. 399), a branch of literature where Court poets display a 
considerable imagination and an extraordinary gift for unboun- 
ded hyperbole. To it also belong the hunting songs, already 

mentioned p. 56, of which I here give a typical example. I have 
been told by my informant, Zebedea Mbenyana, a Native of 
Bilen, that the hunters performed it dancing on the body of the 
enormous beast, after having transfixed it. 

1st Strophe. 

They march in single file, the Elephants, the mighty ones, 
They go to slake their thirst. 

Antistrophe. 
Let us go too! They’re drinking amongst the thickets! Hurrah ! 
and Strophe. 

Hark ! the smothered roarings in the forest. 

Antistrophe. 

’Tis a grand sound, the roaring in the forest. Hurrah ! 

3rd Strophe. 

The crying of the elephant, the mother! ’Tis she who calls the hun- 
ters to the thickets. 

Antistrophe. 
Hurrah ! ’tis she who calls the hunters! Ho! Hurrah! 
4th Strophe. 
Yonder’s the one with ears so large and drooping. 
Antistrophe. 
Hurrah! the big-eared one has just passed us. Hurrah ! 
sth Strophe. 
The boys are there; the sound of knives being sharpened, there from 
the spot where the elephant lies slain. 

Antistrophe. 

Hurrah ! the sound of knives being sharpened, Hurrah ! 

This composition certainly exhibits a forceful and poetic eran- 
deur, describing marvellously well thé emotions of the coura- 
geous band who have finally succeeded in obtaining the precious 
tusks of the elephant, and quantities of meat. This song of 

triumph is worthy of being placed amongst the best productions 
of the Muse of primitive races. 

IV. Satiric poetry. 

I have already mentioned the peculiar manner in which 
Thonga literati speak in a round-about way, using figura- 
tive language, especially when they want to say something 
disagreeable or to give vent to their humour. There is but one 
step from such forms to satire. They generally indulge in this 
satiric vein when dealing with relatives-in-law, women being 
especially prone to it. When the sisters and aunts of a married 
woman go to pay a visit to her, they bring with them all 
kinds of equivocal compliments. These must not be taken 
seriously! It is a round-about — exceedingly round-about way 
— of making gracefu! allusions and of expressing their mutual 
esteem. I will quote the series of these songs of friendly chaff 
and invective as it was given to me by Shigiyane, with a 
running commentary to render them comprehensible. These 
smart and pointed choruses will give a fitting finishing touch 
to the marriage customs, and illustrate the curious relations 
existing between allied families, which I explained in Vol. I, 
Pp. 230-235. 

On the wedding day the women who take the bride to her 
husband sing the fyeka song : 

Let us go with her, but let us go back to our homes! 

This is an ironical way of saying: ‘‘ She is going to find 
trouble: we won’t follow her as far as that!” The same idea runs 
through all the songs these women sing during the next few days. 

When they accompany the bride to her new home, they sing : 

U ya kwi Mamano! — Whither goest thou, mother ? 
U ya kwi shana ? — Whither goest thou ? 
Ba ta tshaha shihundju ni lihlelo, mamano ! 
They will bring thee the basket full of maize and the fan, my 
mother ! 

ge. ae 

Ba ta kuma u tlokoli, ba tlokolisa, mamano ! : 

When thou hast finished crushing it, they will make thee crush it 
again, my mother ! 

Ba ta kuma u kopoli, ba kopolisa, mamana ! 

When thou hast plastered the floor, they will make thee plaster it 
again, my mother ! 

But when they come to visit, carrying jars of beer as presents 
to the newly married couple, they are much less guarded in 
their language, ridiculing the poor husband and his family, and 
making fun of every one in general. They commence singing 
on the way, with the jars on their heads: 

He ntshonga, banhwanyana, he nga batjanana 

He la libango ; fa hi nga labi, we manyana. 

Ku laba manyana ka Nwan’a manyana 

We are a small band, young girls; there are few of us. 

We are looking for a piece of meat on the spit ; formerly we should 
not have known where to find any, our sister (so and so)! 

Now our sister will get some for us from her husband! 

Hi kokobisa lobe, hi ya kwihi shana ? 

Hi bhanu ba ku yalwa! 

He fambaka ni khombo, ni khombo dji le kaya ! 

Where are we going, thus dragging the hook behind us ? (1) 

We are the people that are hated. 

We walk in misfortune (2), the misfortune that has befallen our house ! 

Ka ku kandja Nwana a ku na kule. 

Wo khunga he lihanyi, we koko ! 

Ya kokowela : kowe-kowe-kowe. 

Where a daughter lives it cannot be very far off. 

Go there, grannie, limping and leaning on thy staff (3) 
(Listen to the hen) cackling. She says: kowe, kowe, kowe. 

On arriving at the village they stop at the edge of the stream: 

(1) They compare themselves to women who have been in the fields, pick- 
ing kwakwa fruits (p. 17), and are so heavily laden that they cannot hold 
the hook used for pulling the fruit off the trees; they have had to tie it on 
their belt, and drag it behind them on their way home. ‘The travellers leave 
it to be understood that they are not out for pleasure ! 

(2) That of having to go and see a brother-in-law who illtreats their sister. 

(3) This line is an encouragement to the old woman who finds the walk 
long and tiring. The other women promise her a fowl at the end of their 
journey, which the son-in-law will kill for her. Note the first line of the 
third verse : it is a kind of proverb. 

Fulamelani, banhwanyana, hi ya nwa mati nkobeni. 
Stoop down, young women, let us drink water in the valley. 

Finally they settle themselves in the home of their bakofiwana, 
their relatives-in-law, and commence to insult their hosts. 

Ba yala na wo mbengana loko a boleka ! 

Ba li: ** Famba, u ya teka kwenu u buya wa ta sila”. 

Ba yala ni shudana, ba yala ni musana 

Ba li: ** U ya teka kwenu u buya wa ta tlhokola. ” 

They won't lend (our sister) a grindstone when she wants to borrow 
one, 

They say to her: ‘* Go home and fetch one and then come back and 
grind. 

They won’t lend her the small pestle and mortar. 

They say : “ Go home and get your own, and then come back and 
crush your maize ” 

Then they make fun of the mother-in-law, who is whispering 
with the other women of the village, making arrangements, 
doubtless, how best to entertain the visitors. They pretend to 
discover in these asides some terrible plot. 

A li Dwono-iwono! Mabulela ya nsati Iweyi! Hi file ! Hi lobile! 
That woman over there is whispering !_ What can she be saying! 
We are dead ! we are lost ! 

As for the head of the village, these shrewish visitors accost 
him thus: 

Nwenyi wa muti, hi wene ? A ku hi hi mati, hi hwene? 

A he hlayi wone, yanhlobo! Hi hla byala ne sope! 

Are you the master of the village ? Are you not going to give us 
any water to drink? 

We don’t mean well-water ; we mean beer and brandy ! 

The villagers approach to salute the new-comers, who sulk 
and won’t say a word. Large pots are made ready for ccoking 

food. 

Mi kokela matamteko, mi kokela bamane ? 

Kambe hi balala! hi nga ka manyana. 

You prepare the large pots... For whom are you making them ready ? 
We are enemies, we are ! 

The young folks catch fowls in order to regale them properly. 
They raise objections. 

A hi djyule kwee! A hi djyule kwee! 

Hi djyule nkoka-hi-pindja ! 

We will have nothing to do with that which cries kwee. (The cry of 
the fowl when being killed). 

We want the animal which is led with a string (a goat). 

But it’ is the husband who has to put up with the worst 
insults. 

Ha! matinga-tingela ya nhunu lwe ! loko a hi bona a ku tlhanya psi- 
rubu. 

Ah ! see how he wants to avoid us! As soon as he sees us he runs 
and hides behind the houses ! (He is afraid of us !) 

Hi laba tima-mbilu ! hi djyula mafura ya ku nona phobo. 

We want something to satisfy the heart! We must have our fat very 
rich ! 

Nyoka ya nyoka! Mbyana ya mbyana ! Yi whee! 

Serpent that thou art! Dog that thou art! Thou sayest bow-wow! 

Then to show him that they really like and appreciate him, 
they add, with the truly savage rudeness which they maintain 
to the end of the visit: 

A ku hi lobolele 2 Na wene, bana ba ku ba ku lobolela ki khume ni 
ntlhanu ! 

Won’t you buy another wife from us! Later on your daughters will 
bring you a dowry worth fifteen pounds sterling! 

Finally, after having had plenty to eat and to drink and a 
good dance, they will remark, on leaving : 

Hi thhome nyonga ya mbuti, hi muka 
Twine the goat’s bladder in our hair, that we may go home. 

All this is not very high flown poetry. The general intercourse 
between relatives-in-law is by no means refined and this rude- 
ness contrasts with the ordinary civility of Native life. Let 
us remember that this way of speaking is not meant to show a 
want of politeness on the part of the visitors, but, on the con- 
trary, the behaviour which suits the occasion! I have the music 

— ri — 

of some of these songs which were heard by Mrs Audéoud, in 
Maputju. In Ne 13, the bridesmaids simply exhort the bride 
not to follow her husband! But they are the last to think that 
she would follow their advice. 

V. Dramatic poetry. 

This is perhaps too high a term by which to designate the 
kind of songs, or-other literary productions, which I am going 
to describe. Primitive folk have no theatre, no elaborate tragedies 
or comedies. But our tribe certainly possesses the rudiments of 
a histrionic art in the dances accompanied by songs, which are 
called tinsimu ta Ronge, the songs of Ronge. The word Ronge 
does not seem to be at all related to Ronga. It is applied to an 
old collection of songs in which dancing played the principal 
part and which were quite peculiar to the clans of the Coast. 
They were performed after harvest, when the storehouses were 
full and when the Ba-Ronga said to their souls: ‘‘ Eat, drink and 
be merry !‘‘ Boys and girls used to stay in the bush many weeks 
learning these dances, in a kind of school, which may have 
taken the place of the circumcision school, which has been sup- 
pressed for more than a century in those districts. I say, these 
songs were performed, — because they are now fast disap- 
pearing, having been replaced by Zulu songs, called mudjatu and 
muthimbo. These are, in their turn, giving way to new dances 
called gumpsa, in which young boys and girls put on milala 
palm leaf dresses. These were the great novelty in 1908 and 
pupils of the Mission schools were deserting them to play gumpsa. 
Another new dance is called shiloyi, and consists in the imitation 
of boatmen: the performers sit down and execute movements 
similar to those of sailors pulling a boat, with accompaniment 
of song. The shindjekandjeka was another dance executed by the 
wives of Mubvesha (I, p. 275). Most of these dances take place 
in the capital, and the Chief summons all the boys to take par 
in them. It is not absolutely obligatory, but should any one 
begin the training, and then leave before it is finished, he will 

= [$20 = 

be fined. No doubt these complicated dances-are a beginning 
of the theatre, as will be seen shortly: they at any rate give the 
impression of an organised ballet. 

Many of the songs refer to historical events in the life of the 
clan, or to by-gone occurrences, almost forgotten, and it is for 
this reason that some of them are so difficult to understand ; 
they also vary from one clan to another. The following, accord- 
ing to Spoon, is the most popular song in Nondwane. An 
individual performs on a drum to give the time to the dancers. 
Around the drummer, in a semicircle are arranged the girls who 
sing the refrains (tekelela), and clap their hands t6 encourage 
the soloist (musimi). Farther away, in concentric semi-circles, 
stand the men of the village, dancing but not singing. Between 
the two semicircular ranks the soloist has free play. He com- 
mences by saying: 

Ndji pfumala shigoba sha nakulori. 
Why? I haven’t got a partner for the dance! 

The girls reply: 

Hi hlula hi mbilu yi babisaka. 
Our hearts are indeed very sad. 

He continues : 

A psi na ntshumu! Makweru Nwakubyele a fanaka ni pataka dja 
balungu. 

Never mind! My brother Nwakubyele (will do very well), for he 
shines like one of the Whites’ silver pieces ! ; 

Nwakubyele was a Counsellor whose home was about three 
quarters of an hour from Rikatla. He was probably a famous 
dancer. The words of this song would hardly seem very inspir- 
ing, but the noise of the drum, the clapping of hands, the 
dancing, — and the flow of beer, — all this helps to account 
for the intense pleasure which these games afford to the Ba- 
Ronga. 

Another Ronge song is in praise of another dancer: 

= 183 — 

Nwahangwa! Nwahangwa! Loka ba shi bona, shi ne nkaukelo! 

Shi bombisa tinsimo ta ku tala ta Ronge! 

Nwahangwa! Nwahangwa! When one sees him (one admires) his 
beautiful figure... . 

He is the perfect executant of the numberless Ronge songs. 

Still another, on the same theme, celebrates Gilela, a choregra- 
phic artist who must have rejoiced in a marvellously slim figure : 

; the Bf. 
gnclng CE 
Ne resoke OO SOQ oe 
O 

O 
oo oe 
Oo 
O in which the sols, “6 
O 4c® ey 
O SP es, =. 
@ J their hands O 
Oo jae GOO 0900 ee a 
5 & 

O oe a OSs O 
O O oe re) 
O O 
oO O O Oo 
O O e) ee 

O Drvommer 

The Ronge dance. 

U tlanga, Gilela! Wa tlanga, likhalo li fana ni ngoti! 

Nwatshibeni! tlanga! tlanga! Ku tjhongo; hi nga tolobele! 

Thou dancest, Gilela! Thou dancest and thy waist is no thicker than 
a string ! 

Son of Tshimbeni! Dance, dance. — That was too little. — We have 
not yet had enough ! 

IT came across three other songs which seem to refer to actual 
historical events, but only one of these is sufficiently compre- 
hensible to be worth transcription. The music of the first phrase 
is very characteristic. (Tune 37). 

Ndji wela, ndji wela, Nwatembe! Ndji wela, ndji tjike ndji wela. 
Ndji koka mabyatsho ; ndji tjutjuma, ndji ya tlhasa ka Ntshangane. 

Sala muti wa Muhari! — Ndji tjike, ndji wela ! 

Be 

{ cross the stream. I cross the stream. Oh Tembe! I cross the 
stream, let me cross the river ! 

I tow the boats I fly away as far as Ntshangane. 

Adieu, village of Muhari! — Let me cross the river. 

The two men of Tembe who sang this song to me, telling 
me that it was a very popular one, were unable to explain its 
meaning. It is not difficult however to imagine the circumstances 
under which it was composed. It probably refers to fugitives, 
coming from the South, arriving at the Bay of Lourenco Marques, 
and asking the Coast dwellers, subjects of Muhari (a chief of 
Tembe in the XVIII century), permission to cross the water 
and to continue their journey northward to Ntshangane (1), that 
is to say Bilene, where they wanted to take refuge. The memory 
of their wandering has thus been preserved in a popular song. 

These examples will shew that the Ronge repertoire is a 
varied one, but I have still to transcribe that which, at least to 
my knowledge, is the most curious number of the whole col- 
lection. It was explained to me in detail by Shigiyane who, 
some fifty years ago in the Shirindja country, in Mpatshiki dis- 
trict, (on the borders of Nondwane), had often taken part in 
the performance, always in the réle of soloist. In her opinion 
it is an entirely typical song. It is no exaggeration to say that 
it is almost a theatrical production, and we might rightly call 

it the Shirindja comedy. It comprises five parts — I was on 
the point of saying five acts, — which follow one another, 
but without, it must be admitted, any kind of logical se- 
quence. 

The First Act might be entitled ** The old men’s march ”. 
All the adults of the village go out into the bush, — let us say 
to the westward, — whence they return to the square, halting 
and limping and dragging their limbs along, as if suffering from 

(1) Ntshangane is a sirname of Manukosi who did not establish himself 
in Bilene much before 1820 or 1830. But for various reasons it is probable 
that this name already belonged to an ancient chief of the country, and that 
Manukosi simply adopted it as sirname. If this song were really dating from 
the time of Muhari (a chief who reigned in the Tembe clan in the middle of 
the XVIIIth century), it would be the oldest of the Thonga literary produc- 
tions vet collected, 

— 185 a 

some complaint which prevents them walking. To a monoto- 
nous air they sing the following words : 

Ndji laba batlhaben ! Angati leyi ya masengwe ya tshabisa ! 

Lomo kweru, mamana, we, angati leyi yi ndji tsimba ku famba; 

Ndji teka mumphinyi, ndji tshebukela ku djima, 

Yi yengeta yi ndji tsimba I famba ! 

Psi yengeta, psi ba roma loko ndji tjhama. 

Psi ka ne mpuri, nsasi wa ku famba. 

I am looking for some one to put leeches on me! This complaint, 
this cursed lumbago is terrible ! 

In our village, Oh! my mother ! alas! this trouble prevents me 
walking. 

Take the handle (of my hoe). I start for the fields to till them. — 
And this thing stops me ! 

And it annoys (my relatives) to see me sitting down (doing no work). 
She may well be annoyed, the beauty, the good walker ! 

During this song, the old folks come to the village ; then 
the young ones go out, in the ee direction, returning in 
due course to sing their verse which forms the second act. 

Second Act. heir story is that of a son-in-law, who turned 
his mother-in-law out of his house, because she was suffering 
from smallpox. The poor old woman went out to die in the 
bush, in spite of the protestations of her daughter against her 
husband’s cruelty. The husband and wife are heard giving 
expression to their feelings: 

The son-in-law: (Solo) Ndja famba, ndja famba, na ndji nvenye- 
muka... 

Ba mu hlongola, a famba a ya fela ahangale. 

I am goine-away ! I am going away | am going away in disgust ! 

Let her be turned out and let her go and die in the bush ! 

The daughter : (her part is sung by all the actors in chorus) 

Ndji tjetja shitlambutana,. shi fambaka shi hona abuhlambo. 

Lomo kweru. ka-Mpatshiki, hi nga hanyi! Hi yabana timpsalo ni 
mashaka. 

Psi yentsha he yo ngati ya kutane ! 

Ngati ya kutane ya tshabisa, hosi ya nga ! 

Psa ku hlongola ne mukonwana, a famba: a -buya a kulubisa ku 
hlaya, shi lundja hi la, ba mu hlongola, a famba, a ya fela hangale. 

I feel pity (when I see) smallpox making its ravages and spoiling the 
face: 

Here, at home, in the village of Mpatshiki we no longer live! We 
no longer are kind to each other, even amongst relatives. 

It is the fault of this terrible disease. 

This disease is truly terrible, my lord ! 

It has driven the son-in-law from his home: he goes, but returns 
with cruel words The old woman comes this way, she is turned 
out ; she goes away and dies in the bush ! 

The Third Act begins when young and old are assembled on the 
village square. It is a dialogue (shibalekana) introducing a 
certain Gebuza, a man of Nondwane, who took refuge in Shi- 
sindja some time in the middle of the last century, when Zihla- 
hla’s warriors led by Machaquene went to fight in Nondwane 
on behalf of the Whites. This Gebuza was much beloved by 
Mpatshiki, a sub-chief living in the South of Shirindja, as we 
shall see in the fifth act. At any rate he was a great dancer, 
and also possessed a marvellous faculty of saying a great deal 
and meaning very little! Listen to the following : a volu- 
ble dialogue is kept up between that individual and a young 
man named Mahlablane. 

Gebuza Nandjuwe, Mahlahlane ? My friend, Mahlahlane ? 

Mahlahlane. Ha Makweru ! Say on, my brother! 

G. Tlanga, makweru ! Dance, my brother ! 

M. Utlanga, u ndji tlula, You dance better than I do, 
makweru ! A psi na ntshumu. my brother ! That doesn’t matter. 

G. A ndji psi tibanga I did not know that, 
lepsako, nambe u le makweru, although you are my brother. 
inha ndja ku tlangisile I could please you with my dancing, 
Nhaviyana. Nhavivane. 

Here the sense begins to be wanting... it concludes with a 
cross-fire of utterly meaningless remarks. 

Mahlahlane. Eee ! That's it ! 

Gebuza. Nhaviyana bantsindja. Nhaviyana, the people of the capital. 
Vin Bees! That’s it! 

G. Nhaviyane basurumana, Nhaviyana, the mahometans. 

Yi banga mahlolana ! That works wonders. 
Khumbu-khumbu dja Mayingandlela i ee ae 

A siku dja tolo. Yesterday. 

Iku ta wa shikumbu sha ndladla Pete gr eth 

Ndji ndjuluka ndji nha. I go back, that’s what I do. 

Kupa-kupa ha matikerifwane INGO ARES ie 

On hearing this extraordinary production, quite as unintelli- 
gible as our Swiss children’s ‘‘empros” -- eena, meena, mina, 
mo, etc., — the whole company dance in silence, going through 
various contortions which are doubtless as full of meaning as 
the dialogue which precedes them. 

In the Fourth Act all the actors re-enter the stage and com- 
mence the shiombelane, the hand-clapping with which they so 
often accompany their songs. They sing the following chorus: 

Mamana, n’ta ku yini ? 

Ina, hi tlakula Mpatshiki, fwa-matlanga-ni-tinsana-ta-batjongwana |! 

He tlanga psigaba, Mpatshiki ! 

Ntlhamulo, ndji nyike hi psikwembo, ankulweni ! 

My mother, what shall I say ? 

Oh! yes ! let us praise our Chief Mpatshiki, he who loves to play with 
little children ! 

We dance the Ronge dance, Mpatshiki ! 

The echo (of our songs) comes back to us from the gods all along the 
whole length of our villages! 

Evidently the singers are celebrating the joyous gaiety of 
this féte, where all are happy, the Chief good-natured, and 
wherein the gods themselves (the deceased ancestors, probably 
buried in the sacred wood near the village) join the living. 

Fifth Act. A few songs in which Gebuza plays a prominent 
part, constitute the finale. He was an interminable braggart 
when once he’ started on stories of the contests between No- 
ndwane and Zihlahla. Instead of tilling his fields, he idled away 
his time in his village, in the shade of a nkanye, the tree of 
bitter fruits (nunge)... Hence the following dialogue : 

Gebuza. Tjikan, ndji hlayo ! Let me tell you... 

Chorus of Shirindja ; U hlaya tshini ? What silly tales do you want to tell us? 

G. Tjikan, ndi hlayé6. —~ Let me tell you... 
Chorus : He baka Bidjiankomo... We folks of Bidjiankomo (1) (this is what 

we say) : 

Psigaba psi ne nsiku, i ka leyi ; There is a day for singing, it is to-day ; 

A ku djima, a ku psi koti. As for work, you are incapable of it. 
Gebuza! Ankanyen lo’kulu Gebuza (you who are lazy), under your 
lowa nunge; psigaba psi ni big nkanye of bitter fruit there is a day 
nsiku i ka leyi. for singing; this is the day ! 

(1) The forefathers of Mpatshiki, who was the chief then reigning. 

The moral of this is sufficiently obvious.: ‘To-day we sing, 
we dance: but this is not everything. To-morrow we must 
start with the tillage for the new year. ” 

Doubtless in each small Ronga clan similar songs and dances 
are performed. They seem to us exceedingly childish, but also 
very innocent, and show us what taste these people have for 
musical and literary productions. 

VI. Action songs, or songs accompanying work. 

I remember having once ordered one of my boys to roll an 
empty cask, in which we were collecting the rain water. There 
was a little water in it, and the water was gurgling inside. 
Rolling it with vigour, the boy imitated the noise of the gurgling 
all the while, and apparently with great pleasure. Natives are very 
fond of singing, and shouting, when working; they evidently 
find a help in the conjunction of music and work. 

Many Thonga songs belong tothis category. There are songs 
sung by women when pounding their mealies (I. p. 204), 
or when carrying their jars of beer or of bukanye to the capital. 
One of these psirwalo songs, extolling Mzila, the hawk that is 
in heaven, has been quoted I. p. 375. I heard it, in February 
1893, when an extraordinary inundation had filled all the little 
ponds in the hollows, andthe lake of Rikatla had increased 
tenfold. Commencing with the word : ‘‘Chwe! Chwe!” a de- 
scriptive adverb which renders the impression caused by a wide 
surface of water shining in the sun, the women sang : 

Chwe! Nambyana wu tele! (I. p. 375). 
The lake has overflowed ! 

We seek the hawk who soars in the sky! 
Who is the hawk? It is Mzila! 

For the music of the song see tune 17. 

On the wharf at Lourenco Marques, one could collect a 
good number of the carrier songs, sung by the boys who 
carry loads from the ships to the Custom House. Some are 

ee Paheot 

highly impressive, full of gutturalsounds like this : Ama-haussa- 
haussa! There is generally a soloist who intones (sima) and all 
the boys, covered with dust, clad with sacks, their eyes beaming, 
seize the heavy piece of iron, the bulky case, raise it rhythmical- 
ly to their shoulders, and carry it with measured tread to 
the shed. To havea clever soloist who keeps good time is essen- 
tial, and I was told that such artists are well paid. 

I would remind the reader of the travellers’ songs, an example 
of which has been given when speaking of the journeys of the 
traders in the interior (p. 128). 

But the richest collection is that of sailors’songs. 1 heard one 
of them, (tune 18), on the Nkomati, repeated one hundred times 
in a monotonous way by a boy who pushed the boat with his 
pole along the shore, from Morakwen to Lourengo Marques : 

“T siloyi, I ndandale”, he said — (these words have no more 
meaning than tra-la-la) ‘‘ They are starving at Ntimane, siloyi...” 
He was coming from the Ntimane country, near Khosen, and 
having heard that the crops had failed, he was muttering that 
great news all down the river! Perhaps the song was not his 
own composition. It was an old refrain which had been preserv- 
ed on account of its catching tune. 

Mrs Audéoud, during her long journeys on the Maputju 
river, noted many of their tunes, N° 19-22, some in two or 
even three parts, curiously harmonised. The Native sailors thus 
try to vary the monotony of rowing, punting or towing the 
boat. No doubt a great many more could be collected. 

VIL. Incantations. 

Children, as we saw, (I. p. 67), are fond of singing curious 
little melodies to various animals : to the big galagala lizard, 
to the chameleon, to the crab with one claw, to the owl. The 
tune of the words addressed to the owl is N° 36. Boys of 
Rikatla used to salute our ox-waggon, when it appeared on the 
plain, with song N° 35: ‘“‘ Gweymanao! — here are the oxen”, 
they said running all round the span, girls following them and 

lifting the babies in their arms, to show them the strange 
machine and the long-horned oxen, which were walking slowly, 
with impassive looks, through the little black throng. 

Incantations of a more serious character are the songs of 
exorcism, performed with accompaniment of rattles, big tins 
and drums, close to the ears of the pretended possessed, in order 
to induce the spirit to reveal its name and to “come out”. 
N° 37 is one of the most celebrated songs of this category, and 
has really a great deal of character. I shall speak of it again 
when dealing with possessions. 

VUI. Songs accompanying tales and games. 

As we shall see, little songs are very frequently introduced 
in the tales to embellish them, and they are generally repeated 
three or four times over, as if the narrator wanted to exhaust 
all their charm. Some are very primitive, like N° 33, the mur- 
muting of a little boy who has been swallowed together with 
his oxen by an ogre called Nyandzumulandengela ; imprisoned in 
the stomach of the monster he entreats him to let him out! 
Another, more complicated, is the lament of the mother whose 
child has been stolen by the Baboon, and who follows the 
animal weeping and asking it to give the child back to her. 
(Tune N° 35). Tune No 36 belongs to another ogre tale, of 
the suitors of pretty girls who are but hyenas transformed into 
men. Somebody knows their true nature, and forces them to 
appear as they really are, by chanting their song ; 

Manyange, the leg belongs to me! 

the song in which they dispute with each other about the lee 
of the girl they woo! The most complicated of these songs is 
that in the tale of Zili (No 34); it is a duet, and was sung to 
me by two Mpfumo girls so distinctly that I could easily take it 
down. It is very interesting as an illustration of the laws of 
harmony amongst Thonga. 

ior t- 
C. FOLK-TALES 

Folk-tales are by far the most interesting and valuable part 
of the Thonga Folklore, and before citing any new examples of 
those curious and charming stories, I will try to show their 
importance in the Life of the Tribe, their literary, ethnographic 
and philosophic value. 

L. The place occupied by Folk-tales in the Life of the Tribe. 

In Vol. I. p. 319, we have seen the inhabitants of the village, 
after their evening meal, gathered round the fireplace, devoting 
themselves to innocent amusements; first, guessing the piece of 
charcoal, pulling their fingers, asking each other riddles, — those 
who are beaten in the contest having to pay a forfeit which 
they redeem by telling a tale. So the tale is the conclusion of 
the game, the object of the whole entertainment. I have often 
seen exactly the same sequence followed in an European com- 
pany playing parlour games. 

This interesting scene may be witnessed from one end of the 
tribe to the other: “This is their evening prayer” said one of 
our converts to me, a woman who was also a clever story-teller, 
i. e. as we Christians have our worship every night before going 
to sleep, so the heathen gladden their hearts by their tales. 
Everywhere story-telling (ku tha psihitana) is considered the 
most refined and most pleasing of the games. The tales are 
called shihetana or nsingo (mu-mi) in Ronga, ntyekelo (mu-mi) or 
nkaringana (mu-mi)-in the Northern clans. 

Story-tellers are of all ages and of bothsexes. I have heard 
little girls of ten amusing their play-mates with talesst Lhoses! 
have collected were told by young girls of eighteen (Nkulun- 
kulu and Nwanawatilo), young men of twenty, (Khwezu, 
Maganyele, Simeon Makwakwa), men of thirty and forty 
(Spoon, Jim, Tandane); but the majority come from adult women, 

the most clever being Shiguyane-Camilla, Sofia, Midomingo, 
Martha and Lois. Some only know one tale, and repeat it on 
every occasion, like Jim Tandane, who used to narrate the 
story of an ogre, Nwatlakulalambimbi, with such gusto that 
he was sirnamed after his hero! But others can recite six, ten 
or twenty tales. Shiguyane, for instance, could entertain the 
company for many nights with her tales, some of which were 
very long. (See for 
instance ‘* The lit- 
tle hated one”, 24 
pages, ‘‘Mubia, an 
ogre tale”, 19 pa- 
ges, in my Chants 
et Contes des Ba- 
Ronga). This wo- 
man’s memory was 
wonderful, and the 
graceful manner in 
which she narrated 
was by no means 
less astonishing. 
Nkulukulu had 
heard her tale 
(“The girl and 
Martha, a Ronga story-teller. the whale’’) only 

once in the Ma- 
putju country, and she had memorised it at once with the 
little songs which enliven it. 

Strange to say, there is a curious precaution to be taken in 
connection with story-telling : it is taboo to devote oneself to 
this occupation at noon; it must remain an evening entertain- 
ment; if this rule is not followed, the transgressor will 
become bald! ‘This is one of the mostastonishing of the lesser 
taboos of the tribe. What is its origin? Have the Natives noticed 
that famous story-tellers, those who practised their art day and 
night, were liable to this misfortune? T could get no informa- 
tion on this point. T rather think the prohibition comes from 

aes 193 a3 

the fact that this game is so much appreciated that they are 
afraid to devote too much time to it : people would lose all 
inclination for work, should they start it during the day. So 
they instinctively prohibited story-telling in the day-time! 

Another curious custom in connection with tales is this: 
when a story-teller comes to the end of his tale, he concludes 
with the following words. ‘‘Tju-tju.... famba ka Gwamba ni 
Dzabane!”” — ‘‘ Run away, go to Gwamba and Dzabane.” These 
two personages are believed to be, at least amongst the Northern 
clans, the first man and the first woman (see Part VI), and I 
suppose that the object of this kind of incantation is to prevent 
the marvellous story haunting the hearers during the night, and 
troubling their sleep by disagreeable dreams. It is a means of 
return from fairy land to the realms of every-day life! All these 
details tend to show the importance of folk tales in the Native 
life, and their popularity amongst the tribe! 

I. Classification of Thonga Folklore and its literary value. 

But of what does this foiklore consist ? How is it possible that 
men, girls, youngsters, sit quietly for hours, listening to an old 
woman who keeps them under the spell of her tale? In fact, 
these products of primitive imagination are much more varied 
than would at first appear. Let us open the casket, whose key is 
kept by Gwamba and Dzabane, and make an inventory of the 
“*treasury” of this lore, to use the words of the Rev. Jacottet 
in his publications regarding the Ba-Suto. 

It would certainly be pretentious to apply a strictly philo- 
sophical, or even literary, classification to our tales. However, 
it is obvious that they present many different styles which are 
often combined, it is true, but which it is quite possible to dif- 
ferentiate. 

1) The first and most noteworthy class is that of animal 
folk tales, in which the ‘‘ Romance (1) of the Hare” takes a pro- 

(1) Temploy this term Romance in the same sense as the corresponding 
French term is used when speaking of the ‘‘Roman du Renard”, the cele- 

minent place; the Hare, the Tortoise and the Small Toad are _ 
seen to play clever tricks upon huge beasts such as the Elephant, 
the Lion, the Hippopotamus and even upon men, getting the 
better of them by their cunning. 

2) In a second category, the same idea of the victory of the 
little ones over powerful enemies, is illustrated by stories in 
which human beings, children, miserable, despised ones, triumph 
over their elders and those who hate them. The type of such 
tales, amongst us, is Cinderella. Thonga have a lot of similar 
stories, which I would entitle the wisdom of the little ones. 

3) The third category comprises the Ogre tales, where the 
triumph of the wisdom of feeble creatures over these disgusting 
and cruel beings is again celebrated. 

4) Other tales, which I might adorn with the name of meral 
tales, are stories which are evidently intended to enforce some 
moral teaching. The moralising aim may be unconscious, but 
the conclusion of the tales is undoubtedly moral, showing, as it 
does, that bad deeds or bad characters meet with due punishment. 

5) Another variety of stories of this kind, though they are 
called tales and told as such, seem to have been aeiual facts which 
happened somewhere, and have been preserved in the memory 
of the tribe. But they are not considered as real historical tradi- 
tions. Being told for the entertainment of the hearers, no diffe- 
rence is made between them and ordinary tales. These cannot 
be called legends, a legend being an historical fact, transformed 
by the popular imagination, and held as such by those who 
narrate it. ‘They are rather the contrary of legends, being regarded 
as purely imaginative, while the facts seem to be more or less 
historic. 

6) The last category of the Thonga folk-tales are the foreign 
tales, which have come from Moslem, Portuguese or English 
sources, but have been altered in a very curious way, thus 
affording interesting material for the study of the Native mind. 
Foreign infiltrations can be detected even in those tales which 

brated series of deeds performed by Reynard the Fox, the well-known pro- 
duct of mediaeval literature. 

ee oh 
bear most distinctly the Bantu character, but in this last cate- 
gory, they seem to constitute the very subject matter of the 
story. 

These six classes, once more, are by no means sharply defined. 
A tale might be placed in two or three of them. An animal 
sometimes appears in a tale where the other actors are all human. 
Though the animal folklore is generally absolutely devoid of 
moral intent, some moral idea may be detected in some episodes, 
for Instance, when we see the Elephant punished for having 
contemptuously crushed the spawn of the Small Toad, etc. 

The literary value of these stories varies greatly according to 
the story itself, and to the narrator. Some tales are very short 
and insignificant, or they may be a hap-hazard accumulation of 
episodes without any plan. Others are real compositions in which 
there is order and design, a treatise and a conclusion. I recom- 
mend the perusal of the “‘Fpopee of the Small Toad” and the 
story of the ‘‘Little Hated One”, in ‘‘ Les Chants et les Contes 
des Ba-Ronga”. They are amongst the best and most elaborate 
examples of Bantu folklore, and disclose a real literary talent. 
Very often, as already mentioned, a little song or some little 
songs form the framework of the story. They are repeated at 
least three times, the story-teller arranging his narrative in such 
a way that the refrain recurs again and again. Native speakers 
do not fear repetition ; they seem to think that to hear a catching 
tune once only is not sufficient, and that upon a second or 
third time it will be more appreciated. So they make of repe- 
tition a real art. It may make the recital somewhat monotonous, 
but this literary procedure is by no means tedious. Some one 
once said to me, after having heard the tale of Nabandji, the 
toad-eating girl : “‘I would never have thought there could be so 
much charm in monotony!” 

As regards the narrators, they also differ greatly from each 
other. Some of them, the beginners, are dull, slow, annoying. 
They intermingle the episodes without any order, frequently 
supposing things to be known which have not before been 
mentioned. But others are full of life, and one feels a true lite- 
rary pleasure in listening to them. It was a real treat, for in- 

stance, to hear Shiguyane, Spoon, his wife, and Simeon Mak- 
wakwa! Their gestures, their mimicking, their physionomy, 
the wealth of descriptive adverbs thrown into the narration, 
added a great interest to the story. They imitated little child- 
ren, or old people who had no teeth, with great effect. I even 
saw Spoon’s wife have recourse to imitative action in order to 
increase the charm of one of the songs, No. 36, a kind of 
incantation by which deceitful suitors are transformed into 
hyenas. This song, according to the story, was sung by a woman 
whilst grinding her mealies. So Magugu brought with her an 
earthenware mortar, and vigorously worked with her pestle 
each time the song was repeated. Listeners seemed to take 
great delight in this performance. 

Ul. The Ethnographic Value of the Tales. 

When asked the origin of the tales they tell, Thonga invaria- 
bly say: ‘‘These are old stories which we heard from our 
fathers. No one would dream of originating a tale nowadays”. 
This assertion is certainly true. Bantu tales are very old. It is 
not without good cause that story-tellers, when afraid of being 
haunted by the harrowing details, send them back to Gwambe and 
Dzabane, the first man and the first woman! 

Another fact comes to confirm the testimony of the Natives, 
showing, at the same time, the ethnographic value of the tales. 
It has been noticed when comparing tales collected in various 
parts of South Africa, that there is a great similarity amongst 
them. Bantu folklore, whatever may be the differences met 
with amongst the tribes, possesses a real unity. More than that: 
this similarity is found in the folk-tales of all mankind. A number 
of stories seem to spread from one end of the planet to the 
other. Reviewing my book ‘Les Chants et les Contes des Ba- 
Ronga”, in the ‘‘ Revue des Traditions populaires” of June 1898, 
Mr. René Basset, the man who is perhaps the greatest authority 
in this domain, showed that certain episodes written in 
Lourengo Marques, at the dictation of a Ronga story-teller, 

ais me 
were to be found in the folklore of the ancient Greeks and 
Romans, of the modern Germans, French, Greeks, Italians, 
Lithuanians, Siberians, Kirghizes, Indians; in Brazil, Portugal, 
the Punjab, Scotland, Roumauia, Guatemala, British Guiana, 
Morocco, etc! This is really a wonderful phenomenon and itis 
very difficult to account for it. Three explanations may be 
given of this fact, which is one of the most interesting problems 
of Ethnography : 

1) These stories belong to primitive humanity, and all the 
races have taken them with them in their migrations. 

2) Or there has been, in a more or less remote past, direct 
contact between the various human races, by means of which the 
tales have been transmitted from one tribe to another, in sucn 
a way that, in the course of time, they have spread all over the 
world. 

3) There is such a similarity in the minds of the various 
races, when still in the primitive phase of their development, 
that they have all invented the same stories independently of 
each other. Hence the unity of folklore everywhere. 

I do not think any one of these explanations excludes the 
others. There is probably a portion of truth in each of them. 
The difficulty is to define that portion exactly, and this cannot 
be done as long as we have not more material at hand. For 
South Africa we have already a great deal of information owing 
to the works of Callaway, Theal, Torrend for the Zulu-Kafirs, 
Bleak and Mrs Lloyd for the Hottentots and Bushmen, Casalis, 
Arbousset, Jacottet for the Ba-Suto, and mine for the Thonga. 
But there is still more to be collected. Iam under the impres- 
sion that, having now collected about fifty Thonga tales of 
different lengths, amounting to a total of 300 pages, in-8vo s1Ze, 
I only possess a fifth, or perhaps a tenth part of the whole 
folklore of our tribe! 

However Science cannot wait until all the tales have been reduced 
to writing and published. It will try to come to a conclusion as soon 
as possible, and perhaps the best plan for it would be to restrict the 
field of investigation, and to work thoroughly one, at least, of the 

a4 oe 

regions of this wide land. This is the suggestion I would take the 
liberty of making to my fellow-inquirers in the field of Bantu folklore. 
Let us choose a characteristic portion of it, for instance, that which I 
have called the ‘‘Romance of the Hare”, which is more clearly defined 
than any other section of this primitive and oral literature. Let all the 
episodes of this long story be first published in a form which may be 
regarded as typical, preferably in the form in which they are found in 
any one given tribe; let a short résumé of each be made and given 
a distinguishing number by which it will be henceforth known. 
Then let a folklorist, if he has the necessary time and information at 
his disposal, conduct the following inquiry : — In which tribes are 
those episodes met with? How do they differ from the typical ver- 
sion? Do they appear outside Africa (amongst American Negroes, for 
instance) ? This inquiry would throw light on many important points, 
viz., what is strictly Bantu in the ‘“‘Romance of the Hare”, and what 
is common to other races? Are there episcdes which belong to one 
tribe only, to a group of tribes only, or to tribes widely separated from 
each other? To what extent do the wording and the contents differ? 
Are there not new episodes invented, possibly unconsciously, in 
recent times by Native story-tellers? I think, when this is accom plished, 
important conclusions might be drawn which would greatly assist 
Ethnography in the solution of this problem, and of many questions 
bearing on primitive humanity. 

I hope later on to publish the résumé, and the classification, of 
the 56 episodes of the ‘‘ Romance of the Hare”, which I have collect- 
ed. 1 may be able to complete this collection, as [ know that a num: 
ber of other stories are told about the “ Wily Trickster”, as the Thonga 
call him ! This attempt May serve as a starting point for the inquiry 
which I propose, and should this inquiry ever be conducted on an 
extended scale, under the auspices of the S.A.A.A.S., for instance, 
and the result published in its Journal, the Science of Folklore 
would certainly greatly profit by such an undertaking, 

The antiquity of the tales is beyond any doubt : they are old, 
very old. However this antiquity is only relative : that is to 
say they are constantly transformed by the narrators and their 
transformations go much farther than is generally supposed, 
farther even than the Natives themselves are aware of. After 
having heard the same stories told by different story-tellers, I 

 20G9. = 
must confess that I never met with exactly the same version. 
First of all words differ. Each narrator has his own style, speaks 
freely and does not feel in any way bound by the expressions 
used by the person who taught him the tale. It would bea 
great error to think that, writing a story atthe dictation of a 
Native, we possess the recognized standard form of the tale. 
There is no standard at all! For this reason I cannot attribute 
any great importance to the texts of the tales. They are examples 
of the language as spoken by so and so in such and such a dis- 
trict, and therefore have a linguistic value, just as any report or 
address they may make or deliver. But they are by no means 
stereotyped texts, transmitted as such from the old times. Phe 
words of the songs, which occasionally accompany the narration 
are probably the most ancient and unchangeable element of the 
tales. They are often half Zulu, in those tales which have been 
borrowed from the neighbouring tribe, and contain archaic expres- 
sions. Some sentences also, especially when they are quota tions, 
bear the same character and are reproduced by different narra- 
tors under an identical form; for instance, when the Small 
Toad, Shinana, places its eggs on the road and says, as a kind 
of defiance : ‘‘Let the passer-by pass. If he crushes them, 
let him crush them. If he spares them, let him spare them”. 
I heard this sentence repeated in almost exactly the same 
terms by two Thonga, one from Khosen, the other from 
Rikatla. But these fixed elements are rare and, as a rule, Natives 
change the words with the greatest freedom. 

The same can be said with regard to the sequence of the episodes ; 
although these often form definite cycles, it is rare to hear two 
narrators follow exactly the same order. They arrange their 
material as they like, sometimes in a very awkward way. The 
tricks of the Hare are sometimes attributed to the Small Toad. 
In the Zulu folklore they are all given as the deeds of a dwarf, 
called Hlakanyana. I have heard Natives mixing up elements 
of a totally different style. For instance, in the ritornello of 
the ‘‘Hare’s Hoe”, which will be found later on and belongs 
to the animal or semi-animal folklore, the conclusion is bor- 
rowed from the well-known episode of the “Year of Fa- 

== 2005) 

mine”, which belongs to the class of moral tales (or tales 
originating from an historic fact). New combinations thus con- 
stantly take place, sometimes absurd when the literary sense is 
wanting. 

I go further : New elements are also introduced, owing to 
the tendency of Native story-tellers always to apply circum- 
stances of their environment to the narration. This is one of 
the charms of Native tales. They are living, viz., they are not 
told as if they were past and remote events, in an abstract 
fashion, but considered as happening amongst the hearers them- 
selves, the names of listeners being often given to the heroes 
of the story, which is, so to speak, forced into the frame of 
the ordinary life. So all the new objects brought by civilisation 
are, without the slightest difficulty, made use of by the narrator. 
He speaks of rifles and guns, of square houses and of clothing, 
which were not dreamt of by the ancient authors of the tales, 
and that not only in tales which are distinctly of a foreign 
origin but also in those. which are thoroughly Bantu. Thus 
Magugu, Spoon’s wife, in her tale about the hyena-suitors, 
which otherwise bears a strong Bantu character, concluded by 
showing the girl, the heroine of the story, coming to the Mis- 
sionary Station to be married in the Church! There is not the 
remotest shadow of historic or ethnographic criticism in the 
mind of Bantu story-tellers : hence the changes which constant 
ly deform old traditions. 

Lastly, my experience leads me to think that, in certain cases, 
the contents of the stories themselves are changed by oral trans- 
mission, this giving birth to numerous versions of a tale, often 
very different from each other and sometimes hardly recognis- 
able. See, for instance, the splendid tale of Zili which I am 
now publishing : a man kills his wife and cuts her flesh into 
strips which he gives his relatives-in-law to eat. A bird reveals 
his crime by a little song; he is found out, and put to death 
with his whole family. The theme is very popular, and forms 
one of the most typical moral tales. I possess a version of the 
story in which it is the wife who calls her parents and, with 
their help, kills her husband, because he was ill-treating her. 

ee Oe ee 

They cut off the flesh and hang it in strips on the fence of the 
village. The husband’s mother comes to pay a visit to her 
grandson, and they give her the poor man’s flesh to eat. She 
stays in the village many days wondering why they treat her 
to meat of which they do not partake. When she expresses 
her astonishment, they say to her: ‘‘ We kept it for you!” 
When returning home, having taken a provision of meat with 
her, the old woman hears a bird singing: 

Tsenengu! tsenengu! There is one who fell down ! 
He fell down on the square of the village, 

His flesh hangs and swings ; 

It is that which you carry on your head. 

This song is totally different from the one in Zili, The bird 
repeats it until she understands the words, and then she cries : 

My son! Alas! Alas! 

The source of the two stories is evidently the same, but what 
great differences between them! Such alterations have evi- 
dently taken place, and are still taking place, every day in the 
Bantu folklore. 

How far can these alterations go? To answer this question 
I would ask my readers to study the charming tale which I 
entitle the ‘“‘Epopee of the Small Toad ” (Chants et Contes 
des Ba-Ronga, p. 109). What I call the Small Toad is not 
our little European green frog but a curious Batracian, the Bre- 
viceps mossambicus, in Ronga the shinana. It can swell up to 
double its natural size and cover itself with an exudation which 
keeps its enemies away. It can bury itself in the ground dur- 
ing the winter, and comes out in spring. This interesting 
little animal is, in the Ronga folklore, the equal of the Hare, 
and even surpasses it. Some of its great deeds are the same 
as those well known in the ‘‘ Romance of the Hare ”. The 
Small Toad begins by killing an antelope by its tricks, and uses 
its horn as a trumpet to deceive the other beasts. This brings 
about a fight between the Small Toad and the Hippopotamus, 
followed by another one between it and the Elephant. which 

— + —202" > > 

has wilfully crushed its eggs. The Small. Toad, accompanied 
by the Chameleon, forges assagais, kills the Elephant, and all 
the beasts make their submission. So it becomes a Great 
Chief. It seems that the presence in the sandy country of 
Delagoa Bay of this kind of Batracians with its curious ha- 
bits, coupled with the example of the Ngoni chiefs who subju- 
gated the clans of the coast by warlike expeditions, has given 
birth in our tribe to a new modern type of folklore, the type 
of the Breviceps: all the tricks previously and still told of the 
Hare are attributed to it, though it keeps its own definite cha- 
racter, viz., that of a warrior. If this be true, there has been 
a real creation, though most of the elements of the ‘‘ Epopée of 
the Small Toad ” were previously in existence. 

As a conclusion I would say : — The Bantu tales are very old, 
at least the material of which they are formed is very ancient. 
But they are still a plastic matter unconsciously undergoing 
constant and extensive modifications in the hands of the story- 
tellers. These facts are interesting to note, as they show what 
are the conditions of literary production amongst  uncivilised 
tribes. This production is essentially collective : tales are not 
created, on all sides, by individual authors ; but they are 
modified, altered and enriched, as they are transmitted from one 
person to another, from one tribe to another, from one race 
to another, to such an extent that new types, new combina- 
tions, are adopted and a true development takes place. This 
is obvious if, in addition to these transformations, that which I 
call the fifth category truly exists, viz., if it be true that facts 
which really happened are told in such a way that they come 
to be classed amongst the fabulous. So it is quite possible that 
the impression felt by all the story-tellers that all the taies are 
ancient, that the era of creation has passed, is after all erroneous 
or, at any rate, only relatively true. A development still takes 
place and it has perhaps never been more active than now. It 
this be correct, the hypothesis of Callaway, that our tribes have 
passed through a stage of greater literary production than now 
apparent cannot be maintained. 

1V. The Moral and Philosophical Value of the Tales. 

In some of the Thonga tales the moral lesson is so clear that 
I did not hesitate to make a special category, the moral tales. 
They are as wide-spread as the others. 1 do not pretend that 
those who tell them intend to moralize. But the teaching 
naturally arises from the narratives, and it would be worth 
while studying them to extract therefrom a kind of code of 
Native elementary morals. In them we see a just punishment 
following on faults, such as : the curiosity of Namashuke 
(Chants et Contes p. 22); the jealousy of Mutipi’s. friends 
(p. 158); and of Longoloka (Les Ba-Ronga, p. 327) 3 theobsti- 
nacy of Sidiulu’s wife ; the unkindness of an elder sister (p. 229); 
the presumption of a younger sister (p. 337); the disobedience of 
Halandi (p. 242) and of the elder brother in the ‘Disobedient 
child and the Snake”; the self-confidence of a man who marries 
against his parents’ will (p. 246); the /aziness of the wives 
(p. 257); the selfishness of the husband (p. 260) the homicide of 
Zili. On the other hand we also see kindness rewarded, and 
also pily, in a tale not yet published, told in connection with 
that of The disobedient child. (1) 

The animal folklore and the Ogre tales seem to be absolutely 
devoid of such moral lessons. But, as we have already pointed 
out, they are all more or less illustrations of the triumph ot 

(1) After having told how the little child saved his disobedient brother, (see 
later on), the narrator goes on with a totally different story which had origi- 
nally certainly no connection with the other episode. During the time of 
famine, the child who was now several years older, went away to another 
country.A headman received him, and ordered one of his wives to take care 
of him, but she refused, saying that her own children had nothing to eat. 
All the others did the same except one who consented to feed him. The child 
sowed seeds of all kinds and. his enchanted hoe having tilled large fields in a 
moment, a splendid harvest was the result, and the store houses of his adopted 
mother were well filled. The others said : If we had only accepted him!” On 
his way home, he killed an army and_ took their assagaies, killed a troop of 
merzhants and seized their loads of goods. killed all his relatives and took their 
hoes, — an episode which resembles that of the conclusion of Mutipi’s tale. 
(Chants et Contes p. 160.) 

wisdom over mere brute force. This seems to be the essential 
idea of all this folklore, and is not this indeed a highly moral 
and philosophical idea ? 

To illustrate this very interesting thesis the story-tellers, in 
the first instance, narrate the doings of the animals, choosing 
for the heroes of their tales the smallest and most defenceless 
thus the Hare, the cunning trickster, up to all sorts of dodges; 
the Small Toad, cold and calculating; the Chameleon, with its 
crafty prudence. The same idea runs through the group of 
stories which I have called “ the wisdom of the little ones os 
those who were thought to be dullards, the disinherited, and the 
hated, end by succeeding better in life than their persecutors, 
of whom they often become the benefactors. On the other 
hand the Ogres, as representing brute force and all that is 
merely material, are defeated, receive punishment for their 
misdeeds and are generally cut open (to provide an exit for 
the victims they have swallowed !). So the exaltation of wis- 
dom or goodness is clearly noticeable in almost all the tales, and 
even foreign tales seem to shew, under more or less exotic co- 
lourings, that they owe their origin to the same thought. 
The African story-teller undoubtedly endeavours, above all, to 
interest his hearers by picturesque, laughable or sensational re- 
citals : but, consciously or unconsciously, he is certainly doing 
work the philosophical bearing of which is undeniable, 

Why is it that this theme of the triumph of knowledge over 
strength reappears so frequently and under so many aspects in 
this popular literature ? Doubtless because the thought is na- 
tural and eminently satisfying to the mind of man. It under- 
lies our fairy tales of Cinderella, of Hop o’my thumb and many 
other European fables and stories. But may there not have 
been, in regard to the African tribes, some special circumstances 
which contributed to the evolution of this idea, and impelled 
them to give vent to it in a hundred different ways ° 

Among the Bantus, the Chief is all powerful. Surrounded 
by Counsellors, protected by warriors always ready to do his bid- 
ding, he is an autocrat with power of life and death over his 
subjects, especially where the primitive clan has evolved into a 

confederation of tribes united by military power. If the Bantu 
clan is in a way democratic, the hierarchy is, however, all pow- 
erful in its midst. Before the Chief and before the invincible 
custom of which he is the representative, every one bows and 
trembles In every village the headman possesses similar powers 
over his subordinates, and elder brothers reign as despots 
over the younger. From the top to the bottom of the social 
ladder the strong dominate over the weak and combine, in a 
wonderful way, to assure the submission of the inferior. In 
the evening, round the fire, the women and the children take 
their revenge in the Black man’s usual way, 1. e., by say:ng 
what they think in a round about manner. They do not try 
to upset the existing state of affairs! Far from it ! But they take 
a malicious pleasure in telling of the clever tricks of the Hare 
and his associates! Why? Because Mr. Hare represents th 

little one, the subject, the ordinary private individual, who has 
received no special advantages, either by birth or nature, and 
yet who, by his own personal wit or common sense, gets the 
better of the great ones of the community and even of the 
chiefs. Is it a mere coincidence that three of the tales I have 
collected conclude with the death of a chief brought about by 
the machiavellian acuteness of that rascal, the Hare ? Or, some- 
times, it is the youngest sister, who figures in the story; the 
despised one, covered with a loathsome skin disease ; the insignifi- 
cant little goat-herd ; the son of the neglected wife ; all of whom 
accomplish grand doings, altogether unexpectedly. 

I see in these stories, as it were, a discreet protest of weakness 
against strength, a protest of spiritual against material force; pos- 
sibly they may contain a warning to those in power from those 
who suffer. And who knows if their ultimate object be not to 
assert the value of the individual, in the midst of this down- 
trodden people where the individual counts for nothing ? If 
this be so, then African folklore possesses a greater and more 
philosophical value than would appear at first sight. In the 
collective state of human society it represents an aspiration to 
a state of things where the individual will have his due place. 
In this way, it is prophetic. It can no longer be classed merely 

as an amusement for old women during the long evenings, or 
as a more or less intellectual parlour-game : it is a monument 
upon which the soul of the race has recorded, unconsciously 
perhaps, its ideas and its aspirations. It is thus doubly worthy 
of our study. 

The scope of this book does not allow me to publish more 
than one or two tales of each category, and I must also abstain 
from any technical treatment of them, leaving the work of anno- 
tation and comparison to professional folklorists. My aim is to 
describe the South African tribe and they will be a sufficient 
illustration, as they are, of its psychic life. 

V. The Animal Folklore. 

I have published nearly thirty episodes of the Romance of 
the Hare in the works aiready refered to; those which I collect- 
ed in later years form three cycles : that of the wily trickster, 
a collection of episodes told by Martha and heard by her in the 
Maputju country; the most noteworthy describe the victory of 
the Hare over the Lion; the Hare and the Lion, told by Simeon 
Makwakwa of Bilen, containing episodes quite different from 
those of the first cycle; the Hare and the Baboon, written for 
me by one of my pupils, Mbike Dzengen from Khosen, a very 
amusing story also known in Bilen with some variations. To 
these three cycles I have added the story of the Hare’s Hoe, 
a curious specimen of a. popular literary genus, the ritornello, 
or anadiplosis which is not frequently met with in the Bantu 

folklore. 
1) Nwasuisisana, THE Hare. (1) 

The Hare, that wily trickster (2) went to live with the Grey Ante- 
lope (3). One day he said to her : ‘‘ Suppose we go and till our fields 

(1) For the English translation of this and most of the following tales I 
am greatly indebted to Mr. G. D. Fearon. Iam sorry space does not allow 
me to give the Thonga text. 

(2) Nwashisisana is the surname for the Hare, which is generally called 
Nwampfundla, The word is derived from the verb shisa to deceive. 

(3) Nwamhunti, the duyker of the Boers. 

and plant some beans ! ” So off they went, and set to work. The 
Antelope stole the Hare’s beans, and the Hare stole the Antelope’s 
beans, but the Hare did the most of the stealing. 

The Hare set a trap in his field, and the Antelope was caught by 
the leg. In the early morning the cunning rascal went out and found 
the Antelope caught in the trap: — “* Don’t you think you deserve to 
be killed ” said he, ‘‘ now that 1 have found you out pra RON oy 
No!” replied she. ‘* Let me go, and we will go back to my house, 
where I will give you a‘hoe”. So he let her go, and she gave him 
the hoe. 

The Hare then packed his beans, harvested all his fields, and made 
ready to be off: — ‘‘ Good-bye”, said he to tlie Antelope, ‘‘1 won’t 

Wea 

stay with you any longer, you are a thief 

He soon came across the Great Lizard, the Varan (Nwakhwahle) 
lying at the edge ofa water hole. It was the Chief’s water hole, where 
they drew their water, and he had been placed there on guard to find 
out who it was that was continually disturbing it, and making it 
muddy: — ‘* What are you doing here: ” said the Hare. — ‘‘ I am 
watching this hole to see who it is that muddies the chief’s water”. 
— <J’]l tell you what”, said the Hare, “ we had much better go and 
tilla field together”. — ‘‘ How can I dig?” said the Varan, “ | 
can’t stand on my hind legs and hold the hoe in my fore-paws, ” — 
<« That doesn’t matter: just you come along; I will tie the hoe to 
your tail, and you will be able to dig beautifully ” So the hoe was 
tied on; but when this was done, the Varan couldn’t move. Then 
the Hare ran back to the hole, drank his fill of water, and finished by 
stirring it up well, making it as muddy as possible. After this he 
walked all over the Varan’s fields, and regaled himself on his ground- 
nuts. In the heat of the day he came back and said): == * Houhian 
army has passed through the country. [ hear that the warriors have 
dirtied the water in the hole... I hear too that they have ravaged all 
your crop of ground-nuts 1” < Untie me” said the Varan, ‘‘ I 
can’t budge”. — “* All right, but only on condition that you don't go 
and accuse me, the Hare, of having stirred up the water”. — ‘‘ But 
who told you this story about those soldiers who did all the mischief?” 
__« Don’t ask me so many questions ; if you do, I won't untie you!” 
—‘« Very well! Pll be quiet; but take away this hoe; it hurts me!” — 

“ Listen ! first of all Pll go and draw some water for you. You must 
be thirsty ”. —‘* No, I’m not thirsty. Only let me go! OE you 
are not thirsty, all right ! I won't untie the hoe”. — ‘* Oh! very 
well I am thirsty, Hurry up, and come back as fast as you can”, 

The Hare went to the Varan's village, took the wooden goblet he 
always drank out of, drew some water, and once again stirred up the 
hole. He took a drink to the Varan, and said to him: < If any one 
asks you whether I have disturbed the water, you must say that you 
did it. Ifyou don’t promise me this, I won’t untie you. ”—<« All 
right! Very well.” Then the Hare ran to call the chiefs : Lord Ele- 
phant (Nwandlopfu), Lord Lion (Nwandjawandjawana) and the rest. 
They all came and asked the Varan: ‘‘ Who has been drawing our 
water and making it all muddy ?” — * It isI, ” said the Varan ; and 
the rascal ofa Hare added : *‘ Yes, I found him committing this crime, 
and I tied him up to a hoe, so that he couldn’t run away. ” 

The chiefs congratulated the Hare: ‘* Ah! you have been very 
clever! You have discovered the villain who has been muddying 
our pond!” And they immediately killed the Varan. 

The wily trickster took the hoe, and went to look for the Grey 
Antelope (Nwamhunti). She was on sentry duty, on the edge of a 
pool, for guards were placed at all the pools to prevent any one ap- 
proaching, as the water still continued to be muddied during the 
night. The Hare, not being able to get anything to drink, said to the 
Antelope : *‘ What are you doing there, close to the water ? ” — 
“Tam guarding the Chief’s pool”. — ** You will all get thin and die 
of hunger, if you stay like that at the edge of the pools Listen ! 
You would do much better to come with me. and till a field ; then, 
in time of famine, you would have something to eat”. — ‘* Let us 
go!” said the Antelope. 

The Hare set to work in grand style. He gave the Antelope a hoe 
and told her to dig too — * I can’t get on my hind legs, ” said she, 
‘Cand hold the hoe with my forelegs”. —‘* Let me havea look at your 
forelegs: I'll tie the hoe to them. and you will be able to dig all right. ” 
The Antelope tried, but she couldn’t do it. — ‘* Never mind ”, said 
the Hare. ‘* Waita minute”. He ran back to the pool, quenched 
his thirst, and muddied the water. Then he filled a calabash, and hid 
itin the bush. On returning to the Antelope, he said: ‘ Hello! 
Haven't you done any hoeing yet ?”—‘ No, I can’t manage it. ” 
— ‘* Would you believe it? An army has passed by, and they have 
stirred up the pool.” — **No! Truly ? Untie me, Hare!” —*‘*I won’t 

untie you unless you swear that what I said is true. ’— ‘‘ Very well! 
Untie me”. Off he went to get the calabash to give her a drink, and 
made her promise to confess that it was she who had disturbed the 
water ; then he called the Chiefs, who killed the Antelope. 

But there was one creature, that outdid the Hare in cunning, and 
that was the Tortoise (Nwamfutju), She mounted guard at the pond. 
The Hare arrived on the scene. — ‘‘ You will all die of hunger, if you 
stay at the edge of the pools with nothing to do. We had much bet- 
ter go and till a field together. ” — ‘* How can I hoe with such short 
legs ?” —‘* Oh ! that will be all right. Tll show you how to do it. ” 
— “Eh! no thank you! I think not! ” —‘‘ Well then ! let’s go and 
help ourselves to some of the Wild Boar’s sweet potatoes.” — ‘‘No”, 
said the Tortoise uncompromisingly, ‘‘ no pilfering ! ” 

However, before very long, she began to feel hungry, so much so 
that, when the Hare again proposed a marauding expedition, she over- 
came her scruples, and they went off together to root up the sweet 
potatoes. Then they lita fire of grass in the bush and roasted them. 
—‘‘ Tortoise”, said the Hare, ‘< just go and see if the owners of these 
fields are any where about, as we must not let them catch us. ”—‘* Yes, 
but let us both go. You go one way and I'll go the other.” Off 
went the Hare, but the Tortoise, instead of following his example, 
stayed behind and crawled into his wallet. The Hare soon came back, 
filled up his wallet with sweet potatoes, threw it over his back and ran 
away to escape the proprietors, shouting at the top on hisivoices 9° Hi. 
Tortoise! Look out! They will catch you! [Tm off! Fly!” He 
ran as hard as he could to escape capture; the Tortoise, inside the sack, 
ate the sweet potatoes ; she picked out all the best ones and finished 
the lot! She said (descriptive adverb), ‘‘ kutlu ”. After a while the 
Hare was tired out, and lay down quite exhausted. He felt the pangs 
of hunger. — ‘‘ Aha!” said he to himself, ‘‘ I will have a good feed!” 
He sat down in a shady spot, opened his wallet, put his hand inside, 
and pulled out one very small sweet potato. — ‘* This is much too 
small for me ” said he, and, putting his hand in again, felt a nice big 
one. — ‘‘ Oho! here’s a beauty!” When he had pulled it out of 
his bag, what was his surprise to find that his prize turned out to be... 
Mistress Tortoise. — ‘‘ Hello! (He shoyawe!) Why! it’s you!” he 
cried in disgust, and threw her on the ground. She scuttled away as 

=) 22.10%  

fast and as far as she could. The Hare began to weep :—*‘ When I 
think that I have been carrying her all this time! ...” He felt very 
crestfallen. 

Continuing his travels he next met King Lion surrounded by his 
courtiers. He, at once, asked permission to mkonza, viz., to swear 
allegiance to the King, and to settle in his country. But every day 
he went out to steal other folk’s ground-nuts. When the owners of 
the fields came to look at their crops, they exclaimed : ‘* Who can it 
be that digs up our ground-nuts? The Hare went off to find the 
Lion, and said to him: ‘* Sire, your subjects are not what they should 
be (a ba lulamanga), for they are in the habit of stealing”. —** You 
don’t say so ?” said the Lion. ‘* Go and keep watch, and if you 
discover any one stealing, catch him.” 

The Hare went off to take up his position in the fields, but the 
Lion followed him, and surprised him in the very act of feasting on 
eround-nuts. — ‘‘Ha! ha! You tell me that my subjects are not 
honest folks, while it is you who do the thieving! ’’— ‘* Notatall! I 
was only keeping a look out! Come here, and I will show you the 
footprints of your subjects, for [know them well!” 

So they went to a large shady banyan tree. The Hare made a 
strong string of one of the long tendrils (lisiha), and said to the Lion: 
“As you think I don’t speak the truth, just sit down here and you 
will soon see the thieves passing by; I will wile away the time by 
making you a crown of wax (khehla ngiyana. I. p. 129)”. — ‘* All 
right”, said the Lion, ‘‘make mea crown”. The Hare began by 
parting the Lion’s mane down the middle and arranging the hairs 
carefully, one by one, on either side of his neck, as if he were pre- 
paring a spot on the top of his head for the crown. Then he made 
holes through the bark of the tree, on both sides of the trunk, and 
passed the hairs of the mane right through them, some on one side, 
some on the other. This done, he tied all the hairs securely toge- 
ther at the back of the tree with the string he had made, and said to 
the Lion: ‘ I’ve finished the job. Jump up quickly and you will 
see one of your subjects stealing in the fields!” The Lion tried to 
jump up. He couldn’t! He half killed himself struggling to get on 
his teet ! The Hare ran to the village. — ‘* Come”, he shouted, ‘* and 
see who it is who ravages your fields!” He had previously torn up 
a lot of ground-nut leaves and thrown them down close to the Lion. 

— WY — 

The villagers hurried to the spot. — ** There! don’t you see him? 
Haven't | found him out? eh?” The Lion didn’t dare to say a single 
word. Then his subjects cut great staves and beat him to death: 
— ‘‘ Ah! Hare, you are very clever, and we are very grateful ! <“ 
said they. 

The Hare cut the Lion up in pieces; then he took the skin and 
wrapped himself in it; thus disguised, he went to the Lion’s village 
and entered the Queen’s hut. He said: ‘“‘I am not well”, and shut 
himself up refusing to see anyone. He gave orders to the servants to 
kill an ox because he was ill; then he had a second one slaughtered, 
then a third! The women said to him : “‘ Are you going to move to 
another place, as you are killing all your oxen ?” —‘“‘ No” said he, 
“‘T have no intention of moving anymore. I am killing them 
because I know very well that I shall never get over this illness”. 
So he had a general slaughtering of all the Lion’s oxen, goats and 
sheep, to the very last head of cattle. When all were killed, he said 
to the Queen : ‘‘Haven’t you got my money in your keeping? — 
‘* Yes” she replied. — ‘‘ Well, bring it all out, and put it, together 
with my royal mat, and all my valuables, on the village square ”. 

The Lion’s skin was becoming rather odoriferous, the flies were 
settling upon it in swarms, and the Hare was by no means comforta- 
ble inside it. — ‘* What sort of complaint have you got?” said the 
Queen, ‘‘it is something that smells very nasty”. — ‘*Oh! I have 
only got some sores, I must go and find a doctor. Good-bye : I shall 
start atonce”. The Lion’s wife replied : ‘Then I will go with you, 
my husband. — ‘‘ No”, said he, ‘‘no occasion for that, for I know 
exactly where I must go”. He went out on to the square, picked up 
the mat in which all the money and valuables had been packed; then 
throwing off the Lion’s skin, he tore away as fast as his legs could 
carry him with all the village in pursuit ! 

He came to a burrow, and in he ran. The pursuers got a hook- 
ed stick to pull him out; they tried to hook him and managed to get 
hold of his leg. — ‘‘ Oh! pull away!” cried he, ‘* pull away ! you’ve 
only got hold of the root of a tree!” So they left of pulling, and 

—— 

had another try. This time they really hooked on toa root — * Hi! 
hi!” he yelled, ‘* Hi! hi! take care! you’re hurting me! Your’re 
killing me! Ow! Ow!”... They all pulled as hard as they could, 
and pulled and pulled until the hook broke and they all fell over 
backwards; they said: ‘‘Qaa”, (descriptive adv ). Finally they 
were tired out and said : ‘‘ Oh! let us give it up and leave him where 
he is!” So they stopped up the burrow with a bunch of grass and 
went away. 

The South wind sprang up, and blew the grass deeper into the 
burrow. — ‘‘lam done for”, said the Hare to himself, as he fancied 
they were succeeding in getting nearer to him. He was suffering the 
pangs of hunger and was terribly thirsty, but did not dare to leave 
the burrow, supposing his enemies to be close at hand. At length he 
cried out : ‘‘ Have pity on me and let me go, my good fathers (ba 
baba), I beseech you!” He crept cautiously towards the entrance to 
the burrow, and found only a bunch of grass. Then he made off at 
once, leaving all his treasures behind him, and not even giving them 
a single thought. 

He ran on and on, He became thin and ill. He ate grass, but it 
did not remain in his inside : it passed through him immediately. He 
came to the home of the Grey Antelope. — ‘‘ Say, Antelope, suppose 
we sew one anotherup! You stitch me up, but not completely, you 
know! It will keep the grass much longer in our insides when we 
browse, and we shall get much more nourishment out of it.” She 
consented, and stitched him up partially. He sewed her up entirely. 
The Antelope swelled and died. But, fortunately for her, she fell in a 
field belonging to a woman who picked her up, put her in her basket, 
on the top of her head, and carried her to the village to be eaten. 
She gave her to her husband to cut up, who set to work, and began 
by cutting the stitches that the Hare had sewn. All that was in the 
Antelope’s interior at once came out; she jumped to her legs, and gal- 
loped away. She met the Hare and said to him : ** All right! I’ve 
found you out now !... Never again do I call you my friend !” 

The Hare being thirsty was looking fora pool but couldn’t find one. 
At last he came across one where no one was on guard. ~ The Tort 

toise was really in charge, but she was in the water. ‘The Hare walk- 
ed in : ** What luck! How nice and cool it is!” said he, quenching 
his thirst, and swimming about. The Tortoise snapped at one of 
his legs, then at another... — ‘‘ Hello! let me go! I'll promise you 
a goat if you will let go!” They came out of the pool together, and 
the Hare said to her: ‘‘Come along to my house, and get your 
goat”. They reached his home, but no goat! Nothing! The 
Hare did not give her anything. Then he remembered the money 
that he left in the burrow and said : ‘‘ Let us go and see Mr. Chame- 
leon. He has got my valuables, for he borrowed a lot of money from 
me. Tlljust run round and fetch my brother; he knows all about 
the business and will be my witness.’ Having said this, he decamp- 
ed. The Tortoise arrived at the Chameleon’s abode and said : *‘ Give 
me the Hare’s money which you have got!” — ‘‘ What? I haven’t 
got anything belonging to the Hare!” Whereupon the Chameleon 
blew into her eyes. She swelled, and swelled, and died. 
That’s the end. 

2) THE Hare AND THE Lion. 

One day the Hare was looking into a pool and saw the sky reflected 
in the water. — ‘‘ Hello!” said he to himself, ‘‘ there is a fine large 
country down there, where I can always hide if any one tries to do 
me any harm. I can go and be rude to the Elephants now with 
impunity”. Off he went to insult the Elephants, who promptly 
chased him. He rushed into the pool, but he was soon caught. 
— ‘Hi! hi! my grandfathers! Let me go!” (The Hare calls all 
the other animals “‘ grandfather”). — ‘‘ What shall we do to you ? 
Shall we kill you?” —‘‘ What! Kill me? You will no longer have 
a grandson then...” — ‘Very well! Then we will beat you!” 
— ‘*Why? You can’t find any spot on me big enough to hit, | am so 
small...” — ‘‘ Well then! we-will just roll you in the mud, and 
smother you all over with it, inside and out!” They did so, and left 
him lying on the ground, choked and smothered with mud. 

* 
The Hyena came along. She is very fond of flesh, but it must be 

dead flesh, She lets the other animals kill it for her. She picked up 
the Hare and thought she had found a choice morsel. —‘: But”, 

said she, ‘ this is too dirty ! it is all covered with mud! I must 
wash it.”’ So she washed it. — ‘*‘ Now, the meat will be all wet 
and nasty; I must dry it”. So she laid it out, and sat down in the 
shade to wait. Suddenly the Hare jumped up and made off at full 
speed ! 

He came to Lord Lion’s village and this Chief took him into his ser- 
vice. The Lion went hunting every day, and it was the Hare’s duty 
to look after the Lion’s children, and teach them their lessons. When 
the Lion returned from hunting, he stopped, some distance from the 
village and sent meat by the Hare for his three little children, saying 
to him : ‘‘ Give the little ones the tender meat, for they are young, and 
you can eat the bones!” The Hare told the children : ‘‘ Your father 
says you are to eat the bones, for they are hard and will make you 
strong, and I will eat the meat.’ Thus he regaled himself. 

Then he taught them a nice little game. He collected a lot of 
wood, made a fire and said: ‘* I will teach you how to jump. You 
know that your father catches animals by springing upon them, so you 
too had better learn how to spring properly”. He began first : ‘+I 
will show you the way I jump, and you must do just as Ido.” He 
easily cleared the fire in one bound, but, when the little Lion cub 
tried, he jumped right into the flames and was burnt. Then the Hare 
ate him up. When the Lion returned in the evening, he said to the 
Hare : ‘‘ Show me my httle ones”. He had stopped, as usual, a short 
way off, so the Hare lifted up one of the cubs saying: ‘‘ Here is 
Ne 1r;” then another: ‘‘ Here is N° 2;” and, lifting the same one 
twice : ‘‘ Here is N° 3". —‘** Tis well!” said the Lion. The next 
day the Hare repeated his game with the fire. Another cub perished, 
and was eaten. In the evening he lifted up the one cub that was left 
three times, and the Lion was quite satisfied. The day following the 
third cub was cooked and made away with. Then the Hare climbed 
into a thorny tree and scratched his skin so badly that he was bleeding 
in several places. The Lion caine back towards nightfall : — ‘* What 
is the matter with you ?” said he. — ‘‘ Alas! my grandfather, a 
whole band of enemies have been here! They have killed all your 
children! Just see the wounds their assagays have made all over my 
body!” He had also taken care to make a quantity of marks on the 
ground : “‘ You can see their footprints all around. I will go and 
find out which way they have gone, and we will pursue them ! ” 

The Hare ran off to the mountains, where he found an enormous 
boulder, so poised that it would only require the slightest push to send 
it crashing down the steep slope. — ‘ This will do!” said he, ‘* it 
is just exactly what I want!” He went back to the Lion and said to 
him : ‘‘Come along! and hide yourself just where I tell you to. If 
you hear a great noise, don’t look up, don’t even raise your head. 
It will be the enemy coming along, and, if you make any movement, 
they may see you, and run away. You can kill them when they pass 
close by you. Here is the spot! Hide yourself in here!” He placed 
him just below the rocking boulder. Then up he climbed. —‘‘ Look 
out ! here they come!” He pushed the rock ; down it fell, crushing 
the Lion. The “Slayer of flesh” (1) died! The Hare came hur- 
riedly down the slope, cut off the Lion’s claws and decamped. 

He married the Grey Antelope, for he wanted her little horns to 
make a trumpet. The Hare is so full of cunning that he can induce 
any animal to marry him. After some time had elapsed, he said to 
her : ‘‘ Let us play at cooking each other! (A hi psekane!) This is 
how we will do; we'll get a big cauldron, Pll get into it. You light 
a fire underneath. When the water begins to get warm, I will call 
out to you to take me out, and you will pull me out at once. ” No 
sooner said than done. The Antelope pulled the Hare out before the 
water was too hot. Then the Antelope got in, in her turn. The 
wily plotter put the cover on the cauldron, and plastered it down 
with dung (p. 37), filling every aperture, and saying : *‘ You will be 
warmer if I do this”. Then he sat down, and smoked his hemp- 
pipe. When the Antelope called out: ‘* Come and help me! I 
am boiling!”, he said : ‘‘ Wait a minute, my pipe doesn’t draw 
properly! I must pull at ita bit”. She twisted about and cried for 
mercy. He put more wood on the fire, and, when the Antelope 
was thoroughly cooked, he eat the meat and kept the horns! 

(1) Nwangonyama, is the sirname of the Lion. 

He went farther on, taking with him the jaw bone of the Lion he 
had killed, built an immense enclosure with stakes, and put the jaw- 
bone at the entrance. Then he sent this proclamation all through the 
land: ‘* Come and see! Anewand wonderful thing! Teeth grow- 
ing out of the ground! Quantities of them!” He summoned 
everyone with his trumpet, and all the animals came into the enclo- 
sure, without noticing that there was no way out of it. He closed 
the entrance and all were prisoners. Then he said to them : ‘¢ It is 
well, you are in the Chief’s enclosure. 1 will go and tell him you have 
arrived. He will soon be here.” He went and decked himself out 
in a dress entirely covered with small pieces of looking-glass : it was so 
resplendent that it quite dazzled the eyes of all who looked at him: 
‘“ Here is the King”, said they all, on seeing him approach. Then 
he addressed them and proclaimed this law : ‘* Know ye all ! Hawks, 
Lions, Tigers, that from henceforth no beast of the field is allowed to 
kill any other one, or to eat his flesh. Nothing is to be eaten but 
grass”. He appointed a shepherd to see that the animals did not 
kill each other. The Lions and Tigers grew thin on this diet : it 
made them ill, and none but the herbivorous animals were in good 
health. 

One day the Hare, having sent all the animals away, took off his 
glittering coat, and began to browse near the enclosure. Now it 
happened that a Lion, who was unwell, and could not go out with 
the others, had remained behind. He saw the Hare browsing clos¢é 
by, and, casting a glance around, to make sure no one was watching, 
with a single bound he was upon him and devoured him! In the 
evening all the animals returned, but as the King did not put in an 
appearance for eight or ten days, their spirits began to revive. They 
plucked up courage and flew at each other’s throats: a terrible carnage 
was the result; the stakes of the enclosure rotted and all the survivors 
dispersed. Amongst these was one of the Hare’s brothers, who at 
once stepped into the shoes of the deceased deceiver and continued 
his evil ways. 

One day the Hen invited the Hare to drink some beer at her house. 
There he saw the Hen cooking and the Cock roosting with his head 

under his wing. ‘‘ Where is his head?” he asked the Hen. — ‘‘ Oh! 
he cut it off and sent it round to invite our friends to come. It Is 
only his body that you see there: his head will soon come back. ” 
— ‘No ! really ! You don’t say so ? Honour bright Ce ee ta tah 0 a 
certainly!” — ‘‘ What sort of drugs do you use for this wonderful 
operation?” — ‘*Oh! none at all! You just take a knife, sharpen 
it well, and cut your head off!” —‘‘Ah! is that all? I must 
try it!” 

Later on the Hare asked the Hen to drink beer with him. He cut 
off his head and killed himself. Henceforth the Hen was the most 
cunning of all the animals! 

That is the end ! 

3) Tue Hare AND THE BABoon. 

The Hare and the Baboon built a village together, One day, when 
they were tipsy, the Hare said to the Baboon: ‘ Let us go and kill 
our wives!” The idea pleased the Baboon immensely: so they set 
off to kill them. The Hare went inside the hut and began to hit the 
big basket (ngula), telling his wife at the same time to shriek and cry 
out. The Baboon heard the cries, and was satisfied that the Hare was 
indeed killing his wife ; so he took a big stick and belaboured his 
wife so that she died, whilst the Hare had not done his wife any 
harm, having only belaboured the big basket! 

One day the Baboon overheard the Hare talking to his wife. He 
was greatly astonished. ‘‘ Ha! ha '” he said, ‘‘ the rascal has played 
atrick on me ; I have killed my wife, and he never killed his !”’ 

ok aK 

Another day the Hare proposed to the Baboon that they should go 
and steal ground-nuts in other folks’ fields. The Baboon was quite 
agreeable, as he was suffering from hunger, having no wife to till his 
land, or to give him any good food. When they got to the fields 
they began helping themselves to the ground-nuts, dug them up, and 
eat them. Whilst they were thus employed the Hare said : ‘* Grand- 
father, don’t tire yourself digging up these ground-nuts ; leave them 
alone ; just sit down in the shade and I will dig them up for you ”. 
The Baboon was very pleased, and took a seat under a shady tree 
which was close by: then the Hare dug up ground-nuts, and threw 

= Dit)  

them down in front ot the Baboon in such quantities that he was 
completely hidden behind the pile. He eat them greedily, and with 
great gusto. When the Hare saw that the pile was big enough, he 
went behind the Baboon and said : ‘* Will you let me kill the fleas in 
your tail ?” —“* Certainly, little one!” said he. So the Hare set to 
work, pretending to be killing fleas, and all the while he was digging 
a deep hole, as deep as the tail was long, in which he wanted to fix it, 
when he would get opportunity! He tried to put the tail in the hole. 
but, in doing so, hurt the Baboon who said : ‘* You are hurting me 
grandson!” — ‘“No”, replied the Hare, ‘ I’m not hurting you; Iam 
only playing with your tail!” When the Hare saw that the Baboon had 
nearly finished his ground-nuts, he hurried off to fetch a fresh supply 
in order to divert the Baboon’s attention, while he continued his dig- 
ging operations. Once more he tried to insert the tail in the hole; 
but the Baboon called out: ** What are you doing, grandson ?” ‘+ ’m 
not doing anything, grandfather!” said he, and continued digging 
until he had made the hole quite as deep as was necessary. Then he 
succeeded in putting the entire tail in the hole, right up to the stump: 
he filled in the earth all round it, and hammered it down with a stick 
as hard as he could. He tried to pull it out, but couldn’t; it was so 
securely fixed in. Seeing the Baboon had again nearly finished his 
ground-nuts, he got another lot, and went behind him to put the 
finishing touches to his handiwork. - 

When all was completed to his entire satisfaction, he ran off and 
clambered to the top of an ant-hill, and began to shout, at the top o0- 
his voice: ‘* Hello! Here’s the Baboon eating up other folk’s ground 
nuts!” Hearing this the Baboon scolded the Hare, and told him not 
to make such a noise: ‘‘ My grandson, you must not shout like that 
before I have finished my ground-nuts! You can shout as much as 
you like when I have done, and we will then run away together ” 
But the Hare would not obey him, and went on shouting as loud as 
he could until, at last, the women of the fields heard him and people 
came running up with their bows and arrows and guns. Then the 
Hare came down from his ant-hill and took to his heels. As for the 
Baboon,he was in a great fright, dropped the ground-nuts, and tried 
to make off; but he couldn’t move, as his tail was hard and fast in 
the ground! When he saw the folks approaching nearer and nearer, 
he made the most frantic efforts to get loose, throwing himself first 
on one side and then on the other, until finally, groaning with pain 
and terror, with one tremendous bound, he wrenched his tail free; 

ers 219 ms 

but it was only the bone! With a skeleton-tail waving and dripping 
blood (Iwa ku dzu-dzu-dzu descript adv.) he rushed away. He jump- 
ed, and dodged, fearing lest an arrow ora bullet should hit him, 
until he got safely into the wood. 

When he reached home he found the Hare seated in his wife’s hut, 
but he made no remark. During the night the Hare went back to 
the spot where they had been eating ground-nuts, and unearthed the 
remains of the tail, which he took home to his wife telling her to 
cook it ; this she did with great care, beginning by rubbing off all the 
hairs ; she then stewed it with some ground-nuts. She also cooked 
some flour. When everything was done to a turn, she dished up the 
food on separate plates, one containing the flour, and the other the 
savoury stewed tail. Then the Hare sent his son to call the Baboon, 
who came with much pleasure, as he knew he was being asked to a 
meal. On his arrival he went into the hut, sat down and was served 
with the flour and its seasoning, thestew. He enjoyed the food, took 
some of the meat and ate it. — ‘“‘ Why!” said he, “here is meat ! 
Wherever did you get it, my grandson?” He had no idea it was 
his own tail! He ate it, emptied the plate and went home. 

Some days later, the Hare told his wife to make some beer, which 
she did; when it was properly brewed, he invited all the countryside 
to come to a beer-drinking. They all came and drank beer. Grand- 
father Baboon was among the guests. While they were all enjoying 
themselves, the Hare raised his hand for silence, and requested per- 
mission to make a few remarks. When all the noise had subsided, he 
raised his voice, and asked: ‘‘ Have any of you ever seen any one 
who devoured his own tail?” They all said: ‘‘ No, we have never 
seen such a person!” The Baboon also declared he had never even 
heard ofsuch a thing. — “‘ Well!” said the Hare, * shall I tell you 
who it is 2” — ‘‘ Yes, do! We should much like to know ”, said 
they. Then the Hare exclaimed : ‘‘It is he, the Baboon! he has 
eaten the tail, that he lost over there in the ground nut field!” The 
Baboon was very angry, and left the gathering with a scowling face ; 
he went home muttering to himself: ‘‘ I wonder how I can manage 
to get the better of that rascal ? I must try, for he is always making 
a fool of me, and annoys me horribly ”. 

ok 
* * 

After some weeks during which the Baboon had been cogitating 
how he coud be revenged on the Hare, he hit upon a plan. ‘* Pll go 

= 220° = 

and get a wife” said he to himself, ‘‘ and then J shall be able to trick 
him, and starve him to death!” So he began at once by maxing 
proposals to a girl in a distant village, and, when the time came to go 
and fetch her, he asked the Hare to accompany him on his journey. 
They each packed up their provisions and started. The Hare, when 
preparing for the trip, put his eatables in the bottom of his wallet, 
and three stones on top of them; then he closed the package. The 
Baboon, who wanted to deceive the Hare, and get him to throw away 
his provisions, packed one stone with the eatables in his bag. When 
they were well on their way, they came to the bank of a river where 
they sat down to rest, and, beginning to feel hungry, thought they 
might as well have something to eat. Then said the Baboon : ‘ Let 
us throw our provisions into the water, to see them float down the 
stream, for we are quite close to the village of my future parents-in- 
law”. Now this was not true: the village was still a long way off. 
The Hare was quite willing to throw away the food, so the Baboon 
began and threw his stone into the water ; the Hare followed suit and 
also threw away a stone. Now, in the Baboon’s bag only eatables 
were left, as he had only put one stone on the top, whilst the Hare, 
having put into his bag three stones, and having only thrown one 
away, had still two remaining.— ‘* Go on, my friend”, said the Hare, 
‘* throw away another stone!” ‘The Baboon had no more to throw, 
so he had to throw away his flour, The Hare then threw in his 
second stone. Continuing the game the Baboon flune his ‘*‘ season- 
ings ” into the river, and had nothing left to eat. The Hare tossed 
his third stone into the water, but had all his provisions untouched. 
So the Baboon, failing to trick the Hare, was himself a martyr to the 
pangs of hunger ; for they were nowhere near the village of his rela- 
tives-in-law; they had still four nights to sleep on the way! They 
jogged along on their journey and, whenever they stopped for a meal, 
the Baboon would seat himself at some distance from the Hare, and 
watch him eating ; he longed to share his provisions, but the Hare 
never offered him any, for the Baboon himself had stipulated that 
neither should ask the other for any of his eatables, 

When they had trudged on for four days, they arrived at the village, 
where they were well received.. In the meanwhile the Baboon had 
arranged that if, when swallowing the good things provided, he 

 eee  

should scald his throat, the Hare must run back and get the medicine 
for burns, to relieve the pain. Now this was only a dodge to get rid 
of the Hare, while he himself would eat up all the food, and the Hare 
find none on his return. However, the Hare suspected some trick 
and therefore stuck an arrow into the ground at the foot Gucthesthee 
(muri) (1) which cures scalds and burns. Before reaching the village 
he said :<* Oh! I have left one of my arrows over there; | must run 
back and fetch it ”.-— “¢ Don’t you go digging up the roots of that tree 
that I shewed you ; you must only do that, if | happen to send you for 
some, when we are having our meal.” So the Hare ran back to the 
spot, where he had left his arrow. — ‘‘ He wants to trick me, does 
he?” said he to himself, and he dug up a root and put it carefully 
into his bag, so that the Baboon should not see it. On his return the 

Baboon questioned him as to what had kept him so long : — ‘* You 
didn’t dig up any roots of that tree, did you?” said he. — “ Ohno!’ 

replied the Hare. ‘‘ I didn’t take a single one!” And so they came 
to the village. 

When food had been put before them, and they had commenced 
eating, the Baboon cried out: “I have burnt my throat! Oh! Oh lag 
Then the Hare hurried off, and got the remedy out of his bag : he had 
not very far to go. The Baboon was furious, and shouted: ‘‘I told 
you not to dig up the medicine, but only to do so if I should send you 
for it !’? — “* But, Grandfather, ” replied the Hare, ” I did not like to 
keep you waiting in pain such a long time!” When the Baboon 
found he could not trick the Hare, he hurried up his wedding, and his 
return home, for he was very unhappy : he lost all his appetite owing 
to his fit of rage on seeing how short a time was needed for the Hare 
to fetch the medicine. On the other hand the Hare regaled himself 
heartily. The Baboon couldn't get over the disappointment ; he grew 
thinner and thinner and was nearly dying. 

When they once more reached their home, they were each possessed 
of a wife, so they both started off to build their villages in different 
places. 

The Hare used to go hunting to procure meat, but the Baboon’ was 
too lazy to hunt for himself, so lived by stealing meat from the Hare: 
and this is how he managed it : whenever the Hare had killed some 

(1) Muri means both tree and remedy. 

== 2227 

game and cooked it in the open, the Baboon smeared himself all over 
with mud, and came rushing out of the marshes towards the Hare’s 
village. Then the Hare and his wife and the little ones all fled awav, 
for they were afraid of this great black beast. Now it was only the 
Baboon who frightened the Hare : he took the game and gave it to his 
wife. Thus it went on for several days, until, at last, the Hare con- 
cluded that he must look carefully into the matter. So, on a certain 
occasion, when the Baboon carried on his thieving in the same way, 
the Hare remained hidden in his village; only his wife and children 
ran away. He hid in the hut so as to watch closely the animal who 
stole his meat and see how he could fight him. The Baboon crept up 
to the pot in which the meat was cooking, forthe folks of the village 
had not yet begun their breakfast. He lifted the cover, pulled out a 
piece of meat, and ate itup. Then the Hare let fly an arrow and shot 
him rightin the stomach. The Baboon ran off and went home to his 
wife. He was very ill. A day or two later, the Hare went to see 
his grandfather, and, on arriving, greeted him with: ‘‘ How do you 
do, Grandfather ?”’ Now, before entering the hut, the Hare had 
heard groans, but, as soon as he stepped inside, all was quiet, for the 
Baboon was afraid his visitor might suspect that it was he, who had 
been hit with the arrow. The Hare had, however, already recognised 
the Baboon as the culprit, and said to him: ‘* Well, Grandfather, | 
hope you are feeling all right?” —‘*No ”, replied the Baboon, ‘I 
am not very well: I feel a pain in my side, which shoots right through 
me”. — ‘‘ | knew it was you who stole my meat”, said the Hare, 
*¢so I shot you with an arrow”. So the Baboon died and his wife 
lived in want and misery. — That’s the end! 

* 
cS * 

Simeon Makwakwa, a Native of Bilen, gave me a different version 
of the way in which the Baboon worked his vengeance, or tried to do 
so, on the Hare for having made him eat his own tail. 

The Baboon set to work picking up all the Hare’s excrement for 
several days, until he had collected quite a large quantity. The Hare, 
noticing this manoeuvre, said to himself: ‘All right! We shall 
see!” He caught a fowl and pulled off one of its legs without killing 
it : the fowl survived. The Baboon invited the Hare to dinner, and 
the latter went quite happily with the fowl’s leg in his pocket. ‘+ Here 
is the plat du jour”, said the Baboon, pointing to the pot in which 
the Hare’s excrement was cooking’. — ‘* Thanks ! Thanks! said the 

Hare, who, as soon as his host’s head was turned, dug a hole in the 
ground into which he emptied the contents of the pot, and began 
eating the hen’s leg that he had brought with him, The Baboon return- 
aul, SS Seams chicken is very good’ said the Hare, gnawing the 
bone. And so they parted. 

A few days later, when the village was full of men playing tshuba 
(1. p. 314) the Baboon arrived on the scene, very cock-a-hoop, and 
called out : ‘‘ Let me ask a question. Has any one here ever seen a 
person feasting on his own excrement?” — “ Why certainly not” 
said every one present. — “ Well [| know some one who has so 
feasted! It is the Hare”. — ‘‘Are you quite sure of that: 2” said the 
accused, and holding up in sight of all assembled, the one-legged 
fowl, which he had taken care to bring with him, he told the ier 
story. So the laugh was turned against the Baboon; every body 
made fun of him, and the villagers caer him by his bieiencd and 
twisted-up stump of a tail, and chopped it off! — That’s the end ! 

4) Tae Hare’s Hor. 

One day the Hare said to the Grey Antelope : *‘ Let us go and sow 
peas”. — ‘‘I don’t like peas, I prefer wild beans” said the Antelope. 
So the Hare went by himself to sow peas. When they began to 
sprout, he noticed that they were disappearing, so he hid bincele in 
the field, and caught the Antelope digging up his peas : ** Aha !” said 
he, “‘you area thief. Pay the fine!” She gave him a hoe, and he 
went off. 

He met some women, who were digging clay with sticks. He said 
to them : ‘‘ Haven't you got any hoes :), — 7 oNe- sald they 
haven’t a single one”. — ‘‘ Then take this one”, said he, ‘* you can 
give it me back lateron”. When they had finished, the last one who 
used the hoe broke it. Then the Hare sang the following words : 

Clay-diggers, give back my hoe, my friends, 
My hoe which the Antelope gave me, 
The Antelope who paid the fine for my peas. 

The women took one of their pots, and gave it to him. 

mK 
* * 

He left, and met some men who were harvesting honey ; they were 
doing so ina piece of tree-bark. —‘ Haven’t you got any pot to 

put your honey into ?” said he. — ‘‘No” said the men, we haven’t 
any”. So he gave them his pot. The last one who handled it, 
broke it. When it was broken the Hare sang: 

to) 

Honey-harvesters, give me back my pot. 

My pot which the Clay-diggers gave me ; 
The Clay-diggers paid-for my hoe, 

My hoe which the Antelope gave me, 

The Antelope who paid the fine for my peas. 

They took some of their honey, and gave it to him. 

He came to a village, and there he saw women pounding maize 
flour. He said to them : ‘* Haven't you any honey to mix with your 
flour?” —‘“No”’, said they, ‘‘we have none”. So he gave them 
his honey, saying : ‘‘ Take it, but be careful to leave me some of it”. 
But the last one finished it all. Then he sang : 

Pestle-pounders, give me back my honey, 

The honey which the Honey-harvesters gave me ; 
The Honey-harvesters paid for my pot, 

The pot which the Clay-diggers gave me; 

The Clay-diggers paid for my hoe, 

The hoe which the Antelope gave me, 

The Antelope who paid the fine for my peas. 

They took some of their dough, and gave it to him. 

* 1 
He went on, and met some boys herding goats. — ‘*Haven’t you 
anything to eat?” said he, * your lips look very dry”. —‘‘No” they 

replied, ‘‘we have no food at all”. So he gave them the dough, 
saying ‘* Eat away ! but leave some for me”. The last one eat the 
last bite. Then sang the Hare : 

Goat-herds, give me back my dough, 

The dough which the Pestle-pounders gave me; 
The Pestle-pounders paid for my honey, 

The honey which the Honey-harvesters gave me ; 
The Honey-harvesters paid for my pot, 

The pot which the Clay-diggers gave me ; 
The Clay-diggers paid for my hoe, 

The hoe which the Antelope gave me, 

The Antelope who paid the fine for my peas. 

They took a goat, and gave it to him. 

* 
* * 

He met some young men tending the oxen while feeding. He said 
to them : ‘‘ Your lips seem very dry ; haven’t you anything to eat ?” 
— <‘‘No”, said they, ‘‘ we have nothing”. So he said : ‘* Take this 
goat, but be sure to leave some for me.” The last one devoured the 
last mite. Then the Hare sang: 

> 

Cattle-men, give me back my goat 

The goat which the Goat-herds gave me; 

The Goat-herds paid for my dough, 

My dough which the Pestle-pounders gave me ; 
The Pestle-pounders paid for my honey, 

My honey which the Honey-harvesters gave me; 
The Honey-harvesters paid for my pot, 

My pot which the Clay-diggers gave me; 

The. Clay-diggers paid for my hoe, 

The hoe which the Antelope gave me, 

The Antelope who paid the fine for my peas. 

They gave him an ox. 

* 1 

Still going on, he met some people who were tilling the fields. 
They were working for beer. — ‘‘ Your lips look very dry”, said he 
to them; ‘‘haven’t you anything to eat?” W— ‘‘No!” said they. 
He gave them his ox saying: ‘‘ You must leave a little of the meat 
forme”. They went home with the ox, cooked it, and ate every 
mouthful ; nothing was left. Then the Hare came and sang: 

Workers-for-beer, give back my ox, 

My ox which the Cattle-men gave me ; 

The Cattle-men paid for my goat. 

My goat which the Goat-herds gave me; 

The Goat-herds paid for my dough, 

My dough which the Pestle-pounders gave me: 
The Pestle-pounders paid for my honey, 

My honey which the Honey-harvesters gave me ; 

The Honey-harvesters paid for my pot, 

My pot which the Clay-diggers gave me ; 
The Clay-diggers paid for my hoe, 

My hoe which the Antelope gave me, 

The Antelope who paid the fine for my peas. 

* 

They seized him and beat him. When he was quite unconscious, 
they took him out of the village, thinking he was dead. But he re- 
gained his senses and climbed up a tree, which was in the middle of 
the village, just on the spot where they were all drinking beer; no one 
noticed him and, when he reached the top of the tree, he attracted in 
his direction all the light beer, and the water in the wells, in such a 
way that it all ran away into the ground, and folks soon found that 
there was nothing to drink. The little ones cried for water and there 
was none! The men and the women started out to fetch water, but 
they could not find any; the rivers even were all dried up! The little 
ones died, and so did both women and men! Just a few survived. 
These went to the Hare, and said to him : ‘“‘ My Lord, we ask for 

water, as we are dying of thirst.” — ‘* Pull up this reed, by the 
roots’ said he. All the men, even the strongest, tried hard to pull 
up the reed, but could not succeed. — ‘‘ Now”, said the Hare, and 

with one finger he pulled it out of the ground, and forth flowed water 
and beer, light and strong. Then said he: ‘‘Give me five old 
women”. He plunged them in the pond, and drowned them. After 
this they allotted to him a small province, where he reigned as chief. 

* 

The story of the Hare’s Hoe is told from one end of the Thonga 
tribe to the other. I have another version, told me by a young man 
from Hutwene, near the confluence of the Levubye and the Limpopo, 
that is to say, at the North-Eastern boundary of the Transvaal (in the 
Maluleke clan), It is more or less identical with the Ronga version 
up to the moment where the Hare finds the women pounding maize ; 
they give him a basketful of muize as comp ensation. He comes to a 
village where the fowls have nothing to feed on but beetles, and 
offers his basket of maize to the owners, who throw the entire con- 
tents of the basket on the ground, and it is all eaten by the chickens. 
In compensation the Hare receives some feathers, which they pluck 

from the cocks and hens. He next comes across some young men 
dancing the ‘‘ matangu”” dance, and having no other ornaments than 
blades of grass twined in their hair. He gives them his feathers and, 
in return, they give him two assagais. The last meeting is with 
some men engaged in cutting up an elephant with large sheils. The 
Hare gives them his assagais, and receives from them an elephant’s 
tusk. The ending of the story is an adaptation — and to my mind a 
very inappropriate one — of an episode in the tale of the Year of the 
Famine, which is well known and often met with in the Ronga 
folklore. It concludes thus : 

The Hare planted the elephant’s tusk in his garden, and from it 
grew a beautiful fruit-bearing tree. There was a famine in the land. 
Then the Hare said to his wife and children : ““I am going a long 
way off, to shoot eagles”; but he only went as far as his fruit tree, 
climbed up it and sang : 

Tshoyo, tshoyo, mangayo ! 
I will be the chief mourner for my father. 
T will be the chief mourner for my wife | 

At the sound of this song, the fruit fell to the ground and he feast- 
ed on it. Returning home he would not eat the vegetables whith 
his wife had prepared. ‘‘ Give them to the children ”’, said he, “‘ they 
are hungry”. 

The next day he repeated the same performance; pretended to go 
shooting eagles, but went to his tree and sang : 

Tshoyo, tshoyo mangayo ! 
I will be the chief mourner for my father, 
IT will be the chief mourner for my wife. 

The fruit fell and he feasted on it. 

One day his son followed him, without his being aware of it : he 
heard the singing and, when his father had gone, climbed up into the 
tree and sang the same words : 

Tshoyo, tshoyo, mangayo ! 
I will be the chief mourner for my father, 
I will be the chief mourner for my wife ! 

The fruit fell and he feasted on it; he also put a quantity of the 
fruitin his hair. When he got home he said to his mother : ‘‘ Mother 

= 238 — 

fetch a basket, and take away in it all the lice which are biting me”. 
She combed his hair, and fruit fell out of it. — ‘‘ There” said he, 
‘this is what father feasts upon, whilst we are dying of starvation. 
Come with me and I will show you where he finds it”. She followed 
him and they sang the refrain : 

Tshoyo, tshoyo, mangayo ! 
I will be the chief mourner for my father, 
I will be the chief mourner for my wife ! 

The fruit fell in quantities until there was no more left on the tree. 
They feasted on it, but she filled a basket full of it and buried it in her 
hut. The husband went again to his tree to find fruit, but all was 
gone. Then he returned home, and was glad to partake of the vege- 
tables prepared for him by his wife. — ‘It is odd” said she, “ you 
seem quite hungry to-day ”. 

When the famine was over, the Hare’s wife brewed a quantity of 
beer, and said to her husland : “ Invite all your relatives to a beer- 
drinking, and I will ask all those on my side of the family”. When 
all were assembled round the jars, in the hut, she said : <« Allow me 
to pass’, and went to the back of the hut; there she unearthed the 
basket of fruit. Then she told all that the Hare had done during 
the famine. Her relatives, shocked and angry, took her away with 
them, together with her children, and she left her husband. 

VI. The Wisdom of the little ones. 

The following Thonga tales have already been published under 
this title : 

The Man with the Big Sword (Ch. et C.(1), p. 144). Pili (Ch. et C., 
p- 151). Mutipi (Ch. et C., p. 158). The Little Hated one (Ch. et C., 
p. 170). Sabulana, the friend of the gods (Ch. et C., p. 266). Sikulume 
(Les Ba-Ronga, p. 286). Mutikatika (Les Ba-Ronga, p. 303). 

I add to these the pretty story of The Disobedient Child and the Big 
Snake. 

(1) Ch, et C. abbreviation for ‘‘ Les Chants et les Contes des Ba-Ronga ” 
Lausanne. Bridel. 

’ 

ae ev — 
THE DISOBEDIENT CHILD AND THE BIG SNAKE. 

A man had three children. The eldest and the second one started 
out for a walk in the forest. Their mother said to them: ‘ If you 
see any of that large fruit, the sala, (2) you must not eat it, and if 
you come across any tracks of snakes you must not follow them”. 
When they got into the forest, the elder of the two saw a fine sala 
hanging on a tree ; he plucked it, and broke it open (to eat the pulp.) 
His younger brother said : ‘‘ Take care! Mother told us we were not 
to eat sala” ; but the elder beat him, and made him keep quiet. Soon 
they saw traces of a snake on the sand. The elder said: ‘‘ I’m off! 
I’m going to follow the tracks !” — ‘* No”, said his brother, ‘‘ mother 
told us not to!” but he only got another beating, and was forced to 
hold his tongue. The tracks led them to a spot, where they found 
a boa, which the elder killed; he then lit a fire by rubbing together 
two pieces of wood, cooked part of the boa and ate it. The younger 
one refused to eat his share, so the other cooked some more and ate 
that too ; in fact he went on cooking and eating, until he had swal- 
lowed the entire snake. When it was time to go home he found he 
couldn’t move! Impossible to walk! The younger brother had to 
almost carry him, and at length, with great trouble, they managed to 
reach home. But the poor boy was very ill! 

Then the parents sent a messenger to call the Big Snake, the great 
physician who was called ‘“‘ Chicken’s Wing”. The messenger went 
close to the hole, and sang as follows : 

Tse, tse, tse, tse, Zi-nkinto-nkinto ! 

Do come and see the sick child, Tli-liimamba. 

His father has sent me to you, Tli-li-mamba, 

He told me to seek for the doctor so clever, 

The doctor so wise. Chicken’s Wing, Tli-li-mamba. 

The Snake slowly poked his head out of the hole and looked around, 
when the messenger was so terror-stricken that he dropped his 
weapons and fled. Others tried and failed in the same manner. At 
last the mother said : “ I can’t let my son die thus” ; so she went 
herself to the Snake’s hole and sang: 

sextse, (ise, tse.etc. 

(2) The fruit with a hard shell, about the size of a large orange, which has 
often been mentioned. (See p. 16). 

The great head came slowly out of the hole, and the two big eyes 
glared at her! In her fright she threw away her basket, and ran 
away. Then the youngest child, who was not yet weaned, said : << I 
can’t bear to see my poor brother die like this!” So he went off 
alone to the hole and sang in his baby tones : 

Tse, tse, tse, tse, Qi-ito, ito ! 

Do tum and see sz, sick tild, Ti-litmamba. 

His fader has sent me to’oo, Ti-li-mamba. 

He told me to seek for sz’ doctor so ’tever, 

Sz’ doctor so wise, Ticken’s Wing, Ti-li-mamba. 

The Big Snake’s head came slowly out of the hole, and looked 
straight at the child who never moved, but sang once more : 

Ise; 186, t8e, tse, etc: 

He stood where he was, perfectiy fearless ! Then the Big Snake 
said: ‘* Very well! Just wait while I go and fetch my little calabash 
of medicines, and my vapour bath apparatus”. He came completely 
out of his hole. The child did not say a word. —‘* Carry me ”’ said 
the Snake, —“* How ’tan 1?” I am not big nuff ! ”— “* Never mind, 
try and carry me allthe same”. The child still objecting, the Snake 
wound himself all round him, so that only his legs and eyes could be 
seen ; in this way the child carried the Doctor to the village. — ‘ Is it 
very far?” asked the Snake. — ‘* No, only a little way”. In due 
course they arrived; birds, fowls, and folks, all fled at the sight of 
them! The child entered the hut where his sick brother was lying, 
and the Snake unrolled himself. The patient was terribly swollen, 
for the sala which he had eaten had resumed its original shape, and 
the boa he had cooked had resuscitated inside him. Doctor Chicken’s 
Wing administered his drugs, put up his mats round the boy, and 
gave him a vapour bath. 

While the bath was in progress, the little child began to sing: 

Titilo! Mother told us, you know, Titilo, 

Not to follow the tracks of the snake, Titilo. 

Yet you started by picking the sala, you know, 

And you swallowed it down just as fast as t’?would go | 

The Snake took up the words and sang in its turn ; 

Tsungo, tsungo, ndlontiba ! 
Mother told you, ndlontiba, 

After snakes not to go, ndlontiba, 
Yet the sala you plucked, ndlontiba, 
Broke the shell, the juice sucked, ndlontiba. 

Then the boa, which was inside the boy, began to crawl out of his 
mouth. The sala came out first, as the boa pushed it in front of him, 
and continued pushing it with his head until he reached the very 
spot in the forest where the disobedient boy had eaten it; then the 
boa slid away to his own home. 

The father then asked the Big Snake what reward he could give 
him for having cured his son, The doctor replied : ‘‘ Give me an old 
iron ring which isof no more use to you.”. The father gave it. The 
Big Snake thanked him, and said to the youngest child: “* Take me 
back again to my hole”. But the father offered to send some grown 
up men to accompany him. —‘* No ”, said he, ‘ I wish to be taken 
back by the little one”. So he again rolled himself round the child, 
and together they left the village as they had entered it. 

Later on the little one came safely home. 

VII. The Ogre Tales. 

See the following ones already published : 

Nyandzumula-ndengela (Ch. et C., p. 19g). Nwamubya (Ch. C., 
p. 203). Ngumba-ngumba (Ch. et C., p. 200). Namashuke (Ch. et C., 
p. 221). Nwabungukueri (Les Ba-Ronga, p. 311). Mbukwana (Les 
Ba-Ronga, p. 313). 

I now publish the tale of Scaly-Heart which | owe to a Lourengo 
Marques girl, Nwanawatilo. Scaly Heart is the {translation of Nwa- 
mbilutimhokora, lit. the one whose heart is covered with scales. 

1) Tue Ocre Scary-Hearr. 

Once upon a time the chief of Tembe sent his men to hunt wild 
beasts. Before they found any, they passed by the capital of another 
chief, where they saw a very beautiful maiden: she was so beautiful 

that they gave up their hunting trip and returned at once to their chief 
to let him know what they had seen.—‘‘ Chief”, said they, ‘‘ there is 
no woman worthy to be your wife, but the girl we have seen!” He 
said: ‘*Where did you see her?” — ‘*She is the daughter of Mashomo”, 
they replied. ‘* Then”, said he, ‘‘ go back as fast as you can, and ask 
her in marriage for me”. So back they went, and asked her in 
marriage. Her father said: ‘‘ | am quite agreeable, if you can pay 
me a substantial sum of money”. He insisted upon a whole bag 
full of red money (gold pieces) as the priceto be paid. They took the 
answer back to their chief Mabayi (2), who said : ‘*‘ What he has asked 
isa mere nothing!” He gave the money and they returned to ask 
for the girl in marriage. Having arranged matters with Mashomo, 
they went to announce the fact to their chief, who said : ‘‘ Make haste 
and take the lobola money, and bring the girl back to the conjugal 
home (thlomisa)”. So they started off to fetch her. On the day 
when she set out, her parents gave her a young girl of whom she was 
very fond, as a servant, to accompany her to her husband’s home. 
They walked a long way. When still a good distance from their desti- 
nation, they said to themselves : ‘*‘ We must send some people on in 
‘front of us, to let Mabayi know that his wife will make her entry into 
the village to day, so that he can send folks to meet her.” So those 
who were accompanying them went on ahead, and the girl and her 
servant remained behind alone. 

The two maidens walked along, and came toa spot where there 
was a fig-tree. Suddenly a very ripe fig fell down right in front of 
them. Now that fig had been thrown there by an ogre (Shitukulu- 
mukbumba). The servant girl picked itup, saying: ‘* What a treat !” 
They walked on for some distance, when the servant cried out: “ | 
have a pain in my stomach”. After this she walked a little farther, 
and then fell to the ground, and died. They were still a long way 
from the village, and those who were to have met them had not yet 
arrived. The daughter of Mashomo found herself in a terrible 

(1) Mashomo was the chief of a small territory called Nkasana, to the 
South West of the Bay of Lourengo Marques ; Tembeland, on the other hand 
is due South and is a far larger country, 

(2) Chief of the Tembe, deported i in 1890 (?) by the Portuguese. 

plight, as she had to continue her journey all alone and did not know 
the way. She began to cry, saying: ‘‘ Oh! my sister, I must travel 
all alone! With whom shall I travel ?” After having thus wept, 
she buried her companion wrapping her in the clothes she had been 
wearing and in the pieces of cloth that she carried in her basket. 

When the ogre heard these cries he came down from the tree, and 
approached the maiden saying : ‘* What has happened to make you 
weep so bitterly ?” She replied: ‘¢ | have had a great misfortune : 
my sister who was accompanying me is dead!” The ogre sympathised 
with her, and said (speaking through his nose): ‘‘ Ho! my young 
friend, you are indeed the victim of great misfortune ! ” The maiden 
recommenced crying : ‘* Oh! my mother! Oh! my sister bo Sle 
again began to weep, and the ogre mimicked her adding: ‘‘ Now you 
have wept long enough! Let us be off.” She said: *“Leave me 
alone to bewail my misfortune, With whom shall I continue my 
journey?” He said: ‘‘ Let me carry your basket” and took it on his 
shoulders. The two walked for some little distance, when the ogre 
turned round and saw the maiden in tears. She cried: ‘“‘ Oh! my 
mother! Oh! my sister”! The ogre mimicked her : “Oh! my 
mother!) Oh! my sister!” And said: ‘¢ Forwards! Let us go on ! 
Do you think you can bring her to life again by weeping ?” — ‘* That 
shows me,” replied she, ‘‘that it is you who killed my sister, for every 

-time I mourn for her, you try to hinder me”. He said: ‘* Do you 
take me for one who casts spells ? I met you all in tears, but the girl 
who is dead I have never seen”. 

On they went again and came to a pond. ‘‘ Let us bathe in this 
pond ” said the ogre. She replied: “ I cannot bathe here, for this is 
where my mother died ; she is buried in this very spot.” That was 
how she got out of bathing there. They went on a little farther, and 
came to another pond. — ‘‘ Here isa nice place to bathe ” said 
the ogre. — ‘* No”, said the girl, ‘‘ this is where my father died, 1 
cannot.” They continued their journey. They passed several ponds. 
The girl had some excuse at each of them : here it was her grand- 
mother who died, there her maternal aunt, at another place her mater- 
nal uncle, her brother and so on. When they reached the last pond 
which was quite close to the village to which they were travelling, 
that of Mabayi, the ogre said : ‘No more of your deception now! 
In this pond we will bathe!” She tried to excuse herself by citing 
various relatives who had died on the spot: ‘‘ You are telling lies!” 
said he, ‘do you want to make me believe that every one of your 

relatives are dead and that you are an orphan”? She replied :‘* That 
is just how itis! Well! let us bathe!” The Ogre said :“*Letnis 
leave our clothes here, and jump in : we will see who can get out on the 
other side first”. He pointed to a spot a good long way off. They 
jumped into the water with a “‘ booo ! ”, but the maiden quite forgot 
she was racing, so did not swim fast, and got to the other side a long 
time after the ogre had reached it. He ran round the edge of the 
pond, as fast as he could, and dressed himself in the girl’s clothes. 
When she got back she found he had taken all her clothes, and the 
only thing remaining was his belt of skins, lying on the ground. She 
said to him : ‘‘ Please give me back my clothes!” But he only spat 
on her and said : ‘Why ? you are not dry yet!” She waited a 
moment, and then asked for her clothes, when the ogre once more 
spat upon her saying : ‘* Look here! you are still wet!” When she 
asked him a third time for her clothes, he said : “‘ Can’t you do mea 
good turn, and wear that belt of skins for a little while 2 you might 
as well see what it feels like to be bitten by lice” (Ogres are said to 
be infested with lice), — “Alas!” said she, “ now you have stolen 
my clothes! What a terrible misfortune for me!” He Sales 
will give them back to you when we get a little farther on”’. They 
continued their journey. — ‘** Do give me back my clothes” implored 
the maiden, ‘‘ we are getting close to the village’, —‘*Ha! Hal” 
said he, ‘‘ Come along : put your best foot foremost!” He never 
gave her back her clothes, and in this guise they entered the capital. 

ok * 

The women came out to meet them with shouts of welcome. 
When they saw the ogre, they cried : ‘“ Welcome, daughter of 
Mashomo!” Thus they received the ogre who had assumed a human 
shape, and even carried the reed of the chiefs. They were shewn 
into a hut. The ogre dressed-up said : ‘* Don’t let that individual 
come into the hut; she is not a person accustomed to live under 
cover; let her stay in the open”. The women replied : ‘‘Isn’t she 
your servant ? You brought her with you”. The next morning, when 
seated chatting on the square, folks began to consider the situation, 
and the chiet’s wives said : ‘‘ When the people went out hunting, 
they came back saying, they had found a woman prettier than we 
are; can it possibly be that person over there?” pointing to the 
ogre. During the day, the clothes’ thief said: «Tell the ogre (mean- 

ing Mashomo’s daughter) to go and scare the birds in the fields with 
the other children”. When the reached the gardens they children 
cried out : “‘ Pso! Pso!(1) The birds, Scaly-Heart, here they are!” 
The maiden, when she frightened away the birds, sang softly : 

Tho! Tho ! Nansibo ! 

Never before have I scared away birds ! 
I used to bathe in the morning, 

I used to bathe in milk ! Nansibo! (2) 

The children listened, and the birds flew away. On the following 
days, when the girls went out to watch the crops, Mabayi’s young 
niece listened very attentively when Mashomo’s daughter sang. She 
said to her companions: ‘ Let us all go and bathe together, for it is 
our custom to bathe at noon when the birds are hiding in the trees”. 
Mashomo’s daughter dissented thus : ‘‘ I-nhi-i-nhi” (No !) for she 
never opened her mouth to speak properly. Her teeth were all red, 
but she would not show them, for they were just like pieces of ivory, 
and were a token of her royalty, the finishing touch to her beauty. 
When the other girls went to bathe she remained behind. but when 
they were back from their bath, she went into the water; also she 
never ate with the rest of the folks, when dressed in her skins : she 
ate always by herself. When she came out of the water, she stayed on 
the bank, and dressed herself in other clothes, which she got by the 
power of her magic ring. She began to dance. Then all her female 
relatives and her servants who died, appeared and danced and mourn- 
ed with her, until she sent them all away again. Also, by the heip 
of her ring, she tnade to appear all the food she required, for she ate 
nothing in the village. There they served her meals in a horrid bro- 
ken dish, which they made very hot, so that she should burn her 
fingers when she touched it. These were the orders given by the 
creature who had arrived with her. As for her, she just threw the 
dish on one side when no one was looking at her. When she had 
eaten all she wanted, she said : ‘‘ Let everything disappear!” Then 
she returned to the fields. 

(1) Pso ! the shout by which they frigthten away the birds from the fields 
of sorghum, This occupation is called psaya (p. 25). 

(2) This song is partly in Zulu and has never been properly explained. It 
would seem that the maiden is discreetly letting her companions know how 
gently she has been brought up. Nansibo is probably an interjection without 
meaning, such as are often met with in these short songs. 

pees 236 ss 

A few days later they all went to scare the birds. The girls shouted : 

Pso! Pso ! Pso ! the birds, Scaly-Heart, there they are! 

The maiden once more sang her sweet little song : 

Tho! Tho !-Nansibo ! 
Never before have I scared away birds ; 
I used to bathe in milk ! Nansibo. 

Now Mabayi’s little niece had hidden, and listened to the song : 
she went to her friends and said : ‘“ One would really think a human 
being was singing. It isa wonderful song. She doesn’t sing through 
her nose. ” he others said : ‘* You can’t have heard very well: she 
is an ogress ” 

At noon dey said: ‘Let us go and bathe”, and they called Masho- 
mo’s daughter who replied : “‘ Inhi” — ““No”; so they went off 
without her, The chiet’s little niece said to herself: “<I will hide and 
spy on her”. She did not go with the otl ers, but followed the 
maiden when she went to bathe. When the royal girl had finished 
bathing, she again put on beautiful clothes, sang and danced, and her 
female relatives came and danced and wept with her. The little girl, 
hidden in the grass, felt her heart thumping against her ribs, arid 
wanted to show herself, but did not dare, for fear the dances might 
stop and something else happen. As soon as all the people had 
finished dancing and had disappeared, she came out of her hiding 
place, ran to Mashomo’s daughter, clasped her in her arms, w eeping 
and saying : ‘‘Aha! it is indeed you, my mother’s sister ! (1) My 
heart told me you were not an ogress! W hy do you suffer tortures 
in these horrid skins, when you are a chief's daughter?” The maiden 
replied : ‘* Let me go! Do not hold me, for | am Scaly-Heart!” 
And she added : ‘* Don’t tell anyone what you have seen.” The girl 
replied : ‘*I will say nothing to the people, I will only tell my uncle, 
Mabayi.” — “* You must not say anything, even to him; if you do, 
you will see nothing more!” — « Very well ”, said she, «I will not 
tell anyone”. They went home and the next a once more returned 
to the fields to scare the birds. When it was time to bathe the little 
girl said to her companions : “‘I am not going with the rest of you, 
I am going with the ogress. ” Everything happened just as before; 

(1) The families of Tembe and Nkasana are probably related. 

the maiden sang, and danced: she ordered food, and the two sat down 
and ate their meal together, but, although they talked a great deal, 
and the little girl asked : ‘‘ Why is it that you wear these horrid 

skins?” Mashomo’s daughter would not tell her anything of all that 
had happened on the road. 

Now the ogre who had stolen the clothes, annoyed the village folks 
by stealing their eggs. He unrolled his long tail, and went about at 
night picking up the eggs, and stealing all the food which had been 
left in the pots. People said : ‘‘ Who is it that takes our eggs? It 
must be somebody, as we have no dog to eat them ”. The ogre also 
chimed in, and said : “‘ Yes, even in my hut any food left over always 
disappears!” In this way he deceived them. 

One day the folks said : ‘‘ We must just set a trap and see if it 
really is rats who do the damage”. During the night the ogre 
unrolled his tail (to steal eggs), and it was caught in the trap! He 
coiled it up again as well as he could, but could not force the trap 
open, so had to hide it, trap and all, under his clothes. All night 

long he was groaning: — ‘‘Oh! my stomach! my stomach!” he 
cried, ‘‘I never had such a stomach! How miserable | am ! eam Va! 
my ancestors of Tembe !” — ‘* Whatever is the matter with you ?” 

said the folks, and they dosed him with dysentery medicine, which, 
he said, had no effect at all. It really was the rat-trap pinching 
his tail, which troubled him so. 

The villagers went to the spot where they had set the trap and 
found it had gone! ‘‘ Why!” said they, ‘‘ what kind of a rat 
can it possibly be which walks off with the trap after it is caught; 

The ogre could not rest, night or day, so he was very irritable, and 
stormed at the maiden whom all knew as Scaly-Heart, and told her 
to be off. “Go and scare the birds ; they are eating all our millet, ” 
said he. Mashomo’s. daughter merely replied : ‘‘ Very well, I will 
go.” 

Meanwhile the little girl, Mabayi’s niece, could not hold her tongue 
any longer; so she told her uncle that the supposed ogress was really 
a woman. Mabayi said to her: ‘‘ You are telling lies; what shall I 
do to you if it is nota woman?” — ‘You can beat me as much 
as you like ”, said she, ‘‘I don’t mind, for I am quite sure that it is a 
woman. You have only to go and hide yourself, and you will see.” 

The girl told him at what time the maiden went to bathe, and so he 
took his gun and stretched himself in the grass on the slope of the 
lake. Mashomo’s daughter went at noon, but she saw footprints, and 
recognised them as being those of Mabayi, so she did not let herself 
be seen, and returned home without bathing. Later on she talked 
with the little girl and said : ‘‘ Haven’t you told something to 
Mabayi?” —‘‘No”, said she, “I have not told him anything ”. 
— ‘**Yes, Iam sure you have ”, returned Mashomo’s daughter, ‘‘ for 
I recognised his footprints ” 
When Mabayi returned he was very angry with his niece, but she 
said: ‘‘I have done nothing wrong, Uncle, go and hide again to- 

> 

Then the girl felt quite ashamed. 

morrow.’ 

The next night, the rat trap which had been working its way 
through the ogre’s tail, fell off together with the tip of the tail. He 
fell down over it, shouting: “Yo, Mamana! Oh! my mother !” 
He sat on top of it to hide it, but the chief had seen what had hap- 
pened ; although he made no remark, he did not altogether appreciate 
his new wife, and had discovered that she had coarse hair like an 
Ogre.” The ogre said: My stomach feels a little better now. ” 

On the following day Mabayi again went out to spy. _Now, 
although the maiden had seen footprints, she couldn’t help being seen, 
as the lice annoyed her so, that she was just obliged to go into the 
water and bathe. On coming out she put on clothes still more beau- 
tiful than any she had previously worn. Mabayi’s heart bounded in 
his breast. He said to his niece : “Is she coming this way?” — 
‘“Keep quiet”, said she, ‘‘and you will see something else”. Masho- 
mo’s daughter: began to dance, and to laugh heartily, showing her 
red teeth. Mabayi said to his niece: ‘* Let me go now, I must catch 
her and prevent her putting on those skins again.” — “ Waita bit”, 
said the niece. Mashomo’s daughter then ordered food to appear, 
and sat down comfortably at table. Mabayi asked : ‘‘Isn’t this the 
right time for me to show myself?” — ‘Go quickly”, said his 
niece: ‘If you don’t go.at once she will make the food disappear, and 
put on her old skins again!” The chief ran fast, reached the maiden, 
caught her by the hand, and said : ‘* Good day, daughter of Mash- 
omo!” The girl began to cry and said: ‘*I am not Mashomo’s 
daughter: I am Scaly-Heart; Mashomo’s daughter is at the vil- 
”. -— ‘*No”, said Mabayi, ‘* you are Mashomo’s daughter, why 
do you hide your real self? Don’t wear those awful skins any 
more! My servants indeed told me the truth, when they said that 

lage 

—. 239 -— 
the only woman worthy to be my wife was Mashomo’s daughter. 
Let me complete the lobolo by killing this savage.” (He meant the 
ogre). The maiden was silent, and the chief continued : ‘‘ Tell me 
how I must set about it?” She replied : ‘<I cannot tell you to-day” 
They sat down and finished the meal, after which she made the remains 
disappear, and rubbed herself all over with mud, thus concealing her 
beauty. — ‘‘ That’s all wrong”, said Mabayi, ‘‘ you must throw away 
those skins to day”. — ‘‘I cannot throw them away ”, she replied, 
‘for if the ogre should see me in good clothes he would kill me” 
The chief said : ‘¢ 1 will go back to the village and kill him this very 

day.” — “If you try to kill him, and don’t act with the greatest 
prudence”, replied the maiden, ‘‘ some great misfortune will Gace 
to you”. — “All right”’, said he, and ae went back to the village 

by different ways. 

When they got home, Mabayi and his little niece asked the ogre : 
«« Won’t you make a little dress for the girl who came with you, so 
that she can leave off those skins ?” — ‘‘ Do you suppose”, he 
replied, ‘‘ that ogres like to wear proper clothes?” == ** But, sheas:a 
real human being, as she came with you; any way won't you make 
her just a very small petticoat ?” — ‘* Well”, said the ogre, “* you 
can make her a dress if you like ; I am not going to do it”. So they 
made a scanty little dress for her. 

The next day they said to the ogre : ‘* Queen, you might peshaps 
go out and Jook for some wood and see something of your country. 
— ‘*A gocd idea ” said the ogre, ‘<I have not Rea anywhere since 
the day I first came here. Come along, Scaly-Heart !’” But they ae 
‘¢ No, let her stay at home, and rest for a while ; she is in need of it.’ 
Then the ogre said to the maiden : “‘ Ah! to-day you can play queen! 
You can remain at home”. The ogre started out with the others. 
He tore up the trunk ofa tree with his tail, put it on his head and 
returned. While he was away, they dug a deep hole in the village, 
boiled some grease, made from nkuhlu (mafureira, p. 18) and placed 
it, all hot, in the hole. They also warmed some water and put it 
in the royal hut, where the chief washed and dressed. Over the hole, 
so as to hide it, a nice new piece of matting was stretched, in front 
of which they put a dish of cooked maize, with a delicious sauce of 
makanye nuts poured over it Now, all these days, the chief was not 
eating properly because he was unhappy. When the villagers saw 
the ogre returning, they welcomed him saying: “ Good day, daugther 
of Mashomo ”, adding : ‘* To-day the Queen herself has gone out and 

brought back a whole tree-trunk!” They nodded and made signs to 
one another, saying: ‘‘ One can easily see that this is not a human 
being !” The ogre threw his immense log of wood down on the 
square, and every one urged him to go into the royal hut, saying : 
‘Go, and have a refreshing wash ; you have perspired a good deal 
to-day!” — **Ho!”’ said the ogre, ‘‘you are kind to have even warm- 
ed some water to refresh me after fetching wood.” They replied : 
‘* Are not you our Queen? Don’t you know that we all count as 
nothing in the eyes of the chief; you are the only one for whom he 
really cares.” Then the ogre burst out laughing: the idea tickled his 
fancy! The women said.” Let us wipe you down”. But he quickly 
replied: ‘‘ Oh! I-can very well do that for myself’. (He was 
afraid they would see his tail). The sisters-in-law insisted, but the 
ogre refused. They then left the hut, and he washed himself. As 
soon as he had finished, the women called him to come out, and made 
him sit down upon the spot where they had stretched the matting, 
saying : “* Come Queen, and moisten your mouth a little before the 
evening meal ” (by eating the maize they had cooked for him). The 
ogre replied : ‘‘ Goodness! how very fond of me you allseem to be!” 
Now Mabayi’s niece was watching with a twinkle in her eye, for 
she knew what had been prepared for the ogre, who stepped forward 
to take a seat, but no sooner had he seated himself than down he went 
into the hole, matting and all! The dish of maize was the only thing 
left on the edge of the hole! The boiling grease tortured the ogre, 
making him scream and yollec’ You might as well ”, he cried, speak- 
ing through his nose, ‘‘ have let me finish that savoury sauce before 
killing me! Oh! these fowls! Oh! these egos! It was I who 
picked them all up with my tailt ” Thus he made a full confession 
while boiling in the seething grease. ‘* Ah! I ate my fill of them!” 

When he was nearly dead, one of his eyes popped out and fell ona 
rubbish-heap, where folks threw the cinders. There it took root, 
and grew into a kind of gourd very much like the ordinary gourds. 
As for the maiden, she became the chief’s wife, and told him all that 
happened on the road. The chief was now very happy, and killed 
lots of oxen which they brought as presents to his wife. 

This woman lived a long time in the village and had a little son. 
At the moment her son was born the gourd-plant produced a gourd. 

She saw this fruit and said to herself : ‘““ Why! there is agourd on the 
rubbish-heap! ” and the gourd replied : ‘* There is a gourd on the 
rubbish-heap!” She said: ‘< It is talking to me! ” — ‘ It is talking 
to me” mimicked the gourd ! — ‘I will go and pick it”, said the chief’s 
wife. The gourd answered : ‘‘ Take care, I will pick you too! ” So 
she left iton the plant. and did not pluck it. However, a few days 
later, she was tired of seeing the gourd still hanging on the plant, so 
she pulled it off and took it home. She peeled the fruit and put it 
into the pot to cook. She laid her little son on the ground close to 
the fire, while she went out for a few moments on an errand. While 
she was away that gourd got out of the pot, rolled over and over, 
caught hold of the child, put it into the pot on the fire, and then 
went off and fixed itself again on the plant. On her return, the 
mother looked round and said: ‘* Where can my boy be?” She 
hunted everywhere and asked everybody, but no one could tell her 
anything about him. Distracted, she wept, and went about her work; 
she lifted the cover of the pot to see if the gourd were cooked and 
exclaimed : ‘‘Why! This looks like meat! Could it possibly be my 
child? I most certainly only put a gourd in the pot!” Se lifted the 
utensil off the fire, and, emptying it, found that it really did contain 
her child, completely boiled! She wept and screamed aloud in her 
distress. The villagers came to enquire what was the matter. Aston- 
ished at what they heard and saw, they said: ‘‘ Whatever possessed 
you not to leave that gourd alone when you had already heard it 
speaking to you?” She said: ‘* I didn’t know anything about it! ” 
They went into mourning for the child for the usual time. When 
the mourning was over, she had another child : precisely the same 
thing occurred again. Then the chief said: ‘* We must move from 
this place, and leave this gourd or it will kill all your children ”. 
They moved and built another village. She had several other 
children. Misfortune no longer pursued them. 

VIL. “Moral Tales. 

The following have been already published : 

The Girl and the Whale (Ch. et C., p. 277); The Road to Heaven 
(Ch. et C., p. 237); Nabandji, the Toads’Girl (Ch. et C., p. 264); 
Halandi and Mayiwane (Ch. et C., p. 242); Titishane’s cat (Ch. et C., 
p. 253)3 The lazy woman (Ch, et C., p. 257); Charity rewarded 

(Ch. et C., p. 270) ; Longoloka (Les Ba-Ronga, p. 327); The Bounder- 
of-the-plain (Les Ba-Ronga, p. 353), a totemic tale, similar to Titi- 
shanes’cat. 

I reproduce here the tale of Zili, which was first published in the 
Report of the S. A. A. A. S. for 1904, Vol. III, p. 250. It is one 
of the most striking of all and its graphic description of the torments 
of conscience is wonderful. The song illustrating it, in two parts, is 
also very curious and will be again mentioned. (See tune 34, later on.) 

/ijiitke 

A man named Zili marrieda woman. One day he said to her: ‘‘It is 
a long time since we went to visit thy parents. Prepare a pot of beer 
and letus go.” She put the pot on her head and set out. He led 
her by a path which was new to her, a road which no one used. 
— ‘*Why dost thou lead me here?” she said. — ‘‘Never mind, it is 
another way,” answered he. They came toa tree and rested beneath it. 
The woman objected: — ‘“‘There is no room to sit down”. — ‘Just 
sit down and set down thy pot of beer, that I may drink ” said he. 
She gave it to him. He drank. Then he caught hold of her and 
killed her. He cut oft her head, her arms, her legs, everything that 
had human shape. Those limbs he wrapped in a truss of grass, and 
wentaund hung them up at the top of the tree. As for the remainder 
of the body, he skinned it, cut the flesh into strips, which he also 
wrapped up in grass, and took them with him on his way. 

Soon a bird began to sing: 

Zili! Amasesendini, amasendi baba! — Siloyile, sesendini! 

I nyama mune yakunhati! Sesendin ! 

I kala nkila ka lihondjo ! Sesendin ! 

Zili! Amasesendini, amasendi, old man! — You area witch, sesendini ! 
What’s that kind of meat ? Sesendin ! 

It has got no tail ! it has no horn ! Sesendin ! 

— ‘* What bird is this that sings and calls me by name ? ” said he. 
He threw his stick at the bird and killed it. Then he lifted his bur- 
den, and went on his way. But the bird rose again; it followed him, 
passed close to him, flapping its wings, pfu... pfu..., perched on an- 
other tree, and sangits song once more. Zili astonished, exclaimed : 
‘“* How is it the bird follows me thus? Is it possible that I did not 
kill it outright?” He gave chase to it, knocked it down, tore it limb 

from limb and threw the mangled remains to the winds. Once more 
he picked up his load, and continued his journey. 

But behold the bird gathered together its scattered limbs, and came 
back to life. Zili again pursued it a long way, and again killed it. Then 
he laid the dead bird on the wood and watched it slowly burn to ashes. 
He then ground the ashes to powder, and scattered it far and wide. 
He remained sitting a long time at this place. As the bird did not 
return, he said to himself: ‘‘ This time it is quite dead”. He then 
resumed his journey and duly arrived with his load at the village of 
his parents-in-law. 4 

They hastened to meet him: — ‘Here is Zili. Good-day, Zili! ” 
They took from his hands the truss of grass filled with flesh ; they 
bade him enter the hut, and, before untying the bundle, they asked 
for news of his home. ‘Then his mother-in-law took up the bundle : 
— ‘‘ To-day ” said she, ‘* thou dost treat us as princes!’’ And she began 
to open it. But, lo! swiftly and silently the bird arrived, and, perch- 
ing on the top of the hut in which they were sitting, it began its song : 

Zili ! Amasesendini, amasendi, old man! — You are a witch, sesendini ! 
What’s that kind of meat ? Sesendin ! 
It has got no tail! it has no horn ! Sesendin! 

Zili kept quiet. “What a curious bird’s song that is!” said his 
parents-in-law. Others said, however : ‘‘Oh, it is only a bird.” And 
the bird sang on. 

‘How did you leaye our daughter at home ?” inquired the parents. 
— ‘*Quite well” answered he. ‘‘ She will soon come herself.” But 
the bird continued its song: ‘‘Zili, etc.” 

At last the bird flew into the hut. They drove it out, but it would 
not keep silent. The people began to understand what it said. Zilli 
trembled, but said not a word. The bird then went to sing in the 
ears of the mother, as she began to roast the flesh Zili had brought. 
She understood and fell fainting. 

Then the men of the village turned to Zili : — ‘*‘ What does this mean ? 
What bird is this that follows thee and calls thee by name?” But Zili 
declared: ‘‘The bird came not with me. I heard it here for the first 
time in your hut.” — ‘‘If that is so, come and let us see our child,” 
said they. 

They set off, the bird flying before them, and they following its 
guidance. It led them to the big tree in the bush, and began to sing 
loudly close to the truss of grass which Zili had hung up. Some one 

climbed up the tree, and untied the bundle. They opened it, and, at 
once, the men recognized the girl’s face and the bracelets she wore on 
her wrists and ankles. They seized Zili and bound him. Some of 
them went on to summon Zili’s relations all into one hut. When the 
others arrived they threw Zili, still bound, into the hut and then set 
fire to it. 

So died Zili and his relations. 

IX. Tales founded on real facts. 

This is a new category which I have not mentioned in previous pub- 
lications, but which is, I think, well defined. In it I would include 
the well-known and wide-spread theme of the Year of famine (See 260) 
and the two following curious stories: ‘‘ The Child that was carried off 
by the Baboon” (a fact which might very well have happened), and 
‘* Those who laugh but once.” The latter is an example of ironic popular 
folklore, a branch of literature which is met with in many coun- 
tries, and consists in making fun of people of a certain village or 
region. In Switzerland the village of which one makes fun and tells 
stories is never wanting! Those who only laugh once are said to 
dwell near Inyaka Island, in the Maputju Country. But the story- 
teller, to whom I owe this amusing tale, Jeremia Lomben, asserted 
that they are an imaginary clan. However, the words Makwetjhu, 
ybwala, quoted as pronounced by them, are a deformation of ma- 
kweshju and shjwala, their ordinary form in the Maputju dialect, and 
it is said, that, in a certain spot of Inyaka Island, this altered pronun- 
ciation is really met with. So this tale has been probably applied to 
those Inyaka people, although it originally concerned another clan 
now forgotten. Natives take an immense delight in making fun of 
what they esteem an erroneous pronunciation, each clan laughing at 
the other’s for peculiarities of dialect. 

THE CHILD THAT WAS CARRIED OFF BY A BABOON. 

A man started out with all his belongings and went to marry a wife 
in a foreign country. The woman lived with him for a long time, 
and had a daughter. One morning she went out to work in the fields, 
but could find no one to carry her baby. When she got to the field, 

she hoed a large plot of ground; she laid her baby on the ground, 
and put it to sleep. A baboon arrived on the scene, and began to 
play with the child without anyone seeing it. Soon after the mother 
saw what was going on, but said nothing, for she knew that, if she 
made a noise, the baboon might kill the little one. But the baboon 
presently picked up the child and climbed up into a high tree. The 
woman said: ‘*You can play with him, if you like, but be gentle and 
don’t hurt him”. The baboon replied : ‘If you make any noise, and 
if you call the folks to help you, I can easily crush him against the 
tree.” So she kept quiet, and the baboon jumped from tree to tree. 
When she lost sight of it, she did not say anything, but went on 
hoeing, and soon the baboon managed to slip away unobserved. 
When she finally lifted her head, and looked around, she could not 
see the baboon anywhere, neither could she find her child. She 
looked intently at the tops of all the trees, without seeing anything. 
Then she threw down her hoe, and went to search forthe baby. She 
walked a long way and shouted loudly, but with no result. She climb- 
ed to the top of a hill, for, she said: ‘‘As the baboon went by the 
tops of the trees perhaps he will hear me better if I get on a high 
place too.” There she sang a song, which was both an appeal and a 

Dp? 
lament for her little one. (See tune 35, later on.) 

Baboon! Ravisher! What have you done with my child? Tell me! 
My heart is anxious, 
I must go, I must go home quickly to my master! Alas! (1) 

Not knowing in which direction to continue the pursuit, she went 
to enquire at a village. She said: ‘‘Have you, by any chance, seen 
a baboon, which had a child with it ?”” — ‘‘ Yes”, they replied, ‘‘one 
has just passed by: there are its footprints still in the sand, and the 
hole it made to hold the little one’s calabash”. She started on again, 
in all haste, walked a long way, following the marks as much as 
possible, but she could not find the pair, for the baboons are curious 
animals, and when they are tired, they spring from one tree-top to 
another. The woman searched in many places and went everywhere 
singing her lament and weeping. She sang: 

Baboon! Ravisher! What have you done with my child? Tell me! 
My heart is anxious. 
I must go, | must go home quickly to my master! Alas | 

(1) The words of this song are half Zulu. 

== 46 pipe 

Then she turned homeward. Night was coming on. Before reach- 
ing her home, she cut down the trunk of a tree, which was about the 
size round of a child. She cut it so that it was rather fatter in the 
middle, and thinner at the two ends: then she put this in the skin 
which she had used for carrying her baby, and, feeling very sad, went 
back to her village. She took care to cover the piece of wood with 
a cloth so that folks could not, at once, see what she was carrying. 
She went into the yard of her mother-in-law’s house, who said to her : 
‘«What does this mean? How is it that you are coming back so late 

at night?” — ‘‘Itisn’t my fault”, said she, ‘‘it is the child’s: she is 
feverish.” — ‘* Well! if she is feverish, that is just why you ought 
to have come home earlier!” — ‘‘No, I wanted to hoe a small patch 

and sow my maize, but even now, I have not been ableto hoe a piece 
worth mentioning, and have brought my seeds back with me.” The 
mother-in-law was silent; but shortly afterwards she said: ‘‘ Put the 
child down, so that I can have a look at her; you are not going to 
sleep with her on your back to-night, are you?” — ‘*I will put her 
down when she wakes up,” said she, and the mother-in-law said 
nothing more. 

When the husband came home, he asked his wife similar questions. 
He said: ‘‘Put the child down on the ground so that I can see her ; 
it won't hurt her, even if she is not very well.” The wife went about 
from spot to spot, doing her work, and hoping thus to distract her 
husband’s attention, and prevent him asking her any awkward ques- 
tions; at last she went into her hut to go to bed. Her husband said 
to her: ‘‘ Didn’t I tell you to lay the child on the ground, so that I 
might have a look at her? If she is ill, never mind; she will die in 
my arms, | who am her father!” In spite of his insisting, the woman 
would not obey him. Then the man became very angry; he took 
his assagai and slit open the skin in which the baby was carried, when 
out fell the log of wood! — ‘‘Is this what you were hiding ?” cried 
he. ‘‘Is this my child?” Irritated to a degree, he went out and called 
his relations to come and see what had taken place in the hut and to 
look at the block of wood. He wanted to kill his wife, but the rela- 
tions said: ‘‘ Don’t kill her; we will begin by examining her, and 
trying to find out how all this has happened, how it is that her child 
is changed into a log of wood?” The poor woman, all faint and 
trembling said: ‘‘T fear it is all up with me to-day!” Then she told 
them just what had occurred saying : ‘‘It was while I was hoeing: and 
you know that I had no one to take care of the baby”. Her relations 

=— 24/7] —— 

replied: ‘It is quite clear to us that you have killed your baby; she 
was not carried off by any baboon. If a baboon had done this, why 
didn’t you rush home and tell us about it?) We would have aroused 
all the men in the village, and they would have followed it until they 
caught it”. 

They turned the woman out of the village: perhaps they killed her, 
| am not guite sure. ; 

THOSE WHO ONLY LAUGH ONCE (Ba KA MAHLEKAKANWE). 

These folks lived in a country by the sea, a country that was quite 
cut off from all other countries by an immense marsh of papyrus. They 
were all able to go across this quagmire, for they knew just where to 
plant their feet. (No one ever went to see them, for those who were 
not accustomed to jump from one clod of earth to another were apt 
to fall into the slimy mud). They were called ‘*Those who only 
laugh once”, for when they burst out laughing, they only got as far 
as ‘“‘Ha!”; they could not go on: ‘‘ Ha! ha! ha! ha!” That was their 
infirmity. — Now their chief never had any occasion to assemble the 
army for warlike expeditions, because his people were entirely separated 
from all the rest of the world. However, some of his folks, having 
gone to visit a neighbouring country, heard that the army had gone 
out to battle, and saw the warriors dancing and celebrating their 
doughty deeds before the chief. On their return home, they said to 
their own chief: ‘‘Call our army together too and let us go out to 
fight wild boars!” So they started out for the big forest, where the 
wild boars are to be found, and roused them up about noon; one 
man ran his assagai through a boar and cried out: “Tjhokota mak- 
wetjhu, ndi tlhabile sha ku tjhwala nkumbu ndi nomu!” — ‘‘Ho! 
my brother, extol my prowess! I have slain a beast which carries 
his nose on top of his mouth!” The other replied: ‘‘Ho! it is a 
wild boar.” They returned home, and their chief entertained them 
quite royally, bacause they had shewn themselves so valiant in the 
fight. 

On another occasion they heard far off in the distance a noise : 
«‘Huuum!” They cried: ‘‘ Chief, call the army together! To arms, 
every one of you!” They all went to get their assagais. Again 
they heard a quail, “Huuum!” — “It is over there!” they said, 
and proceeded very slowly and cautiously in the direction of the 
sound. Once more they heard: “‘Huuum!” — “‘It is some huge 

oe 248 —— 

wild beast”, they cried: ‘‘ Let us be after it!” So.they all began to 
stamp on the ground together: ‘Rji, rji, rji”, and holding the assa- 
gai in one hand and the shield in the other they formed a circle round 
the enemy and gradually closed in onhim. Suddenly: « Whirrr!!" (1) 
and up gota quail! The whole army were so startled that they fell 
over backwards! When they recovered from the shock, they all went 
home, feeling very much ashamed of themselves. 

X. Foreign Tales. 

Under this title | have already published in ‘‘ Les Chants et les Contes 
des Ba-Ronga”: Bonawasi (p. 291); The three vessels (p. 364); Likanga 
(p- 309); The Boy and the Big Snake (p. 314); The King’s Daughter 
(p. 317); and in Les Ba-Ronga: The mice (p. 352); Big Head (p. 339). 
I intended adding two tales to this collection : The Lion’s Ring and The 
Unnatural Mother. Owing to the want of space, I must unfortunately 
renounce publishing them here. They contain an extraordinary 
mixture of wholly incongruous elements. Some of these elements are 
absolutely Bantu, even in relation with local circumstances. Others 
are evidently exotic. It seems as if Asiatic, Mussulman influences had 
been the first to transform the Bantu narrative; afterwards European 
elements made their way into the Native tales, first Portuguese, later 
on English influences. I hope to publish some day those curious 
stories ; together with the foreign tales contained in ‘“‘Les Chants et 
Contes” and in ‘‘Les Ba-Ronga”, they also prove the essentially plastic 
character of Bantu narration. 

(1) Whirrrr! is the usual way of expressing the rising of a quail or a 
partridge,

Music. 

Music under a more or less rudimentary form, plays a great 
part in the Life of the Bantu tribe. Some tribes are more gifted 
than others in this respect. In the Province of Mozambique 
the Ba-Chopi are certainly the best musicians, as we shall see. 
But Thonga also are great singers and players, and their dances 
are invariably accompanied by music. What is its character ? 
The melodies and rhythms are very difficult to catch, and I do 
not pretend to give here a full and definite description of Thonga 
music; but the following specimens will convey a fair idea of 
it, and the study of the musical instruments will help us, in some 
measure, to understand their musical system. 

A. MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. 

1) Winp INsTRUMENTS. 

The simplest is the shiwaya, an empty sala shell, or the shell of 
a Kafir orange (p. 19): it has two holes, one through which children 
sing, another which they alternately shut and open, the with- 
drawal of the hand allowing the sound to be emitted ; the result 
is a monotonous wu-wu-wu, which is sufficient to amuse little 
boys. 

Next in importance comes the nanga, (yi-tin) the goatherd’s 
flute, made of the tibia of a goat, or of some other animal, on 
which the boys play two notes, generally in thirds. This is 
truly the infancy of art, but the tone of these little flutes is very 
sweet and wonderfully in keeping with the bush life, the bleating 

“ASLI[IA P[O SseqeTyNW ur uso 

“A10uaT “404g 

of the goats and the nudity of the artist! There are many 
kinds of goatherds’ flutes. One is called ndjwebe and its sound 
resembles mbvrrr.... mbvrrr.... Natives are fond of putting 

a feather inside their bone flutes in order to keep them clean. 

Another more elaborate flute is made of a reed which has a 
hole at one extremity for the mouth, and three others at the 
other extremity for the fingers. According to the number of 
holes stopped, the sound varies. — It is called shitiringo (Dj.), or 

shitloti (Ro.), and Native artists are capable of producing pleasing 
tunes with it. N° 39 in my collection of tunes is a shitiringo 
melody, heard on the banks of the Great Tabi. 

But the true tinanga are the trumpets which compose the 
bunanga, the band already referred to (I. p. 404) as being one 
of the manifestations of Court Life. They are also called timha- 
lamhala, from the name of the mhalamhala (Hippotragus niger), 
the large, dark antelope whose horns are employed for the manu- 
facture of these trumpets, together which the horns of the mhala 
(impala) antelope. These instruments are tuned according to 
rule. Ten of them, each having a different sound, form a simo, 
a kind of orchestra, completed by the big and the small drum 
already described. They are used to accompany the special 
dances which take place in the little Capital of the Ronga clans 
and in which the players are themselves the dancers, marching 
behind each other, with peculiar contortions, narrowing and 
widening their circle according to the time beaten by the drum. 

The bunanga players receive a regular training before going 
to the capital, to play before the chief. When they have prepared 
the numbers of their programme, they all go to the Capital, each 
sub-chief leading his band, for a musical contest. The tinduna 
act as judges. Each simo plays in turn. The judges discuss 
their respective merits, and when they have come to a decision, 
they call a young man to proclaim the result of the competition. 
This proclamation is called ku tema shibangu, to cut the contest, 
and it is performed in a very curious way. The herald has an 
axe in his hand. With a loud voice, he pronounces the verdict : 
“So and so played badly; so and so better; the one who played 
Kec ieicorand so. —-““ Nkino hi nkhensa wa ka man;”’ then 
he beats the trunk of a tree with his axe, as if he wished to con- 
firm the decision, and runs away: this to avoid protests and in- 
sults from those who did not win! 

Ne 4o is a tune played by the bunanga. It is very mono- 
tonous and the music is evidently not so important as the dance, 
the rhythm, and the contortions. ‘There are only four notes 
in this tune. However it is probable that the ten instruments 
of the simo form a whole octave, with two notes below it, the 

same as the ten keys of the timbila which will presently be 
described. Unfortunately I have not been able to ascertain if 
this is actually so, having only once witnessed the performance 
of the bunanga. 

2) STRINGED INsTRUMENTS. 

As regards stringed instruments, they possess the unicord harp 
called gubu. There are two different forms of it; the shitjendje, 
which consists of a bent rod, a bow, both extremities of which 
are united by a string made of milala palm fibres (nkuha), or a 
piece of wire. On the lower part of the bow a calabash is fixed 
as sounding box. The shitjendje is held upright; one hand 
grasps it at its lower extremity, whilst the other beats on the 
lower third of the string with a little stick. The hand which 
grasps the instrument places its finger on this lower third of the 
string in different places, so as to vary the length and produce 
different sounds. 

In the nkaku, the sounding box is fixed in the middle of the 
bow. From it a wire starts and is tied to the middle of the 
string, thus dividing it in two equal parts. The instrument is 
grasped near the calabash, and the fingers 
are extended on either half of the string 
to differentiate the sounds. The other 
hand beats on either side with a stick. 
| The tune N° 12 was accompanied by 
/ a shitjendje. 

en 

3) THE TIMBILA oR THE Bantu 
XYLOPHONE. 

The most complete characteristic mu- 
sical instrument of our tribe is the tim- 
bila, which may be seen on the adjoin- 
ing plate showing both the upper and 
the under side of the very interest- 

A gubu player. 

ing Native piano. It is composed of ten keys, made of very 
hard wood, attached to each other by straps of leather on a 
“wooden frame consisting of a curved branch. The keys rest on 

+. Bore/ Sel 

The timbila and its ten notes. 

shells of sala, which act as sounding boxes, and in which two 
holes are pierced, one in the upper part to receive the sound, 
and one on the side, covered by a membrane, generally a piece 

ee 7 
of a bat’s wing, in order to cause the sound to vibrate. This 
piano is easy to carry. The player puts it in front of him and 
beats on the keys with one or two sticks, furnished at one extre- 
mity, with an india-rubber or a leather ball. (See the cover 
of Les Chants et les Contes des Ba-Ronga). 

Comparing it with an European piano I have ascertained that 
the third key is a G flat, and that, if we strike the following 
ones, up to the last, we obtain a regular major scale, that of G 
flat with its proper half tones between the third and fourth and 
the seventh and eighth intervals. The two lower keys are, 
the first one E flat, the second one F natural. The interval 
from E flat to G flat is a minor third, so that, should we start 
with the lower key and strike the seven following ones, we 
should obtain a minor scale of E flat corresponding to the major 
scale of G flat: but it would not entirely resemble our harmonic 
minor scale as there is no ‘‘ sensible ”’, viz., the seventh note 
of the scale is not raised. Only when descending from the 
eighth to the first we should have a perfect melodic minor scale. 
This minor scale, without the raised seventh, is well known in 
the history of music : it is called the Eolian scale. 

So we find this interesting fact as the result of our examina- 
tion. The timbila, in its ten notes, contains both the major 
and minor scales. 

Is this accidental 2? Or are all the timbila tuned according to 
the method? The second hypothesis is highly probable. Of 
course there may be slight differences between the instruments, 
which is not astonishing, as they are made with primitive imple- 
ments by unskilled workmen; but the proof that they are all 
made according to a fixed rule is that many timbila are often 
played together by musicians who form an orchestra. This is 
rarely the case amongst Thonga but frequently amongst the 
Ba-Chopi, who are the true ‘‘ masters ” of this instrument. It 
is said that, in this very musical tribe, Native pianists sit in a 
line along the street of the village (for their villages are built 
in astraight line) and play together, all the throng of men danc- 
ing in front of them. I witnessed a similar performance when 
the Crown Prince of Portugal visited Lourengo Marques in 1907. 

EA gee ae 
Great feasts were given in his honour; 25.000 armed warriors 
defiled before him, and thirty timbila played the National Por- 
tuguese Anthem. The Administrators who taught these Native 
artists to play that difficult tune on their xylophones deserve 
every congratulation! It was wonderful. The melody was 
quite recognisable and played in perfect tune. Should the 
timbila not have been tuned to the same pitch, this concert would 
have become a dreadful cacophony! In the Johannesburg com- 
pounds the East Coast boys manufacture timbila themselves, of 
smaller and larger sizes, some with enormous keys made of 
common pitch-pine boards, and emitting deep low tones, the 
sounding boxes being empty oil cans. They succeed in tuning 
them more or less perfectly. So every citizen of Johannesburg 
can hear their concerts, and witness their dances, in the Com- 
pounds of the Ferreira Mine and elsewhere on Sundays, and, 
though these ugly pitch pine timbila seem a parody on the 
beautiful instruments played at home, still the performance is 
worth a visit ! 

The presence of the timbila is a proof that these tribes possess 
a real musical system. The Ba-Chopi are the “‘ masters ’’, and 
every one admits it; however the Thonga do not come far 
behind them, some of them having learnt to manufacture the 
instrument, and a great many playing upon it quite artistically. 
In order to define this musical system more precisely, let me 
now give the forty following tunes as examples, some of which 
I owe to Mrs Audéoud, whilst the majority have been noted by 
myself. 

BA COLLEC MON OF \THONGA TUNES 

Tune rt. The song of the Manyisa bard (p. 167). 
soe eae th hae 
ee ee 

BI 0° 9 aaa =~ 0 U ya kwi-wi, ma-ma-ne? 
Mo-ther, tell wheredo you go? 

Tunes 2. 3. 4. 5. 6., heard far away through the bush in the village 
of Muzila, sub-chief of Rikatla, in the years 1890-1893. In No 4 the 

—. 256 Ree 

singers were beating the ground with their feet to mark the time. In 
5 and 6 boys answered to men and girls to women in the usual anti- 
phonic way. 

Be 

N \ “ 
[= reer eS eeee eee 2 

a 

Ser 

Ble 
—— 
ee  carne: o i SK : a 
eat * Cet e 
Foot Foot Foot Foot Foot Foot 
S- 
(Voices of men) (Voices of boys) 
2 =A + E 
5s ee Bee ete 
—_—s ——s es f- +. al 
ibid eich Widens Sek Tate Seal a 
6. 
(Women) (Girls) Women) (Girls) 
 Nee sae 3  as ee eee 
SSS SSS es 

Tune 7. The Complaint of the childless woman (p. 170). 

on 
Ss say = 
ee fa ea “Fs — = 
; = 5 9 e+ o~e 
A ba bo - Ie - ki nwa-na! Ba bo-le-ka_ tshu-rini nkamba! 
They won’tlend me a ba- by! Theylendmebut a mortar... 

= 2 ———_- — ——- 
 Ss f ey as 7 Soar e = 
Tie mse mes" a +s 
Ngi ndji ma-nga tlu, Ngi ndji shi- mu-ngwe, Ngi n’ta ku u - tla. 

Were I an ea-gle! Were I abird of prey! Quick would I carry itaway! 

Tune 8. Complaint of the boys going to Johannesburg (p. 170). 

[Ss 

~e . 
Stones are ve - ry hard to break, Far from home in 

—ée @ e 
fo - reign land. Far from home, in fo - reign 
5. = as 
= a ema “| — ee et ee 
eS 
~ + 
land, Stones are ve - ry hard to break. 

Tune 9. aaa of the Nkuna boy (p. 170). 

eee Sie ES SS ees 
=a at Sr 

ve 
Ba hi sha-ni sa! Ba ku hi hlu - pba 
They treat us bad-ly! E-he! Theyarehard on us! E-he! 

SSS iee == 
+ 7 

Ba nwa ma-kho - fi! Ba nga hi nyi-ki! 
They drink their cof-fee E-he! Andtheygive us none! E - he! 

eee 

Tune to. ‘The song of the-Crab (p. 171). 

SS See 

Yo! lo -mo tju-ke-ni ku na ma-ni? Ha- 
A - las Here on the shore is there no one? The 

a 4 ee 

la yi kho-mi li - ti ho ! 
crab hascaughtme by the hand! 

Tune 11. The lament over the deported chief Nwamantibyane 

(p. 174). 
ean st ee eee 
pHs SS aaa 

Hi ttwa-nao! Hi fwa-na ba tee Nwa-ma-nti-byane ! 
Itis the child! The child whom they havekilled Nwa- ma-nti-by-ane! 

6 ied 

Ndu-ma - ka- zu - lu! tju-tju- ma a ya Kho-sen.. 
Hey sis) the Pst: see had to fly up to ose 

THONGA TRILE II — 17 

eo 258 a 

Tune 12. The same lament as sung thirteen years later, with 
accompaniment of the shitjendje. 

[os Sey aie ee eee 

~ - 
Hle Ndu-ma-ne, Nwa-na! Hlo - ngo- la Nwa-ma-nti-bya-na 
Have pi-ty onthe child, Theychasedhim, Nwa-ma-nti-bya-na 

Po Sere 

Hi iwa-na ba dle - le, mbo-si! 
"Tis the child they have killed, a - las! 

Tune 13. The song of the bride’s maids: (p. 181) ‘‘ Do not go 
with him”. (Mrs. Audéoud, Makulane). (Comp. p. 177). 

4 ae = 3 3 2 
CES 5 al 
Ae SO ) kul SO” imal nd ye! 
Ye. . as. « ! Don'trconssentsto Wao wut shim! 

Tune 14. Mourning song heard after the death of Hamunde’s wife 
who was drowned in the lake of Rikatla (1893) (p. 172). 

ie sees oe 

Ma-ma - nee! Ma-ma - ne! U_ ndji si- 
O my  wmo-ther! O my mo - ther! You have left 
oe ese ae 
[ saaSes = 
vies sus Seyi kwi - ni! 
me, wheredid you go? 

Tune rs. Old Nkuna mourning song (p. 173). 

ie eee es eee ees 

Hi > va - na. va, Nhu-mba ya nti - ma Hi ‘va- 
We are sons of the house, the black house. 

SS 

na wa Ma -'la-la mi ngo-=~be, 

Tune 16. Mourning song at the death of Chief Tshutsha (Maputju. 
Mrs. Audéoud) (p. 173). 

[aes Gee asa 

Ha - mban mu-tha-ka - ti, Ha - mban mu- tha - ka - ti, 
Good bye, you, wi-zard, Good bye, you,  wi-zard! 

== aa  aa 
ae eS 

bu - le - la ba - ntu, Ha mban mu- tha- ka- ti, 

you kil-ler of men! Good bye, you, wi-zard. 

 ——  : . eS 

eres o_o eee i= re a EF 
——___—. @ ——— —— 

TT 
U ta ku bu-le-la ba-ntu U_ te-kab’si-kwin. 

Why do you come and kill our folk, You come in the night. 

eae 17. Song of the women carrying ‘‘makanye” to Muzila 

+375» LL p. 188). 
= a ieee 
= ee 
Chwe! Chwe! Ma mbya-na u_ te - le! U te- let 
Hi la - ba shimun-gu Le - shi_ ka 
Shi-mhu-ngu hi ma - ni? Hi Mzi-la! 
; fo 
ce aS 
8) we SNe! 
Le ti - lwen! 
Hi Mazi - la! 

Tune 18. Sailors’song on the Nkomati River (1904) (p. 189). 

———— SS == 

A hi si - lo- yi, A hi nda-nda-le, Ku ni ndla- 
AUee imeesigi— el OWN Vise esue | hi eee They are starv- 

eso Sas 

la ka Nti-ma-na, si - Te bie Oe ane ov ES Ue Ko yi, A hi nda- 
ing at Nti-ma-na, si-lo-yi, A hi si-lo-yi, A hi nda- 

S255 222s  , 

=== a 

+ 36 
nda-le, Ku ni ndla-la ka Nti- ma-na, si - lo- yi. 
nda-le, Theyarestarv-ing at Nti- ma-na, si - lo - yi. 

Tunes 19. 20. 21. 22. Sailors’ songs on the Maputju River. 
(Mrs. Audéoud. 1906-1907). 

SS SS Seg 
SESS SSS 

UV 
=a 
U fe-li ma-li, hm!...U fe-li ma-li, hm!... hm! 
DT s 
ae ¢ Fee 
 jae pit e ee | 
Au na_ ti-nga-na fa-mba b’si-kwin ? 
A -re you not a-shamed to go at night? 
ES eee es 
> —— pea 

yo yo yo yo yo 

= — — 
(a ae ee eee ee 
A 
A 

una ti-nga-na fa - mba bsi-kwin? 
-re you not a-shamed to go atnight? 

| 
ene ee 

Tune. 23. Carrier’s song. 
zi z a Eases 
Ge eee: = ae  

Tune 24. War song executed at the coronation of the Mpfumo 
chiefs (I. p. 347). 

SSeS Se 

Sa - be - la, Sa_- - be-la, nko-si! {pues ype 
O - bey, O - - bey the chief! Jhee- yaa! 

— 26% — 

Se Sees a 
CSS SSE SSS Sd 
SS <= at 
Si ya ku we-la mu-la-mbu mku-lu wa_ ka nko-si. 
Let us go, let us crossthe great ri-ver, that of the chief, 

Tune 25. The great war song of Maputju (I. p. 175). 

Paes SSS 
fo ——  j : rj p—S  j : a 
lo - ko aa ul Ge, Love k Ome kee tl Gan Ui 

the dawn of the day, At the dawn of day, Who 
fen 

ae Sa Sen ee a 

kwe ngu-ba-ne Mu-wa- of Mwai ka Ma- ihe du, Mwa- 
is ss thatcrowned thee, Muwayi? Mwai of Ma-pu-tju, Mwa- 

ee eel 

yi, ka Ma - bu-du, U be - kwe  ngu - ban! 
yl of Ma - pu-tju, Who has crown-ed thee! 

Tune 26. Marching song of the army (I. p. 444). 

(aS SSS 

A - ba-fo! Na-ngu-ya, E-e! E-e! E-ne-nal 
The en’ my! Herethey are, E-e! E-e! Heretheyare! 

——— el 
Ha ~ a! Ha - a! 
a — ay! [sien = ay 

Tune 27. The song of the spear(Nkuna), (I. p. 436). 

— SS SS 
[= Se ee 
se 

Hi yi-kwa ka ma-kho-si, Si phu-ma ka ma- 
Warcomesfromthe chiefs. It is or-dered by the 
ae, ae eal are Saree a a = 
oes See <a  f eee e 9 =x 
oe 6 ae EIS 
kho - si, si ga-mbu-za! U-mkhonto se sa-ndhle-ni E- 
chietso & We go and kill! The spear is in our hands. E- 
Sree ge ee 
E —<— NE ee r| 7s s| = , tH 
 Ss EN  D ona Zz — 
if E - ji! U_ mkho-nto u SAOM NN EZON DEC ate 

ji! E - ji! The spear killsand bends in the wound. 

Tune 28. The Giraffe of the desert (Nkuna, Nondwane).I,p. 435). 

ES Sa oe ee 

O-ho ho-ho! Nha si hu-hlu, ya se ma-na-nga. 
*Tis the gi-raffe, far in the de -sert. 

E-ho hou hes ! Nha si hu- hlu ya se ma-na-nga. 
’T is the gi-raffe, far in the de-sert. 

Tune 29. Oldest Nkuna war song (I. p. 436). 
Y 8 P- 43 

oy Se eee Snipes Ses — = aes! wae 
306 |S = «la Y-6— 06 | | 

Hi ba yi- ma, hi ba yi-ma! Hi ba yi- ma, hi ba yi- 
Let usstand fast, let usstandfast! Let usstand fast, let us stand 

—— ek i ‘ A DS SS yi 
i ale | 4 4 Sire aS 
= : aan Seige” eae hed ae | | a 4 
o—o—e—_—-— 
rTwwv 

ma! Mi te- ka bu-re-na mi nyi-ka ti nu-ba ta ba-mbe! 
fast! Do not let your strength go, it would help the en’my to con-quer! 

Tune 30. Childrens’song welcoming the trek oxen (p. 189). 

==. 

Gwey - ma na - 0, Gwey-ma na - 0, Gwey-ma 
See the o - xen! See the o - xen! See the 
TX 
Si 
== Sees 
r) — - 
na - 0, Gwey - ma na - o! 
O =e xen) PSee athe o - xen! 

Tune 31. Children’ song to the owl (p. 189). 
 J = E 
Pee dere a ieeN rhs  N ‘ + 
Gi lS SSS aSe 
6 + 

Shi-ko - ta-na gau-le-la fo-le, Nwa-mbengen gau-le - la fo - le, 

Tune 32. Incantation to the spirit during exorcism (p. 190) 

(Part VI). 
(eee ee eviaeae 

Fe 
-ka Mu-ngo-ni, Vu-ka, ku - si- ra I - nyo-ni ya 
A-wake,o Zu-lu, The day hascome. Now the bird is 

269). = 

(ese SaaS: 

dhla-la, Dhla-la ‘oete: -ni, Dhla-la va-len, I nyo-ni ya dhla-la. 
sing - ing, Play al-so, Zu - lu, Play in the bush, Now the bird is singing. 

Tune 33. Song of the tale of the ogre Nyandzumulandengela (Ti- 
mbila song). 

Ss ee ee 

¢——o—@ 
ore 

Nya-ndzu-mu -la-nde-nge-la, Ndzu-mu -la-nde-nge - la! 

Fh : 
gS aan 
o—e—o-! 6 
Ndji hwe ti- ho- mu ta nga ndji mu-ka! Nya ndzu-mu-la - nde-nge- 

Give me my o-xen,pleasethat I may go! 

ie 2 ier ae es - ag. . =: x4 

la, Ndzu-mu-la-nde-nge - la! U - te - ki-le mi mhu- 
You have ta-ken me and 

SSSS— 

Tie mi = tal 
you swal lowed me! 

Tune 34. Song in two parts, in the tale of Zili (p. 242). 

ie 

= 

eee ee eee aN oN a epeoe eS 
(SoS =F y—> (Sane omen emer Fe DEP Dae oa ze 
| —— J—9—p—- ama psi Che sl Sas 

Wi - il A ma-se-se-ndi-ni, a-ma-sen-di ( baba! 

‘old man. 

fe~ 

sara | \ loa al \ ainiaea aN z 
Ges a ar Se 
ae ek noe ae Sea 
xa roa * see se 4 3 x se e] 
— o-—¢--6-—-@ - 

Si - lo - yi-le ) se-se-ndi-ni, I  nya-ma mu-ne, ya ku 

| You bad wi-zard = What's that kind of meat ve-ry 
ae a2 See ee eee 
= ares is 
(=== SS Se eae 
a | oan re a ee 
nha - ti {se-se-ndin, I ka - la nki-la ka li = ho-ndjo, 
| Rime ment — It has got no tail, it has no horn. 

e__@ 3 . P 
eS Se 

v 

ee. 264 aa 

G : ee ee 
- nden. Zi - li! A - ma-se-se-nde-ni, A - ma- 
  e a a Se 

es === 
aS ——— 
| 

i 8 
sie 

se - ndi / - ba! Siv  louscyt  le™) se  se uden! 
old man, You bad wi-zard' 

 4 : ; 3  ee ——! =| 

Tune 35. Song of the mother whose child has been carried off by 
the Baboon (p. 245). 

+ a x 
= p ao —— 
i See eee 

Mfe-ne sa - ndhle - ni, Mfe- ne sa - ndhle - ni, A 

S : +s 
Se a ae Ss Bey es eee 
G J— D po E es o > - aS = 

ungi dhla - yi-se - le mu - nta-na-me,_ si ya ndo-ndo 

a ——————— 

za | Si ngi - ya mus- Ka, “hgi ya mu - ka. 
--f}-$— — evar = 
| a ar e @ e@ . —— f : ———— 
“7 SS r ¢ Y ¢ S Pi — ie aie 
aes a In- ko -si ya mee i eee Ve 
Tune 36, Incantation - which hyena-men are transformed into 
char in an ogre-tale (p. 196). 
SSS — ee 
ra |- fag) Al —\—— — === mart 
a oh 0 a BS 

Ma -nya-nga, ma-nya-nea. ;Wanga hi ne-nge.) Ho! 
/Theleg is for me. 

Lune 37. One of the Ronge songs Cp. 282 
(eg) eas ee eae 5G) Sa RS RES we PES AES ORS La: Zs 
pap 5—e . a beeen inom | ren me ee | ] 
i sane ge je bs So —— =e Cae 
Ndji we - la, ndji we - la, Nwa-Tem - bé, Ndji we- 
[ will cross, I will cross, Nwa-Tem - be, Twill 

Ww 
oN 
wal 

es 

la, ndji tchi- ké, ndji we - la! 
cross, please let me, let me cross! 

Tune 38. A tune played on the shitiringo flute on the banks of 
the Great Tabi (p. 250). 

[Sto ea ee ee ae 

Tune 39. A shitiringo tune from Shiluvane. 

Tune go. A bunanga tune CI. p. 404, II. p. 251). 

3 oS S | Ss Ss | 
; 5 ie Sa Naps Scene ai oan) =i} pal 1 
IG: oe aa od Ee ee ee 

C. THE MUSICAL SYSTEM OF THE THONGA. 

After having studied the instruments used by our tribe, and 
a certain number of tunes, we can try to come to some con- 
clusions as regards its musical system. Let it be said, first of 
all, that such conclusions are only provisional, and I do not 
pretend that they are definitive. Noting Native tunes is a very 
delicate task, as nothing is more plastic than sound, and how- 
ever accurate we have tried to be, we may have introduced 
something of our own into this transcript. Nothing but pho- 
nograph records would be scientifically beyond suspicion ! 
However there is between all these tunes enough similarity, 
enough family likeness, to convince students of primitive music 
that they are genuine, and that we are entitled to draw some 
inferences from this material. 

— 266. 

As regards rhythm, it is generally very well marked, being 
emphasised by the accompanying instruments, and the move- 
ments of dancers: arms lowered in cadence, weapons brandished, 
feet stamping the ground at regular intervals, etc. However I 
did not always find it easy to catch, and there are certainly 
sudden changes in the time which put the hearer out of his 
reckoning. I heard people assert that in primitive music rhythm 
is by far the most interesting element. Anybody having 
witnessed a war-dance, or the performance of the East Coast 
boys in the Johannesburg compounds, will be able to certify that 
there is a wonderful sense of time in these productions. The 
binary combinations, 2/4 and 4/4 time, are met with more 
frequently than the ternary modes, 3/4 and 6/8. 

The melodic system is evidently based on the scale of seven inter- 
vals, just the same as our own music. The presence of the scale 
as underlying all this music is proved by the preceding tunes, but 
more specially, as we noticed, by the timbila. Most of the tunes 
could be played on this primitive piano, which is evidently con- 
structed according to the rules of the ordinary scale. I came to the 
same conclusion when teaching the sol-fa notation to raw 
Natives, and I remember having had a class of boys, just from the 
bush, in Lourenco Marques, who, at the first lesson, after a quar- 
ter of an hour, were singing our scale without difficulty : that 
which seemed to be unknown was the name of the seven notes 
do, re, mi, etc., but the sounds themselves, in their regular suc- 
cession, were quite familiar to their ears.. One hears sometimes 
of a scale which has but three or four notes. Does it exist? 
Is not this succession of sounds “ given” to the human ear, 
as well as the succession of colours in the rain-bow to the 
human eye? As we shall see, Natives do not distinguish all 
the colours. They call by the same word, libungu, yellow, and 
red; black and dark blue being also both ntima. Their eye 
has not yet been fully trained. Their ear seems to me to be in 
better condition, and to have attained a distinct perception of 
the elementary sounds. 

Let it be remarked, however, that there are differences 
amongst them. Some sing more in tune than others. Often 

os 267 aces 

they are a third or a quarter of a tone flat or sharp. I might 
say they do not precisely sing out of tune, they are not yet 
true on the note. But this will come with due training. I very 
rarely met with Natives with no idea of tune. This occurrence 
is, I think, more frequent amongst the Whites than amongst 
the Blacks. As regards accidentals, I have seen some boys mas- 
tering the chromatic scale without much difficulty. But sharps 
and flats, viz., sounds which do not bear the ordinary, regular 
relation to those preceding or following them, are generally very 
difficult to catch, sometimes out of their reach altogether. 
The use of European instruments will raise them to that 
higher level in the course of time. 

But let us confine ourselves to their primitive state. They 
not only know our major scale, but frequently sing in the 
minor one. On the timbila, as we saw, they can play in the 
eolian method, viz., in a minor scale in which there is no raised 
seventh. In fact, even in the distinctly minor tunes, this raised 
seventh is never met with. We often notice the passage from 
the major to the minor, or vice versa, and our collection 
affords two striking examples of this musical procedure : in tune 
Ne 33, the melody after 6 bars recommences a third lower: 
this is a characteristic timbila tune; the melody, started on the 
third key, is again played starting on the first one, so as to pass 
from the major to the minor. In N° 25, at the end of the 
second bar, the reverse phenomenon takes place. The melody 
was first minor; it is raised a third higher and becomes major 
for a while, returning later on to the minor. 

The character of most of the Bantu melodies is rather sad, and 
this is generally explained by the assertion that they are in the 
minor key. I do not think this is true. Most of my tunes, 
25, are undoubtedly major, 10 are minor, and 5 are mixed or 
doubtful. This impression comes rather from the fact that the 
melody almost invariably begins on a high note and descends 
to deep notes, often ending by the lowest. The song starts 
brilliantly, triumphantly, and goes down, down, till it dies away 
on the lowest note. Hence the melancholic impression these 
tunes convey. The melody is very short, as a rule; sometimes 

quite rudimentary ; its constant repetitions also produce a mono- 
tonous effect which enhances the sadness of the music. A pro- 
fessional musician, after having perused these tunes, once said 
tome: “ Well, they are not “jolly good fellows” your black 
people! Nota single tune for dancing ! Nothing merry about 
this music !” 

The rules of Native harmony are very difficult to detect. 
They certainly exist. When you hear a chorus of beautiful 
voices singing in two or three parts, you at once perceive great 
differences between their system of harmony and ours. These 
choruses are by no means disagreeable, but are very strange to 
our European ear. It would be most interesting to catch them 
and note them down, but it would be a long job! Ihave 
succeeded at least in fixing the two parts of the song of Zili, 
which can be considered typical; I owe it to two girls of Lou- 
renco Marques, who had clear voices and lent themselves will- 
ingly and with great patience to the long inquiry. One will 
notice a curious succession of fourths and sixths, quite unusual 
in our music. The professional to whom I submitted this song 
told me it reminded him of similar chords found in the works 
of mediaeval composers like Bianchois, and Adam de la Halle. 
The fourth seems to be more acceptable to the Bantu ear than 
the third or the fifth. A collection of timbila music would be 
of great assistance in coming to a conclusion on the subject, as 
the artists invariably play with two hands, and a score of pho- 
nographic records taken in Johannesburg of a good player would 
be very valuable. Not having had the Opportunity of making 
such an investigation, I must be satisfied to commend it to 
those who have time to devote themselves to it. 

To sum up the result of this inquiry, I may say that Thonga 
music has certainly reached a certain stage of development, being 
based upon the seven intervals scale, recognizing the major and 
minor keys, and following a certain system of harmony; but the 
melodies are still short and rudimentary and, although they may 
attain a real grandeur when performed by hundreds of warriors, 
they are generally monotonous and _ sad. Notwithstanding 
this, the black race is essentially musical; its gifts in this domain 

are real, and if properly developed they will certainly produce 
remarkable results in time.

The Problem of Native Education. 

The study which we have made of the Bantu Intellect has paved 
the way for us to consider this great question, which is one of the 
most important features of the Native problem in South Africa. 

The wild buffalo has been made prisoner! Onits neck a yoke has 
been placed. — The savage mind of the Bantu is now being trained 
to civilised methods, and the Elementary School gathers in goatherds 
of the bush, all over South Africa. More than 175.000 children follow 
a course of instruction. The wild buffalo has bowed its neck with 
wonderful readiness! It is one of the promising features of the actual 
situation of the Black race that it has so quickly accepted the school. 
This proves its vitality: it understands that the acquisition of 
knowledge is, for it, the only way of adapting itself to the altered cir- 
cumstances. So, though primary education has nowhere yet been 
proclaimed as obligatory, children leave their flocks and learn reading, 
writing, and arithmetic. This phenomenon is universal, and is not 
only witnessed in the towns, were big boys of twenty or thirty years 
of age crowd in the evening schools, patiently writing letters on the 
slate with a clumsy hand, but in the most remote ‘parts of the country, 
everywhere where a missionary or a Native teacher opens a school. 

This spread of Instruction is bound to have great results for the 
future of the race, and of its intellect ; so it is of the utmost importance 
that rational and wise, methods be adopted in the conduct of this 
work, in order to help and not to injure the Bantu mind. Unfortu- 
nately it can not be said that such has always been the case in past 
times. To avoid mistakes and errors I beg to advance as the first 
principle of Native Education : 

1) Tue NECEssITy OF A SPECIAL NaTIVE CURRICULUM. 

May I first relate a personal recollection ° 

When a young missionary on the Rikatla Station, I had the great 
misfortune to lose my Native teacher. He was not satisfied with the 
pay he received from the Mission, so he took leave without ceremony 
and went to town to earn more money. I remained alone to attend 

to all the spiritual and educational duties of the Station. So far I had 
left the whole charge ofthe school to him. Now I was obliged to go 
myself and meet each day the twenty or thirty boys and girls of the 
class. But what I thought to be a very sad occurrence proved a real 
blessing. Having to teach in a Native school for some months, I 
gained experience which was indeed very precious, and I at once saw 
that, with a language totally different from our own, having been 
subject to other influences, to another training in their homes, Native 
children could not be taught exactly on the same lines as Europeans ; 
in altered circumstances, other methods had to be employed. In 
which way, and how far, the training had to be different was a very 
interesting question and its solution was worth every effort on the part 
of the friends of the Native. 

What was my surprise, on visiting Cape Colony some years later, 
to see that, in this most advanced South African State, the same course 
of instruction was followed in the schools for the Natives as in those 
for White children! The former had to go through the VI classical 
Standards just in the same way as the sons of the English or Dutch 
colonists. What was the reason of this strange provision? Was it in 
the name of a liberal and generous negrophilism that Blacks were 
treated exactly as Whites? I was told that such was not precisely the 
explanation of the case, that it came rather from the indifference with 
which Native Education was regarded: the Authorities had not taken 
the trouble to inquire into the matter, and see if this was the proper 
way of dealing with it. Natives, asa rule, were satisfied, believing 
that the more they were treated as Europeans, the more did they 
really resemble them. But there were signs of uneasiness. School 
Inspectors, intelligent Natives, were noticing that such a system ended 
in a superficial and useless education, in a denationalisation of 
Native children without any real progress towards a more civilised 
condition. In fact, the agitation on this question led to an official 
inquiry conducted by a Select Committee of the House of Parliament, 
and a number of complaints were brought forward condemning this 
system as actually harmful to the Native pupils. 

Three times the South African General Missionary Conference 
discussed this important subject; it had full right to do so; it was its 
undoubted duty : Native Education in South Africa is in the hands of 
the missionary bodies who provide the teachers, found the schools, 
the State only exercising a general supervision and paying part of the 
salaries. So on two occasions I had the privilege of impressing 

upon this Assembly the necessity of a special Native course of instruc- 
tion, once in Johannesburg in 1904 and once in Bloemfontain in 
1909. (1) 

Before explaining the reasons for this necessity, let me remark that, 
a priori, it is most reasonable to make a difference between the in- 
struction given to a young savage just emerging from the bush, and 
that afforded to a civilised child. The VI Standards of the British 
Curriculum are indeed an excellent programme, and many education- 
ists are so convinced of its perfection that they would apply it to all 
the children on the face of the earth. However, we see that, in foreign 
countries like France and Germany, where the schools have reached 
the same degree of excellency, the curriculum is slightly different. 
It seems as if, in.a programme of primary education, there were two 
series of elements : the universal elements, which every human being 
must be taught if he wishes to be considered as educated, and the par- 
ticular or national elements which answer to the special wants or 
gifts of the various nations. So it might be said that the English 
course has a more practical, the German a more scientific, and the 
French a more literary character. If such differences exist amongst 
the civilised nations, is it not reasonable to expect to find them when 
educating White children and children born in the bush, far away 
from European influences, ina totally different environment, amidst 
totally different traditions ? 

But the necessity for a special course of instruction for Natives arises 
not only from the differences between the Bantu and the European 
mind, It is forced upon us by the fact that these tribes possess and use 
their own languages to the exclusion of any other : the centre of the 
problem is in the presence of these languages, and this being the most 
important point in the discussion, | must dwell at length on it. 

2) THE PLACE OF THE VERNACULAR IN NaTIVE EpucaTIon. 

If we want to express a sound judgment on this subject, another 
question of a more general character must first be considered. What 
will be the fate of the Native languages in the evolution of the Black 
race in South Africa? 

(1) See Reports of the South African General Missionary Conference of 1904: 
«+ The place of the Native Language in the Native Education ”, and in tae 
Report of 1909 : Native Education and Native Literature”. Compare Journal 
of the African Society. October 1905. 

Some superficial observers have expressed their conviction that these 
‘* disagreeable dialects” are bound to disappear in the near future before 
the all powerful civilisation and its vehicle, the European languages. 
This opinion is devoid of any substantial foundation. In the last 
20 or 30 years, the use of Native languages has not decreased at 
all, nor is there any sign that the Black population will abandon them. 
In some places, in the Orange Province, a kind of Low Dutch has 
superseded Sesuto, or the old Hottentot dialect, but this is owing to 
the disintegration of the tribes and the prevalence of European influ- 
ences. Where the Bantu still adhere to their tribal system, or where 
they dwell in locations, they keep their native tongue and they are 
quite right in doing so: these languages are by all means worthy of 
preservation, as has been shown in the first chapter of our Part V. 
They are not degenerate, they are not inexpressive, they are rich in 
their way, and, at any rate, they are admirably in keeping with those 
who invented them. Thus they are by far the best medium for the 
expression of their thoughts. I may quote here the Thonga proverb : 
‘The strength of the crocodile is water.” When speaking his own 
tongue, the Native isacrocodile in water. Heis strong, heis eloquent, 
he is somebody! When speaking a foreign language, most of them 
are caricatures. Of course some of them master English perfectly, or 
Portuguese, or Dutch, if they have been ina long and intimate contact 
with White people. But this is a chance which occurs to very few, 
and will probably not be the lot of the majority as long as social and 
political circumstances have not undergone an entire change. If our 
European patois have been preserved for centuries in so many coun- 
tries where they have had to fight against a literary language, against 
books, School and Church, how much more probable is it that Sesuto, 
Zulu and Thonga will remain the languages of the South African tribes ! 
So the Vernacular will live, and it is worth being used both as a 
medium for instruction and as an object of study in Native schools. 

On the other hand, the European languages make great progress 
amongst the Natives, and it is but natural and good that it should be 
so. The South African Native instinctively understands that he must 
be able to converse with his White master in his tongue, as the White 
master is much too busy (and perhaps too lazy) to learn the language 
of his boy. The most he can concede, I mean the White master, is 
to speak a smattering of the ‘ Kitchen Kafir”, that most miserable 
mixture of Zulu, Dutch, English and Portuguese, without grammati- 
cal construction, which flourishes on the docks and in the stores of 

— 273 ——s 

half civilised South Africa. To kill this execrable product more 
promptly, let the Natives learn the European language properly as 
quickly as possible. ‘The Governments desire it, the storekeepers long 
for it, the mistress of the house demands it; and the missionaries have 
nothing against it! 

In fact the South African tribe must be bi-lingual: the vernacular 
remaining the language of the home, of the soul, of the religion, of 
the intercourse between the Blacks ; and the European language, Eng- 
lish, or Portuguese, or Dutch, as the case may be, being used in the 
ever increasing relations with White people. ‘That the race can attain 
such a level is beyond doubt: its literary ability is quite equal to 
the eftort. 

If these premises be true, what conclusion can we draw from them 
as regards Native Education ? The Native child enters school knowing 
his vernacular only. He must leave school, having acquired a real 
training of the mind, and having become at the same time a useful 
member of the community, two aims, the educational and the practical, 
which must not be sacrificed the one to the other. How shall we reach 
them both? | consider the question more especially from the point 
of view of language. 

Without entering into technical details, let me say that Native 
primary education ought to comprise three stages : 

1) The Vernacular Stage, a period of two years during which pupils, 
who are just commencing, learn to read and write their own language. 
This will form a sure foundation which will be useful to them all their 
life time. In this stage, the European language is taught by ear only, 
colloguially, according to the method of the Berlitz School, as much 
as possible by establishing a direct relation between objects seen and 
the foreign words learned. This period corresponds to Sub- 
Standards A and B. 

2) The Mixed Stage, corresponding to Standards 1, I, II] of the Eng- 
lish course, forms the transition. The pupils are still taught through 
the medium. of their own tongue ; they receive lessons on its admirable 
and so regular grammar, until they are able to parse sentences, a very 
good exercise which will accustom their minds to distinguish and to 
classify (1). But Readers in an European language are now put into 

(1) This teaching of the Native grammar to Native pupils has been given in 
the Swiss Mission schools for years, and found to be very interesting. I am 
glad to see that Bishop Cameron, of Cape Town, recommended it in the follow- 
ing words: ‘‘In order to train the mind and understand the process of 

ey 
their hands, and they read them, the teachers always taking care to 
avoid a mere memorising of words without understanding their mean- 
ing. For this purpose we recommend bilingual books during this 
stage, books containing a literal translation of the text in the Native 
language on the opposite page. 

3) The European Stage, corresponding to StandardsIV,V, VI. Some 
contact is still kept with the vernacular in this stage by reading the 
best of Native literature, when available ; but here the Native 
curriculum comes nearer to the European, some subjects, however, 
such as history, being taught in a somewhat different way, to answer 
to the needs of Natives. The European language, English, or Dutch, 
or Portuguese, is employed as a medium as much as possible. 

This division into three stages will provide a healthy evolution from 
the untrained bush life to the adult and civilised life, and it will de- 
stroy as little as possible the character of the Native. 

} cannot here explain all the details of the course of instruction 
which | proposed to the Bloemfontein Conference, in 1909, and which 
has been published in the Report. I only add that after an interesting 
discussion, this assembly passed a resolution, approving the system of 
the three stages proposed, which in the English Colonies would be 
termed: the Vernacular, Anglo-Vernacular and English stages. In 
the Mozambique Province, the Governor General Freire d’Andrade 
adopted a similar plan, combining it with the Portuguese Code of 
Education. Lately Natal also changed its Code of Native Education 
exactly on the lines indicated in the Bloemfontein Conference. When 
will the Cape Province take a definite step in the same direction ? 

As regards the Transvaal authorities, they only began to take an 
interest in Native Education after the Anglo-Boer war. Provisional 
Standards were adopted with two Sub-Standards in which the require- 
ments, as regards English, were very modest. The study of the Native 
language was nowhere mentioned; the Vernacular was entirely lost 
of sight. ‘‘ Teachit asmuch as you like and have time to do it”, said 
the Department, ‘* but we cannot take it into account”. However, 
such a recommendation cannot easily be carried out. A subject not 
mentioned in the curriculum, not included in the examinations, will 
never be properly studied. Moreover this system gave rise to the 
following great difficulty : Native children, on their first arrival at 
the school, had to be provided with two books: the Vernacular 

thought, the Kafir grammer which is elaborate, logical and on the whole 
regular, is a much more satisfactory instrument than the English grammar. ” 

Reader and the English Primer. So they had to begin by learning the 
same letters with two different values, a being pronounced as the 
Italian a, in the Bantu orthography, and as é, the French é, in the 
English book; e being respectively the English a and the French i ; 
1 the Engishe and the French ae; u the French ou and the English you ! 
The case is almost as bad with the consonants! Is this course com- 
mendable from a pedagogic point of view ? Is is not cruel to force 
pupils, who are just beginners, to learn two alphabets at the outset ? 
And are we not right in claiming that one of the axioms of Native 
Education is the exclusion of any European book, as long as the 
child is still learning to read his Native Reader? Otherwise, the result 
is deplorable. A teacher in Cape Colony, having to examine pupils 
taught in out-stations according to such methods, said tome: ‘‘ They 
are supposed to have passed Standard III. They easily read a St. III 
Reader, but they do not understand a word of it, and when I examine 
them in Kafir, they are unable to read the first Kafir Reader.” So 
the result of this method has not been more favourable to the English 
language than it has to the Vernacular. Four years of study on those 
lines have only led to a useless memorising of English words, and 
an almost complete inability to read Kafir. Out-station teachers may 
be blamed for this deplorable result; but antipedagogic methods, or 
rather the want of reasonable methods, have had a great part in bring- 
ing it about. 

The system I now advocate, insisting, as it does, on a real understand- 
ing of all the subjects taught, is designed to correct the great fault in 
Native Education all over South Africa. The Bantu mind is endowed 
with a wonderful memory, as we have seen. Moreover, being the 
mind of a primitive race, it has a strong tendency to imitation. Hence 
the fact that Native children (and often teachers) are perfectly satisfied 
with a parrot-like learning of words and sounds which they do not 
understand. They commit to memory entire books in a purely 
mechanical manner, without bothering at all about the meaning of 
the words : this knowledge is but a varnish which will disappear as 
soon as they have left the school, and most of them leave after Stan- 
dard HI. This parrot-like way of learning must be combated with 
the utmost determination and, knowing that this is a weak point of the 
Bantu of this and perhaps of the next generation, the Native curricu- 
lum must provide means of checking the spread of this evil, which 

‘I ventured to call the mildew of Native Education (See Rep. of the 
Bloemfontein Conference, page 20). 

3) THE WANT OF THE ARITHMETICAL SENSE. 

In the preceding pages, I have dealt with the best means of deve- 
loping those literary faculties of the mind which are so prominen 
amongst the Bantu tribes. A system of education ought to foster the 
natural abilities and gifts ofa race. It ought also to remedy its defects, 
and a thorough teaching of arithmetic must be given in the Native 
schools precisely because the mathematical sense is feeble in most of 
the Native pupils. The method generally followed is to teach them 
European numeration. [think it is the only reasonable course, as 
their own system is much too complicated, and no elaborate arithme- 
tical work would be possible if counting were done in the Vernacular. 
The danger which we meet in this branch of study is once again the 
tendency to be satisfied with mere mechanical work in which reason- 
ing plays no part. Beware if you see the eyes of your pupils shine, 
and their heart thrill when merely reducing feet into inches, or yards 
into feet! Complete your teaching by giving them a problem which 
appeals to their faculty of reasoning ! 

4) SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF NaTIvE EpucaTIoNn. 

As a conclusion, I would say, Native Education, in order rightly to 
direct the evolution of the race, must be actuated by the following 
principles, the four first ones being a résumé of the foregoing disser- 
tation, and the three last ones being also of great importance : 

1) The teaching of Vernacular reading and writing is the basis of 
the whole edifice. 

2) The teaching of the European languages must be given at first 
orally and never allowed to become a merely mechanical effort of 
memory. 

3) Arithmetic must play a considerable part in the programme and 
be taught as a means of developing the reasoning faculty which is 
still dormant. 

4) The study of the Vernacular Grammar is a first-rate means of 
developing the sense of classification amongst young pupils. 

5) The Native curriculum must try to supplement other wants pecu- 

liar to the Natives. They have not been taught a number of common 
scientific facts which White children naturally learn through their 

environment : so they ought to be given an elementary course of 
science in order to check ideas of witchcraft and other superstitions. 

6) The Industrial Training is of the first necessity to a race which, 
though much gifted in this domain, has still to be civilised and can 
aspire to something better than mere uncultured labour. Agriculture 
ought preferentially to be taught, and, where it is possible, each 
school should have its experimental garden subsidised by the State. 

7) Last but not least, Native Education ought to give a prominent 
place to the religious and moral element, these being of the utmost 
importance in the uplifting of a race in which character is weak and 
whose religion is still unrelated with morality, But this question 
already introduces us into another domain and will be more ap- 
propriately dealt with at the close of the last part, into which we 
now enter. 

I do not deal here with the problem of Higher, Normal and Univer- 
sity education for the Natives. These also ought not to be servile 
imitations of White methods, but so organised as to answer to the 
special requirements of the Natives, and I would refer the reader to 
the Report of the Bloemfontein Conference on this point; all those 
who have taken the trouble of studying this question will agree that 
such higher education ought to be iiberally offered to the Black race. 
The more qualified physicians, advocates, or ministers can be trained, 
the stronger will be the elite which, sooner or later, must take the 
lead in the development of the race. Is it not in the interest of all 
that superstition should disappear, hygiene be taught, justice adminis- 
tered irrespective of colour, and Christian morality be preached ? 
Natives are ready to pay for these higher qualifications. 1 do not 
see any reason why they should be prevented from acquiring them, 
if their intellect be equal to the task. 

SIXTH PART 

THE RELIGIOUS LIFE AND SUPERSTITIONS. 

The mystery of the Psychic life! There is a mystery in any 
form of life, be it vegetal, animal, or intellectual. But how 
much deeper and more difficult is it to solve, when dealing with 
those higher manifestations of psychic life, those which seem 
peculiar to mankind: Religion, Morality and also, besides them, 
Magic of all kinds, Divination, Spirit-Possession, Witchcraft, 
all of which we include under the name of Superstitions. 
Amongst savage people Religion and Magic, Morality and Taboo, 
are not yet clearly differentiated. I think they proceed from 
different sources; meanwhile they are more or less confounded 
in the rites, and this makes them all the more difficult to under- 
stand. I do not now pretend to throw a perfect light on the 
dim, confused notions of the Bantu soul. The race is so little 
philosophical that it can admit conflicting ideas to an extent 
which would be impossible in more rational, more intellectually 
developed minds. My aim is, as ever, to be as impartial as 
possible. I have no preconceived idea ‘about what was, or ought 
to have been, the primitive man. I believe the evolutionist 
theory is supported by a great number of probabilities and is the 
best solution of many problems. Yet, I think it is but an hypo- 
thesis, and it would be unscientific to regard it as a dogma to 
the strengthening of which Science must devote all its labours. 
I may try to reach some conclusions at the end of this VI" Part; 
but my intention is to treat this subject by merely faithfully 
recording my own observations: professional anthropologists, 
or historians of Religion can do what they like with this mate- 

2 aS 
rial, my only ambition is that it should be wholly reliable. 

In a first chapter, I will try to record the ideas of the Thonga 
on Nature and Man; this is what might be called their Natural 
Philosophy, if the term were not somewhat pretentious. In the 
second, the distinctively religious notions and rites will be ex- 
plained. In the third I will describe the manifold manifesta- 
tions of their Magic, in which I include Practice of Medicine, 
Witchcraft, Possessions and Divination. In the fourth, the 
question of Morality and Taboo will be considered.

CONCEPTIONS OF THE THONGA REGARDING 
Nature AND Man. 

A. CONCEPTIONS REGARDING NATURE. 

I. Origin of the World. 

“What is it that created Heaven and Earth ? — Nature !” 
This proverb or riddle, already quoted (p. 161), is perhaps the 
only answer the Thonga give to the question of creation. 
Ntumbuluku, the word I translate by Nature, comes from ku tum- 
buluka, to happen, to be formed. It does not convey any clear 
idea of aCreation. The sense of causality is very little developed 
amongst most of the Thonga. So they are contented with this 
rather pantheistic notion, beyond which many very educated 
scientists of our age will not trespass : Nature created the world, 
and they do not search further. Some say that the originator 
of Heaven and Earth-is Rivimbi, or Kudjwana, or Nwari. The 
two first of these names are the Venda or Pedi names of the 
first human beings; Nwali or Myalt is a god of th: Bi-Nyu 
whose legend has spread amongst the Northern clans of the 
Thonga, especially the Hlengwe and the Maluleke. It is possible 
that the tribes, from which these names have been borrowed, 
truly believe these personages to have created the world. In the 

story of Nwari, for instance, it is said that when he lived, stones 
were not yet hard, and so the implements of the first men left 
their impression on the rocks (Comp. I. p. 21). But they are 
in the first place the creators of mankind, as we shall notice. 

I believe that the origin of man preoccupies the Bantu mind 
much more than the origin of the world as a whole. They can 
live their whole life without being troubled by this question, 
which has perplexed so many hearts in other lands. Only a 
few particularly serious minds, those who are the religious ge- 
niuses of the tribe, longingly search for light on this subject. 
I have met with one of these. His name was Rangane, and he 
came from the Maluleke district. When quite a young boy he 
often asked his mother who it was who had made heaven and 
earth. She told him: “It is Khudjwana. But he died long ago. 
Even the place where he was buried is unknown.” This did 
not satisfy the curiosity of the child: so she sent him to the 
old men to question them. They answered by the myth of the 
reed which we shall explain later on, saying: ‘‘All men have 
originated from a reed.” This also failed to satisfy the thirst of 
this inquiring soul wanting to know whence everything proceeds, 
and he told me how gladly surprised he was when, having 
come to Pretoria for work, he heard a convert saying that God 
had created everything and teaching the Christian explanation 
of the world. I remember his face beaming with joy when he 
told his story. But such earnest, philosophical natures are very 
rare amongst Natives, and Rangane was an exception. He died 
when still at the beginning of his course of study; and he was 
vastly superior to most of his comrades as regards religious 
perception. 

Il. The celestial world. 

(THONGA ASTRONOMY). 

If Thonga do not bother much about the origin of heaven, and 
of its lights, what are their ideas concerning them ? 
Heaven (tilo, dji-ma) is for them an immense solid vault which 

rests on the earth. The point where heaven touches the earth 
is called bugimamusi, a curious word of the bu-ma class, the 
prefix bu meaning a place, viz., the place where the women can 
lean their pestles against the vault, (whilst everywhere else pestles 
must be leant against a wall or a tree). This expression is some- 
times further explained by the following words: ‘‘Lomu ba 
kandjaka na ba khisamile ” — ‘‘ Where women pound their mealies 
on their knees”; they cannot stand erect, or their pestles would 
strike against the vault! This vault rests on the earth, which 
is often called Jibala, viz., the great plain. On what is the 
earth itself resting ? This question does not seem to trouble the 
Thonga mind and I never heard an answer to it. In this respect 
it may be said, in excuse for the African Natives, that the ancient 
Greeks, with all their cleverness, were not much in advance of 
them. Some people escape the difficulty by asserting that the 
earth is infinite, viz., that it is endlessly prolonged downwards 
and has no bottom. — In the next chapter we shall see that 
Tilo, heaven, for the Thonga, is not only the material firmament 
which rests on earth, but a spiritual principle which plays a 
considerable part in the religious conceptions of the tribe. 

The sun (dambu, dji-ma) is never personified, nor worshipped. 
This word is perhaps related to Nyambe of the Ba-Rotse, Nzambi 
of the Vili, and a number of other similar words which are 
names of God. Does it proceed from the stem wmba or vumba, 
to mould, to form ? Ido not know. At any rate, should there 
ever have been a time when the sun was regarded as a personal 
being, the notion has now entirely faded away. On the seashore, 
in the Makaneta district, according to Mboza, people believe 
that the sun emerges from the water. The reflection of light 
which remains on the sea, after the appearance of the sun, is 
considered as a kind of source of light from which the sun 
emerges and renews itself every morning : it is “cut out from 
the provision of fire”, sticks to heaven, follows its course and dies 
in the West. To-morrow another sun will come out from the 
‘provision’, and so on. But other people make objections to 
this explanation and assert that the sun passes under the earth 
and comes back the following day: so there is only one sun- 

to which theory the first retort that the earth having no bottom, 
the sun cannot pass under it! 

The dawn is called mpundju; then comes tlhabela sana, the 
time when the rays of the sun (sana) are piercing; hisa ka sana, 
when they are burning; nhlekanhi, the middle of the sky, or 
shitakataka, the maximum point of the heat; then ndjenga (Dj.), 
or lihungu (Ro.), the afternoon, the time when the sun goes 
down (renga); ku pela or ku hlwa, when it reaches the horizon, 
and mpimabayeni (Dj.) the twilight, literally ‘‘the time when 
you do not easily recognize strangers coming to your village 
because it grows dark.” These are the divisions of the day 
(siku). Then comes the night (busiku). 

Eclipses do not seem to have ever much impressed the imagi- 
nation of Thonga. At any rate, they never caused panics 
(Mboza). When warned that an eclipse will take place and 
seeing that, indeed, the sun or moon is ‘‘turning dark” (dji 
yentsa ntima), Natives are more struck with wonder at the 
supernatural knowledge of the White people, than with fear of 
the phenomenon itself. 

[have already dealt with the notion of the year, (lembe, dji-ma), 
which is very vague; it begins at two different periods: that of 
tilling and that of harvesting the first fruits (I, p. 371, I, p. 20). 
Thonga do not make any difference between a solar and a lunar 
year, their knowledge of months being very imperfect, as we 
shall shortly see. 

Before leaving the source of light, I may add that the light 
itself is called ku bonekisa (Ro.), or ku bonakala (Dj.), litt. that 
which makes to appear. Of course Natives have no explanation 
of it to give. Colours are very imperfectly perceived, at least 
if we must base our judgment on the vocabulary. Nima means 
both black and dark blue. Libungu is carmine, red, purple, and 
also yellow. Yellow is not perceived as a distinct colour. Psuka 
is the tinge of dawn, and of the rising sun. Nkushe, which 
means sea-weed, is applied to the dlue sky; nkwalala is grey, 
liblaza (Ro.) is green, the green of grass in the spring, and the 
corresponding term in Djonga is rilambyana, that which makes 
dogs howl. Very green grass has this effect on Native dogs. 

=e 283 ae. 

The moon (fihweti (Dj.), hweti (Ro.) cl. yi-tin), has perhaps 
been personified in former times, as it bears the feminine suffix 
eti, which is also met with in myeleti (star) and in the names of 
certain rivers. (I. p. 35). At the present time there is no 
trace of worship, or of mythological conceptions in connection 
with it. Natives see in its spotsa woman carrying a shirundju 
basket or a bundle of sticks: but they do not attach to that 
image more importance than we do when we talk of the man 
in the moon. 

I have described (I. p. 31) how the new moon is received 
with acclamations of joy : in the villages the first person who 
sees it shouts: ‘“ Kengelekezeeee”, — ‘‘ the Crescent ! the 
Crescent! ”, and this word passes on from one village to the 
other, and dancers rejoice because they will have moonlight to 
illuminate their feasts! Such is, at least, the reason actually 
given by the Ronga for this custom. There were perhaps other 
ideas connected with the new moon in former times. — According 
to a Nkuna informant the day of the new moon is a shimusi, a 
day of rest. It is taboo to till the fields and cut the roots of the 
trees with a hoe. The moon must be left to become firm 
(tiyela). It is still tender as a new born child. Destroying winds 
might blow and hail fall if this taboo were transgressed. — The 
appearance of the crescent was also carefully examined, says the 
same informant. If its horns were turned towards the earth, this 
showed that there was nothing to fear, all the dangers contained 
in this month had been poured out: “‘mafumo ma hangalakile” 
— “the assagais were dispersed”. On the contrary, if the horns 
were turned towards heaven, this showed that the moon was 
full of weapons and misfortunes. — The new moon is of great 
importance in the customs connected with exorcism and posses- 
sions, as every exorcist must undergo the haza purification at 
each new moon (Chapter IID). Moreover Thonga, like many 
civilised people, also believe that some persons at this time have 
an attack of madness which is called ribuhe ra nlnwet, the lunar 
madness. 

When the first quarter appears the moon is said to ¢hwaga, 
a Zulu word which corresponds to tjhama in Thonga, and 

se OS ae 

is very much used in ‘the terminology of possessions. Eight 
days later, it is said to basa, to be white or brilliant; full moon 
is said to sima or to lata batjongwana, to put the little children 
to bed, because when it rises, it finds them already sleeping on 
their mats. The wane is called ku shwela dambo: the moon is 
then found by the rising sun to be still in the sky, not having 
yet dipped below the horizon. When, at last, it disappears, it 
is munyama, the obscurity ; the moon is said to fa, to have died. 
Is this meant figuratively, as is often the case with the word ku 
fa, or do the Thonga really think that each moon dies and is 
replaced by a new moon? It is difficult to say; most of them 
believe in a real destruction and a new creation of the moon 
each month (Timotheo), and this would explain why they have 
the same word for moon and month; they evidently identify 
the two notions. However some told me they believed it was 
the same celestial body which appeared anew each month. 

Spoon, who is endowed with a very vivid imagination, belie- 
ved that the sun and the moon have a race each month : the 
moon, when it first appears is not yet firm (a yi si tiyela), like 
a new born child ; so its light is feeble ; it is dominated by the 
sun ; but it grows and fights. When it is full, the sun sees 
“that now it is the moon!” : it is something to be rekconed 
with! During the second half of the month, as it decreases, it 
delays in the sky and the sun soon overtakes it again and com- 
pels it to pass behind. Then the moon is entirely vanquished! 
How far these were Spoon’s personal explanations or the gene- 
rally adopted conceptions, I could not say. The term shwela, 
applied to the last quarter and meaning : “ to be surprised 
in the morning” (See Ch. II), seems to convey a similar idea, 
and it is probable that Spoon rightly interpreted the ancient 
ideas of the tribe. 

Each moon, being new, bears a special name. These names 
of the months, or moons, are now almost completely forgotten, 
at least in the Southern clans. This is curious indeed, when 
we think of the custom of presenting little children to the moon 
and telling them the name of their month (I. p. St ewe ars 
rite ought to have prevented those names from becoming obso- 

— 285 _ 

lete. In the Northern clans they have been better preserved, 
and it has been possible for one of my colleagues, the Rev. 
H. Berthoud, to identify them more or less. His attempt to 
revive the nomenclature so that it should be used by civilised 
Natives did not, however, succeed any better than the attempt 
of the Scientists of the French Revolution. Amongst the 
Ba-Ronga those which are still known are : Nblangula, the 
month in which the flowers are swept (hlangula) from the 
trees, probably October, when all the minkuhlu, minkanye, 
etc., blossom ; Nwendjambala, the month in which the antelope 
mhala, brings torth its young (November ?); Mawuwana, when 
the tihublu (p. 18) are plucked, because the people shout : 
< Wuwana! wuwana! ” intheir joy at having plenty of almonds 
to suck. It corresponds to December. Hukuri is said to be 
the month when the fruits of the nkwakwa (p. 17) are ripe. 
(December also?), Ndjati, or ndjata, viz., | am coming. It is 
the time of nwebo, when everyone is in his fields eating the new 
cobs of mealies, and if you call a person he will answer: “ I 
come directly! Have patience! I am busy here! i SEbis 
may be January or February. Swnguti is also one of the sum- 
mer months. Sibamesoko, the moon which closes the paths, 
also called Dwebindlela or Sibandlela, is easy to identify: it is 
February, the time when the grass grows so high that it hides 
the paths leading to the nkanye trees. This is the end of 
the bukanye time (I. p. 369). Nyenyana, N ywenywankulu 
are the months of the birds (nyanyana), when one spends 
all the time in chasing the winged marauders from the fields 
of sorghum and millet (March. April). Mudashini, viz., what 
am I to eat ? is the month when you have harvested so 
many different kinds of food that you do not know which to 
choose : this is the time directly after harvest, May or June. 
Khotabushika, viz., when winter comes, probably June or July. 

The stars are called tinyeleti (yin-tin) and play a remarkably 
small part in the ideas of the tribe. The modern theory, accord- 
ing to which all religions have started from the worship of 
stars, finds no confirmation at all in the South African Bantu 
tribes. 

It is taboo to try to count the stars. When any one attempts 
to do so people will say to him: “ Keep quiet or you will 
wet the hut during the night! ” Counting stars represents the 
torments of the soul! If a child has been deprived of food as a 
punishment for an offence, his parents will tell him, when he 
goes to sleep: ‘“‘ Go and count the stars”, viz., ‘* you will feel 
hungry and not be able to get to sleep; you will be as unhappy 
as 1f you had to count the stars”. 

I never heard a distinction established between fixed stars and 
planets. They are all called tinyeleti. The best-known is 
Venus, which bears many names. Not knowing that the eve- 
ning and morning star are one and the same, they have given it 
different names. The evening star is Gumibashilalo, the one 
which steals the evening meal, because it appears when people 
take it, or khwekhweti, the brilliant star, or Nkata wa hweti, the 
moon's husband (as both are often seen close together); the 
morning star is called Ngongomela, or Khwezu, and is greatly 
lauded as the herald of the day. It gives the warriors the signal 
for starting on a war-like expedition: the warriors can easily 
kill their enemies under cover of the darkness, and the sun will 
soon appear and help them to complete their victory. Travel- 
lers also start on their journey when they see it : the dawn will 
soon be there! Lightened with its light, candidates of the cir- 
cumcision leave the village of the chief to go to the house of 
initiation. According to one of my informants (I. p. 74) there 
is a deep and mystic idea in this custom : Negongomela announ- 
ces the day; so little boys must be conducted by the morning 
star when they abandon their childhood and all its ignorance to 
enter the adult life with all its knowledge. It leads them from 
darkness into the light! So Venus plays a great part in Thonga 
customs. It is the great star. Notice the feminine suffix efi in 
one of its names. It may have been personified in former times. 

The Pleiades are the only constellation which bears a name 
in Thonga. They call it shirimelo, the one which announces 
the tilling season, because, in fact, in the lands situated under 
the Tropic of Cancer, it rises in July or August, when tilling 
is resumed. I have not heard of any other constellation known 

to the Natives. They have no notion whatever of con- 
stellations : their mind does not seem to have tried to group the 
stars, or to have seen figures of animals, or of objects, in the sky; 
their imagination in this domain is very poor, and they remain 
far behind the Oriental nations in this respect. 

The failing stars are considered as a bad omen. When seeing 
one falling towards a certain point of the horizon, Natives think 
that a Chief must have died in the country towards which the 
star was directing its course, and they have a formula of incan- 
tation to get rid of the misfortune attending this phenomenon. 
They say : “Thu! Thu! nkulunkulu ndjuwee, famba psa ku u 
nga fau ku bi”. — ‘You great thing, go away alone (with- 
out me, leaving me behind) and die and disappear entirely ”. 
This is more an imprecation (shiruketelo) than an incantation. 
The syllabe thu means, and accompanies, the emission of a little 
saliva. It is different from the sacramental su, employed to 
invoke the spirits of the ancestors: it is an insult.) sltssis 
spitting at something, not an act of respect and an offering as 
tsu.(1) This is the Ronga formula; the one used in Northern 
clans has the same meaning : “ Rura, rura weshe” (Move, move 
alone !). 

The comets greatly impress the imagination of the Thongas ; 
they are called shimusana, or nyeleti ya musana, the star of dust, 
or nyeleti ya nkila, the star with a tail, and when they appear 
they also mean the death of a chief. People say : Seas e 
chief has died, but they have not yet published the mourning” 
(I. p. 387). The star which is said to have appeared the year 
of the death of Manukosi was probably a comet. (See Report 
Brine SA. A. ALS. 1905, Vol. Ill, p. 232): 

These few superstitions and observations make up all the 
Astronomy of the Fhonga. The sideeal world is almost entirely 
out of the range of their preoccupations. 

(1) One spits at a child who emits a bad smell saying to him: “‘ Thu! u 
ya tinyela matjimba”.—- ‘Go away to ease yourself”. Should you do so 
to a person older than yourself, he will say to you : “«What ! you make thu 
to me (wa ndji thuka), you want me to ease myself !” 

. 

III. Cosmographic and Meteorological phenomena. 
1) THE Winp. 

The wind is called moya, an interesting word which means 
also spirit (the human breath and the spiritual part of man), 
and is applied to the acting, living agent, or to the smell, or 
taste, in some objects. For instance it is said of an alcoholic 
beverage which a lost its strength that its ‘“‘moya” has gone. 
It is also the moya which gives the potency to medical charms. 

Another word for wind is mbeho. Strong winds are called 
shidzedze. When they break trees and damage the mealies they 
are attributed to baloyi, wizards, who fight during the night, 
quarelling over the cobs. 

One frequently hears about tinheho ta mune, the four winds. 
They are called: Nwalungu, the North wind, (a curious word 
perhaps in relation with Balungu, the White men, see later 
on); Nyingitimu (Ro.), or Djenga (Dj.), the South wind: 
Mupfanyaka, the one coming from the plain of the black earth, 
the West Wind; Mfenya, the sea breeze, coming from the East. 
Sailors who are great connoisseurs in this domain still distin- 
guish the South Westerly wind, which they call Mfenyakulu, 
the great Mfenya. In Siicene. the West wind, which some- 
times blows with great violence, coming down from the moun- 
tains of the Transvaal Plateau, is called Burwa, place of habi- 
tation of the Ba-Rwa (bu, locative prefix indicating a country). 
(Compare I. p. 18). Two other terms of the bu-ma class, also 
applied to East and West in all the clans, are : Busha, the spot 
where the sun rises (ku sha), the East, and Bupeladambu, the 
spot where the sun sets, the West. So there is no doubt that 
the Thonga possess the idea of the four cardinal points. 

2) Native Grocrapny. 

The geographical notions of the tribe are, on the other hand, 
very scanty. As a rule, they do not think they can know a 

— 289 pie 

country, or a place, where they have not travelled. Every one 
must compile his own geography. Hunters, and men engaged 
in commercial journeys, had some knowledge of the Spelonken 
(Bvesha), of Pietermaritzburg (Umgungundhlovu), of Kimberley 
(Dayiman), and now every grown-up Thonga, so to speak, has 
been to Johannesburg (Nkamben). But the people who have 
always remained at home, women especially, show gross igno- 
rance regarding their own country. I met some who were 
totally ignorant of the fact that the Nkomati River, which leaves 
the Transvaal at Komati Poort (a place known by all), was 
the same as the Nkomati which enters the sea near Morakwen, 
northwards of Lourenco Marques, at a distance of 60 miles from 
Komati Poort. It must be said, to excuse them, that in Mora- 
kwen the river is called Morako (locative Morakwen) and thus 
many people have never been aware of the identity of the two! 

If you want to give Natives a grand idea of your knowledge, 
tell them the names of all the countries of Thongaland in their 
geographical order, as you may have learnt them in conversation, 
or by studying the map. They will be amazed and say: “‘ What 
a wonderful traveller you are, knowing so many spots so far 
distant from each other!” The teaching of Geography in the 
schools tends, of course, to alter this state of things. 

3) EARTHQUAKES AND Ratnpow. 

Earthquakes are not frequent in this part of the world; so 
they are rarely spoken of. However Thonga have a name for 
them, shimbeti. They do not give any explanation of them 
and believe they are perhaps caused by the gods. I remember 
having once heard a mysterious sound accompanied with a slight 
tremor of the soil. It was during the Boer war and I think it 
was caused by the blowing up of a bridge somewhere on the 
other side of the range. All the Natives covered their heads 
with their hands and seemed greatly impressed. 

The rainbow is called shikwangulatilo, viz., the one which re- 
moves the danger from the sky. Notice the stem kwangula, to 

inaugurate, which we have already met with, when dealing with 
pottery. The sky after rain is compared to a new pot, from 
which the nkangu must be removed. But this is nothing but 
an expression. No one can tell what the danger is that is thus 
taken away; it is probable that the tribe had more precise ideas 
on the subject in former times, and that these have become ob- 
solete. 

The two great phenomena which mostly impress South Afri- 
cans are lightning and rain, and of these you hear wonderful 
and endless stories ! 

4) LicHTNING 

is called /ihati (li-tin), and is said to be caused by a bird called 
ndlati (yi-tin). These two words, etymologically speaking, 
seem to be related to each other. They possess the feminine 
suffix t@ which is met with under the forms efi, ati, oti. This bird 
is also called nkuku wa tilo amongst the Ba-Ronga, the cock o 
heaven, or psele dja tilo, the hen of heaven, and magicians 
know how to determine its sex when the bird has fallen. 

The thunder is attributed either to the bird itself or, more 
frequently, to Heaven. The proper expression for: ‘It thunders” 
is: “Tilo dji djuma” — ‘‘Heaven roars.” 

In the Northern clans those who practise magical arts add 
many other particulars to the story, some of which may have 
been borrowed from the Pedi magicians who seem to possess a 
more complete explanation of the phenomenon. According to 
them, the ndlati (Pedi, dali) is a bird of four colours, ereen, 
red, black and white, which lives in the mountains, preferably 
at the confluence of rivers. The medicine-men of former times 
knew its hiding place and had even found the eggs of the bird 
in a nest floating on the water. When a thunderstorm breaks, 
the bird flies to heaven into the clouds; there may be scores of 
them, but one only will be dangerous (lebya) and cause death. 
It rushes down to the ground, strikes a tree on its way, tearing 
its bark and its wood, and throwing it down; or it falls on a 
hut and burns it, or on a man and kills him. Having reached 

= 351  

the soil, the bird can be caught, and I heard people seriously 
asserting that four of these, unable to fly away, had been found 
the previous year in Sikororo’s country. Or the 
bird enters the ground, to a depth of two to three 
feet, and either remains there in its own form, or 
(this is the most common saying) deposits its 
urine (murundju), which had already caused 
the flash of lightning, and flies away back to 
the mountains; the magician who understands 
the ‘‘treatment of Heaven” comes and digs at the 
spot ; there he finds a kind of gelatinous sub- 
stance which solidifies after a little time. I possess 
a little of this curious drug given to me by a Pedi 
magician, by name, Mudjumi; it resembles a piece 
of chalk, and is considered very valuable on 
account of its rareness, and because it helps in 
the manufacture of the wonderful medicine of 
Heaven. Should a village have been struck by 
lightning, the magician of Heaven will come and 
dig out this foreign body; if he finds it, the 
taboo is removed. If he does not, the whole vil- 
lage must move to another place. In the same 
way, it is taboo to warm oneself at a fire made 
of the wood of a tree that has been struck by 
lightning, or to use it as fuel. 

Happily this dreadful bird can be prevented 
from killing and burning by magical means. 
Both the Pedi Mudjumi and the Thonga Maka- 
sane possessed the enchanted flute, by which they 
could force Heaven — or the bird of Heaven — 
to spare them. Mudjumi having sold me his flute, 
I can describe it at leisure. It is made of a hol- 

b = zie . ss The flute of 
ow bone five inches long, covered with Varan Hoieen 

skin, filled at its larger extremity with a black DrawnbyJ.Wavre. 
substance like wax. Inside, to keep it clean, 

there is a vulture’s feather. The bone is said to have been 
taken from the ndlati bird; the wax substance has been made 

pa 292 cated 

from powder obtained by drying up and pulverising a little of the 
heart, the eye, the bones, the feathers, and the flesh of the bird. 
In the wax are embedded three seeds of Abrus precatorius, the 
“lucky beans” well-known in South Africa, a round seed of a 
splendid coral colour with a black spot, very much used in 
Thonga magic. This addition of Abrus precatorius intensifies 
the sound of the flute and enables it to reach heaven. The 
magician seeing the thunderstorm approaching climbs up the 
hill, without any fear, blows in his flute: psee... psee... psee.., 
and shouts: «You! Heaven! go further, I have nothing against 
you! Ido not fight against you!» He may add in a threa- 
tening tone: ‘‘ If you are sent by my enemies against me, 
T will cut you open with this knife of mine.” The thunder- 
storm will then pass away! 

This invocation to Heaven is curious, and we shall better understand 
it when studying the part played by Heaven in Thonga religion. 
Here I merely consider the. superstition as an attempt at explaining 
a natural phenomenon. And we may well ask: how is it possible 
that such absurdities are believed, and firmly believed, by men who are 
not at all devoid of a sense of observation? The idea that lightning 
is a bird comes perhaps from the fact that its movements in falling 
from above resemble the evolutions of a bird in the air. After all the 
phenomenon is so sudden that this explanation could easily be accept- 
ed by the imagination of the savage. As regards the affirmations 
about the coagulated urine of the bird, I must say I have been unable 
to understand on what they could be based, until I saw some samples 
of fulgurites found where lightning had struck the ground : the heat of 
the electric current vitrifies the sand, forming a kind of pipe, enter- 
ing the soil, where it ramifies to a certain depth. These fulgurites, 
through not perfectly answering to the description given by Native 
magicians, may have been the natural substratum to which the Bantu 
imagination has added all the other superstitions. 

5) [HE PROBLEM OF RAIN AND THE WAY THONGA DEAL 
WITH IT. 

All over the earth the question of rainfall is of primary impor- 
tance, but this is especially the case in Subtropical Africa, even 

more than anywhere else. Rain may not fall during seven 
months, from April to October, and nobody worries about it. 
But if it fails in November and December, at the beginning of the 
rainy season, this is a dreadful misfortune, acalamity more serious 
than any other. The life of every individual, and consequently 
of the whole clan, is threatened. Famine will certainly follow, 
as cereals can only be sown during these two months and fa- 
mine means not only suffering and anguish, but often death, in 
a primitive tribe which is totally ignorant of trade with out-lying 
countries, and does not possess any means of conveyance for food 
bought in other lands. No wonder therefore if the imagination 
of the South African Native has invented ways and means in 
order to regularise the rainfall, if rites, and charms, all the powers 
of magic have been resorted to with the view of ensuring the 
precious rain to the tribe at the right time. 

These means can be classed in two categories: the rites which 
aim at removing the causes which are believed to prevent rain 
and the charms by which the rain is made to fall, irrespective 
of any cause preventing it. 

a) The causes which prevent rainfall and the rites 

by which they are removed 

The general intuition is that rain comes from the gods : “ Psi- 
kwembu psi nisa mpfula”’ — “‘ the spirits of the ancestors cause rain 
to fall.” So, should the spring showers not come in due time, 
the first idea will be to offer a sacrifice to the ancestor gods, es- 
pecially if the bones consulted have revealed that the anger of 
the gods is the real cause. Men will go to the sacred wood 
where the ancestors have been buried, sing there an ancient 
mourning song (I suppose No 15, page 258, is used for the pur- 
pose), and some of them beat the graves with sticks. As regards 
the sacrifice, it consists of a black victim; it may even be the 
offering of a living human being to the gods: these rites we 
shall describe later on. 

Or it may be that a certain individual, a wizard, endowed 

with magical power, or rather possessing enchanted drugs, 
prevents the rain from falling (a siba mpfula) through wicked- 
ness, or hatred of his countrymen. This is a rarer occurrence. 

But the terrible calamity of drought is put in direct relation 
with some physiological phenomena which no one would have 
thought of in this connection: the miscarriage of women when 
the foetus has not been dealt with according to rule, the birth 
of twins, the death of children who were not yet aggregated to 
the tribe by the ceremony of boha puri (I. p.55) and who 
have not been buried in wet ground; these are the great natural 
causes which prevent the rain from falling! I have met with 
this conception all over the Thonga tribe. I found it also 
amongst the Pedi of the Transvaal who firmly believe it, and it 
would be most interesting to know if Suto, Zulus, and Hotten- 
tots have the same superstitions. Let me quote the ipsissima verba 
of Mankhelu, the great medicine-man of the Nkuna Court. I 
shall never forget the earnest tone of his voice, his deep convic- 
tion, when he was speaking to me in the following words, as 
a kind of revelation: ‘When a woman has had a miscarriage, 
when she has let her blood flow secretly and has burnt the abor- 
tive child in an unknown place, it is enough to make the burn- 
ing winds blow, and to dry up all the land: the rain can no 
longer fall, because the country is no longer right (tiko a ra ha 
lulami). Rain fears that spot. It must stop at that very place 
and can go no further. This woman has been very guilty. 
She has spoilt the country of the chief, because she has hidden 
blood which had not yet properly united to makea human being. 
That blood is taboo! What she has done is taboo. It causes 
starvation. ”’ 

“What then must be done? — The chief will collect his men 
and ask them: ‘‘Are you in a normal state” ? (lit. are you 
right?). They answer: “Such and such a woman was pregnant 
but nobody knows what she has brought forth”. This woman 
will be arrested and told to go and show us where she has put 
it. ‘The earth is dug up; the hole is sprinkled with a decoction 
made of two drugs prepared in a special pot, the mbendula and 
nyangale; the woman herself must wash her body every day 

= 39%. 
with that medicine. Then a little of the earth taken from the 
hole will be scraped up and thrown into the river; water 
drawn from the river will be poured into the hole: the country 
will be well again, and then the rain will come”. 

‘Moreover, we, the medicine-men, after having sent old wo- 
men to the river to throw away that contaminated earth, we order 
them to make a ball ofthat earth, and to bring it back to us in 
the early morning. We grind it, we put it into a pot where it 
must remain for five days, and then we prepare the great drug 
to sprinkle the land. The medicine is put into horns of oxen 
and they go to all the drifts, to the boundaries of the country, 
on the borders of the Nwebeti and of the Thabina rivers, on 
the road to Sibila’s country, to Diskop (Leydsdorp). They 
must not cross rivers: ourneighbours do the same on their own 
side. One of the girls digs the earth, the others dip a stick 
into the horn and sprinkle the drug into the hole. We also 
sprinkle the road on which these women have trodden, when 
they had their blood; we remove the misfortune caused by 
these women on the roads. The country is pure again. Rain 
can. fall 

This is the purifying rite in the Nkuna clan. Mankhelu 
asserts the Pedi do the same. He did not know if it existed 
amongst other Thonga clans. But Viguet described the same 
custom to me as being in force on the borders of the Limpopo, 
under the name of mbelele. The bones having revealed that the 
country is impure, the chief orders the mbelele : it is a period 
of mourning (nkosi) for the land. First the phokolo, or the sa- 
crifice of the black victim is performed (See Part VI). Then 
the women assemble. They must remove all their clothing, 
only putting on some grass round their loins and, with a peculiar 
skipping step, singing a special song: ‘‘ Mpfula nana” — ‘‘rain fall,” 
—they go to all the spots where children prematurely born have 
been buried in dry ground, on the hills, take what they find in 
the broken pots and collect all that impurity in a secret place, 
so that children may see nothing of what they are doing. Water 
is poured on these graves in order to ‘quench them”. Onthe 
evening of the same day they go and bury these impurities; this 

— 296 a 

is done in the mud, near the river. No man must approach 
during that work: women would have the right of striking 
the imprudent one and of asking him questions on the obscene 
formulae of circumcision; the man would answer them in the 
most impure words he could find, as all the language taboos are 
suspended on that day : nakedness even is no longer taboo, 
“because”, says Viguet, ‘‘it is the law of the country!” Every- 
body consents to the suspension of the ordinary laws! (1). 

Amongst the Ronga, I did not hear of any relation established 
between children prematurely born and the rain. When the 
mbelele rite is performed, a mother of twins must lead the pro- 
cession of women who draw water and pour it on the graves 
of the twins in order to-secure the rain. They also clean all the 
wells (kuha tinhlobo), digging them afresh and removing any 
filth in the water. It may be that the corpse of a twin, if it 
has been buried in dry ground, will be dug out of its grave and 
buried again near the river, or they will go in procession and 
pour water on the grave. This will act on Heaven which is 
killing the earth by the terrible heat of the sun. The burning 
October winds will cease and the rain will fall. 

There is something mysterious about all these customs. Con- 
sidered merely as ideas regarding Nature and natural pheno- 
mena, I believe their essential meaning is this: — there are some 
cases of human birth which are taboo. If any birth is taboo, 
owing to the lochia, those of children prematurely born are 
doubly dangerous. Abnormal children such as twins, children 
who have died before the “ boha puri” rite, (I. p. 54), in some 
clans also children who cut their upper teeth first, partake in 
this nocuous character. They are a calamity for the whole 
land as they are in connection with the mysterious power of 
Heaven, and so they prevent the rain from falling. The great 
remedy for the evil, the only means of counteracting this in- 

(1) This rite of mbelele shows striking analogies with the Passage rites 

which we have already often met with in Thonga customs. This is a special 
period, a mourning period for the land, says Viguet, a mar ginal period which, 
as such, is accompanied with obscene manifestations, both in speech and ab- 
sence of clothing. 

 Bon)  
fluence, is to bury these children in wet ground. Should this 
not have been done, the chief must order these little corpses to 
be exhumed and buried near thé river: this is the aim and 
object of the mbelele. If wet, these graves will cause no 
harm (1). 

How did these extraordinary conceptions first originate ? 
Where is the connection between abnormal births of human 
beings and the rain-fall? I think it can be found in the con- 
ception of Heaven which has inspired so many curious rites, 
and which I shall explain in the next chapter. So, it is possi- 
ble that, after all, the mbelele rite has a religious idea at its 
base. 

b) Rain charms 

The removal of the corpses of abnormal children from dry 
ground and their burial near the river probably proves some- 
times ineffective to produce the rain. So Bantu magicians have 
invented a great many charms to obtain the so greatly desired 
showers, and the power of the rain-makers is enormous. Our 
tribe does not seem to have developed this art so much as 
other tribes. The Suto-Pedi are masters in this domain and 
Mankhelu, who had been taught by them and had become a 
ereat and renowned rain-maker, has revealed all his secrets to 
me. He possessed the drug and used it frequently, said he, 
having often been called by Suto chiefs dwelling in far distant 

(1) In the Maluleke clan, as previously mentioned, these three categories of 
children must be cremated, and foreigners dying in the midst of the clan are 
also burnt after their death, from fear that they may belong to one of these 
categories and so prevent the rain from falling, if they were buried in dry 
ground. The mbelele rite there is called nkele nkele. Rangane describes it as 
foliows: — Women collect the bones of twins, children born dead. or who 
died at their birth; to these they add their old rags (perhaps the cloths used 
for their menses ?); they bring all these impurities to the cross-ways and burn 
them there, singing impure songs, saying: **To-day is a great day ! There is 
no taboo any more ! If you atin anything, this will be an insult to the 
rain; it will not fall. ” The smoke of all that they have burnt constitutes a 
religious offering: then the country will be pure and the rain will fall. The 
conception among the Maluleke is somewhat different from that of the 
Ronga. 

——- 298 ass 

districts, as far as Pretoria. He assured me he had met with 
so much success that these chiefs had given him oxen, horses, 
a waggon, precious beads, etc.! Where had he found this 
marvellous drug? At Rivimbi (in Pedi: Lebibi), a country 
northwards of Spelonken, not far from the Limpopo and to 
which he went, as far as I could make out, in 1865 or 1866. 
The Lebibi people are the descendants of Lebibi, a chief of the 
old times (as old as Nkuna, says Mankhelu) who, after his 
death, went to heaven and became king of heaven ; he still 
exists there as a spirit, hearing and knowing everything that is 
done on earth. This Lebibi is probably the same whom the 
Pedi call the first man, and about whom they have a number 
of traditions which I shall mention a little later. They all 
invoke him to obtain rain, asserts Mankhelu, even Modjadji, 
the great queen who has acquired such fame : she does not pre- 
tend to be superior to Lebibi; she owes her rain-making power 
to him! His successors have kept the famous recipe for rain- 
making. Mankhelu visited them. He brought with him 
“bukosi ”, viz., riches, and they gave him horns full of the 
drug. One of them is in my possession ; it seems to be the 
horn of a he-goat. These people manufacture this medicine 
for producing rain on an extensive scale. Baskets are seen 
in their huts, full of the ingredients of which it is composed. 
Strange to say these ingredients come all’ from the sea: as far as 
I could identify them from Mankhelu’s description they are: 
sea-urchins, (shinana sha mitwa), seaweeds (pindja ra lwandle, 
lit. rope of the sea), bones of whales, or sea-fish, bivalve sea- 
shells, pieces of wood coming from wrecked vessels run 
aground, etc. All these are roasted and, when the process is 
sufficiently advanced, sea-water is poured on them to cool them 
(timula). They are then pulverised and ‘‘ salted? with ano- 
ther drug called ‘ shinyuke ”, something black which I could 
not identify. The powder so obtained is put into the horns, 
half of which are dipped into sheep’s fat and so become female 
drugs. Having been given the four horns, two male and two 
female, Mankhelu was told that these would retain their virtue 
for ever; when seing that their contents were near the end, he 

= 299 mee 

could always prepare a fresh supply by roasting marine pro- 
ducts, but he would have to grind a little of the original drug 
with the new powder in order to pfusha, viz., to raise its 
strength; according to the universal practice of Bantu medicine- 
men. The original drug is the well-spring (shihlobo). Should 
any one try to manufacture the drug himself, using exactly the 
same ingredients, he would meet with total failure, as the vir- 
tue of the drug derives from two sources: the produce of the 
sea, and the power of the first inventor, Lebibi. 

Having come back with the precious charm, when summon- 
ed by any chief to act as rain-maker, Mankhelu employed it in 
the following way : 

He first asked the chief to kill a black goat or sheep (a he 
goat, or a ram, if the bones said so); the head, at any rate, had 
to be black. The heart was pierced with a puncheon and the 
blood flowed. He carefully washed the horns with the blood and 
smeared them later on (horola) with the ‘‘ psanyi” found in 
the intestines of the animal. Then he took his ntsiko, ViZ., 
the two pieces of wood which acted as his flint and steel, poured a 
little of the powder into the notch of the female stick and made 
fire by the rapid friction described on p. 33. In the meantime 
Mankhelu was praying as follows : ‘* Here are the drugs, Ri- 
vimbi of Tsome (Rivimbi’s father)! give us rain.” Then he 
invoked his own gods, saying: ‘“ Go to Rivimbi for me and 
come along here all of you to make the rain fall.” This per- 
formance is a ‘‘mhamba”, a means of calling the gods, especially 
Rivimbi, “the master of this mhamba.” After a while the 
wood began to burn; leaves of the ‘‘nembe-nembe” bush (Cassia 
petersiana) were placed on it and a black smoke rose and ascend- 
ed to heaven. Then the clouds appeared and soon the thunder- 
storm broke. A feather of the ndlati bird of lightning was put 
amongst the leaves as a protection against thunderbolts. 

Mankhelu was absolutely convinced of the efficacy of this 
means of rain-making, and there seems to be more sense in 
this rite than in many others. To employ the sea to make 
rain fall is not so absurd after all! I could not assert that 
Natives have a clear idea of the formation of clouds, mapapa 

(Dj.), matlabi (Ro.),.and know that the water from above 
comes from the water below. At any rate they know that the 
sea is water and rain is also water. To obtain rain by a smoke 
rising from burning sea products is a procedure which is in 
keeping with one of the most common intuitions of primitive 
man, that like produces like, a belief which has found its 
expression in the famous principle of the old physicians: *‘ Si- 
milia similibus curantur. 

When practising his rain-making art at home, Mankhelu pro- 
ceeded with less ceremonial pomp. After having consulted his 
bones, he took four leaves of the tscheke plant (p. 14), smeared 
them with the magical powder and exposed them to the rays 
of the burning sun. As soon as those leaves were fully. dessi 
cated, ‘‘Heaven began to roar” and the rain came. 

The great rain medicine is of Pedi or Venda origin. In ad- 
dition to the sacrifice of the black victim and to the mbelele 
rite of purification of the land, which are characteristic Thonga 
customs, it seems that another old Thonga way of obtaining 
rain was the tjeba fishing which I described on p. 70. When 
the whole clan had gone to catch the barbels in the almost 
dried up ponds, a thunderstorm would come and rain would 
fall. This was especially the case with certain small lakes such 
as Malangotiba in Nondwane, and in Nsime near Morakwen, 
because battles had taken place on their borders and the ene- 
mies’ corpses had been thrown into the water. So these lakes 
had become ‘‘ great sacred woods ” (ntimo). I suppose the spi- 
rits of the deceased, which were certainly ‘‘ gods of bitterness”, 
(see next chapter), were supposed to prevent the rain, and the 
ieba either appeased them or made them powerless. 

To sum up this very complicated subject, I would say rain 
rites belong to three different categories : 1) The religious rites 
in relation with ancestor worship (black offering, visit to the 
sacred woods, old songs and sometimes offering of a human 
victim.) 2) Rites of purification of the land, those which derive 
from the mysterious relations established between the power of 
Heaven and abnormal births (mbelele, cleaning of wells by 
women accompanied by the mother of twins); these present 

some features of the ordinary passage rites, either because the 

| of rain inaugurates a new season, or because drought is a ca- 
lamity comparable with death and attended with contamination. 
3) The magic rites, in which the sea charms play the most 
important part. 

Hail, shihangu (Dj.), mabyana, lit. little stones (Ro.), is 
frequent in Thongaland ; according to Mboza, it is not the object 
of any peculiar superstitions. Amongst the Pedi the day on 
which it has fallen must be kept as asabbath. It is taboo to till 
the fields on that day. 

IV. The Inorganic World. 

Water is called mati, a noun of the bu-ma class, class of 
liquids, employed only in the plural form. Notice the suffix f, 
which seems to show that, at a period when mythological con- 
ceptions were still alive, it was considered as a feminine princi- 
ple. This supposition is confirmed by the fact that rivers 
(nambu. pl. milambu) also have the feminine termination (1. 
p. 36, Note). 1 find the following names of rivers ending in #7 : 
Nkomati, Nfoloti (Umbelosi), Nwebeti, Shalati, Timbati ; the ter- 
mination etsi, edzi, may be another form of the same suffix 
(Nwanetsi, Ntsatsi, Shingwedzi, Madzi, etc.). A very curious 
fact, which reveals the same conception, is that the river which 
crosses the territory of the Tembe clan is called Mi-Tembe. I 
first thought this was a plural form of the-mu-mi class ; but it 
is more natural to explain this mi as the feminine Pee a ) 
which means daughter of, as Migogwe, etc. (I. p. 320). 

Crossing rivers is subject to a curious rule: — it is taboo to 
bathe in the stream before crossing it ; taboo also for the tra- 
veller to cook his food on the hither side of the river ; he will 
first cross, then take his meal. This rule is still universally 

(1) A number of river names have the prefix Ii or ri, especially those which 
are of Suto origin: Lebvubye. Ritabi (Letaba) Ritshindjele (Letsitele), Rimbe- 
lule (Lepalula, Olifant), Others begin with nwa, ma, and may be ancient 
names of men. 

followed by waggon trekkers in South Africa. In this case we 
might find a reason for the taboo : South African rivers are apt 
to be filled in a moment by a sudden rain, and the crossing 
made impossible for days: so the traveller makes haste ; he will 
have time to stop on the other side! When the river is dan- 
gerous, a Thonga will first chew (phora) a little of his ndjao, the 
root of a juncus, which is supposed to increase courage and to 
give the victory over hostile influences. (Sée. Part VE), 

Some Lakes and Rivers are believed to be inhabited by spirits, 
but not in the ordinary fetichistic way, as if there were a special 
spiritual being incorporated with the natural object ; these spi- 
rits are psikwembo, spirits of the deceased ancestors of the owners 
of the land, and they are propitiated by their descendants. 
Should another clan have invaded the territory where those lakes 
are, should crocodiles threaten fishermen, (p. 72) they will 
call some one belonging to the clan of the old possessors of the 
country and ask him to make an offering to appease his gods. 
This is the ordinary course and the more you search the better 
you identify these lake and river spirits with ancestor gods. 
In my investigations I found one case, however, where it 
seemed that a special spirit, a kind of Nature spirit is invoked. 
It is on the sea shore, in the Northern part of Nondwane, ata 
place called Mahilane, where there are two great rocks on the 
beach. When the great waves rush against them, with a fearful 
roar, people go and sacrifice (hahla) ; they praythus: “Tsu! Oh 
sea! Let vessels wreck, and steamers also, and let their riches come 
to us and help us.”” In former times, a young gitl was some- 
times abandoned there as a prey, or an offering to the power of 
Mahilane. Now this is exactly what is done in the sacred woods 
for the ancestor gods and, in fact, Mboza asserts that: “« When 
abandoning the eirl, the officiant says : “* You, Psikwembo, 
ancestor-gods, push the sea that it may wreck vessels. ” 

When urged to speak with more precision, my informant 
answered : ‘‘ Mahilane and the sea are one and the same thing 
(ntshumu mufiwe). When the sea is roaring people exclaim : 
‘ Mahilane roars’! Near the island of Shefin, where two branch- 
es of the Nkomati river meet in the estuary people say : 

‘ Makaneta roars.’ Here it is Makaneta and no longer Mahi- 

” 

lane. 

This information is extremely interesting. As regards Makaneta, 
we know him perfectly well ; he is the ancestor of Mboza and descen- 
dant of Mazwayi (1. p. 331). This ancestor god begins to be con- 
fused with a natural phenomenon happening in the country where he 
was living. The religious fear of the spirit of the deceased mingles 
with the awe inspired by the roaring of the sea to such an extent that 
both notions coincide inthe imagination of the savage. We here note 
the exact point where an ancestral spirit evolves into a Nature spirit, and 
this instance proves, as clearly as possible, that the conception of the 
ancestor spirit has preceded that of the Nature spirit. Here, at any 
rate, Ancestrolatry is anterior to both Fetichism and Naturism. 
These later forms of the belief can be easily accounted for by the 
development of Ancestrolatry: the reverse process would be much 
more difficult to explain. 

The sea, with its immensity and its wonderful power, deeply 
impresses the Thonga dwelling near it. They do not however 
tell many stories about it, nor did I hear of any explanation 
regarding its confines and the shore over yonder. Some magi- 
cians pretend to have gone and stayed for sometime down in the 
depths: to have “‘crossed the sea” is for them a kind of diploma, 
which gives them the right of exercising their art. (See Chap- 
ter III). 

The tide (byaela) is considered as being caused by a whale 
(nkomu) which alternately swallows and vomits the sea-water: 
this is the common idea. However some Natives put it in 
connection with the moon, having noticed that the tide is higher 
at full moon and at the wane. 

The sea must be feared: it is jealous. ‘‘ When some one 
is taken away by the great wave, do not shout! Do not ex- 
claim : ‘He is lost!’, else you will never see him again. On 
the contrary, if you say: ‘ All right, let him go’, then the re- 
turning wave will bring him back.” These are declarations of 
Spoon. And the old Makhani approved by nodding his head ! 

“Tt is the same with fire,” also remarked Spoon. There was 

a terrible bush fire im Rikatla on the 18 of September 1908. 
As always happens at the end of winter, the bush was absolute- 
ly dry. A leper woman, tilling her fields, wanted to cook a 
little manioc. The fire leapt to the weeds which she had ga- 
thered and from these to the bush. Two huts were burnt: — 
“Tt is their own fault ”, said Spoon, “‘ when the bush fire comes 
you must put it out quietly. If you make any noise, if you 
cry, it comes straight at you. That is what happened. In the 
first village people fought calmly and succeeded in saving their 
huts. At Jeck’s village, they cried out. The fire leapt on a 
hut, the-small hut of the son. The mother cried = < Yo! yo! 
Where shall I put my child?’ She wenton crying out until 
the hut was burnt to the ground. So the fire leapt on the big 
hut and burnt it. She has only herself to blame ! ” (1) 

The origin of stones is absolutely unkonwn. Pikinini,a Nkuna 
boy, who was endowed with an extraordinary imagination, once 
made me notice the stratification of a large dolomite boulder on 
which different concentric layers were visible, and he said to me: 
“sYoursee! “Stones also srow!?’ Another Native geologist, 
who had heard the European story of creation, coming from the 
Coast, a country of sand and sand only, and visiting the Dra- 
kensberg Mountains near Shiluvane, was amazed by the enor- 
mous cliffs of the Mamotswuri and gave vent to the following 
reflection : “No wonder we have no stones, in our sandy land. 
When God created the earth, he used them all in building these 
mountains ! ” 

Crystal greatly pleases the Natives. It is rare in South Africa. 
When magicians can secure a white or a black stone they gene- 
rally carry it round the neck together with claws, or teeth, of wild 
animals, or with their little skin bags which they use as amulets. 
This is why I once had the good fortune to be able to exchange 
a crystal I had brought from Switzerland for one of these 
charms ! 

(1) Silence is always recommended to prevent misfortune: in the case of 
war (I. p. 445) women at home must keep silent ; the same when the hus- 

band is hunting hippopotami (p. 61), when a child is seized with convulsions 
owing to the power of filo (heaven), 

The earth (misaba) is also a great, great thing. First because 
it is identified with the people dwelling on it, with the clan. 
Tiko, the land, means both the soil and the people. More than 
this: the earth is the chief (I. p. 354); hence many laws : e g. 
the tusk of the elephant, which has fallen on the earth when the 
beast has been killed, belongs to the chief, etc. (I, p. 378). The 
most solemn oath is that which is taken with earth (ku funga u 
hahla hi misaba). Shoulda man be accused of stealing or being 
a wizard, if he puts a little earth in his mouth, says tsu, and 
declares: “I do not know anything about it”, people who care 
for his safety will look fora medicine-man to treat him: it isa 
mondjo (an enchanted way of divination. See Chapter III). 
The same is done when an oath has’ been taken by sucking a 
piece of iron. 

A curious superstition regarding earth is this: after having 
moved from one country to another, for some days you should 
mix with your food a little of the earth of the country which 
you have left ; this will provide the transition between the old 
and the new domicile (See I. p. 47). 

Metals known by the tribe before the coming of the Whites 
were few. (See page 120). Nhumbu or nsimbi, iron, nsuku, cop- 
per, and ntchopfa, a name applied to all white metals (tin, silver, 
etc.) are the only Native names for metals. There is no word 
for gold. 

V. The Vegetable world. Thonga Botany. 

If Bantu possess a very limited knowledge of Astronomy, 
Geography, Mineralogy, etc., if their superstitions do not in any 
way deserve the name of Science, they are much more advanced 
asregards Plants. Here it is quite allowable to speak ofa Science, 
a rudimentary Science, no doubt, but a true, precise knowledge 
which has been transmitted from past ages and which denotes a 
real power of observation. 

The Delagoa flora is not very rich. I have succeeded in collect- 
ing between four and five hundred different kinds in her- 

—— 306 s, 

barium which I sent many years ago for classification to the 
Herbier Boissier in Geneva. In February 1893, before forward- 
ing the second lot of exsiccata, I once gathered together some 
Natives of Rikatla in the hut which I had pompously styled a 
Museum and, having promised them 1/ each if they con- 
sented to remain till the end of the examination, I submitted 
the dried plants to them, asking them their names, their uses, 
etc. ‘The result of the inquiry was marvellous. My areopagus 
did not seem to be a very choice one : an old woman, as dry 
as my exsiccata and smoking her pipe, another with ochreated 
hair, a young one, a baby on her shoulder, an elderly one-eyed 
man named Hamunde, my milkman. After them came the 
young chief Muzila, walking slowly, swinging the tails of his 
belt : this chief, notwithstanding his social rank, showed gross 
ignorance in botany; but some of the others knew the name 
of almost every plant; had. I had a manga, a medicine-man, 
amongst them, I am sure I would have obtained names for each 
specimen of the collection, for they are the great connoisseurs 
in this domain, their drugs being almost entirely obtained from 
the vegetable world. 

A study of these names undoubtedly proves that Natives have 
the notion of the genus. This had been denied; it seems that, 
when naming animals, Bantu correctly distinguish species, but 
do not classify species into genera In Botany it is not so. 
Under the same name they unite forms which are sometimes 
widely different, but belong to the same genus. Here are some 
of these names : 

Tsuna means fern and applies to the Acrostichum tenuifolium, 
which climbs on the palm trees in the marsh, as well as to the 
few other kinds of Filicea found in the district of Lourenco 
Marques; gonhwa is the name for Liliaceae, many kinds of which 
blossom in the spring : the Crinum Forbesii, with its big white 
and pink flower, and other kinds forming a bowl at the extre- 
mity of the stem; there are five kinds of Commelina in my 
collection which were called Nkompfana, either those with blue 
flowers, or the yellow one; a certain Papillionaceae genus, the 
Eriosema, is called Rongole. All these Strigae, a genus of the Scro- 

S07 
phulariaceae family, are known under the name of Shitshinya- 
mbita, those which prevent the pot from boiling, as they are 
believed to have this effect when put into the fire. The Lobe- 
liae are called Shilawana, etc. 

The notion of the genus is so really present that Thonga dis- 
tinguish various kinds in the same genus. So the tree called 
Nkahlu, an Apocynea, the Tabaernaemontana ventricosa, a pre- 
cious tree whose sap is used as a styptic, and whose roots make 
a decoction for lung complaints, has a congener, found in the 
palm-tree marsh, the Voacanga Dregei, which is called Nkahlu- 
obo, nkahlu of the marsh. ‘The two genera are very near each 
other. 

Cognate kinds found in various regions are thus distinguished 
by the mention of their habitat, either the hill (ntlhaba), or the 
black earth (nyaka), or the forest (mutju). There is the Mublu 
wa ntlhaba, of the hill, and Muhlu-tjobo, of the marsh (Secamone 
sp. tree of the Asclepiadaceae family). The case is even more 
striking with the Hibiscus genus. Its name is Nijhesi ; there 
are the Ntjhesi of the hill (Hibiscus surratensis, etc.), the Ntjhensi 
of the ‘nyaka, another kind found in Morakwen in the 
black earth; and there is the shitjhesinyana sha nilhaba, double 
diminutive of ntjhesi, the Sida cordifolia, a nice little Malvacea, 
a near relative of the Hibiscus, very much used in treating 
children’s complaints, a panacea for babies, as it cures their 
vomiting, headache, wounds and internal troubles ! 

I find the same correct connection established between two 
Anonaceae shrubs, the Artabotrys brachypetala, called Ntiti, and 
the Art. Monteiroae, called Shintitane, littie Ntiti, same genus. 
but a shrub of a very different appearance. 

However there is, of course, no anatomical study at the base 
of this classification : so their ideas of genus are not always 
scientifically speaking, correct. They call Phakama any para- 
site of whatever form it may be, and have a superstitious fear 
of them, especially of the larger ones, growing on other trees, 
such as the nkanye and nkuhlu : “ Phakama dja singita! ” (1) 

(1) “The parasite stem singifa”, i. e. is of bad omen. They do not 
say yila, is taboo, though some rules apply to it, similar to those concerning 

GOR == 

Nkushe means sea-weed, either the true algae, as Lagarosiphon 
muscoides, or other plants growing in water and belonging to 
totally different families, such as Urticularia stellaris, found in 
the same locality. Nkaka, or Nkakana, is the little Cucumber 
already described (p. 14), whilst Nkaka wa tjhobo is a Convol- 
vulvus (Ipomea cairica). The Shirimbyati, one of the names 
most employed, designates first the Helichrysum parviflorum, 
a yellow Composita which covers the sandy dunes, and blos- 
soms during the winter; but Shirimbyati sha tjhune, the male 
one, is Gnaphalium stenophyllum, and Shirimbyati sha mutju, 
the one of the forest, an Indigofera belonging to the Legumi- 
nosae family : these three plants have in common small hard 
leaves: hence the same name given to them, although they 
are by no means related botanically speaking. So shirimbyati 
corresponds to our word heath, which is applied to many ever- 
green under-shrubs. 

The want of an enlightened botanical sense is further seen 
in the following fact : three different kinds of Vernonia, though 
belonging to the same genus, are called by different names, as 
if their relation had altogether not been perceived by the Thonga. 
The Vernonia cinerea is called Néshontshongori; the V. Perot- 
teti, Nkukulashibuya (the plant with which one sweeps the 
threshing floor); the V. Tigna, Hlungublungu. 

Another case of one and the same name applied to plants 
of different families which have but an external resemblance is 
the following: the Ndjiba is a Leguminosa tree of great pro- 
portions, Apalatoa delagoensis (Schinz), and the Shindjibana, viz, 
the little Ndjiba, is a small shrub with leaves somewhat similar 
to those of the Ndjiba. Its scientific name is Synaptolepis Oli- 
veriana and it belongs to the Thymeleaceae family. 

No wonder the notion of genus, though existing, has not 
been always correctly and universally applied : Thonga have 
no idea of the anatomy of the plants : they never analysed a 
flower, and are totally ignorant of the presence of male and 

the tree struck by lightning. One does not warm oneself at its fire; its wood 
is not employed to cook food, for fear that men may suffer from hydrocele. 

= 509) 
female elements in it. They however know that these sexual 
differences exist. They have noticed, for instance, amongst the 
nkanye stems, which are a dioecious kind, that some are male 
and some female, and they carefully preserve some of the male 
stems in order to fecundate the female ones; but they believe 
that this fecundation takes place through the roots of the trees ! 

Thus, when the name of a plant can be explained, we see 
that, in naming it, its external characters, or its uses, have only 
been considered. For instance the beautiful yellow Stercu- 
liacea, Melhania Forbesii, is called Muhlwadambu, Setting Sun, 
because its deep colour is similar to that of the sun when dip- 
ping below the horizon. A certain plant whose seeds make an 
explosion when crushed, is the Buputwana, because, “‘ it says 
bu-bu-bu”. A climbing Composita with juicy stem is the 
Kamele, ‘‘the one which is pressed’, (kama) to express its juice, 
which is said to have medicinal value. An Euphorbiacea whose 
fruit is eaten by the partridges (Fluggea obovata) is the 
Midyanhwari, patridges food. Those named after their uses 
are, for. instance, Nkukulashibuye, the one which sweeps the 
threshing floor (Vernonia Perotteti); Nhlangulabatjongwana, 
Hibiscus damarensis, the one employed to wipe little children 
when dirty! (This plant is tomentous and answers well for 
the purpose); Psekamafura, a large tree (Casearia Junodi, 
Schinz), a tree whose fuel is particularly good for melting the 
mafureira fat (p. 18), etc. 

The great use of the vegetable world is that it provides men 
with food and medicine. If plants bear names and have been 
carefully studied by the Bantu it is, in the first place, because 
they are useful in these two respects. We have already consi- 
dered the Thonga vegetarian food (p. 9-20),ardI shall devote 
some pages to the medical art in Chapter III. 

In Appendix ILI give a list of Thonga botanical names with 
their scientific equivalents. These plants have been identified 
by D* Schinz, who published a flora of Delagoa Bay in the 
“Bulletin de ’Herbier Boissier ”, N° 10, 1900. 

The conclusion of this study of Thonga names of plants is 
that the vegetable world has been the subject of a real and, in 

a certain way, scientific observation,on their part. Their bota- 
nical knowledge can be compared with that of our forefathers 
of two or three hundred years ago, before Botany became a real 
science, when plants were still named from their external cha- 
racters, and studied as medical herbs; I may even state that 
this knowledge, though of an inferior character, is more gene- 
ral amongst Thonga than, for instance, amongst European peas- 
antry; this fact showing that the powers of observation and of 
scientific study are not inferior to those of other more advanced 
races. 

Do plants play a part in Thonga religion ? 

When travelling through the country, you may come across 
a tree round which ‘a rag has been tied, evidently for some 
religious purpose. The first idea would be that this tree is 
worshipped, but this is by no means the case. The tree is pro- 
bably the one which divinatory bones have singled out as the 
one around which the village should b ebuilt, and the offering 
of this rag is made to the spirits of the ancestors, exactly as it is 
done when the rag is placed near the grave, or at the door of 
the little hut built on it, in the case of possessed ones, (See 
I. p. 141 and later on Chapter III). The tree is only sacred 
on account of this association. I have sometimes called the 
Nkanye a sacred tree and Thonga call it the king of trees: but 
it is not so of itself, as if it had any Nature spirit dwelling in 
it; everybody can cut it without transeressing a taboo; it is 
venerated because it provides the tribe with the national beer, 
and because its branches are used as pillows for the dead and its 
twigs as mhamba in the funeral service (I. p. 138). The reli- 
gious and social Juma, to which the bukanyi is subject, is 
observed from fear of the ancestral spirits and not because the 
tree itself is in any way worshipped. In fact I never met with 
any worship offered to a plant as such. 

VI. The Animal World. 

Plants, psimili or psa-kumila, things which grow (ku mila), 
are distinguished from animals, called psibandjana, or psthari, 
which are said to kula, become great, and not mila. 

The knowledge which Thonga have of animals is extensive. 
They give names to all the larger ones, especially, of course, to 
those which are eaten, but also to smaller, insignificant and 
useless ones. 

The Annelida are called by the generic name of tinyokana, 
diminutive of nyoka (yin-tin), snake; the leeches, ntjundju (mu- 
mi); the lumbrics, nshikwa (yin-tin), either those living in the 
earth or parasites in the intestines of children. 

Amongst Myriapoda the Julideae are called Khongoloti (dji- 
ma); the Millepedes, Ndlandlalati (yin-tin). When one of these 
has stung a Native, you will see him swallow a little earth, and 
a mouthful of water after it, to prevent swelling taking place. 
“The milleped will die at once and you will not suffer much, 
because you have been wiser than it (u mu yi rangelile butlha- 
rua ee 

The same precaution is taken with Scorpions, shiphame (D}.), 
mubalane (Ro.). Other Arachnida are the Spiders (pume (dji- 
ma), ripe (dji-ma), the Ticks (shikalana), and the Itch (shi- 
nwayana), which Thonga know but too well without being aware 
that it is caused by a microscopic animal. To this group pro- 
bably belongs the maroda, a parasite met with in the huts of 
Bilen and other remote parts of the country, and whose bite 
causes a real disease. 

The Insect world, so richly represented in Tropical countries (1) 

(1) See my publications on the Entomology of Delagoa Bay ; I). Coleoptera, 
with the collaboration of Dr. Bugnion ; II Orthoptera, by Dr.A. von Schulthess 
Rechberg ; ILI. Hemiptera by Prof. Montandon in the ‘‘ Bulletin de la Société 
vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles”. XXV, p. 132-220; 1V). Lepidoptera, « Bulle- 
tin de la Société Neuchateloise des Sciences naturelles » Tome XXVII, p. 177- 
250. 

is pretty well known, though many of its representatives are of 
no practical use to the Natives. 

Orthoptera. Acridius peregrinus, the locust which ravages the 
fields, is called humbi (yin-tin) in Ronga and ndjiya (yin-tin) 
in Djonga. (See p. 65). The first ‘‘ clouds” which appeared 
greatly impressed the Natives when they were seen at the begin- 
ning of the war of 1894. I heard some one say that this phe- 
nomenon had been foretold by a ‘‘ mulungwana”’, a little man 
fallen from heaven to announce this calamity which was threat- 
ening the land. (See next chapter). Other Acridians are called 
mhera (yin-tin); the larvae of locusts, which abound at certain 
times in the gardens, are the hondje (yin-tin). The Pamphyeus, 
fat, heavy, grey locust, the female apterous, are called phuphu 
(dji-rma). The Grillus is Shiyendlwa (shi- psi), and is eaten by 
some. But the best known Orthoptera are those of the Man- 
tidae family whose representatives are numerous in the country. 
They are called Nwambyevu-mbyevu (Dj.) or Niwambyevulane 
(Ro.), viz., the one which cuts the hair, probably on account 
of its paws which move like scissors. This insect plays a great 
part in the superstitions of the Bushmen who worship it. 
Amongst the Thonga there is a similar custom : young shepherds 
when they meet with a Mantis, tear out a little hair from the 
skins of their belt and offer it tothe insect saying : “‘ Take, Grand- 
father!” They say that in old times they were considered as 
gods (psikwembu), or rather emissaries of the ancestor gods just 
the same as the little green snakes (Chapter II); their name 
was Mahulwahulwane, and when one of them entered a hut, no 
one interfered with it, as it was thought that perhaps some god 
had come to pay a visit to his descendants. ‘These ideas regard- 
ing Mantidae seems to be disappearing now and the offering is 
but a little children’s game. An other Orthoptera is the Shi- 
pfalapfapfa, an onomatopoeia, describing a flying locust, and the 
Shishirikoko, a large kind which emits saliva through its tho- 
rax. When it flies Thonga say to it: ‘Go to the place where 
people eat meat !” 

Hemiptera. Bugs are well, too well, known in Vhongaland, 
having taken up their abode in most of the huts, where they 

eter ok 
are tolerated. They are called Nsiketi (yin-tin) and the wild 
bugs Nsiketi ya nhoba, bug of the bush. Lice, Nhwala (yin-tin), 
are considered as vermin, and often as the result of bewitch- 
ment, especially when seen swarming on children. Many Aphi- 
dae (grubs) cause an exudation on certain shrubs, a kind of 
wax, the Mubodi, which is used for the manufacture of the 
black crowns (I, p. 129) ; others are called Shibungubungu, 
the red ones, probably a kind of cochineal. 

Neuroptera. Diptera. The equivalent of these names of flies is 
Nhongana (yin-tin). Mosquitoe are called Buswna and fleas 
Butseka, with the prefix bu which here means a collection, a 
great number. Busokoti a similar word designates the ants. 
The big gad-flies are the Bawa (dji-ma). The Libellulidae are 
called Mungutane (mu-ba) and the Termitideae Muhlwa 
(mu-mi). 

Lepidoptera. Butterflies and moths are designated by a single 
word, Phaphalati (Dj. Notice the feminine suffix), or Phapha- 
tane (Ro.) (dji-ma), and their caterpillars by the term Hukwa 
(yin-tin) or Tomane (dji-ma), this last word especially applying 
to the large Saturnidae caterpillars which are eaten by the Na- 
tives (p. 64). The relation between the caterpillar and the 
butterfly is not generally known; only once did I find a boy 
who knew that a certain white cocoon, used as an ornament 
in dances (p. 84) gave birth to the big green moth with long 
tails, the Queen Moth. The reason why butterflies, though 
plentiful in-Thongaland, have so little attracted the attention 
of Natives is, no doubt, the fact that they do not in any way 
contribute to their food. I have told the story of a woman 
who tried to force a child to eat a butterfly. (I. p. 419). 

Coleoptera. The general term for Coleoptera is Shifufununu, 
and it especially applies to the big Tenebrionidae (Psammodes 
Bertoloni), called shifufununu sha aribar (p. 67) and to the large 
black Carabidae of the Anthia genus which abound on the 
roads in spring; one of them marked with small depressions 
on the elytra is, for that reason, called the small pox shifufu- 
nunu ‘(sha nyedzane). Travelling once with a grown-up 
Thonga we saw a black Carabida which had four white spots 

a 

on the back. It was the charming Eccoptoptera mutilloides. 
Isaw him trace a circle round it in the sand saying: ‘* To-day 
I shall eat to my heart’s content! ” — “ Namunhla ndji ta 
shura! ”” — What are you doing ? ”’ I said. — “‘ Oh! this is 
the Shurwa-shurwane ”, he answered. “ When you meet it it 
is a sign that you will have plenty to eat! ” He was making 
a mistake! The real shurwa-shurwane is the Mutilla, a kind 
of apterous wasp, which also has four white spots on the back, 
and the beetle we met was so similar to it that he mistook it 
for a Mutilla : is it not called mutilloides, pseudo-mutilla ? (r) 
— The Copride are called Gadlen (dji-ma) and these strange 
dung-eaters, which are extremely abundant in the country, are 
thought to be under the command of the wizards who can 
introduce them into your body to kill you. The pretty Ce- 
rambycide, with their long horns, are the Nwahomurikotjo the 
ox of Rikotcho, or, according to a better etymology, the ox 
with horns bent backwards (kotjeka). Children sing an incan- 
tation before them, clapping their hands (1, p- 67). Their big 
white larvae, the Shipungwana, dig channels in the stems ot 
nkanye, nkuhlu, mphesa, etc., and are readily eaten as well as 
the Shimhukuta, larva of a large Cantharis swarming in the 
stems of the palm trees of the marsh (p. 4). The Shitambela, 
a big Buprestida is roasted by the shepherds and eaten after 
they have torn off its elytra (I. p. 65). 

Hymenoptera. Wasps are called Mupft or Mupfu (mu-mi), 
and four different kinds are classified : the Mupfu proper (Belo- 
nogaster), the T/atlanhongana, the Bamaandlopfu, a grey kind, 
and the Mumpfundlopfu, a large black kind which burrows in 
the soil. When somebody has been stung by a wasp, the 
others laugh at him. If he resents being made fun of, they 
say to him: ‘* Be not angry; we do this to help you”. They 

(1) This custom reminds one of what Swiss children do when they send 
the ladybird to heaven, to ask God to give them fine weather to-morrow, or 
what they say when they pretend that crushing a golden Carabus on the 
road will make rain fall. Certain Coleoptera are of good omen everywhere ! 
Only, ifin Europe they foretell fine weather, in Africa they announce a good 
meal. The difference is significant ! 

SSeS ee 
really try to divert his attention from the pain in order to 
comfort him. Bees are called Nyoshi (yin-tin) and are greatly 
appreciated for their honey (p. 43). Natives know the males 
(djongwe, dji-ma) the larvae (shipungwu), which they eat with as 
much pleasure as the honey itself. They call the honeycombs 
hahla (dji-ma) or shiblenga, the wax, mumpfu (mu-mi) and the 
pollen brought by the bees, msindjo. The curious Mbonga (yin- 
tin) Bee is worth special mention, owing to the superstitions 
which are held regarding it, and the part it plays in certain 
rites (I. p. 361). This species, which does not sting, digs a 
narrow passage of two or three feet deep in the soil and exca- 
yates a hole of one or two feet broad where it builds its round 
nest. Natives say nobody knows what the mbonga does with 
the earth which it digs out of the cavity in which it puts its 
nest. No heap of earth is ever seen in the vicinity. The hole 
is continued under the nest and has no end. It propably reach- 
es subterranean pools where the insects go to drink, — as it is 
said that one has never seen a mbonga drinking from the lake, 
or the well, as do the other bees. Moreover the entrance to a 
mbonga nest is invisible to the majority of people. It is only 
certain families who can see it and consequently dig out the 
precious honey. For all these reasons the mbonga is surrounded 
with a certain mystery, and this is no doubt why its honey 
‘s used in the manufacture of the nyokwekulu. Its scientific 
name is Trigona togoensis, var. Junodi (Friese). 

Amongst the Mollusca, a great many are eaten: the Mbatsana 
(yin-tin) of the sea (bivalve shells), Likatla (lin-tin) of the lakes, 
and the Hwaru (yi-tin), oysters of the Tembe shore. The 
land shells are called Humba (yi-tin) ; the big ones (Achatina 
Lamarkiana) are used as safes for the deposit of pounds sterling 
and are often buried in the huts ; hence the expression Humba 
ya bupfundji, shell of riches ! The smaller ones, resembling 
our snails (Aerope caffra), are rarer and it is considered a bad 
omen to meet with them on the road. — ‘“‘ Where you go you 
will hear cries of mourning!” Their name is Shikumbukwane. 
The slugs are called Holokompfa (yin-tin) and the smaller shells 
Shihumbanyana, diminutive humba. 

eee 316 —s 

Fishes all have names, but having never dwelt in the close 
vicinity of the sea, I have not learnt them. I know the Mfungwe 
(yi-tin), the fish whose mouth ends in a saw, the Mangapfi 
(dji-ma), the name of a kind of hawk given to the flying fish 
of Delagoa Bay, the Nhempfane (yi-tin) found in the fresh water 
ponds, the Ntima (yi-tin) the barbel, the black fish which must 
not be eaten by lovers before their marriage (I, p. 167). 

Amphibia. Ntlambya (mu-mi) is the ordinary frog (Rana oxy 
rhynca) whose young ones are known and called Shilungula ; 
another black kind is the Rebya (dji-ma); the tree-frogs are call- 
ed Shilungwalungwana (Rappia marmorata and argus); the toad 
Kele (dji-ma), Bufo regularis ; the famous Breviceps mossambi- 
cus is Shinana (1. p. 86) the great warrior of the tales. 

Reptilia. There are many kinds of Lizards. The common 
kind found in the houses, under the verandas is, the Mabuia 
striata, the Mponondjo (mu-mi); the Lygodactylus capensis, 
found on the hills, is the Nkolombya (mu-mi); the little Agama 
aculeata, running on the sand, Shipyindji or Shihonokamablo, the 
one which gazes at you; the large gheko, Agama atricollis, 
with a head whose grey colour can change into blue, Galagala 
or Phululu (dji-ma) ; the grey one hiding itself in dark places, 
in hollow stems or under roofs is the Hokokwana (dji-ma), He- 
midactylus grenatus; it is said that when this lizard sucks at the 
breast of a human being, it is impossible to remove it, and the 
only means of getting rid of it is to go and suckle a dog ! 

But the most curious lizard of these countries, the one which 
most strikes the Native imagination is the Chameleon (Chame- 
leon Petersii), Lumpfana (dji-ma). Herd boys throw ground 
tobacco into its mouth to avenge themselves of the bad trick it 
played upon mankind when it delayed on the road and came 
too late to bring the message of eternal life (as we are just 
about to learn). It is used by certain magicians to discover 
thieves. They smear a chameleon with a drug which makes it 
turn white and they let it go: “ Then the thief, where he is, 
also turns white, and if he does not confess his theft, he dies!” 

The flesh of all these lizards is not eaten, but that of the big 
Varan which lives near the rivers, Kwable (dji-ma) is considered 

Be 
a treat. The kwahle is said to be very hard to kill. About 
Crocodiles (ngwenya, yin-tin) all sorts of stories are told. 
When one of them has been killed, the contents of its stomach 
are carefully preserved : Thonga pretend that each year, when the 
rains begin, crocodiles swallow a stone, so that their age can 
be known by counting them. These stones are taboo : for a 
subject to swallow them is a cause of death, but one of them 
is chosen, treated with certain drugs and swallowed by the 
chief to warn him of his death as we have already seen (I, 
p. 365). 

Tortoises, whose generic name is Mfutju(yin-tin), are eaten and 
used in the divinatory art, as we shall see. Some lake tortoi- 
ses are called Gamba (dji-ma) and sea tortoises Hast (dji-ma). 

Snakes (nyoka, yin-tin) are generally dreaded and considered 
dangerous, although many kinds are quite harmless. The Shi- 
pyahla (Ro.), Mbiri (yin-tin, Dj.) is the big, lazy, grey puff- 
adder, creeping on the ground, one of the most venomous kinds, 
together with the Mbamba (yin-tin), a slender kind, very swift 
and often found on trees. ‘‘ When you meet a mhiri ”, say 
the Nkuna, ‘‘ throw a little earth on it and you will soon see 
its brother! ” Of course magicians have plenty of drugs to 
cure snake bites. For this purpose they use the head of the 
adder roasted and pulverised. Shibatlankombe, (Naja nigricollis), 
“the one which carves a spoon ” is the name of a kind which 
inflects its neck till it looks like a spoon. The Hhlaru (yin- 
tin) is the boa. They eat it. Another member of the Clapi- 
dae family is the Likure, a pretty greyish violet kind (Causus 
Lichtensteinii). Amongst the harmless snakes are those: little 
blue ones, Shibundje (Dendrophis subcarinatus), which are con- 
sidered as emissaries of the ancestor spirits. I shall mention 
them again later on. The Nsoma (yin-tin), very common and 
harmless, is probably Dispholidus typus. Some small ones, not 
larger than worms, but hard and shining like metal, are called 
Tumbi-tumbi, because they hide (tumba) in the sand. One ot 
them seems to. be Xenocalamus bicolor. 

There are also legendary snakes of the Thonga. On the 
Coast they speak of the Buwumati, which dwells in the lakes 

ae 318 a 

and is invisible. One. only hears it crying “ bu-wu-bu-wu ” 
when the rain is falling, and its voice is as loud as that of an 
antelope. Should it show itself to a traveller, it is a very bad 
sign. ‘The story is told of a man who came back from con- 
sulting a bone-thrower. He saw the buwumati lying on the 
ground, its rings extending far away, closing all the passages. 
He retraced his steps, but after three days he died. In the 
Transvaal, this dreadful snake is called Shimhemhemhe, the name 
also being an imitation of its cry. This superstition is perbaps 
of Pedi origin, but it has been accepted by the Nkuna. The 
shimhemhemhe dwells in certain dark woody ravines on the 
slopes of the Drakensberg mountains. If anyone imprudently 
penetrates there, the snake pursues him, creeping along the 
branches above, and bites him on the top of the head. A man 
met with it once on the way to Thabina and saw it on the 
road, its head raised, a shining head of two colours. There was 
no end to its body. He tried to avoid it by making a long cir- 
cuit; he reached home, but died because he had seen the snake 
which it is death to see! 

Birds (Yinyanyana, yin-tin). Having made no regular col- 
lection of birds, I cannot here give the scientific names corres- 
ponding to vernacular ones. These are very numerous, and 
they are not always the same in the different clans. Here is the 
list which I made by questioning the pupils of my school who 
came from all parts of Thongaland : (1) 

Palmipeda. Sekwa (dji-ma) duck. Sekwanyari, Sekwambala, Shi- 
kukubi,. (Mal. Kho.). Nwafamben (Mal. Nku.). Shiblakablaka, Lin- 
gubi (Mal.). Shiyankaken, Tutwana, (Mpf. Bil.). Neululwana (yin- 
tin), (Mpf.). 

Long-legged birds. (Tinyanyana ta psikokoko). Kukolwe (Mpt. 
Bil. Mal.). Munyangana, Nwantjangantjangana (mu-ba) (Mpf.)- 
Makhondjwawa, Gumba (dji-ma), Mayiwabembe, Tshebane (Mal.). 
Mugalandlopfu (Mpf. Mal.); Tshembyana (Mal.). Tjololwane (Mal. 
Mpf.). Yindwa, Randjane, (Kho. Mal.). Nwamablanga (Mpf.). 
Mampfana, or Shistbaliendjo. 

(1) Abbrev. Mal.  Maluleke: Kho, — Khosen, Antioka: Nku.  Nkuna g 
Mpf.  Mpfumo ; Bil.  Bilene ; Spel. = Spelonken. 

ee gee 

Gallinacea. Huku, domestic hen. Nkuwku (mu-mi) cock. Hwart 
(yin-tin) partridge. Mhangelane (yin-tin), Guinea fowl. Shiljatjatja 
(Mpf. Nku.). Nkungu (Mpf.). Matjyatjyana (Nku.). Teentana, or 
keenkana (dji-ma), quail, (Mpf ). Nkwahla, (Mpf. Kho.). Huku- 
mati, (Mpf. Nku.). Mangoko (Mal.). Makokwe, or Makwekwe 
(Mpf.). Hlokoyo (Mal.). Shibotshe (Mal.). Djyedjyedjye, (Mal.). 
Nadjendjenle (Mal.). Ndura, (Nku.). Ngukulukwana QNku.), or 
Shitiwitioi (Mpf.). Nkulunkulu (Mpf. Kho.) a splendid bird red, 
ereen and blue, called the bird of the chiefs, because chiefs used 
to adorn themselves with its feathers, is the Gallirex porphy- 
reolophus. 

Pigeons. Tuba (dji-ma), pigeon. Shibambalana, or bombokonyi 
(Mpf.); same as Mbabawunyi (Nku. Mal.). Gororotwana (Mpf.) 
corresponds to Gugurwana (Mal. Kho.). Nyakungufe (Mpf.) cor- 
responds to Kopolo, or Mangobolo (Nku. Mal.). Ngalane or Shidju- 
vapepe (Mal.). 

Sparrows. Mbawulwane (yin-tin), (Mpf.) or Mbeulwane (Kho. 
Nku.) swallow. Psikidyana (Spel. Mal.). Tinhwana (Mpf. Bil.). 
Tinkala (Kho.). Nkapa (mu-mi) (Mpf.) Nsongwana, (Mpf.). 
Nblekwana, Tshamatisa, Shindjengeletana Mpf. Nku.). Nadwa- 
ngafolen (mu-ba) (Mpf.). Nwamutjalatana (mu-ba) (Mpf.). Lidja 
djana, (Spel. Mal.). Timbatana (Mpf.). Tinhelwa (Mpf.). Ngodzi 
(Spel. Mal.). Khwezu, Kololwana, etc., Sowa (dji-ma), sparrow. 

Creepers. Gongondjwane, lit. the one who knocks. Shitjemaha- 
ngala (Mal.). Munywane (Mal.). Ngobo (Nku). Hokwe, Ndblazi, 
Nkoro. 

Rapaces. Gama (dji-ma). Khoti (dji-ma). Shikotana, Mangapfi, 
Shimungu, Shibununu, (Mpf.), or Khukhuniu (Kho. Mal.). Shiko- 
tlwane, Hwali, Fukwana (dji-ma). Manhengana, etc. 

Runners. Yinljya (yin-tin), ostrich. 

Some birds are the objects of superstitious ideas. First, the my- 
thical lightning bird whose story has been told p. 290. Then the 
Mampfana, the one who stops travellers (p. 128), and the Nhla- 
lala. The Nblalala is the honey-bird. It is a little sparrow of 
greyish colour.. When atraveller crosses the uninhabitated coun- 
try, it calls his attention by emitting short and repeated cries ; it 
jumps from one branch to another and does not rest until it has 

induced the traveller to follow it. It leads him to a hollow stem 
where bees have gathered honey. The fortunate wayfarer can 
eat to his heart’s content and gives the bird the wax. If he 
wants to be shown a second tree, he only has to burn the wax : 
the nhlalala not having had its full share of the treat will lead 
him to another stem, hoping to have one more chance; there 
is so much honey in the second place that you will certainly 
leave some for your kind guide! Such are some of the stories 
told by a boy called Pikinini about the honey-bird. 

Mammalia My information, on the subject, is far from com- 
plete. One ought to join a Native hunting party, and hear 
the hunters tell their mighty deeds round the fire in the eve- 
ning, if one wished to acquire all their knowledge and learn 
all their queer ideas about the beasts of the bush, which they 
have carefully observed, and regarding which a great number 
of stories are circulated. I will have to content myself with 
giving the name of some Mammalia and relating some super- 
stitions about them. 

Edentata : two kinds are known, the Mpandjana (yin-tin) the 
ant-bear, which is covered with hair, and the Kwara (dji-ma) 
which has scales. The only Cetacea known is the Nkomu (yin- 
tin) the whale. 

Solipedes : Mangwa (yin-tin) means zebra and this term is 
sometimes applied to horses; this latter animal is called Hanshi 
(dji-ma), evidently a corruption of the English word. Mbongolo 
(yin-tin), donkey. Mula or Mewula, mule. 

Pachyderna : Ngulube (yin-tin), wild boar and also, by exten- 
sion, domesticated pig. Mpfubu (yin-tin), hippopotamus. 

Ruminantia : Homu (yin-tin), ox. Nyari (yin-tin), buffalo. 
Hamba (yin-tin, Ro.). Nyimpfu (yin-tin, Dj.), sheep. Mbuti (yin- 
tin), goat. Mbhalambala (yin-tin), sable antelope, Hippotragus 
niger. Mbala (yin-tin) (Zulu impala). Mbunti (yin-tin), duyker 
Hongonyi (yin-tin), gnu. Mangulwe (mu-ba). Mbetlwa (yin-tin) 
water buck. Nhlangu (yin-tin), reed buck. Mbofu (yin-tin), elan, 
Nhutlwa (yin-tin), giraffe, etc. 

Proboscidea : Ndlopfu (yin-tin), elephant. 

Rodentia : Mpfundla (mu-mi), hare, Noblolo (yin-tin), rabbit. 

Khondlo (dji-ma), mouse. Vondo (dji-ma), Phephe (dji-ma), Ngole 
(yin-tin) etc. 

Insectivora : Shitlulandlela, mole, lit. the one ‘which crosses 
the road; it is a bad omen for a mole to cross your path. Tju- 
kunyana, a brownish mole which burrows its passages just below 
the surface of the ground. Hence the fact that a bracelet made 
of its skin is employed as medicine against the Filaria, a 
parasite which makes its way under the skin ! 

Carnivora : Nsimba (yin-tin), civet cat. Shipakana, cat. Mbyana 
(yin-tin), dog. Mhisi (yin-tin), hyena. Hlolwa, Nblati (mu-ba), 
fox. Yingwe (yin-tin), leopard. Ndjaw (Ro), nghala (Dj.), lion, etc. 

Chiroptera : Tangadana (dji-ma, Ro), Mangadyana, (mu-ba. 
Diss: bat: 

Prirnates : Mfene (yin-tin), baboon. Habu (yin-tin), monkey. 

The monkeys are considered degenerate human beings, who 
lost the habit of working and of tilling fields, and thus fell into 
their present miserable condition. 

The collection of Native names of animals which I have com- 
piled is interesting; first from the linguistic point of view, for 
purposes of comparison. Bantu philology needs such lists of 
words on which to base its conclusions. Let me point out 
that there seems to be a great uniformity in the various South 
African dialects as regards the names of big animals : the root 
being the same although the names have been differentiated 
by the regular phonetic permutations (1) ;0n the contrary, names 
of trees vary very much, even from one Thonga clan to the 
other. But these names also interest us as throwing some light 
on the conceptions of the Bantu regarding Nature. ‘The notion 
of genus is not so marked as amongst plants. It is, however, 
not absent. The different kinds of ducks are called sekwa, 
sekwa-nyari, sekwa-mhala, the word sekwa being a true genus 
name. We may even find the notion of order in the classifica- 
tion of mammalia made by Mankhelu when he said : “ Wo- 

(1) Compare the names of my list with the Zulu and Nyandja ones col- 
lected by Miss Werner in the Revue d’Ethnographie et de Sociologie. Jany. 
Avril 1911. 

men eat only flesh of animals having hoofs, and not that of 
animals having paws” €p. 67). 

It is curious to inquire to which of the grammatical classes 
these names belong. Most of them are of the yin-tin class, the 
proper class of animals. Torrend has put the prefix tin in rela- 
tion with the stem psala, to beget, to bring forth, and this may 
be correct. But many are of the dji-ma class. which often con- 
tains objects forming groups; animals roaming in companies, as 
well as the regiments of the army (mabotshu, mabandla, I. p. 
431), frequently belong to this class. (Sekwa, duck; sowa, spar- 
row; khoti, vulture; hanshi, the horse of White people, of the 
cavalry, etc.). Some mammalia have the personal prefix ba for 
the plural. The mu-ba prefixes are always employed in tales 
when the animal is personified; however in the few cases here 
refered to, ba is used without any idea of personifying the ani- 
mals; the bat, the fox and a kind of red antelope (mangulwe) 
are designated in this way, and I could really not give any 
reason for the fact. A few other names of animals begin with 
bu, the singular prefix on the bu-ma class which has evidently 
a collective meaning. Busuna is the immense number of mos- 
quitoes which one hears buzzing in the night during the rainy 
season, whilst one mosquito is nsuna, pl. tinsuna; busukoti, is 
the crowd of ants swarming in the ants’ nest, whilst nswkoti, (cl. 
yin-tin) is one ant, etc. 

Thus, amongst the Bantu, the scientific knowledge of animals 
is still very primitive and may be compared to that which, for 
instance, the author of Leviticus possessed. On the other hand, 
for them, the animal world is not so far removed from man as 
it is with us. Man lives in close connection with the animals, 
not only when he hunts them and tries to transform himself 
into “a thing of the bush” (p. 57), but even in ordinary life, 
and he considers them as very similar to himself. For instance, 
some Thonga believe the animals have a /anguage, and they try 
to speak to them. I have already mentioned Pikinini; he was a 
boy from the Bilen country who stayed with me for a time at 
Shiluvane, having left Bilene after the defeat of Gungunyana. 
As he was working one day together with some little Pedi boys, 

ce 

I heard him talking volubly. Evidently he did not expect any 
answer from his helpers, who knew Thonga but imperfectly : 
— ‘What are you saying ?” I asked him. — “Oh! I 
am speaking to the 
cock.” — ‘* What Meee ON 
do you mean?” — 
“Task it if it knows 
what is going on in 
our country, at Gun- 
gunyana. It answers 
that it does. This 
cock is a clever cock. 
It isa man. When 

cocks do not know 
what one asks them, 
they say hwi (descrip- 
tive adverb mean- 
ing to keep quiet). 
SeAremtheré any > *'| 
other beasts to which 
one can talk?” — 
* Gertainly, » those 
which belong to the | 
village.” —‘‘Dogs?” | 
““No! Pigeons! 
When someone dies | 
in the village, the Phot. A. Borel. 
headman must go Gebuza whose nose was torn off by a hyena. 

and assemble all the 

pigeons, giving them some water or some food and he. must 
tell them about the death. Then they begin to coo, they are 
satisfied to have been informed, treated like people of the home. 
Should this precaution be omitted, pigeons will leave the village 
in the afternoon and never return. (1) This happened to a 
Ngoni of Bilen”’. 

(1) A curious resemblance may be noted here. Amongst French Swiss 
peasants and in parts of England and of Germany, when the master of the 

4 Pi 
Enchanted animals can also speak, for instance a hyena which 
has been sent by a wizard. In Rikatla there was a man called 
Gebuza whose face was entirely disfigured ; his nose had been 
torn off by a hyena and people told his story as follows : 
— Once a hyena entered the village in the early morning when 
every one was still asleep. It saluted the people saying : 
“Good morning, you people.” — ‘“‘ Good morning” 
answered the people in the hut. — ‘‘ Give me fire” added the 
hyena. — ‘‘ Open the door and take an ember” they said. — 
“No, open it yourselves !” 

Gebuza opened the door and the hyena seized him by the 
nose, with its teeth, and bit it off. This is one of the countless 
wizard stories. With the exception of these instances I do not 
think the Natives, as a rule, believe that animals have a lan- 
guage, nor that men can speak with them. However they do 
not feel themselves so far removed from the animal world as is 
the case amongst more civilised races. 

Another point on which Thonga see a resemblance between 
man and the animal is this: they believe that both possess the 
nuru (I. p. 453. Il p. 57-62). It is true that the nuru is only 
found in some animals: the elan, the ndakazi antelope, the ele- 
phant, the hippopotamus, etc. We shall have again to consi- 
der this superstition when dealing with Thonga Animism. 

Is this idea of identity between man and the animal pushed 
so far as to believe that men can transform themselves into 
animals, and vice-versa? It is true that often in tales men are 
changed into hyenas, lions, ete. (See Dukuli, Les Ba-Ronga, 
p. 283 and many other similar stories). But these are purely 
fictitious. The theory is by no means generally accepted. In 
the ordinary course of life such transformations ie not be 
considered possible. But they are certainly thoroughly credited 
in the domain of magic. Magicians pretend that they can fly in 
the air, with their axe, transform themselves into the lightning 
bird and so kill their enemy. But it is the wizards (baloyi) 

farm dies the bees must be officially informed of the fact and some one goes to 
the bee hives and tells them what has happened: else misfortune will befall them. 

= Bo 
who are considered as possessing this power par excellence, 
especially the faculty of changing human beings into beasts to 
make them work on their behalf. These ideas will be studied 
in Chapter III. 

I have already mentioned the bird which ‘ stops travellers * 
(p. 128) ; amongst Mammnalia a certain Antelope is the object of 
the same superstitious fear. It is the little red magulwe (or 
shipene) whose astragalus bone is employed in divination under 
the name of malumbi (See Part VI. Letter D). — ‘‘ When it 
crosses the road, in front of a travelling party ”, says Ma- 
nkhelu, ‘‘the leader of the company stops his comrades, goes 
forward, sits down alone at the spot where the antelope passed, 
and pours his magical powder in the footprints of the animal. 
Then he cries to his companions to come and follow him. 
Having walked for some time, he takes off all his clothing, 
lies down quite naked, as if he were dead. The others conti- 
nue their march forward. After a while, he jumps to his 
feet and, making a circuit through the bush, he outruns them, 
without being noticed, and sits on the road, further on. They 
reach him and wonder how he came there : by this rite he 
has prevented the misfortune which the antelope would have 
caused to the travellers. ” 

ce 

B. CONCEPTIONS REGARDING MAN 
I. The origin of man. 

If the Thonga mind is very little puzzled by the question of 
the creation of heaven and earth, the origin of man preoccupies 
it more seriously. I must now enter into some details on the 
story of the origin which has been already mentioned (I. 
p. 21). It contains two parts: the creation of man and the 
cause of death. 

=e 326 — 
1) THE CREATION OF MAN.. 

The first human beings came out from the Jiblanga, the reed, 
say some, from the nhblanga, the marsh of reeds, say others. 
These two versions seem to answer to two different concep- 
tions. The first is that one man and one woman suddenly 
came out from one reed which exploded (baleka) and there 
they were! According to the second, men of different tribes 
emerged from a marsh of reeds, each tribe already having its 
peculiar costume, implements and customs. So when you ask 
about the origin of the iron hoes amongst the Venda, who 
possessed them before Thonga, you will be told : ‘‘ The Venda 
emerged from the marsh of reeds holding them ”. (1) 

The first man and woman are called in the Northern clans 
Gwambe and Dzabana. No special story is told of these ances- 
tors of mankind, but their names are still used under certain 
circumstances. When expelling a disease, in the hondiola rite, 
the medicine man says: “ Go away to Gwambe and Dza- 
bana”, an expression used coincidently with this: “* Go away 
to Shiburi and Nkhabelane ”’, viz., to the extremity of the land, 
iar away ; again, when many tales have been told and folks are 
going to sleep, those tales are also sent away back to Gwambe 
and Dzabana (p. 193). Why? Perhaps because these are the 
old, old people, and the tales which are so ancient belong to 
them? At any rate, by this kind of incantation story-tellers 
want to prevent the hearers’ sleep being disturbed by the remem- 
brance of the marvellous things they have been told. In the 
legends related to old migrations the “Road of Gwambe”’ (1) 
is mentioned. When the ancient people passed along it, the 

(1) I believe the first version to be the true Thonga one. It may be that 
the idea that all the races came out of the marsh of reeds is an alteration of 
the primitive conception under Nyai influence. Ba- Nyai say that all men 
emerged from a big hole, the hole of Nyali or Nwari, in the earth, at a time 
when stones and rocks were still so soft that foot prints remained marked on 
them. It has been supposed that the myth of the reed was simply an allu- 
sion to a physiological phenomenon, but I do not believe it. 

(1) What is the relation between this Gwambe and the name of Magwamba 
commonly given to the Thonga of Spelonken (I. p. 18)? It is difficult to 

Ss Boh 
earth was not yet solid, so they left the print of their feet, of 
their mortars, etc., in the rocks, where they are still to be 
seen on the border of a river called Hlantsabuhlalu. (Nyai 
dea ¢:1. p. 21): 

In the Ronga clans, these two ancestors of mankind are called 
Likala humba and Nsilambowa. ‘he first name means : the one 
who brought a glowing cinder in a shell, viz., the originator of 
fire, (Compare the Hlengwe tradition, I. p. 23). Nsilambowa, 
the name of the woman, means the one who grinds vegetables. 
The first human beings, according to these names, would have 
been those who introduced fire and the culinary art into the 
world ! This idea is interesting and seems to show that, for the 
Native mind, the cooking of food is the pursuit which diffe- 
rentiates man from the animals ! 

In the clans of Maluleke and of Spelonken there is a third 
tradition relating to the first man, but it has certainly been bor- 
rowed from the Venda or Pedi tribes. hey say the first man 
was Ribimbi and his son Khudjana (name transformed into Ho- 
byana according to Thonga phonetics). Thonga only say that 
Hobyana is the creator of Heaven and Earth and the first 
ancestor of the race. But Venda and Pedi have a number of 
traditions about these two heroes (1). : 

say. According to some, there is still a clan descended from Gwambe, the 
first man, whose chief calls himself Gwambe. The Ba-Venda when they 
saw the Thonga merchants bringing their goods from Delagoa Bay or Inham- 
bane, called them Makwapa, Balungwana bakwapen, the little white people 
from Kwapa or Gwamba country, viz., those who bring clothes. beads 
bought from the Whites. It seems certain that there exists a Gwamba clan 
somewhere in Gazaland, not far from the Chopi border. A story is told of 
this Gwamba chief who sent messengers to Modjadji to obtain rain from her. 
On their return they refused to cooperate in gathering fuel for their fire and 
died on the road. where their graves are still to be seen. Other informants 
give a totally different version of the origin of the term Magwamba: Gwambe 
was a chief dwelling on the border of the Oliphant. near the Dunduli villages ; 
his men, on a travelling trip, said to the Venda: ‘‘ We people of Gwambe 
even accept old women ”’, viz., if they receive us well, we call them our 
wives to please them! Hence the name they were given. Other explana- 
tions might still be found and I think there is no real connection between 
Gwambe, the first man, and the Ma-Gwamba. 

(1) Here is one of the most curious of these traditions, a strange story in- 

a 328 peat 
2) THE CAUSE OF DEATH. 

When the first human beings emerged from the marsh of 
reeds, the chief of this marsh sent the Chameleon (Lumpfana) 
to them, with this message: ‘Men will die but they will rise 
again’. The Chameleon started walking slowly according to 
his habit. Then the big lizard with the blue head, the Galagala, 
was sent to tell men: ‘ You shall die and rot ”. Galagala 
started with his swift gaitand soon passed Lumpfana. He deliv- 
ered his message, and when Lumpfana arrived with his errand, 
men told him: ‘* You are too late. We have already accepted 
another message ”. This is why men are subject to death. 

This myth is so strongly believed that shepherds, when they 
see a chameleon slowly climbing on a tree, begin to tease it, 
and, when it opens its mouth, throw a pinch of tobacco into it, 
and are greatly amused at seeing the poor thing change colour, 
passing from green to orange, and from orange to black, in 

deed, when one thinks that these two personages are the great gods who crea- 
ted the universe! Once, in olden times, Khudjana planted a big pole in the 
earth, and passed spokes through it, right to the top. Ribimbi having climbed 
up, Khudjana took out the lower spokes and went home. _ His father being 
unable to get down, the son stole the food prepared for him and ate it at his 
ease. Then he again put the spokes in their places and the old man came 
home. But when he wanted to have his meal, he found nothing was left. 
His wife then gave him Khudjana’s portion ! 

There is a great confusion amongst those traditions, According to Ma- 
nkhelu this Ribimbi, or Levivi, is the same as the great rain-maker to whose 
descendants he went to obtain the rain medicine (p. 298). He is not only the 
creator of the earth, but the protector of all the men, who are his sons. So, 
when some one wishes to harm a man who is not guilty, the Venda say to 
him : “ Do not kill Levivi’s man”, If you steal a partridge caught in a trap 
which was not set by you, they say : ‘* Levivi, who stands on that tree, sees 
you”, It seems that he is a superior being, a god (shikwembu), even the 
chief of gods, endowed with omnipresence and omniscience, Moreover there 
is a relation between Rivimbi and Nwali the Ba-Nyai god who is represented 
either as father, or son of Rivimbi, or identical with him. It may be that 
the Ribimbi tradition, which is both Pedi and Venda and seems to be essen- 
tially related to a first ancestor who has become the great god, has been 
mixed with the Nwali tradition, which is Nyai, so that ideas of different ori- 
gins have been intermingled. 

es tag 
agony, to the great delight of the little boys: they thus avenge 
themselves on the chameleon! (p. 316). 

The same story is told amongst the Zulus, and other myths 
of asimilar character are found all over Africa, especially amongst 
the Ba-Rotsi. (1) It would be an interesting study to collect them 
all, and thus to compile the African Genesis. One would probably 
find that the question of the origin of man and death are the 
two great subjects on which the imagination of the Bantu has 
tried to throw some light, and that, though the moral element 
is strangely deficient in these myths, yet there is a striking 
resemblance between them and the biblical story, where an an- 
swer to these same questions is given. 

a 

Il. The various human races. 

Have Bantu a clear idea of the human race? What they call 
banhu in Thonga, bantu in Zulu, evidently means “Black people”, 
the first inhabitants of the country... The Zulu are considered, 
owing to their military ability, as a superior race, not however 
to such an extent as they themselves believe they are! See the 
matrimonial relations between clans (I. p. 240). Whatever may 
be their hostility or repugnance to their fellow black people, 
they know that they belong to the same species. I am not sure 
that they hold this idea regarding White people, who are not 
banhu but balungu. 

What is the origin of this word ? As it is also used in Zulu 
(abelungo), the etymology proposed is the verb kw lunga, to be 
right, good. White people would be correct, nice people, for 
the Natives (2) However complimentary for us this explana- 
tion may be, I very much doubt its accuracy. Firstly, Black 
people have not generally such a good opinion of us. They 

(1) Compare Foi et Vie. Oct. 1910. Les Origines. A. Jalla. 

(2) Others say that their forefather named the White people balungu 
because they were clean (lunga having also that meaning). ‘* They are always 
clean though they do not wash their body !_ They have no dirt. ” But these 
explanations are not quite satisfactory. 

een eee 

admit our superiority: in intelligence. They unhappily have 
not always noticed that White people behaved correctly in 
their dealings with them. Secondly, when we compare the 
word balungu with Nwalungu, North, balungwana, inhabitants 
of Heaven, (see Chapter IL), and with Mulungu, the great 
name of God in Central Africa, we are led to suppose that 
there may have been ancient mythological traditions, now for- 
gotten, relating to White people, when they were not yet well 
known. 

To account for the superiority of the White race, Mankhelu 
assured me he had heard the following story long ago, told by 
his grandfather in the village of Shiluvane, long before the arri- 
val of the missionaries. Nwali having created the first man 
from whom both, Whites and Blacks descend, they were all 
naked. Gwambe slept with his sister, an act which had been 
forbidden, and she had a child. Since then children are born : 
but this was not the intention of Nwali who wanted to create 
adult human beings only! The Gwambe (first ancestor) of 
White people showed respect to his father who was naked, 
whilst the Gwambe of the Blacks did not; hence the deterio- 
ration (onhakala) of the Blacks. ‘* We have been fools and 
have been deprived of everything, and Nwali said: You Blacks, 
will wear down your nails to the end by digging the earth to 
find food !” As already pointed out, Mankhelu had not the 
least trace of the critical sense. This is evidently the Biblical 
story very curiously transformed. However the idea of an ori- 
ginal fault of the Black race in the beginning, having resulted in 
the inferior position it now occupies, is met with in many parts 
of Africa and is probably autochthonous amongst the Thonga. 

‘* Balungu ba hlulwa hi lifu ntsena” has become a kind of 
proverb, quoted by Natives when seeing the marvels of civilisa- 
tion and means: ‘* White people are only overcome by death.” 
I heard a little boy muttering it once when I was playing the 
harmonium. 

Their notions regarding the several European races are very 
crude. Asking one of them once if he knew whence the 
Whites came, he told me: ‘The Portuguese came from the sea, 

oa Boe 
the Boers from the mountains. ” — ‘‘ And we, missionaries, 
who are neither Portuguese nor Boers ?” — “‘ You come from 
Heaven”, he answered with a charming smile ! 

Pikinini, who knew how to converse with the cock, once told 
me what the Bilen people think of the Whites. It was just after 
the deportation of Gungunyana : 

— ‘*Gungunyana is dead. The Portuguese have eaten him!” 

— ‘* How is that ?” 

— “ Certainly! The Portuguese eat human flesh. Every 
one knows it. They have no legs; they are fishes (tinhlampfi). 
They have a tail instead of legs. They live in water”. 

— “ Then how do they manage to fight with you and to 
beat you if they are fishes and have no legs ? ” 

— ‘Ho! Those who come to fight against us arethe young 
men; they have legs. They take us and put us all in a steam- 
er which goes far away, far away. This steamer reaches a 
large rock which is surrounded by water on all sides. This is 
their country. We are taken out and placed on an island, 
whilst the soldiers go and fire shots to announce to the great 
White men-fishes that we have arrived. They choose one of 
us and make a little cut in his little finger to see if he is fat 
enough; if not, he is put into a big basket full of ground-nuts 
which he must eat in order to become fat. If he is fat enough, 
they lay him in a big, elongated pot of the size of a man, and 
red hot. We know these particulars because a man, Ngomo- 
ngomo, gave us the full explanation. He had been caught, but 
on the road his gods helped him; he was covered with an 
eruption of pimples which was so disgusting that he was left in 
the island, and brought back here. He saw everything. We 
had first refused to believe that. Now we know that it is the 
truth!” : 

Evidently Pikinini was in earnest and these absurd ideas were 
accepted as facts by the majority of his countrymen in Bilene. 
Is it not strange to notice that, whilst a great number of Euro- 
peans think of the Blacks as being all cannibals, these savages; 
on the other hand, believe exactly the same thing regarding us! 
Of course a closer contact with White people has already led 

eo 2 aes 

them to a truer knowledge of what we really are, and they have 
discovered that, after all, there is not such a ‘great difference 
between the various human races! 

It seems that in former times the Thonga believed that the 
White people, not only the Portuguese, dwelt in water. They 
were said to have eyes in front and behind and to see on all 
sides, so that it was impossible to escape from them. They 
used to kidnap; Black people and to take them away. 

il. The human body. 

1. IDEAS oF ANATOMY. 

Lhe Thonga have never made an anatomic study of a human 
corpse. ‘They have a riddle to this effect : ‘‘ Ku pfura ndjilo 
mungema ? — Ba lahla munhu wa ku fa. ” — “A fire of live 
coals? — They bury a dead man”. As you never put your 
hand in the fire, so you would not touch a corpse. Nor have 
they ever made a post mortem examination! What they know 
of the human body is entirely due to the inductions they have 
drawn from oxen, pigs and game which they cut open. Con- 
sidering that the source of their knowledge is so indirect, one 
wonders that they have learnt so much of the human physical 
structure. 

Having taught a little anatomy to the students of our Insti- 
tute, I can bear testimony that they have names for most of 
the bones of the skeleton. Pala (dji-ma) means skull ; liblaya 
(li-ti), maxillary bone; finyo, pl. menyo, teeth ; tshuri (djima), 
molar tooth (same word as mortar) ; litlatla, clavicle ; likhongo- 
ilo, spine; khalla (dji-ma), shoulder blade ; shinijintji, sternum ; 
shikangana, extremity of the sternum ; libambo, rib ; (they believe 
there are fen ribs on each side!) ; shikukwana, humerus ; nkono 
(mu-mi), cubitus ; jwaliblanya, (mu-ba) femur ; lihandja, tibia ; 
they seem to ignore the radius and the peroneus; guywa-guywana, 
rotula ; nblolo, astragalus ; other bones are called by the name 

Preset 
of the region, or the organ, to which they belong: the bone ot 
pelvis, nyongwe (yin-tin), the hip; the wrist bones, hlakala ; 
those of the ‘palm, shipapa ; those of the fingers, litiho ; those of 
the toes shikunwana ; those of the ankle, shirendje ; of the sole, 
nkondjo (mu-mi) ; the thumb is called khudju (dji-ma), of and the 
big toe, the great shkunwana. 

The different organs are also known : byongwe (bu-ma) (Dj.) 
bongwe (Ro.) is the brain ; thlo, pl. mahlo, the eye ; ndlebe 
(yin-tin), the ear ; mbompfu (yin-tin), the nose ; nomo, pl. m- 
lomo, the lips and the mouth ; /idjimi, the tongue ; nkolo (anu- 
mi), the throat ; they know that there are two pipes, one for 
the food, the other for the air, but they are not sure which is 
in front and which behind! Habu (dji-ma, Ro.), phaphu (Dj.), 
lungs ; shidyelo, the stomach ; mbilu (yin-tin), the heart ; shi- 
bindji, the liver ; libengo, the spleen ; lipfolo, the diaphragm ; 
rumbu (dji-ma), the bowels, including the male internal genita- 
lia; external genitalia of man and woman are taboo; yinso 
(yin-tin) means kidneys ; nblonge (yin-tin), skin ; nwala (mu- 
mi) nail ; sist (mu-mi), hair, etc. 

But on pushing the inquiry somewhat further, we begin to 
notice a gross ignorance of important facts. The one word 
nsiba (mu-mi) means nerves, tendons, ligaments, veins and 

rteries ; nyimba is the uterus, but also means pregnancy. Na- 

tives seem to think that a new nyimba is created at each 
pregnancy ; they know nothing of the glands and I never found 
a name for the pancreas. 

2) PHYSIOLOGICAL NOTIONS. 

For this reason it is obvious that they cannot know what 
really happens in the body, and the marvellous and complicated 
system of our physical life. The mystery of the nervous sys- 
tem is entirely unknown, as is also the way in which blood 
(ngati, yin-tin) is formed by food, the digestive process, 
the circulation of the blood and the action of the air upon it, 
etc. We must not wonder at this ignorance: our forefathers, 

SS oe Wear 
three hundred years ago, were not much more advanced than 
the Natives are now. ; 

On the other hand, Bantu, and especially Thonga, have a 
number of physiological notions, which are pure superstitions, 
being devoid of any scientific foundation, but are, how- 
ever, firmly believed in and give rise to a number of practices, 
rites, and purifications. This is a most interesting subject and 
its study throws much light on the condition of primitive man. 
I have tried to explain these physiological conceptions in an 
article published in “‘ La Revue d’Ethnographie et de Sociolo- 
gie, Mai r910 ”. It is not possible to enter into all the details 
here, and I am obliged to refer the reader to that article for 
more particulars. However my description of the Life of the 
Tribe would not be complete if this subject were entirely omit- 
ted ; so I will rapidly give a general idea of this curious Native 
physiology. 

For the Thonga, human life is composed of a certain number 
of periods which follow each other, each having its particular 
character. 

As we have seen in the Evolution of man (Part I), the first 
period (busahana) extends from the birth to the fall of the um- 
bilical cord; the baby is in a state of contamination owing to 
the lochia and must not be touched ; from the eighth or ninth 
day till the weaning takes place, it is the nursing period, divided 
into two or three sub-periods by the presentation to the moon 
and the tying of the cotton string. The child has been more 
and more aggregated to human society. Up to this day he has 
been considered as under treatment: because a child is not a 
complete healthy human being; he is but water (mati), not 
yet firm ; he is always threatened with disease and so he must 
continually drink his milombyana. The hondlola ceremony clo- 
ses this period and, by the weaning, he enters into the childhood 
period. (I, p. 56). 

Infancy is a bukbuna, a state of incompleteness fraught with 
a certain defilement. Childhood is also a bukhuna, and_ this 
despicable inferiority must be removed by the circumcision 
rites, the significance of which is both physiological and social. 

a eae a 
When wishing to marry, viz., to pass from the class of unmarried 
to that of married people, young men and women must again 
undergo a number of ceremonies of a social rather than of a 
physiological character. 

But, in addition to these conceptions of human life which 
determine so many acts and customs, there are at least five phy- 
siological phenomena which are believed to be attended with defi- 
lement, and which call for special precautions, and rites: the 
menstrual flow, the lochia, disease, death and the birth of 
twins. To protect individuals, the family, or the clan, against 
these dangerous defilements, is one of the main preoccupations 
of any adult Thonga; and to gain this end they submit to 
endless ceremonies of purification, they observe numberless ta- 
boos ; thus it is plain that these physiological conceptions, abso- 
lutely unscientific and wrong, play an immense part in their 
life and cause them any amount of unnecessary trouble. 

I need not deal at length with these five physiologic facts 
so greatly dreaded. As regards menses, the subject has been 
treated in Vol. I, p. 187, 489. (Compare Vol. II, p. 49); as 
regards lochia, see Vol. I, p. 41, 60 ; concerning disease, we 
shall see more in our third chapter. The tremendous conta- 
minating power of death has been shown in the explanation of 
funeral rites, and the birth of twins will be studied more close- 
ly in the next chapter. The importance of these facts in the 
system of taboos will also be explained in Chap. IV. 

The sexual act, though not considered as attended with con- 
tamination to the same extent as the five other physiological 
facts just referred to, is however subject to some curious super- 
stitions. Notice first, that, when indulged in before marriage, 
by boys and girls in their gangisa, it has quite another bearing 
than when accomplished by married people. In the first case 
it is deemed of no consequence, and has not the ritual value 
which it sometimes acquires in the state of marriage. ‘The 
sexual act certainly places married people (la’ba khilaka, viz., 
those who have regular and lawful relations) in a peculiar po- 
sition; if it is not a state of actual defilement, it is at least 
attended with some danger to society. Patients, more parti- 

ee Ciara 

cularly convalescents,; must not tread on the same paths as 
married folk, or they must tie to their ankles a root of 
sungi as a protection against the emanation, or perspiration 
(nyuku) which married people may have left on the grass. For 
the same reason, a woman who has relations with her hus- 
band must not visit a sick person ; she must wait two days 
before entering the hut of a confined woman (I. p. 41). This 
is why certain acts in the ritual must be performed either by 
very young children, still unaware of sexual matters, or by old 
women having passed the childbearing time, and belonging 
consequently to the asexual class. See this rule in connection 
with pottery firing (p. 100), in the case of the hunter starting 
on his expedition (p. 56), in the tjeba of the Ba-Maluleke 
(p. 72), and in the mbelele (p. 295). 

The numerous prohibitions forbidding sexual relations at cer- 
tain times probably come from the same conceptions. As we 
saw, this act is taboo: during the menses (I. p. 187); absolu- 
tely after the birth till the tying of the cotton string, and rela- 
tively from this time to the weaning (I p. 55); in any case of 
serious disease taking place in the village (I. p. 133), or in 
time of epidemics (1); during the Great Mourning, and for 
those specially affected by death during a longer period ; it is 
also taboo during the moving of a village (I. p. 290); during 
certain hunting and fishing operations (p. 57 and 69); after hav- 
ing killed an enemy (I. p. 454); in certain religious ceremo- 
nies (Chapter If) : in a word, during all the marginal periods, 
those periods of transition, or of danger, when the life of the 
individuals or of the community is threatened. 

On the other hand, by a curious contradiction, it is the sexual 
act, accomplished in the ritual way. s. n. i. (I. p. 488) and fol- 
lowed by a collective lustration, which removes the defilement 
and inaugurates a new period of normal life. Thus, though 
being more or less contaminative, it becomes the great  puri- 

(1) Mboza was so convinced that this was a rule of first importance that, 
having heard that White people make proclamations when an_ epidemic 
breaks out, hethought the object of the decree was to suspend sexual relations 
amongst the White community ! 

ee eS 
fying means in certain circumstances: for widows (I. p. 201) ; 
for the mourning community (I. p. 155); for the newly found- 
ed village (I. p. 290), etc. All these physiological ideas, though 
pure superstitions, denote however a deep and earnest concep- 
tion of life, an aspiration towards purity which it is most inte- 
resting to note. 

Beside these great principles of Thonga physiology, I may 
mention a few other ideas relating to the various secretions of 
the human body. 

Spitting (ku thuka) is a sign of want of respect, as we saw 
(p. 287) It is especially prohibited in presence of people eating, 
and if any one spits, they will insult the culprit and say to him: 
“* Eat your own shikohlolo” ! — When some one expecto- 
rates, other people will cover the phlegm with sand, not on 
account of taboo, but from disgust. 

Blood (ngati yin-tin) is also instinctively covered with sand, as 
soon as it has been shed. This is a taboo because wizards 
might use it to bewitch you! The charms of the wizards are 
commonly called tingati, bloods. 

As regards sweat (nyuku, mu-mi), without being able to assert 
that this is a universal idea, I think that it is conceived as 
coming from outside and falling on men like the dew (mbere) 
on the grass. When they enter a place which is close, Natives 
say: ‘* There is sweat here”. The etymology of this word 
is ku nyuka, to melt. 

Excrement (matjimba) is looked upon as disgusting, but there 
is no taboo in connection with it. 

Yawning (yahlamula) is attended with no superstition. 

Hiccough (shitikwane) is not feared in children, but very much 
so in the case of sick people. 

Belching (bisa) is sometimes considered as the result of having 
been bewitched, especially if the patient becomes thin. Magi- 
cians also belch, to show the mysterious power hidden within 
them. . 

When any one sneezes it is the signal for addressing him with 
good wishes: ‘‘ Butomi ni burongo!” — ‘‘ Life and sleep!” The 
sneezer himself may begin to pray as follows : ‘* Bupsayi ! Buk- 

wari! (two liturgical words of invocation to the gods) I pray 
toyou! I have no anger against you! Be with me, and let me 
sneeze ! Let me see sleep and let me see life ! so that I may go 
by the road, I may find an antelope (dead in the bush), I may 
take it on my shoulders; or that I may go and kill ‘‘ ndlopfu 
bukene ” an elephant, (viz., meet with a girl and obtain her 
favour), etc. «Now I say it is enough, you my nose !” 

Cutting the hair has been referred to already CI, p. 145, 
II. p. 83). In Tembe and Nondwane there is a curious supersti- 
tion regarding hair : it is taboo to throw it away without pre- 
caution, otherwise a bird called makhondjwana, or nwantshekuto, 
might find it and put it in its nest, and your hair would not 
grow any more! 

IV. The human soul. 

Thonga have a quantity of names to designate the psychic facul- 
ties and they generally localise them in various organs of the 
body : Patience resides in the liver, and the identification is so 
complete that there is but one word to mean both the organ 
and the virtue: shibindji ! Hatred is in the spleen, and both 
are called libengo (from ku benga to hate). Mbilu, the heart, is 
the seat of genius and intellectual gifts. A man expert in cer- 
tain arts and crafts has been taught by his heart. From the 
heart come the decisions of the will : a heathen cannot be con- 
verted to Christianity because his heart has not yet told him to 
become so (mbilu a yi si hlaya). To have a good heart means 
kindness, compassion. ‘The chest, shifuba not the lungs, is the 
seat of intelligence and eloquence (as pectus in Latin). A 
dumb man is a man ‘ whose chest is dead”. The diaphragm 
either lipfalo, sing., or timpfalu, plur., is the conscience : its con- 
tractions are identical with qualms of conscience. The head 
and the bowels do not seem to be the seat of any special fa- 
culty. 

But although Natives localise the psychic faculties in the 
different organs, they certainly believe in an independent psy- 

ae Sy ear 

chic principle, in a soul. On this point, however, their ideas 
are most confused. They call it moya, the spirit, and in the 
Ronga clans, bika, the breath (the plural mahika, in the expres- 
sion “‘ ku ba ni mahika”, means to be out of breath). This 
is the vital principle of man and when some one is dying, his 
relatives sit near him “‘ waiting for the departure of breath” 
(langusela ku suka ka hika). ‘‘The spirit has gone”, — 
““moya wu sukile”’, they say when death has come. ‘They 
have no theory as regards the way the breath goes out of the 
body, nor do they stop the nostrils or the mouth to prevent 
its escape. 

A third name for soul is néjhuti (mu-mi), or shitjhuli (Ro.), 
ndjuti (Dj.) shadow. It seems to apply more especially to the 
departed soul than to the psychic principle of the living man. 
I have been assured that one cannot dream of the shintjuti of 
any one still alive, but only ifhe is dead. The shadow, as such, 
is not subject to many taboos or superstitious fears. People do 
not fear to tread on the shadow of a chief for instance. It may 
even be questioned if they identify the material shadow with 
the shitjhuti, the spiritual part of man which separates from his 
body at death (1). At any rate many think that it is the shi- 
tyhuti which becomes shikwembu, the ancestor god. 

In former times Thonga feared to look at their own reflec- 
tion ina pool. They seem to have passed that stage now. 
The reason was perhaps that they thought their spiritual prin- 
ciple was identical with their image. This notion seems to be 
at the root of the fear they show of being photographed, as we 
shall see directly. 

So we see that Thonga are not at all dogmatic on this sub- 

(1) In the following story a direct relation is established between the real 
shadow and the vital principle. A Ronga magician, Shidzabalane, used to 
show his supernatural power in the following way : he slept on the ground 
and ordered a mortar to be placed on his chest and three women to pound 
mealies in it. This seemed to make no impression on him (a fact which can 
easily be explained if he was in a state of catalepsy). But one of these wo- 
men suddenly thought that he had perhabs transmigrated into his shadow, so 
she hit the shadow with her pestle. The magician at once rose, crying out: 
he had really left his body and entered into his shadow ! 

ay 
ject. The soul is at the same time the breath, viz., something 
of the nature of the wind, the shadow, the image, the external 
likeness, or fashion of man as opposed to his flesh. 

Whatever may be the original notion, they consider the 
human being as double and capable of unsheathing itself on cer- 
tain occasions; their conception on this point may throw some 
more light on their ideas concerning the nature of the soul. 

Some believe that the wnsheathing always takes place during 
the night and that the soul comes back when its owner awakes : 
this is, par excellence, the case in regard to witches who un- 
sheath by their magical power and bewitch people during the 
night, as we shall see. But, though the belief is not universal, 
some think all souls go away (or die) during sleep. I heard 
a boy earnestly praying one evening that his soul might come 
back to him next morning! This is a kind of physiological 
normal unsheathing which is attended with no bad results. But 
the pathologic unsheathing also exists, and is very dangerous. 
It may be caused by the photograph of a man being taken. 
Ignorant Natives instinctively object to being photographed. 
They say : ‘These White people want to rob us (pepula) and 
take us with them, far away into lands which we do not know, 
and we shall remain only an incomplete being”. When shown 
the magic lantern, you hear them pitying the men shown on 
the pictures, and saying : “ This is the way they are ill-treat- 
ing us when they take our photographs ! Cry 

But the great and dangerous parting of soul and body, which 
surely causes death, is that which wizards operate by their magic 
charms. We shall study these strange conceptions in Chapter 
Ill. They firmly believe that such is the result of witchcraft ; 
so, when some one is dying, and the divinatory bones have 
revealed that the disease was caused by a certain noyi (witch or 
wizard), the magician shuts him in with the dying man in the 

(1) The following reflection well illustrates the superstitious fear which 
Natives have for likenesses of dead people. Before the 1894 war broke out, I had 
gone to show the magic lantern in remote heathen villages, and people accu- 
sed me having caused the disturbance by having brought to life again (pfusha) 
men who had died long ago. 

ite 

hut and gives him the following command : ‘Bring back the 
spirit which you have taken and hidden somewhere.” Some 
magicians, who are more powerful than the wizards, pretend 
to be able to find the stolen spirit and so to restore the patient 
to health. In cases of epilepsy, or of any psychic trouble attend- 
ed with unconsciousness, when the sick person returns to his 
senses, they triumph : have they not brought back the soul ? 
But they say this must be done in haste! No time must be lost ! 

Lastly, the definitive unsheathing of personality takes place 
at death. The body becomes rotten, but the shadow goes 
away and continues its life as a god, shikwembu. The belief 
in the continuation of life after death is universal, being at the 
base of the Ancestrolatry, which is the religion of the tribe. We 
shall study the ideas relating to the future life when dealing 
with the gods. 

What Thonga can absolutely not understand is the resurrec- 
tion of the body. ‘‘Mbuti yi fa, yi bola; homu yi fa, yi bola; 
munhu a fa, a bola” ! — “‘The goat dies and rots, the ox dies 
and rots, man dies and rots! ” answers the sceptical Thonga 
when he hears the story of resurrection. 

On the whole their ideas of future life are not so very different 
from those of the ancient Greeks, who believed the human soul 
went after death to the realm of shadows. 

Dreams are not generally liked by the Thongas. If some- 
thing they happened to dream really takes place, it “disgusts” 
them (nyenyetsa). When a man has seen a woman several 
times in his dreams, especially if she were pregnant, he 
will consult the bones. If he dreams he has relations with 
her, he may go next day and hit her with a stick. He leaves 
the stick on the ground and goes away without a word. 
According to Mboza, this is done to get rid of the obsession, 
and to prevent the dream from passing to reality. This is the 
reason, I suppose, why a Christian boy once said to his mission- 
ary: “I am dreaming of many people, but I keep quiet !” 
Amongst Thonga dreams do not seem to play the great part 
which the animistic theory attributes to them inthe formation 
of primitive beliefs. ; 

"S42 

CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER I. CLASSIFICATION OF THONGA 

Conceptions OF NATURE aND Man. 

During the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh, the ques- 
tion of the various religions was discussed one day, in connection 
with the preaching of the missionary message. Speakers were fre- 
quently mentioning Animism in their discourses. In the gallery 
which was reserved for missionaries’ wives, a lady wrote a few words 
on a slip of paper and forwarded it to a gentleman who happened to 
be sitting not far from her: — ‘* Can you tell me what are animistic 
religions ?” was the question she asked. Unfortunately the answer 
given by the gentleman is unknown. Isuppose he must have felt 
somewhat embarrassed... The lady was quite right in putting the ques- 
tion, as few people really understand what is meant by this term! 
Itis not so easy to improvise a thorough and adequate definition of its 
meaning on a slip of paper. 

The South African tribes are considered as animistic in their beliefs. 
They belong to this section of mankind which is said to profess the 
animistic religion. But in what does their Animism consist ? Since 
Tylor first invented the word Animism and defined it ‘‘ the belief in 
spiritual beings ”, it has acquired a wonderful popularity, but it has 
been used so indiscriminately that its clearness has been very much 
impaired, and it has been necessary for modern Anthropology to restrict 
its meaning in order to maintain scientific precision, 

Animism according to Prof. Marett (1) implies not merely the attri- 
bution of personality and will, but of ‘* soul or spirit”. He calls 
Animatism conceptions according to which natural objects are endowed 
with personality and will only, and not with a distinct existence as 
spirits. As far as the power attributed to the natural objects is not 
clearly personified, but conceived as an energy, a virtue more or less 
independent, we have to deal with Dynamism and not Animism. To 
these distinctions | would add another one, which is essential. Speak- 
ing with savages, or semiprimitive men, you hear them sometimes 
expressing ideas, giving explanations which are purely personal, whilst 
others of their notions are collective, When wishing to ascertain the 
conceptions of a tribe as a whole, one must lay much more stress on 

(1) The Threshold of Religion, pe 15. 

ee Mors 

the information of this last kind ; they are generally incorporated in 
rites and customs which every one accepts; they are really beliefs, 
whilst those of the first category are but ideas born in the imagina- 
tion of the savage. 

Having drawn the broad lines of our classification let us now see 
how far the Thonga conceptions are animistic, animatic and dyna- 
mistic. 

1) INDIVIDUAL IDEAS. 

A certain year, the mintjhopfa trees (p. 19) did not bear fruit. A 
Rikatla boy, named Zinyao, took a stick and walked through the bush, 
belabouring all the ntjhopfa shrubs, scolding them because they had 
not done their duty. An ethnographer, anxious to penetrate into the 
mysteries of primitive souls, might infer from this fact that Thonga 
believe in the personality of trees, and that each tree possesses a spirit; 
this is absolutely false. Zinyao was doing the same thing asa little 
boy who hits the table against which he has knocked his head, or as 
a little girl who breaks her doll because she is angry with it. The 
same boy, who was evidently endowed witha strong animistic proclivity, 
once saw a big moth fall to the ground ; a hen at once ran towards it 
and devoured it. Zinyao watched very attentively, and I heard him 
muttering to himself: ‘ The Son-of-Moth goes to the Son-of-Hen, 
yonder, and asks him to pay a fine, because, says he, I have been 
eaten by you there on the earth”. Should this reflection be taken in 
earnest, it would mean that, for the Thonga, each animal has a soul 
which continues to exist after death, and even that wrongs done to 
an animal during its earthly life, must be repaired in the after life. 
This conclusion would be absolutely erroneous. No one seriously 
believes in a continued existence of animals after death ; and, as regards 
a final judgment, there is no idea of it, even, as regards human beings 
who are believed to be immortal! These are personal ideas of Zinyao. 

[ would put in the same category, the description of the fight be- 
tween moon and sun, as given by Spoon, The same informant, ano- 
ther day, gave me another eloquent and graphic account of the battle 
of water near the lake of Rikatla, when the rain has been falling for 
many days: ‘‘ In the hollow there is a marsh of papyrus which be- 
comes filled with water ; at.a quarter of an hour’s distance the lake 
itself swells up; there is a canal which joins marsh and lake ; so the 
waters flow into that canal from both sides ; they meet in the middle 
and fight: but the water from the papyrus marsh comes with greater 

“BA ee 

force, and after a while it overcomes the other flow and goes 
triumphantly to the lake !”’ These individual ideas are either ani- 
matic (idea of trees, of sun and moon, of water, lightning), or 
animistic (Son-of-the-Moth). But they have not much importance. 
They belong to the same category as the description given by the 
Psalmist of the sun as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, or 
to that of Homer comparing the break of the day to a young damsel 
with rosy fingers. This is poetry, mere personification of natural 
objects, or forces, and not beliefs. The poetical tendency is very 
marked amongst primitive races. It may be that ideas of this 
kind were more firmly held in former times, if the tribe has really 
passed through a more mythological phase, a hypothesis which one 
has some reasons making, 

2) COLLECTIVE BELIEFS. 

The beliefs of the Thonga, those which deserve to be called by that 
name because they are universal and express themselves in important 
rites, and customs, are the following : 

1. The human soul continues its existence after death when it is 
endowed with new powers which make it.awesome, and to be feared. 
The spwrits of the ancestors are the main objects of religious worship. 
They form the principal category of spirits (psikwembu). 

2. Although the spirits of the departed generally have nothing to 
do with people other than their descendants, some of them, espe- 
cially those belonging to foreign tribes, can take possession of living men 
and cause troubles which must be cured by a process of exorcism. 
This is the second category of spirits. 

3. Some individuals have the power of magically unsheathing them- 
selves during the night, and their spirit goes out to torment, or to kill, 
and eat other people. These are the wizards (baloyi) ; this third cate- 
gory of spirits accomplishes its wicked deeds when separated from 
the body; but their body is still living and they re-enter it. — 
These three beliefs are distinctly animistic. 

4. There is in man, and in a few big animals, a semi-spiritual prin- 
ciple, the nuru, which escapes from the body when killed in war, or 
in hunting, and through which the dead man, or animal, avenges 
himself or itself on the murderer (See I. p. 453 IL. p. 57-62). What 
is the relation between the nuru and the shadow (sitjhuti) ? This is 
not stated. ‘The nuru seems to be of a more material nature, as it can 

ae 3405 
enter a root, and it remains connected with the corpse and the bones. 
ofthe person or animal killed. This category of spiritual enemies, 
probably invented under the burden of fear and remorse, has nothing 
to do with ordinary people, and only troubles those who have killed, 
rendering them, as is generally believed, insane. — The nuru belief 
seem to be a compromise between Animism and Dynamism. 

5. There are in plants, animals, stones, hidden virtues which can be 
either useful or harmful to man. Medicine-men (tihanga) possess a 
more or less esoteric knowledge of such, and magicians (bangoma), 
endowed with special powers, can acquire a control over these vir- 

tues and use them in medical art, or in magic. — This is true 
Dynamism. 

6. Certain natural objects, such as the sea, the bush fire, are some- 
times vaguely personified. — This is Animatism. 

7. But over them all is Heaven, Tilo, which 1s considered some- 
times as a real being, sometimes as an impersonal power, a number 
of mysterious superstitions finding their explanation in this strange 
and perhaps obsolete notion of Heaven. — This is more than Anima- 
tism and seems to be a vague theistic, even monotheistic, notion. 

In the following chapters, the exact nature and influence of these 
various kinds of spirits will be studied, and I hope that the explana- 
tion of all the facts concerning them will throw more light on Thonga 
Animism and show that it is very different from the Animism of 
the Dutch Indies, for instance, where one speaks of thousands of 
spirits, of earth, air, water, mountains and trees.

RELIGION 

About the end of the XVIIIm century, a Portuguese military 
commander visited the Bay, and, after having spent a year and 
eight months in the country, sent ‘to the Prelate of Mozambi- 
que a very curious report of the cultivation, the trade and the 
state of civilisation of the land (p. 125). The following 
sentence is found in his report: — ‘t All the inhabitants are 
Hottentots, and have no religion. ” That he should have had 
erroneous notions about the distinction between Bantu and 
Hottentot tribes is but natural: the ethnology of South Africa 
was not yet known. But that, after such a long sojourn 
amongst the Natives, he should have declared that these people 
have no religion seems really strange! I can, however, under- 
stand that error, and excuse it. Amongst Thonga there is no 
temple, no special day set apart for worship, no class of priests; 
in fact, nothing external to attract attention to their religion. 
Even if he had been present at any of the religious ceremonies, 
the visitor might very wellhave mistaken them tor ordinary fa- 
mily gatherings, as he would not have noticed anything like 
religious awe in the offering of the sacrifice, stolen by the ba- 
tukulu (1. p. 162), in the prayer cut short amidst laughter, or in 
the songs which were common ones, perhaps even of rather an 
obscene nature. Yet, notwithstanding all that, how real is the 
Ancestrolairy, the Religion ofthe Thonga, of, in fact, all the South 
African Bantus! How frequent and manifold are its manifes- 
tations! This is the first, and the most perceptible set of their religious 
intuitions, and any European, who has stayed in their villages, 
learnt their language, and tried to understand their customs, 
has had the opportunity of familiarizing himself with this religion. 

oo Ne anes 

But there is a second set of religious intuitions, less easy to perceive. 
In the quartz of the South African veldt miners, in their inves- 
tigations, sometimes strike a reef: they crush the hard stone, 
wash it, apply to it certain chemical tests and find there is gold 
in the reef, This is similar to an experience which I once had 
when conversing with Thonga natives. Quite unexpectedly 
I heard them speaking about Heaven, not as a kind of imperso- 
nal being, but as a king, endowed with great powers and 
omniscience, who must be feared by thieves, because he knows 
them. Persevering in my inquiries, I discovered that second 
set of religious intuitions quite distinct from the first, viz., 
the Deistic Conception of Heaven. 1 intend now describing these 
two parts of the Thonga religious system. Later on we may 
discuss their relation. ‘‘ System ” is perhaps too great a word, 
for no Native philoscpher or theologian has ever classified 
this somewhat confused mass of religious notions, and we must 
not expect anything logical and corporate. We may even meet 
with contradictions, conflicting statements... While trying to 
bring some order into the subject, I will endeavour to give a 
faithful and respectful explanation of Native ideas. 

A. ANCESTROLATRY 

1. The Anceslor-Gods (Psikwembu). 

1) THE NAME OF THE ANCESTOR-GODS. 

Any man, who has departed this earthly life, becomes a 
shikwembu, a god. We. shall show, later on, that to translate 
< shikwembu ” by god (with a small “g”) is by no means 
incorrect. The word is indeed interesting, but unhappily no 
light is thrown on it by etymology. It belongs to the shi-psi 
class, the class of the instruments. Take the verb ‘“‘famba” to 
walk ; put the prefix “shi” to it, and change the (a aUntO som 
and you thus obtain “ shifambo ” — “ the thing with which one 

walks!’ So Shikwembu would mean: “the thing with which one 

= a 
kwemba ”. Only this stem kwemba is never used, and nobody 
knows its meaning. There is another form, nkwembu, of the 
class mu-mi, very rarely used, and | having the same meaning, 
and the word bukwemlu, the abstract noun derived from the 
same root. Bukwembu is the << power, which creates life and 
death, which gives riches, or which makes poor’, says Viguet. 
In Pedi the ancestor-gods are called badimo, a word which 
seems to be related to Xedimo (above, in heaven). But I have 
heard this connection doubted. In Zulu the etymology of 
indhloxi and itongo, employed to designate the ancestor-gods, is 
also unknown, which is a pity, as it would have been interest- 
ing to see if the stem, from which they come, also means 
aibvet Is it not strange that in these three languages so cog- 
nate, the terms used for the spirits, about which they have 
exactly the same ideas, are absolutely without linguistic relation ? 
In Suto, these spirits belong to the class “ mu-ba” , the class of 
persons, which seems natural. In Zulu their two names are 
of the class yin-tin and dji-ma, respectively ; in Thonga they 
belong to the shi-psi class. This unlikeness is indeed curious. 

2) The Carecories or Ancestor-Gops. 

Since every human being becomes a shikwembu after death, 
they have consequently many categories. As regards little 
children, what is their fate? If they die in infancy no religious 
ceremony is performed over their grave, nor are any prayers 
offered to them. The twig rite (I. p. 142) only begins for 
children who have died at the age of puberty. Infants are 
however, seen in the sacred woods amongst the adult Bh 
This is one of the points about which there is no very clear 
explanation ; doubtless the matter did not seem w orthy of an 
inquiry ! 

The two great categories of gods are those of the family, and 
those of the country, the latter being those of the reigning family. 
They do not differ as regards their nature. In national calam- 
ities those of the country are invoked, whilst, for purely 
family matters, those of the family are called upon. 

ee A le 

Moreover, each family has two sets of gods, those on the father’s 
side and those on the mother’s, those of “ kweru ” and those of 
“ bakokwana ” (I. p. 254). They are equal in dignity. 
Both can be invoked, and the divinatory bones are always asked 
to which the offering must be made. It seems, however, as if 
the gods on the mother’s side were more tender-hearted and 
more popular than those on the father’s. The reason for this 
is, perhaps, that relations are easier with the family of the 
mother than with that of the father. It is also just possible 
that it is a relic of the matriarchal period, when the ancestors 
of the mother only were known, and consequently invoked. 
At any rate, the part played by batukulu nephews in the offer- 
ings shows that they are the true representatives of the gods, 
not of those of their father, but of their mother. 

Two other categories of gods, which I have sometimes heard 
mentioned, are the Gods of assagais (psikwembu psa matlhari) 
and the Gods of bitterness (psa shiviti). The former are those who 
have been killed in battle ; the latter are those who have been 
drowned, killed by a wild beast, or who have committed sui- 
cide, or the pregnant woman, who has been buried without 
being cut open (I. p. 166). In most of these cases, as is evi- 
dent, the corpse has not been buried with the due rites and 
ceremonies ; the deceased has not been properly cared for : 
hence his bitterness ; or, as in the case of the pregnant woman, 
something has been buried without having first breathed its 
last breath (I. p. 139). In the case of the suicide, the poor 
man who hanged himself was full of sadness: ‘* The great 
bitterness is the rope,” said Mboza. In most of these cases 
nobody attended at the death ! These gods are therefore angry, 
and are the most to be feared. 

The Gods of the Bush, psikwembu psa nhoba, are also especially 
dreaded. There is a little song which is sung as a welcome to 
travellers, who reach their home safely : 

Shikwembu sha nhoba shi etlele ! 

Shi etlele, banhwanyana ! 
Amadikeo-dikeo-dikeo ! 

The god of the bush has remained asleep ! 
He has remained asleep, young girls ! 
Hurrah! hurrah ! hurrah ! 

= 366) = 

The spirits of the departed, who wander about in the bush, 
having not been properly buried, try to attack innocent travel- 
lers. How fortunate you are to escape their anger! For this 
reason one often says to a relative, who is starting out on a 
journey : “‘Go with your god”, viz., the special ancestor-god, 
who can protect you against the dangers of the bush. 

3) THe ABODE OF THE ANCESTOR-GODS AND THEIR MopE oF LIFE. 

The ideas about these two points are very confused, even 
contradictory. Some tell you that the departed go to a great 
village under the earth, a village where everything is white 
(or pure, ‘‘ku basa”); there they till the fields, reap great har- 
vests, and live in abundance, and they take of this abundance 
to give to their descendants on earth. They have also a grea 
many cattle. The place, where they live, seems to be a kind 
of Hades or Paradise. But it seems, in contemplating the funer- 
al rites, that the deceased, on the contrary, remains in his grave. 
Is not his grave his house (I, p. 136)? Does he not sit on his 
square, where his mats have been unrolled? Thus the life of 
the shikwembu, seems to be the exact continuation of his earthly 
existence.. That such is the idea is proved by the two bones, 
which represent the gods in the set of divinatory bones : 
1) the astragalus or the nail of an ant-bear, because ant-bears 
live in the earth, and come out only during the night; 2) the 
astragalus of an antelope, found in the stools of a hyena; the 
hyena ate the antelope, swallowed the bone, which came to 
light again; in the same way the gods have been buried in the 
ground, and they reveal themselves later on. (Compare Ch. III, 
D.) Athird idea, more or less intermediate between the other 
two, is that the gods reside in the sacred woods, and there lead 
their family life under a human form, parents and children, 
even little children, who are carried on their mothers’shoulders. 
Mboza went so far as to say that they are indeed married and 
bring forth children, as children are seen on their mothers’backs. 
Here again, we see the life of the other world considered as the 
exact reproduction of this terrestrial existence. 

4) Tue Sacred Woops. 

These are vast almost impenetrable thickets, in which the 
ancient chiefs have been buried, and they are consequently 
called ntimu, cemeteries. Every clan owns one or more of these 
burying places. The ntimu is reserved for the men of the 
royal family, those who have been the owners of the land. 
They are buried in different sections of the forest, “ according 
to their villages”, in such a way that the wood represents sepa- 
rate cemeteries, corresponding to the villages of the living. No 
woman, no uterine nephew is buried in the official cemeteries. 

These woods are taboo. It is prohibited to gather fuel there, 
to cut any tree, or to allow the bush fire to enter them. Should 
anyone have imprudently set on fire the grass in the neighbour- 
hood, and be unable to arrest the blaze, should the fire so pass 
over the grave, he must provide a goat for sacrifice, in order to 
“extinguish ’ (timula) the sacred wood. All entry is strictly 
prohibited except to the guardian of the wood (mutameli wa 
ntimu), the priest, who is the descendant of the gods of the 
forest. He goes there from time to time, to offer the sacrifi- 
ces. He penetrates into the dense foliage by a narrow path, 
hardly noticeable. I have often visited one of the most cele- 
brated woods, that of Libombo, two miles east of the Rikatla 
station. The old Libombo chiefs were buried there, and Nko- 
lele, the proprietor of the forest, was very proud of it. He pre- 
tended that Mahazule, the chief of Nondwane, belonging to the 
reigning family of Mazwaya, whose forefathers had conquer- 
ed the land of Nondwane, feared the spot and, in order to 
avoid it, took a circuitous route to Lourenco-Marques, or, if 
forced to take that road, he stopped near the wood to pay his 
respects to the old chiefs buried there. I did not see anything 
remarkable in that wood. Forcing my way through the bushes, 
brambles, and creepers I at length came to a sort of tumulus, 
but very slightly raised, on which were to be seen some dried 
leaves of maize, the remains of offerings placed there sometime 
ago. The young man who acted as my guide — considerably 

against his inclination, I fancy, turned away his face, with a 
terrified expression, when we came upon this grave. In ano- 
ther spot I found some other tombs. Snakes thrive, naturally, 
in these thickets, where they areun disturbed, but I did not see 
any on that day. No mausoleum has been built over any of 
these venerated sepulchres ; a few pieces of old blackened pot- 
tery was all we saw: remnants of the jugs and plates belonging 
to the deceased, which were broken, on the spot, after his death. 

The dread in which these sacred woods are held by the 
Natives, is certainly not due to any unusual objects they may 
have seen there. It-is inculcated, and kept in mind, by the 
truly terrifying tales which are told concerning them. In low 
tones, and with frightened looks, these are related in the even- 
ing, and the feeling of awe is fed and maintained by these 
legends. I intend here narrating those I heard from various 
informants ; these stories will illustrate the ideas, which the Nati- 
ves have of their gods, better than any philosophical explanation. 
Those in connection with the Libombo wood are the most 
typical. I owe them to Spoon and the aged Nkoiele. I will 
begin with those which are of the most ancient origin, and 
whose legendary character is the most unmistakable. 

One day a woman was passing close by the forest of Libombo : she 
plucked a sala (p. 16) from a tree and ate it, after which she went 
to till her garden. On another ocasion, just ‘as she was cracking 
another sala against the trunk of a tree before eating it, she saw that 
the fruit, instead of having a stone inside, was filled with small vi- 
pers. She threw it away, but the vipers said to her: ‘*Goon! eat 
away | haven’t we seen you every day picking sala? And these 
sala are ours, and not yours. What shall we gods have to eat? 
Have we not made this tree to grow?” And she went home and 
died, because she had been cursed by the gods. 

Another woman was passing by the forest on a rainy day, and saw 
a child, who had climbed a tree, and was eating berries. She approach- 
ed the child and said: ‘* Give me some of those berries!” The boy 
made no reply, so she began to pick some for herself. When she had 
picked enough, she said: ‘‘ Are you going on picking berries in such 
a rain as this! Where is your mother?’ He still remained silent. 

nearlie > b Sic os 
She felt sorry for the child, thinking he was indeed to be pitied : 
—‘*Come”, said she, ‘‘and let mecarry you on myback”. So she 
went up to the tree, and lifted down the child, and tied him on her 
back, with her shawl ; then, putting her conical basket on her head, 
she started for home ; on arriving at her hut, she saw that a fire had 
been lighted on account of the rain :—‘* Put on some more wood”, 
said she, ‘* for the sake of this little one, whom I found on the road 
eating berries”. She untied the shawl, and tried to put the child on 
her hip, but he refused to be moved, and clung to her back, where he 
kept quite still. The folks said to the woman: ‘‘ Put him down on 
the ground, so that he can go and warm himself near the embers ”. 
He refused. Then they said to him: ‘Get down!” But he still 
refused to move. Then the villagers said to the woman : ‘‘ Didn’t 
you pass by the Libombo forest ?” —‘*Yes! I did”, she replied 
‘and there I found this child gathering berries, and brought him along 
with me”. — ‘This is no child! it isa god!” they cried ; ‘‘ a child 
never has a hard head like this one has. And look at his legs ! what 
strength ! However did you come to think it was a child ?” 
— ‘* But”, said she, ‘‘I certainly thought it was a child — and can it 
be a god?” — They sent for magicians, who threw the bones. At 
once the -magicians knew what was wrong: — ‘‘Ha! Hé! you found 
him at Libombo, did you not?” They tried to remove him by force, 
but he clung still more closely to the woman’s back, stiffening his legs 
round her waist, and his arms around her neck. They tried to unclench 
his hands, but it was impossible ! Then they begged her to go back 
to Libombo, and implore the owners of the forest to set her free 
from this child. She took her basket, and returned to the tree, where 
she had found him. The guardian of the forest soon appeared. It 
was Makundju, the ancestor of Nkolele. He inveighed against the 
woman, and those who accompanied her, saying: — ‘‘ When you find 
fruit in the forest, do not pick it! If it be maize, leave it alone, or, 
if you pick it, spare at least one ear. If your chicken flies into the 
wood, do not go after it. If your goat runs away into it, you mus 
not follow it. We are worn out, we, folks of Libombo, with offer- 
ing sacrifices for you passers-by... Your troubles are the consequen- 
ces of the sins (psihono) you commit in this place”. A white hen 
was caught, and sacrificed on behalf of the woman, Emitting the 
‘“tsu ” the priest said : ‘‘ Behold our ox, by which we present our 
petition. Let this god leave her back. She did not do it on purpose. 
She thought it was a child ; she did not know it was a god. Which 

“— 354 

way can people go henceforth if you, gods, put obstacles in the way ¢ ( 
While this sacrifice was being offered, the being suddenly left her back, 
disappeared, and no one knew how, or whither he went. As for the 
woman, she trembled violently and died.. 

A man once defied the prohibition of cutting dry wood in the forest. 
Suddenly he was pelted from behind, with’kwakwa’ and ‘ sala’ fruits. 
It was the gods. He tried to fly, but was unable to find the path out 
of the thicket. He was lost, and tired of wandering about he let his 
bundle of faggots fall. Then the gods allowed him to find his way 
out again, but, when he found himself in the open, he perceived that 
he was carrying nothing, even his axe had been taken from him. 

Sometimes the gods made themselves heard ; when they were 
especially happy they played on trumpets, sang and. danced. 
Passers-by often tried to get a glimpse of them, but the noise 
ceased at once, and would commence again suddenly right 
behind the listeners. The people of the country know quite 
well whence this music comes, and, at Libombo, they can 
even report the song which is heard in this forest. It is a great 
pity that I was not able to obtain the music of this ode of the 
gods! I can, however, give the words, which will probably 
be found to smack considerably of the earth, earthy ! — 

With ground- nuts and onions, nté, nté, nté ! 
Make a good sauce in the pan ! 

However, here are one or two facts of quite recent occurrence, 
showing that the age of sacred wood miracles is not yet over, 
or that, at least, the religious awe still survives in some faithful 
hearts ! 

Spoon assured me that he saw on one occasion a whole herd o¢ 
goats in the forest, while he was picking tihuhlu nuts. He ran to tell 
his grandfather, Nkolele, and to ask if he might appropriate them, 
Mkolele detoved him with bitter words: ‘‘ Unhappy man! don't 
dare to touch them! They belong to the gods | Don’t even speak 
of them ! — It is taboo ! (psa yila) ” 

The young folks of Libombo used to blasphemein their hearts, saying: 
‘“‘ There are no gods”. ‘* But”, added Spoon, ‘* we very soon saw 

ar SON ee 

that there were some, when they killed one of us, named Mapfindlen. 
He was walking along the path, singing and jumping, when he trod 
on a snake, which he had not seen, and hurt it. During the night 
the gods came to him. He began to scratch himself all over his body. 
He saw them against the wall : they were like snakes, and they said : 
‘* Thou hast hurt us!” No one else saw them. His mother tried to 
quiet him, but he shrieked, and said to her: ‘‘ Leave me alone! 
The gods are killing me because I trod on them ! Help!” They threw 
the bones. ‘The diviner said: ‘‘ This comes from your household 
gods! Has he not trodden on a snake ?” His parents procured an 
offering, and sacrificed to the gods, trying to propitiate them ; but the 
gods were angry and Mapfindlen died. 

The following is the most recent of the stories. It was rela- 
ted to me by the hero himself, Nkolele, the aged priest of 
Libombo. 

After the war of 1894-1895, the Portugese Authorities established 
a camp at Morakwen, and decided to build a town there. To do this 
it became necessary to widen the primitive pathway, which led to Lou- 
rengo Marques, and Natives had to cede trees and grass lands, to the 
extent of several metres on each side of the path ; then a fine road 
was built of some 20 kilometres in length. This road passed close by 
the sacred wood, as it had been decided to follow the line of the path- 
way, which skirted this wood for a distance of about half a mile. 
Amongst many other trees was one huge mahogany, under whose 
shade I have frequently passed, which sent out a low branch, right 
over the path, and it was necessary to cut off this branch ; the people 
living in the neighbourhood were intrusted with the job. ‘When 
they began the work”, said Nkolele to me, on the 28 November, 
1895, “ I went tosee what they were doing with the mahogany tree. 
As I was seated the gods came to me, saying: ‘‘ What are you doing 
here? You ought to have stayed at home”. I fell backwards un- 
conscious, and remained in that state for four days. I couldn’t eat: 
they had closed my mouth, I could not speak! My people picked 
me up and carried me home. My relatives and my children were all 
summoned : the villagers said: “‘Our medicine-man has left us! He 
is dead!”” Then my eldest son went to offer a sacrifice in the sacred 
wood. He let loose a fowl, which flew away and never returned ; 
he prayed :‘‘Oh! my ancestors! Here is myox. Do not slay my 

father!” Then I got up. Ah! it was{he, who saved me, Ngele- 
fiwana, my eldest son! 1 looked around and said : <¢ What have all 
these people come here for?” They were terror stricken. Then 
they told me that the gods of Libombo were angry with me. The 
gods said to me (doubtless by means of the bones): ‘‘ Take an ox- 
cock” (meaning an ox, an animal for sacrifice, which might be a 
cock), ‘and go to your brother Shihubane. Let him give you a 
fowl. and go and sacrifice. Why did you go there? You ought to 
have stayed at home, and have sent your children”. I did not go 
any more by the big road. Igo by the path through the marshes, 
and never by the avenue made by the Whites. Now I can go that 
way, for I have sacrificed, and the gods have said: ** He has asked 
our pardon by means of his gifts”. 

Is there not something significant and touching about this 
tale? Civilisation penetrates irresistibly, crushing everything in 
its way, and cutting remorselessly, perhaps unwittingly, through 
the edge ofthe sacred wood! And there, under the mahogany 
tree, the aged priest, the guardian of its traditions, swoons away 
and asks forgiveness for having been an involuntary witness of 
the sacrilege ! 

These stories are by no means restricted to the Libombo sacred 
wood. Similar tales are told of all the forests. Mboza says: 

A woman was imprudent enough to cut some dry branches in 
the sacred wood of Masinge, near Morakwen. She at once heard 
an unusual voice: bi... bi.., and received blows. She ran away 
home leaving her garment in the bush. Having arrived home, she 
asked her husband to go and fetch it, but he refused, from fear. 
Nkomuza, the guardian of the forest, went to fetch it, but they had 
to reward him with a bottle of wine. 

An older story about the same forest runs as follows: — In olden 
times the gods were frequently seen marching in file, going to draw 
water from the well. They had their own road. They were of 
short stature, the women carrying babies in the ntehe, but, strange 
to say, with the feet up and the heads downwards! A man, called 
Mishimhongo, built his village near to the forest. The gods, angry 
with him, entered his huts, while he was busy with all his people 
working in the fields. A little child only remained in the village, 

mr. aae ae 

whom the gods wrapped up in a mat, and hid him somewhere behind 
the huts. Thenthey went tothe garden and shouted: ‘* Mishimhongo! 
There are visitors in your village”. The man looked to see who was 
calling him, but saw no one. He went home, and found! the child 
had disappeared. In the evening the gods came and said to him: 
‘*Look behind the huts. But move at once; do not remain near 
our road! If you do so, we shall kill you and your child”. The 
poor man needed no second warning! 

Not far from this place, in the Nkanyen district, is the sacred wood 
of Tlhatlha. An enormous pot is said to have been placed there long 
ago, a marvellous pot which possesses the faculty of locomotion. It 
can moye as far as that village yonder (half a mile). But though it 
.may have arrived only yesterday at the spot where you see it, it is 
quite hidden in the grass and shrubs, as if it had been there for years! 
It takes its walk from one end of the graves to the other. It is taboo 
to touch it! When the Portuguese tried to establish a camp there, they 
heard strange noises during the night, drums, trumpets, etc. The 
Landi (Natives) said to them: “‘ Take care! There are gods here”. 
So they removed their camp to Morakwen. (Mboza). 

The wood of Tembe, called Mudlomadlomana, is very celebrated. 
It is said that, in olden days, there was an anchor there, and before 
sacrificing the priest always used to lift it up, and let it fall to the 
ground, saying : ‘‘Shawan! (I salute thee) Tembe!”. If the sacrifice 
was acceptable the sound of a trumpet: ‘ byé... bvé...”, was heard, 
far away in the depths of the woods, but no form was everseen. This 
anchor also possessed extraordinary powers. When the country was 
at war with its neighbours, and matters did not go well with Tembe, 
the anchor would move off by itself into the Matjolo district. This 
was the portent ofsome terrible catastrophe ! 

No one ever penetrated very far into the sacred wood of 
Tiyini, of the Matjolo clan, for it was said that any one doing 
so would be lost, and unable to find his way out. When the 
people of Matjolo were in need of rain, they took a young man 
of the country into the wood, and there abandoned him. The 
gods accepted their offering, and the young man, struck with 
paralysis was unable to follow in their retreat those who had 
led him to martyrdom! He saw them going away but remained 
behind to be devoured by the gods. The others hastened to 
sacrifice and returned home ; they were forbidden to look behind 

them. Once home they told how they had seen on the ground, 
in the wood, foot-prints of adults, and even of little ones who 
must have been old enough to crawl on their hands and knees! 
Often, they say, they brought back the rain with them! 

According to all these stories, it is evident that, for the Thonga, 
the ancestor-20ds dwell in the sacred woods, and lead a life 
there in the earth, and occasionally outside, very similar to the 
terrestial one. Mankhelu had, however, another idea, which is 
difficult to reconcile with this representation. On his forked 
magic pole he had a long shining grey branch of a climbing 
shrub called fiwabola. This has enormous thorns, which are 
supposed to have the power of “calling the precious things 
which are far away, and of gathering them in the hut : money, 
oxen, girls to marry, etc., and also the ancestor-gods : ‘‘ When 
they pass through the country, coming from our old domicile, 
near the Limpopo, they are caught by the thorns, and settle 
here to bless us”. This conception, that the gods fly through 
the air, is very rarely met with. I never heard it said that the 
gods were in heaven, notwithstanding the Suto term badimo, 
those who are above. 

5. RELATIONS BETWEEN ANCESTOR-GODS AND THEIR LIVING 

DESCENDANTS. 

The apparitions of ancestor-gods in a human form in the 
sacred woods are not of frequent occurrence. The gods reveal 
themselves to their descendants by other and more common 
means : first, by their appearance in the form of animals, such 
as the Mantis (p. 312) or more often as little bluish green 
snakes called shihundje (p. 317). These charming harmless rep- 
tiles are frequently seen in the huts, creeping in the thatch ot 
the roof, or along the reeds of the walls. Natives never touch 
them, thinking that they are some of their gods, who have 
come to pay them a visit. It is taboo to kill het Ifa disease 
breaks out in the village the bones may reveal that some one 
in the hut has hurt the gods, and a sacrifice will be required 

ak Oe a 

in order to appease them. They also appear in the form of the 
large green puff-adder (shiphyahla). (1) 

Secondly, the ancestor-gods communicate with the living 
in their dreams. If some one dreams of one of his dead relatives, 
he is very much frightened, and consults the bones, in order 
to know exactly what the god desires of him (Viguet). If 
the apparition was painful, if the god had come as an enemy, 
fighting, the dreamer, when awake, will take some tobacco, or 
a small piece of cloth, and put it somewhere in the reeds of the 
wall, near the door, as an offering. Or possibly the god has 
ordered him to give him something to drink. He will then 
buy a bottle of ginor wine, and pour a littleat the out door ; 
whatever remains he will drink with his companions. 

But the great means by which the will of the gods is reveal- 

(1) Describing to me a sacrifice, at which he officiated either in September 
or October 1895, the old priest Nkolele told me for a fact the following story, 
which I will now quote word for word : 

‘‘T myself went into the wood with the offering I had prepared for the 
goas, and then 7f came out. It was a snake; it was the father of Makundju, 
the Master of the Forest, Mombo-wa-ndlopfu, Elephant’s-Face. He 
came out and circled round all those present. The women rushed away ter- 
rified. But he had only come to thank us. He didn’t come to bite us. He 
thanked us saying: ‘‘ Thank you! thank you! So you are still there, 
my children! You came to load me with presents, and to bring me fruit ! 
“Tis well!” — He came to thank us fo1 our chicken. Even if one kills 
only a chiken, he is quite content. For him, it has just the same value as 
an ox. It was an enormous viper, as thick as my leg, down there (he pointed 
to his ankle). It came close up to me, and kept quite still, never biting me. 
I looked at it. It said: ‘Thank you! So you are still there, my grandson | ” 

— “But”, said I to Nkolele, ” what you are telling me, is it really fact, or 
just fancy 2?” 

— “ Undoubted fact! These are great truths! After this I prayed, and 
said: ‘* Thou, Mombo-wa-Ndlopfu, the Master of this land, thou who 
hast given it to thy son Makundju; Makundju gave it to his son Hati; 
Hati gave it to Makhumbi; Madhumbi gave it to Kinini; Kinini gave 
it to Mikabyana ; Mikabyana gave it to Mawatle... (‘‘Mawatle gave it 
to me, his son” is here understood)... Look upon my offering. Is it not a 
beautiful one? And here,am I, left all alone. If I had not brought this with 
me, who would have given you anything ? Is it not just so ? Task of thee, 
my ancestor, I ask of thee all the trees; the palm trees for building, the 
trunks which can be hollowed out for canoes ; and let it be that these trunks 
shall not fall on the people and crush them, when they go to cut them down, 
over there in the marsh. ” 

= 360 — 

ed is the set of divinatory bones, which are cast on every occasion, 
and are called the ‘‘bula”, the Word. Is it the Word of the 
gods? Not precisely, but in most cases the diviner thinks he 
owes his divinatory power to a dead relative, who used to cast lots 
himself, and who transmitted his spirit of interpretation to him. 
Whatever may be the real explanation, the fact remains that it 
is by means of the bones the Thonga believe they know what 
their gods think and wish, and this is the reason, as we shall 
see, why divination plays such an important part in their life. 
It is of the utmost importance to know what their gods think 
and do, as the very existence of the village, of the clan, and 
the welfare of every member of the clan depends on them. Is 
not Divinity ‘‘ the power of killing or of making alive, of en- 
riching or of making poor?” Natives firmly believe in these 
two opposite actions of their gods. They are the masters of 
everything : earth, fields, trees, rain, men, children, even of 
baloyi, wizards! They havea full control over all these objects 
or persons. 

The gods can Ddless : if the trees bear plenty of fruit, it is 
because they made it grow (I. p. 387); if the crops are plenti- 
ful, it is because they sent good wizards to increase them, or 
hindered bad ones who tried to spoil them (I. p. 369); if you 
come across a pot of palm wine, it is your god who has sent 
you that windfall (p. 42). When Mboza escaped from the 
Morakwen battle, one of his relatives exclaimed on his return 
home : “ The gods of Makaneta have still been with you!” 
(Psikwembu psa ka Makaneta psa ha ku yimelele). Often 
when a man has narrowly escaped drowning, or having his 
ankle sprained by a stump which has caught his foot, he will 
say “‘ The gods have saved me”. 

But they can also curse, and bring any amount of misfortune 
on their descendants. If the rain fails, it is owing to their 
anger ; if a tree falls on you, they have directed its fall; if a 
crocodile bites you, the gods residing in the pool have sent it; 
if your child has fever and is delirious, they are in him, tor- 
menting his soul; if your wife is sterile, they have prevented 
her from childbearing; perhaps the gods of your mother have 

es 361 pews 

done this, because you had not given your maternal uncle the 
tjumba part of the lobolo, which he has the right to claim 
(I. p. 253); in fact any disease, any calamity may come from 
them. There are, of course, other sources of misfortune : the 
baloyi, for instance, of Heaven, and the bones will show who 
has caused the mischief; but the ancestor-gods are certainly the 
most powerful spiritual agency acting on man’s life. Hence the 
necessity of propitiating them by offering prayers and sacrifices. 

I. Zhe Means of Propitiation. Offerings and Sacrifices. 

{t is no wonder that since these spirits are so terrible, their 
descendants have sought means of propitiating them. The study 
of these rites is very interesting, and will throw more light on 
the ideas which the Bantus have of their ancestor-gods. Some 
of these means of propitiation bear a magical character. For 
instance, when Mankhelu wanted to induce the gods to sleep 
and leave him in peace, he took roots, which had been brought 
to light naturally by a swollen river, which had washed away 
the ground. ‘The reason is clear; the gods are in the earth, 
therefore things found in the earth can influence them. So he 
cut these roots in small pieces, cooked them with the flesh of 
a goat, and drank the broth ; the assagai, which killed the goat, 
had been first smeared with a powder made of these roots, and 
he put the astragalus of the goat on his ankle, on the right side 
if the god to be propitiated belonged to the father’s family, and 
on the left if it was one of his mother’s ancestors. If the pro- 
pitiatory ceremony was performed for a woman, the astragalus 
was tied with a strap ‘‘ en bandouillére ” round her body. 

But the propitiatory rites very rarely bear a magical charac- 
ter : they are religious acts, viz., acts performed with the inten- 
tion of influencing living, conscious and superior beings, and con- 
sist in most cases in gifts. Their general name is mbamba, a 
word which can be translated by offering, but which admits of 
a wider meaning, as we shall see. They are not miri, charms, 
or medicines similar to those employed in magic. 

1) CLASSIFICATION OF OFFERINGS. 

These offerings are much more complicated and varied, than 
they at firstseem. They might, perhaps, be classified thus : — 

1) The family offerings — those which concern the family alone, 
— and the national offerings — those which concern the whole clan. 

2) Che simple offerings called gandjela, and the sacramental ones, 
accompanied by the famous fsw which makes them a habla, a real 
sacrifice. 

3) The offerings attended with bloodshed, and those where there 
is no victim killed. 

4) The regular offerings, made at certain dates, or in connection 
with definite events in the life of the family or of the clan, and 
those made in special circumstances, which have not arisen unex- 
pectedly. 

a) The family offerings. 
Simple offerings (Gandjela). 

Here the ritual is reduced to its minimum. The offer- 
ing is made by the father of the family at the gandjelo, 
the altar, or place of worship. This is, as has alreadly been 
pointed out, a little pot, placed at the right side of the 
entrance to the village, or under the tree, designated by the 
bones (I. p. 283). In some cases, especially if the headman 
is a medicine-man or magician, the gandjelo consists of a for- 
ked branch, planted in the ground, either inside a hut, or 
in the very middle of the square. Such was the case, in 
the village of Mankhelu (See illustration I, p. 4). His gand- 
jelo was a branch of nkonola (or nkonono); this tree, the 
mpfilu and shisalala are the only trees which are used for the 
purpose. He had removed the bark in some places, and smear- 
ed the stems with his black powders, so that there were two 
dark rings of about 3 inches wide on the branch. A lot of 
curious things were to be seen, hanging from the lateral bran- 
ches : bags full of roots, calabashes of different sizes, containing 
the precious drugs, pieces of the nwabola shrub, etc. When he 

had earned some money or acquired something by accident, 
Mankhelu used to put these objects near the stem, and leave 
them there for the night in order to inform his gods of his good 
fortune. Atthe foot of the branch the earth was smeared with 
black clay, forming a circle with a little furrow made round the 
outside of it. Men, who are not so important as this great 
~anga, are contented with the small pot I described before. This 
can be placed on the grave, if it happens to be near the village. 

In the case of Sokis (I. p. 140) it was indeed the deceased’s 
which had been pierced at the bottom in order to 

own mug, 

Sokis’ mug. The altar of primitive mankind. 

allow the beer to sink easily into the ground, when an offering 
was made to the recently deceased by his relatives (1). 

Regular offerings are brought to the altar by the headman. 
When he has finished preparing his tobacco for use, he carefully 
puts aside some leaves of it, and places them near the pot. 
When he has ground the tobacco for snuff he puts two little 
spoonfuls into the pot, one for the paternal, the other for the 
maternal gods, saying at the same time: 

(1) I had the good fortune of obtaining this mug, which may well be call- 
ed the altar of primitive humanity! | “offered Sokis’ wife a little pig in 
exchange. She was quite willing to accept the bargain but her sister-in-law 

made objections, fearing doubtless that the deceased might be-angry... The 
widow answered her thus : — When he was living how often did you not 

refuse him beer!- You may do the same now, and accept the little pig. 
Thanks to the common-sense view taken by Sokis’wife I am now in possession 
of this precious pierced mug, and can give its fact simile on the adjoining 

plate. 

i 

Fole hi ledji! Tlanganan mi djaha, mi nga ndji hobilise loko ndji 
djaha fole, mi ku ndji mi tjona. ‘ 

Here is some tobacco! Come all of you and take a pinch, anddo 
not be angry with me when I snuff, nor say that I deprive you of your 
share. 

Having made his offering the headman must return to his seat, 
on the hubo, without looking behind him : this is a taboo. 

Another way of gandjela is the offering of a piece of cloth 
(nturu), which may be tied at the entrance, or to the tree of the 
village (p. 310). Liquids also are poured int the gandjelo : 
beer, when a beer feast is to take place, wine, when it has been 
bought at the neighbouring store ; palm-wine, when the big pot 
called gandjelo (see p. 42 for the explanation of this word in 
this particular connection) has been filled, and the precious drink 
has been brought to the village. 

Occasional offerings are made, for instance, in a case of shirwalo 
(I. p. 378) when relatives-in-law have brought jars of beer. A 
little of the beer is first offered to the gods, in order that the 
pots may not get broken during the return journey. Another 
case is after adream, in which the gods have asked for such and 
such an offering to be made (p. 358). 

Sacramental offerings or Sacrifices (Ku hahla (Ro.), phahla Dj.). 

These are of much greater importance than the simple ones 
and also differ from them in two ways, viz., they are always 
ordered by the divinatory bones, and accompanied by the sacra- 
mental tsu. The bones are first consulted, and give many indi- 
cations, e. g., what must be the nature of the offering ; to which 
god it must be consecrated ; in which place the act of worship 
must be performed, (in the hut, behind it, at the door, in the 
square, in the sacred wood, or in the bush ?) When the cere- 
mony takes place over the grave the bones reveal whether the 
officiant must stand at the head or at the feet. (See Chap. II, 
D. for the consultation of the bones). 

Sacrifices of Bitterness. There is a progression in the offerings, 

= 365 

according to the value of the gift accompanying the fsw. In 
some cases, all that is given to the gods is the small amount of 
saliva, emitted in pronouncing the sacramental sound, or it 
may be that, instead of being well fermented and fine flavoured 
beer, the gift consists merely of water poured over sorghum or 
millet, a mixture which has neither taste nor value. These 
offerings are called ‘ Sacrifices of Bitterness ” (ku habla hi shi- 
biti), and form a most curious category. They are generally 
presented by a headman, who is overwhelmed with sorrow, and 
deprived of everything. “‘ He shows his misery by offering 
nothing but his saliva. He leans his head against his shoulder 
with a look of profound sadness. His heart is bitter! He has 
nothing! He therefore does not try to win over his gods by 
presenting rich gifts to them. He wishes rather to gain their 
blessing by this appearance of abject misery. And they will 
indeed have pity on him ! ” (Mboza) This is certainly touching! 
But this kind of offering, though showing more individual piety 
than others, must, however, only be made ritually, i. e., by order 
of the bones. ‘The sacrifice of bitterness may be resorted to, 
when no evil has as yet fallen on the village, as a preventative 
against misfortune. 

Sacrifices of the medicine-men. The Native physicians are, as 
has already been pointed out, very pious. Having inherited 
their art from their forefathers, as family secrets, they always 
implore the blessing of their ancestors on their various treat- 
ments. This is done by real sacrifices, performed with the tsw 
and a liturgical prayer. In Vol. I, p. 53, the religious ceremony 
which accompanies the monthly vapour bath administered to 
infants has been described ; the religious act takes place also in 
the hondola of the weaning (I. p. 57). These are typical cases. 
Another offering of the same nature is made on behalf of the 
man, who is about to start out on a journey, soing for in- 
stance to Johannesburg. The doctor, having prepared the pro- 
tective drugsin a pot, brings them tothe entrance of the traveller’s 
hut, calls his ‘* patient ”, then taking a little of the decoction 
ni his mouth, spits it at him with the sacramental tsu and 
prays in the following words: 

— e6oe 

Akhwari! Abusayi! Ndji hlaya psolepso! Khongelwa a nga dlawi. 
Ku dlawa phalaburena! Khombo a dji suke, dji ya ka Shiburi, dji ya 
ka Nkhabelane ! A a fambe psinene, a kandjetela balala, mitwa mi 
yetlele, ku yetlela ni tindjau. A a yenwa mati ya kone, ma mu tjabisa 
hi djo tluka ledji. 

‘© Akhwari! Abusayi! I say so. Death does not come to him for 
whom prayer is made ; death only comes to him who trustsin his own 
strength! Let misfortune depart, let it go to Shiburi, and Nkhabe- 
lane (1). Let him travel safely ; let him trample on his enemies ; 
let thorns sleep, let lions sleep ; let him drink water wherever he 
goes, and let that water make him happy, by the strength of this leaf 
(viz., of my medicinal herbs) ”. 

To these words is generally added an invocation to the medi- 
cine-man’s gods, who are entreated to bless the drugs they have 
given to their descendant, and to meet the traveller’s gods in 
order to insure his success in this undertaking. The decoction 
is then used to wash the body of the young man. He will pay 
the fee on his return home. 

Regular family sacrifices. We have seen them performed in 
connection with the most important events in life. At the wean- 
ing (but then, it was what one might term a medical sacrifice), 
on the marriage day, either publicly as amongst the Ronga clans 
(I. p. 111), or privately, by the bride’s father alone, as isthe cus- 
tom amongst the Nkuna (I. p. 119). The gods are entreated to 
give the newly married women “ timbeleko ”, bifths;: 1264 
children, as it seems that the power of begetting depends di- 
rectly on the gods. Regular acts of worship are performed also 
at the burial, with the nkanye twig, which is called mhamba 
(I. p. 142), at the crushing of the hut (1. p. 159-164), on the 
days of mahloko (I. p. 211), and at the adjudication of the inhe- 
ritance (I. p. 205). 

I have already mentioned the stringent taboo in regard to the 
victims killed in these sacrifices. The portions distributed 
amongst the different relations must not be eaten either in the 
village of the deceased, or in those of the various visitors. 
This meat must be roasted on the road, and eaten then, and it 

(1) The extremity of the land (Comp, I, p. 53). 

SS Gor se 

is likewise taboo to season it at all. The inhabitants of the 
deceased’s village can eat the meat boiled, but it is prohibited 
to add ground-nuts to the broth. 

These are the great family sacrifices, in which the uterine 
nephews play their curious part, and on the occasion of which 
family matters are brought up and settled. They play a most 
important part in the life of the family, and I have therefore 
described them at length, when treating of the social life of the 
tribe, as here religion and social life are intimately united. 
There is therefore no need for me to add much more regarding 
them here. With their well determined and typical ritual they 
form the most definite and settled element of the religious life 
of the tribe. 

Rangane asserts that another sacrifice is regularly performed in 
the Maluleke district. On the first occasion of the cooking of the 
new mealies, each headman prepares a little of the flour, takes a 
spoonful of it, and throws it away, praying at the same time 
to the Ba-Nyai spirits, i. e., the gods of the Ba-Nyai, who have 
been conquered by the Maluleke. He calls this “‘magandjelo 
ya ku fiwantseka”, i. e., “sacrifice tasted and thrown away”. 
This is evidently to propitiate the gods, who were the first 
owners of the country and who might work havoc on the inva- 
ders. Compare p. 351 the respect shown by Mahazule to the 
Libombo sacred wood, and also the curious request of the 
Samaritans, II Kings. XVII. 

Extraordinary family sacrifices. By these, [mean specially those 
offered in cases of disease. The bones, having revealed that the dis- 
ease is caused by the gods (and not by the wizards, nor by 
Heaven, which are two other possibilities), and also that it 
comes from such and such agod,a god of bitterness, or a god of 
the paternal or the maternal line, now indicate the nature of 
the offering which must be made, the place, and sometimes even 
the person, who must make it. Here is the detailed description, 
given by Viguet, of a sacrifice made fora ntukulu, an uterine 
nephew, who is ill: —‘‘ Suppose”, says Viguet, “‘that I am the 
sick child. The bones have said that an offering must be made 
to the gods of our bakokwana (mother’s family) ; so we go to 

our maternal relatives, to my malume, and ask him to perform 
the sacrifice. .The offering may consist of a hen or an orna- 
ment like a bracelet. Ifit is a hen, my malume will kill it in 
accordance with the ceremonial rite, take a few of the feathers 
of the neck, which have been soiled by the blood, put them to 
his mouth, and spit on them, making tsu(the blood of the vic- 
tim thus mingles with the saliva of the priest), and say (bulabu- 

lela): 

You, our gods, and you so and so, here is our mhamba (offering) ! 
Bless this child, and make him live and grow ; make him rich, so that 
when we visit him, he may be able to kill an ox for us... You 
are useless, you gods; you only give us trouble! For, although we 
give you offerings, you do not listen to us! We are deprived of 
everything! You, so and so (naming the god, to which the offering 
must be addressed in accordance with the decree given by the bones, 
i. e., the god who was angry, and who induced the other gods to 
come and do harm to the village, by making the child ill), you are 
full of hatred! You do not enrich us! All those who succeed, do 
so by the help of their gods ! — Now we have made you this gift! 
Call your ancestors so and so; call also the gods of this sick boy’s 
father, because his father’s people did not steal his mother: these 
people, of such and such a clan, came in the daylight (to lobola the 
mother). So come here to the altar! Eat and distribute amongst 
yourselves our ox (the hen !) according to your wisdom. 

Then the priest takes a feather from one of the wings, a claw 
of the left foot and the beak, and after tying them together, 
attaches them to the left wrist or left ankle of the child, or to 
his neck, passing the string over the shoulder and under the left 
arm ; (everything is on the left side, because it is an offering to 
the gods of the mother’s family ; everything would be on the 
right side if it were tothe gods of the father). These parts of 
the victim are called psirungulo, the religious amulet. 

When the offering consists of a bracelet, the bones having 
so ordered, the priest will pour consecrated beer over it, and 
say his prayer. The bracelet will then be fastened to the child’s 
foot. Hemay not removeit, nor exchange it for something else: 
it belongs to the gods. 

<u 
This description, given by Viguet, is typical for the sacrifices 
offered in the case ofa disease. In the Maluleke clan the sacri- 
fice made for a sick person is as follows: — the headman 
takes beer, which has been specially prepared for the gods 
and is very much diluted, the beer called byala bosila, and a 
twig of male nkanye. He orders the patient to sit near the 
altar, and after dipping the twig into the beer, sucks it and says 
the following words: 

Phaa! ( this word corresponds to tsu): this is byala bosila, you 
Makhima! Take it and convey it to your father Mashakadzi; call each 
other and come together here to drink! Let all disease depart ! 
Heal this man! 

I must also mention the sacrifice performed in the curious 
ceremony of dlaya shilongo, in the case of marriage between near 
relatives (I. p. 245), and will now proceed to describe two 
others, viz., the sacrifice on behalf of the son, who has just 
returned from Johannesburg, and the sacrifice of reconcilia- 
tion. — 

When a young man, who has been absent from home for a 
long time, returns to his village, he cannot be received again into 
the community without special precautions being taken. If 
there has been a death in the kraal he must be purified from 
the collective contamination before eating the food of the vil- 
lage. This is the luma milomo (I. p. 146), and it is in con- 
nection with the defilement from death. Some of the provi- 
sions of the deceased, kept in a pot and diluted with hot water, 
must be poured between his two great toes, and he must after- 
wards rub them together. But, before this, a religious act is 
performed. Before the boy, who is on the return journey, is 
allowed to enter his native village, he has to stay for a short 
time just outside, while his father, seated at the great entrance, 
cuts the neck of a hen, which he has previously selected, and 
throws it on the boy’s luggage. Then the victim leaps about 
(phuphumela) in its agony. The officiant plucks out some of 
the bloodstained feathers, pronounces the tsu, and says : 

Here is your son. He has returned home safely, because you have 
accompanied him! Perhaps he has brought back pounds sterling 
with him to lobola. Perhaps he will now take a wife! I do not 
know. The great thing is that he is healthy, and you have brought 
him back safely . 

The Sacrifice of Reconciliation. One of the most curious of the 
religious acts performed in connection with the family is called 
ku hahlela madjieta, viz., to perform a sacramental act in con- 
nection with the madjieta. Djieta (dji-ma) means a rash oath, or 
an oath with imprecation. If two brothers quarrel, and the 
younger believing himself to be the injured one, breaks off all 
connection with his brother, he may say to the latter in his 
anger: “ Never shall I speak to you again, or come any 
more to your village!” This is a djieta. The two men can 
remain for years without the slightest intercourse with each 
other. But shoulda serious disease break out in the village ot 
the younger, and should the bones order him to offer a sacrifice, 
he is at once in a predicament. He has no right to offer the 
sacrifice himself, for, according to the great law of priesthood in 
ancestrolatry, it is his elder brother, who must do it for him. 
The bones, on being consulted again, give the response : — 
«* There is something in the way. You two have tied a knot. 
Untie it first, then offer the sacrifice.” The younger brother 
will then go to the elder, and say : ‘I have sinned in swear- 
ing that I would never come again to your village. Let us 
hahlela djieta, i. e., accomplish the sacrificial act, which will can- 
cel the rash oath (1). The elder will scold him soundly, but will 

(1) See also my article on ‘* The Sacrifice of Reconciliation ” amongst the 
Ba-Ronga (South African Journal of Science. February 1911). The djieta is 
any rash oath, and not only one pronounced against a brother. If a man 
swears that he will never enter a pool again (because he has been stung), or 
a river (because he has been followed by a crocodile), it is likewise a djieta. 
Should he find it necessary to enter this lake or this river again, he must 
first hahlela djieta, i. e. cancel his oath by a sacramental act. This is not 
necessarily a prayer to his gods, but only an invocation addressed to the 
imprecation itself: “* You, djieta, I said I would enter this lake no more, but 
I want to ijeba (p. 71) and to eat fish! Don’t cause me to suffer from BS 
Then he takes some water in his hands, and throws it into the pool. 

eerie eae 
eventually accept his excuses. This meeting for confession and 
reconciliation is called ku hahla madjieta, even if no other act, 
no isu, or prayer, is performed. — The reconciliation may, how- 
ever, be celebrated, in a more solemn way, by a ceremony, 
which is attended by the elder members of the family. The 
brother, who pronounced the imprecation, prepares a decoction 
of a special herb, called mudahomu, and pours it into a sala 
shell. Everybody assembles on the square, and the two for- 
mer enemiessit in the midst, on the bare ground. The offender 
raises the shell to his lips, sips the decoction, spits it out with 
the customary tsu, and says: ‘‘ This is our djieta. We pro- 
nounced it, because our hearts were bitter. To-day it must come 
to an end. It is right that we make peace.” The other 
brother, the offended one, then takes the shell, and after going 
through the same rite of the tsu, says: ‘‘I was justly angry, 
because it was he who first offended me! But let it be ended 
to-day ; let us eat out of the same spoon, drink out of the same 
cup, and be friends again. ” Then he breaks the shell, and 
they drink and enjoy themselves together. 

b) The National Offerings. 

They are those offered at the Capital, to the ancestors of the 
chief, but on behalf of the whole clan, because the gods of the 
reigning family have control over the clan, just in the same 
way as the chief over the families of his subjects. 

The regular national offering is the luma of the first fruits, their 
consecration, which I have described at length, as one of the 
principal manifestations of the National life (I. p. 366-376). 
The Bantu conception of hierarchy is clearly illustrated by this 
custom : the gods must be the first to enjoy the produce of the 
new year, then the chief, the sub-chiefs, the counsellors, the 
headmen, then the younger brothers in order of age. There 
is a stringent taboo directed against the person who precedes 
his superiors in the enjoyment of the first fruits ; this law 
being applicable to Kafir corn or bukanye in certain clans, and 

— 
also to sorghum, pumpkin leaves and beer, etc., in others. (1) 

The religious meaning of the rite is clear: the gods, if depriv- 
ed of the right they possess by virtue of their hierarchical posi- 
tion, would avenge themselves by threatening the harvest ; so 
they must be given their share first. 

In the Maluleke clan, where the customs seem to have been 
influenced by the Ba~Nyai, there is also a regular sacrifice offer- 
ed at the capital, when the crops are still growing. Rangane 
describes it as follows: ‘‘ When the chief sees that the Kafir 
corn is threatened by the vermin in the fields, he says: ‘‘ Per- 
haps the master of the country (i. e. my ancestors who are 
dead) are angry ; perhaps I have not worshipped them well.” 
He summons the sons of the royal family (mangalakana) from 
all parts of the country, prepares beer, and selects a goat for 
sacrifice ; they assemble around the graves with the sons and 
the uterine nephews, where they worship, and then, after eating 
all that is to be eaten, they return”. 

The extraordinary national offerings, are those in connection 
with the rain. If the rain falls at the right season, the sacrifice 
will not be made ; but should it fail to do so, the whole ritual 
will be gone through. This sacrifice for the rain, is, as has 
already been mentioned (p. 295) called phokolo amongst the Bilen 
clans, and is performed in the following way: — The bones 
are consulted, and a special pot, called phokolo, is buried just 
below the surface of the ground, in the middle ofa clean place 
well hidden in a dense thicket of thorny shrubs. ‘The victim, 
a black ram without any white spot, is brought there, and kill- 
ed in accordance with the ceremonial rites. (See the prominent 
part played by the chief’s uterine nieces in this sacrifice which 
is preceded by an offering of beer, I. p. 296). The grass of the 
paunch is squeezed over the pot, so that the green liquid drips 

(1) Amongst the Maluleke a second lwma is necessary after harvest, when 
brewing the first beer. It seems that the sub-chiefs or even headmen, settled 
in districts far away from the Capital, can obtain a special license to perform 
the Juma ceremony on their own account, but they must first apply for this 
permission, and, after having finished, they must forward the chief's share to 
him. 

i oe 

into it, and the blood is spread all over the place. Four turrows 
have been dug in the form of a cross with the pot as a centre, 
and pointing towards the four cardinal points. Little girls 
(“‘ who are not yet wise ”, i. e. they are not yet aware of sexual 
matters) are sent to fetch water and fill the pot until it over- 
flows into the furrows. This being done, they go back to their 
mothers. The méelele rite will immediately follow (p. 296). 
This phokolo sacrifice is the religious act in connection with an- 
cestrolatry, the mbelele being actuated by entirely different ideas. 
The phokolo rite is replaced in the Nkuna clan by the official 
visit to the graves, with an old mourning song, and the custom 
of beating the mounds with sticks ; (whether to awake the gods 
or show them the dissatisfaction of the worshippers, I do not 
know). In many sacred woods, a living human victim is offered 
to the gods, as already mentioned (p. 357). The phokolo rite 
is a regular sacrifice attended with bloodshed. 

Another national act of worship, which recalls the rite of the 
nkanye twig in funeral ceremonies, is performed with the aid 
of the great mhamha, to which I already made reference in I, 
p- 360. This is a most curious object, the mhamba par excel- 
lence, in the Tembe and Zihlahla clans. It is so venerated 
that people fear to call it by its own name, and refer to it as 
hlengwe, riches. According to the description of Hlekisa, (a 
Tembe Native), it consists of the nails and hair of the deceased 
chiefs. When a chief dies, the more or less imperishable por- 
tions of his body, such as the nails and the hair of his head and 
beard, are carefully cut, kneaded together with the dung of the 
oxen which have been killed at his death, and a kind of pellet 
is thus made. This is bound round with thongs of hide. 
When another chief dies, a second pellet is made and. added 
to the first one, and so on down through centuries. The 
mhamba of the Tembe clan is at the present time about one 
foot.in length, says my informant, who is a cousin of the man 
to whom the custody of this sacred relic has been committed, 
and who has seen it often. The guardian has to be of a parti- 
cularly even temperament, and must not be given to the use 
of strong language, nor to intoxication. The chief gives him 

S/o Aree ae 

money, or perhaps a wife for his trouble, because he incurs 
such a responsibility towards the country. He keeps the 
mhamba in a hut specially built for the purpose, at the back of 
his own village. Whenever he is called upon to use it for a 
religious purpose he must abstain from sexual relations for a 
whole month. The sacrifice then performed will consist of a 
goat, slaughtered in the usual way, but consecrated without the 
ordinary tsu. The tsu is replaced by the mhamba, which the 
officiant will brandish in the same way as the nkanye twig 
(I. p. 142) in the funeral ceremony, tracing circles in the air, 
and invoking the gods. — This object is wrapped in great 
mystery. Mboza thinks that the ntjobo of the Nondwane, kept 
in the sacred hut of nyokwekulu (I. p. 360), the national medi- 
cine, was the same thing, but most people were ignorant of 
what it consisted. At any rate the same law applied to both : 
it was considered the greatest calamity for it to fall into the 
hands of enemies in time of war. When the clan is forced to 
seek refuge in flight, the keeper of the mhamba is the first to 
flee. The whole army stands between him with the precious 
amulet of the clan and the enemy. It is more than its flag, 
and will not be taken until all the warriors have been killed 
or dispersed. — It is said that once during the war between 
Tembe and Maputju, the latter succeeded in gaining possession of 
the mhamba; a terrible drought ensued, for the gods of Maputju 
were irritated, as they were of the same family as those of Tembe 
(I. p. 229). Not knowing what to do with it, the Maputju at 
length cut open a goat between the hind legs, and introduced the 
mhamba into its body. They then led the goat to the river, 
which marks the boundary of the Tembe country, and threw it 
into the water. Hlekisa’s grandfather, a Tembe man, who had 
settled in Maputju, was asked to lead the goat. — Thus the 
rightful owners recovered their mhamba. (Is there not a strik- 
ing resemblance between this story and that of the capture of 
the ark of the covenant by the Philistines ?) 

The mhamba of the Zihlahla country used to be kept by a 
man named Petshela, who carried it with him from place to 
place, when fleeing, refusing to trust it to the care of any, save 

aod eee 
his own children. Is it still in existence, since the clan was depriv- 
ed of its independence ? In Nondwane the national amulet 
was taken care of by the Godhlela family, as already mention- 
ed in I, p. 361, and this function was hereditary. 

2) THe Main ELemMents oF ANCESTRAL WorsHie. 

The sequence of the religious acts in a typical sacrifice, like that 
performed at the crushing of the hut is as follows : 

1) The bones are first consulted and reveal to which god, 
when, how, and by whom the sacrifice must be made. 

2) The officiant, who is as a rule the eldest male member of 
the family, comes and presides over the sacrifice. 

3) The victims are brought by those, who have either been 
designated, or who have volunteered, to provide them. 

4) They are killed by the uterine nephews, the goats or sheep 
by piercing the heart, the hens by cutting the throat. Some- 
times the face of the goat is directed to a certain point of the 
horizon. 

5) The victim bleats, or if it is a hen, jumps about on the 
ground in its agony. At each thrust of the assagay, or of the 
knife, the uterine nephews ejaculate their cries of joy. (1) This 
is their way of consenting (pfumela) or answering, for they 
accept the offering on behalf of the gods. (2) The whole crowd 
joins in these manifestations of joy. 

(1) Amongst the Ba Nyai they clap their hands and shout: ‘“‘ Ndiyo! ” 
— ‘all right”. 

(2) It is not necessary to add more about the part played by the uterine 
nephews in the sacrifice, for it has been explained in detail in Vol. I, p. 255 
when treating of the family system. The two great reasons for their taking 
such a prominent part in the religious ritual seem to be the following : 
1) during the life of their maternal uncle, and also of all their mother’s family, 
they were on very intimate terms with them, “ even eating from the same 
piece of food, not fearing their saliva”. Therefore they now eat the flesh 
of the victim instead of the ancestor-gods of their mother. 2) Maternal rela- 
tives have a special religious duty towards their nephews. They act as their 
priests (I. p. ), offerings being frequently made to the gods of the 
mother’s family through the agency of the maternal uncle. Hence the fact 
that uterine nephews take such a peculiar part in the ritual of the worship. 

 B96 = 

6) The victim is cut open, and one limb, or small pieces of 
each limb, are put aside for the gods ; the half digested grass, 
psanyi, found in the intestines, especially in the shihlakahla sto- 
mach, is put aside carefully. 

7) The priest takes a little of the psanyi mixed with the 
blood of the victim, puts it to his lips, emits a little saliva, and 
spits out the whole in making tsw, this being the means of con- 
secrating the offering, or, so to say, of forwarding it to the gods. 

8) He pronounces the prayer — occasionally interrupted by 
some member of the family, who has a complaint to make. 

9) In certain cases of special misfortune, whilst praying he 
squeezes the green liquid contained in the psanyi, over his 
hearers, who rub their bodies with it. 

10) One of the nephews-‘‘ cuts his prayer” (i. e. brings it 
to an end) by taking in his mouth a little of the consecrated 
beer or wine, or part of the hen’s gizzard. 

11) The uterine nephews steal the offering and run away, fol- 
lowed by the \throng, who throw pellets of psanyi at them. 
They eat the portion of the gods. 

12) Should the offering have been made on the behalf of a 
particular individual, the astragalus of the goat, or some parts 
of the hen are tied to him and worn for a time on the left or 
right side of the body: left if the offering was made to the 
maternal ancestors, right if it was made to the paternal gods. 

Let us examine more closely some of these acts, so that we 
may better understand the elements of this worship. 

a) The priesthood. 

The Thonga have no sacerdotal caste, but, as has already been 
pointed out, the right of officiating in religious ceremonies is 
strictly confined to the eldest brother. All the offerings must pass 
through him. To supplant him is a great taboo, and would 
entail the malediction of the gods, and even the death of the 
trespasser. ‘There are, however, some minor offerings which 
anyone is allowed to bring to his gods ; for instance, a lover who 
has been jilted, may, after having consulted the bones, give his 

ere cx 

god something in order to obtain his aid in regaining the favour 
of the girl he loves. But, as a rule, nobody must habla, even 
gandjela, before the death of his parents. If, after their death, 
their son should happen to dream of them, he must worship 
the deceased by pouring some ground tobacco on his wooden 
pillow ; this being the commencement of his religious functions : 
*“‘he begins to learn to gandjela” (Rangane), and, if he is the 
eldest, he may in course of time become the priest of the whole 
family. As regards the great offerings, ordered by the bones 
and accompanied by tsu, he would commit a serious offence if 
he attempted to offer them during the life time of an elder bro- 
ther. The eldest sister officiates as well as the eldest brother. 

The beginnings of the constitution of a sacerdotal caste may be seen by 
the fact that in each clan, the mhamba, the sacred object used by the 
royal family to invoke its gods, or the national drug of invulnerabi- 
lity, is entrusted to the care of a certain man, whose office is heredi- 
tary. As soon as the political tie becomes stronger, and the power 
of the paramount chief greater, the religious acts which are performed 
at the Capital, gain more in importance, and the one who officiates be- 
cornes a kind of high priest. Should this evolution continue, itis easy 
to see how a sacerdotal class may be formed at the expense of the pri- 
mitive family worship, which thus loses more and more its importance. 
Amongst the Thonga this has not yet taken place, and their religious 
system seems to correspond to a very ancient state of things: it is, no 
doubt, the purée form of primitive Ancestrolatry. 

b) The Conception of the Offerings. 

Let us now consider the nature, the value, the most impor- 
tant features in the ritual and the real meaning of the offerings. 

As regards their nature they are indeed most varied, consist- 
ing in the first place, of domestic animals, the ox, the goat, the 
fowl, which are only used by the subjects, the sheep being the 
proper offering of the chief (p. 52). Pigs are not accepted for 
the altar, neither are antelopes, and the other kinds of game. 
I have never heard of any offering consisting of the flesh of 
wild beasts. The victim is generally killed, but there are cases 

=a) 7S ee 

of its being consecrated living. If a hen or a goat is given liv- 
ing to the gods, (a ring sometimes being attached to the leg of 
the fowl), it is taboo henceforth to kill it; if it dies, it must 
not be eaten, and it must also be replaced by another. Living 
offerings seem to be presented to possessing spirits (Ch. III. B.), 
rather than to ancestor spirits. Another kind of living offering 
is the human sacrifice made in certain sacred woods in order to 
obtain rain, but they rarely resort to this. ‘‘The victim wan- 
ders about in the forest till he dies,” says Mboza; ‘‘the gods 
take him”. 

A third kind of offering is the produce of the fields, not only 
the Kafir Corn in the official luma, but also the various kinds 
of beer, and tobacco. Gods seem to want not only substantial 
food, but also wine, beer, tobacco, intoxicants and narcotics ! 

Clothing, especially handkerchiefs of various designs (these 
designs being often prescribed by the bones) are another offer- 
ing. The mhamba may even consist of ornaments, e. g., the 
bracelet in the sacrifice for the uterine nephews (p.368); but it 
is the sick boy who wears it (instead of the gods ?) 

Lastly, one sometimes finds on the grave ‘‘ wealth”, elephants’ 
tusks, or hippopotamus’ teeth, affirms Nkolele, thus sho- 
wing that the living try to connect the gods with their own 
welfare. 

From the magic forked branch on the altar of Mankhelu 
hung any amount of objects, e. g., old hoes, astragalus bones of 
oxen (especially of those taken to Sikororo in the war of 1901, 
I. p. 484), all his treasures, and especially the famous cala- 
bashes of medicine, and occasionally baskets of divinatory bones. 
I have never heard of any money, however, being consecrated 
to the gods. The chief, but only the chief, can use earth in 
the sacrificial act, for he is the master of the earth, which has 
been given to him by his ancestors, and so can offer it. 

All things considered, it must be confessed that the actual value 
of the offering, viz., of the part really given to the gods, is 
very little. The sacrificing Jew made a burnt offering: he burnt 
the victim to please Jehovah with the smoke of the roasting 
flesh ascending to heaven! Nothing of the kind is met with 

=p) es 
amongst the Thonga. They make offerings, which indeed cost 
them nothing! They give their gods a goat, but they eat it 
themselves! From each limb a small piece is cut: this is 
enough for the gods, and the uterine nephews will steal even 
that. The beer is sometimes diluted to such an extent that it 
hardly deserves the name any more. I have even heard of 
offerings consisting in flour mixed with water, a mixture which 
nobody would dare offer to any visitor. How must this be 
explained? Mboza assured me that it was done to deceive (kanga- 
nyisa) the spirits of the ancestors, as if they were still the 
wretched old people from whom the grandchildren used to steal 
the food (I. p. 131). But I doubt the truth of this explanation. 
The valueless nature of the offerings rather comes from the fact 
that Natives know perfectly well that the gods do not eat, nor 
take what is offered to them, and that the fowls running 
about appropriate it. Telling the story of the theophany des- 
cribed p. 359, the old priest Nkolele made the following remark: 
‘Even if one kills only a chicken, the god is quite content, for, 
to him, it has the same value as an ox”. This seems to be the 
true explanation. The gods do not ask for real food, or 
wealth ; they only consider the ‘‘mhamba” as a token of love 
from their descendants, and as a sign that these have not forgot- 
ten them, but will do their duty towards them. (1) If this be 
the case, the offerings, which have little material worth, acquire a 
real religious or spiritual value. But it must be confessed 
that, although this may really have been the old conception, 
the greatest preoccupation of the worshippers now-a-days is 
to follow exactly the details of the prescribed ritual. ‘This is 
what makes an offering acceptable, and not the disposition of 
the heart towards the gods... It is possible that an offering may 
be refused by the gods. A worshipper may be ‘‘ overcome” by 
his mhamba, and he would then return home shivering, hav- 

(1) In Chinese Ancestrolatry the same is to be seen. Worshippers do not 
offer their ancestors real money, etc., but paper representations, which they 
burn for the ancestors, thinking that the spirits of the various articles will enter 
the other world, and be accepted by the spirits of the deceased. Probably 
Bantu worshippers have unconsciously got hold of a similar idea. 

=e 380 5 oe 

ing only increased the anger of the spirits. Therefore, let the 
rules of the ritual be well observed and especially the indications 
of the divinatory bones. 

Some features of this ritual are most interesting, especially the 
tsu, so often mentioned, by which the offering is consecrated. 
What does it mean? The Natives themselves are unable to 
explain it, so we are reduced to mere supposition. It consists in 
an emission of saliva, generally mixed with something from the 
victim : some of the short feathers of the neck soiled with blood, 
ifit isa fowl, or a little psanyi also kneaded with blood if a goat. 
But in the sacrifice of bitterness (p. 364) there is merely saliva : 
this, however, is a true “hahla”’, and this fact shows that the 
saliva isa gift, the personal gift of the worshipper: he first gives 
his gods something coming from himself, mingling it with the 
blood or psanyi of the victim, and only then approaches his gods. 
So there seems to be a deep meaning underlying this sacra- 
mental act, though most of the worshippers are not aware of 
it (a fact, which unhappily occurs in all religions) ; but though 
unconscious, it exists and has actuated the rite : the gift of one- 
self is necessary to obtain the favour of the Divinity. — What is. 
the intention implied in adding the blood and psanyi? It pro- 
bably informs the gods that such and such a victim has been 
offered to them, hence the words commonly pronounced at the 
beginning of the prayer : “‘ Mhamba hi leyi!” — ‘‘ Here is the 
offering!” Is there any intent in the choice of the blood to 
make this intimation ? Is the blood (ngati) considered as con- 
taining the life of the animal, as was the case amongst the Jews, 
who used it in the sacrifices ‘‘to cover the soul” or the sins of 
the worshipper (hence the idea of atonement)? There is no 
sign of there having been a similar conception among the Thonga. 
It is true that they prefer to resort to sacrifices with blood in 
cases of misfortune, disease and death, when some idea of guilt 
may be entertained. The moral element, if it ever really existed, 
has, however, entirely disappeared from the actual horizon of 
ancestrolatry. 
~ On the other hand, the use°of the psanyi, the half digested 
grass found in the shihlakahla stomach, is easier to explain. It 

is evidently a means of purification for the family, if not exactly 
from sin, at least from misfortune (khombo): hence their cus- 
tom of washing their bodies with the green liquid extracted 
from it, a religious act which to us seems very disgusting, but 
to the Natives quite clean, their ideas about dung being very 
different from ours (p. 37). A large ball of psanyi is put on the 
head of the bride after the dlaya shilongo ceremony (I. p. 245) 
in order to remove the dangers of consaguineous marriage, 
and so help her to have children. Pellets of this substance are 
thrown too at the uterine nephews, when they run away, after 
stealing the offering (1. p. 162); or at the roof of the deceased's 
hut, when it is officially closed, with the aim of preventing 
the danger of death: the slaughtered goat has to contribute in 
this way to the restoration of peace and happiness to the family. 

No special use is made of the bones of the victim, except, as 
we shall see later, in offerings on behalf of possessed people. 
The only part kept is the astragalus, or the psirungulo just 
described, which are tied to the person on whose behalf the 
sacrifice has been made, probably to insure for him a perma- 
nent blessing from the gods. 

It must be observed that the sacrificial ritual, as well as the 
medical art, lays great stress on the sex of the offerings. As a 
rule, there must be opposition between the sex of the victim 
and that of the one for whom, or to whom, the sacrifice is 
made. A woman is prayed for by means of a he-goat or a 
cock, and a man byashe-goat ora hen. Another course, which 
is considered still more praiseworthy, is, when sacrificing on 
behalf of a man, to add a second offering of a cock, “‘ in order 
to quench the first one (timula mhamba), so that it may keep 
quiet, and that it may cool down, because the first offering may 
cause annoyance and overcome them ”’ (Mboza). This idea 
seems to be that an offering, if otherwise inefficient, is helped 
and amended by another of the other sex. So, if one has 
wrongly performed the funeral ceremony of the twig with a 
female nkanye (I. p. 142), since female trees are of no use in 
this connection, it will be necessary to quench the first mhamba 
and renew the ceremony with a male twig. 

ater. 382 sae 

The nkanye twig isa mhamba! This leads us, before leaving 
the subject, to consider the real and full meaning of this term. 

Gifts offered to the gods, such as victims, Kafir corn, hand- 
kerchiefs, etc., are mhamba. But, as has already been pointed 
out, the word has a wider meaning. In the nkanye twig cere- 
mony, nothing is given to the gods It is, however, a 
mhamba. The sacred collection of the nails and hair of the 
deceased chiefs is also called so; it is indeed the mhamba par 
excellence, though it constitutes no real gift to the gods. — 
Nkohlele, the great priest, wno officiated in the Lebombo, was 
also designated by the name of “‘ the Lebombo Mhamba ”. — 
The flint used by Mankhelu to cause the rain to fall by invok- 
ing Rivimbi, is also a mhamba, the one specially appropriate 
for that great god. 

My old friend once made another ‘“‘mhamba”, which he des- 
cribed to me in a very interesting conversation we had together. 
He was telling me the particulars of the battle of Nov. 1901, 
during the Sikororo war CI. p. 485), when suddenly jumping 
to his feet and taking a small bundle of grass, he said: ‘‘ Hear! 
I will show you the mhamba I made when the enemy 
rushed on us. I took a bundle of grass like those which 
women use for binding their sticks, and feverishly separated the 
blades, saying : ‘ Let them fail to surround us, or to entice us!’ 
Then I scattered them in all directions and said: ‘ Let them 
be so dispersed, carried off and destroyed!’ And this is exact- 
ly what happened. On my return from the battle I showed 
all the army how I had prayed.’ The old general’s sponta- 
neous appeal to the gods on behalf of his country in its hour 
of supreme danger is indeed worthy of notice, and it also fur- 
nishes another proof that the mhamba is ‘‘ any object or act, 
which aims at establishing a bond between the gods and their 
worshipper. ” Both the nkanye twig, (whose ‘‘ brother ”  re- 
mains in the hands of the deceased), and the sacred object con- 
sisting of the hair and nails of the late chiefs also provide this 
connection. The act of Mankhelu symbolising before his 
gods the rout of the enemy is also a mhamba; it is a prayer 
in action, which must have a decided influence on the gods. 

© 

a ae 

If this is indeed the conception of the mhamba and of the 
offering, their spiritual, and religious value cannot be denied. 
Whatever place the ritual may have in the ceremonies of 
Ancestrolatry, the offering is not a mere external gift appeas- 
ing the gods by its material value : it is a means of really en- 
tering into relationship with those powerful spirits in order to 
obtain their favour. 

c) The Prayers. 

The act of prayer is called khongota (Ro.), khongela (Dj.) 
(the same word being also employed to mean ‘‘supplicate ”) ; 
or bulabulela, to speak to, or to scold the gods; bukutjela means 
a long, meandering prayer in which the officiant says the same 
thing over and over again. I have given sixteen various texts 
of prayer when describing the manifold religious acts of the 
Thonga : two prayers of medicine men (I. 53, II. 366); those 
pronounced on the day of marriage (I. p. 3); of death, with 
the nkanye twig (I. p. 161); at the distribution of the widows 
(I. 205) ; at the death of a sister (I. 213); in the ceremony of 
killing the tie of consanguinity (I. 245); on offering the first 
fruits (I. 368); before the tjeba fishing (II. p. 70); when 
sneezing (II. 337) ; on offering tobacco at the altar (II. p. 363); 
for a sick nephew (II. p. 368); at the sacrifice of reconciliation 
(II. p. 371); see also Mankhelu’s prayers before the battle 
CI. p. 382), and Nkolele’s invocation in the Lebombo wood 
(P. 359): 

Most of these prayers have an extremely liturgical character. 
Everybody knows what must be said on each occasion of a 
regular sacrifice. The personal element is almost totally want- 
ing. Here are the principal ‘‘ moments ” of a typical prayer. 

After the consecration of the offering with the sacramental 
tsu, a kind of dedication, the officiant sometimes begins with the 
words: ‘“‘Abusayi! Akhvari!”’, or ‘‘Ibusayi! Ikhwari!” The ety- 
mology of these words is unknown. They are pronounced with 
a gentle intonation, as if to express deep feeling, and their 
meaning is, according to Mboza: “I am not angry with you! 

= kg 
“Tt is thetisola of the heathen,” said the same informant. Tisola, 
in the Christian language of the Thonga means to humble, or 
condemn oneself, in asking for forgiveness. 

Then comes the invocation. If the sacrifice is on behalf of 
a sick person, the god, to whom the offering is made, having 
been designated by the bones as the cause of the misfortune, is 
called, and asked to bring thither all the other gods, whom he 
had induced to aid him in punishing the patient; or the priest 
may call first his own father, and entreat him to go and bring 
his grandfather, the latter to bring his ancestor, and so on till 
the last named. The ancestors of the main line are then sent 
to call all the great uncles, and all the deceased of collateral lines. 
Or, if praying for the welfare of the country, the officiant will 
address his furthest back ancestor first, because he is the one 
who gave the land to his descendants, and then call the son, 
grandson of this ancient founder of the dynasty, continuing 
the succession of generations until he reaches his own father. 
It seems as if one wanted to have as many gods as possible 
present at the ceremony. The gods of the father’s family are 
also summoned, if the sacrifice is made to the gods of the 
mother’s (p. 368). 

The request follows the invocation, and this naturally differs 
with the circumstances. At the luma sacrifice (January) the 
priest asks the gods to increase the produce of the fields. At 
the family gatherings, after a death, the elder brother entreats 
the gods to bless the family, to prevent bad feelings, or strife, 
to give wisdom and strength to the new headman, that he may 
be successful in his rule over the village. 

When some great misfortune is the occasion for this religious 
act being performed, the request is preceded, or followed, bya 
regular insulting of the gods. There are two words used to 
designate this curious part of the prayer: holobela, to scold the 
gods, or rukatela, the real word for ‘‘ to insult”. There is an 
instance of this strange impertinent way of addressing the gods 
in the sacrifice for the sick nephew. (p. 368). These insults are 
generally uttered while the priest is squeezing the psanyi over 
the shoulders of his subordinates. 

The last feature of the prayer is its sudden termination, when 
one of the uterine nephews puts a portion of the victim into 
the officiant’s mouth, thus “ cutting his oration ” (tjema). 
This is indeed a part of the ritual. When the victim is a hen, 
it is its gizzard which has been half roasted during the long 
prayer that is used for the purpose. The priest eats it, and so 
is the first to partake of the flesh of the offering. 

Prayers to the ancestors do not reveal very much religious 
feeling, and are, at any rate, absolutely devoid of awe. Whilst 
sacrificing the Natives laugh, speak in a loud voice, dance, sing 
obscene songs, even interrupt the prayer with their remarks, 
and insult each other about family matters. The officiant him- 
self sits on the seat designated by the bones, and speaks in a 
monotonous way, looking straight in front of him in utter 
indifference. There is nothing in his demeanour which denotes 
fear or even respect. If the gods were indeed real old people, 
still living, he could not address them with more familiarity. 
This leads us finally to consider in what the divinity of ancestor- 
gods consists. 

d) The Divine Nature of the Ancestor-Gcds. 

I have brought together in a preceding paragraph (p. 347 and 59) 
all that the Natives say about their gods. Now let us return to 
them, after having studied the religious ritual, and ask: What 
do all these ceremonies reveal about the conceptions the Thonga 
have of the ancestral spirits which they worship? A striking 
contrast exists in their ideas. On the one hand, the ancestor- 
gods are truly gods, endowed with the attributes of divinity ; 
whilst, on the other, they seem to be nothing but mere human 
beings, exactly on the same level as their worshippers. 

1) They are divine! When an old decrepit man or woman 
dies, he at once becomes a god: he has entered the domain of 
infinity. The Thonga have not a very clear idea of infinity. 
They have, however a technical term for it: “ lepsi nga yiki 
helo (Dj.), or mbangu (Ro.)” — “ that which does not reach 
the point where it ends.” This notion has certainly been 

applied to the shades which have reached the rank of psik- 
wembu ; — The psikwembu are omnipresent. As Mankelu says: 
‘‘ For them there is no such thing as distance (a psi na kule) ” ; 
they are everywhere present (psi kone hikwaku). They are 
like heaven, the sun and the moon. ‘There is no place where 
it can be said the moon is not.’ The notion of ommnipresence 
is perhaps that which has been understood most clearly. Ommi- 
science is also believed in: the gods know what their descendants 
do, though they may be separated from them, perhaps dwelling 
in distant lands. Omnipotence results from the fact that they 
control everything in the life of their descendants. They are 
superior to wizards in this respect. As regards their connection 
with Heaven, I have never heard the point discussed. . Natives 
do not philosophise. Thus the ancestral spirits are real gods 
endowed with divine attributes 

2) They are still, however, but men! ‘They are not transcen- 
dent beings before whom miserable sinners tremble and offer 
prayers. The attitude of the worshippers, which I have just | 
described, the liberty they take in insulting their gods, shows 
that they consider them as exactly on the same level as them- 
selves. This human nature of the gods is clearly shown by two 
facts: the limits of their power and their want of moral charac- 
ter. The domain in which they exercise their power is limited, it 
being only that of their own family ; they watch over their des- 
cendants, bless or punish them, but they are absolutely indif- 
ferent to other men, and do not bother over their affairs more 
than they did when still alive on earth. Ihave nothing to fear 
or to hope from my neighbour’s gods, if I do not belong to the 
same ‘‘ shibongo ” (I. p. 333). The gods of the royal family 
are invoked on behalf of the whole country, and have power to 
give the rain to the land ; but it is the chief, and his uncles, who 
must approach and sacrifice to them. I have no right to do so. 
It is true that an exception seems to be made in the case of the 
gods of bitterness, or of the bush, who attack the traveller, 
although he belongs to another family. But this is indeed only 
exceptional, it being their kinsfolk, who did not bury them, 
who are most exposed to their wrath. 

Sg ae 

Another proof that they are men is this: although as 
gods they have acquired such divine ontological powers, they 
have not made any real moral progress. They are not better 
than they were as men. Their character is that of suspicious 
old people, who resent any want of respect, or of attention, on 
the part of their descendants. They wish to be thought of, and 
presented with offerings. It seems that they are not actually 
in need of anything, for they live in abundance, but they exact 
a punctual observance of the duties of their descendants in 
regard to them. They must Juma, eat the first fruits, and have 
their share of the tobacco leaves and also of the ground tobacco. 
They are jealous, and avenge themselves when forgotten. (1) 
The only sin, which seems to be worthy of punishment is to 
neglect them. There are, however, two other faults which they 
strongly condemn, and for which they may even kill their des- 
cendants: the first is any serious transgression against the law of 
hierarchy (as we saw, when dealing with the sacrifice of recon- 
ciliation) ; they punish especially the young man, even though 
he be the chief, who dares so to encroach upon the right of the 
regular priest, which is a great taboo ; secondly, they kill a man 
who loses all restraint in sexual relations; when any one gives 
way to that crime, people say: “ The gods will lead him into 
the thick bush and kill him there.” To other sins they are 
quite indifferent. Mboza even asserted, with a sadness which 
reminded me of the complaints of Asaph in Ps. LXXII, that 
men of bad habits do not become ill or meet with misfortune, 

(1) In a very interesting tale, which is unique. and which I owe to Ca- 
milla and have published in ‘‘Les Chants et Contes des Ba Ronga” p. 264, 
we hear of the people of Mashaken, near Lourenco Marques forgetting 
for many years to make offerings to their gods. Famine ensues. The men 
go to the marsh to cut sugar cane. They are unable to break them, and the 
gods chase them away. The women, who come to a place where honey is 
flowing from a tree, try to take the combs, but their hands break off and 
remain fixed to the spot! The bones order Sabulana, a young girl, to go to 
the sacred wood to sacrifice. She enters the forest and sees the gods assem- 
bled. They say to her: ‘Teil your people that they have sinned, because 
they have tilled the ground. and harvested without presenting us with any 
offerings. Now we are glad, because they have come to invoke us.” This 
story was told me as a tale, not as a legend of the sacred woods, 

the bad cough only attacks the good ones, and wizards bewitch 
them and do not go to the bad fellows, ‘‘for the gods see that 
they are not worth anything ! ” 

In conclusion, I should say that what is wanting in the con- 
ception of the ancestor-gods, compared with the God of higher 
religions, is both the transcendence and the moral attributes. 

Il]. General Characteristics of Ancestrolatry. 

If I had to characterise Thonga (and I may also add Bantu) ances- 
trolatry, | would say : 

It is a spiritualistic religion, in this sense that no idols are adored ; 
there being neither idolatry nor fetichism in it. Spirits and spirits 
alone are worshipped. 

It is an animistic religion, as defined in the preceding chapter, the 
categories of spirit gods being numerous, and these spirits being wor- 
shipped in order to stand high in their favour, and propitiated when 
they are angry. 

It isa particularistic family religion, each family having its own par- 
ticular gods. One also sees in it the beginnings of a national part- 
cularistic religion (the great mhamba). 

It is a social religion, its enactments aiming at keeping alive and 
strengthening the hierarchy, which is the main feature of the social 
order. 

It is an unsacerdotal religion, there being no sacerdotal order, but, 
at the same time the priesthood of the elder brother is strictly enforced. 

It is a non-moral religion, by which I do not mean that it is tm- 
moral, i. e. opposed to the laws of morality, but that it has no, or at 
least very little, connection with the moral conduct of the individual. 
It has no moral enactments except those which insure the observance 
of the hierarchical order in the family. It neither promises reward 
nor threatens punishment after death. 

Consequently it is purely eudemonistic, the religious acts having as 
their sole aim the material benefits in connection with terrestrial life, 
e. g. abundance, health, peace, and good sleep ! 

It is unphilosophical, that is to say, it does not attempt to answer the 
great problems about the origin and the aim of the world, and human 

389 2 
existence. These questions of causality and finality are absolutely 
beyond its horizon. 

It is essentially ritualistic, and leaves very little place for true reli- 
gious feelings. Adoration is practically non-existent. However, 
elements of personal religion are not altogether wanting. Some ex- 
pressions in the liturgical prayers reveal humility and trust, e. g. 
‘*Death doth not come to the man who is prayed for, but only to the 
one who trusts in his own strength” (p. 366); thankfulness for dangers 
which have been avoided is sometimes expressed in a spontaneous 
and genuine way; and may not also the sacrifice of bitterness (p. 364) 
be actuated by a real and touching feeling of dependency ; the old 
formula of invocation and the sacramental word fsu, now inexplica- 
ble, seem to show that there was, even in former times, such a thing 
as self dedication, and some aspiration towards a real communion be- 
tween the worshipper and his gods. 

Animism is generally spoken of as a religion of fear. Applied to 
Thonga ancestrolatry, this statement would be an exaggeration. There 
is indeed no deep love for the ancestor-gods in the hearts of the 
Thonga ; how could it be so when these ‘‘ psikwembu” are so jea- 
ous, and show so little love themselves ? But there is no perpetual 
fear. The attitude is rather that of indifference. Natives ask for one 
thing only: that they may live in peace, and that their gods may 
interfere with them as little as possible. 

Peepbati CONCEP LON COE BH EAY EN 

When studying the classic tragedies of Greece, and more 
especially those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, one is led to the 
conclusion that the gods of Olympus, in wnom may be recog- 
nised, more or less distinctly, the personification of the forces 
of Nature, or heroes glorified by apotheosis, were not the only 
beings in which that intelligent people believed, nor the sole 
objects of their veneration. Higher than Olympus, and dwell- 
ing in the more remote heavens, a mysterious divinity looks 
down upon mankind, a divinity wiser and nobler than the 
capricious Zeus, or the voluptuous Artemis ; sometimes it is 
called Nemesis, the avenger, inexorable fate, and sometimes it 
is a god more human and more moral in character. But 

this Supreme Being is vaguely conceived, and its form is, as 
it were, closely veiled. In the religion of the Thonga one 
meets with a similar phenomenon. Above the gods which the 
ordinary people know, worship, and call by name, there exists 
a power, which for the majority remains ill defined and which 
they express by the word Heaven(Tilo). This word Tilo, which, 
in the ordinary language, is used to designate the blue sky 
(p. 28), contains a far deeper and more comprenhensive mean- 
ing. I shall not attempt to throw a full light on these concep- 
tions, which are so dim in the Native mind. But the reader, 
who studies carefully the facts and customs, which I am just 
about to describe, will certainly be convinced that there really 
exist two parallel series of religious ideas in the Thonga Reli- 
gion. We have already dealt with those which first manifest 
themselves to the observer. Let us now consider the others: 
they are not less interesting, nor less picturesque; they are 
indeed perhaps deeper than the common Ancestrolatry. This 
principle of belief is in such an embryonic state that it very 
easily escapes observation. As already pointed out, it is a vein, 
a reef of gold, which has been discovered through some fortui- 
tous circumstance, and must be worked with great care. 

I. The definition of Heaven. 

Tilo is a grand word; it comes from the same root as Zulu, 
the honoured name of a great and powerful tribe. 

‘* Before you came to teach us that there is an All-Good Being, 
a Father in Heaven, we already knew there was a Heaven, but 
did now know there was anyone in it.” Such was the decla- 
ration of one of the most intelligent women of our congrega- 
tion at Lourenco Marques, who was also the best acquainted 
with all the ancient Ba-Ronga customs. Timotheo Mandlati said 
to me, on the other hand : “ Our fathers all believed that life 
existed in Heaven” (butomi byt kone tilwen). It is quite cer- 
tain that, in the idea of the Thonga, as well as in that of 

ee ae 
many other tribes, Heaven was a place; a place much to be 
desired, where was to be found that which is so seldom met with 
on earth, namely rest. Hence a song, which one finds under 
very similar guise amongst the Zulus, (1) and even amongst 
the Ba-Suto, which runs thus: 

(Solo) Bukali bya ngoti! 
(Tutti) Nha ndji yahliya ngoti, ndji ya Tilwen ! 
Ndji ya kuma ku wisa ! 
(Solo) What a rare thing is string ! 
(Tutti) Oh! how I should love to plait a string, and go up to Hea- 
ven, I would go there to find rest! 

An old refrain which has come down through the ages, and 
has in no wise been inspired by the Christian religion: it is pure, 
authentic Bantu! Thus the warriors, when threatening their 
adversaries, and hurling defiance from one troop to another, 
say: ‘Make ready your string, and climb up to Heaven, there 
is no place for you here, below. Here you will find nothing 
but misfortune ” (I. p. 447). 

Thonga, however, never declare as a belief that men go to 
Heaven after death. They become ‘‘psikwembu”, and we have 
already seen where is their abode. Nevertheless Viguet told me 
the story of a Hlengwe, whom he knew in times long gone by, 
in the Bilen country, who used to address the people in myste- 
rious tones as follows: 

Though you eat plenty of fat and of honey, and drink plenty of 
beer, the day will come when you will say ‘* Huku-huku” (fall on 
your back, i. e. die) ; people will say ‘‘ Woo” (i. e. mourn you), and 
ask you: ‘‘ Where are you going?” Then answer: ‘‘I am going to 
Ngundju-ya-mapsele, the Source-of-Grace, to the place where the oxen 
are herded by vultures (because there is no hatred, and no death there), 
where the mosquito is killed with a stick (because everything is so flou- 
rishing and so big there), where the fowl dies from fat (because there 
is no disease, nor dearth in that blessed land) — to Heaven!” 

(1) ** Who could make a cord, whereby to go to Heaven?” Such is the 
Zulu version given by Callaway 

a 

This Hlengwe had either heard these words in his -home or 
had invented them himself. 

But Tilo is something more than a place. It is a power which 
acts and manifests itself in various ways. It is sometimes called 
hosi, a lord. But this power is generally regarded as something 
entirely impersonal. Thonga appear to think that Heaven 
regulates and presides over certain great cosmic phenomena to 
which men must, willingly or unwillingly, submit, more espe- 
cially those of a sudden and unexpected nature, by which I 
mean above all: rain, storms, and, in human affairs, death, 
convulsions and the birth of twins. From this idea emanate 
certain very characteristic customs, which I will briefly proceed 
to describe. 

It is Heaven that afflicts children w ith those terrible and mys- 
terious convulsions, which carry them off without their having 
been ill, so to speak... ‘‘ He is ill from Heaven” — “A ni Tilo”, 
said an old Native doctor to me in a low tone, referring to a 
case of this description. So Heaven is the great nombo (infan- 
tile disease, (I. p. 46), whilst diarrhea is the small nombo. 

But more than this, zt is Heaven wh ich kills and which makes 
alive. ‘Hence the frequent expression :” ‘“‘ Heaven loved him”, 
when someone has escaped some deadly danger, or is particularly 
prosperous, and “‘Heaven hated him”, when he has been very 
unfortunate, or has died. 

The same idea is expressed in the following dirge. 

Wa hi kanganyisa, Tshabane ! 

Hi yingeli Tilo, dji ku dja buya nininini ! 

Hi kumi babanuna babiri, ba famba, ba hlahluba Tilo. 
Wa nga yingeia psa bambe, u ta yingela ni psa ku ! 

You deceive us, Tshabane ! 

We have heard Heaven thunder... The roaring will soon come. 

We have seen two men who were going to throw the bones with refe- 
rence to Heaven... 

Doubtless you have heard tell of the misfortunes of others : 

You will hear them talking of your own! 

Enigmatic words, but, with the help of the Natives, I have 
unravelled their meaning: — You are deceiving us, Tshabane, 

bet sem 

you who are trying to reassure us. We have heard Heaven. A 
storm has burst, a sudden downpour, a flash of lightning; 
Heaven struck! It killed some one. Two men passed by, ter- 
vified ; they went to consult the bones, to try and find means to 
ward off these strokes of Heaven. Useless! If you have seen 
the sorrow of those who mourn, do not imagine that you will 
escape. It will soon be your turn! 

Another song which contains a similar allusion to Heaven as 
the power which kills, has already been quoted when describ- 
ing the customs of widowhood (I. p. 205). ‘‘ What shall we 
say to thee! King!” 

The tale of “‘ the Road to Heaven ” (See Les Chants et Les 
Contes des Ba-Ronga, p. 237) is also very significant in 
this respect. It tells the story of a young girl, who having 
broken her jar, and fearing a scolding from her mother, climbs 
up her string and goes to Heaven. (Always the same idea of 
shelter from all evils.)(1) There she findsa village; a child is 
given to her, because she is so sweet and obedient. Her sister 
tries to do the same thing. But she is cross and wicked. Hea- 
ven explodes (baleka), kills her (by lightning), and her bones are 
blown right to her parents’ house. In the tale of the Adven- 
tures of Bonawasi (Ch. & C. p- 295) Heaven intervenes to 
endow a young Native with peculiar wisdom, by means of which 
he gets the better of the Governor of the town. Possibly some 
idea of the God of the Europeans may have found its way into 
the composition of this tale, in which may be recognized cer- 
tain traces of foreign influence. But this is assuredly not the 
case in respect to the story of Nwahungukuri, which I have 
published in Les Ba-Ronga, p. 312, and in which Heaven is cre- 
dited with the full knowledge of a hidden crime committed by 
a murderer. ‘This idea is so far from being an innovation due 
to European influence that thoughtful Natives all agree that, in 

(1) The mention of this string is perhaps due to a common tradition amongst 
other African tribes. According to the Ba-Rotse, Leza, God, who dwelt on 
earth, went up to Heaven one day by a spider’s web. Several human beings 
tried to climb the same way, but fell and did not succeed. (Comp. A. Jalla. 
Foi et Vie. Oct. 1910). 

ee a 

former times, it was more usual to attribute death to the power 
of Heaven. It was common saying ‘* Heaven has fallen (ku we 
Tilo) on such and such a village.’ Nowadays it is rather the 
gods, or the wizards, who are believed to cause death. 

But this belief in Heaven has not only inspired these sayings, 
songs, and tales ; it has also given rise to curious customs, the 
description of which will throw more light on this conception 
of the Thonga. Their existence proves that we have not to 
deal with the ‘‘animatic” invention of some person gifted with 
a vivid imagination (p. 344), but with a real belief of the tribe. 

II. Customs connected with the Conception of Heaven. 

1) Heaven, Twins anp Rain 

This power, which causes lightning and death, also presides, 
in a very special way, at the birth of twins, to such an extent 
that the mother is called by the name of “Tilo”, — ‘ Heaven ”, 
— and the children “Bana ba Tilo”, — “ Children of Hea— 
ven”. (1) Now the arrival of two or three babies at the same 
time is looked upon, by the Thonga, as a great misfortune, a 
defilement in respect of which very special rites must be per- 
formed. I give the details of these rites as practised in the 
/ihlahla, Nondwane, and Nkuna clans, as they were described 
to me by Tobane, Mboza, Mankhelu, etc. 

Twins (habla, or bandjwa, dji-ma) are now both allowed 
to live. But in former times, one of them, the one who 
looked the feebler, was always put to death, being left to die of 
starvation, or strangled by a rope. He was buried in a broken 
pot, like other infants (I. p. 166), just below the surface of the 
ground, a hole being left for the air to enter, so that the “ spi- 
rit (moya) may go out ”, in order that, for the mother also, the 

(1) In our school at Lourengo Marques there was a charming young girl, 
who was named Nwana-wa-Tilo, daughter of Heaven, because she had a twin 
brother. 

=): 
“ spirit may get out”, may be able to fly outside and may not 
close (the passages), this being a primary condition for her to 
have other children. (1) 

But even the death of one of the twins is not considered suf- 
ficient to remove the curse. Directly after birth a particular 
doctor is sent for, who keeps the drugs needed in such a case. 
Shimhuntana and Manganyele were the medicine-men who were 
capable of dealing with the twin defilement in the district of 
Lebombo, and Nwashihuhuri of the Matimela family in the 
Zihlahla clan. They were held only to be surpassed by the 
medicine-man who treated cases of leprosy. The mother has 
to leave the village immediately, and they build for her a mise- 
rable little hut behind the others, where she goes to live with 
her twins. Her former hut is burnt with all her possessions. 

In Zihlabla, all the women assemble that same day and start 
out in all directions, North, South, East and West to draw water 
in old calabashes from all the lakes and wells of the neighbour- 
hood. They go skipping along, and singing 

‘“Mbelele ! Mbelele ! Let rain fall” 

This is the Mbelele song. 

Then they return. The mother is seated with her two babes 
in her arms. They throw the water over her, intoning all the 
while the same monotonous refrain. This ceremony is to begin 
the removal of the ‘‘ misfortune of twin birth which is a death”, 
(khombo dja lihahla, dji nga lifu). To complete the purifica- 
tion the magician gives to the father and mother a certain drug, 
which is kept in the Matimela family. The mother will put 
some of this in the little milombyana calabash, the diet drink of 
newly born infants. 

In Khosen the purification is performed by the medicine-man 
alone (See Les Ba-Ronga, p. 414). He pours his drugs into 
one of the pots brought by the women, adds to them the psanyi 

(1) Even if a child dies, aged ten days or more, if buried in the ground its 
grave must have very little depth ; for if it were buried too deep the mother 
would have no other children. 

 396  
of the goat sacrificed for the occasion, and pours all the contents 
on the shoulders of the mother, who holds the babes in her lap. 
After which he pours from some other pot, which contains pure 
water, and the woman conscientiously washes herself and her 
children all the while. Before her purification no inhabitant ot 
the village is allowed to eat anything, and the following day it 
is taboo to work in the fields, for this would prevent the rain 
from falling 

Amongst the Nkuna, the mother of twins sits at the entrance 
of the hut, and the drug is poured over the roof above the 
doorway ; it leaks through the thatch on to her, and thus both 
the mother and the hut are purified at the same time. 

This preliminary purification being thus accomplished the 
woman goes to live in “‘ her shelter ”’, outside the village. She 
is absolutely shut off from all the other inhabitants. She has 
her own pots, axe, mortar, pestle, and does all her own cook- 
ing. Nobody even pays her a visit, and“people only speak to 
her from a distance. Her children see no one but her. To 
each is allotted one breast, always the same one. ‘To help her 
in the nursing of twins the mother must “ buy ” a girl to whom 
the care of one of the children is committed. This is a law. 
It is taboo for a girl, even should she be the elder sister, to 
“play” with a twin. The payment of £ 1 or ten shillings 
removes this taboo and the defilement (shisila) connected 
with it. 

Women fear that, if they touch anything belonging to the 
mother of twins, if they smear themselves with her provision 
of fat, or if the defiled one smears herself with their fat, they 
will also fall into the dreadful misfortune of giving birth to twins. 
For that reason it is taboo for a mother of twins to draw water 
anywhere. She must select a spot and always go there. When 
coming back from drawing water, she must take care of the little 
wreath of grass, which she wears on her head to help her 
balance her pot : it must not be thrown away with those used 
by other women, for fear that they also should become conta- 
minated ‘(tekela). 

All these regulations clearly show that, for the time being, the 

a 

mother of twins like the widow (I. p. 197) is considered out- 
side the pale of society. But her defilement is worse than that 
of the widow; so, in order to be purified from it, the 
rite of Jabla khombo (cast away the malediction) through which 
she must pass is much more trying. According to Mboza she 
must ‘ deceive ” four men one after the other, in the bush, all 
of whom will die. She hears that so and so says djoo-djoo, 
viz , becomes livid, that his body swells, that he is dead! 
She knows the reason. They have taken her defilement ! 
Perhaps the fourth does not die, but only becomes consump~ 
tive. These men have been designated to her by the divinatory 
bones. Each time she succeeds in performing the purification 
ceremony, described in I. p. 202, she informs her medicine-man 
who “‘ prepares for her a vapour bath”. Afterwards, she goes 
to reside at her parents’ house, has relations with a lover, and 
gives birth to another child. Then her purification is complete, 
and her husband goes with 10/- to take her, and bring her 
home. The lover completed the removal of the ‘ buhahla” 
i. e. the condition in which a mother of twins is. He has 
washed her (hlantsa). A new hut will be built for her, furnish- 
ed with new utensils, and the ordinary family life will begin 
over again. 

As regards the twins themselves, they do not pass through 
the ceremony of presentation to the moon (I. p. 51) as other 
children. They are weaned earlier ; immediately after the 
reappearance of the menses the mother begins her Jabla 
khombo, which at the same time is a Jumula, a weaning of the 
children. They are then fed with goat’s milk. 

Twins are not liked by other people. They are considered 
as bad characters. When the little ones begin to crawl, and 
chance to go towards the other huts, people throw cinders at 
them and drive them away, saying : ‘‘ These are children of 
Heaven. Be off! You annoy us!” If any ordinary child has 
a particularly bad disposition, one often says: ‘* You are naugh- 
ty! You are just like a twin!” — “Hahla dja karata 7 
‘© Twins are troublesome ” is another common saying ; and if 
a child is really exceptionally difficult to deal with, people say: 

; 
==) 358.) 
“Ttis a twin! You cannot do anything with him! (A dji 
koteki !) ” 

Special precautions are taken in respect to twins, when they 
pay a visit for the purposes of mourning. One of the grave- 
diggers meets them at the entrance of the village and says: ‘‘ Do 
not fear, Children of Heaven”. He then puts some ashes on their 
heads, and their fontanelles. This is done because twins are 
feeble (ma ni bushapu) and the defilement might affect them 
more than other children. Let them therefore be protected 
by smearing the middle of the head, and the ‘“ extremity of 
the tree of life”, -viz., the fontanelle, with a preventive. 
The mother also undergoes a similar treatment. She must 
prostrate herself near the hut of deceased, at the place where the 
wall has been pierced to make an exit for the corpse. Then 
the grave-digger brings some live embers in a broken pot, pours 
a little water on them, dips his fingers into the water; he then 
presses both his hands against the woman’s belly and brings 
them round her waist, pressing then all the while against the 
skin, until they meet on the spine : thus she is ‘‘ cured inside” 
(dahiwa ndjen) ; this will prevent her from suffering from 
internal troubles, to which she, having given birth to Tilo, 
Heaven, is particulary liable. (Comp. I. p. 152) 

This rapid description of the customs connected with twins, 
in most of the Thonga clans, shows that their explanation is 
twofold: 1) The birth of twins is a death, consequently a defi- 
lement, indeed the worst of all defilements. Hence the puri- 
ficatory rites which bear the character of passage rites : the 
mother is secluded and passes through a period of isolation, 
after which she is again admitted to society after a painful 
“casting away of her misfortune”. 2) But the cause of the 
defilement is not an ordinary death, but Heaven. She is 
Heaven ; she is said to have made Heaven (a hambi Tilo), to 
have carried Heaven (a rwi Tilo), to have ascended to Heaven 
(a khandjiyi Tilo). This connection established between her 
and Heaven is clearly seen in the rain customs previously des- 
cribed. Notice that the day following the birth of twins is a 
shimusi, i. e. a day of rest. Nobody tills the ground, fearing 

ie ee 

that it would prevent the rain from falling. When the mbelele 
takes place in Nondwane and Zihlahla (p. 295), the half naked 
women, who are sent to clean the wells, take with them a 
mother of twins. This is no doubt in order to show them 
where the graves of twins are. But there is also another rea- 
son. In the sacred wood of Libombo, there is a hole where 
the woman is put, and her sisters pour on her the water which 
they have drawn from all the wells, till the hole is half full, 
and the water comes up to her breasts. This will make the 
rain fall. Why ? No doubt it is because the woman of Heaven 
being wet, Heaven itself will be wet. Spoon did not give this 
explanation himself, but, when I suggested it to him, he accepted 
it readily. For the same reason the graves of twins are watered. 
In certain cases water is poured on the graves of the ancestors 
also, because rain is attributed both to them and to Heaven, 
and in accordance with the principle that “‘ like acts on like ”, 
this watering the graves is meant to induce either Heaven or 
the ancestor-gods to make rain fall. Hence again the precau- 
tion taken of burying twins in damp places, and of exhuming 
them in times of drought if they have been buried in dry ground 
(p. 296) (1). 

The connection between twins and Heaven, so clearly to 
be seen in these customs, again appears in respect to thunder- 
storms, another manifestation of Heaven as we _ shall see. 
When lightning threatens a village, people say to a twin: 
‘‘Help us! You are a Child of Heaven! You can therefore 
cope with Heaven (mi kota Tilo), it will hear you when 
you speak”. So the child goes out of the hut and prays to 

(1) In other clans this law is extended to prematurely born children, though 
they are not twins, and even to children who have not had the cotton string 
tied round their waist or have cut their upper teeth first. On the other hand, 
among the Nkuna, it does not seem that any special relation is established 
between twins and Heaven. These differences may be explained by the fact 
that all these abnormal cases were ascribed to Heaven in former times, and the 
connection has been preserved in the various clans in respect to one or the 
other of these categories. Note that, in the song of the widows (I. p. 205) 
the king Heaven seems to have caused the death of the husband; this is another 
proof that Heaven was formerly considered the most frequent cause of death. 

Heaven in the following words: ‘‘Goaway! Do not annoy 

us! We are afraid. Go and roar far away.” When the thun- 
derstorm has ended, the child is thanked. (1) His mother can 
also help in the same way, for has she not ascended to Heaven ? 
‘(She can speak with it, she is at it (or in it) — a li ku 
(djone)”. (Spoon). 

Customs regarding twins vary from one clan to another. If 
in one tribe they are put to death, in others their advent is 
considered an event of great happiness. This is the case in 
Tembe and Maputju, where it is said that women wish for twins, 
and, if certain mothers have had that good fortune, others ask 
them for some of the fat with which they smeared their bodies, 
hoping by the use of the same ointment to obtain a like happy 
result. The hut is never burnt. The mother gives birth to 
the twins behind the hut (fukwen, I. p. 35). When itis time 
for her to re-enter her domicile, a hole is made in the wall at 
the back. The husband is excluded from the hut till the day of 
presentation to the moon (a ceremony, which is not omitted 
for twins, in these clans). When he is again admitted, his wife 
hits his legs with a stick, in order “‘to cure him” (ku mu daha). 
Hitting, is often one of the rites of aggregation. (See Van 
Gennep, Rites de Passage, p. 55). Let us remember that the 
Tembe clan is of Northern origin (I. p. 21) and has kept some 
customs which are different from those of the other Thonga(2). 

(1) Mrs. Junod, who was for years a missionary amongst the Fat or 
Pahouin of the French Congo, told me that, one day, after a tornado, the 
rainbow suddenly appeared in the sky. One of her female pupils at once ran 
to her, and hid her face in her schoolmistress’‘lap. Having asked the reason of 
this fear, the teacher was told that this girl was a twin and twins dare not 
look at the rainbow. So the connection between Heaven and twins also exists 
in this tribe of Western Africa. 

(2) Amongst the Herero a multiple birth is the happiest event which could 
possibly happen! The Rev. E. Dannert published in the Capetown Folklore 
Journal an account of the customs practised on such occasions by the Natives 
of this tribe, which occupies the Western side of Southern Africa, on about 
the same latitude as the Thonga. The father and mother are condemned to 
complete silence, under penalty of bringing a curse on those who speak to 
them. All the members of the tribe are convened and bring their cattle with 
them. The twins’ family has to appear before the whole assembly, and are 
received with lamentations. Every individual must present himself to the 

? 

2) HEAVEN AND THE ‘‘ Nunu’ 

The following is a very extraordinary custom, and one which, 
in many respects, greatly resembles those I have already des- 
cribed. There is to be found, on the shores of Delagoa Bay, a 
small Coleoptera, belonging to the Alcides genus of the 
Cucurlionide family. It has a proboscis shaped mouth, a very 
hard carapace of half a centimetre in length, brown, and mark- 
ed on each elytron with two longitudinal white bands. The 
Blacks call it the nunu. It is a scourge for the fields of beans 
and maize (much as the cockchafers are with us). In Decem- 
ber or January, when these insects begin to swarm, the chief 
men of the country order the diviners to throw the bones, and 
send the women to pick the “ nunu ” off the bean stalks. They 
gather them in “sala” shells. Then they choose (probably by 
casting lots) a woman who has given birth to twins. One of her 
daughters, who is one of the twins, is told to throw all the 
*< catch ” of insects into the neighbouring lake. She is accom- 
panied by a woman of mature age, and, without speaking a 
word, must go straight to the lake in question. Behind her 
marches the whole crowd of women, arms, waists and heads 
covered with grass, carrying branches of the big leaved 

ce 

parents, and make them a gift of beads, or o‘her ornaments, in return for 
which the father and mother purify them by means of a certain powder. After 
' this the father has the right of going from village to village, and claiming an 
ox from each one, asa kind of ransom. He becomes quite a rich man. This 
is the kunga rite which we have also met with amongst the Thonga in con- 
nection with the ‘ destitute (bowumba) ” women i. e. women who have given 
birth to a child after having lost many (I. p. 190). How can the diversity 
between the customs of the Herero, and those of most of the Thonga be 
explained ? No doubt by this vague mysterious notion of Heaven, which 
hovers above the religious conceptions of these tribes and originated all 
these rites This celestial power, when it manifests itself, stupefies the 
Natives, for it causes “‘a death”, entailsa curse. With the Thonga it is the 
mother and the children who are the objects of this malediction, hence the 
purifying ceremonies imposed upon them. With the Herero, it is the whole 
tribe, who are affected. The family, into which the twins are born has been 
distinguished and honoured by this heavenly visitation, and itself collects the 
fines which all must pay to regain the celestial favour! 

manioc, which they wave from side to side, and singing the 
following song, which has been composed for this occasion : 

Nunu, muka! Hi da mabele ! 
Nunu, go away | That we may eat bread ! 

The twin throws her little calabash into the water without 
turning round (for she is not allowed to look behind). Then 
the savage yells are heard louder than ever, and the women 
sing their impure songs (ta ku ruketela), to which they 
would never dare give voice on ordinary occasions, and which 
are reserved for these ceremonies : rain seeking and “‘ nunu ”’ 
hunting. 

On that day, as during the mbelele, woe to the man who 
walks along the paths! He is pitilessly tackled by these vira- 
gos, who push him to one side, or even maltreat him, and none 
of his fellows will go to his assistance. They all keep out of 
the way, for they well know what is in store for them, should 
they meet the savage crowd! So they mostly stay quietly at 
home in their huts ! 

The ‘ nunu” is not always thrown into the water. Some- 

_times, to get rid of the plague, or rather to conjure it away, 
they start out in a band, armed with sticks, to throw these de- 
structive insects on to neighbouring lands. It would seem that 
the men are mixed up in these underhand dodges, for it is said 
that this way, of handing over the ‘‘ nunu” to neighbours, 
often leads to pitched battles, in which sticks are wielded to 
some purpose, and blows rain thick and heavy! The people 
of Rikatla, citizens of Nondwane, used to make a present of 
their pseudo-cockchafers to the inhabitants of the district of 
Makunyule, belonging to the Mabota clan. But the true way 
of conjuring away the ‘“‘ Nunu” is to drown them in the lake, 
and this custom, in common with the preceding ones, certainly 
bears some relation to the notion of Heaven : the appearance 
of these pests being caused by that mysterious power, which 
presides over all unaccountable and inevitable phenomena of the 
atmosphere and of the life of the fields, or of human existence. 

We have seen the two sets of religious customs playing their 
part in a parallel manner in the rites of rain-making. A simi- 
lar coincidence may be noticed here. The removal of the 
“nunu”’, a rite which has originated from the conception of 
Heaven, corresponds to the sacrifice of the chief in the Malu- 
leke country, when he gathers his sons to pray to his ancestor- 
gods for the fe ererion of the vermin (psidi) which eat the 
mealies and endanger the harvest (p. 372). 

3) Heaven, Storms and Rossers 

The most characteristic manifestation of Heaven is in the 
storm. According to the statement of the credulous Natives, after 
the women have finished cleaning the wells, and have watered 
the graves of twins, clouds appear, a whirlwind arises, and ‘“‘ Hea- 
ven begins to thunder” — ‘ Tilo dji djuma”.— I have 
already described Thonga ideas about thunder and the lightning 
bird (p. 290), and the powerful charm made from the flesh, fea- 
thers and urine of this marvellous creature! There is still ano- 
ther use made of this extraordinary drug. It is a splendid aid 
in tracing thieves! The magician, who possesses this powder 
of Heaven, (Nwagwalen of Shikhabele in the Mabota clan), when 
called upon to point out the thief, acts in the following way : 

Suppose some one finds that some valuable article has disap- 
peared from his hut, he says to his near relatives, to those 
whom he suspects of having committed the larceny: ‘‘ Take 
care! If you don’t confess, we will go to Nwagwalen, who lives 
at Shikhabele ! ” This threat may possibly be sufficient to eli- 
cit an avowal. If not, the individual who has been wronged 
goes to the diviner, and asks his assistance ; the latter takes his 
“bag of tricks ”, his drugs, and his big black stick, i. e., the 
stick which he had when he dug the earth and found the urine 
of the bird, or the bird itself. A notch has been made in the 
stick, to show the depth of the hole in which he has discover- 
ed Heaven. Carrying these charms, he goes to find the chief. 
An audience being granted, he cries aloud: ‘“ O Chief! a 

ES aio y 
theft has been committed ! Now, no one ought ever to rob 
me. What shall Ido!” Then the Chief assembles his sub- 
jects and invites the guilty one to confess. If all deny it, Nwa- 
gwalen starts off, with all his apparatus, for the place where the 
theft was committed, and “‘ treats it medicinally ” (a dahela 
mbango). He spreads out his drugs, raises his stick in the air, 
and addresses Heaven as follows : 

We, Tilo, hi wene u ka ni mahlu, u bonaka busiku ni nhlekanhi! 

Ba tekile psa nga, ba kaneta! Tana, u ba komba, ba psha ! 

Oh Heaven, it is thou who hast eyes which see as well by night as by 
day... 

They have stolen my goods, and they deny it! Come and discover 
them ; may they be consumed ! 

Then the clouds begin to gather, and, towards evening, the 
storm breaks. Lightning strikes the thief in his hut, and causes 
the stolen articles to reappear. — ‘I saw this happen at 
Hofiwana” declared Spoon “ but, of late years such occurrences 
have been less frequent ”. 

According to Camilla the guilty person is sometimes punished 
by a terrible attack of vermin, of which he is unable to rid him- 
self ; or he is confronted with several palm leaves, which, by a 
kind of divine judgment, turn into snakes, if he be truly guilty 
of having stolen the missing property. 

The intervention of Heaven in the matter of detecting thieves 
is also an accepted fact in Khosen. My colleague, Rev. Grand- 
jean, told me of the following significant custom: When it 
storms, those who have missed any belongings go and stand at 
the door of the hut of the suspected thief, and it is quite possi- 
ble that the inmate terrified by thunder, may throw the stolen 
articles outside. 

One might conclude, from these perfectly authenticated cus- 
toms, that the Natives attribute to Heaven the power of ommi- 
science, but more especially in respect to the detection of theft. 
The basket of bones is never consulted with that intent. 

4) HEAVEN AND THE BALUNGWANA. 

In 1894, as previously stated, grasshoppers, which had not 
been seen for some fifty years, made their appearance on the 
shores of Delagoa Bay, and also in Natal and the Transvaal. 
The popular imagination was, naturally, greatly stirred by this 
unusual phenomenon, which was, at first, greeted with smiles 
and astonishment, but which, later on, was the cause of endless 
lamentation. Iwas, one day, walking up the hill of Lourenco 
Marques with an old man, the counsellor of one of the sub- 
chiefs of Tembe, a thoughtful and intelligent individual, who 
said to me, with great earnestness, in a low voice, as if refer- 
ring to some important event: ‘“‘Haven’t you heard that in 
Maputju, two dwarfs (psimhu-nwanyana) fell from Heaven: 
a little man and a little woman. They came to say to 
the people: ‘‘Do not kill the grasshoppers! They belong to 
us!” This counsellor only repeated what eyerybody thought 
and was saying in all the native villages: these grasshoppers, 
arriving unexpectedly from on high, were a manifestation of 
Heaven, just as the lightning, rain, twins, or the nunu, and these 
celestial beings had come to announce it to men. 

But the belief in the existence of special personages in Heaven 
did not originate in connection with these terribly destructive 
insects. The idea had been familiar, for a long time past, to 
the Ronga, and probably to all the Thonga. These personages 
were not only designated as dwarfs, but also as balungwana 
(p- 330). They are said to fall from Heaven at the time of 
the great rains. Thus, Timoteo Mandlati told me people had 
seen some of them appear, a long time ago, in the Nkuna coun- 
try, and that they had gone back to heaven in a cloud: they 
live in celestial space, and when it thunders without rain falling, 
the Nkuna say: ‘‘ Balungwana ba tlanga henhla” — ‘“‘ The 
balungwana are at play up there”. Or, it is they who are sing- 
ing in heaven, when there is a prolonged roar of thunder, 
saying : “ wuwu-wuwu! ” 

When some one passes along the road, they dispute up there, 

a 406 ass 

as to who he may be.. One says: ‘‘It is so and so”, and the 
others contradict. Then they spit on the traveller, who is quite 
astonished to see some saliva on his hand. He mistakes it for 
rain, and looks up to the sky to see where the rain is coming 
from. The balungwana then have the chance to see his face, 
and the one who had rightly guessed says to the others: ‘You 
see! I was right.” , 

In Bilen I heard of a man, who prevented children from pick- 
ing the beautiful red flowers of Tecoma capensis, telling them 
that the balungwana wanted them for dresses. That same indi- 
vidual believed these little men would bring oxen to him. 

The Ronga say that a little man fell on the hill of Lourenco 
Marques, near the house of Sithini, the son of Mashaken, just 
before the famous war between Mozila and Mawewe (I. p. 27), 
the rival claimants to the kingdom of Gaza, and that the dwarf 
came as a presage of the troubles which were to follow. ‘Lots 
of folk saw him” said Charlie in 1895; (he was then a man of 
some forty years of age). ‘‘ We were too young to be allowed 
to look at him; the Whites took him and carried him off to 
Mozambique ”. — Heaven is therefore inhabited. This is gene- 
rally admitted, but this idea, from all that one can gather, is 
very vague. 

C. CONCLUDING REMARKS ON THONGA RELIGION 
I. The Origin of the Conception of Heaven. 

Ancestrolatry forms a clear, well-defined religion, with its theology 
(i. e., the ideas as regards the psikwembu), its sacrifices, and its 
prayers. The dim, mysterious ideas about Heaven, incorporated in 
or rather hidden behind some of the most extraordinary rites of the 
tribe, beara very different character. There is something incoherent, 
vague and unexpected in them, and it seems that, bearing an essen- 
tially deistic character, attended with no proper worship,-they might 
as well be absent from the horizon of the Thonga mind. 

However, when we study other Bantu tribes, we come to exactly 

the opposite conclusion, i. e., that it would be indeed strange, if no 
religious ideas of this kind were found amongst our tribe. In fact, 
this occurrence of a double set of religious ideas is universal amongst 
Bantu. They all believe in a kind of Supreme Being, an All Father, 
who bears many different names, Nzame amongst the Fah and a 
great number of West African tribes, Nyambe amongst the Ba-Rotsi, 
Lexa in some Zambezi and Rhodesian districts, Mulungu amongst 
fifteen East African tribes, (1) Nkulunkulu in Zululand, Nungu- 
ngulu round Inhambane, and Mudimo amongst the Ba-Suto, etc., etc. 
The Thonga Tilo is, most likely, one of these names. The word 
probably comes from the root ulu, high, elevated, and ilu, heaven, 
which the R. P. Sacleux has found with that significance amongst 
Central or West African tribes. (Mulu, amongst the Bemba ; Liulu, 
in Kimbundu ; Diulu, in Luba; Wilu, in Luyi; Egulu in Ganda ; 
Idjulu, amongst the Thonga of Zambezi, etc.). This root, with the 
personal prefix, has given birth to the term Mugulu, designating 
God in Tabwa and Mukuru in Herero. It may be that Mukuru ts 
rather related to the Unkulunkulu of the Zulus, the Great One. (See 
Mer. Le Roy, “ La Keligion des Primitifs ”, 1909, p. 498). 

In the South African tribes, however, the conception of the Su- 
preme Being is not nearly so precise as in most parts of Central 
Africa.: The Thonga Tilo, although sometimes implored, is hardly 
a being, but seems rather to be a personification of Nature. Is this 
the original conception regarding the Supreme Being, or is it, on 
the contrary, a transformation of it? I abstained, in ‘‘ Les Ba-Ronga”. 
from expressing any definite opinion on this point. A further study 
has now led me to believe that the latter conclusion is the more pro- 
babie, and that the ideas about Heaven were clearer in former times. 
This is, at any rate, also the conviction of elderly intelligent Natives, 
who are able to remember the former ideas held by the tribe. They 
say: ‘ As regards death, people commonly affirm now that it is 
caused by witchcraft, whilst formerly they attributed it to the agency 
of Heaven.” Let us also notice the name of the dwarfs, who 
are believed to inhabit Heaven, the balungwana. This word isa dimi- 
nutive of Mulungu, balungu, by which are designated, amongst the 
Zulus and Thonga, White people of every description, Europeans or 
Asiatics. Could the inhabitants of Heaven have been called ‘* balung- 
wana ”, on account of their resemblance to the Whites? It would 

(1) Comp. J. Torrend’s, Comparative Grammar of the S. A. Bantu Lan- 
guages, p. 68, . 

ats 408 Cae 

hardly seem probable, for the name of, and the ideas connected with, 
the balungwana were in ‘existence long before White people were ge- 
nerally known, or had settled in the country. It is much more 
reasonable to suppose that the name of these mythical beings, as also 
that by which the Whites are designated, is a derivative of some other 
pre-existent term ; and what term should it be if not the famous voc- 
able ‘‘Mulungu ”, which stands for God, the One Supreme God, in 
so many of the Bantu dialects of East Africa, from Lake Victoria 
Nyanza to the Zambesi, 10 Senna and Quilimane >? | should be 
inclined to think that the tribes in the neighbourhood of Delagoa were 
also acquainted with this name, which is so widely known, and that 
it has, in the course of centuries, disappeared from their theology, 
only leaving, as a last trace, the term balungwana, applied to the 
heavenly beings who occasionally descend to earth, and baluneu, 
designating that superior race whose wisdom has always impressed 
the Blacks as supernatural. If this hypothesis were confirmed, we 
should have the right to conclude that the idea of Heaven, such as 
described in this chapter is the disfigured remnant of a higher and 
monotheistic conception, which the primitive Bantu held before their 
dispersion, and which evolved in various Ways, amongst the diffe- 
rent tribes, 

I. The Antiquity of Ancestrolatry. 

Ancestral Worship seems, on the other hand, to be a very, very 
ancient religion amongst mankind. There have been discovered quite 
recently sepulchres of prehistoric date, which seem to show that the 
funeral rites of the first races were very similar to those practised by 
the Bantu of the present day. In comparing the burial of Sokis 
(I. p. 134) with that of a human being of the Mousterian age, whose 
remains were recently discovered by Hauser in the celebrated ‘ Abri 
du Moustier” (Dordogne) (1) I noticed the following resemblan- 
ces: 

1) In both cases. the corpse was treated with great, even affectionate 
care. protected against the earth. and provided with a pillow. 

2) The legs and arms had been bent against the body, a custom which 

(1) See my paper ‘* Deux Enterrements a 20,000 ans de distance”. Anthropos, 
1900, I. v. Comp. also * L’homme prehistorique ”, January, 1909. 

== A409. -2— 
is widespread amongst primitive races, and which is directly due to the - 
belief in an after-life. 
3) The deceased is considered as sleeping : hence the pillow pro- 
vided for him. 

4) His after-life is believed to be an exact continuation of his exis- 
tence on earth. Hence the fact that the articles which he was accus- 
tomed to use are put on, orinside, his grave, the mats, rugs, mug in 
one case, and silex or ‘‘coups de poing” in the other. 

5) If the rites performed for Sokis may be explained by the hypo- 
thesis that he has become a shikwembu, a god endowed with divine 
powers, if they are already acts of worship, it is but reasonable to 
suppose that the same religious conceptions gave birth to the simi- 
lar rites of the Mousterian Primitives. The Mousterian Age is one of 
the first periods of the Quaternary. Some palaeontologists believe it 
is anterior to the last glacial period, and think that the dwellers in la 
Dordogne lived 200,000, even 500,000 years ago! They possessed a 
religion, and this religion was probably Ancestrolatry. 

Il. The Relation between Ancestrolatry 
and the Conception of Heaven. 

The conclusion which might be drawn from the two preceding 
paragraphs is that both the Ancestral Worship and the Conception 
regarding a Supreme Being are of very ancient date, and the question 
naturally arises as to which is the older. Ido not pretend here to be 
able to give an answer to this great problem, which probably cannot 
be solved in a purely scientific way. I intend merely adding the few 
following remarks. 

1) When questioned as to the relative antiquity of their two sets of 
religious ideas, Thonga reply that they are unable to give an answer. 
‘Their conception of Heaven is so impersonal that they cannot draw 
any comparisons. Their neighbours, the Swazis and the Zulus, how- 
ever, are very decided about this point. The Rev. W. Challis, in 
‘The East and the West” of July, 1908, summarises their statements 
as follows : 

“Long ago a great and noble Bantu king was in the habit of climb- 
ing a twin-peaked mountain at day break, there to intercede with 

—— 410 —= 

the Great Great One (Nkulunkulu) on behalf of his people. His — 
son, who succeeded him, was afraid to draw near to the Great God 

whom his father worshipped, so he called upon the spirit of his 

father to intercede for him and his people before the Creator of all. 

Gradually each head of a house adopted this method of approaching 

God, until each family had its own ancestral spirits as mediators first, 

then merely as beings who brought good or bad luck, and who needed 

to be propitiated by sacrifice and constant flattery and attention. But 

God is not in their thoughts now; only a vague tradition among the 

old men survives as to the existence of the Great Great One. ” 

The Zulus affirm, so Callaway says, that the same proceeding took 
place amongst their ancestors. This seems a phenomenon similar to the 
adoration of saints in medieval times, after a period when the religion 
had had a much purer and transcendental character. 

2) Asecond fact, which points in the same direction, is the contrast 
which exists in the conception regarding the ancestral spirits. On the 
one hand they are but men, who may be insulted (as were often the 
saints to whom reference has just been made ; take, for instance, the 
incident of the striking of the image of St Antony of Padua by a wor- 
shipper, because the saint had not helped him to recover some lost pro- 
perty) ; on the other hand they are endowed with the qualities of omni- 
presence, omniscience and omnipotence in their relations with their 
descendants, It seems as if the idea of divinity, which was not origi- 
nally connected with the spirits of the departed, had been in an awk- 
ward and merely external way applied to them. 

3) It is wonderful to notice how easily the idea of the God of Chris- 
tianity is accepted by the Bantu. They have almost no difficulty in 
believing that this is the real God to be worshipped. Livingstone long 
ago remarked this, and the truth of it has been confirmed by Miss Kings- 
ley, for one, in regard to the Northern Bantus, and also by most of those 
who have endeavoured to win over these tribes to Christianity. Itseems 
as if one were telling them an old story, with which they had been quite 
familiar but had now half forgotten. In regard to the Thonga I under- 
stand the psychological proceeding to be as follows: when they hear of . 
the Shikwembu, who is in Heaven, there at once takes place in their 
minds a coalescence, a reunion of the two main characteristics of their 
two religions : their shikwembu is personal but not transcendental ; their 
Heaven is transcendental but not personal. God, the real God who is 
preached to them, is both personal and transcendental: it is as if two 
different kinds of electricity suddenly came in contact with each other 

 4IL/  
in their minds and produced a flash of light... The result is defini- 
tive. The two ideas can no longer be kept apart. When the Native 
has adopted the living God of Christianity, he either understands Him 
more and more fully, and is able to find great joy and satisfaction of 
his soul in his new religion, or he abandons Him, and becomes godless, 
if he is unwilling to accept the morality of a true Christian life ; but he 
never returns to the Ancestrolatry, nor to his former deistic and natu- 
ralistic conceptions. This is another proof that the knowledge of 
the one and only God, who reigns over all, was indeed sleeping in 
his heart and conscience, no doubt as a result of the ancient mono- 
theistic conceptions of the Bantu. 

The evolution of mankind has been a long one! Even if the Ban- 
tu had formerly had the idea of God, it would not go to prove any- 
thing as regards the first religion of humanity. This question is en- 
tirely out of the range of the present work, and even Science may 
perhaps never be able to answer it. I can therefore leave it out of 
consideration. 

My last remark has shown the caducity of the Thonga religion. It 
is not able to stand before the advance of the higher revealed religions, 
Mohammedanism and Christianity. Hence the facility with which 
they are converted to one or other of these beliefs. This fact is of 
considerable importance in respect to the future of the tribe, and it will 
be necessary for us to consider it in our Conclusion.

Macic 

Without pretending here to give definitions applicable to all the pri- 
mitive races, well knowing how delicate is the subject, yet, I think I 
must first of all try to establish a distinction as clear as possible 
between Religion, Magic and Science, as they are represented amongst 
the South African tribes. 

T call Religious all the rites. practices, conceptions, or feelings which 
presuppose the belief in personal or semi-personal spirits endowed 
with the attributes of Deity, and with which man tries to enter into 
relation, either to win their assistance or to avert their anger (offer- 
ings, prayers). 

I call Magic all the rites, practices, and conceptions which aim at 
dealing with hostile, or neutral, or favourable influences, either imper- 
sonal forces of Nature, or living men acting as wizards, or personal 
spirits taking possession of their victims. «I recognise two kinds of 
magic: ‘*White magic” by which man tries to protect himself against 
these influences, or turn them to his advantage, and ‘* Black magic” by 
which man attempts to make use of these forces against his fellows. 
The magic rites rest on well defined principles which may be called the 
axioms of Animism, or rather of Dynamism, for instance: like produces, 
cures or acts on like; the action of the part on the whole; etc. 

I call Scientific, all the rites, practices, and conceptions which are 
inspired by a real observation of facts. I include in this category cer- 
tain medical treatments, botanical and zoological notions ; etc. 

These different elements are intermingled in practice to such an 
extent that Religion is greatly disfigured by Magic. For instance, 
when the national priest ‘sacrifices ” with the great mhamba, he prays 
to the ancestor-gods of the country : this is Religion ; but he also 
brandishes the sacred object containing their nails and hair, to in- 
fluence them : this is Magic. On the other hand Magic often admits 
religious elements (see Possessions), and the proper domain of Science 
is invaded on all sides by conceptions of a magical character. This 

= 41g — 
will be shown by the study of the four subjects which I include in the 
Chapter on Magic, viz.: Medical art, Posssessions, Witchcraft and Divi- 
nation, 

The confusion between these three domains also accounts for the 
composite character of those individuals who practise the medical, or 
magical art. The medicine-man (fanga) is far from being a purely 
scientific man: he partakes more or less of the nature of the magician, 
and prays to the ancestors who transmitted their charms tohim. The 
magician (mungoma) is sometimes a kind of priest when he under- 
takes to exorcise the spirits of possession, The diviner (wa bula), whose 
art is entirely based on magical conceptions, occasionally prays his 
ancestor-gods to help him in throwing the bones which he received 
from them. I am convinced that the three domains are essentially 
distinct, and that the Thonga vaguely perceive the distinction. But, 
indeed, they grade into each other with the greatest facility, and I will 
try to follow them, faithfully endeavouring not to alter their ideas, 
whilst trying to explain them intelligibly. 

AS MEDIGAL CART 

The medicinal practices of the South African Bantu are very inte- 
resting from the ethnographical point of view, but their study has 
also a practical importance. In all civilised lands the medical pro- 
fession is subjected to restrictions ; the candidate must pass exami- 
nations showing that he is capable of treating his future patients. 
Nothing of this kind ismet with amongst Thonga. The only qualifica- 
tion of the doctor is that he has inherited some recipes from one of his 
ancestors, and that he uses them with more or less success on volun- 
tary patients. Should not steps be taken by Colonial Governments in 
order to stop, or at any rate to regularise, the action of the medicine- 
men ? 

A precise knowledge of their practices is necessary in order to come 
to a conclusion on this point. Missionaries have also a great interest 
in this study. They have all noticed how often their converts, when 
sickness overcomes them, abandon the Mission Station and run to their 
quacks, sometimes brusquely interrupting a treatment which had been 
prescribed to them by a fully trained medical missionary. The result 
is almost sure to be the eventual loss of their health and of their faith. 
Let us, therefore, try to understand the Native medical art and see 
how far we can trust its representatives. 

— Ald —— 

I. The Medicine-men. 

I came across a good many fanga (yin-tin), the technical name 
given to Native physicians. They are all very proud of their 
knowledge and it must be remarked that this knowledge is mostly 
hereditary. Certain drugs have been tried, used for years, 
by a certain individual, who probably owed them to his father, 
or to another of his ancestors. Before his death he trans- 
mitted his art to his son, or to his uterine nephew, the one of 
his descendants who seemed to be “ induced by his heart ” 
(inbilu) to enter the profession. This being the case, medicine- 
men are very different from each other as regards their compe- 
tence. Some only treat one complaint, or one category of 
patients, because they only know the medicine which applies to 
them. For instance Eliashib, one of our first converts, native 
of Khosen, had only one drug, the bark of a certain tree which 
possessed frightful purgative powers, and he prescribed it in any 
case, half killing those who came to him for treatment, and who 
had all the more confidence in the drug because it came from 
a distant land. Eliashib was hardly a flanga. Sam Newetsa, 
my Rikatla neighbour, was a physician for infantile diseases only. 
He knew the milombyana prescription and how to biyeketa 
(I. p. 46), and people used to ask for his assistance as a specia- 
list in this domain alone. We have seen that there is also a 
special doctor who boasts of being able to attend to the dangerous 
condition of the mother of twins, and another one who treats 
leprosy, this latter being regarded as the cleverest of all. Spoon- 
Elias had a more extensive knowledge of the popular ‘ mate- 
ria medica” than Sam, but he was still a beginner. His No- 
ndwane colleague, Kokolo, was vastly superior: an individual in 
the prime of life, wearing the black crown which distinguishes 
the notables of the land. He belonged to an ancient family of 
doctors; his father Mankena and his grandfather Mablahlana 
practised before him, and bequeathed to him the valuable legacy 
of their experience. ‘Tobane, to whom I applied to put me in 

touch with some really clever practitioners, said of this man: 
**Awa daha”- ‘‘He is one who succeeds in his cures!”, adding 
withalook of profound respect : “It seems that even the Whites 
of Lourenco Marques consult him!” And Kokolo, without 
too much persuasion, shewed me his drugs, and went to “‘dig” 
for some for my special benefit. I had to pay him fairly gene- 
rously, as the gentleman does not work for nothing, and it was 
with an evident consciousness of his talent and powers that he 
explained to me the uses of his medicines. 

But the most distinguished medicine-man I ever met was the 
old Mankhelu, who may be considered as having been one of 
the masters of the profession in the Thonga tribe. “It is no 
play, what I am doing! I have beaten an ox (i. e. made a 
present of an ox) to my maternal uncle Hlomendhlen! I gave 
him even two oxen and hetaught me his medical art! He led 
me everywhere, showing me all his drugs.” So Mankhelu 
became a regular flanga, over and above being a diviner, master 
in the art of throwing bones, a rain-maker, a counsellor, and 
general of the army. His whole family partook of his charac- 
ter, and helped him in his work. Every year, at the time of 
bukanye, the drugs had to be renewed. His wives went all 
over the bush to dig out the medicinal roots and to collect them 
in their Jiblelo baskets (p. 106). On their return home the 
bones were consulted to find out who was to cut the roots in 
pieces (gemela). This having been done, they pounded them 
in their mortars; a portion of this material was dried outside, 
and reduced to powder without having been cooked ; these were 
the male medicines; the other portion was roasted in pieces of 
broken pots, burnt until they were like charcoal, ground and 
made into a black powder: these were the female medicines. 
The whole village assembled and inhaled the smoke through 
reeds during the operation. A goat was killed and a sacri- 
fice performed; the liquid contained in the psanyi (p. 376) was 
squeezed on the burning drugs to put them out; a little bukanye 
beer was also used for the same purpose. In the meantime Ma- 
nkhelu said “‘tsw”, and addressed this prayer to his gods, and 
especially to the ancestor who had taught him his science : 

aes 416 =~, 

‘You! so andso! Let these drugs of yours rise (pfuka, i. e. 
find new strength). Let people come from the Zulu, from Mosile- 
katse, from Mpfumu! Let them think of our leaves (matluka, com- 
mon name for drugs). Let them bring elephant tusks, marrriageable 
girls, etc. Let them dream of us!” 

This operation of renewing the drugs aims at giving them 
new strength. Mankhelu said. “We Jet our drugs Juma for 
the new year; we raise our calabashes, so that the new season 
may be not too heavy forus... This will consolidate our home ; 
bad coughs will not attack us too severely. It will shut out the 
wind; we will no longer be very sick, because these are new 
drugs. As regards the old ones, they have been contaminated 
(khuma) by the misfortunes of last year. They are mad (hu- 
ngukile). A new rain falls; let there be also new drugs, and we 
can undertake our journeys to sell our goods.” So the nanga 
removed a little of the old powder from each calabash; he threw 
it on the path at a crossway; then he washed them at the same 
spot: “Misfortune is thus thrown away. Passers-by will take 
it with them as it has been thrown out there by us.” Then 
the new powder was added to the remainder of the old one 
which was ‘“‘raised ” by it. 

In order to throw more light on the nature of Mankhelu’s 
art, let me briefly mention the roots (rimetju), or the leaves (tluka, 
ri-ma), or, to use the great, the general name, ihe drugs (muri, 
mu-mi) which composed the marvellous powder of the cala- 
bashes. He was not a man of one drug. He pretended to 
be an universal physician: so he put together all kinds of drugs, 
being sure that, in this way, they would certainly act in 
any case brought to him. Here is the description given by 
him : 

Nyebe: the one by which we find the strength to trample 
on our enemies ; we trample also on the winds which spoil 
the mealies; we drive out the bad cold (or wind) which has 
come to us and made us cough. (Notice the triple use of this 
drug). 

Shikuku: the one which tramples on misfortune. 

=> yh 

Mponwanawa burisi matuba-tubana: vanquisher of the enemy 
and of misfortune. 

Shinano: the one which induces the enemies to sleep; you 
hang some leaves of it on yours hield and they are overcome by 
drowsiness, they do not see you coming toward them. 

Nembe-nembe. By it you reach your enemy while he still 
sleeps and kill him before he can defend himself. 

Mpetshu wa milomo: the one of the lips! It overcomes the 
curses and the assagais of the others ! 

Rihinga ra ndlela: a root found across the path; it helps you 
to go through, though others may want to hinder you in your 
way. 

Shivunge: the one which attracts patients to the doctor. 

Nandjiyane: the one which makes his words agreeable, so that 
patients will like them; (from ku nandjiya, to be agreeable). 

Mvakazi, phuphuma ra matlhari: the one which is used to 
make the slayers vomit the main drug of the tintjebe (I. p.455). 

Mbendjula: the one which strengthens all the other drugs. 

These are the principal trees, or plants, used for the prepara- 
tion of the powder. They must be salted by the addition of the 
sea, viz., of the medicines taken from the sea, and which Ma- 
nkhelu uses to make the rain fall (p. 298). 

The sexual character of the drugs is essential. The female 
ones are used principally for sprinkling the army and the assa- 
gais, the male for treating diseases. We find here again the 
law of opposition of sexes; the military domain is the male 
domain par excellence : it must be treated by means of female 
drugs. On the contrary, when slaughtering a she-goat, for the 
sacrifice, a little of the male drugs must be placed in its mouth 
and the weapon used to kill it must be smeared with the same, 
and vice-versa for the he-goat. ‘‘To act otherwise is taboo. 
All the flanga do so”. 

There may be some really scientific elements in the Thonga medi- 
calart. Experiments have been made in using certain roots to cure 
certain diseases, and tradition has handed down some prescriptions 
from the fathers to their sons. Why should there not be effective cura- 

a Ase 

tive properties in plants-of their country just as there is in the Cinchona 
bark, or in Castor oil seeds? And why should they-not have discovered 
them? However the Native hanga is by no means a scientific man, 
and the best, the most renowned, are perhaps the least scientific. Those 
who treat only one complaint, and only know one drug, are perhaps 
those who most resemble real physicians. They act on the result of 
experiments. But the line between science and superstition is very 
soon crossed, and the medical art passes with the greatest ease into the 
domain of magic, all the more so as the difference between Science 
and Magic is not perceived. Muri, which means originally tree, plant, 
medicinal herb, is at the same time any means of producing any effect, 
natural or supernatural, onany influence, /hostile or favourable, person- 
al or impersonal. This is why the mtjebe shrub helps Mankhelu to 
attain three objects at the same time: cure a bad cough, protect the 
mealies and rout the enemy. 

This mixed character of the medical art of the primitives, which is 
so evident in their medicine-men, will appear clearly when we conti- 
nue our study. 

I]. Medical practices. 

Surgical cases are treated in the worst way, any interference 
with a knife being considered absurd, ifnot culpable.(1) When 
dealing with sores, the aim of the Nanga seems to be to conceal 
them under a black powder, so as to put the patient under a 
false impression: for he thinks himself healed as he can no longer 
see his sore. Mankhelu used to grind the bark of the ndjupfura 
tree (a tree with a white sap), and put the powder on the sore 
to make it dry up, renewing the application on the fourth day, 
then five days later, then six days later. — For wounds Kokolo 
used the sap of the shilangamahlo, and made it fall in drops on 
the bleeding wound. The nkahlu (p. 307) with its milky sap, 
is commonly used for this purpose. — “* But ”, says Kokolo, ‘the 
chiefis shilangamahlo”’. Bruises are treated by the rimba method. 

(1) Gungunyane, who killed thousands of poor Ba-Chopi without the slight- 
est remorse, could not conceal his horror at Dr. Liengme who dared to 
amputate limbs, or to cut open the body in order to cure patients ! 

a i gee 
When some one has fallen and some complication is feared, a 
fire is made ; when there are enough glowing embers, and the 
soil is very hot, the ashes are pushed aside and a little sand 
taken from the river is poured on the spot, some nkuhlu leaves 
over it. The patient leans over the place ‘* which has been so 
aS ”; this is an unexpected application of the principle 

*“ similia stenilibus curantur”: as the soil has been burnt but 

“quenched” (timula) by the cool sand, so the bruise will be 
prevented from burning him dangerously ! — Decayed teeth are 
not extracted, properly speaking ; they are broken down with a 
piece of iron, on which the Native dentist beats with a hammer, 
until he has removed as much as he can of the tooth! Some- 
times he breaks the jaw also ; the jaw may even pass through 
the cheek, causing a frightful rial Once one of my collections: 
had to perform the operation of the removal of the inferior 
maxillary bone, which was protruding as the result of the so- 
called extraction of a tooth by a fianga ! — Snake bites are treated 
with a powder made of a snake burnt to ashes, and of some 
ingredients mixed with it, the whole being salted with common 
salt. Incisions are made in all the joints, wrist, ankle, elbow, 
and also in front of the neck, and the powder inoculated into 
them. Children are inoculated as a means of prevention, so that, 
moe bitten, the wenom will not affect them; the doctor has 

‘“ preceded the snake” (yi yi rangerile). 

Medical cases are generally treated more reasonably than sur- 
gical cases. Here are some of Kokolo’s and Spoon’s prescriptions : 

To commence with the drug used when one “ feels his head ”, 
otherwise has a headache: it is the root of a shrub called 
nhlangula, which seems to be a regular anaesthetic, and it is 
used as follows: the fresh bark is scraped with a knife, and a 
certain quantity is folded up in a cloth and applied to the fore- 
head for half a day. In case of toothache the same drug is used 
together with another called ndjenga: they are boiled ; a little of 
the decoction thus obtained is held in the mouth and the pain 
should disappear. 

When it ‘bites inside ’’, that is tosay when one suffers from 
colic or looseness of the bowels, the remedy is munwangati, 

shimbyati and shidlanyoka made upin a bunch. ‘The doctor pre- 
pares this medicine with great care, cutting the roots in equal 
lengths and tying them together with a band of palm leaf. 
(See illustration, N° 2). He concocts his remedy with a greater 
quantity cf the roots of the milder type, and only a few pieces 
of those?which act more violently. The bunch called shitsimbo 
is then boiled to bring out the active principles of the drugs, and 
the decoction is taken by the patient, just as it is. Sometimes 

& Bope/ def ATONGER- $e 

Thonga Pharmacopoeia. 
1. Box made of maize bracts, containing medicine. 2. Shitsimbo. 3. Skin of a 
mole containing powdered drugs. 4. Pill. 5. Bracelet of ftjukunyana. 
6. Timfisa amulets. 7. Sungi root tied round the ankle. 

it is mixed with maize, when preparing the meal, and taken in 
that way. As the bunch, or packet, of these roots retains its 
medicinal properties for a long time, a single packet may be 
used over and over again during a whole week. 

The prescription for dysvntery is as follows :  Shimbyati, Shi- 
dlambangi, Likalahumba, Nkononoand N:ala (Strychnos, sp related 
to spinosa). That for bronchitis. or for a cold in the head, is 

Menyomamba, Mphesu (a kind of mimosa) Shongwe, Ntshatshe 
(a papilionaceous shrub), Gowane (Zygia fastigiata, a large mi- 
mosa) and Muhlandlopfu. The last is a very powerful drug : 
the last but one is less so. For hydrocele the following are 
used: Lihlehlwa, Ntshatshe, Nkonono, Mamuntana. The Natives 
consider this complaint to be contagious, and to be transmitted 
by matrimonial relations. 

I obtained two purgatives from my Native doctors : the one, 
an aloe, or cactus, a species of which grows plentifully on our 
sand dunes ; the sap is squeezed on to grains of millet or 
sorghum, which are kept in neatly constructed boxes of maize 
leaves: these are made by plucking an ear of maize, breaking 
off the cob and leaving the large bracts which enclose it and 
which adhere to the stalk at its base. This is a very primitive 
receptacle, and easily procurable (No 1). The medicine is thus 
kept until required for use, when it is ground to a powder and 
taken in water. The second of these purgatives is the bark of 
a tree growing in the Nkomati valley in the Khosen country. 
It is the one, already alluded to, which was appropriated by one 
of our Christians, named Eliashib, who administered it to the 
Rikatla folk in such generous doses that it generally did more 
harm than good. 

Three or four other roots form part of the packet for children ; 
these are called, as previously explained (I. p. 46), by the gene- 
ral term milombyana, medicines to promote the growth of newly 
born infants. If an intestinal parasite be expelled by dlanyoka, it 
is burnt to cinders and reduced to a powder ; an incision is made 
on the belly and on the loins of the child, into which the pow- 
deris rubbed. It is a kind of inoculation, a further application 
of the principle ‘ like cures like”. 

The packet used for treating haematuria contains six drugs : 
Humbutlo, Ntshopfa, Shintitana (an Apocynea shrub related to the 
Artabotrys, p. 307), Likalahumba, Ndyjindjila and Shimbyati. 
According to doctor’s directions these are boiled in a pot with 
beans; after a while the packet is taken out. The patient must 
then transfix one bean with a thorn and throw it over his left 
shoulder ; he pierces a second -in the same way and throws it 

over his right shoulder, then a third which he swallows. The 
first two beans are used to ‘‘ try the earth ”,.that is to say, to 
propitiate the several evil influences existing in the soil, which 
have probably been the cause of the illness. Such is the first 
part of the treatment. The second part consists in pounding 
large white tubers (something like elongated potatoes) in a mor- 
tar. The paste thus obtained is squeezed into a jar, and the patient 
must take this juice as well as the beans, seasoned as aforesaid ! 
Every evening he must drink a cup of the bitter mixture (the 
packet broth), and also a cup of the sweet medicine made from 
the tubers. If, after this, the haematuria does not stop, the 
patient will be given a pungulu, a turkish bath, which I will 
describe later on. The foregoing is Spoon’s method of treat- 
ment. — Dr. Kokolo had another cure for the same complaint; 
he used Shirole Nembe-nembe, Likumba-kumba and Nhlanhlara, 
which he recommended to be taken in the usual way as a tisane, 
cutting them up in small pieces in a pot. They areroasted on 
a brazier and the smoke inhaled through a hollow reed : the car- 
bonised pieces are ground to a powder which is mixed with 
ordinary food. A curious fact to be noted with regard to this 
complaint is that the patient’s wife, if he be married, has to 
undergo the same treatment. — Gonorrhea is treated with Shilan- 
gamahlo, Hlablana, Nembe-nembe (Cassia petersiana) and Ntinti 
(Artabotrys Monteiroi). If necessary Shimbyati is added as an 
adjuvant. It is with the leaves of this latter plant that Kokolo 
made the huge pill, 8 inches in circumference, which he pre- 
sented to me (N° 4). 

For the last named illness, as for haematuria, if internal 
medication does not suffice, a more efficacious method “ for out- 
ward application only ”, is resorted to. A certain number of 
roots will be calcined and pulverised, the black powder thus 
obtained being mixed with fat taken from the paunch of an ox. 
This is rolled up into a ball and placed on red hot embers, and 
the patient must expose the part affected to the heat thrown 
out, and to the smoke thus engendered. 

Fever is not considered very dangerous by the Thonga, and 
strange to say, has no special name. It is called : to feel one’s 

et ea 
head, or to have the body hot. Natives are so accustomed to it, 
and its attacks are generally so mild that they do not take much 
heed of it. They le on the ground, exposed to the burning 
sun, wrapped in a blanket, and perspire to their heart’s content. 
“Take the root of Mbalatangati, cook it in a little pot and drink 
it with a spoon ; you will have a good sleep”, says Mankhelu. 

Consumption (lifuba) is treated as follows by Mankhelu: a 
part of the lungs of a crocodile, and of a sheep, is mixed with fat 
taken from a gnu anda root of the Khawa tree. All the ingre- 
dients are burnt ina broken pot and the patient must inhale 
the smoke through a reed : it will dry up in the chest, because 
the fat of the gnu is always dry and cannot melt (?!) 

Leprosy, “‘ the vanquisher of physicians ’, is treated by some 
specialists. There was one near Rikatla, but he absolutely 
refused to communicate his secret. He belonged to the Chopi 
tribe. Ba-Pedi prohibit sexual relations to the lepers. 

A nurse who has no milk must take a certain Euphorbiacea 
shrub called nete, containing a milky juice, crush it in the mor- 
tar, cook it in water and drink it. When a cow refuses to 
nurse a. calf Natives smear the calf with the ribuumbara herb, 
which has a pleasant odour. The cow smells it, and allows the 
calf to suckle her. 

The treatment of sterility has already been described (I. p. 188.) 
Mankhelu tried to cure it by digging a root of Nembe-nembe 
and one of Nhlangowume; he cooked both together, ordered the 
woman to eat them during six days, mixing them with her 
food. This drug was considered as “closing her ” (pfala), so 
that she would no longer have her ‘‘tihweti ”, and thus be able 
‘to conceive. In the meantime, she had to undergo the horola 
or hondlola rite, which I shall describe presently. 

Small pox, was on several occasions introduced by the Whites, 
or by the Zulu armies on their return from their Northern 
raids. There have been at least five or six epidemics in the 
environs of Lourenco Marques during the last fifty years. 
Natives inoculate the virus itself in order to mitigate the 
virulence of the disease. This inoculation (which they may 
have discovered themselves) does not prevent the attack being 

very severe. I have seen faces terribly marked after the di- 
sease induced by inoculation. A fact still more strange is that 
it does not give any immunity from a subsequent attack. | 
know the case of a Christian woman, named Fabiana, who 
was seriously ill during the epidemic of 1892 and who had al- 
ready taken the complaint, by inoculation, during a previous 
epidemic. 

Nervous diseases are peculiarly feared by Natives. Melancholia 
is believed to be caused by those spirits of possession which will 
be the subject of the next paragraph. Idiocy has no remedy : 
nothing can be done with an idiot; “ it is death! It has found 
him!” (Mankhelu). Delirium (mihahamo) is cured with Mbu- 
lula khutla. The patient must enter the hole from which clay 
is taken for smearing the huts, and is washed with a decoction 
of the drug when in this hole. Moreover a stick of the same 
tree is cut and kept in the roof of the hut, and the person who 
sleeps with the patient will take it every night and place it near 
his head. “Thus we kill delirium.” (Mankhelu). — Ano- 
ther form of insanity is called ribuhe, “ the disease which comes 
from far away with the winds” — “ ri pfa timhehwen ” (Ma- 
nkhelu). A drug is prepared with the shiromo root, mixed with 
the lung of a sheep and the blood found inside its heart. All 
these things are burnt in a broken pot, and made into a medi- 
cinal powder. The patient is brought to the broken pot; a 
cut is made in his head so that it bleeds abundantly until the 
pot is filled with blood ; the blood boils in the pot, it becomes 
firm and is burnt. The fianga takes it and buries it in an ant’s 
nest, according to the timula rite described below. The wound 
of the patient is filled with the medicine ; he eats the meat, he 
sleeps: — “If you have been equal to the occasion, he will 
be cured; you have given him lots of sleep. — You have killed the 
ribube” (Mankhelu). The wutleka disease means both convul- 
stons of little children (generally explained by the agency of 
Heaven), called tilo (p. 392), and epilepsy. The great remedy 
for the latter disease, which frightens the Natives very much, is 
provided by monkeys and baboons. Pieces of their skin and 
their stools are roasted in a broken pot. Some pieces of lion’s 

ee 
skin are added; when the powder is made, the limbs of the 
patient are smeared with it; his body is also sprinkled with a 
decoction made of these drugs, or an ointment is prepared from 
them and applied to the head, the fingers, and all the limbs, 
which are then pulled with some force (olola). The patient is 
laid down and leaves of the hlampfura tree (Kigelia) are put on 
his head : — “He sleeps, he passes water, he evacuates stools, 
he is cured”! But to confirm the healing, a very curious 
ceremony is performed which reminds one of the rite of the 
Scapegoat, so often met with amongst primitives. The doctor 
makes the image of a monkey (habu) with a kind of grass 
called muhulane ; this image is smeared with the drugs just 
described, tied with a long rope ; a little boy must then drag 
the dummy out of the village, and all hiscomrades hit him with 
sticks, saying: ‘Go away! Go away!” He runs until he 
reaches a tree far away in the bush. All the boys hang the 
figure to it, and it remains there swinging in the wind. The 
disease has thus been expelled ! 

In our study of these various treatments, we have met with 
about twenty different prescriptions of Native physicians, con- 
taining, in all, some 4o to 50 different drugs, to be made use 
of in various ways: outward applications, inhalation, fumiga- 
tion, infusion, decoction, inoculation, manducation of carbonis- 
ed or pulverised drugs, etc. We may then well assert that, up 
to a certain point, the Blacks do possess an ars medica. But, 
to complete our review of medical matters, I must still mention a 
few curious practices of the Thonga doctors, which forcibly 
remind us of those to which our own practitioners sometimes 
have recourse. 

To begin with: cupping. A full account of this will be found 
in the story of the ‘‘ Gambadeur de la Plaine”? (Chants et Con- 
tes des Ba-Ronga, page 357) where a young girl resuscitates a 
buffalo by performing this operation. She does it as follows : 
water is boiled and in it is placed the packet of roots required ; 

pods 426 ee 

a spot in the temporal region is carefully washed, and a few 
incisions are made with a razor (likari). A particular horn 
(nbluku ya ku lumeka), which is open at both ends, is placed 
over the incisions and the operator, placing the horn in_ his 
mouth, draws in his breath, causing the blood to flow freely. 
The wound is then exposed to the vapour emanating from the 
boiling shitsimbo packet, and smeared with a particular ointment, 
kept in a calabash. 

The next in order of the practices which we are noticing, is 
the phungula (Ro.), or hungula (Dj.), a kind of turkish or vapour 
bath, which is administered in certain complaints and also after 
the funeral rites, in order to remove the contamination of death 
(I. p. r45). A circular enclosure is made, with a screen of mat- 
tings, in the middle of which the patient is placed, and, close by 
him, a pot on live embers containing leaves which are suppos- 
ed to possess medicinal properties. A second mat is then 
spread over the top of the enclosure, thus shutting the patient 
up ina sort of small hut. The smoke from the live embers 
makes him cough terribly !_ The hot vapour from the pot indu- 
ces profuse perspiration from every pore, and the victim of this 
treatment is left for a very considerable time in this intensely 
uncomfortable predicament ! When, at length, the remedy is 
supposed to have had sufficient time to act efficaciously, the 
mats are removed. The patient suddenly finds himself in the 
open air, absolutely dripping with perspiration. I saw a man 
remaining in this condition, in the chill of the evening, appa- 
rently risking inflamation of the lungs. The doctor rubs his 
cheeks, or some other parts of his body, with either a white or 
a black powder. Such is the Thonga turkish bath, whicl. is 
frequently referred to in their folklore. — The phungula is 
administered in most of the cases where ritual defilement is 
feared, or is believed to have caused the disease. The kind ot 
poisoning caused by the impurities connected with death, men- 
ses, lochia, etc., manifests itself by swelling of the joints, of the 
hands and feet, pains in the bones, etc. This vapour bath is 
also resorted to in order to cure married people who do not 
succeed in having children. The physician makes for them a 

shitsimbo packet of the following roots: Nbhlangawume, Mpo- 
nwana, Kitiyi; he cooks it in the pot inside the mat enclo- 
sure ; he puts into the fire, under the pot, part of the flesh of 
the goat which has been sacrificed for the occasion, especially its 
uterus. The flesh has been previously smeared with drugs. 
So, either by the vapour, or by the smoke, the medicine enters 
the patient. ‘* Ba wupfa”, — “ they ripen” or “are cooked ”. 
When the mat is removed a pot full of cold water is poured 
over them and extinguishes the phungula which has cooked 
them. They will have to take home the meat, and cook it 
in their hut together with the packet of roots. Another packet 
is put in the pot in which they keep their beer. 

A third practice, quite as old as the foregoing, is the t/hema~ 
or cautery. This may be done with a packet of roots which 
are heated and applied to the part affected. But, asa general rule, 
cautery is done with the foot. This is undoubtedly, a curious 
proceeding! Kokolo gave me a detailed description of it: a 
hoe is made red-hot ; an obliging individual lends his foot, a 
foot which has rarely been encased in a shoe and possesses a sole 
with askin like leather! This natural sole is rubbed with the 
leaves of a plant called shungwe, which has been chewed and 
mixed in the palm of the hand with saliva and grease. For the 
same purpose Mankhelu employed a fat comprising among other 
ingredients, the following drugs: Hlampfura and Nwambula-wa- 
mitwa. ‘Yhen the kindly operator places his foot on the red-hot 
hoe and, with a quick movement, plants it on the spot to be cau- 
terised, the patient being hardly able to bear the contact. As 
for the owner of the foot, the horny sole seems so thick that he 
feels no pain at all. This is the remedy for the shitjebe blood, 
probably pleurisy. 

The last practice to be noticed, the one by which the doctor 
gives his patient a clean bill of health, is the hondlola or hondla 
(Ro.) or horola (Dj.): it is a ceremony of purification, per- 
formed after the cure is effected, to remove the defilement (nsila) 
of disease. ‘‘In this way”, says Mankhelu, ‘‘ we disperse 
(hulurisa) the bloods which have made the patient sick, so that 
they cannot return to him violently.” The hondla is obliga- 

 428  

tory after all serious diseases and after the weaning. I have 
described how it is performed in this last case (I. p. 57). Accord- 
ing to Mankhelu, a sacrifice is always made in connection with 
the hondlola. In the case of adults, a goat is slaughtered. The 
doctor having carefully taken a piece of each limb of the goat, 
prays “‘by means of them” to his gods, saying: 

You so andso! This is my ox which I have slaughtered... Give 
me strength (ndji thwasane matimba) that I may cure this man. [ 
have no other drugs! I do not add any other to those which you 
gave me. So give me strength; accept me with both hands, that I 
may be able to cure. 

The psanyi of the goat is then mixed with various drugs, 
especially the Shireti and the powder of the calabashes. The 

“4 1; LAIN \y 
RU 

Fowa and timfisa, medico-magical amulets. 

patient, sitting ona mat, rubs his whole body (tihorola) vigo- 
rously with this psanyi; all the particles (timhore, or timho- 
rola, or timbhorola) which fall on the mat are carefully 
gathered together and the bones are consulted to know where 
they must be thrown (See Letter D). This is the famba rite, 
followingthe hondlola. The bones may perhaps have indicated 
a hole in the trunk of a tree, or the river, or the mud of the 
marsh, or an ant’s nest, or the entrance to a molehill. ‘The 
physician takes the timbhorola in a piece of broken pot, or sala 
shell, introducing them into the hole which he closes with a 

= 5 
little clay ; he has with him water in a little calabash, takes a 
sip and says: “‘ Tsuu!, or pheuuu! Let the misfortune remain 
here.” On the return home no looking back is allowed : this 
is taboo. Should the tumba be made in an ants’ nest, and should 
the ants themselves close the hole, this is a very good sign! 
The bones may perhaps order the particles contained in the sala 
shell to be placed in another kind of ant’s nest, made of grass; 
the nanga will go during the day and prepare a place for the 
shell. In the evening, when it is dark, he will put the shell 
into the hole without looking back towards it. The ants will 
take all the timbhorola down into their nest, and so ‘‘the mis- 
fortune will remain with them ”. (Mboza). — The hondlola 
rite is generally accompanied by the preparation of protective amu- 
iets (timfisa). The nails and hair of the patient are cut, putinto 
small bags of lizard skin and tiedround hisneck. One frequently 
meets people wearing this ornament which also aims at making 
the cure permanent. Sometimes the nails are those from one 
hand and foot only. The psirungulo i. e. the astragalus of the 
slaughtered goat, or the beak, claws and some feathers of the hen 
(p. 376) are also tied round the neck of the patient. This is the 
religious amulet, whilst the lizard bag is the medico-magical one. 
Convalescents are moreover provided with the fowa, a kind of 
rattle, consisting of a root called sungi (no relation between this 
word and the sungi of the circumcision school, I. p. 77) con- 
tained in a kind of round box made of palm leaf which is tied 
round the ankle. This is intended to protect them against the 
perspiration of those who have sexual relations (p. 335). They 
sometimes wear a little piece of reed filled with a protective 
powder, as do also the nurses during the whole nursing period (1) 

(I. p. 46). 

(1) I may here mention two other articles which are frequently worn by 
Thonga Natives : one is the dried seed-pod of the flower of the large Protea 
bush (sugar bush) which is so common on the slopes of the Drakensberg, It 
looks like a hard brownish cone, all covered with concentric layers of little 
square ledges. This cures vertigo. Why? No doubt because when it is 
turned round rapidly, it makes the spectator giddy. It is hung round the neck 
with a string. This curious remedy is brought back from the Barberton moun- 
tains by those who go to work in the Transvaal. The second is a bracelet 

ee ae 

The hondlola rite also marks the moment when sexual rela- 
tions, which had been suspended during the disease, are resumed. 
Celebrating the victory over disease, the day of hondlola is 
considered as a féte day. Beer is prepared as a mark of grati- 
tude to the doctor and “‘to ‘rejoice his heart”. Itis also the 
day of reckoning: the physician must be paid: this individual 
has not, however, waited until now to ask for a “refresher”. 
From the commencement of the case, it has been necessary to 
pfula hwama, that is to say to lift the cover of the medicine 
wallet by means of sixpence or a shilling. At times he has been 
very anxious to change the medicine, in order to produce a 
greater effect; on such occasions he has been presented with a 
chicken as an encouragment; but on the day of the hondla, 
when his skill is joyfully attested, and the cure an accomplished 
fact, accounts must be definitely settled with the nanga who will 
henceforth discontinue his visits. 

III. Conception of Disease. ° 

All the preceding details enable us now to understand the 
conceptions which underlie all these rites and ceremonies. Pos- 
sessing so few, or so false, notions regarding Anatomy or Phy- 
siology, it is not surprising that correct pathological knowledge 
is absolutely non-existent amongst South African Bantu. In 
fact this knowledge is both superficial and superstitious. I will 
try to prove it by now studying the names given to the diseases, 
the causes to which they are attributed, the notion of contagion, 
and the ideas underlying the hondlola rite. 

1) As regards the way of naming the diseases, it is most childish. 
Thonga call the complaint from which they suffer by the 

often seen round little children’s wrists, and made from the skin of a kind of 
tawny mole, called tshukunyana, which digs its burrowsalmost on the level of 
the ground. You can see the earth a little raised all along its track. The 
Filaria parasite, which is often met with in our tribe, also creeps under the 
skin in a similar way (p. 321). See illustration, No 5. These are two new 
instances of the principle: © similia similibus curantur ”. Bags filled with 
snake powder are also often worn as a preventative, 

SO A 

name of the organ affected: for instance ‘I have a foot, I have 
a hand, I have a neck” (ndji ni nenge, boko, nkolo) means: 
““T have a pain, in my foot, my hand or my neck ”. These 
curious expressions doubtless arise from the fact that no notice 
is taken of the existence of any particular organ until something 
goes wrong with it. ‘“‘ He has a head” means “‘ He is mad”. 
For “I have a headache”’, the expression ‘‘ndji yingela nhlo- 
ko”, meaning “‘I feel my head”, would generally be used. Very 
often one hears complaints of ‘‘ a blood” (ngati) which moves 
from spot to spot, finally taking up its abode in the side, or in 
the stomach, or elsewhere. This is an idea similar to that of 
the morbid humours of olden days. There are then as many 
diseases as there are organs and we are often asked for remedies 
forthe “nape of the neck complaint’, or for the‘ inside 
trouble”. ‘This latter might be gastritis, congestion of the liver, 
or dysentery, and we should often be wholly at a loss how to 
prescribe were it not for the highly picturesque, and often par- 
ticularly appropriate, imagery used by the patients, or by their 
friends, in describing the various symptoms; for instance when 
a sufferer from ‘inside trouble” says that ‘‘it bites” (luma), 
we know that it is a case of intestinal colic. But it becomes 
somewhat puzzling when a patient declares that he suffers from 
an intestinal worm which passes from his stomach into his 
neck and returns through his lungs, when it does not happen 
to take a fancy to remain in his head! “It emits a sound like 
pfie...pfie...”, said an old man to me when describing this ani- 
mal, which plays an important part in the medical science of 
the Natives. (1) CI. p. 46). 

There are, however, certain technical names which are used 
to designate some diseases; thus mukub/wana means cough and 
the mucous catarrh of the throat and nose. The ordinary 
mbukulu seems to be tonsilitis, while the extraordinary mbukulu 
is an affliction accompanied with fever, vertigo, delirium and 
madness, which is generally attributed to the malign influences 

(1) I may here mention that the tape worm and the lumbric, both called 
tinyokana, small snakes. are very common amongst the Natives, and are 
well known to them. 

OO PAD Ate om 

of the spirits of the departed. — Hydrocele (masangu, or ma- 
senge) is wide-spread and well-known, as is‘ also bilharzia, a 
form. of haematuria called shinyalu or ndjundjwane, which ap- 
pears in severe forms and is due to a special parasite. Rheuma- 
tism is called shifambo, the runner, as it moves from spot to 
spot. Syphilis, imported long ago by Europeans, is univer- 
sally known, and is, alas, so general in the environs of the town 
of Lourenco Marques that almost all Natives suffer from it 
(p. 46). The Natives call it buba (probably from bubo). Go- 
norrhea is of more recent importation, and dates — according to 
my informant Tobane — from the time of the construction of 
the Pretoria Railway : it is called shikandjameti, the disease 
which crushes the villages. 

The eruptive diseases are perhaps those which Natives best 
recognise. Shinishinana is the name for measles, but seems also 
applicable to scarlet fever. Small pox is called nyedzana, and, 
as regards psychic or nervous troubles, the treatment of which 
we have just seen, they are attributed either to Heaven or to 
evil spirits or to the winds. The name of the wutleka disease 
is worthy of notice. This word comes from wutla which means 
to rob, to seize; wutleka, the qualificative derivate (Thonga 
Grammar § 196) means the condition of something taken away. 
It seems as if this were a passive meaning, as if the patient 
had been robbed by some agent. However Mankhelu explains 
the term by saying : “ The patient has stolen the rirabi” — “a 
wutle rirabi”; rirabi is very closely allied to a word meaning 
stick; the old doctor says it is the name of the disease. If this 
etymology be correct the patient would be considered as having 
taken the disease by a kind of robbery. But Native etymology 
must always be accepted with caution. 

All these names show how unprecise is the pathological know- 
ledge of the Thonga. 

2) As regards the causes of diseases, Thonga are groping in 
the grossest superstition. When a medical man wishes to 
treat a disease, he first tries to diagnose its cause. The Bantu 
anga does the same, only the difference is this: he takes very 
little notice of the physical symptoms. No auscultation! No 

= ASB os 

palpation! No examination of the secretions, blood, saliva, or 
urine, as these are too disgusting and must be covered with sand 
as soon as possible! The great means of diagnosing a disease 
is the throwing of bones. There are three great causes of 
disease : the spirits of the gods, the wizards and the makhumo, 
defilement from death or from impure persons. A fourth one 
not so common is Heaven. The bones will reveal which is the 
one to be combated according to the way in which they fall. 

3) The ideas regarding contagion are not much in advance of 
the other pathological notions. The two most dreaded diseases 
in this respect are consumption (lifuba) and leprosy (nhlokonho). 
Consumption is by no means a new ailment due to civilisation, 
though it has increased enormously since Thonga boys have 
gone to the towns. The proof that it has been known for a 
long time is its great importance in the ritual. For the Thonga, 
it is caused by the makhumo, i. e., the contamination of death, 
or the defilement resulting from contact with a woman in the 
state of physiological impurity. Hence the law ordering peo- 
ple affected with one or the other of these kinds of makhumo to 
eat with spoons: they protect themselves against the poison 
which may make them consumptive. A curious feature in the 
notion of contagion is the following : when Sokis died (I. p. 138) 
I heard some present entreat his sister, who was carrying a child 
on her shoulders, saying to her: ‘ Do not cry! If you cry the 
disease will jump on your baby!” There were two reasons 
for this warning: to cry in presence of misfortune increases 
tenfold the danger (compare p. 303); moreover the contagion of 
disease is especially to be feared in connection with the relatives 
of the sick or dead person. Hence the strange custom illustra- 
ted on plate p. 27: when a man dies of consumption his rela- 
tives are absolutely forbidden to eat any of the food he may 
have left. The ‘‘luma milomo ” ceremony (I. p. 146) is of no 
use in this case. In former times all his mealies were burnt. 
Nowadays, however, it is allowable for people outside his family 
to buy and consume his provision. The large storehouse, on 
p- 27, contained the mealies harvested in Sokis’ fields. These 
were sold to strangers, whilst relatives bought other mealies 

= G4se 
which were stored in the small hut for the use of his widow 
and children. The same reason, no doubt.explains why the 
widow of a consumptive must Jahla khombo with strangers, and 
not with men of the village (1. p. 203). 

This peculiar idea of contagion also gives rise to the rules 
for burying lepers. Their relatives must not have anything to 
do with the burial (I. p. 478). Relatives-in-law can perform 
this painful duty ; or possibly the family of the deceased leper 
will ask a friend to help them in their distress. ‘‘ Have you 
prepared something to reward me’’? he asks, and if so, he digs a 
grave just outside the wall of the hut where the patient died, 
removes the reeds of the wall, and pulls down the corpse into 
the hole without any funeral ceremony. ‘The relatives are 
assembled far away on the square, and do not even dare to look 
at the burial. All the implements are broken in the depth of 
the forest, at a great distance, for fear that a relative may touch 
one of them and die. Or they are left in the hut, and the 
whole village at once removes. Leprosy is called  nhlulabadahi, 
the disease which is stronger than the doctors. It is very much 
dreaded ; however lepers are not segregated ; they live in the 
village with other people and even attend beer-parties, but they 
bring their own mugs, whilst every other guest receives a drink- 
ing utensil from the master of the village. 

Another disease which is believed to be contagious is the 
“possession” by the Bandjao spirits. Should you pick up on 
the road some object which belonged to one of the possessed, 
his madness will jump upon you (tlulela).— Epilepsy is also 
dreaded on that account. A nurse must not see any one suffer- 
ing from an attack of this disease, or the child which is on her 
shoulders will become epileptic. 

Speaking of the conception of disease, I must remind the rea- 
der of the fact that sexual relations between the inhabitants of 
the village are believed to aggravate the condition of the patient 
dwelling in it (I. p. 133), and are consequently forbidden during 
epidemics and in any case of serious illness. Hence the pre- 
cautions which convalescents must take by wearing the sungi, 
as we have just seen. 

sort sce 

4) The hondlola rite seems to show that, for the Thonga, 
a serious illness constitutes a marginal period, after which the 
patient must be aggregated afresh to society. The rite evi- 
dently bears the character of a passage rite. The rubbing with 
psanyi, the removal of the defilement of disease, the throwing 
away of the « timbhorola », the cutting of nails and hair, all 
these are rites of separation from the period of disease, whilst 
the feast of the hondlola day, and the resuming of sexual rela- 
tions (1) are rites of aggregation. In the disease of posses- 
sion, as we shall see, it is the aggregation to society of 
spirit-possessed persons: it amounts to an initiation. 

The medical art of the Bantu is mingled with such an amount of 
superstition and errors that one can rely very little upon it. The ques- 
tion which I put at the beginning of the section is therefore very dif- 
ficult to solve. What is the duty of the White Government in respect 
of the Native quacks ? The ideal would be to replace them by fully 
qualified, civilised doctors. As this is impossible, let the medical 
missionaries at least be encouraged, and their number increased, and 
let a medical course be open to educated Natives, if not a complete 
University course, at least such instruction as would allow them to 
treat their fellow men in a scientific way, the medicine-men being 
gradually prevented from practising their very questionable art. 

B. POSSESSIONS 

The curious psychic phenomenon, which I am now about to 
describe, belongs to the medical domain: it is ‘‘the disease”, or 
rather the ‘‘madness of the gods” (bubabyi bya psikwembu). 
But at the same time it bears a distinctly religious character, 
the spirits which are believed to cause the disease being psik- 
wembu, spirits of deceased people, to whom a worship will be 
addressed. On the other hand, the rites connected with the 

(1) We often hear of a Christian woman, who has gone to a heathen medi- 
cine-man for treatment, coming home after having had sexual intercourse with 
him. We generally attribute this fact to immorality alone. But it has pro- 
bably been a part of the treatment, at the precise moment when sexual taboos 

were removed. 

Be 
treatment of this kind of madness are decidedly magical, and 
those who have suffered from it often become recognised magi- 
cians, claiming to possess supernatural powers. 

This is a very interesting subject from the point of view of 
psychology and psychiatry. Phenomena of possession exist 
amongst most uncivilised races, even amongst more advanced 
peoples, and it will be useful to compare the manifestations of 
this disease amongst Bantu with those met with in other parts 
of the world. I will however leave this task to professionals, 
and only try faithfully and clearly to describe and, if possible, 
to understand the facts which I witnessed myself. This disease 
has spread enormously amongst the Thonga in the last thirty 
years. It is said thatit was very rare,even unknown, previously ; 
since then it has become quite an epidemic, although it is actu- 
ally rather on the decrease. Possessions are more frequent 
amongst the Ba-Ronga than in the Northern clans. 

I. The Spirits which cause the Disease. 

Strange to say, the gods or spirits, which are credited with 
the power of possessing the people, are not the ancestors of the 
Thonga themselves, the ancestor-gods, but are Zulu spirits 
and those of the Ba-Ndjao tribe, who inhabit the country 
beyond the Sabie, as far as the environs of Beira. It seems 
that the possessions which first occurred were due to the 
Zulu and Ngoni spirits ; possibly they coincided with the 
invasion of the warriors of Manukosi, and with the ever increas- 
ing exodus of young men who go to work in the diamond 
mines at Kimberley, or the gold mines at Johannesburg, or 
Natal, and travel across the country occupied by Zulus. As 
regards the Ba-Ndjao spirits they are sometimes called ama- 
ndiki, and are said to have followed the Thonga and the Ngoni 
soldiers of Gungunyane, who established themselves for some 
years at Mosapa, right in the middle of the Ndjao country, to 
the North of the Sabie, and who, later on, came down again 
from that mountainous region into the fertile plain of Bilene. 

ae ees 

(Lower Limpopo). On the other hand, when the war of 1894 
to 1895 compelled the Northern Ba-Ronga, those from Mabota, 
Zihlahla and Nondwane to fly, they left, so the story goes, 
taking with them the gods who had possessed them and “scat- 
tered” them so thoroughly in the countries of the North that, 
when they returned to their own homes, they were no longer 
molested by these psikwembu. That is what I was told by a 
Native. We must carefully note, at the outset, these two ideas : 
the tormenting spirits are the manes of strangers and not of the 
people of the country, and they frequently attack the Thonga 
who happen to be travelling in such countries, and follow 
them in their further migrations. (1) 

The Ndjao possessions appear to be worse than the Zulu. 
“Bundjao bya karata” — “‘ the Ndjao possession is painful.” 
If the incantations used are in Zulu for Zulu possessions, they are 
in the Ndjao language when such are caused by Ndjao spirits, 
and those who suffer from this affliction are known by the large 
white beads which they wear in their hair. Sometimes itis merely 
a short string of small beads, hanging down somewhere from 
the head. 1 well remember seeing a good-looking young woman 
wearing one of these curious ornaments, on the banks of a 
stream, in a wooded valley called Nhlalalene, where we had made 
a halt during one of our journeyings. I was struck with the 
sight, and asked my companion why she was thus decorated ? 
— “She invokes the spirits of the Ba-Ndjao”’, was the reply. 

Il. Beginning and Diagnosis of the ‘Disease. 

I have carefully studied the story of many cases of possession 
amongst the Ba-Ronga (See Bulletin de la Société Neuchateloise 
de Géographie. Tome X, p. 388). Most of them have begun 
by a distinct crisis, in which the patient was unconscious, but 

(1) However, in the case of Mholombo, the spirit was an old Tembe chief 
a real ancestor, and in that of Nwasuhwana there was a throng of occu- 
pants, amongst them her own son, Manuel, who died some time ago; for 
Mboza it was also a Ronga, but he died in a foreign a country (See later on), 

ort 430 Sees 
it seems not to have been brought about by any previous 
nervous trouble. A woman ofthe neighbourhood of Lourenco 
Marques, Nwashinhwana, fled from her home and threw herself 
into the Bay. The contact with cold water brought her back 
to her senses, after which the bones declared that she had psik- 
wembu. Another one, Mbolombo, heard a voice calling her 
during a dream: it was the possessing spirit, which revealed itself 
later on as being a chief long since dead. I will now give full 
details of the case of Mboza, who was himself possessed at one 
time, and later on became a regular exorcist. After having 
worked in Kimberley for some time, he returned home in good 
health. But soon afterwards, he was lame for six months. He 
attributed his difficulty in walking to rheumatism (shifambo). 
There was some improvement in his condition, but he began to 
feel other symptoms : he lost his appetite and almost completely 
ceased to eat. Here is his testimony: ‘‘ One day, having gone 
with another young man to gather juncus, in order to manufac- 
ture a mat, the psikwembu started at once in me” (ndji sungu- 
leka hi psikwembu psikafiwe). I came back home, trembling 
iu all my limbs. I entered the hut; but suddenly I rose to 
my feet and began to attack the people of the village ; then I 
ran away, followed by my friends who seized me and at once 
the spirits were scattered (hangalaka). When conscious again, 
I was told I had hurt a khebla (a man with the wax crown — I. 
p. 129), and had struck other people on their backs: ‘* He!” 
said they, “ he has the gods (or he is sick from the gods, a ni 
psikwembu)”. Thus the first signs of a possession seem to be a 
nervous crisis, but also the occurence of certain suspicious symp- 
toms: a persistant pain in the chest, irrepressible hiccough, 
extraordinary yawning, emaciation without apparent cause, etc. 
However these symptoms are not sufficient ground for a diagnosis, 
and the bones are always consulted to come toa conclusion. 
The amulets of the patient (called ‘his shade”) are placed on 
the mat, the bones thrown near them. We shall see, under 
letter D, how they must fall to confirm the diagnosis. Should 
they do so, a second consultation takes place in order to know 
to which doctor the treatment must be entrusted. There are 

ew Rae ce 
medicine-men who are specialists for this disease. They are 
not proper "anga, they are called gobela (dji-ma), at least amongst 
the Ba-Ronga who suffer from possessions more than the other 
clans. These gobela have formed many. rival schools in which 
the drugs used, and the rites followed, slightly differ; the school 
of Khongosa, Sindondondo, Nwatshulu, who are men, and those 
of Nwamutheto (in the Shifimbatello district) and of Thambula- 
nyoka, viz., Snake-bone, both of whom are women, etc. 

Nuecban ane was treated by a disciple of Khongosa; Mboza 
by Nwatshulu. 

If. The Treatment of Possessions, or Exorcism. 

In former times, the only remedy was waving a large palm- 
leaf (milala) in front of the patient. This was deemed sufficient 
to ‘scatter the spirits”. Now the treatment is much more 
complicated. Though it varies slightly in the various schools 
above mentioned, it comprises four principal rites: the drum 
performance, the ablution in the gobo calabash, the drinking of 
the blood and the hondlola ceremony. In the Khongosa treat- 
ment the gobo rite comes first, and is called baselo. A certain 
root, the phuphumane, is prepared, and dipped into water in a 
big calabash cut through the middle so as to form a large basin. 
The mixture is stirred ; an abundant foam is thus produced and 
the patient must wash himself with it: or he must take the 
basin on his knees, suck in a little of this foam between his lips 
and spit it out in the direction of the four winds, saying tsu, 
evidently as a first means of propitiating the possessing spirits, 
which will be invoked and entreated to reveal themselves in the 
following rite. 

In the case of Mboza, the calabash came as a second phase of 
the treatment, the first being the drum performance. 

1) THE DRUM PERFORMANCE (GONGONDJELA). 

This extraordinary rite reminds one of the witches’ sabbaths 
of medieval times by the infernal din and uproar through which 

poate Secs 
the possessed will have to pass. However, notwithstanding the 
external resemblance, it is totally different, having nothing to 
do with witchcraft proper, and being only a “ medical practice ” 
in the eyes of the Thonga. — A strange medical practice, indeed, 
better devised to kill than to heal the patient! 

In the first place the bones must be consulted to find out in 
what spot the sabbath should be held. If the bone, which 
represents the patient, falls in the middle of all the rest, it shows 
that the tambourines, or ‘‘ tom-toms’’, must be beaten in the 
interior of the hut itself. If the bone falls on the outer edge, 
the sabbath must be in the doorway ; if it falls farther to one 
side, beyond all the others, the treatment must take place on 
the village square (hubyen) ; should it roll still further off, and 
should the astragalus of the roaming gazelle also be separated 
from the rest, it shows that the meeting must take place in the 
bush, quite away from the village. If the bones remain silent, 
revealing nothing, then the throwing will be continued behind 
the hut, or on the square, until they speak. tis also necessary 
that the four shells Oliva, and Cypraea, which form part of 
the set of bones, fall on their backs, exposing their crack or 
mouth. This signifies that the possessing gods, the spirits, will 
come out: there will be an egress for them, whilst if, on the 
contrary, the shells fall differently, shewing their convex sides, 
the diviner will say : ‘* Ma tikarata ntsena” — “ all your trouble 
is in vain”: the sabbath will have no effect: no means of egress. 
for the gods ! (Compare Letter D. Divination). Buta way will 
soon be found to get over this difficulty, and it will not be long 
before the sabbath is in full swing. 

In the hut, right in the middle, the patient is seated. Deject- 
ed, with downcast eyes, and fixed expression, he waits... Every- 
one throughout the country knows that to-day, to-night, on 
the appearance of the new moon, the strange and terrible exor- 
cism will begin. All those who have once been possessed 
will officiate. The director of the ceremony, the gobela, whom 
the bones have appointed, holds his tambourine, made of the 
skin of the big varan lizard, stretched over a circular wooden 
frame. (See Illustration p. 107, N° 9). In the calm quiet of 

= de 
the evening air, the first blow is struck. It reverberates, is 
heard from afar on all sides : it penetrates the thickets and reach- 
es the neighbouring villages, where it inspires an emotion, a 
transcendent delight born of curiosity, of malice, and I don’t 
know what feelings of inconscient satisfaction. All rush in the 
direction of the well-known sound: each one hurries to the hut 
of the possessed one, and all wish to take part in this struggle, 
the conflict with the invisible world. 

They all assemble, some with tambourines, others with large 
tin cases picked up on the outskirts of the town (tins in which 
kerosine oil is sold in Lourencgo Marques), and still others with 
calabashes, filled with small objects, which do duty as rattles 
(ndjele, yin-tin) ; and now, crowding round the patient, they 
commence their hideous din, striking, brandishing, shaking their 
various instruments of torture with all their might and main. 
Some lightly touch the head or the ears of the unfortunate suf- 
ferer. It is a frightful hubbub which continues, with but short 
interruptions, during the whole night, or until the performers in 
this fantastic concert are compelled to stop from sheer fatigue. 

But this is merely the orchestra, the accompaniment. That 
which is the most essentially necessary is the singing, the 
human voice, the chorus of exorcists, a short refrain, following a 
still shorter solo, repeated a hundred or a thousand times, 
always with the same object in view, toward which all strive 
seriously and persistently, namely to compel the spiritual being, 
this mysterious possessing spirit which is there, to reveal itself, 
to declare its name, after which it will be duly overcome. 
These songs are, at the same time, both simple and poetic. 
They address the spirit in laudatory terms, trying to cajole it by 
flattery, to get the right side of it, and thus induce it to grant 
the signal favour of a surrender. Here follows the first of 
those songs which I heard. — One day, when I was travelling, 
hearing the uproar of a sabbath behind some bushes, I jumped 
off my waggon, and found myself right in the midst of a cere- 
mony of exorcism. 

Shibendjana! u vukele bantu ! 
Rhinoceros! thou attackest man ! 

a | ees 

These were the words shouted by the singers around a poor 
woman who appeared to be in some dream, and was seemingly 
unconscious ; my arrival had scarcely any effect on the un- 
earthly hubbub, in spite of the fact that the appearance of a 
White man in the villages of that district was generally consi- 
dered to be quite an event. 

When the hours pass without any visible effect being pro- 
duced on the patient, the chorus is changed. The night may 
be far spent, and the day-light at hand : 

Come out, spirit, you make us weep till sun-rise ! 
Why are we thus ill-treated ? 

Or, perhaps by way of bringing greater pressure to bear, 
they will threaten to leave the spirit, for good and all, if it will 
not heed the chidings of the frenzied tambourine players : 

Come, let us be off! bird of the chiefs ! Let us go away (as thou treat- 
est us so harshly), 

The melodies of the exorcists’ incantations have a singularly 
persistent, incisive, penetrating character. I had the opportu- 
nity of noting down one which was sung with a strange alto 
accompaniment in fourths. This tune is N° 32 in the collec- 
tion (p. 262). The disturbing effect of this music was intensi- 
fied by a very pronounced sforzando when the chorus took up 
the dominant phrase. This is the song, as universally known 
and rendered in the environs of Lourenco Marques. 

Awake! Awake! The daylight breaks! Now the bird is singing ! 
Play also, Zulu, play in the bush. Now the bird is singing. 

The meaning is not difficult to catch. « Day is dawning. 
Awake then, sleeping spirit! (This spirit is called Mu-Ngoni, 
Zulu, for the case is supposed to be one of the Zulu posses- 
sion). The birds are already sporting in the thickets. Soon 
we shall be obliged to go to our work and leave you! Itis 
your last chance; come out and salute the morning and reveal 
yourself to us!” 

This insistence is renewed. The patient begins to show 

% 

= Aa 
signs of assent. The Shikwembu is preparing to come out. 
The assistants encourage it : 

Shawane! Mu-Ngoni Huma ha hombe hi tindlela ta ku lulama... 
We salute thee, spirit! Come out gently by the straight way. 

Meaning: Do not hurt the afflicted one ! Spare him! 

Conquered at length by this noisy concert the patient enters 
a condition of nervous exaltation. The crisis occurs, the result 
of evident hypnotic suggestion. He rises and dances wildly in 
the hut. The hubbub is redoubled. They implore the spirit 
to declare its name. A name is shouted, a Zulu name, that of 
some ancient departed chief, such as Manukosi, or Mozila ; 
some times, strange to say, the name of Gungunyana_ himself 
was given, although he was still living. An old woman, for- 
merly possessed, told me that she cried out the name of Pitlikeza, 
and it appeared that this Pitlikesa was an itinerant Zulu bard, 
who wandered about the district of Delagoa when she was a 
young girl. She was quite convinced that the spirit of that in- 
dividual had taken up its abode in her, tens of years after Pit- 
likeza’s passage through the country. 

In the case of Mboza the patient was covered with a large piece of 
calico during all the drum performance. A first medicinal pellet 
was burnt under the calico, in a broken pot full of embers, a male 
. pellet (made with the fat ofan ox or a he-goat) ; noresult having 
been obtained, a second pellet, a female one, made from fat of a 
she-goat, was introduced. Nwatshulu prayed the gods as follows : 

Help us, you Ngoni spirits (or gods, psikwembu). I received this 
medicine from your hands ; so ‘‘ they” must come out at once from 
my patient. Should he have swallowed a snake, ora toad, should 
these prevent the spirits from coming out, let these animals run away, 
far away, and provide an egress for the spirits. 

When the second pellet was nearly all burnt, Mboza began 
to tremble ; the women sang with louder voices. The gobela 
shouted amidst the uproar: ‘‘ Come out, Ngoni!” Then he 

ordered the singers to keep quiet, entered under the veil and 
said: ““ You who dance there, who are you? A Zulu? A 
Ndjao? Are you a hyena?” The patient nodded his head 
and answered : ‘‘No!” —‘ Then you are a Zulu ?” — “Yes, I 
am...”” And, during a pause, he said : ‘1am Mboza.” Mboza 
was a Ronga who died in Kimberley many years ago. The 
uproar was resumed and the third pellet was introduced. This 
is the “ pellet par excellence ”, neither male nor female, the one 
which is expected to have the strongest effect. Mboza suddenly 
rose, threw himself on the assistants, beat them on the head, 
scattered them all right and left, and ran out of the hut feeling as if 
the spirits were beating him! “Every one saw that day that I 
had terrible spirits in me.”’ In the crisis of madness the pa- 
tient sometimes throws himselfinto the fire and feels no hurt, or 
falls in catalepsy (a womile, lit. becomes dry), and strikes his 
head against wood, or the ground, without feeling pain. 

Sometimes the concert of tambourines continues for three or 
four days, a week, or a fortnight. I know a woman (since con- 
verted to Christianity under the name of Monica) who under- 
went a seven days treatment of this description. All depends 
upon the patient’s nervous condition, and upon the state of 
dejection into which fasting and suffering have brought him. 

The spirit having disclosed its name and title, it is hence- 
forward known and can be interrogated. Spoon, the diviner, 
whose wife had been possessed twice. once by the Zulus and 
once by the Ba-Ndjao, told me the story of one of these confa- 
bulations. He happened to be in one of the neighbouring vil- 
lages when he was suddenly sent for in great haste and told that 
his wife, who had attended a sabbath in such and such a spot, 
was taken with the madness of the gods. He went as fast as he 
could to the place indicated, and found that his wife was really 
beside herself, and dancing like a person possessed. He had 
never before noticed in her the slightest sign of any possession. 
The spirit began to speak, as soon as she was somewhat calmed 
down, and gave answers to the questions put to it: ‘I entered 
into this igodo, i. e. into this body, this vessel, in such and such 
a manner. The husband had gone to work in the gold mines. 

ae AA Se 

I entered into him while he was seated on a stone and, when 
he returned home I left him and entered into his wife. ”. — 
“Are you alone, spirit ?” is the usual question, to which it 
may reply : ‘‘No, I have my son and my grandson with me”; 
and, if the assistants suspect that there really are several spirits 
in the patient, the tambourine symphony is again resorted to, in 
order to dislodge the entire company : sometimes the possessed 
enunciates as many as ten different names. 

Or it may be that the gobela only asks the name of the father 
and grandfather of the possessing spirit, in order the better to 
‘know the latter with all his genealogy. Such was the case with 
Mboza. ‘‘ My father is Ndlebende ”, said the spirit. — ‘* Ho!” 
answered the gobela, “ then you are Mboza, son of Ndlebende”. 
And he identified the spirit in that way. 

It may be that, at the first sitting, the spirit will claim some 
satisfaction: a ‘“‘nturu”, a piece of calico of such and such a 
colour. It is also generally at this time that the patient will 
sing his song. Every possessed person invents a song which will 
be henceforth fis, and by means of which crises, or trances will 
be provoked or cured. Nwashifiwana sang : 

Alas! my father! Medicine-men can do nothing for me! 
Who will deliver me ? 

Mboza : 

Iam the one who wanders about, I come out from the body of 

magicians. 

These songs are generally in Zulu, and it is asserted that, even 
if the patient does not know this language, he will be able to 
use it in his conversation, by a kind of miracle of tongues ! 

The first act is now completed. It has succeeded in forcing 
the spirit to reveal its name. 

2) THE RITE OF THE GOBO BASIN 

When Mboza had finished revealing the name of the spirits 
possessing him, he had to undergo the rites of the gobo. His 
head was dipped into it, not entirely, but so that his eyes, at 

= Ato a 

least, might be plunged in water. Then the gobela said : “ Open 
your eyes.” He felt a sensation of burning, and saw -nothing 
but a red space with black dots running to and fro through the 
field of vision. He was kept in that position for a good long time. 
Then he raised his head again, and the water fell all over his 
face and on his body : he was purified (a basile). But this rite 
does not seem to be essentially a rite of purification. By this 
kind of baptism the patient is said to have ‘crossed the sea”: 
he enters a new life, and this is certainly a rite of passage. 
Now he will be able to speak, because “he has seen everything”. 
It is the drug which “makes one see” (muri wa ku bonisa). 
Some are said to have learnt divination by this ablution of gobo. 

Having gone through these two first acts of the treatment, 
Mboza says he slept soundly. Next day, came the third. 

3) THE APPEASEMENT BY BLOOD (KU THWAZA) 

During the confabulation following the concert of tambour- 
ines, the spirits speaking through the mouth of the patient, al- 
though perfectly distinct from him, had already insisted on some 
presents ; but there is one in particular that must be given in 
order to propitiate them and to get rid of them (hangalasa). 
The refrain of the second verse of the exorcists’ song, which I 
have already quoted, mentions this offering, and half promises 
it, as an inducement to the spirit to disclose its name. This is 
what is called the thwaza. 

Aba ka Khongosa ba thwaza hi huku! 

meaning : the patients of Khongosa’s school treat to fowl’s blood. 
Blood, an abundance of blood, is necessary to effect the cure of 
the patient, and to obtain an assurance from the objectionable 
tenant in possession that it wiil do no further harm. As a gene- 
ral rule it is treated to something better than fowl’s blood. In 
most schools a she-goat is taken, if the patient be a man, or a 
he-goat in the case of a woman. The exorcist, who has been 
in charge of the cure, orders the assistants to repeat the song 

Sa Ae 

which had induced the first crisis. The possessed one again 
becomes excited, and exhibits the same symptoms of raving mad- 
ness that I have previously described. Then the animal is pierc- 
ed under the foreleg (in the case of Mboza it was at the entrance 
cf his own hut), and the patient rushes at the wound, greedily 
sucks the blood which flows, and, in frenzy, fills his stomach with 
it. When he has drunk his fill, he has to be dragged away 
from the animal by main force ; certain medicines (one of which 
is called ntshatshu, apparently an emetic) are administered, his 
throat is tickled with a feather and he retires behind the hut to 
vomit all the blood he has absorbed. By this means the spirit, 
or spirits, have been duly appeased and expelled. 

The sufferer, now getting better, is next washed again, and 
smeared with ochre. The spirits will have ochre on the day 
of thwaza, and torment him if he does not satisfy their desire ; 
Sometimes the kunga rite is also practised for the exorcised, 
viz., no one is allowed to speak to him before having given 
him a present. (Compare I. p. 191). 

It is interesting to note what is done with the different parts 
of the sacrificed goat: the Dile-bladder is stuck in the patient’s 
hair as customary (p. 52), to symbolise the happiness and 
good fortune that the sacrifice has ensured ; afterwards he is 
clothed with strips of the skin of the animal. All the tambour- 
ine players who are themselves maihwaza, i. e. who have 
already gone through the torture of possession, decorate them- 
selves also with these strips of skin, crossing them over the 
breast. The strips must be tied together with munganazi, 1. e. 
strings made from the roots of the munga tree, which have a 
pleasant odour, a smell which has the property of “* rejoicing 
the nose” of the spirits, and is always used in the ritual of 
possessions. In former times people wearing strips were often 
met with, as these ornaments had to be worn, at that time, a 
whole year, until the hondlola. — The flesh of the sacrificed goat 
also supplies the means of definitely exorcising these myste- 
rious spirit powers. From each limb a small piece is cut, and 
these pieces are cooked in a separate saucepan, with a powdered 
drug prepared for this special purpose. The head exorcist 

. = Se 
breaks off the branch of an acacia bearing enormous shiny 
white thorns, on each of which is spiked a piece of meat. The 
patient runs at full speed towards the branch, and seizes a 
piece of meat, between his teeth, in passing. While eating it, he 
rushes towards the East. He comes back, seizes another piece in 
the same manner, and runs towards the West, and so on towards 
all the four cardinal points. In this way he propitiates the 
gods, the spirits of every country, in whatever direction they 
may lie. The young mathwaza, viz., those who have lately 
passed through this initiation, must also seize the pieces of 
meat with their teeth, but not the gobela, nor the old mathwa= 
za. ‘This is one of the rites of the Khongosa school. Nwatshu- 
lu used not to observe it. The remainder of the goat is then 
cooked and eaten. A feast is celebrated, in which the chief 
exorcist dances and sings his song, all the people clapping their 
hands (wombela), to encourage him, as an accompaniment. — 
The horns and hoofs will be carefully kept, and placed on the 
roof of the hut, just over the door (shirafiwin) by which the 
afflicted one enters, evidently to protect the abode from malign 

influences. — The astragalus will be tied, together with the 
strips, on the sternum of the patient. — The bones of the goat 

are the objects of special care. They must not be broken to 
eat the marrow, but burnt in the shade of a large tree, where 
it is “ cool”. So the possessing spirit will also be cool (titi- 
mela) and not too wild. Sometimes they are preserved in a 
special pot, and burnt on the day of the hondlola. 

The period of convalescence then begins. It lasts one year, 
and is a distinct marginal period, as clearly appears from the 
fact that sexual relations are absolutely forbidden during that 
phase, and until the hondlola. It is also, more or less, a pe- 
riod of apprenticeship, as the possessed one will become an 
exorcist himself, if his magical powers acquire sufficient devel- 
opment. He accompanies the gobela everywhere, assists him 
in his cures and so learns the art of exorcism. The apprentice 
will also have to observe the rites of protection, which I will 
describe shortly and which will be obligatory during the whole 
convalescence, and even later on. 

a | te 

4) THE FINAL PURIFICATION OF THE HONDLOLA AND 
INVESTING WITH AMULETS (TIMFISA). 

As we saw, the hondlola, the removal of defilement of 
disease is necessary at the close of any disease. So, when a pos- 
sessed is considered healed, he will have to pass through this 
rite. However it can only be carried out on the one condition 
that the possessed husband, or wife, has remained in a state of 
continence during the period of convalescence. In order to 
know if they have obeyed this law, a fowl will be placed on 
the head of the patient. If he, or she, has been continent accord- 
ing to order, the bird will remain quiet ; it will not fly away, 
even should someone approach and pass close by. If it flies 
off making a great noise, the angry exorcist will also take his 
leave saying : ‘‘ You have sinned and, in so doing, have marred 
the efficacy of all my medicines (mi honile miri). ” On the 
other hand, if the rule has been properly observed, the bird 
will remain quite still, when it will be stabbed with a knife 
and its blood be used in connection with the hondlola friction. 
Afterwards the fowl will be plucked and eaten by the village 
folk, but neither the patient, nor his spouse, nor the exorcist- 
in-chief will be allowed to partake of it. Thenceforth the 
husband and wife are permitted to live together as in the past. 

The hondlola rites seem particularly complicated in the cases 
of possession. ‘Their sequence was as follows for Mboza: First 
he had to pay ¢ 1 to Nwatshulu, as a reward for his medical 
attendance. He gave him the money together with a pot of 
beer. 2) Then the doctor took his gobo calabash, stirred the 
medicine in order to make it froth abundantly, invoking his 
gods all the time, saying : ‘Awake, you who spit on the road, 
you, Zulus, who have ears capable of hearing, etc... 3) Then 
he shouted: “‘ Mboza! Eat! ” The exorcised had to kneel 
down and swallow the froth. 4) The exorcist took mafureira 
fat, mixed it in his hand with medicinal powder, smeared and 
rubbed the body of the convalescent, from the knees to the 

feet, the arms, the chest, the belly, and the head. 5) He, cue 

DO 

the nails of the hands and feet with a knife, and also a little of 
the hair on the forehead, and put the whole into the timfisa 
bags (p. 428) together with medicinal powder. 6) Then fol- 
lowed the ordinary hondlola friction. A pellet (shibuwu) had 
been prepared by crushing roots of bambhuntane and shilewana 
trees in a mortar, and a hen had been killed. Mboza sat on a 
mat and the doctor rubbed his whole body with the pellet. 
He gathered the timhora, the particles fallen on the mat, mixed 
them with the blood of the hen, and again rubbed the patient. 
7) Fresh timhora fell on the mat. They were gathered up a 
second time. Some were put in the amulet bags, the re- 
mainder made into a ball, which was not thrown away as in 
ordinary diseases but carefully put at the back of the hut, 
where the forked branch was to be planted. 

Let us remember that, in the case of the exorcised, the ho- 
ndlola does not only mean the re-introduction of the patient into 
the society of the healthy, but his aggregation to the society of 
magicians. It is the last act of initiation: he himself becomes a 
magician, a doctor able to treat those who are possessed. This 
new dignity is symbolised by the shiphandje (forked branch) 
which will be given to him to-day, as it is to medicine-men 
(p. 362), or diviners (See later on). It was Nwatshulu who 
chose and cut the branch for Mboza from the tree called shi- 
ralala. He dug a hole at the back part of Mboza’s hut, chewed 
his sungi or ndjao root, and blew against the foot of the branch 
before planting it into the hole. Then he fastened the branch 
in the ground, hung to it the baskets full of drugs and the cala- 
bashes full of medicinal powders which he gave his disciple. 
This branch will be the drug store of the new magician, the 
place where he keeps all his magic drugs ; it will also be his 
altar (gandjelo), not the altar of the ancestor-gods who have 
nothing todo here, but that of the possessing spirits to whom 
he will also henceforth address his worship. (Compare with 
Mankhelu’s forked branch, letter D). This leads us to consider : 

IV. The new condition of the exorcised. 

It is interesting to note the progress in the initiation of the 
possessed through the different acts of his treatment. The 
tambourine performance has provoked, or accentuated, the man- 
ifestation of his dual personality, viz., the patient possessed and 
the spirit possessing. The baptism in the calabash has helped 
him to cross the sea and to reach the land beyond, the land of 
miracles and of magical powers ! By the drinking of blood, he 
has become a superior being: a man who does not fear that 
which makes others tremble: he has thwaza. This word is the 
same that is employed for the renewal of the moon (p. 283): 
like the moon, he has been born again ;a new light has appear- 
ed after times of darkness. He has entered a new life. The 
period of convalescence, with its taboos, has been his last trial ; 
by the hondlola he definitely enters the society of the initiated. 
Henceforth he wiil lead a special life, characterised by protec- 
tive and propitiatory rites, which tend to the development of his 
subliminal faculties. 

1) PRorective Rtres. 

As soon as he was “born again” in the thwaza ceremony, 
but still more so later on, when he has been elevated to the 
dignity of the magician, the exorcised, having entered the mys- 
terious world of those endowed with powers, becomes the 
butt of all his colleagues in the magical arts : first the baloyi, 
the witches, who try him, to see if he is able to discover 
their malefactions, and secondly the other magicians who are 
angry to see a rival who will dispute with them their practice. 
So he must be continually on his guard; in the evening, espe- 
cially, he must protect himself against their nightly charms. 
The great protective medicine is a pellet made of the powder 
of many carbonised roots, stuck together with fat taken from 

SO 

the bowels of a goat. The first of these roots comes from a tree 
called mabopheand found in the Bilen country. * This has the power 
of tying (bopha, in Zulu, means to tie) the knees of the wizards 
who come during the night, so that they will be found in the 
morning, stark naked, in the -hut of the exorcised. The nulu 
root seems to be used for the same purpose ; the masala, which 

Protective amulets worn by exorcised. 

also enters into the composition of the protective pellets, rather 
aims at ensuring the success of the treatment undertaken by 
the new gobela: as its fruits are plentiful (p. 16), so will the pos- 
sessed come in great numbers tothe doctor. The pellet is used for 
medical treatment. But the same drugs are also kept under the 
form of powder, in a piece ot reed, or in the calabashes hanging 
from the forked pole. Every night the exorcised swallows a 
pinch of it, and throws another pinch on the fire in his hut. 

aS Ae as 

This will prevent enemies from entering, or make them priso- 
ners. Before eating he must also protect himself by chewing 
(phora) a little of the manono, a kind of antiseptic or anti-male- 
faction root as big as a stick, which he always carries with 
him; this is the special Juma of the exorcised. Who knows if 
his food has not been poisoned by the malpractices of his 
rivals? When undertaking a journey, he must always chew 
his ndjao, the root of juncus which has been often mentioned 
and which ‘‘cleans roads” ; this is ‘his shield”, because the 
ndjao knows and tries (djinga) everything, and overcomes the 
hostility of man and things. It is the universal remedy against 
any inimical influence. So, after having chewed, he spits on 
his stick, rubs it and starts on his journey, saying: ‘The road 
is ripe (wupfile), let us go! ” — The astragalus will be the 
principal charm that the possessed will have to wear, and will be 
tied round his neck between two little amulet bags or reeds. 

The exorcised leads a life of constant fighting against spiri- 
tual evil influences. ‘These protective rites are already observed 
all through the year of convalescence. 

Another rite, which is observed after the hondlola only, is 
the haza, viz., the monthly purification of the exorcist. He 
fills his gobo calabash with a decoction made of the roots of the 
mphesu and ntjebe trees, drinks the whole, tickles his throat 
with a feather and vomits the medicine. ‘‘ A tibasisa ndjen ” 
—“*he purifies his insides.” This is done at every new moon. 
The relation between the possessed and the moon, which was 
first established by the fact that he had thwaza as well as the 
moon, is maintained and accentuated by this rite. 

2) PROPITIATORY RITES. 

Besides these protective drugs, the exorcised wears a necklace 
made of little pieces of a creeper called mayambatju, tied together 
with a munganazi string. See the second necklace in the 
illustration. This is intended to calm his gods, and to scatter 
them when they want to come to him with violence ; 

= pa ees 

this is indeed a great danger: the exercised is liable to 
nervous attacks of a dangerous nature, especially during the 
first few weeks following the exorcism. Perhaps his song has 
been heard in the distance? Suddenly he becomes mad, and 
‘furiously assaults his neighbours with the small hatchet, or the 
assagay used in the dances. People run away ; or, on the con- 
trary, they collect and begin to clap their hands, and make 
their infuriated companion dance and sing his own song. This 
may help to dispel the spirits, and calm him down. Some- 
times, feeling uneasy, foreseeing a crisis, the poor man himself 
asks them to sing. But he may also be led, in his frenzy, to 
the bush, far away, unconscious, quite mad, tearing his clothes 
and his skin with the thorns. This often happened to Nwa- 
shinhwana. Her husband then followed her and, when the cri- 
sis was over, he saw her falling down exhausted and brought 
her home, when, having returned to her senses, she felt very 
sad and wept bitterly. So, in order to avoid being tormented, 
the exorcised propitiate their spirits; they worship them in rea- 
lity, and this gives birth to a new religion totally different from 
ancestrolatry, which has its rites and its duties. 

As already pointed out, the exorcised has his own altar, in his 
hut. It is the forked branch round which a circle of raised clay 
is carefully maintained, and, regularly smeared. He puts his 
offerings there, principally tobacco. The snuff box is deposited 
there. Does he want snuff? He enters the hut clapping his 
hands, saluting his spirits, and, taking the box, throws a pinch 
of it at the foot of the branch, and says: ‘You! Ngoni, you 
see that [have not stolen! I first gave you your share. ” His 
wife will do the same. This is a ‘‘mhamba”.— When ready 
to undertake a journey, he will come to the altar, sit on his 
ankles (if it is a woman she kneels down) and take leave of 
the spirits. Holding his assagay, and his manono root, he Sayan 
“Good-bye, Ba-Ngoni! This hut is yours; keep it well ! 
I go to such and such a place”, and he asks them to bless his 
journeying. On his return he will inform the spirits, that he 
has succeeded in his trip. Ifhe is sick, and the bones have 
revealed that the disease has been caused by the spirits, he again 

se ees Ya rare 

comes to the altar, and says: “You! Ba-Ngoni why are you 
angry with me?” These acts of worship are not only perform- 
med at the altar. Wherever he may be, before drinking beer, the 
exorcised will pour out a little for his spirits. He will also 
throw a little food for them before eating. This will be a daily 
worship, much more constant and individual than the rites of 
ancestrolatry, a real communion with the spirits who, after 
having tormented the exorcist, have become his benefactors, 
giving him the power of healing others and of thus making 
money! There is much more religiosity in exorcised than in 
ordinary people. 

3) DEVELOPMENT OF SUBLIMINAL FACULTIES. 

All these nervous crises, natural or provoked, the double psy- 
chological existence which is fostered by them, the regular par- 
ticipation in the exorcism of others, generally greatly injure 
the mind of the exorcised; they have an extraordinary jook, 
something wild, out of their senses. You hear them some- 
times groaning, or emitting a sudden cry without any reason. 
This nervous shaking may pass away and they may return to 
their normal state, but it may be that if they possess those 
strange virtual mental powers, which modern physiology calls 
subliminal, and which are more or less dormant in every indi- 
vidual, these faculties will suddenly develop and the exorcised 
will really become a magician. A faculty of double sight may 
reveal itself. Or he will become a diviner, either by extasy or 
by bone throwing (See Letter D). Or he will be a wonder- 
worker, a prophet, etc. Mbholombo, who was an extraordinarily 
acute woman, had possessed all these gifts. She could discover 
wizards: one night, crossing the Mabota country, she met one 
of the indunas of the chief accompanied by two other men, 
leading his own wife to the marsh, in order to eat her. They 
were acting in their capacity of wizards (See Letter C). Mho- 
lombo knew them at once and said to them: ‘‘No use eating 
her. Her meat is bitter sour.” ‘Terrified, the wizards fled 

Se AC 

and confessed their guilt next morning! I have related in the 
Bulletin de la Société Neuchateloise de Géographie, of 1910, how 
she received divinatory bones from her possessing spirit, prophesi- 
ed the arrival of missionaries, showed up the man who had 
stolen £ 8 to the Mpfumo chief, was given the power to cross 
the Nkomati river by walking on the water, etc. By this same 
power Shidzabalane was able to leave his body, and to go and 
dwell in his own shadow (p. 339). We will again refer to the 
_ profession of magician when dealing with witchcraft. 

4) THE SOCIETY OF THE EXORCISED. 

If the power of an exorcised becomes very great, it he suc- 
ceeds in his cures, all his mathwaza join him, and he becomes 
the founder of a school. He initiates new rites, discovers more 
powerful drugs, and so attracts to him patients from all parts. 
We have seen that five or six schools existed northward of 
Lourengo Marques, in the Mabota and Nondwane countries. 
Mboza might have originated a new one, having already cured 
two patients. 

Each school of exorcists celebrates an annual feast, in winter, 
at the close of the harvest season, a feast to which all the dis- 
ciples of the master are summoned. This is the rite of the 
renewal of the drugs, which we have already noticed as a medical 
practice, in cases of ordinary medicine-men. Mboza, who wasthe 
favourite of Nwatshulu, was entrusted with the organisation of 
the feast. He stood at the great entrance of the village and 
welcomed the exorcised coming with their empty calabashes; 
on their arrival, each of them gave two shillings, or half a crown, 
or a mat, or a fowl for the master : this was their annual fee. 
Next day they all gathered fuel and burnt the drugs in broken 
pots, two or three mathwazana around each fire. Then they 
all inhaled the smoke through reeds, and drew in the froth of 
the phuphumana and psekamafura decoction from the gobo 
basin. In the evening the old inhabitants began to grind the 
carbonised roots, and Mboza filled the calabashes of the disci- 

aie, 
ples with the new protective medicines, after which dancing 
began, each of the exorcised singing his own song as well as the 
universally known refrains, such as: ‘“‘Vuka Mungoni”, etc. 
This was a great day of rejoicing ! 

As already pointed out, great rivalry exists between these 
schools. The professional hatred is pushed to its last limits 
amongst magicians; they not only test their colleagues, enter- 
ing their huts during the night, but they steal each other’s drugs. 
I have been told how Sindondondo overcame Khongosa.  Si- 
ndondondo was a wonderful man, dwelling on the Western 
border of the Nkomati, at Shifukundju. He had disappeared 
for two years or three, and was considered as dead, but he 
unexpectedly reappeared saying he had inhabited the bottom 
of the sea during the whole time. There he had not eaten 
anything : he was like a fish. The chiefs of that country, under 
the water, had given him his great drug called ndzundzu, and 
he returned home bringing with him a bunch of the precious 
roots. His people welcomed him and made a feast on his 
return. He then became a great magician, and exorcised a 
number of people. He and his only wife were the sole inha- 
bitants of his village; as regards his food he was very particu- 
lar, eating only mealies of the preceding year, and drinking no 
beer. (The exorcised often observe special, individual alimen- 
tary taboos). His forked pole was outside, on his hubo, not 
in the hut, and when he went on a journey, he ordered a 
neighbour to keep watch over his drugs and his fowls. Should 
some other man try to enter his village, he would find it full 
of enormous snakes, surrounding the magic branch. Khongosa, 
who inhabited the district called Nkanyen, on the Eastern bor- 
der of the Nkomati, wanted to possess the marvellous ndzundzu 
drug; so one night he crossed the river and tried to steal it. 
But Sindondondo was on his guard, his protective charms were 
acting. They caught his rival who was shwela, viz., imprison- 
ed till after sunrise. Sindondondo behaved magnanimously : 
‘“Why, my friend (gobelakulori), did you not come in day- 
light to ask for my medicine ? I would have given it to you! 
I could cover you with shame now, and show all the people 

At EGO Bie 

what kind of an exorcist you are! But I have pity on you! 
Go home.” And he released him. Mboza was fully persuad- 
ed of the truth of this story. 

It may happen that a disciple emancipates himself and founds 
a new society of the exorcised; this is, of course, very dis- 
agreeable to his master, because the new doctor will start a dan- 
gerous competition and refuse to pay any more fees to his ini- 
tiator; he will proclaim himself as his superior. So the old 
gobela goes to his altar and prays his Ngoni gods to strike the 
drugs of his rival with inefficacy. This prayer is heard and 
the young gobela is obliged to ask for forgiveness, and to pay 
a fine of £1 in order to obtain success in his future cures. 

He may perhaps succeed his master, but only when the latter is 
dead. 

5) FUNERAL RITES OF THE EXORCISED. 

The burial of the exorcised is attended by other mathwazana, 
by his disciples, if he was an exorcist, and special rites are ob- 
served for his funeral. The corpse is taboo. It must be cover- 
ed with ochre. The grave is smeared with clay, and the body 
is not laid down on the side, but is put in the sitting position, 
the hand holding the assagay, or the hatchet, which the deceas- 
ed was using when dancing and singing the songs of exorcism. 
A bunch of shibowa, an Urticaria growing in the water, is plac- 
ed on his head : “ This is to cool him, because the poor head has 
been so tired, it has suffered so much from anguish, pain, excite- 
ment!” The grass coming from the water also appears to cool the 
spirits, who will thus remain in the grave, and not trouble other 
people. Moreovera little hut is built on the grave itself, as was 
the case for Sokis (I. p. 141), with the same intent, to protect 
the exorcised against heat and fatigue. If the deceased was not 
only a disciple but a master, his drugs will be stored in the 
hut till the adjudication of the inheritance (I. p. 204). The 
most clever of his followers, the one who best knows the use 
of these charms, will dance on the grave, all his companions 
clapping their hands to encourage him, and, when the mourning 

co PANO rs 

is ended, he will “raise the drugs ”, burning them as is done 
at the annual feast and will eventually succeed his master. 

6) CONCLUSION ON Possessions. 

Cases of posssession, such as those which happen amongst the 
Thonga, are met with ina great many other countries. A Swiss mis- 
sionary, the Rev. Rusillon, working in the Paris Mission in Mada- 
gascar, has drawn attention to practices very similar to these, called 
the Tromba amongst Hovas. It is impossible not to note the striking 
resemblance between the Thonga disease and that of the demoniacs of 
the New Testament. Hearing the story of the madman in Gadara, 
whose spirit called itself Legion, the Natives at once identify the phe- 
nomenon, and say : ‘* These demoniacs had psikwembu ”. 

Those psychological phenomena certainly beara morbid character. 
The fact that they generally appear under an epidemic form is signi- 
ficant. It has been noticed that a similar epidemic broke out in popu- 
lations which had been weakened by the sufferings of along war, when 
the nervous resistance had been reduced by privations. Cannot the 
progress of Alcoholism, together with the desintegration of the old 
social order caused by the influence of European civilisation, account 
for the spread of the disease amongst the Ba-Ronga in the last forty 
years ? 

Whilst not pretending to analyse these phenomena scientifically 
and fully, I wiil only add two remarks: 

1) For the Jews, phenomena of possession were due to evil spirits, 
devilish agencies, martyrising poor humanity, and they were healed by 
the power of the real and true God. Dualism prevailed in their reli- 
gious conceptions. This idea of dualism is altogether absent from the 
Thonga belief. South African Bantu have not yet reached that stage 
of religion where the antagonistic ideas of right and wrong are trans- 
ported into the domain of divinity, thus originating the true gods and 
the devils. Possessing spirits are not worse than ancestor-gods. They 
all are non-moral. They can bless and curse, and their moral charac- 
ter is not taken into account at all. 

2) The progress of modern psychology gives the explanation of 
many of these phenomena. The disease of the personality which 
manifests itself by the presence of two psychological consciences in the 
mind is well-known; the hypnotic suggestion which the tambourine 

players exert on their victims, without knowing it, sufficiently explains 
the origin of the disease, and the kind of life led by the exorcised is 
well devised to develop their mediumistic faculties. So many of the 
so-called miracles of possession are easily accounted for. However it 
would be pretentious to exclude, a priori, any possibility of external 
spiritual influences in those phenomena. ‘There is one very striking 
fact at which Natives greatly wonder. These patients, as soonas they 
put themselves under Christian influence, are healed at once and for 
ever. We have, amongst our converts, exorcists who had acquired 
great fame, and who tell, with beaming eyes, how they have been deli- 
vered from their terrible anguish by theirnew faith. For, whatever 
may be the success they obtained in their career of exorcists, their 
condition was a disease, a painful disease and they are extremely glad 
to have been delivered from it. This fact must certainly be remem- 
bered when trying to arrive at an explanation of possessions. 

C, WITCHCRAFT 

Ihave pointed out, in an article published in the Report of 
the S. A. A. A.S., of 1906, how little comprehension most of 
the White people have of this important but difficult subject. 
A confusion is almost always made between the witches and the 
witch-doctors. In French the word sorcier and in English the 
term sorcerer, indiscriminately used for those who cast spells and 
for magicians, leads to the same misconception. I think, in 
order to avoid errors that it is imperative, first of all clearly to 
distinguish between Black Magic and White Magic. These 
adjectives, black and white, are not employed in this connec- 
tion amongst South African Natives, but Thonga certainly do 
make the distinction and possess different terms for each. Black 
magic is called Buloyi; it is the criminal magical practices by 
which wizards and witches bewitch innocent folk. Buloyi is a 
crime. White Magic is called Bungoma and means the magical 
operations of those who fight with evil influences and use their 
powers for the benefit, and not for the ruin, of their country- 
men. The mungoma (magician) is consequently the great 
enemy of the noyi (caster of spells). It may be that the power 

are 5 aaa 

of both is essentially of the same nature. But the use they 
make of it is exactly the reverse, the one exerting it in the 
interest of Society, the other against it. So we will have to 
deal with these two categories of men in two separate para- 
graphs. 

I. Black Magic (Buloyi). 

Buloyi, an abstract noun of the bu-ma class, as well as noyi 
(pl. baloyi), derivates from the verb ku Joya (Ro.), lowa (Dj.), 
to bewitch. This word is very interesting. It seems to have 
been known already in the Ur-Bantu (Comp. Meinhof, Grund- 
fISS. p> AL 73) aud) exists in~Swahelis. Herero,,, Xosa, —Suto; 
Thonga, etc. Strange to say the stem is absent in Zulu, where 
it is replaced by thakata. In Thonga its most common mean- 
ing is to bewitch. But the word is also applied to the act of 
a man who marries his near cousin (I. p. 244). Moreover 
Nkolele, describing to me the sacrifice in the sacred wood and 
speaking of the mtukulu who prepares to steal the offering, said: 
‘Here is the noyi, ready to come and steal the beer... ” I also 
heard the crocodile stone, used by the chief as a charm to prot- 
ect his life, called buloyi bya hosi, the magical power of the 
chief (I. p. 366); these instances show that the word loya is 
sometimes, though rarely, used in a more general sense. How- 
ever its technical meaning is and remains: to injure or to kill 
by enchantments. Who are these baloyi, and what crime do 
they perpetrate ? 

1) Tue Batoyt. 

The baloyi, or people who have the evil eye, are numerous 
in each tribe. Their power is hereditary, but, strange to say, 
it is transmitted by the mother and not bythe father. There- 
fore should a polygamist have three wives, one of whom is a 
noyi, all the children he will have from that ‘‘noyi” wife will be 
baloyi, and his other children will not be such. That dreadful 
power is sucked from their mother’s breast when they are still 

=i ogee 
infants, but it must be strengthened by special medicines to be 
really efficient. The ‘ noi” mother chooses one of her sons, 
to whom she does not dispense these drugs, and he will be: 
free from buloyi. Her aim in doing so is that, should one of 
her offspring later on be accused of having killed by witchcraft 
and be called to pass through the ordeal (of which we shall 
speak hereafter), the immune child will be sent in his place to 
undergo the trial. The chief will consent to that substitution, 
as it is well known that all the sons of a “ noi” woman are 
equally baloyi. But the intoxicating medicine of the ordeal 
will have no effect on the substitute, and therefore the true noyi 
will escape ! 

Those baloyi know each other. T hey form a kind of secret 
society amongst the tribe, and they assemble — with their spi- 
ritual bodies — during the night to eat human flesh in the de- 
sert. ‘There they form a true “ hubo ”, that is, a debating 
assembly. They discuss what they will do to injure property 
or destroy life. They fight sometimes. If one of them is 
defeated in the discussion (saying, for instance, that there 
should be no mealies this year, a proposal which is not accept- 
ed by the others) they condemn him to pay a fine, and the 
fine will consist in a human body, which he will have to pro- 
vide, after having killed it by witchcraft. It might be that he 
will choose his own child to bring it to the horrible banquet ! 
It shows that there are powerful and less powerful baioyi, and 
they are constantly trying to overcome each other in finding 
out more efficient charms. 

As regards the other members of the tribe who are not 
witches, or wizards, they are considered by them as stupid 
beings who do not deserve a better fate than that of being 
eaten wholesale by the clever baloyi! These man-eaters are 
the truly intelligent, the superior, the wise ones! (Ba tlharihile). 
They are also called for that reason “ bahanyi ” — ** those 
who live ”, no doubt because they possess a kind of superior 
life. However they are greatly feared by the others, 
and when a boy wants to marry, the main thing to consider 
in the choice of his wife is that she does not belong to a family 

en iia teste 
of witches. The accusation ; “ You are a noyi ” is the gravest 
insult which a man can make to another. 

The activity of the baloyi is almost entirely nocturnal. That 
is the reason why they are sometimes called by the euphe- 
mism : ‘ ba busiku ”— “ the men of night ”. In fact, they 
possess the faculty of getting out of themselves, during the 
night ; they fly, have large wings, and, after having got out of 
their huts by the crown of grass which covers its top, or by 
the closed door, they fly through the air and go to their hor- 
rible work. The little flying flames which are seen sometimes 
in the marshes, the will-o’-the-wisp (1), are considered as being 
one of the forms under which they go. These flames may 
also be seen on the back of the hippotami, during their fight 
with the batimba hunters (p. 61), or high in the air, following 
the paths over the heads of the people. 

Two questions arise here. Does the Native mind think that a 
true unsheathing of the personality takes place when the baloyi go to 
their nocturnal expedition, or that they get out of the hut them- 
selves, as entire beings, with their ordinary ‘‘ego”? As far as I 
could make out, the Suto theory is different {rom the Thonga 
view. The Ba-Suto say: The wizard is going entire, soul and 
body. Nothing remains on the mat, when he has departed for 
his nocturnal ride! He throws charms on the other inhabitants 
of the hut, and they sleep so heavily that they do not notice 
anything. The Thonga speak differently. According to them, 
the noyi is but a part of the personality. When he flies 
away, his “ntjhuti ”, his shadow, remains behind him, lying 
down on the mat. But it is not truly the body which remains. 
Itappears as such only to the stupid non-initiated. In reality 
what remains is a wild beasi, the one with which the noyi has 
chosen to identifyhimself. This fact has been disclosed to me 

(1) Amongst Christian Natives you will find some who believe that the 
will-o’-the-wisps are the spirits of the deceased which come back on the earth. 
But I strongly suspect this idea of being of European origin. For the Bantu 
the ghosts of their ancestors, which are their gods, appear sometimes, but only 
under the form of snakes, as explained, around the graves, near the village in 
which they lived, and the will-o’-the-wisps are the baloyi. 

aa! a 

by the following sttiking confession of S. Gana, a very intelli- 
gent Nkuna. “ Suppose ”, he said, “ my father is a noyi and 
Iam‘not. I want to marry a certain girl because I love her. 
My father knows that, she is a noyi because they know each 
other, and he tells me: ‘Don’t do that! She is clever ; you 
will repent!” However, I persist in my idea. He urges me 
to drop that plan, and threatens me with great misfortune. I 
marry her. One night, my father enters my hut and awakens 
me. Hesaystome: ‘ What did I tell you! Look! Your 
wife has gone!’ I look at her place and find her sleeping 

calmly — ‘ No. Here she is.’ — ‘It is notshe! She is 
away! Take this assagai and stab her. — ‘No, father, I dare 
not.’ — ‘Do, Isay!’ And he puts the assegai in my hand 

and makes me violently hurt her leg. A cry, the cry of a wild 
beast, is heard. And a hyena appears instead of my wife, a 
hyena which deposits its “faeces ”, because it is frightened, and 
which escapes from the hut howling. My father gives me 
some powder to swallow and I shall be able to see the baloyi 
and their ways and habits. He Jeaves me — very much trem- 
bling from fear —and goes home. When the sun is going to 
appear, I hear a noise like that of the wind in the branches, and 
suddenly something falls down from the top of the hut near 
me. It is my wife. She lies down sleeping, but her leg 
shows a wound, the wound that had been made in the hyena !” 

From this dramatic story it must be inferred that, in the 
idea of the Ba-Thonga, there is truly an unsheathing of the 
personality into two when the noyi goes to its nightly work. 

A second question arises, which is this: As the baloyi lead a 
double existence, a day-light one, when they are but men, and 
a nightly one, when they perform their work as witches, are 
they aware, during the day, of what they have done during 
the night ?. In other words, are they conscious of their doings 
as witches? The question is difficult to answer, as there does 
not seem to be a clear idea on this point in the Native mind. 
The old, genuine conception is thata noyi does not know what 
he is doing ; he is not even aware that he is noyi as long as he 
has not been revealed as such by the means which we shall 

= es 
explain later on. Therefore he is unconscious. His nightly 
activity is unknown to him when he has come back to his daily 
ordinary life. For instance, my informants assure me that a 
man might have sent a crocodile to kill another one, during his 
Hoyi existence, but he willbe the first one to show sympathy to 
the poor wounded one, and to be sorry for thissad accident. And he 
will be amazed, when the diviner points to him as having caus- 
ed the death by his buloyi, of which he was in perfect igno- 
rance. But it seems as if the baloyi, who have long practised 
their horrible tricks, are aware and even proud of their doings, 
and therefore more or less conscious of their double life. Some 
of them go even further: they renounce their evil deeds and 
become magicians, using the knowledge they have acquired to 
baffle the enchantments of other baloyi, as we shall see. 
But let us hear what are the dreadful acts which they 
commit under their baloyi form. 

2) THe Crimes oF THE BaLoyi 

(a) The baloyi, first of all, are thieves. This is the least cri- 
minal aspect of their activity. They steal mostly mealies or 
the products of the fields. They empty the ground-nuts of their 
contents (p. 12). The magicians havea kind of medicine with 
which they plaster their mealie cobs in the gardens, and the 
noyi, when he wants to tear them from the stalk, remains pri- 
soner on the spot, unable to draw his hand away from the cob! 
But, what is even more curious, the baloyi ofa country assem- 
ble to make up an army and go to fight with the baloyi of 
another one, in order to deprive them of their mealies and 
bring them into their own fields. For instance, in 1900, there 
was a great war between the baloyi of Mpfumu, near Lourenco 
Marques, and those of the peninsula of Inyack, at the entrance 
of Delagoa Bay. That year the Kafir beans were plentiful at 
Mpfumu, and it was explained by the fact that the Mpfumu 
baloyi had had the victory over their Inyack enemies. They 
owed their success to the following trick: they gathered 

any number of seeds of the little cucumber, called nkakana, and 
made with them a kind of enormous ladder, which was sus- 
pended midway between sky and sea; upon it they crossed the 
2o or the 30 miles of the bay of Delagoa and stole all the Ka- 
fir beans of Inyack. (1) Should a tempest have uprooted trees 
and broken branches, people are sure to say : Here the “‘ army 
(yimpi) of baloyi” has passed as a terrific storm during the night. 

b) But the great crime of the baloyi is that of killing. They 
are murderers, and all the more to be feared as they act uncon- 
sciously, without being seen or known. Two motives inspire 
their crimes — hatred and jealousy. Should one of them have 
been offended, he is sure to revenge himself by putting to 
death his enemy. During the night he escapes from his hut 
(as we have seen above), he opens his wings and flies directly 
to the dwelling of the man he hates. But the habitation of 
that man is well protected; there is all round it a spiritual 
fence made up of charms, various medicines which close the 
kraal against any invasion of witches. How must he act to per- 
petrate his crime? He has first made an agreement with ano- 
ther noyi residing in that village, and who has wrought an open- 
ing in that spiritual fence, similar to one of the small holes 
in the material one! He then gets into the kraal, tries to pene- 
trate into the hut by the door, finds it closed, beats it and, being 
unable to enter this way, flies to the crown of the hut and de- 
scends through it into the hut of the enemy, calmly sleeping on 

(1) In one of these expeditions to Inyak Islands the baloyi of the Movumbi 
district wanted to buy food from their colleagues beyong the Bay. A certain 
woman, who was a great noyi, took her daughter-in-law with her, but the lat- 
ter was not a noyi. However she was led through the air, alongthe nkanka- 
na ladder, to the village of Magilankinsin, a headman of Inyak. This man 
refused to accept her as she was ignorant of the buloyi art, and he sent her 
back home. In the mean time the husband, Midlalen, noticed that his wife 
was not sleeping in the hut. When she reappeared in the morning he asked 

her : “Where did you go” — ‘ To Inyaka”.— ‘Indeed ?” — ‘* Yes | 
saw everything there”. — ‘* How did you go ?” — “I do not know. ” 
‘© How did you return ? ” — **I do not know ” — ‘* Have you seen Magi- 
lankinsin 2?” — ‘“‘ Yes!” The husband suggested that his mother had played 

this trick by her buloyi and he chased her away from his village Mboza 
tells the story as absolutely authentic, and adds ‘‘ these facts occurred some ten 
years ago. 

his mat. Then he proceeds to the bewitching operation, and 
the poor bewitched man is condemned to die! “© loyiwile, ” 
—“‘he has been bewitched ” > “ku sa ntjhuti htsena, 7)" "his 
shadow only remains.” They say also the “nthumbu, ” the 
corpse only has been left, his true self has been stolen and eaten. 
“Ba mu pepulile”, they have ravished him, (like a feather taken 
away by the wind). He will get up in the morning, die some 
days later, but what will die is only his shadow. He himself has 
been killed during that frightful night. He has been eaten 
already! Or he will become mad (lihlanyi) and people will 
say: “The living have had the better of him” — “ Ba mukotile 
bahanyi”. Here we find again, under an even more mysterious 
form, the idea of the duality of human personality. How it 
is possible that a man who has stil] to live some days or months 
may be considered as already eaten up entirely, I do not pre- 
tend to explain. Such is the Native idea, at any rate. One of 
my informants tried to overcome the difficulty by saying that, 
what the noyi is taking with him to eat, is the inside, the bowels; 
the external frame only remains, and the man will die soon ! 
Most of the Natives, when you show them the absurdity of the 
idea, laugh and that is all. 

In order to gain his criminal ends the noyi may resort to 
various means : he may point at his enemy with the index finger, 
which is a common bewitching procedure in many nations. If, 
later on, you are overtaken by misfortune, you will remember 
that so and so has “ shown you with the finger ” (komba hi 
litiho), and will suspect him of having cast a spell over you, 
(Comp.I. p. 237). Or he may obtain a hold on you by taking 
your own blood, if this has been, per chance, shed on the ground, 
and using it as a means of bewitching you ; (a ku loyela ha 
yone). Hence the precaution universally taken of covering 
one’s blood with earth, should any have dripped from a wound 
(p- 337). But the five great means which a noyi has at his 
disposal are the following : ruma, mitisa, matshelwa, ntshutshu 
and mpfulo. 

The ruma (to send) consists in sending either a crocodile, or 
a lion, or more often a snake, to the place where the enemy is 

going to pass. He will be killed or wounded. Remember the 
story of Gebuza whose nose was torn off by a hyena : this is a 
typical case of ruma. In Maputju, the heathen accused the 
converts of bewitching them by means of the owls which took 
shelter under the roof of the chapel! In Khosen also the 
Christians were charged with having sent a crocodile from 
Nkomati River into the Sokotiba lake to kill those who refu- 
sed to be converted to Christianity! If the noyi does not wish 
to kill, he may only send antelopes to destroy the fields and 
eat the sweet potatoes. Even in the Christian village of Shilu- 
vane, during the days when the “duykers” are plentiful, and 
become a nuisance, you might hear somebody saying : ‘‘ They 
are sending us their duykers!”? Who are they? _ Mystery ! 
They are the baloyi! But do not call them by their name ! 

The mitisa (ku mita, to swallow, ku mitisa, to make somebody 
swallow) is the only one of these five means of bewitching which is 
used during the day. It consists in giving to a visitor some- 
thing to eat or to drink in which certain drugs have been intro- 
duced. The mealie pap or the beer seem perfectly normal, but, 
owing to the enchantments of buloyi, as soon as you have swal- 
lowed them, they are transformed, in your throat, into any 
kind of harmful beast, which threatens to suffocate you, and 
gives rise to a disease and perhaps produces death! You will 
have swallowed in this way a snake, a beetle of the Copris genus, 
one of those strange dung-eaters, a big fly, or certain kinds of 
flesh of animals. The great effort of the magician to whom 
you will apply for treatment will be to remove these foreign 
bodies, and, when you vomit, they will show you with triumph a 
bit of bone, a tooth, that famous beetle, or other objects which 
they had previously and cleverly introduced themselves. There 
is a medicine which Natives like to have inoculated into their 
tongue, and which has the wonderful property of forcing the 
bewitched food to reveal its true character when you eat it. If 
you have been treated with it, you will hear the cracking of the 
elytra of the beetle, and at once be able to spit out of your 
mouth the death-containing food ! 

The matshelwa (ku tshela, to throw) are not only these foreign 

a Tse 
bodies which the noyi introduces into you by means of giving 
you poisoned food, but it may be tingati (bloods) poured on you 
during the night in such quantity that the floor of the hut will 
be found quite wet in the morning. 

The ntchutchu (ku tchutcha, to inspire) is another way of 
getting rid of an enemy. It is a bewitching of the will by which 
the noyi inspires his enemy with the idea of leaving the country. 
Without motive, the poor bewitched person prepares to go to 
Johannesburg, or anywhere else. There he will become the 
prey of other baloyi, who will kill him. When a boy dies in the 
mines, as hundreds of them do, his parents think : — ‘He has 
been killed by such and such a disease.” But the author of his 
death is not in Johannesburg, he is here at home; it is the noyi 
who hated him and made him go by “ntchutchu.” 

The mpfulo is still worse. That word which comes from the 
verb ku pfula, to open, designates the mysterious power which 
the baloyi possess to open any kind of things. One of them, a 
Nkuna, named Nwayekeyeke, had charms to open the kraals of 
oxen; during the night, he would come into a village holding 
a tail of hyena daubed over with peculiar medicines, and would 
throw on all the inhabitants a deep sleep. Then, waving the 
tail, he would open the kraal and call the cattle out. Flying 
with the rapidity of the wind, he would then be followed by all 
the herd bewitched by him. When tired, he would jump on a 
tree and rest a while, fearing lest the oxen might run over 
him and tread him down, as they were irresistibly attracted by 
the tail. Should people see him on his way, he would say : 
“Take an ox, I give it to you,” until he reached his village and 
housed the stolen oxen in his own kraal. But there are 
other kinds of mpfulo : the power of opening the hut, of putting 
away the husband sleeping there without waking him, and of 
committing adultery with his wife. However the great mpfulo 
consists in opening a man. ‘The following story will show how 
that criminal act is accomplished. Some fifty years ago, a 
young man called Nkokana, the uncle of my informant, aston- 
ished the whole tribe by his splendid way of dancing like the 
chameleon. The circumcision school was just over, and on the last 

day of it all the boys had to enter solemnly into the kraal of 
the chief, performing the ceremony which has been described 
I. p 92 and is called kunenga. One of the men of the tribe, 
who was a noyi, was struck by the perfect performance of Nkokana, 
and, filled with jealousy, he resolved to bewitch him. As the 
boys were going home that same day, happy to be at the end of 
all their trials, they had to cross a thick wood; suddenly a voice 
was heard calling : “ Nkokana!” The boy said : “Yes, I am 
coming, “and he went to the place from where the voice came. 
But he found nobody. Instead of going back to his companions 
who were waiting for him, he ran all through the bush, as pos- 
sessed by a kind of madness, always following the voice, but 
with no success. The night passed. He came back home en- 

tirely worn out, a shadow only of himself, and died some days 
later. He had been ““opened up” by the witch. When such 
bewitching takes place it is probable that the noyi wants to 
enslave his victim, and make him work for him. 

c) This leads us to the last of the crimes of the baloyi. Their object 
may not be to kill their victims but to use them as their servants, 
for ploughing their fields, cutting their wood, and so on. One 
day footprints of a leopard were seen in a mealie garden near 
the Shiluvane station. People were convinced that this was 
nothing but a bewitched person, sent there during the night 
under the form of an animal (1) to serve the owner of the field ;-it 
is said that the baloyi, when assembled in their hubo, choose 
those whom they like amongst the victims they have overcome by 
the ntshutshu, by their magical inspiration, and change them 
into leopards, hyenas and snakes, compelling them either to till 
the fields, or to uproot mealies in the gardens of others, and to 
“lead” (byisa) the stems and plant them in the gardens of baloyi. 
A Nkuna of Thabina once pretented having witnessed such a 

(1) The relation established between animals and baloyi is pushed even 
further in Maputju. My colleague, the late Rev. Audéoud. heard of baloyi 
who really consider themselves the possessors’ of certain beasts. One of 
them owned a wild boar. A hunter killed the son of that wild boar and the 
noyi bewitched him as he considered he had a vested right of property in the 
son as well as in the father ! 

irs RE ee 
case of nocturnal theft, — and he was expelled from the country 
because, as people said, he could not know of such deeds if he 
were not himself a noi. 

To bé fair towards the wizards I must add that there are 
also some good baloyi, viz., baloyi who use their power to bless. 
They can do so when sent by the ancestor-spirits to increase the 
produce of the fields, if the prayer of the luma day has been heard 
by the gods (I. p. 369). In this case the wizards are said to have 
loyela masimu, bewitched the fields to make thém produce more 
(loyela, applicative derivative of loya). This seems to show 
that baloyi are more or less subject to the aucestral gods. It 
may happen also that if somebody acts kindly towards a noyi, 
this noyi will take him under his protection, and prevent his 
comrades from doing harm to his friend. But these are rare 
occurrences, and the baloyi are, and remain, criminals in the 
ideas of the Thonga. 

Stealing, killing, enslaving, these are the principal crimes of 
these maleficent beings. But they can also cause any other 
kind of harm to their infortunate victims. One of them once 
complained to me of having been deprived of the power of 
begetting by the tricks of a noyi uncle : his wife was pregnant 
and the wizard wanted to act in such a way on the offspring as 
to change him into snake, or a hare, ora quail, or a duyker, so 
that the mother would die on the day of the birth. (I. p. 490. 
Note 11). 

Il. White Magic and Magicians 
1) DIFFERENCE BETWEEN Macictans aND Wizarps. 

As previously stated, the power which the magicians claim to 
possess is perhaps not essentially different from that of the baloyi. 
They even sometimes boast of being baloyi themselves, baloyi 
more powerful than the ordinary witches, and that they are thus 
able to discover them and to baffle all their tricks. So Mathuza, 
one of the most celebrated Ronga witch-doctors, used to say: 

ys eee 
“Tam the great Noyi! I am the one who kills. I can fly. 
So I know them all and I disclose them”. But magicians 
absolutely differ from the wizards in four ways, at least : 

1) Their activity is not secret, nocturnal and more or less 
unconscious. They act openly, in the full light, during the day, 
and do not hide their magical powers ; on the contrary, they 
make a show of them, covering themselves with any amount of 
charms ; most of them wearing tingoya and smearing themselves 
with ochre (p. 83). 

2) They all undergo a preparation, or pass through an initia- 
tion, differing according to the various kinds of magic they 
practise. So they possess, so to speak, letters patent, either 
because they have been aggregated to the society of their fellow- 
magicians (as isthe case for medicine-men, exorcists, and throwers 
of bones), or because they have found new and powerful drugs 
during an absence, or a pretended sojourn, in the sea, in the 
desert, or elsewhere 

3) Whilst baloyi are said to use tingati (bloods), poisons, the 
magicians employ miri, i. e., medicinal herbs or objects, drugs 
which, however, are all meant to possess special powers. I do 
not say “‘ supernatural” powers, as the notion conveyed by this 
word cannot clearly exist amongst people who have not yet the 
notion of Nature. The stronger the miri, the stronger the 
magician. — In addition to their drugs, they certainly believe 
themselves endowed with personal power due to the develop- 
ment of their faculties of double sight, etc., and which they also 
attribute to the spirits (ancestor-gods) from whom they have 
inherited their drugs. 

4) The last but not least difference: magicians are the helpers 
and upholders of the social order, and not criminals attempting 
to destroy it. They foretell the future, cure diseases, prevent 
misfortune of all kinds, fight against baloyi, and are regularly 
consulted by the Native Court in order to detect wizards. 

eee 
2) VARIOUS CATEGORIES OF MAGICIANS. 

Some of them specialise in one part of the immense domain 
of magic, but some pretend to practise the magical arts in all 
their diversity. 

1) Those whose activity bears a less magic character are the 
nanga (yin-tin), or ba-muri, whom we met with whem dealing 
with the medical art (Compare Chapter I. the Medicine-men). 

2) Those who have passed through the exorcism and have 
beeome exorcists. They are called gobela, and the story of 
their initiation has been sufficiently explained in Chapter II. 

3) Those called mungoma, magicians, properly speaking, who 
can guess and accomplish wonders, fight the baloyi, make the 
rain fall, act on Heaven, etc., even if there has been no story 
of exorcism in their previous career. 

4) Those whose principal qualification is the power to detect 
baloyi, and whoare called for that reason shinusa, ‘‘smellers-out”. 

5) The bone-throwers (ba-bula) whom we shall describe in 
Chapter IV. 

The priests, ba ku habla, do not enter into any of these cate- 
gories, their proper activity being of a totally different character : 
they have recourse to Religion and not to Magic. 

3) Some THonca Macicians. 

If I think of the various magicians with whom I came in 
contact, I notice that very few limited themselves to the medical 
art alone: Sam Negwetsa and Kokolo only did this. The aim of 
the magician is to combine as many branches of the business as 
possible. — Mankhelu, with his forked branch, was a medicine- 
man of the highest rank, owing to his calabashes containing a 
mixture of all the most powerful drags, salted with Rivimbi’s 
charms of the sea: He was a magician, being a rain-maker, a 
detector of baloyi and especially a successful bone-thrower, but 
he seemed to altogether ignore the art of exorcism. — Makasana, 

Tee 72 Has 

on the contrary, a Thonga from the Leydenburg district, had 
acquired his power after having passed through the exorcism 
and had obtained the drugs of his exorcist. This had made ot 
him a regular mungoma. Round his neck he wore three neck- 
laces of half transparent yellow beads, between which were small 
square lizard skin bags, timfisa, containing: 1) drugs against 
snake bites; 2) charms against the baloyi ; 3) the maringo ya 
tilo, the charms of Heaven. Birds’ claws and a crocodile’s tooth 
also hung round his neck ; his hair was elongated, the tingoya 
radiating in all directions, and in the very middle, on the top 
of his head, he wore a little chain, in the form of a narrow 
turban, to which a brass cartridge was fixed: his snuff box, 
comfortably resting on his thick thatch ! Possessing all these 
drugs Makasana was at the same time exorcist, witch-doctor, 
medicine-man, and magician of Heaven. The last qualification 
was perhaps the principal one for him; he told me that he had 
to fight against his colleagues, who wanted to test him by means 
of their own charms. — “At noon”, he said, “when the sky is 
quite clear, I see a little cloud appearing over my head, quite 
black. The lightning bird is in it, and wants to. kill me, 
having been sent by one of my enemies. Then I pour a little 
of the medicine of Heaven in the palm of my hand ; when I see 
the bird moving its wings and ready to rush down to me, I 
blow a little of my drug towards the cloud and the bird will 
come and fall quite near me powerless. Then I take it, I cut 
it through the middle. I take a little of the heart, of the eyes, 
I crush the bones, I make a powder with all these ingredients, 
and this is my great medicine. With one of the bones, I make 
a flute, I put a little powder in it, and, when a thunderstorm 
breaks, I go outside without danger and conjure the lightning 
by playing on my flute, ete. ” (p.o29%) 

Mathuza, the magician of Nondwane to whom I have just 
made au allusion, was essentially a detector of baloyi. — So was 
also Nwashihandjime, the great Nkuna magician, a splendid man, 
tall, his eyes beaming with a kind of supernatural light. I once 
saw him, after having performed the “ smelling out” rite, point 
out a woman with the tail he always carried with him, an enor- 

S34 ee 

mous tail fixed on a handle richly decorated with beads and 
copper wire. This tail, which is one of the most common at- 
tributes of the mungoma is generally a gnu tail. It is said that 
when a mother gnu has dropped her offspring, she beats it 
(phyita) with her tail and thus gives the new-born gnu the ne- 
cessary strength to walk and follow its mother. Hence the 
peculiar magic use of the gnu tail. In its very middle certain 
drugs are hidden which possess a revelatory virtue : the magi- 
cian puts his nose right amongst the hair before pronouncing 
his sentence and beating (phyita) the noyi. Nwashihandjime 
is said to have disappeared from his village for months, and to 
have come back from the desert emaciated but full of new ma- 
gical powers. I once tried to draw his attention to things more 
spiritual than his art and his drugs. He gazed at me with 
wild eyes, as if he were unable to follow my demonstration ; 
suddenly he emitted a cry very similar to hiccough and turned 
his back. (Hiccoughing is a well-known symptom, shewing 
either that one has been bewitched by ‘“mitisa”, or that one 
possesses a magical power). 

At the station of Shiluvane I once made an inventory of the 
charms of another Nkuna magician. In his hair the man wore 
a brass bracelet and some rings, a necklace with a sixpence, all 
these objects having been inherited from his father who was 
himself a mungoma ; moreover he hung round his neck a little 
piece of the skin of a goat, which had been sacrificed after the 
death of his father ; in this way he tried to acquire and keep the 
power of his initiator and of his god. Two panther’s claws 
were fixed on his head, pointing towards each other, as if want- 
ing to catch something: this helped him to go and seize (to ba) 
the wizard in the vumisa rite, which I shall now describe. Two 
empty bladders of goats were swinging amidst his crop of ti- 
ngoya when he walked, an unmistakable sign that he had cured 
patients and received goats as reward. The noise they made 
by hitting against each other “called other goats to come to 
him”. From his neck hung two crocodile’s teeth, a piece of 
buffalo’s horn, “‘ psiboho psa nga” — ‘that which ties me, viz., 
makes me firm”; another horn which had been broken bya 

eo AOR ean 
bullet and in which he kept the nulu medicine (p.452), the root 
of a white sea-weed, used to produce the foam of the gobo rite in 
the exorcism, a goat’s horn full of a powder which cures the 
“burwa” disease. The burwa is the strong Westerly wind in 
Shiluvane (I. p. 18) which the baloyi are said to use for 
bewitching through the ears. He rubbed the patient with the 
horn and placed it near one ear, then near the other, and could 
cure the bewitched in that way. Another drug, called ‘ri- 
shwala”, helped him to acquire many wives, and to have many 
children ; a cock’s spur was also worn in order to give him 
“courage and weight”. This mungoma, who called at Shiluvane 
on the 28" of June 1899, sold me a “‘kaross” (a rug) made of 
skins of rock rabbits, a work of the Ba-Pedi, worth £ 6. He 
had earned it by the practice of his art. 

I here give the picture of a true Ronga gobela, from Tembe, 
who once passed through Rikatla with two assistants; he was 
on his way exorcising the possessed of the land. He looked 
frightful with all his military and magical attire, his big snake 
skins, and his gnu tail; he hardly condescended to pronounce a 
word, maintaining all the time a most dignified demeanour. 
He was, before everything, an exorcist. 

These few descriptions are sufficient to illustrate the composite 
character of the magicians. There is no end to their charms, 
and their tricks, but they are certainly in earnest as regards the 
practice of their art, and are convinced that they are very use- 
ful and powerful personages. 

Ill. © The way of dealing with wizards. 

All the power of the magicians is resorted to in order to check 
the enchantments of the baloyi. Their drugs are used with two 
Objects: protection and cure, the cure consisting mainly in dis— 
closing the wizard. 

A Ronga « gobela ». 

1) PROTECTIVE MEANS. ° 

The village, as we saw, (I. p. 28 1) is well protected with anti- 
baloyi drugs. The fence itself, the main entrance and the thres- 
hold of the headman’s hut, have been magically treated when 
first built. But the magician, when he thinks it necessary, 
“revives” the drugs by burning his powder in a little fire on 
the road which enters the village. This protects the main 
entrance, and he does the same at the threshold of the headman’s 
hut. The smoke will keep the wizards away. Stones, daubed 
with the powder, are put in all directions to close the openings. 

“These medicines act wonderfully, ” says Mankhelu. _ Should 
a noyi succeed in entering the hut, the power of that smoke will 
be such that he will at once be revealed. Without any cloth- 
ing, the noyi will suddenly be seen there as if dreaming, seeing 
nothing, knowing nothing. If it is a woman, [| will call her 
husband and show him his wife... © What are you doing here >?’ 
he will say to her. She will not utter a word. Then I will 
tell him: ‘Look here, my friend... | might be hard on you. 
But I have pity. Do notallow your wife to do anything of the 
kind again. Pay me one or two oxen, and I will keep silent. ’ 
He will consent. Then I beat the woman with my stick. She 
awakes, and, quite ashamed of being in another hut without 
any clothing, she will fly away home!” Such is the testimony 
of Mankhelu, and he is sure of having succeeded more than 
once ! ! 

Mboza asserted to me that he had witnessed a similar case 
in Muthiyane (near Rikatla). A woman had been thus “ surprised 
by the rising sun” (shwela, p. 283). She was stark naked and 
had something red, like fire, on both shoulders : these were the 
remnants of her wings. Having been overcome by the magical 
drugs she had been unable to reintroduce these wings into her 
flesh, and there remained a part of them outside. Every one 
ran away at this sight, and the chief ordered the woman to be 
shut up in her hut. 

Some magicians use to fight the baloyi by running through the 

cose etre 
bush during the night and catching them as they flew on their 
wings of fire. See how Mholombo prevented two wizards from 
killing a woman (p. 455), and how the exorcised protect them- 
selves by means of the mabophe drug, and by swallowing their 
nulu powder (p. 452). 

2) MEANs OF DISCLosiNG THE BALoyI. 

But should all the protective medicines which surround the 
village, which have been swallowed by the inhabitants, or by 
which they have been inoculated, remain without effect, should 
a serious disease occur, one of those evils which are generally 
attributed to the baloyi, the first thing to do is to detect the culprit. 
The patient’s relatives go to the diviner who will cast the bones 
and discover if the disease is due to witchcraft or not. This 
consultation is secret, and only preliminary. There are, in the 
sets of bones employedin the (Thonga) divination, some which 
represent the baloyi, especially the astragalus of the reedbuck, or 
of the duyker, that small antelope which rambles about during 
the night, just at the time when the witches operate. Should 
that bone fall in a certain way near the bone representing the 
patient, or near his amulets which have been placed on the mat, 
it shows that his disease is the outcome of buloyi. The name 
of the noyi will be searched for, and perhaps ascertained, that 
first day, but the parents of his victim will never dare to accuse 
him merely on the testimony of the bones. The next step will 
be to go to the mungoma, the magician who “smells out” the 
baloyt. 

The magician employs various means to find out a noyi. 

a) The Enchanted Horn. 

In the Murchison Range there is a magician who possesses an 
enchanted horn, into which he introduces a short twig smeared 
with an anti-baloyi medicine. Persons suspected of having kill- 
ed by witchcraft must try to pull the twig out of the horn. The 

= 480 ees 

noyi will be unable to do it, though he may declare, like the 
others : ‘‘I have not killed”. Amongst the Nkuna, the magi- 
cian, who has succeeded in finding out a wizard, takes his coat 
and hangs it to a tree as a trophy. 

b) The Enchanted Flute. 

When some one dies and his relatives think he has been be- 
witched, they can call a certain mungoma who “treats the 
grave” with his drugs. Ifhe thinks that he has disclosed the noyi, 
he gives to the bereaved a small flute, telling him to go and 
play on it in the neighbourhood. This helps not only to detect 
the wizard but to punish him; he will die. This rite is called 
“to play on the little flute (ku yimbelela shinangana) for 
somebody”. 

c) The rera nyiwa, or ba hungwe. 

Rera nyiwa or ba hungwe means to summon an assembly for 
disclosing wizards. This is done when the chief is sick, or 
when an epidemic has broken out and threatens the villages. 
The headman, or sub-chief, assembles all his people and says : 
“ Hungwe !” (this word is a kind of : “Take care!”). ‘The 
bones have declared it : It is so and so: a woman having two, 
three or four children... or married twice... or a widow... or a 
girl... or a man... or a medicine-man..... Cease your enchant- 
ments and make the patient live! We know you! Do not bring 
upon him bad influences during the night! If you do not re- 
store him to health, we shall kill you!” All the people look at 
each other and try to discover who is meant by the bones and 
by the speaker. The rera nyiwa acts as a solemn warning to 
all the baloyi of the country, and may thus prolong the life of 
the chief. 

= Wire 

d) The smelling-out procedure. 

But should it be desirable to ascertain the name of the noyi, 
in order to punish him (for instance, in a case of death, where 
nothing remains but to avenge oneself on the murderer), the 
mungoma will proceed to the shinusa divination, the regular 
smelling-out. This can be done in two ways, either by ques- 
tioning or by ecstasy. 

1) Smelling-out by questioning. The relatives of the bewitched 
come to the shinusa, pay him £1, and ask him to find out the 
murderer. He makes them sit down ina half-circle, and, facing 
them, begins to put some questions to them. They always 
answer by the word mamoo, which means yes, in the language 
of bungoma. Hence the Zulu term of vumisa viz., « to make 
somebody say yes”, appliedto thisceremony. The mamoo is cool 
or warm, doubtful or convinced, and the clever diviner easily 
perceives every shade of meaning in that perpetual mamoo. He 
‘is well aware of all the disputes and hatred between the people 
and, in his investigation, he draws nearer and nearer to the man 
of whom the consulting party is thinking. Their mamco becomes 
bolder. The questions are more precise. At last, when he 
feels himself agreeing with the consultants, the mungoma pro- 
nounces the name and lets his tail fall. He is bathed in perspiration 
after the great strain, and he remains silent, as if he were invulner- 
able; he has triumphantly “ smelt out” the culprit. Next day, 
relatives of the patient go to the kraal of the noyi, waving branch- 
es, dance before him, and say : “‘ Thus you are killing us!” 
The accused one keeps silent. Then he says: “All right. We 
shall come to-morrow and consult also our mungoma.” Both 
parties then go toanother divinator. The scene of “‘smelling out” 
is again gone through, and very likely the verdict of the second 
mungoma will confirm that of the first one; the augurs know 
that they must not contradict each other if they want to main- 
tain their authority, and the terrible tail falls on the head of the 
accused. As soon as the proof and counterproof have been ob- 
tained, the case becomes a judicial one. The plaintiff puts the 

= 482 — 

matter before the chief, who will not condemn before the guilt 
of the pretented noyi is confirmed by the ordeal, the trial by the 
famous philter called mondjo. 

2) Smelling-out by ecstasy partakes more or less of the character 
of the rera nyiwa. All the people have been assembled in the 
Capital. The chief wants to collect together all the baloyi of 
the land. The diviner arrives, decked out with amulets and all 
the insignia of his power. In his hands he carries his magical 
tail, by way of a whip, and an assagay. He begins to dance, 
the ead seated all round him, clapping their hands (wombela), 
and singing a chorus special to the occasion : 

Nwashongana khalo! Famba u ya teka, u ya teka, mungoma ! 
Beautiful dancer of slender figure ! Seek for it, seek for-it, diviner! 

He goes on dancing; like Pythia of old he gets into a condition 

of excessive nervous excitement, ecstasy, inspiration. He bran- 
dishes his tail, dilates his nostrils, inhales the air on all sides, 
as if to smell out the spot from whence the evil influence has 
emanated, then takes to his heels in a certain direction, the* 
assembly still clapping their hands and singing. He approaches 
a hut, enters, and triumphantly plants his assagay in one corner. 
A hole is dug in that spot and the discovery mz just 
where so and so placed his wooden pillow when retiring to rest 
for the night — of a small gourd full of blood, packets of doubt- 
ful objects in connection with enchantments, and perhaps a 
snake. It is quite possible that the diviner may have previously 
hidden these articles; nevertheless he carries them exultingly 
away ; they are the wizards’weapons, the ‘‘ bloods” (tingati) 
which they throw over their victims at night. 

The shinusa returns to the chief’s village, who is very angry 
and orders him to go and show these objects to their owner. 
Then the magician, making a sign to the crowd to stop singing, 
will go and throw the articles in front of the occupant of the 
hut to put him to shame before the whole assembly. The 
mysterious charms, the noyi’s gourd, must in every case be 
consumed by fire, and then the sickness and deaths in the village 
ought to be arrested. 

e) The Mondjo ordeal. 

As already pointed out, the last, the supreme means for un- 
masking baloyi is the mondjo-ordeal. This is a juridical action 
ordered by the chief, a real means of instruction in a criminal 
case. This custom calls to mind the judgment of God in the 
Middle Ages (ordeal is derived from “ urtheil”’, judgment); it is 
practised by the majority of the Bantu tribes, varying from one 
tribe to another, but everywhere it has the same end in view, 
namely the discovery of the casters of spells by imposing an 
ordeal which is supposed to be fatal to such as be guilty. 

This ordeal is called amongst the Ba-Ronga (as also from one 
end of the Thonga tribe to the other) drinking the mondjo (ku nwa 
mondjo). The mondjo is a plant of the Solaneae family which 
possesses intoxicating properties. With it a special magician 
prepares a beverage which must act as a means of revelation. 
It can be resorted to by any individual accused of witchcraft, or 
of any other crime. A woman accused of adultery, for instance, 
may say : ‘Let us go and drink the mondjo.” The mondyjo 
magician will give both the accused and the plaintiff a little of 
his drug, and the one who becomes intoxicated, or unconscious, 
after having taken the magic beverage will be convicted of guilt. 
But the mondjo ordeal can also be ordered by the chiefs, just 
the same as the rera nyiwa, not only as warning, but with the 
aim of revealing the wizards and in order to get rid of them. 

This is how the ceremony is performed in Nondwane. When 
it has been decided, at the Capital, that all subjects shall undergo 
this ordeal, the chief sends word to the Shihahu folk to prepare 
the mondjo. These particular folk are a small clan inhabiting 
the left bank of the Nkomati, not far from the sea, northward 
of the district of Manyisa. The mondjo is cultivated by the 
medicine-men of Shihahu ; but they have by no means the mo- 
nopoly of it, for my neighbour, Hamunde, who lived at Rikatla, 
a few steps from the station, had one of these plants growing 
in his village, where I myself saw it. But it is at Shihahu that 

a! Ge == 
the recipe is known for the preparation of this magic philter. 
This is very complicated and intricate. ‘It contains several 
strange ingredients, amongst others, a fact to be noted, the fat 
of a leper long since deceased, or a little of his powdered bones! To 
make sure of the efficacy of the drink, the Shihahu folk expe- 
riment upon a certain individual named Mudlayi. This man is 
considered the very chief, the “bull” of all the wizards of the 
country (nkunzi ya baloyi). He is more powerful than all the 
others in casting spells. If, therefore, the decoction produces in 
him the characteristic intoxicating effect, by which the spell 
casters are discovered, it is certain that the brewing has been a 
success. If, by any chance, Mudlayi should not have been in- 
toxicated, word will be sent to the chief that the decoction has 
failed (yi hi hlulile), and another brew will be made, until the 
mondjo has attained the strength required. Then the people of 
Shihahu do not go directly to the chief, but, according to the 
rules of etiquette, to the counsellor who looks after the interests 
of their country. The other counsellors come to greet them, but 
the whole business is kept a great secret. Messengers are then 
sent to all the sub-chiefs, telling them to assemble, at a certain 
time, in a given place, bringing all their people with them. This 
general assembly takes place, on the borders of a lake. Every 
man and every woman must defile before the proprietors of the 
decoction and take a small mouthful of it, tepid, from a particular 
receptacle. Already at this stage of the proceedings some few, 
terror-stricken, make a confession : ‘*‘Ndja loya!” — “‘I ama 
caster of spells”, they cry. These persons are then collected to- 
gether and placed on one side under a tree. The rest sit down 
in a line, in the fiery glare of the noon-day sun. There they 
are, then, all seated and exposed to the torrid heat of the sun's 
rays. They have received the following order: ‘‘ Do not move! 
You must not scratch yourselves! Remain motionless!” 

Mudlayi begins to dance in front of them. With widely 
opened eyes he glares in a peculiar manner at those who have 
sipped the mondjo. In his hair is fixed a large feather, which 
he waves up and down by moving his head. Everyone gazes 
at him intently. 

ee 

Suddenly some one scratches his arm. Sounding his trumpet, 
nte~nte-nie, Mudlayi approaches the individual and places the 
feather in his hair over the forehead. The man tries to pull it 
out, but only clutches the air on one side or the other, in front 
of the feather. He is quite incapable of catching hold of it. 
A second individual begins to show the same symptoms of in- 
toxication (popya) a little way down the line. Mudlayi con- 
tinues his comings and goings to the sound of his trumpet. A 
third and a fourth are overcome in turn. They try to get up, 
clutching the grass to assist them to do so, but fall to the ground, 
or crawl feebly about. The others keep away from them. It 
seems that the mondjo dries up the saliva of all who drink it, 
but, in the case of the truly guilty, this effect is greatly accen- 
tuated; the jaws become locked. They try to speak but can 
only say be-be-be-be (they stammer). They are carried off, and 
all placed together under the tree where they are guarded by 
the chief’s counsellors, who will not allow their friends or re- 
lations to come near them. 

“* Selekan !” — “Get up!” is the order given to all the others, 
the seated crowd who have not become intoxicated. Jumping 
to their feet, they must run at full tilt to the lake and bathe. 
Some get into difficulties on the way, they jostle each other, fall 
to the ground, and remain there, unable to regain their legs. 
Some even fall down in the water; all such are baloyi. The 
rest who have successfully undergone the trial of the mondjo, 
come back and are restored to freedom, after having received 
three pinches of a special powder; one of these is thrown over 
the right shoulder, another over the left, and the third is swal- 
lowed, in order to counteract the defilement consequent on 
having imbibed this drink of the wizards, which contained in 
solution.... the fat of a human being! As to the poor, unfortunate 
hypnotised folk, their business is settled. The magic potion has 
revealed their criminal character. They must be made to admit 
their evil deeds. The counsellors interrogate them. To restore 
the power of speech, a particular tisane, prepared from the herb 
called thjeke, is poured into the mouth; they are shampooed 
(thlema) on the cheeks and all over the body with its leaves. 

 Tye"  

The saliva returns.. They gradually revive and then begin to 
speak : “Yes! I devour men! I ate so and so and I still have 
some of his flesh in store!... I hate so and so, and I would 
like to kill him, but I haven’t done so yet... I bewitched the 
maize to hinder its growth.” They are well reprimanded and 
told: “Cease your witchcraft and enchantments. Remove your 
spells from the cereals, let them grow properly, or we will 
kill you!” 

How can the effect of the mondjo be explained? According 
to an old Native, the intoxication of the baloyi comes from the 
presence of these elements of human flesh contained in the so- 
lution. The noyi, who swallows them in drinking the philter, 
happens to do during the day that which he is accustomed to 
during the night : hence the loss of his senses. As a matter of 
fact the man who administers the drug, is clever enough to give 
a larger dose to those who are more or less supposed to be 
baloyi. Moreover there is a regular process of hypnotisation in 
Mudlayi’s performance, and this is why some people fall into 
what seems to be a real cataleptic state. 

3) Tne puNIsHMENT OF WITCHCRAET. 

What is the punishment inflicted on the people convicted 
of the crime of witchcraft ? Let us remember that this is a crime, 
a homicide, an act doubly punishable by the Court Chief Shi- 
Juvane had regularly prohibited it by a decree in the following 
words: ‘I do not allow anybody to die in my country except 
on account of old age. So let the baloyi at once cease their 
enchantments, or I shall kill them all.” In former times the 
crime of witchcraft was punished by death and the culprit was 
hanged at once. The last one punished in that way, amongst 
the Nkuna clan, was Mudebane (I. p. 418), and Mankhelu 
himself executed him. The wizards are impaled, or drowned 
according to the case. Flogging and banishment were also re- 
sorted to when the crime was not so heinous. 

One of my informants (Fenis), who drank the mondjo at the 

SO ee 
death of Zihlahla, chief of the Mpfumo district, about r8ro, 
told me that the heaviest penalty imposed on the wizards on that 
occasion was a fine of one or two goats, or of one pound ster- 
ling. He attributed this leniency to the proximity of the Whites. 
The civilised Governments in Africa have certainly done their 
best to put down this method of smelling-out wizards, and 
their efforts have by no means been without result. Native 
chiefs are now content with fining the wizards £ 10 or 15, half 
of which remains in their pockets. I heard of one of them who 
pretended to be a Christian, but did not object to the substantial 
increase to his civil list, brought about by witchcraft suits. 

IV. Concluding Remarks on Witchcraft. 

Witcherait is one of the greatest curses of Native Life. I attribute the 
enormous hold which this superstition has taken on the mind of the 
Bantu to three causes: 1) The Animistic beliefs explained on p. 344 
which are at the root of the idea of the double existence of the baloyi. 
2) Cannibalism, which has perhaps never existed as a general custom 
in South Africa, but has been practised sporadically in times of 
famine, and has left a feeling of disgust) and horror, amongst the later 
generations : this feeling is also shewn in the numerous Ogre tales. 
3) The terrible hatred of which the Native mind is capable. If some 
people dare to accuse members of these tribes of such awful acts as 
those of killing and eating human flesh, it is because they know that 
a Native who hates would not shrink from anything to satisfy his desire 
of vengeance. 

However we must remember that the witchcraft superstition has been 
universally spread amongst our own forefathers, and that there have 
been epidemics of it in the XIVth, XVth and even the XVI centuries, 
hundreds of wizards having been tortured and burnt in most of the 
European countries, after having been tried before regular Courts. | 
have tried to establish a parallel between the ideas and practices of 
witchcraft in French Switzerland and those amongst the Thonga. The 
results of the comparison are very curious. I cannot give them all 
here, and must refer the reader to the Paris Revue ‘‘ Foi et Vie”, No 
of October, 1910, where I published them. The most striking diffe- 
rence is this: amongst Thonga, we are still in the predualistic age, viz , 

—— 498 = 

the opposition between a good, moral Spirit (God) and bad, wicked 
spirits (demons, Satan) does not yet exist in Religion. So the power 
of God is not invoked to disclose the wizards, or to protect the inno- 
cent against their epells. But the same animistic conceptions evi- 
dently lay at the base of European, as well as of African witchcraft. 

This superstition has a deadly effect on the Native life. It is for it 
a continual source of trouble, fear, quarrels, sorrow. Strange to say, 
it is on the increase in recent years. It ruins the villages. — ‘‘For- 
merly”, say my informants, ‘‘you could see villages of ten, or twenty 
huts. Now the accusations of witchcraft have broken them in pieces. 
Everyone builds his own hut, separately, from fear of being bewitched, 
or because he is suspected of being a noyi.” The evil affects the Native 
Christians communities ees. (1) fosters hatred amongst them, 
and this animistic doctrine is much more difficult to overcome than 
heathenism itself, or ancestrolatry, which is very quickly and tho- 
roughly abandoned by the converts. 

I have already explained how I think Government can and must 
interfere in order to check this terrible superstition. (I. p. 418). But 
its eradication will only be possible under a twofold influence : the 
increase of the scientific spirit, which will victoriously destroy the 
absurdities of the animistic magical conceptions involved in these prac- 
tices, and the Christian Rehan, the Religion of Love and of Light, 
which banishes fear and ey 

D. DIVINATION 

Divinatory practices are extremely common amongst Thonga. 
Surrounded by so many evil influences, having very little or 
no scientific knowledge, possessing no notion of a God capable 
of lighting the path of their life, they try to obtain directions 
by consulting the various means of divination which they have 
invented, fh it must be confessed that they have reached a high 
degree of proficiency in this domain. The anxiety to know the 

(1) Christian Natives are so convinced that witchcraft is a reality that they 
interpret Matt. X. 28 by saying that ‘‘those which kill the body and who must 
not be feared” are the baloyi. Unhappily a Zulu translation of the Greek 
word paowanol by baloyi, in Revelation Th Vv. I5, confirmed them in their 
idea that wizards certainly exist, as they are mentioned in the Bible! 

future lies at the base both of presages and of the divinatory 
practices. Let us briefly consider first : 

I. The presages. 

They are of two kinds : some objects are ill-omened, they 
singita or hlolela, they foretell bad luck; others are favourable 
and announce happiness and, more especially, plenty of meat ! 
Amongst the first we have already noticed: the falling stors 
(p- 287); the snail (p. 315): should you meet with it on the 
road, you will soon hear that one of your relatives has died ; 
the stem of cuscuta (yendje-yendje) ; there are families, however, 
for which this is not of bad omen, but for other people it 
foretells misfortune ; the mbonga bee is of the same order ; the 
various kinds of mistletoe are also of bad omen. So also is the 
puff-adder (p. 317), the likure (p. 317), a greyish slender snake : 
if it blows upon you, or bites you, you will become thin and 
turn grey, as the animal itself ; the long-legged bird shitshinya 
riendjo foretells misfortune on the road (p. 128). See also the 
buwumati snake and the nkangu bird. 

Other objects are of good omen; the beetle Eccopteptera and 
the Mutilla (p. 314), and especially the beetle Boméolosi, belong- 
ing to the Curculionidae family, a curious insect which 
drops on the ground and counterfeits death, when touched or 
frightened : it is the symbol of riches. Natives hang it on a 
string at their door ; I have heard of others hanging it in their 
hair; but in this case it is said to be placed there to eat lice ! 

All these superstitions are held more or less seriously. But, in 
order to know their fate and what they must do to avoid mis- 
fortune, Thonga have recourse to proper means of divination. 
Amongst these mantic practices some are simple and some more 
elaborate. 

II. Less important means of divination. 

1) Amongst these I may mention first the pshapsha, which 
corresponds to our ‘‘ drawing lots” and is performed exactly 
in the same way by taking pieces of grass or sticks of different 
length, between the fingers, and drawing one of them: having 
first decided to act in such and such a way if the longer or the 
shorter grass be drawn. This is more or less a game and is 
employed mostly by children. 

2) Another more serious means of divination is the mondjo, 
the enchanted philter, used as a regular means of procedure to 
obtain evidence in Court (I. p. 417), especially to discover 
wizards and adulterous women. It has been described at full 
length in the preceding paragraph. 

3) A third one is the divination by ecstasy which is employed 
by the magician when “ smelling out ” the wizards: The old 
men pretend that, in former times, there were diviners who 
could guess anything when in that peculiar psychological state 
in which the subliminal faculties can develop wonderfully. 
Hendrick, a very old Native of Khosen, told me, speaking of 
one of these shinusa (this is the term by which these diviners 
are known): “‘ He used to travel all through the land, practis- 
ing his art in the villages. He was able to describe minutely a 
goat which he had never seen ; or if somebody had buried 
something in a certain place to test him, he would go straight 
to the spot and say: ‘Dig the earth here, you will find it’. 
Viguet also asserted that formerly there were real and trust- 
worthy diviners in the Hlabi clans. 

4 & 5) A young man of the Mabota clan described to me two 
other divinatory means employed by his father, the old Tumben 
(I. p. 270). One was called the Small Mug (shintyekwana). 
The diviner used to take a wooden mug in his left hand and 
hold it by the handle. He placed in it an antelope’s or goat’s 
horn and, with his right hand he beat his right leg, putting the 
question he wanted to elucidate. He said: ‘‘Is the matter 

pa ae 

really as I say ?” If he had guessed rightly, the horn began to 
move to and fro ; if not, it remained quiet. Tumben also con- 
sulted the oracles by means of the Small Calabash (nbungu- 
bane). This calabash was fitted with some rags hanging from 
its neck. Moreover he passed a string round the calabash and 
held it hanging from the thumb of his left hand. He lifted 
that hand and with his right hand beat his right hip, putting 
questions to his magical calabash, calling it by the name be had 
given to it, viz., Nkoshi-wa-tihomu. When agreeing, the cala- 
bash answered by the rags, which moved in all directions. 
Then he said: ‘‘ Keep quiet!” and the calabash kept quiet. 
~ “He astonished us greatly, our father”, added my infor- 
mant! “* His divinatory power came from the fact that certain 
incisions had been made in his hand and a special medicine 
had been inoculated therein. He had been taught by a man 
called Shitakule. Those who have not been initiated cannot 
consult the calabash : the rags do not move for them, neither 
does the horn in the small mug ”’ 

These are still primitive means of divination. We now come 
to the more elaborate, the famous divinatory bones. But before 
explaining this most curious and interesting subject, I will des- 
cribe the Hakati, which proceeds from the same intuitions, but, 
being very much more simple, affords a useful introduction to 
the study of the bones. 

Il. he Hakati. 

Hakati (yin-tin) is the name given to the stone of a fruit 
growing in the desert. This stone is oval-shaped and is cut 
down the middle so as to form two pointed cupules presenting 
a small notch at each extremity. These extremities are both 
called nomu, mouth, though there is certainly an anterior part, 
the one which is pointed, and aposterior part, the one which is 
blunt. Six of these cupules constitute a whole set. Three are 
male (6), three female (Q), the former being distinguished merely 
by their larger size. In the set which I possess, some cupules have 

=e ae eae 

been marked with brands of different kinds. It does not seem 
that these marks have any significance, except that they help 
the diviner to recognise such and such a shell at once. The six 
shells are pierced through in the middle so that they can be 
passed through a string and hung round the neck. (See on the 
left side of the adjoining plate). 

The hakati is mostly employed in Hlengweland (Gaza), and 
r seems to have been invent- 

jt cD || ed by the Ndjao tribe ; the 
| Fd i siti 
| BD 7G | Ba-Ronga and Thonga of 
| | AS aS || other clans, found it there 
' = $- : 
= 

during the hunting expedi- 
QB tions, and brought it back 
#~.| | withthem. Itisused most- 

ly by hunters to obtain di- 

( 
XY 

Wigas rections and predictions as 
regards their undertakings. 
e& J) | Some also employed them 
YX for their eae attairs 
(psa muti), but they are 
: hardly sufficient tor this pur- 
pose. 

oe 

= I have given an_ illustra- 

ORAS tion of four cases which 

Spoon explained to me. 
The shells are thrown on a mat and two main things must 
be considered in the interpretation : the direction towards 
which they look and the side on which they fall : they may 
be on their back, in the negative position, showing the concavity 
of the shell, or on their “legs” in the positive position, showing 
the convexity of the shell. 

Ne 1. ‘Two female shells on their backs looking to the right: the 
women have remained sleeping in the village. Oneofthem (6 shell on 
her legs) is working. The male shell, on the top is the hunter who 
starts in the early morning, pursues the elephant (the & shell to the 
right) with his gun (the § shell at the bottom)... The hunter is on 

Deore ne 

his back : he has missed the elephant which runs away, being on his 
legs! Bad prognostic ! 

Ne 2. Same scene: Women sleeping at home ; early morning. 
But here the hunter is on his legs and the elephant on his back : the 
beast will be killed! Favourable prognostic ! 

Ne 3. Case of disease. Everybody on their backs, males and 
females! Very bad case! No hope! They hardly breathe |! 

Ne 4. Another case of disease. On the left, three shells; the shell 
_ in the middle is the patient ; that at the bottom, in the negative posi- 
tion, is his grief, his mouth wide open, moaning ; that on the top is a 
female one, a woman who caused his disease, either by bewitching him, 
or because he had unlawful connection with her. On the right three 
other shells : that at the top, the male one, is a friend going out of the 
village to fetch a remedy; the two others, female, are two women 
opening their mouth, not to lament, but to laugh! They laugh at 
that man who was silly enough to expose himself to such a disgrace ! 

Those who practice the hakati art must also be initiated. 
They have to bury their shells in the earth on the road, and, 
when a person passes on the path they unearth one shell, a male, 
one if the passer-by be a man, a female one if it be a woman, 
(See later on). 

IV. The Divinatory bones (Bula). 

The hakati shells are considered as a more or less childish 
custom. The divinatory bones, on the contrary, form an admi- 
rable system of divination and play a considerable part in the 
life of the tribe. They are called nblolo (yin-tin), this is the 
little name ; the great one is bula, evidently the same word as 
ku bula, to speak, i. e. the Word with a capital letter, the Reve- 
lation! I remember the old Maselesele, a Nkuna diviner, tell- 
ing me: “You Christians, believe in your Bible. Our Bible is 
much better than yours! It is the divinatory bones! ” 

I was initiated. into the knowledge of this wonderful art by 
many masters. The first one was Spoon; he was only a begin- 
ner, and his set of bones was not complete; but he understood 

a TAA 
the rules perfectly well and all that he told me was confirmed 
by a subsequent study. The second was. Maselesele, the old 
Nkuna just referred to, a blind man who knew his bones by 
the mere touch, and had for them a real veneration. Unhap- 
pily for the poor Nkuna, his hut was burnt during the Sikororo 
war (I. p. 484) and the precious. basket containing his bones 
was destroyed. — ‘* Why did they not warn you of the fate 
they were about to undergo? ”, I asked Maselesele one day. 
““ They might have ordered you to save them if they knew 
everything! ” He could find no answer to this remark, but his 
faith was absolutely unshakable. Such was also the case of 
Mankhelu who had practised the art all his life, and was attached 
to his divinatory bones by all the fibres of his heart. His set 
was the most complete I ever saw, containing as many as 64 
objects. He even had two sets, one contained in a leathern 
basket, the other in a kind of net with small meshes; the first 
he called che Father and the second the Son. The Father 
always remained at home, whilst he took the Son with him on 
his travels. I spent many hours with him, trying to fully 
understand his teaching and he took great trouble to initiate 
me, concealing nothing from me, wondering sometimes at his 
own willingness and saying: “ This thing I would not have 
told my own son.” So, I had the opportunity of reaching the 
depths of the Bantu mind, that mind which has perhaps 
invented nothing more elaborate and more typical than this 
divinatory system. Of course no sensible person would for a 
moment believe in the objective value of these practices. 
Astragalomancy has no more real worth than Cheiromancy, 
Necromancy and all the other ‘‘ mancies ”. But I am obliged 
to confess that the Thonga system is far more clever than any 
other which I have met with, and that it admirably answers to 
the wants of the Natives, as it comprehends all the elements of 
their life, photographs them, so to speak, in such a way that 
indications and directions can be obtained for all possible 
cases. 
I have explained in detail Spoon’s art in “ Les Ba-Ronga ” 

I will here confine myself to Mankhelu’s revelations which were 

Be AD ZS 
more complete, as the old man was one of the masters of the 
diviners’ profession as well as of that of the medicine-men. 

1) THE OBJECTS COMPOSING THE SET OF DIVINATORY BONES. 

They can be divided in two kinds: the bones properly speak- 
ing, most of which are astragalus bones, and the various objects 
which are not bones. I shall enumerate them now, always 
giving the Native name of the object, as these names are techni- 
cal and form quite a special vocabulary which seems to bear an 
archaic character. 

a) Amongst the bones some belong to domestic animals, goats, 
and sheep, and they consequently epresent the people dwelling in 
ihe village : 

Five astragalus of he-goats: 1) Mbulwa, astragalus of an old cas- 
trated he-goat, the old man. 2) Mbulwana (diminutive of 
mbulwa), a he-goat not so old : men of ripe age. 3) Shivimbiri. 
a non-castrated he-goat: men in their prime. 4) Shivimbidjana 
(diminutive of the preceding), a non-castrated younger he-goat: 
young men of sixteen to twenty. 5) Morisana wa timbuti shi-anwa- 
mafi, the astragalus of a kid which still suckles: litte boys, 
goatherds. a 

Six astragalus of she-goats : 1) Gosha nkata wa mbulwa, the old 
woman no longer capable of childbearing (1). 2) Miblangwana 
va bukati, shinyuki sha timbuti, a ripe woman still in the child bear- 

(1) This, as most of the bones, has a long story. When Mankhelu was 
made prisoner by the old Boer Government for having strangled a pretended 
wizard (I. p. 418), and condemned to death, a diviner consulted the bones for 
him and advised him to draw the image of a Native village on the earth and 
to pray every day to his ancestor-gods on his mother’s side. asserting that 
they would deliver him and that, when he returned home, he should sacri- 
fice a goat to them. He added: ‘‘ If people offer you a cow on the road, 
refuse”. Mankhelu was released indeed owing to petitions made in his 
favour, and, on his way home, everybody was welcoming him. In a village, 
people wanted to give him a cow: he refused. When he reached his kraal 
one of the wives of his maternal uncle came with twenty jars of beer, five 
baskets of mealies and three goats. He sacrificed one of these, and the astra- 
galus became the gosha of his set... He cannot see it without a thrill of the 
heart ! 

ee 

ing age, still smearing her body with ochre. 3) Ntibulana (from 
tibula, to bring forth a child for the first time) young married 
women, having only one child. 4) Nhombela, she-guat before 
parturition : girls practising the gangisa (1. p. 96), running about 
during the night but not yet married. 5) Nhombedjana and 
uhombedjana yo-anwa-mafi, littie goat and suckling goat : girls still 
unaware of sexual matters, or babies at the breast. 

The goats, here as every where else, mean the subjects. The 
sheep mean the chiefs. There are five astragalus of sheep : 
1) Hamba. nuna wa noni, a castrated ram, the chief and the old 
men of the royal family ; 2) shikwela sha limpfu or khura ra 
limpfu, a non-castrated ram: the sons of the royal family, the 
evyevets! (bana ba-ku-tsalwa). 3) Another shikwela, astragalus 
of the ram sacrified during the Sikororo war, the one whose 
psanyi was used for the sprinkling of the Nkuna army ; it desig- 
nates the enemy, and is watched with special attention when 
casting the bones in connection with military matters. 4) Noni 
wa timpfu, an old sheep, the widow of the chief. 5) Nhombela 
ya timpfu, a young sheep, the girls of the royal family. As 
regards the wife of the chief, she is represented by the astraga- 
lus of the female mhala antelope. 

In one of his sets of bones Mankhelu also had two objects 
taken from an ox. One was an oval shaped smooth bone, two 
inches long, the other one of the hoofs which was decorated on 
one of its three faces with triangular marks (See plate). Both 
represent the Nkuna tribe, whose totem is the buffalo. (Comp. 
I. p. 337). But this isa custom borrowed from the Suto-Pedi. 
I never saw bones corresponding to totems in the Thonga divi- 
nation; the idea of totem is altogether absent from the minds of 
the Thonga when not influenced by their Pedi neighbours. 

After the domestic animals, there are a number of astragalus, 
or other bones, taken from wild animals. 

First from antelopes: the male mbala, tsombe ra mbala, means the 
chief, and the female mhala, his wife; the male mhunti, tsombe ra 
mhunti, mbunti ya matlhari, the duyker of the weapons, means fight- 
ing men, and the female mhunti, called mbiri, means women of 
loose character : mbiri ya ku tola nwashifamba ni mafura eku rimen, 

7 Ohio == 
the woman who smears herself with grease and ochre, even 
when she goes to her field (thus trying to attract the attention 
of men). The nhlangu (reed buck), wandering about during 
the might, means wizards, as these cast their spells nightly. 
Mankhelu had only the astragalus of the female in his set. The 

Objects particularly remarkable in Mankhelu’s set of divinatory bones 

1. Mbalala antelope 6. -+. 2. Ram —. 3. Mhala antelope 6 x. 4. Reed 
buck @ :. 5: Phalanx -of-a_Lion -—". 6 Astragalus found in the dejecta of 

a hyena. Ancestor-god. 7. Malumbi +. 8. Ant-bear +. 9 Hyena -+-. 
10. Leopard +-. 11. Baboon +. 12. Kanye stone +. 13. Kanye : part of 
twig +. 14. Ox. 15. Ox hoof. 

mbalala antelope dwells in the forest; it does not like to come 
out in the plains; so its astragalus designates the chief who 

THONGA. TRIBE II — 32 

a 29S = 
rests in his hut and does not expose himself to the toil and the 
heat. 

The astragalus of the ngolube ya ku dya marambo, yi tjela mitshi yi 
ralarala, yi languta bi ma tlhelo, the wild boar which eats the bones, 
which digs holes, which looks on all sides, is the medicine-man 
who searches for roots to prepare his drugs. The female wild 
pig is the medicine man’s wife. 

Three astragalus of a very different form come from baboons, nuna 
wa mfene, the male baboon, usati wa mfene, the female baboon, 
nhombela ya mfene, the young baboon They symbolise the v/lage, 
because baboons never move. ‘“‘ You never see the ruins of their 
habitations ; though men may build in their neighbourhood, 
these apes do not leave for ever, you will see them coming again 
next spring. ” 

The following bones are asexual. There is only one of each 
kind in the set and it is not said whether it is male or female: 
the phalanx of a lion (ndjao), either male or female, either taken 
from the fore leg or from the hind leg, either on the left or on 
the right side. The lion is the chief of wild animals, so its 
phalanx represents the chief of the tribe, par excellence. It also 
designates White people, who are considered as rich as kings ! 
The astragalus of the panther, yingwe, shidya mafura, the beast 
which eats fat and eats no grass, is also alone of its kind, 
the male only being taken; it represents those who can 
chose their food, the rich, not the miserable, ‘‘ the chiefs and 
you, White people”, says Mankhelu! The hyena, mbisi, means 
the counsellors, the sycophants, the parasites; they resemble the 
hyena which tollows the lion and the panther to eat the remains 
of their feasts, breaking the bones of a prey which it was not 
strong enough to kill! But the astragalus of the hyena also 
represents the wizards, because they eat the meat of people whom 
they steal, the ancestor-gods, because it keeps hidden in holes 
during the day, as the psikwembu in their graves, the chief him- 
self, inso much as the chief also “eats” his subjects and you 
cannot follow him and recover your property any more than 
you can from a hyena! 

The astragalus of the ant-bear (mhandjela), which digs the holes 

e, Ae ee 

in which porcupines live, has also many significations : the ances- 
tor-gods, because they dwell in the earth and never come out 
in the day-time; the power of death, because it digs the grave ; 
the chief himself, because ant- bears eat earth, and the chief also 
puts it to his mouth when sacrificing ; he alone has the right 
to do so, when he says sw. because the earth is his; it already 
belonged to his ancestors and he calls to them through it (p. 378). 
Spoon used one of the claws of the ant-bear, instead of its as- 
tragalus 

A very curious bone is the one called Shikwembu, ancestor-god. 
It is an astragalus of mhala which has been found in the stools 
ofa hyena: a most uncommon discovery and one which Ma- 
nkhelu made when going to Swaziland. The bone is worn down: 
it has evidently been bitten by sharp teeth. I have explained 
(p. 350) how fittingly this bone was chosen to represent the 
spirits of the departed. They have also been swallowed by the 
earth, as the astragalus by the hyena, but they come again to 
light and life in a new and divine existence! 

The last astragalus of the set is the malumbi, the astragalus of 
the shipene or mangulwe antelope ; it is also asexual : shirombe sha 
matiko, malumbyana wa tintibo, ntsinyarendjo! the miserable of the 
lands, the little antelope with white spots, the one which stops 
travellers (p. 325)! It plays a special part in the divinatory 
system, representing everything which is violent (leba) : the 
chief, the enemy and especially the mysterious power of Hea- 
ven. his is why it is watched with great attention by those 
casting bones in regard to the rain. When it falls in the 
“mild” position, it means that “the eye of Heaven is open, 
the knot is untied, the mouth of Heaven is open, rain will 
fall!” Then Mankhelu will present the offering (mhamba) for 
the rain : first the four leaves, then, if this is not sufficient, 
and if the chief requires it, the sacrifice of the black ram (p. 295, 
300). 

[ include in the category of bones the pieces of Tortoise shell, 
mfutju, four of which are found in Mankhelu’s basket : mbulwa 
wa mfutju, the adult male tortoise, nsali, nlibula ya mfutju, the 
young tortoise. According to the way they fall, these objects 

designate the peace or the misfortune of the village, prosperity 
or starvation. (1) 

b) The second category comprises the objects which are not 
bones or parts of the body of an animal. The most conspi- 
cuous are the sea-sheils (djuma, dji-ma) belonging to two diffe- 
rent genera : the Oliva shells, representing the attributes of the 
males, assagais, virile courage, etc., the Cypraea shells, cor- 
responding to the attributes of the females, baskets, pots, 
pregnancy, births, oxen for lobola, etc. 

Besides there are two kanye stones of an abnormal form, one 
found by a woman, it is the female nkanye, the other by a man, it 
is the male nkanye. ‘These abnormal stones are very rare They 
represent the vegetal world, especially the medicines, the drugs. 
They are supplemented by a little piece of nkanye twig, nhom- 
bela ya nkanye, the girl of nkanye, which was cut by a girl of 
Mankhelu’s village on a certain day when he went to his 
“ bakokwana ” (to the relatives of his mother) to make a sacri- 
fice. Being their uterine nephew, he had special rights and 
took the opportunity of enriching his divinatory set with their 
assistance. 

Two stones are also in the basket : the first is ribye ra ngwenya 
or shimidjya sha ngwenya, a stone found in the stomach of a cro- 
codile; these stones are generally of a dark colour and fre- 
quently represent mourning, defilement (khumo, nsila); the 
second one is ribye ra dayiman, the stone of diamond, not a real 
diamond unhappily, but a stone with striking tecdgant found on 
the road, or in distant lands, by a traveller. It means luck, 
money, riches brought from foreign countries, gold which is 
extracted from the soil, in the same way as was this stone. I 
have shewn on the adjoining plate the most curious and rarest 
of the contents of Mankhelu’s basket. In that of Maselesele 
there were also two pieces of white china, which 1 represented 

(1) One day travelling through a heavy rain, Mankhelu found a tortoise. 
He borrowed one of his divinatory bones from it. Soon afterw ards he dis- 
covered an animal (I did not catch what it was) which had just died and he ate 
it. Some time later he was offered a big he-goat in a village. So when the 
tortoise falls together with the astragalus of that animal, it is a sign that plenty 
of meat will be available ! 

a OT 
the Whites; another Nkuna diviner had adopted the shuttle of a 
sewing-machine for the same purpose. But these are new- 
comers in the basket, and are not met with in the old sets. 

Comparing the explanations of the old Nkuna Mankhelu, who 
had been initiated long ago and was an experienced diviner, 
with those of Spoon who belonged to the Coast clans and was 
still a beginner in this art, I found a remarkable uniformity. 
However, there are some differences which can be explained by 
the wonderful imagination of the diviners. For instance, the 
wild pig indicated for Spoon the ancestor-gods, because they 
dwell in the sacred woods and dig the earth. and also old rela- 
tives who are on the eve of becoming gods; the duyker meant 
the wizard because it also walks during the night, and the tra- 
veller because it rarely rests. 

Though the bones have a determinate and essential meaning, 
they can also designate other objects if it is possible to establish 
a similarity between the animal and these objects, and we know 
how clever the Bautu mind is at discovering such relations be- 
tween men and animals. 

2) ‘THE RULES OF INTERPRETATION. 

Mankhelu is ready to consult his bones, either in his own 
village, if he wants a guidance for himself, or in the hut of one 
of his customers who may have called him for a consultation. 
He puts aside the supernumerary objects : each animal is repre- 
sented by two astragalus, as a rule, so he first removes any 
third or fourth, if they happen to be in his basket. He 
holds them firmly between his two hands, chews a little 
piece of an odoriferous root (the bulb of Liliacea called shiru- 
ngulu), spits on them in order ‘‘to awaken them”, or “‘to make 
them see” (hanyanyisa), and throws them on a mat saying: 
‘“Mamoo!” Should he operate in another village for other 
people, in the case of disease, for instance, the inmates are pre- 
sent, sitting near the mat on which the bones are thrown. It 
may be that the consulter himself will throw the bones: in any 

a 502 — 

case all answer: ‘‘Hizwaa! si ya vuma” SRE Ves te: eine 
agreed!” All of them intently look at the bones scattered in 
all directions to learn what has been revealed by the Word. 
Possibly there will be a correspondence between the way the 
bones fall and the case for which the consultation is made. For 
instance, if it is on account of a sick person, the astragalus repre- 
senting that person has fallen in the negative position. Then 

Consulting the bones. Phot. A. Borel. 

the “* Word” has spoken. If there is no correspondence what- 
ever, the bones are thrown again, once, twice, or ten times! If 
they “refuse to speak”’ (yala) in the hut, the diviner will per- 
-haps move to the square, or to the bush, or behind the hut, 
until a clear answer is given. 

Suppose the bones have consented to speak : three or four 
things will be specially examined: the side on which the bones 
have fallen, the direction towards which they look, their disposi: 
lion or the position they have taken in regard to each other, and 

SSP ates ae 
the relation of the male and the female bones with each other, 
viz., are all the male or all the female bones on the same side ? 
Each object can fall on two sides, as all of them present a convex 
and a concave side. If thev fall, showing the convex side (bukha- 
tsha position), they are said fo be full (ku tala), or to sland on their 
legs and to march forward (ku famba); this is the positive side, which 

Phot. H. A. Juned. 

Mankhelu imitating the « ntjumba » position. 

I mark +3 if they fall showing their concave side (lwandla posi- 
tion) they are emply (ku pshya, image of a lake which has dried 
up), or lie on their back: this is the negalive position which I mark 
by In the first case, the person or principal represented by 
the bones is happy (tjaka), in peace (rula), active, marching, 
powerful; in the second he is tired (karala), ashamed (tingana), 
powerless, dying (fa). Astragalus of goats, and sheep, on their 
convex side, show that the inhabitants of the village, or the chief, 

ee 
are in good health and good spirits, working, succeeding ; on 
their concave side, they show that those persons are lying ill or 
dying. On the other hand, the astragalus of the ant-bear in the 
positive position, indicates that the digger digsa grave, that ances- 
tor-gods are awake and probably ready to punish, etc. So it 
would not be correct to call the convex side the favourable, 

Phot, H, A, Junod, 
Mankhelu imitating the « minkono » position. 

and the concave side the unfavourable one. ‘The first is the aclive 
position, the second the passive one. — Most of the astragalus can 
fall not only on these two principal sides, but also on the ee 
or on the left side. The right side is called nijumba, and i 
somewhat convex. Mankhelu explained to me its meaning < 
mimicking the position himself (See the adjoining plate). He 
is sitting, his shield protecting him; but bis chest full, ready to 
spit (like a cat), and his assagay is lifted 1 ready to be thrown; 

this is the position of hostility, of anger. The left side is 
called dzwari, or minkono, viz., the elbows; it is somewhat con- 
cave. It is the position of a man half leaning on his elbows, 
his chest empty, enjoying life and not threatening others, the assa- 
gay being turned towards the soil (See the next plate). These 
two positions which I would represent by ><, the sign of mul- 
tiplication for ntjumba, and : , the sign of division for minkono, 
are rarely met with. Spoon ignored them. They belong to 
a more elaborate art. In fact the two first positions are by far 
the most common. Let us see what is the meaning of some of 
the divinatory objects in those different positions : 

Baboon -+, the village is firm; no ruin! Baboon —, the vil- 
lage is destroyed ; disease or death; that which you eat does not 
remain inside: dysentery. 

Ancestor-god -+, the gods are happy and thankful. Ances- 
tor-god —, they sleep; there is nothing to fear. x, they are angry 
they speak in alow voice; : , they speak mildly. 

Kanye +, the drugs have their eyes open (the two kernels 
inside the nkanye stone have been removed, and it looks as if 
it had two eyes which are visible in the positive position and hid- 
den in the negative); the drugs help, cure. Kanye —, the eyes 
of the drugs are closed ; the medicine-man will not succeed. 

Crocodile stone +, the country is in peace, the village is 
happy, no miscarriage. Crocodile stone —, the crocodile is 
hidden in the water, it waits for you and will kill you: starva- 
tion, death, defilement. 

Tortoise-shells +, the village is smeared with ochre; every 
body perspires agreeably, walking slowly as tortoises do when 
they come out, enjoy the rain, eat grass. People drink beer. 
They eat plenty. Tortoise-shell —, misfortune in the village; 
everything looks black (the concave side of the tortoise-shell is 
rough and more or less black). Nothing is cared for on the 
square ; the grass grows there; disorder, death, starvation. 
The tortoises are hidden in their holes. 

Female sea-shells +, the rivers are full; pregnancy is normal ; 
the riches which come by the sea on the steamers are well pro- 
tected. Female sea-shells —, the rivers are empty; birth is 

eS 50G., ee 
imminent, either favourable or not; there has been a wreck at 
sea : you will find riches on the shore! 

Male sea-shells +, the assagais are in good condition ; men 
succeed in their undertakings. Male sea-shells — , assagais are 
broken; the army will be defeated. 

Sea-shells in the negative position, showing their opening, also 
mean a mouth open to laugh or to cry: if all are in this posi- 
tion, it means lamentaticns, because when all the people open 
their mouths, it is always to lament; when two or three only 
show their teeth, it means laughter, as people never laugh all 
together, but only a few at a time (?!) 

If the side on which the bones have fallen is to be considered 
before all else in the interpretation, the direction towards which 
they look is also very important, as it reveals the intentions and 
the movements of all the personages represented ; their disposition 
shows the relation between those persons ; moreover if all, or 
most, of the astragalus of the same sex fall in the same position, 
this is a sign to be particularly noted for the following reason: 
ifa woman is sick and you want to receive directions as to what 
to do for her, you cast the bones: she-goat falls on the negative 
side; this proves that the Word speaks; but if all the other femi- 
nine astragalus show their concave side also then no doubt re- 
mains; the Word really speaks : a precious confirmation is giv- 
en ! 

3) SoME CASES OF ASTRAGALOMANCY. 

My informants have explained to me a certain number of 
cases which will illustrate the system of astragalomancy better 
than anything else. I have published illustrations of seven of 
them in an article in the Bulletin IX of the Society of Geo- 
graphy of Neuchatel. ‘They were given to me by Spoon. I 
will here republish one of them, the case of the sick mother, 
and two new ones, much more complicated, which I owe to 

Mankhelu. 

7 aes: 

These three cases will be sufficient to illustrate the divinatory 
system. Let me give, as a preliminary, the two following instances : 

Prediction of rain: Ram >< and Mhala x, the chief is full of confi- 
dence; the He-goats, the headmen are glad and thankful; Mbalala +, 
the chief is happy ; it will be wet in the forest! Tortoises —, there is 
black everywhere; the soil is dark on account of the rain. Olivae +, 
all the huts are closed because nobody dares to go out lest he will be 
soaked ! Baboons +, the village will eat plenty. If Baboon were —, 
the rain would be accompanied with bad winds which would break 
the mealies and bring starvation. 

The place where the timbhorola (the dirt falling from the body of a 
convalescent during the hondlola rite, p. 428) must be thrown, Here 
the diviner proceeds by questions, in order to obtain the directions 
required. He asks: ‘‘In the river?” and throws the bones ; if the 
astragalus of the patient falls in the -++ position, Male Tortoise also, the 
female astragalus are on their elbows, playing, smiling ; if the Lion is 
— (the bad bloods have been overcome) ; if Hyena is — (the disease 
which kills is vanquished), the Ant-bear is — (the gods sleep), the 
female Tortoises are 4+-, meaning that women will soon be able to 
smear their bodies with ochre, — then the answer is : yes. If this is 
not the case, he asks: ‘‘Into an ants’nest ?” and he again throws the 
bones, until the answer is positive. 

The chiefs always consult the bones to know if the time has come 
to sow the seeds of pumpkins and millet. If all the Sea-Shells fall 
showing their mouths (yahlama), if the astragalus of the ram and ewe 
are in the + position, then you may sow. 

See, p. 440, how the bones are consulted in order to obtain direc- 
- tions in the riles of exorcism, and, p. 479, how they help to disclose the 
wizards. 

a) The case of the sick mother. 

See in the centre She-goat —; the mother is sick, on her back! 
Above Antelope + and under the red Oliva +, Malumbi, are looking 
towards her: these are the malignant influences which have put her in 
this state. Cypraea — wide-open, on her left, shews that she suffers 
from dysentery! At the extreme left see Weaned-Kid + and Young 
Goai ++ on their legs, walking ; they are going towards He-goal, the 
father, who is also +, not quite discouraged, and pointing toward 
the kanye, the medicine by which he hopes to help his wife. By so 

doing he keeps in check Wild sow, the ancestor-god, who is thus 
prevented from adding his hostile influence to those already active. 
Near him is Kid —, a young boy on his back, quite in despair, 
remaining near his mother. The father, having spoken with his chil- 
dren, starts for the bush and he follows the three arrows shewn at the 
bottom of the plate. Look, on the right, Gazelle, Duyker + ; it is he 
again who returns from his walk asa traveller (the duyker, being always 
on his legs, often represents travellers). He holds the drug he has dug 
up (Kanye —). But this kanye stone is on the bad side ; it has been 
difficult to find the roots which were penetrating into the soil, as do 
the two protuberances of the stone! Moreover two Crocodiles’slones 
speak of death: the little Oliva + looks at the father in a hostile 
way. The bones of the upper part, on the right, contain no encou- 
ragement whatever: Wild pig + is an old relative coming to pay a 
visit to the sick woman ; he is accompanied by a girl, Young She-Goat, 
under him, who also goes to the village with lamentations shown by 
the open Cypraea in front of her; on the top, Ant-bear (fourmilier ) 
“comes to dig the grave! Near him Gazelle — is on her back, without 
strength, whilst Tortoise —, at the left corner, lies also on her back : 
no agreeable perspiration, no peace, no happiness. 

The bones have given a triple revelation : they have depicted the 
actual position, shown its cause, and indicated its course and the 
rémedy: the disease is serious, but there is ground for hope if the 
father finds the right drug. Should the astragalus of the He-goat have 
been on its back and that of the Wildsow on its legs, directed against 
the patient, the case would be hopeless. 

b) The battle of Moudi. 

On the 6th of November, 1900, when the hostile army of Sikororo 
was signalled (I, p. 485), Mankhelu, seized with a terrible dread, 
consulted his bones. The Word spoke with such precision that one 
would be tempted to believe in an arrangement made post eventum., 
But Mankhelu asserts that many witnesses were present and testify to 
the prophecy of the victory which occurred the following day. 

The bones fall in two lots, a first lot, those on the two upper thirds 
of the plate, on the side of the diviner, representing consequently his 
own army: complete victory! A second lot, in the lower third of the 
plate, representing the enemies: absolute rout! I have separated these 

‘IDYIOW YIIS YI JO Is" IIT, 

25 wabuigy 

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two parts with dots. Look at the inferior part first. Three Rams on 
their backs ; the chiefs killed; the Ram is Rios, the acting chief of the 
Sikororo clan, the great enemy. Yesterday a ram was sacrificed to 
ask the gods to give victory, Its astragalus was taken and added to 
the other bones, with the intention of representing Rios: here he is, 
dead on the battle-field! Quite near, Wild pig and Kanye are also 
on their backs : their medicine-man has been unable to protect them. 
Baboon is —, the village of Sikororo is destroyed ! Tortoises —, no 
peace in that village, they are black! No resplendent ochre, but 
darknéss and misfortune for them! Female mhala x, the women 
have their chests full of grief; they cry. See all the female astra- 
galus-on their backs, or on their sides, in dreadful misfortune. 
Oliva —“the weapons broken, powerless. Two Cyprea +, no 
laughter, faces dark ! Hyena —, Titus, a Pedi Christian who acted 
as counsellor to the chief, the sycophant of Rios, has been killed. 
Look, on the left corner, at the bottom, Ram +. It is the old Si- 
kororo, the chief who dwelt in the mountains and had not given his 
consent to the treacherous attack. He is alone, unaware of what 
has been done by Rios, the chief regent. The Nkuna will not inter- 
fere with the good old man. 

On the Nkuna side, Lion and Malumbi are in the foreground ; the 
one + the other X, viz. full of courage : they represent the superior 
powers : you, Ba-Moneri (the missionaries), who have helped us in 
that terrible hour! Leopard +, the sons of the chief are also running 
wildly towards the enemy. Ox +, the totem of the Nkuna clan is in 
good order; he is safe. Shikwembu sleeps; the ancestor-gods are 
not anxious about us; they rest peacefully. Wild pig +, the medicine 
man who sprinkled the army is happy; all his drugs (kanye ++) are 
acting, having their eyes open. Look behind Malumbi: all the troops 
of warriors, Mhunti, Mhala, all in the atjumba position, in high spirits, 
and their arms (Oliva +-) all firm, victorious. The guns will not miss 
fire, Behind them, the kids and young goats, little boys and girls, 
are playing, quietly leaning on their elbows (minkono position). The 
chief (Mbabala +-) who remained at home is happy, as is also the old 
He-goat, his uncles who did not take part in the battle. Ant-bear +, 
the ancestor-god of the village is also quiet ; the two Tortoises + warm 
themselves in the rays of-the sun; the women still smear their bodies 
with fat and ochre ! 

The battle of the 6th of November, 1900, was a great event for the 
Nkuna tribe. For me it was a wonderful Opportunity of witnessing 

qi © 

Crocodile 

Kid + 

) 
| 
| Baboon + 
| Kid 4+ 
Kanye 4+ 

Young goat? 

Mother Goat + e 5 

Kid; 

Baboon + 

Oliva + 

Mhala $ Wild Pig+ 

Mbabala 4+ Cpee Shikwembu — 
> Duiker Ex 
&\ : 
alow BS 

Kanye -+ 

Young Ram — 

Young Ram— Ram — 

Tortoise 9 — . 
| Wit” EE } Goat >< 

Oliva — 

Mhala 2 x 
| Goat 
| we 
| Ram -- Cypraea -- Reedbuck 2 

Tortoise — 

Baboon — 

(One third of the natural size). 

The battle of Moudi 

some of the most curious customs of the tribe. I owe to it this con- 
sultation, the narrative of Mankhelu’s mhamba’ (p. 382) and the 
knowledge of many military rites (I. p. 451). 

c) Prophecy of a Migration. 

In the day of renewing his drugs, which was a feast for his whole 
village (p. 415), Mankhelu threw his bones and they gave marvellous 
promises : a throng of distinguished visitors was going to come and 
make their submission to him, to increase his power ; princes, rich 
people laden with wealth! As Mankhelu was residing on the Mission 
farm, he said to me one day: “ Be happy, my missionary, you will 
have new tenants who will increase the value of your farm! They 
prepare their loads now... My god, Shiluvane, has revealed that to 
me. They will come before the tilling season begins. If they do not 
come I will give you an ox!” Some months later, no one having ap- 
peared on the horizon, I inquired from my old friend where was my 
ox. With a good-natured laugh he said: ‘* Look! I will show you 
how the bones have told me lies”, and he placed his sixty-two bones 
on the mat as they had fallen on that day : 

There are the two halves again, separated by the dotted line; in 
the lower part the migrating clan coming, in the upper, Mankhelu’s 
village welcoming it: Two Baboons —, the village is ruined, they 
leave it ; their chiefs are Lion, who is +, in good health, and Ram:, 
laughing, smiling, playing. Malumbi is <; his chest is full, be- 
cause he runs away ; he is a powerful man, but he is out of breath. 
See near Ram his daughter Duyker 9 on her back : he offers her in 
marriage. She will even give us a child (young male Duyker near 
her!) The child will be a boy, as he is surrounded by Tortoise 4 and 
the male shell Oliva. These chiefs might have been dispossessed of 
their own country : this is shown by the Ram of Mapsakomo; this 
astragalus was taken after a sacrifice made at the death of Mapsa- 
komo, the rival of Muhlaba, who died from anger when his right 
to the chieftainship of the Nkuna clan was forefeited Cl ps 385). 
Young He-goat, in front of him, also proves the foreign origin of the 
Visitors : it is an astragalus which Mankhelu obtained in the Mpahlela 
district, South of the Oliphant. Young goat, playing, shows the 
same thing, its astragalus came from Swaziland. Look, in front of 
her, another Young goat —; it is a girl who is offered us in mar- 

‘ \ 
jae 
kt 
we 
y Reedbuck 
Kid 
Cypraea +. 

Oliva 
Mbala + 

Kimberley stone = | He-Goat ++ | 

dy | 

¢ | 

He-Goat —- Kid - 
Crocodile + Mother. Goat; 
Kanye = 
Mbabala g + Tortoise - 9 eh 
Young Goat 4 
Mbabalads é 
Tor 

toise — 
Sikororo Ram  1 | Baboon f | 
Tortoise — Crocodile —-= y | 
aed es | 
a / Kanye 4 fron Goat 3 Bee | 
Goat + pee 
sa Duiker 9 +b Young Goat + ere 

Seo ar = Wild Sow @ tinceieciee Jab -- aga / 
Sere 

mae ie! Young Gort (Zulu)? 
Ram: PNG os Young Duiker $ 2 he? \ 
Hyena + : » 7 / i 
¢ Young. He-Goat + 
Kanye (Mpablela) | 
Malumbi > Tortoise $ — 
Cypraea + 
Ant-bear 
J Ram of Mapsakomo =. 
Leopard ‘ f 
One Kanye \ | 
Shikwembu ¢ Wild Pig b4 Mhala 9 + 
eG, Cynical Evang ier Goats e | 
Ewe 9 + | 
& Tortoise s + Duiker $ 
é | 
Lion + Baboon = Baboon — 
(One third of natural size), 
Prophecy of a Migration. - 

riage, perhaps a second one, perhaps the same as Duyker 9; at any 
rate the prediction is confirmed. This Young goat is called that of 
ringela bovumba, because its astragalus has been taken from the animal 
sacrificed: in the rite of removing the malediction of bovumba (I. 
p. gt). It might show that the misfortune of these noble strangers 
will also be removed when they come and dwell with us! Hyena is in 
the + position: they are cunning people; nobody will dare to run 
after them! They keep firm hold of what they possess or have stolen! 
Leopard +; they are rich people, living on fat and meat. Look at the 
two Cypraea +, the sea! the wealth brought into the country by the 
steamers and which they carry with them! One could think they 
were White people! Wild pig +, they have their medicine-man 
and their drugs (kanye +); their children (voung He-goat : and 
Duyker & : play and dance ! Their women (Mhala + Ewe. +) are co- 
vered with ochre as shown by Tortoise-+. Their gods, Shikwembu :, 
and Antbear +, are with them and have ‘‘given them the road’ ; 
they are pointing in the same direction. ‘‘ Look at Ewe,. the old 
woman, the widow of the chiefs! What has she hanging round her 
neck ? — Oliva, a crocodile-tooth ? an amulet well smeared with 
protective drugs?” Such is the procession of the new-comers. 

In the upper half, see the village of Mankhelu welcoming them : 
the young children and the women run in front (Duyker 2 +-, Young 
Duyker +, Young Goats + and :, Young Ewe +, Ntibula +-); they 
are curious, they will see who are the visitors. Behind them come 
the old ones : Mbabala 9 +, the wife of the chief; the chief him- 
self, Muhlaba, Mbabala 6 is on his elbows: quiet and smiling, in no 
way fearing this peaceful invasion, whilst his mother, Mother-Goat, 
also comes dancing. Baboon +, does it not show that the village is in 
security ? Mankhelu himself is represented by three bones: Ram + 
and two He-goats +. He,comes with dignity to meet the arrivals. 
Behind, in the village itself (on the top of the plate), boys (kids) 
play under the shade of the trees (kanye); two women kill each 
other’s lice! i. e. Reedbuck and Cypraea, the female sea-shell! etc. 
One of the Tortoises is —, showing its black side. But this is nota 
sign of disease or defilement; it is the village cleaned, the black soil 
visible everywhere, because it has been well swept and the huts also 
have been smeared afresh. The black colour also means the bush 
which has been burnt; it prophesies the time when these strangers 
will come : when the bush-fire has reduced all the grass to ashes, in 
September or October, at the end of the winter. The Tortoise in 

= 515 + 
front of He-Goat is -++; it is the face of Mankhelu, radiant with joy. 
‘* Mahlwen ka mbulwa ku nyuka!” — “ on the face of the old man 
there is sweet perspiration.” His drugs are all right (kanye +, 
means both drugs and shade). Crocodile is —, the rivers are low; 
this confirms the forecast of the time of the arrival. The Kimberley 
stone is +; the earth is solid, firm. Oliva +, the sky is clear, we 
are happy! When we rise in the morning we look towards the East! 
econ 

— ‘* Wonderful!” said I to Mankhelu. ‘*Only they did not 
come!” — <“* Never mind,” he answered. — ‘* Then the bones have 
deceived you!” — “Not at all! If it is not: this year, it will be 
next year! Moreover, we diviners do not fear to be told that our 
bones lie. When, later on, our prophecies are fulfilled, then people 
wonder! They are convinced. And after all, if the Word lies, it 
is not my fault” ! — “ How is that >” — «« We do not put our ideas 
into them (a hi ti rumeteli); we merely interpret them ; it is they 
who speak!” — <‘* Then they have a power in themselves ?” — 
‘“No! the power is in the chest of the diviner.” Such was the 
conversation by which the demonstration was closed. I shall return 
to it presently. 

4) THE INITIATION OF THE DIVINERS. 

The astragalomancy is not an esoteric art; every one in the 
tribe knows the bones, and their signification, and all the men 
attend the consultations and help in the interpretation. However, 
every one is not a diviner and an initiation is necessary to 
become a fully qualified practitioner. If a young man feels that 
he has the necessary qualities of cleverness and shrewdness to 
practise the art, he begins by collecting the astragalus one after 
the other. This is a long job. Spoon told me that, having 
once been annoyed by a forecast made by a diviner, he thought: 
““T might as well consult the bones myself!” So he picked up 
the astragalus of a goat in a hut. He obtained others when 
hunting ; on the road to Johannesburg he saw a curious stone 
which became the stone of luck in his set. When he had ten 
astragalus, he began to throw them for his comrades, giving 
them advices in their love affairs! ‘Then he consulted his bones 

be. 5 I 6 ae! 

before going to hunt and noticed that, when the astragalus 
of the duyker fell in the negative position, he killed game. But 
he was still an apprentice; he had not the right to receive 
money, but only bracelets which hung on the string of his bas- 
ket. (1) When the apprentice has earned enough of these 
bracelets, he goes to an old practitioner, gives them to him as 
a fee, and asks to be initiated, so as to become a master himself. 
Shishakane, in the Movumbi district, and Nwahofiwana, in the 
Mabota clan, were those to whom such applications were made. 
These are the ceremonies of initiation amongst the Ba-Ronga. 
The master takes all the bones collected by the apprentice, 
kills a fowl, introduces them into the body, (2) and cooks 
the whole. Then the candidate eats the fowl, returns home 
with his bones and buries the astragalus on the road, at the 
entrance of the village. He hides himself there, on watch. When 
a woman passes, he exhumes a female astragalus; when a man, 
a male one: the he-goat, when it is a man of ripe age, the kid, 
when it is a boy, etc. In this way all his bones are said to 
“have returned to him”. Then he again calls on the mas- 
ter. The old man orders him to close his eyes and puts before 
him all his bones in a line ; the candidate must recognise them 
all by touch and take them all one after the other, pronoun- 
cing the name of each one. The examination evidently aims 
at ascertaining if he knows them thoroughly well. Having suc- 
cessfully passed through the trial, the new diviner must undergo 
a hondlola: a long ablution with nkuhlu leaves, after which he 
is initiated ; he has the right of asking payment in cash, as 
much as three pence. For one shilling, he will consent to throw 
the bones all day until they have revealed everything 
Amongst the Nkuna the initiation is somewhat different : 
the apprentice does not exert his art until he has earned a goat. 
He practises in foreign villages, where he is not known and 
where people believe that he has already been initiated. Having 

(1) The divinatory basket of Spoon is shewn on the plate p. 107, No 2. 

(2) I suppose that he adds his own bones to those of the applicant, in order 
that their divinatory virtue may enter the bones of the candidate. This is the — 
rule followed in the Nkuna i itiation. See later on. 

Se 
succeeded, he brings the animal to the master and will then 
““ have his bones cooked for him” (a ta psekeriwa bula). One 
of the forelegs and the diaphragm are put in a pot together with 
a root called banga. The set of bones of the master and that 
of the apprentice are added to them, and the whole is cooked. 
When the meat is done, the contents of the pot are poured into 
a lihlelo basket and both draw in the broth with their lips. 
Then they eat the meat cut in pieces without touching it with 
their hands, seizing it with their teeth alone, “ the sameas vul- 
tures do, those vultures, which scent meat from far away ”. 
The heart of one of these birds has been cooked with the other 
drugs ‘‘so that the new diviner will be able to dream of things 
which are far away and go straight to them”. He will be able 
to go and guess anything at once without fear nor hesitation. 

The bones having remained in the lihlelo basket, another drug 
is used to wash them: it is the bark of a tree called mbandjwa. 
Then the new diviner must show his power of divination: 
all his astragalus being mixed with those of the master, he must - 
choose them without an error, calling them by the name he 
gave them. If he fails, the trial must be renewed after a time: 
he returns home and the bones are given a rest; he then comes 
another day and the two sets are dipped again (in beer, this 
time); the beer having been drunk by both the master and the 
apprentice, the bones are washed, thrown and the latter must 
now choose them again. He will probably succeed, and so be- 
comes a master. But the old diviner gives him one of the bones 
of his own set, which will ‘‘ reign over the set of the initiated”. 
This bone will always be first considered : it is the father and 
the mother of the set. If the other bones indicate bad omen, the 
new diviner will not be troubled as long as the king of the set 
shows good one. If, on the other hand, the king is in the — 
position, or in the >< position, the young man will fear to pro- 
nounce a favourable prognostic ! 

The diviner (wa bula) is in most cases at the same time a 
nanga, a medicine-man, and he will propably initiate the can- 
didate in the knowledge of his drugs also. ‘‘ Because”, said 
Mankhelu, “to possess the Word alone is of little use: you 

=) Rien ee 

want also the mbhulo, the magic medicines”. The price paid to 
the initiator was formerly 80 hoes, or a wife, and the initiated, 
when calling at the village of his master, used to sleep in the 
hut of that-woman. Being in possession of these new qualifi- 
cations the new diviner has the right of planting his magic forked 
branch (shiphandje. See Illustration I. p. 5 and If p. 450). This 
rite is subject to many rules which the initiator teaches his 
pupil; the latter must dig a certain quantity of white sand ina 
deep pool, and bury it in his hut where he intends placing the 
branch. This will henceforth be ‘planted in the abyss” (shi- 
dziba). Should the hut burn, should enemies put fire to it, 
water will spring from the bottom and prevent the shipandje 
being consumed. Moreover a sacrifice is made to the ancestors 
who transmitted their drugs to the initiator, and the psanyi of the 
slaughtered sheep is used to smear the branch. An intimate re- 
lation remains between the old doctor and his pupil. When 
the former dies, the latter must ‘raise’, or ‘‘awake his drugs” 
by a number of ceremonies which aim at removing the defile- 
ment that comes upon them through that death. These are rules 
which apply to medicine-men as well as to diviners. 

The forked pole is both the laboratory and the altar (it is 
also called gandjelo, p. 326) and the museum of the magician. 
He hangs to it his calabashes of drugs, his basket of bones, the 
psirungulo (part of the victims preserved as religious amulets, 
p- 326) and anything precious he may possess. When Ma- 
nkhelu had made some money by his bone-throwing or his me- 
dical practices, he used to expose the coins during the night 
at the foot of the branch, in order to inform his gods of his 
success ! 

I could not say, if in former times, the diviners formed a class 
in the tribe, better defined, more close and secret than now. 
It may be so, as the hondlola by which they pass from appren- 
ticeship to mastership is a real aggregation rite, by which they 
enter a new condition and acquire a special position. At every 
new moon henceforth they will have to wash their bones ri- 
tually in order to remove the defilement of the preceding 
month, after which they smear them with psanyi. 

Spe es 

When a diviner sees that he does not succeed in his forecasts, 
he consults another member of the confraternity who tells him 
to offer such and such a victim to an ancestor-god who was him- 
self a bone-thrower and who is supposed to have given the 
bones to his unsuccessful descendant. The spirit of interpre- 
tation of the deceased will enter into the supplicant. 

In order to attract customers, Mankhelu kept a little pellet of 
black grease amongst his bones. When arriving somewhere to 
practise his art, he took a little of it and put it on a glowing 
cinder, disposed the bones all round, and the smoke which rose 
from the fat went to call the people. ‘‘So I saw one coming 
from this direction with an ox, another from another direction 
with a goat and made good profit!” 

Women can also become bone-throwers, but this is a rare 
occurrence. 

5) THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DIVINATORY BONES. 

From all the preceding information it is easy to gather that the art 
of bone-throwing is by no means child’s play, nor a mere quackery by 
which astute sooth-sayers deceive their credulous fellows. It is a real 
art which diviners practise im all sincerity, believing themselves that 
they receive objective revelations through it. This sincerity is attested 
by many proofs : 

1) The fact, already mentioned, that it is not a secret, esoteric art, 
but that every one knows its rules and takes part in the interpreta- 
tion. 

2) The confidence which diviners have in the power of their bones, 
and the strong attachment which they profess for their divinatory 
basket. (1) Each of their astragalus bears a name which reminds them 

@oelibe conversation, just referred to, which I had with Mankhelu after 
his explanation of the unfulfilled prophecy, is 28 striking in this respect. 
Its conclusion was the following : — ‘‘ Mankhelu”, I said to him, ‘‘ you see 
that your bones deceive you! They are old, dry, dead things which cannot 
help you! Come to the light of the true Bercistion of Jesus Christ. > — 
“You are right, Moneri”’, Me reccd my friend. ‘+ Iam oid! I cannot use 
my bones any more, asI no longer tray el for trading ortreating !_ I willhaveto 
come to the Church by and By, ” _. *¢ Tf that is so. let me h yave your basket; 
it interests me very much. I will pay for it.” — ‘*He! Moneri! Impos- 

of the person who gave it to them, the circumstance in which it was 
found, and some of the successes of their career. - Their whole life is 
connected with these bones, which they really love and to which they 
are bound by all the fibres of their heart! 

Of course diviners are shrewd! Their interpretation does not proceed 
from mathematic evidence, but from their prodigious imagination. 
Tortoise in the negative position may at the same time mean black earth, 
death, defilement, well swept village, burnt bush, according to the 
requirements of the case ; but this is fair play and everybody approves 
of this ingenuity: it is not a conscious attempt to deceive. It is 
evident that the predictions often remain unfulfilled, as did the prophecy 
of Mankhelu. Or the exact reverse of the forecast happens. One of 
my evangelists, Filipi Mabemane, when still a heathen, went to consult 
a Matjolo diviner regarding the birth of a child which was to take 
place shortly. <* It will be a boy, and he will live ” was the answer. 
In fact, it was a girl and she died! So many people are more or less 
sceptic and say :*: Timhlolo i ntlhangana na pso! ” — ** The bones say 
the truth when per chance it so happens!’ However the faith is not 
impaired for a long time! The anxiety to know the future is so great 
that one consults again, but not the same diviner. People say: ** Psa 
mu hlula”, — ‘* He has been overcome”, and they go to another! 
Qualified doctors sometimes experience similar treatinent even amongst 
the Whites! Viguet once quarelled with a bone-thrower. The man 
of the art contended that he always said the truth. ‘* What have you 
told me?” said Viguet. ‘* You told me that I should get plenty of 
oxen and goats. Where are they? And why did you not tell me: 
‘* Hanya, hanya, hanya... Live, live, live... there will be days when 
something will happen and we shall quarrel!”” But the sceptics are 
rare. Faith in the bones is blind, but it is great ! 

How can this confidence which both diviners and their customers 
have in the divinatory bones be explained ? 

Does it come from a religious belief? It is not easy to define to what 
extent the divinatory art rests on religion, On the one hand, the spirit 

sible |” — ‘* Why? At any rate sell me the Son, if you want to keep the 
Father!” — “No! I want to keep the Son.” — ** Then give me the 
Father |”? — ** Never!” said he quite scandalised. — ‘> You see that you have 

sull your heart in it, old chap!” —** Yes. Whena child has dysentery, can 
I leave itso? Must I not consult the bones to know what drug to give 2...” 
I did not succeed that day in buying either Son or Father. However the 
diviner died some years later and his heirs consented to sell me one of his sets, 
Which is now in my possession. 

of interpretation of the bones comes trom the ancestor-gods who were 
bone-throwers themselves, and they are invoked to give or to revive 
this spirit. Mankhelu even told me that the prophecy of the arrival 
of the strangers had been given to him by his deceased father Shilu- 
vane. But the Bula, the Word, is not generally considered as being 
the utterance of the ancestor-gods. The bones are, in a certain sense, 
superior lo the gods whose intentions they disclose. The Bula is the 
revelation of a somewhat impersonal power, independent of the gods. 

It seems to me that the divinatory art is essentially magical ; it is 
entirely founded on the great axioms of Dynamismm, and I think that 
this isthe explanation of its value for the Bantu. The first of these 
axioms is: ‘‘ pars pro tolo”, the axiom according to which the portion 
acts instead of the whole: the astragalus, one bone, represents the 
entire animal, and its fate indicates the fate of the whole body. The 
second — ‘‘Jike acts on like”, — is an axiom which I would call: 
the law of correspondence. The savage mind, endowed with such a 
vivid and extraordinary imagination, instinctively establishes corres- 
pondences between objects of a very different nature, which have been 
placed in connection for various reasons, especially owing to external 
similarity. Thus the human beings are represenfed by animals which 
resemble them in a certain point: the reed-buck, wandering during 
the night, signifies the wizards who do the same; the hyena, which 
eats the remains of the feasts of the lion, is the parasite following the 
chief, etc. There are thus signifying and signified objects: the fate 
of the signifying object will be the fate of the signified. This conclu- 
sion, to which an enlightened mind would certainly object, is forced 
on the mind of the primitive, plunged in the twilight of his: animistic 
conceptions, by a kind of self evidence. He has amuch deeper intui- 
tion of the unity of the animal and the human world than we have. 
Spoon once told me mysteriously : ‘‘ The astragalus of the goat truly 
represents the people of the village because these animals live in it, 
they know us, they know what is in us”. This is probably the deep, 
hidden reason why the diviners believe in their art. 

On the other hand, this art is so perfect that bone-throwers can find 
any amount of satisfaction in practising it. Consider that, in fact, all 
the elements of Native life are represented by the objects contained in 
the basket of the divinatory bones. It is a resumé of all their social 
order, of all their institutions, and the bones, when they fall, provide 
them with instantaneous photographs of all that can happen to them. 
This system is so elaborate that I do not hesitate to say that, together 

with their folklore, their lobola customs and their burial rites, it is the 
most intelligent product of their psychic life. The premises of divina- 
tion beingaccepted, astragalomancy seems to me vastly superior to chei- 
romancy and all the other systems which have been invented by us. 
Some reasons might lead us to think that this system of Divination is 
very old in the evolution of mankind. I read somewhere that, amongst 
ancient Greeks, the oracle of Heracles practised astragalomancy. It 
has been impossible for me to discover in what it consisted. The 
Greek word éotgayadog means both the astragalus bone and the dice, 
and it is not difficult to understand why: take one of these bones, shape 
ita little at both extremities and you easily obtain a cube with six 
facets. So itis most probable that dice are a fuller development of the 
astragalus bone and that, before throwing the dice, primitive men have 
thrown the astragalus. Bantu (1) have preserved this custom as they 
did that of the wooden pillow of the old Egyptians, that of the ances- 
trolatry of the Mousterians (p. 408) and that of the mbaya (p. 78) 
of the Libyans. 

But if this system of divination is a token of great intelligence, it 
must be confessed that tls resulis, in the psychic life of the tribe, are 
most deplorable. ‘These practices kill in ovo any serious attempt to 
use reason or experience in the practical life. Native doctors might 
have arrived at a useful and beneficial knowledge of the medicinal 
virtues of vegetables, if they had studied them properly. But what is 
the use of troubling themselves with study, when a single cast of the 
bones at once tells them what root must be taken to cure the disease ? 
(Compare my account of diagnosis, p. 432). More than this: the 
bones annihilate the moral conscience, or, at any rate, they prevent any 
healthy development of this so precious faculty. When overtaken by 
misfortune the Bantu might be ready for introspection to review his 
conduct, to see what wrong he may have done. From this self exami- 
nation, a moral progress might result. But this trouble is useless ! 

(1) Astragalus are used for divination amongst most of the South African 
tribes : the Ba-Suto of Basutoland, the Pedi of the Transvaal, the Ba- Rotse of 
Zambesi, the Nyandja of Lake Nyassa. In the Northern Transvaal Ba-Pedi 
use conjunctively the astragalus and the four pieces of ivory, two male and 
two female; the adult male, Lehwami, the young male, Selume, the adult 
female, Thwahalime and the young female, Thohwane. ‘These four objects 
have two faces each, and can fall in 16 different w ays, each of which has its 
name and signification, ‘This is a totally different system, the laws of which I 
have found out, but which I cannot publish here, The astragalus system is 
vastly superior. 

iS) 
The bones are thrown. They reveal that misfortune was caused by 
such and such spiritual influences, wizards, gods, defilement, Heaven, 
that it must be combated by such and such means: a drug, ora packetof 
drugs, a victim, male or female, offered by soand so, in such andsuch 
manner. This is all sufficient and the conscience remains sleeping (1) 
and so does the reason. Iam convinced that, whatever may be the 
astuteness engendered by the divinatory bones, they have been extreme- 
ly detrimental to the intellectual and moral welfare of the Natives. 

This leads us to our last chapter, in which the questions of Taboo 
and Morality will be considered. 

WwW 

(1) Wishing to know if the bones were sometimes used to obtain moral 

guidance, I once asked Mankhelu: ‘‘ As you throw your bones on every 
occasion, would you consult them when going to a beer party? There might 
be trouble. perhaps quarrels, blows... If you want to avoid them would the 

bones tell you to abstain from the party?” He laughed heartily. ‘* No!” 
said he. ** If I see the men drink too much I would leave before they were 
quite drunk”. I have some doubts if he would really have done so. But 
what is certain is that bones have nothing to do with morality !

Taboo and Morality. 

When taking the trouble to carefully study the life of the so- 
called savages, one very soon notices that, instead of being free 
of all law and of all restraint, as superficial observers believe, 
their life is, on the contrary, subject to a great number of rules 
and prohibitions, which enslave those primitives in the bonds 
of custom and tradition. These prohibitions are of two prin- 
cipal kinds. Those which are the most obvious are the taboos. 
We have met with them at each page in these two volumes. 
They play an immense part in the conduct of the raw Native. 
But, besides these, there are other restraints which seem to ori- 
ginate from totally different notions, the moral principles. The 
relation between taboo and moral conceptions is very difficult 
to determine. It is actually one of the most debated questions 
of Anthropology ; I will try to show what is the state of things 
in that phase of human development to which the Thonga ot 
South Africa have attained. 

A. THE TABOO 

| have ventured to give a provisional definition of the yilu, or 
taboo, of the Thonga, when we met with the first interdiction of 
that kind, Vol. I. page 36: “Any object, any act, any person 
that implies a danger for the individual or for the community, 
and that must consequently be avoided, this object, act or per- 
son being under a kind of ban”. After having explained hun- 
dreds of taboos, I do not feel the need of altering this defini- 

tion. Its main element is this: the object, act or person taboed 
constitutes a danger. (1) It must be avoided. 

I. Classification of taboos. 

Let us now sum up our study of taboos by attempting to 
classify them. 

The most primitive of all are those which are called by 
Modern Ethnographers the sympathetic taboos, those which, man 
instinctively observes to preserve his life, to avoid suffering. 
To touch a burning ember, a fire, is taboo. Thonga sometimes 
use the word yila for such prohibitions: for instance they say 
«psa yila” for a little child to play with a knife. But this cate- 
gory of taboos, which impose themselves on man with a kind 
of self-evidence, do not play a special part in Thonga cus- 
toms. 

1) The first category I would dwell upon are the physiological 
taboos. | 

a) First those connected with defilement. When dealing with 
physiological notions (p. 335), we noticed that there are five or 
six physiological phenomena which are considered as attended 
with special danger, because they are the great agents of defilement : 
the menstrual flow, the lochia, disease, death and the birth of 
twins. Those who have been defiled by one or another of these 
agents are taboo; they are subject to a number of interdictions, 
in order to avoid fatal contagion ; in most cases, they have to 
pass through a marginal period, at the end of which they are 
again aggregated to society. Hence a great many taboos which 
I would call the proper physiological taboos. The sexual taboos, the 
special feminine taboos (I. p. 184) naturally belong to this category, in 
which I would also include the military taboos in connection with 

(1) The word yila very closely corresponds to the term taboo so widely 
used in Anthropology. In current speech it is sometimes employed in a wider 
sense, in cases where the notion of danger is not clearly present, but this is 
certainly an extension of the meaning. In fact the yila proper exactly answers 
to the definition just given. 

ak 526 a 

the slayers (I. p. 454), and those which underly the strange 
hunting rites (p. 57-62), as all these seem to proceed from the 
idea of defilement through death. Adultery is taboo because the 
husband fears “the bad bloods” by which his wife may have 
been contaminated through her misconduct. As far as the res- 
pect of the totem is considered necessary for the maintenance of 
the health of the clansman, I would also call physiological the 
taboos of this order which are, however, very few in number 
amongst the Thonga (I. p. 327). 

b) Another variety of the same category are the taboos connected 
with growth, change of condition, or with the various initiations through 
which a Native may be called to pass. The whole life for these 
primitives consists, as already stated, in a succession of stages ; 
one must proceed from one to the other through ceremonies in 
which a number of taboos can be noticed. The individual, who 
ascends from an inferior stage to a superior one, always passes 
through a marginal period by which he separates from the for- 
mer and is aggregated to the latter. In this case the seclusion 
is not due to defilement properly speaking ; it is in connection 
with the idea of growth. Hence all the taboos of tying the cotton 
string, (I. p. 54), of weaning (I. p. 57), when passing from infancy 
to childhood, of puberly (when entering the adult life through 
circumcision), of marriage (when being received within the group 
of married people) ; the initiation to the society of the possessed, 
to the profession of magician, or diviner, are attended with simi- 
lar taboos. 

All the taboos of this category seem to have been actuated 
by the idea of danger accompanying ritual impurity, or passage 
from one condition to another. 

2) A second category of taboos, much less numerous, are the 
cosmic taboos. Nature prohibits certain acts; if they are com- 
mitted, rain will not fall, and the community will suffer. The 
prohibition of cutting the roots at the new moon (p. 283), of 
tilling the fields when a shower falls in the morning (p. 28), 
of warming one self at a fire of parasite plants and at the ntjhopfa 
(p 18), and some agricultural taboos belong to this category. 
Some of the most severe physiological taboos, those connected 

with twins, and with unlawfully buried children, become cosmic, 
inasmuch as they prevent rain from falling (p. 294). 

3) A third kind of taboos are those I call taboos of prevision. 
Foresight is dangerous on certain occasions: Do not build 
your hut before being married ! (I. p. 238). Do not prepare 
the ntehe before the birth of your child (I. p. 44), nor your 
ugula basket before harvest ! The travellers’ taboos (p. 56) 
might also be included in this class. 

4) A fourth category comprises the manifold social taboos, viz. , 
those actions which are prohibitedbecause they would be danger- 
ous to the social order. Exogamous laws (I. p. 242), hlonipha 
customs, viz., the taboing of certain words by the chief 
(1. p. 356), and especially the curious taboos to be observed in 
the intercourse of allied families (1. p. 257), are social. The 
taboos connected with the moving of a village (I..p. 288) are 
physiological in so far as they are actuated by the fear of defi- 
lement, and social in so far as they try to maintain the life of 
the social organism, which is the muti. But those which mostly 
bear the character of social taboos are those connected with 
the idea of hierarchy, We have met with them in the ceremo- 
nies of the first fruits (1) (1. p. 367) and in the rules of sowing. 
It is taboo to ‘‘ precede” a chief, or an elder brother, in agri- 
cultural operations, sowing or harvesting ! 

5) This leads us to a fifth category : the religious taboos. The 
ancestor-gods, being the elders of the actual members of the 
family, must be treated as hierarchically superior ; hence the 
religious taboo of luma : interdiction of eating the new crop 
before having presented the gods with the first fruits; the prohi- 
bition of infringing the sacerdotal rights of an elder brother 
(p. 387) is a taboo of the same kind. We notice here the 
intimate relation between the social and the religious life in 

(1) The lama taboos are social and religious ; but they also belong to the 
first variety of physiological taboos in so far as they are actuated by the fear 
of defilement (food of a deceased, Vol. I. p. 146); to the second variety in so 
far as they are connected with a change of condition : first use of a new crop 
(L. p. 366), of a new meat (p. 62), of a new implement (p. 100), or fishing 
trap (p. 69). (Notice the relation between khangula, to inaugurate, and luma), 

= 528 — 

Ancestrolatry. Forgetfulness of fulfilling duties towards gods 
(p. 387), killing green snakes (p. 358) are also religious ta- 
boos. 

6) LT include in a sixth category the language taboos, ku ruke- 
tela, viz., the use of obscene expressions not allowed in ordi- 
nary life. The words designating the sexual act and the various 
parts of the genital organs yila; but there are substitutes for them, 
euphemisms which can be used instead of them. Whena child 
employs such words, people scold him and say to him: ‘* Psa 
yila! Do you think we are cleaning the wells 2?” This remark 
is due to the fact that the language taboos are suspended during 
the marginal periods and especially during the ‘mourning of 
the land”, when the rains are delayed and people try to make 
them fall by the rite of cleaning the wells (p. 296). The lan- 
guage taboos are related to the social taboos, to use obscene 
words leads to the destruction of social order, and this is allowed 
only when that order is really destroyed, for instance during 
the mbelele rite (p. 295), during the time of moving the village 
(I. p. 288), and during mourning ceremonies (I. p. 160). 

These six categories, although they are not absolutely distinct, 
are a convenient means of classifying the taboos. 

Il. Some remarks about the taboos. 

1) What is their origin ? It is not impossible to trace itin a 
number of cases. The hlonipha taboos, for instance, are proclaim- 
ed by the chiefs under certain special circumstances (I. p. 357). 
The taboo concerning the planting of new fruit trees is 
explained by the coincidence of the desolation of a ruined vil- 
lage with the presence of such trees (p. 30). Such coincidences, 
amounting to bad omens, have no doubt given birth to numer- 
ous taboos. If misfortune has followed a certain act two or 
three times, a hasty generalisation is made by the primitive 
mind : post hoc ergo propter hoc! So the act is tabooed. 
But most often taboos are inexplicable ; their origin is the 
animistic of dynamistic superstition itself (p. 345) and that 

ee 3 Cees 
superstition is instinctive, unconscient and consequently unac- 
countable. 

2) Whence is their sanction ? Inasmuch as taboos have been 
proclaimed by conscious agents, their transgression will meet 
with a punishment from those agents. A chief will-sue a sub- 
ject using a hlonipha word. Gods will punish those who 
transgress the law of hierarchy, who pass all bounds in their 
incontinence, who forget their duties towards them (p. 387). 
But, in most of the cases, the decree is not enforced by a con- 
scious agent. The taboo avenges itself directly. Consumption, the 
swelling of the legs, the impossibility of passing water, disease 
of one kind or another will follow the transgression, or the 
children will be covered with an eruption of pimples. 

3) How are taboos dealt with? 

Happily the danger of the taboos can be removed, otherwise 
life would be nearly impossible! The medicine-men have the 
necessary drugs to protect their poor fellow-men against misfor- 
tune (khombo), which always threatens them! Is not all the 
arsenal of magic at their disposal? Rites in great number pro- 
vide the needed protection, especially the Juma rite, which is the 
proper means of avoiding the special dangers connected with 
the first use of something. The wish to obtain protection 
against all these dangers explains the immense influence of the 
medicine-men, of those who know the preventive drugs to be 
used against defilement and misfortune. 

4) One cannot reach a true knowledge of the taboos if one 
has not studied the laws of their suspension. Taboos are some- 
times suspended. For instance the chief is above them, at any 
rate above some of them, being himself a magical being, a ta- 
booed personage (I. p. 355). The collectivity has still a greater 
power over them and can cancel them. There are times when 
all these prohibitions, or at least some of them, are recalled ; 
these are the marginal periods when we assist at the strange 
spectacle of ordinary taboos suspended (language taboos, rela- 
tives-in-law taboos), whilst others are enforced (sexual taboos). 
I have often drawn attention to this curious phenomenon. 

B. MORAL RESTRAINTS 

But taboos are not the only kind of restraint to which primi- 
tive Bantus submit themselves. Hear the following declara- 
tions gathered from old or young informants when urged to 
express their inner feelings on this question : 

1) The maternal uncle must provide the ntehe for the first 
child of his sister. However this is not yila, it is a nau, a law, 
and if it is transgressed no direct harm will follow. (I. p. 45). 

2) Men and women do not bathe in the same spot, in the 
lake of Rikatla. Why? Not on account ofa yila, but on 
account of shitshabo, viz., fear, or respect.(1) There is no dan- 
ger in transgressing that law of decency... However it is con- 
demned. 

3) When a young man has transgressed the taboo of matlu- 
lana (1. p. 195), having had sexual relations with the same 
woman as another man, he is not allowed to attend the burial 
of his rival. It is a taboo. However if the deceased be his own 
father the culprit can be treated with drugs, and so fulfil his 
duty of grave-digger, being protected against the danger of his 
condition : ‘‘ The yila has been removed, but the biba remains.” 
Biba means that which is bad. ; 

So there are three domains, besides the yila, in which the 
Native feels the restraints imposed on him: law or custom, re- 
spect or decency, and duty or fanelo. We might add a fourth 
one, the disgust for a certain food (p. 66). The great difference 
between the taboo and the other prohibitions is that the trans- 
gression of the latter is not necessarily attended with danger. (2) 

Let us consider more closely the idea of fanelo, or duty. 

Fanelo comes trom ku fana, to be alike ; fanela is what is 
(1) Ihave heard the mixed bathing of men and women also called a yila ; 
but it is a special kind of yila, the yila of tshabisa, the taboo of respect or de- 
cency. 

(2) 1 would, however, not insist too much on the distinctiveness of these five 
domains. Theft and murder are prohibited on account of duty, but they be- 
come taboo if the culprit is discovered, because they will bring punishment 
upon him. The moral wrong of these acts has been perceived before their 
dangerous character, and here we have an instance of a taboo grafted on a 
moral, or social, prohibition. 

a Sere aes 
seemly, becoming. This is not yet a very high notion of mo- 
rality. However the moral sense certainly exists and this is 
proved by three facts : 

1) The richness of expressions which the dictionary possesses 
to indicate moral notions. There are more words applying to 
the negative side of the notion and signifying bad, than to 
the positive, signifying good ; a phenomenon which can be no- 
ticed in most primitive languages, even in our French patois. 
Ku biha means to be bad, morally speaking, and to be ugly 
esthetically speaking. The distinctiveness of the two domains 
exists, however, in the mind of the Native. He says: ‘‘behile 
mbilu” — ‘‘is bad in his heart”, or “behile liso” — “is ugly 
as regards his face.” Shibi, the derivate noun of the verb ku 
biha, is regularly used in Djonga to mean sin. It also desig- 
nates the offensive object which a child or a careless person 
may have deposited on the path, instead of following the rules 
of the W. C. of Native villages. (I. p. 281). But besides 
biha is dyoha (Dj), doha (Ro), to commit a wrong, hona (Ro), 
onha (Dj), to spoil, but also to sin, from which shihono, the 
proper word for sin in Ronga. Somboloka means to be irremed- 
iably bad, crooked, like a stem which cannot be made straight 
any more. 

On the contrary the adjective nene, corresponding to biha, 
embraces three meanings: good, nice, and true, the derivate 
bunene designating rather goodness and beauty, and another de- 
rivative, psinene, truth; the verb used for to be good is shonga 
(Ro), or saseka (Dj), and has both the moral and esthetic signi- 
fication. Ku lulama is to be straight, as a stem, and the use of 
this word discloses a deep and clear sense of right doing. Many 
other expressions might be quoted showing that the notion of 
moral good and bad is certainly present in the Native mind, 
quite independently of that of taboo. They also recognise the 
conscience (timpfalu), seated in the diaphragm (p. 338). 

2) Intercourse with Natives proves the same thing Though 
their ideas may differ from ours as regards what is good (1), 

(1) The idea of charity is particulary low : charity is due only to relatives, 
or to clansmen, and not to foreigners. I remember a man of the Manyisa clan, 

za eon oes 
they are certainly moral beings, feeling strongly the imperative 
of conscience. 

3) Their folklore is the best and most objective proof that this 
is so. Vice is punished, and virtue rewarded in all the tales 
which I have called moral, and they certainly contain a 
whole code of natural and elementary morality (p. 203). The 
pangs of conscience in a criminal are depicted in a wonderful 
way in Zili, for instance. 

However, it must be confessed that this morality is low, that 
it does not possess a very strong hold on the Native soul, and 
that the imperative of conscience is by no means the catego- 
rical imperative of Kant! If you can steal without being 
caught, you may steal! Such is the advice given generally! 
To tell lies is mere play which few people take seriously, 
especially if the lies are not intended to do harm to your fel- 
low-men. There is a great laxness in Native morals. Why ? 
I am convinced that this weakness of the moral feeling comes 
from the fact that the moral law is not considered as having 
been proclaimed by a personal, transcendental God. There is 
no relation established between duty and the divinity. The reli- 
gionis non-moral. ‘The ancestor-gods themselves are non-moral. 
The absolute character.of the moral law can only come from 
the absolute character of a God who has established it. For the 
Bantu the law, mau, is the interest of the clan. Theft is bad be- 
cause it ruins the individual property, and it is necessary to respect 
property, otherwise the collective life becomes impossible. 
So theft, blows, insults, murder, and witchcraft are condemned 
and punished, because these actions endanger society and its 
recognised modes of life But if society is not aware of it, you 
may steal; you are not guilty; no one has been offended ! 
This principle gives to the morality of Natives a very curious 
juridical character, which White people are sometimes wery slow 
to understand. A man is not guilty if he has not been con- 

who nearly died near the lake of Rikatla, having been hurt when working on the 
railway; nobody took pity on him, because he belonged to another clan. He 
was saved by a converted woman, Lois, who had wonderfully understood the 
new principles of universal brotherhood. 

oe On ws 

victed of his fault by a regular judgment. He does not even 
feel himself guilty. But if his sin be proved, then he at once 
gives up all subterfuge (Compare Zidji, p. 206). We thus 
come to this conclusion : if the great fault of Bantu religion 
is that it is non-moral, that of Bantu morality is that it is non- 
religious. No supreme legislator has ordained it. Hence the 
want of the notion of the absolute in the imperative of the 
Bantu conscience. 

Notwithstanding, the rudiments of morality are present in 
the Thonga conscience, feeling of duty, the sense of right and 
wrong, and these are independent from the essentially interested 
notion of taboo. 

C. RELATION BETWEEN TABOO, SACREDNESS 
AND MORALITY 

Modern Ethnographers see in the taboo notion the origin of 
that of sacredness, and of morality. Amongst South African 
Bantu, the notion of sacredness is not a prominent one. It 
may be said that the person of the chief is sacred for.them, 
being set apart; the law of hierarchy, the right of precedence 
belonging to the elder brother is also sacred, and this concep- 
tion is very nearly allied to that of taboo, though it does not 
necessarily contain the idea of danger. But if sacredness has 
been in certain cases a natural development of taboo, I do not 
think this is the case with moral notions. 

In some cases, morality distinctly preceded taboo : speaking 
of theft, we have just seen the taboo conception grafted on a 
primitive moral notion; we have also met with a taboo evoly- 
ing from a notion of disgust (nyenya) (p. 66); or from decency 
(p. 530). Ido not pretend that it could be proved that the 
moral restraint, in all cases, preceded the taboo prohibition. 
Nothing on the other hand allows one to assert that the moral 
notions are a natural development of original taboos ; these two 
sets of notions seem to be parallel in the domain of conduct, 
just as Ancestrolatry and the notion of an All-Father are in 
religion.

I have reached the end of my study of the Life of a South African 
tribe in its principal manifestations, social and psychic. To write a 
complete anthropological monograph, I ought to have also dealt at 
length with the physical features of the Thonga. This would have led 
me too far. However I have taken a few anthropometric measures, 
which will be published in the Bulletin de la Société neuchateloise de 
Geographie pour 1913, together with an explanation kindly written by 
Doctor E. Pittard of Geneva, whose competence in this domain is 
well-known. Now I come to my conclusion. The aim of this book 
being twofold, scientific and practical, I will try to answer in these 
last pages two great questions, one belonging to Science: How far 
can the actual South Africans be called Primitives ? the other, being of 
superior practical importance: How can the South African tribe 
withstand the new condition of things brought about by the XX‘ 
century civilisation ? 

I. How far can the actual South African Bantu 
be called Primitives ? 

One often hears of Primitive Humanity. Do the South African 
tribes belong toit? Thisis a very difficult question to answer, as we do 
not exactly know what Primitive Humanity was and what the evolu- 
tion of these tribes has been. In the absence of any old written record, 
of any remains of an ancient stone civilisation, we can only make sup- 
positions. Butthey are based on three sets of facts : Native traditions 
(to which, however, we must always apply severe criticism), traces of 
an old and obsolete past actually found in the language or in the rites, 
and comparison with early civilisations now discovered in palaeoli- 
thic stations, or apparent on the ancient Egyptian monuments, etc. I 
do not pretend to have obtained positive evidence on all points, and I 
introduce a good number of interrogation marks in this attempt. 
However we know that Science proceeds by successive approximations. 
I submit my table of the development of civilisation in the South 
African tribe as an hypothesis, open to any amendment which further 
discoveries may suggest. 

I hesitated before writing anything about the first period. A number 
of Native traditions declare that, at a remote time, their forefathers did 

eee) Conn 

not know fire, (1. p. 23 If. p. 42 ). According to some Pedi 
informants, fire would be of relatively recent origin amongst certain 
clans. However we cannot believe that fire ever was absolutely absent, 
seeing that the cave dwellers of the Mousterian age, at the end of the 
glacial period, knew it, as attested by the fire places found everywhere 
in the Mousterian deposits. It is probable that the first ancestors of 
the Thonga lived on roots and fruit, having but very simple wea- 
pons, and hardly any clothing. This condition of things may have 
prevailed long before the Bantu stock was formed. ‘The race perhaps 
passed through the totemic phase, which is still regnant amongst 
more primitive races (I. p. 335), and has left some traces 
amongst the Thonga, up to this day. Mother-right, the remnants of 
which are so clear, was probably the family system of these times of 
which we know nothing definite. In what did it consist? This is 
impossible to say and the only feature of which we are sure is that 
female descent prevailed during that period. Funeral rites probably 
existed, as they are met with in Mousterian sepultures, and they imply, 
as shown previously, the belief in Ancestrolatry. Who knows if the 
idea of an All-Father, which is almost universal in primitive humanity, 
was not already existent? It seems as if the notion of the divine, 
under one form or another, was one of the earliest ideas of the human 
mind. Nay! that its appearance in the dim consciousness of this 
ancient being from whom we descend was the signal of his accession 
o real humanity... But this is speculation, and I do not wish here to 
leave the solid ground of Science. 

In a second period, whose beginning it is impossible to fix and which 
I consequently-separate from the first one ‘by dots, in the table, ani- 
mals are domesticated, the goat probably first. Agriculture sets in, 
The soil is tilled with wooden hoes (?). Male descent supplanis , 
female descent and patriarchate becomes the family system ; its further 
development leads to the formation of the clan: an enlarged patriar- 
chal family. I suppose thatit is in this condition that the Bantu stock 
was founded. Language was probably the Ur-Bantu, and it is very 
interesting to reconstitute its main elements, grammatical features, and 
dictionary, by comparison with the actual Bantu dialects. Things 
called by the same word in all existing dialects were probably existing 
at that time. (1) I suppose the physiological taboos were already 

(1) However, one ought not to push this argument too far. I have been 
able to ascertain that the fowl was unknown amongst the Pedi clans of 

Implements 4 State Fam 
Costume enpous Food Trade syst 
1st Period | Men. Mbaya?} Wooden Fruits ? Half Fem 
(Pre-Bantu) | #omen.Skins?) Clubs ? and roots. sedentary? | — desce 
24 Period id. Pottery. Goat. Millet, | Exchange a Agricultural. | Male de 
Ur-Bantu Basketwork.| Pumpkins. | ware against 
till 1500 Wooden hoes'?, Game caught produce. 
Bowen in traps. 
Wooden pil- 
low. 
34 Period | Men: Mbaya.| Pottery. Goat. Godji(p 126). id. Patriar 
1500-1820 |#omen:Skirts.| Basketwork.) Sheep? Ox? | sales Amber, Lohe 
of cloth. | Iron hoes and Millet. Ivory, Skins, Polyga 
assagais. Sorghum’? etc. 
Bows. Beans ? Purchases 
Stuff, Beads, } 
Copper, Iron. 
4th Period | Men: Zulu id. id. S. Mafusreira,} Agricultural. id. 
1820-1910 belt. Guns. Bows | Maize, Peas, | India-rubber, Yearly mili- | Decre 
Women: Skirts| disappear. | Bananas, Man- Skins. tary expedi- | of Polyg 
Keimao. goes, etc. | Commercial | tions in Gaza. 
expeditions. 
Introduction 
of European 
money. 

1910 Increase Increase id. Decrease of Work id. 
| of European | of European European | Native trade. | in towns. Family 
dress, implements. food. | injured | 

Decrease in Alcohol. long ab 
Native arts | of me 
and crafts. 
i 

in force then, as they are found nearly identical amongst Semitic 
people, as showni n Leviticus. The hierarchy must have soon followed 

Northern Transvaal, in the beginning of the XVIIth century, having been 

introduced by the Malemba some time about 1750. 
Pedi call it khugu, same word as huku in Thonga, Ur-Bantu kuku. 

Notw ithstanding, the 
The name of 

the thing may have been introduced at the same time as the thing itself, and 
incorporated by undergoing the phonetic permutations required by the dialect, 
(Compare Folklore. Sept. 1908, The Balemba). 

HE THONGA, TRIBE 

Tribal Military bia , 
neieot SL Language Folklore Religion Taboo Magic 
| 
‘otemism ? ? ? ? Aucestrolatry.| Sympathe- ? 
| All-Father ? tic. 
Clan re Ur-Bantu, ? Mythological |Ancestrolatry.| Physiologi-| Witchcraft. 
Sex denoting | CONceptions. | AjjFather.  cal Astragalo- 
suffixes. Tales. Hierarchic. mancy. 
11 Classes of | Agri- 
Nouns. | cultural. | 
| Fermation | 
of Thonga. 
nvasion of Linear Thonga. Decrease Ancestrolatry. | id. id, 
ighbouring| formation. | g Classes of | of Mythology. | Clearer notion| 
clans. Skirmishes. Nouns. Rich folklore. of Tilo, 
| Six dialects. All-Father. 
| | | | 
| 
formation | Zulu circular | Progress of Addition |Ancestrolatry. id. id. 
| disappear- formation. |Ronga dialect.| of Asiaticand | TjJ9 concep- | Military. | Possessions. 
ARE Cruel wars. | Adoption of | Portuguese jtion less clear. | 
peeiary, Buropesiet Pte Chadian | 
‘ingdoms. expressions ats ae 
al Control. | (Portuguese, p ie } 
auto} ee eat ossessions. | 
English). 
: 
Authority Decrease id. id. id. Severity id. 
of Chiefs of military | Progress of | Of taboos 
jecreases, and political | | Christianity. | decreases. 
spirit. | | 
| 

the institution of patriarchism, and of the clan. 

Witchcraft probably 

existed ; itmust have been a belief of primitive humanity, as it is still 
present under a very similar form amongst peasants and uncultured 

people in civilised lands. 
astragalomancy was practised. 

We have the right to suppose also that 

Some features of the Thonga language 
show that mythological conceptions prevailed then, which seem to have 
nearly entirely disappeared nowadays (I. p. 35. II. p. 283). This 
period must have lasted for tens, perhaps hundreds of centuries. 

until the South African.tribes, after endless migrations, reached their 
present aboze, probably pushing the early occupants towards the 
South ; at the end of the XVth century we find the Thonga tribe 
located near Delagoa Bay. (1) 

The third period is inaugurated by the invasion by the clans men- 
tioned in our Introduction. White men appear, trade begins, stuffs 
are adopted by women, the men keeping their mbaya. Iron is intro- 
duced both by these invaders, and by the White whale-fishers and tra- 
ders. Agriculture takes a new development: so also do military tac- 
tics, the Natives now possessing better weapons. A decided progress 
has certainly taken place all round, the invading population being super- 
ior in civilisatiom to the old one. The Thonga language is definitely 
formed with itssix dialects. Folklore is enriched by the contributions 
of all the various clans, Ancestrolatry still reigns in the religious 
beliefs, with a relatively clear notion of Heaven and of an All- 
Father. The change was gradual until 1820. 

Fourth period. At that timea new period begins, owing to the pro- 
found disturbance caused by the invasion of the Ngoni army under 
Manukosi. The costume of men changes. The clans are amalgamated 
under the Zulu conqueror. The military spirit increases. 
War, accompanied with blood-shed and all the Zulu apparatus, repla- 
ces the skirmishes of former times. In Gazaland the year is divid- 

(1) The Lowrenco Marques Guardian, ina very kind review of Vol. LO. 
1912), expresses the regret that I have not dwelt longer on the first origin 
and migrations of the Thonga tribe. The writer thinks that this was for- 
merly a much larger tribe ‘*the basic element in the Hamitic invasion of the 
coastal region”. As far as I know, there is no document on which we may 
base evidence on such questions. The Portuguese chronicles of the XVIth and 
XVIIth centuries describe a state of things which is quite modern compared 
with the first Bantu invasion of South Africa, that of the Zindj to which 
Masoudi’s ‘Golden Meadows ” make an allusion, A. D. 943. When the Por- 
tuguese travellers reached the Delagoa Bay shore, the stream of migrations 
had already taken an Eastern or North-Eastern direction (ls “ps 23), —=cAs 
regards inferences drawn from the wide-spread term Thonga (Ronga, Tonga), 
I think they have very little value as this word probably means ‘‘ people of the 
East”, as Kalanga people of the North. — Itis applied by Natives to those tribes 
which dwell eastwards of them, whatever their origin may be. Thisis a geo- 
graphical designation, as the term Orientals, and it discloses nothing as regards 
the ethnological features of the tribes to which it is applied. In fact, as regards 
language, customs, folklore, there is much less affinity between our Thonga, 

Pa 

ed into two halves: one for agricultural labour, the other for the 
military plundering raids organised by the Ngoni kings. Foreign 
elements increase in number and power. The Asiatic and Portuguese 
influences begin to work. A considerable Native trade develops in 
Lourengo Marques. The Ronga clans dwelling near the town acquire 
more influence. This leads us to: the present time which I need not 
characterise more fully. 

In 1910, we see European civilisation invading the whole territory 
of the tribe, by leaps and bounds, and the changes, which have been 
slow in previous decades, becoming rapid and profound. The tribe 
loses more and more its coherence; the authority of the Chief decreas- 
es and that of the White Commissioner increases. Taboos, ancestor- 
gods are no longer much believed in; Islam makes some recruits, ow- 
ing to intermarriage, and Christianity pushes forward its Missions. 
The few indications given in that part of the table show the tendency 
of the evolution at the present time. 

This sketch of the development of the tribe — a sketch which is 
drawn, I repeat, under all reserve, — does not confirm the opinion ge- 
nerally held in former times regarding black tribes, i. e., that they are 
ina state of utter degeneracy. Onthecontrary, a slow progress can be 
noticed; generally due to outside influences, notwithstanding the fact 
of long industrial stagnation; this progress has been so marked in 
agriculture, in the family and in the social system, that one can no 
more designate the Bantu as absolute Primitives. They would be 
more fitly called Semi-Primitives. On the other hand there seems 
to have been an almost complete immobilily in the religious domain, 
even a degeneration, if the old monotheistic notion has really lost 
its precision in the last century. Folklore has been enriched, but, as 
a whole, the psychic life has evolved very little. Of course I do not 
mention the quite modern changes brought about by missionary enter- 
prise and Islam propaganda. 

the Tonga of Inhambane and the Tonga of Zambezi than between them and 

the Zulus. 
We must be content to remain ignorant of facts on which there exist no 
reliable record. 

ee 

Il. How can the South African Tribe withstand 
the new condition of ihings brought about 
by the XXtb Century Civilisation ? 

There have been more changes in the South African tribe during the 
last fifty years than during the fifty or five hundred preceding centu- 
ries, and this process of transformation is bound to continue at a geome- 
trical rate of progression, during the fifty ensuing years. Taking 
into consideration for a moment the real and permanent interest of 
the Native, let us ask to what probable goal this transformation is 
leading him. I leave on one side, for the present, the influence of 
missionary enterprise. 

Civilisation has certainly brought some blessings to the tribe and I 
have impartially and carefully noted them. Disappearance of deadly 
famines, owing tothe development of trade ; better clothing (this is a 
mixed blessing) ; better seeds and agricultural implements (plough) ; 
possibility of earning money ; incentive to work in order to pay taxes ; 
(this Natives would certainly not calla blessing !); decrease of polygamy ; 
broadening of ideas, consequent on travelling and work in towns. 

But the curses of civilisation far exceed its blessings for the South 
African Native : he has lost more through it than he has gained. Loss 
of political interest and responsibility (I. p- 461); loss of hierarchic re- 
spect for the chiefs and for the elder brothers ; loss of personal dignity ; 
moreover we notice decrease of religious faith and of respect for 
taboos. 

In addition, the vices of Civilisation have tound a deplorable 
welcome on the part of these Primitives : alcoholism ofa degraded type 
(on the Coast), onanism, sodomy (in the Compounds), looseness of 
morals, — and thesehave caused new and very dangerous diseases which 
are now quickly spreading amongst them: alcoholic cachexy, syphilis, 
a great increase of consumption, due to the work in towns, without 
speaking of the criminal instincts which have developed under these 
influences (I. p. 46), murder, and rape (hence the Black peril, which 
was unknown in the primitive state), Thetribe has lost its orientation, 
and moral and physical results have quickly followed. 

To fight against these new and frightful foes the Black race happily 
possesses a considerable physical strength, and agreat prolificacy. But 

ae Ae 
these may not necessarily last for ever. They canbelost. Weseethe 
Mpongwe tribe, in the French Congo, after a longer contact with debas- 
ing White influences, fast disappearing : the birth-rate is reduced to 
almost nothing and this formerly large tribe will probably have died 
out in the course of one or two generations. 

I cannot conceal the fact that I consider the situation of the South 
African tribe, under present circumstances a very serious one. Ifthese 
influences are not checked, I believe in the possible extinction of the 
race, in the long run, and | think every thoughtful observer will come 
to the same conclusion (1). Ought not certain steps to be taken by 
the Government in order to stop the progress of the evil? Would not 
for instance, a policy of segregation be commendable? Or, would it 
not be in the interest of the Natives to remove them to tropical Africa, 
leaving the White man alone in South Africa? These questions have 
been discussed at length in South African papers, and I have nothing 
to say about them except that such steps seem to be absolutely imprac- 
ticable. Lamconvinced that the only remedy for these deadly dangers 
is the formation, in the Black tribe, of a strong moral character accom- 
panied by sufficient enlightment of mind to enable the Native himself 
to perceive the danger, and to overcome it. 

Various ways have been proposed to reach this goal. Without 
speaking of the eugenistic attempt suggested by D. Kidd, in his Kafir 
Socialism, some have recommended what they call the Gospel of Work. 
Let the Natives be forced to work with their hands, and their character 
will soon improve! There is much truth in this theory, and I believe 
regular manual work is a blessing for the Blacks as it is for any other 
race. Let us remark however that this ‘‘ Gospel”, isnotalways preached 
with the sole idea of benefitting the Black race. Moreover, should it 
even be possible to enforce labour on the South African Bantu, in this 
age of liberty, what would be the ultimate result? Would it really 
transform them? As soon as they could get rid of the obligation, 
they would run away and become worse than before. Labour is a 

(1) These remarks apply to the Thongatribein a specialway. Thesituation 
of the Zulu and Suto tribes is better, in as much as the sale of intoxicants is 
prohibited amongst them. However, many of the dangers here described 
threaten those tribes also. 

A ae aa 
great educator, provided the worker is in agreement with the law of 

labour, and this agreement can only be obtained when the heart of the 
savage is changed by a power of another kind, 

* bd 

In the conclusion of Volume I, I have myself advocated the grant 
of certain, after all very modest, political rights ; this proposal was not 
made with the intention of taking part in South African politics 
(which I am quite willing to leave to those whose duty it is to attend 
to them), but as a means of protecting the Native mind against dege- 
neration, and I believe sucha provision may help to form the character 
of the race, as no human being can make any real moral progress if he 
has no responsibility. However, neither would this be sufficient, and 
the lowering of character, wrought by the actual influences, would 
even make an enfranchisement of the Natives dangerous. 

* 

at 
D>? 

the same time, the enlightenment of the mind which also is of primary 
necessity. My readers will do me the justice to acknowledge that I 

My conclusion is that the only salvation for the South African tribe 
is in a regeneration achieved by Christianity, Education providing 

have not too often alluded to the great work of Christianisation in 
which Iam engaged. Hovewer I am missionary. Assuch,I havea 
faith and I entertain a hope. May I be allowed to express it in a few 
words at the close of this study ? 

lam convinced that Christianity is the only true solution of the pro- 
blem : Christianity, not merely a new set of rites taking the place ofthe 
old animistic rites, but the spiritual Christianity — which perfectly comb- 
ines the religious belief and the moral duty, — accepted by the Bantu 
soul, -—thatsoul which is eminently religious,—and leading the weak 
and carnal Bantu savage to the height of the Christian ideal, thus vic- 
toriously replacing the non-moral religion and the non-religious 
morality of the Native. 

Christianity, the Religion of sanctity, affording the only real satisfac- 
tion to the aspiration for purity so conspicuous in the Bantu rites, 
Science will soon dispel all the superstitious dread of the taboos. 
Let those imaginary fears be replaced by the fear of moral wrong, — 
sin becoming for the Christianised Native the real, the true taboo, — 
and a healthy life will then be possible. 

ah re 
‘ 

Christianity, the Religion of conversion, regeneralion, supernatural 
transformation, bringing within the reach of the Native a power from 
above to deliver him and to save him. Magical notions are doomed to 
die before long in the light of Science : the absurdity of the axioms 
of Dynamism will soon be perceived. But the faith in an all power- 
ful Father will free the savage from the fear of spirits and open’ his 
heart to tbe holy influences of the Religion of Christ. 

Christianity, the Religion of love, love between individuals, and love 
between the races, regulating the relations between Whites and Blacks, 
who are both indispensable to the cultivation, exploitation and full 
utilisation of the marvellous riches of South Africa, dispelling race 
hatred, and promoting the helpful collaboration of Africanders and 
Africans. 

But is the Bantu capable of accepting such a high and spiritual 
religion? I answer: ‘‘ Yes”, 
Gospel of ‘the Father Who is in Heaven”’, as they already possess 
the rudiments of this central teaching of Christianity in the beliefs of 
Ancestrolatry, and in their conceptions of Heaven. That their heart is 
able to grasp it by the faith — the only condition of entrance into the 
kingdom of God —is proved by a thousand instances. I fully recog- 
gnise that many, perhaps most of the Christianised Natives, have not 
reached the heigths of moral and religious life, that their conduct is 
often in strange contrast with their profession. ‘‘ Mission Kafirs” are 
not in very good repute. But I have seen many, in the modest cir- 
cumstances of kraal life, who have been thoroughly transformed, 
women who have displayed wonderful qualities of sweetness and 
perseverance, and men whose character has become firm and strong, 
full of love and disinterestedness; I know self-denying, consecrated, 
even pastoral souls amongst them, who are by no means inferior to 
European Christians, and, sometimes, | have had the vision of the 
South African tribe, less hampered by social and worldly circum- 
stances than we are, transformed by the powerful spiritual influence 
of the Gospel of JesusChrist, approaching the Christian ideal as nearly, 
and perhaps nearer than we do! This was a dream; but the reality 
is that the Bantu soul can be regenerated as well as the European. 

Their intelligence can understand the 

Let therefore all the friends of the South African.tribe work for its 
salvation. This is a sacred duty : according to a great law of the 
moral world, if a superior race does not work for the moral better- 
ment of the inferior, the inferior causes the superior to degenerate. 

So let the Christian Church increase its Missions, the Government 
multiply the schools. Let the Native Commissioner, the mistress of 
the house, the storekeeper, the Compound Manager, instead of treat- 
ing the Black maa with contempt, remember that he is a moral being, 
and must become more and more so through their influence. Let 
the educated Natives also be aware of their immense responsibility 
towards their tribe in this respect. Native industry may disappear, 
the tribal life come to an end, the old restraints fall away : something 
better will take their places. Bantu collectivism is dying out. In its 
stead Christianity will promote a healthy and progressive Individual- 
ism and, under the new regime, the race will find its proper place 
in the South African Commonwealth. I do not see any other way 
in which it can escape destruction. 

The Africander population, formed by the amalgamation of some 
of the best stocks of the Aryan race, certainly has a great future in 
store. May it be blessed on the sunny shores, and on the high lands 
of South Africa, May it enrich itself, and humanity, by bringing to 
light the marvellous mineral, wealth, hidden in the rocks of this old 
country. But should the expansion of the Africander race be obtain- 
ed at the cost of the ruin of the former occupants of the coun- 
try, this would be an immense pity and an undeniable blemish. For, 
however bright the future of the Africanders may be, Africa would no 
longer be Africa, should there be no more Africans ! 

* * 

Gode save the Life of the South African Tribe !

The Chronology of Shinangana, a Thonga of Spelonken. 

Speaking in 1905, he says: 

Sixty-seven years ago, Shiluvane and the other Thonga chiefs fled 
before Manukosi (1838, or 1839 os 

Three years later, battle with Matshekwane, Manukosi’s general, 
who followed the Nkuna (1842). 

In the sixteenth year of the era, battle of Gologodjwen, when the 
Nkuna chief, Shiluvane. fought against the Ba-Pedi of Sekukuni. 
(1855). In the nineteenth year, Manukosi dies (1858 or 1859 2). 

From there each year is known by its principal event: 

Expedition of Shihahen (1859). 

Beginning of the great war of succession between Manukosi’s sons, 
Muzila and Mawewe. Muzila fled to Spelonken (1860). 

Circumcision school at Mudjadji (1861). 

We are plundered by Djiwawa (or Joao Albasini, the Portuguese 
commander who for many years was the chief of the Thonga refugees 
of Spelonken) (1862). 

Djiwawa goes to fight against Mawewe (1863). (1) 

We are plundered by the Swazi army (1864). 

Shiluvane, the Nkuna chief, settles in the Nyarin country (1865). 

Djiwawa kills Ribole and Magoro (1866). 

The Modjadji army fights with the Nyari clan (1867). 

The Swazis plunder Modjadji’s country (Buiuberi) (1868) 

Djiwawa plunders the people of Mashao (Spelonken) (1869). 

Muzila’s army comes back from Mosapa (Gaza) and plunders Spe- 
lonken (Bvesha) (1870). 

The Swazis plunder Makandju (1871). 

Circumcision school of Madori in Spelonken (1872). 

Daiman ! (Opening of the Kimberley mines where Natives begin 
to go and work) (1873). 

(1) According to Portuguese documents, this intervention of Muzila and 
Albasini took place in 1862, Mawewe having been definitely beaten on the 
20th August, 1862. 

Birth of my child Rihlangana. Death of Shiluvane (1874). 

Famine of Magadingele e (1875). 

Death of Nicamibi son of Mhalamhala,a Khosa (1876). 

War of Makhanana of the Loyi country. Refugees come to Spe- 
lonken (1877). 

The Makandju people kill Saraenigine of Rikotjo (1878). 

Birth of my child Ntitiri (1879). 

Circumcision school of Mayingwe (1880). 

Djiwawa goes to catch Sekukuni (1881). 

War between the Boers and the English (1882). 

Year ofthe comet (1883). Djiwawa’sson,Sambana, becomes chief. 
Sambana plunders the village of a Venda called Mbekwa (1884). 

Phundjululu: the vermin destroys mealies (1885). 

Circumcision school of Nwamutjungu, a Hlanganu who had come 
from Spelonken (1886). 

A Gwamba chief quarrels with Girifi. (Mr. Grieve, and old colonist 
of Spelonken) (1887). 

Sambana beatsa policeman (1888). 

Death of Djiwawa (1889). 

Sambana calls statute labourers (1890). 

, Death of Sambana (1891). 

Circumcision school at Modjadji (1892). 

My son Magondjwen starts fora journey (1893). 

He comes back home (1894). 

We are beaten by hail. Four people die (1895). 

My son-in-law goes away (1896). 

Epidemic among cattle. War of Makhube. We accompany the 
Boers (1897). 

Matshona : Plague among oxen (1898). 

Bahehemuki! The people of Gungunyana take refuge in Spe- 
lonken (after the war of Magigwana with the Portuguese) (1899). 

The Boers attack Phefu, ae Venda chief (1900). 

The Whites fight. (Anglo-Boer war) (1901), 

The English column chases the Boers away from Pietersburg 
Nwashimbutane! The Son-of-the-Kid! (General Beyers compar- 
ed with a kid on acount of his swift movements through the country 
during the guerilla war, (1902). 

Mugayo! Ndlala! The mealie flour bought from the Whites on 
account of the famine! (1903). 

Of course many of these dates are doubtful... Many are of a very 

Se ate 

small importance ; it seems childish indeed to keep as the only re- 
membrance of the year 1888 the fact that Sambana, Albasini’s son, 
had beaten a policeman. But this shows however the histo- 
rical sense of-Shinangana ; he wanted to keep that uneventful year 
in his chronicle, and he chose the most noteworthy fact that had 
happened, though it was, indeed, no great event! So he attained his 
object which was to preservea full record of all the years from 1858 to 
1903, and he certainly succeeded. The chronology of Shinangana is 
a real feat of memory and, as he remained free of any civilised in- 
fluence whatever, this feat must be considered when dealing with 
phenomena of oral tradition amongst savages. 

= SAS 8 

APPENDIX M1 
List of botanic Thonga names with their scientific equivalents. 

According to the publication of Hans Schinz and Henri-A. Junod : 
“Zur Kenntnis der Pflanzenwelt der Delago-Bay.” 

‘* Bulletin de \’Herbier Boissier”, Tome VII, N° rr, 1899. 

Pteridophyta. Tsuna. Acrostichum tenuifolium (and other ferns 
Typhaceae. Papala. Typha australis (Used to make mats). 
Pandanoceae. Shihlowa. Pandanus. 
Aponogetonaceae. | Fenyana Aponogeton spathaceus (1). 
Hydrocharitaceae. | Nkushe. Lagarosiphon muscoides (2). 
Gramina. Luhlwa. Imperata cylindrica (Used as thatch). 

» Byanyi. Andropogon (and all the other grass). 

» Litlange. Cynodon dactylon. 
Cyperaceae. Nblale. Cyperus flabelliformis. 

» Bungu. Cyperus prolifer (?) (Papyrus). 
Commelinaceae. Nkompfana. Commelina africana, Forskalei, etc. 
Liliaceae. Gonhwa. Crinum Forbesii, etc. 

Orchidaceae. Shishengane. Eulophia papillosa. 
Olacaceae. Psautemu. Opilia tomentella (3). 
Amarantaceae. Shinghalafumane. Hermbstaedtia elegans. 

» Tlabatlabane. Cyphocarpa Zeyheri (4). 
Nympheaceae. Tibu. Nymphaea coerulea (Bulb edible). 
Menispermaceae. Shimbyati. Cissampelos Pareira (5). 

» Shihumbula. Synclisia Junodi. 

Anonaceae. Ntiti. Artabotrys brachypetala. 

» Shintitana. Artabotrys Monteiréae. 
Leguminosae. Gowana, Albizzia fastigiata. 

» Khawa. Accacia kraussiana. 

» Ndjiba. Apalatoa delagoensis. 

» Ntjenge. Dichrostachys nutans. 

» Nembe-nembe. Cassia petersiana. 

» Hlapfuta (Ro) Afzelia Cuanzensis ( 

» Shene (Dj). » » (6). 

» Shirimbyati sha mutju. | Indigofera podophylla. 

» Shiringeti sha tchune. Indigofera sp ? 

» Lisekaseka. Sesbania aculeata., 

» Shekane. Desmodium incanum. 

» Nwamahlanga Canavalia obtusifolia. 

» Rongolo ra nhlohe. Eriosema cajanoides (The white Rongolo). 
Meliaceae. Nyamari, Ekebergia Meyeri. 

Euphorbiaceae. Midyanhwari. Fluggea obovata. ‘ 

» Shinyandjana. Phyllantus pentandrus. 
Anacardiaceae. Nkanye. Sclerocarya caffra (King of trees !) (p. 17) 
Hippocrateaceae. Shikokombela. Hippocratea sp. 

» Mphyinsha. Salacia Kraussii (Fruit edible). 
Sapindaceae. Buputwane Cardiospermum halicacabum. 
Malvaceae. Ntjinsi Hibiscus surattensis, Trionum, etc. 

» Shintjinosana. Sida cordifolia. 

» Bushale Gossypium herbaceum (Cotton). 

s- eo  ea 

Sterculiaceae. | Muhlwadambu. Melhania Forbesii. 

» | Nkondhwahari. Waltheria americana. 
Ochnaceae. Kelekele. Ochna arborea. 

Flacourtiaceae. Psekamafura. Casearia Junodii (Schinz). 

» Nhlungunu Flacourtia Ramontoli. 
Passifloraceae. Menyamamba. Modecca Kirkii, 
Thymeleaeaceae. Shindjibane. Synaptolepis Oliveriana. 
Combretaceae, Balekanhloko. Combretum Gueinzii. 

» Nkonono. Terminalia sericea (Used for handles, etc.). 
Ebenaceae. Nhlangulane. Euclea natalensis. 

» Shirole. Royena pentandra. 
Sapotaceae. Ndjole. Mimusops caffra (Fruit edible). 
Loganiaceae. Nsala. Strychnos spinosa (p. 16). 

» Nkwakwa. Strychnos Ungasha (p. 17). 
Apocynaceae. | Nulu. Carissa Arduina. 

SS ba) Ntamunga. Carissa sp. (Fruit edible), 

» Mbungu. . Landolphia Kirkii (7). 

» | Nkahlu. Tabaernaemontana ventricosa (Sty ptic). 

» Nkahlu-tjhobo. Vocanga Dregei. 

» Nyulu. Strophantus Petersianus. 
Asclepiadaceae. Muhlu-tjhobo. Secamone sp. 

» Ndjutlwane. Sarcostoma viminale. 
Convolvulaceae. Nkaka-wa-tjhobo. Ipomoea cairica. 

» Masinga. Stictocardia Woodii. 
Scrophulariaceae. | Shitsinyambita. Striga orobanchoides. 

» Murilwane (Dj). Striga lutea. 

Solanaceae. Rulane. Solanum sp. 

» Mondjo. Datura fastuosa (?) (8). 
Bignoniaceae. ~ Mpfungura. Kigelia aethiopica. 
Pedaliaceae. Hlehlwa. Pretrea Forbesii. 
Lentibulariaceae. Nkushe. Utricularia stellaris. 

Rubiaceae. Negalangala. Tricalysia Kraussiana. 
Cucurbitaceae. Nkaka. Momordica Balsamina (Edible), 

» Shirakarana Citrullus Naudinianus. 

» Nkaka wa Batshopi. Coccinia jatrophaefolia (Eaten by Chopis). 
Campanulaceae. Shihlangwana. Wahlenbergia arenaria. 

» Shilawana Lobelia chilawana. 
Compositae. Ntshontshongori. Vernonia Cinerea. 

» Nkukula-shibuya. » Perotteti. 

» | Hlunguhlungu. » tigna. 

» | Shifodyana. Ageratum conyzoides. 

» Kamele. Mikania scandens (Medicinal). 

> Shirimbyati sha tchune. | Gnaphalium stenophyllum. 

» hirimbyati. Helichrysum parviflorum. 

> Mushidji. Bidens africana. 

» Nhlangula-batjongwana. | Helichrysum damarense. 

This list might be very much lengthened by any one devoting more time to the study 
of Thonga botany. Though it is not complete, I publish it, knowing by experience 
how difficult accurate botanic determinations are in the South African flora. It may 
be used as a starting point. 

(1) Dancers make crowns of it. (2) All the algae and generally plants growing in water 
are called Nkushe. (3) Banyans are said to use it to wash their teeth. (4) Used for rheu- 
matism. (5) Medicine for bowel complaint. (6) Used to manufacture canoes. (7) India- 
rubber, Kafir orange. p. 19. (8) Thisplant, used as adivinatory means, is a Datura, subspon- 
taneous or cultivated in various spots. 1 cannot guarantee the name of the species (p. 483). 

he