Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/426

 374 Bavili Notes.

her mother, having made a long journey into the bush, came across her daughter and asked her how she got there. She said that she had been sold to the chief of that town. After some palavers and delay she was brought back to her town, where she lived as a Ximbindi. She was forbidden to go near the place where she had been buried. The only difference people noticed about her was that her will was not her own, and that her eyes were like those of a person who had been drinking.^

3. Xilunzi, or ndunzi, the intelligence, dies, so they say, with man, and a Ximbindi is simply a tool in the hands of the ndoxi, and has no ndunsi.

4. Nkulu, voice or soul of the dead. The Bakulu, or souls, of the Bavili have nothing to do with witches, or shadows, or ghosts, or breath, or even intelligence : they are the good and guiding voices of the good dead, i.e. of those who are not ndoxi. They prefer to dwell in the heads of some of their near relations, and are placed there as described in the Death and Burial of the Fjort? If they are not fortunate enough to find such a habitation, they are said to hover about the outer division, or verandah, of the houses of their relations. They are never seen. They mourn with their relations when in trouble and long to help them. And they say that if every one of the Bavili were destroyed to-morrow, these Bakulu would hover about in the grass around their town for ever and ever.

I was very much touched the other day when present at the funeral of a woman whom I had learnt to respect very much, to note the careful way in which the brother picked up the sacred earth from the grave of his now

^ [There is, of course, no reason to suppose that these narratives have any basis in fact further than the abduction of people for sale into slavery, accomplished perhaps with the aid of hypnotism? N. W. T. — I knew the parties. R. E. D.]

"^Folklore, vol. viii. p. 136.