Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/372

 CORRESPONDENCE.

A Culture-Tradition. {Ante, vol. iii., p. 92.)

When at Ntumbi, West Shire district in 1894, I obtained from a girl named INIbuya, daughter of Chipanga of Nziza, the story of which a translation is given below. I could make little or nothing of it at first (as, probably owing to want of practice on the part both of reciter and reporter, it is incomplete, and per- haps, in some places, not correctly taken down), but on seeing Dr. Elmslie's "Folklore Tales of Central Africa," in vol. iii. of Folk-Lore^ I recognised it in " The Man who lived by Over- reaching Others," though as will be seen, there are some im- portant differences. Dr. Elmslie gives no more precise indication as to locality of collection than Lake Nyasa. My locality was about sixty miles to the south of the lake, and inhabited by so-called " Angoni " — in reality Anyanja, with a sprinkling of migrants from other tribes. The general language was Chinyanja. Chipanga was, so far as I know, a iNInyanja, his wife, Mbuya's mother, a Yao. The girl knew both languages, but usually spoke Chinyanja, in which she dictated this story to me. I was at first inclined to conjecture that it might be an older form than Dr. Elmslie's version, some native Euhemerus about Kotakota or Bandawe having substituted a man for the rabbit as more possible. But it is also conceivable that where "Brer Rabbit" is the hero of almost every " kiichenjera " story ^ (as is the case in those I collected at Ntumbi and Blantyre — the tortoise and one or two other creatures occasionally takes his place) adventures originally not his own might be attributed to him.-

' One involving cleverness.

- Mbuya makes the guinea-fowls eat " sand," while Dr. Elmslie has "white ants " — the former seems to me to have far more point, white ants being rather a delicacy than otherwise, both to fowls and human beings.