Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/358

308 medicine and poison, and "konko," or law of prohibition. These last two are really one and interchangeable in their usage.

The "mpangu" is a tabu that passes from father to sons. So long as the daughters are in their father's house they observe it, but, when they marry, they generally follow their husband's mpangu and drop their father's. Sometimes the father would tell his child of this mpangu, and at other times, when the woman is near her confinement, a nganga is called and orders a feast, which is eaten by the same clan only as the woman. The nganga, knowing the mpangu of the child's father, says that the child is not to eat certain things, mentioning the father's mpangu. In one family, the inherited tabu was not to eat any wild animal or fish with spots on it, such as the striped antelope, certain gazelles, civet cats, leopards, shrimps, etc., and the penalty for breaking this tabu was a very bad skin disease,—a form of leprosy. The idea here was simply to avoid any flesh food that had a spotted skin. The mpangu of another lad was not to eat hippopotamus flesh or yams, the penalty being elephantiasis; not to eat crayfish, the penalty being a skin disease on the hand; not to eat razv palm nuts, the penalty being an outbreak of scald head; not to eat a spotted fish called "nlumbu," the penalty being ophthalmia and loss of eyelashes; not to eat the "ezunda" or great bull frog, the penalty being that the eyes will bulge out like the frog's. Here the penalties are in accord with the broken prohibitions;—eating hippopotamus will cause elephantiasis or a leg like the legs of a hippopotamus; eating the nlumbu, a fish with opal eyes, causes ophthalmia, and eating the frog causes bulging eyes. These mpangu did not act as omens, neither did they regard them with respect, but they would help to kill them. They only had "not to eat them" for fear of the penalties.

Around Wathen they do not use the word "mpangu,"