Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/499

 The Bantu Element in Swahili Folklore. 435

preserves expressions, lost at Zanzibar, which show its kinship with the other Bantu tongues.

It has sometimes been said that the admixture of Arab blood gives the Waswahili a great superiority over the African of an inland tribe. This I take leave to doubt. The opinion has gained currency, I fancy, on the authority of explorers who travelled with picked specimens of trained men (trained by experience under other Euro- peans), and whose standard of virtue and efficiency in details was largely determined by their personal require- ments at the moment. Whatever the Arab descent in any given case may amount to, — and one fancies that it is often a negligible quantity, — the system of slavery by which it has been perpetuated must have tended to vitiate any advantages it might have been supposed to entail. I think, where a fair comparison is possible, the average Mnyanwezi, Yao, or Mnyanja compares very favourably with the average coast-man ; and, while not undervaluing the elements of culture which the latter has carried far inland, to the shores of Lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika, it is generally found that the aborigines are decidedly the worse for contact with him.

Taking in the first place agricultural customs, we find an obscure passage which perhaps indicates that the reporter himself did not fully understand what he was describing : —

"They do not eat of the new crops except with mavumba. Many have spirits, such as the kinyamkera, the dungumaro, the shamfigombe, and every kind of spirit. There are very few Waswahili who have no spirit. As people inherit property they inherit the family spirit too. And if a person who has a spirit eats without mavumba, by the evening he will get fever or some other sickness." {Desturi, p. 189.)

Mavumba is explained as "a particular kind of flour," which, presumably, is to be sprinkled over the firstfruits ; but I own that this does not seem very satisfactory, and it seems much more probable that the real meaning has