Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/330

 290 escape without any difficulty, and the indignant villagers massacred the warrior. "This is the end," says Kwizu, the narrator of the story.

These villagers, like the Basumbwa, seem singularly deficient in perspicacity. Perhaps the Makua, through long contact with Portuguese and Arabs, are somewhat sharper, and Nakami or Mpfundla lost his too easily-acquired reputation when he ventured among them. It will not have escaped the reader's notice that Uncle Remus attributes to Brer Fox (and in one case to Brer B'ar) the part played by "the people" in these two African stories. In fact, except for Miss Meadows and the girls, so delightfully accounted for by the statement that "dey wuz in de tale," and one solitary appearance of "Mr. Man" (from whose superior power only Brer Rabbit can deliver Brer Fox), the actors in the great majority of his tales are animals only. In the aboriginal African stories, however, the distinction is not very clearly marked. I had myself frequently noticed this characteristic in Shire Highlands folklore, when I came upon the following passage in Chants et Contes des Baronga (p. 89):

"Le Lièvre, la Rainette, et toutes les bêtes qui passent et repassent dans ces curieux récits, représentent des êtres humains, cela va sans dire." . . . (Or would it not be more exact to say that the narrator, by a familiar myth-making process, invests them with his own personality?) "Leurs caractères physiques particuliers sont présents devant l'imagination du conteur pour autant qu'ils donnent du pittoresque au récit. Mais on les oublie tout aussi aisément dès qu'ils ne sont plus essentiels à la narration. . . . L'Hirondelle est un oiseau, mais sa femme est une véritable femme qui demeure dans une hutte, qui cuit dans une marmite des légumes. . . . . Dans l'histoire de la Femme paresseuse, l'Antilope déclare au Lièvre avoir vu les traces de ses pas dans un champ qui a été pillé par un voleur. Or, c'etaient les empreintes d'une femme! Le conteur è oublie la