Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/425

 Bavili Notes. 373

the person alone, and then threaten to call out his name if he does not return the Xidundu, and then if it is not returned, knock some fetish, calling his name out, so that if the ndoxi does not return the Xidundu he will surely die.

2. Ximbmdi, or Revenant. We have already learnt a good deal about the Bimbindi in the tales in Notes on the Folklore of the Fjort (pp. 11-16, 115, 156).

After death the Ximbindi of a person may rest in the house in which he dies for twenty days, after which it goes off to the woods and lives the very natural kind of life described in the above tales. But the Ximbindi of an ndoxi may haunt the place he died in for ever.

It is believed that if a person ever sees the Ximbindi of one of his relations that person who sees it may die ; but should any one be beaten by one, that person certainly has not long to live.

An ndoxi who has the proper medicine {mpangd) is spoken of as having the power of Nyungala. Such a ndoxi catches and keeps Bimbindi, and sends them out to beat and kill living persons. This ndoxi has also the power to send the leopard to kill people, or the crocodile to drown them or to carry their Bimbindi away under the waters to some island in the river Kongo, where he collects them previous to selling them to the white man, who (they believe) makes his cloth beneath the blue sea far away.

The girl mentioned in Notes on the Folklore of the Fjort (p. 11) as living in Malela, and as having died and been buried there, and then sold in Boma as a slave, and who afterwards came back to her family, was supposed to be under the influence of Nyungala by her parents. Since giving this example of a living Ximbindi I have heard of another case. A girl of the village of Lumbembika, in the upper Lukulu river in Kakongo, died and was buried. Some time after this