Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/133

 The Folklore of the Ba-Thonga 1 17

same stock, more akin to the Zulu type than to the Suto, but bearing certainly its individual character. But at my station of Shilouvane, near Leydsdorp, I had not only Thonga people, but also a Pedi-Suto tribe called the Ba-Khaha which represents, I think, a very primitive stage of the Suto nation ; and therefore the field of study was very wide indeed.

Of course it would not be possible to me to give you the whole of my observations on those two native communities during three and a half years. But I intend to-night to go into three of the domains of this manifold science which calls itself Ethnography, and especially to show you some specimens which I have brought with me for that purpose.

Beginning with the native industry or handicraft, I may say that I did not find our natives very much advanced in that domain. However, interesting proofs of their manual ability are not wanting, and I exhibit before you one of the most curious, viz., what we may call a Suto pound-sterling. It is like a kind of stick, one foot and a half in length, having a protuberance at one end with short branches pro- jecting therefrom; but it is of splendid copper mixed with a good percentage of gold. It used to be the money of the tribe ; not the small money, but a thing of value. Ten were sufficient to buy a wife, two to buy an ox. You can estimate by this fact the value of the Urate. This object was indeed named the Urate, and was obtained in the fol- lowing way. At Palaora, far away in the desert of North- Eastern Transvaal, there is a little chain of hills with very rich deposits of copper ore. The Ba-Suto natives of these parts knew how to smelt the ore ; they dug in the clay of a white-ant-hill a kind of basin which had a long narrow vertical hole at the bottom. This shaft led into a larger semi-spherical hole beneath, and in the sides of this larger cavity they made some smaller ones. Then they heated the ore in the basin by means of charcoal, till the copper melted, sank to the bottom of the basin, flowed down into the