Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/501

 The Bantu Element in Swahili Folklore. 437

we learn elsewhere that every family has some kind of meat, or some part of an animal, or certain fishes which its members are forbidden to eat, (the forbidden food being called mwiko or mzio). I hardly dare use the word totem, but I cannot help thinking that the kinyamkera, dtwgumaro, and the rest of them are nothing else but totems whose real meaning has been forgotten, though their hold is too strong for them to be got rid of altogether, and who, under the influence of Islam, have become mere sheitans to be exorcised with drums and dances.^ It may also be noted in passing that, when a growing girl's health gives her friends cause for anxiety, they try the effect of feeding her on her mwiko for a time.

The initiation ceremonies for young people of both sexes, though now including various Mohammedan features, have a strong Bantu element. We need only mention the nianyago or unyago dance, in which a grotesque figure is constructed out of grass and leaves, and moved about by a man dancing inside it, to frighten the boys. Whether the bullroarer is used, I have not been able to discover, but a generation ago the Wanika, (the neighbours of the Waswahili inland from Mombasa), still used the mwanza friction-drum, the men and women having each their own, which the other sex is not allowed to see, (just as with the Nandi of the present day).

Before passing on to the folk-tales with which my paper is mainly concerned, I would mention one point more. It will be remembered that, in the Story of Lioiigo in Steere's Swahili Tales (p. 437), the hero can only be killed by being stabbed in a particular way with a copper needle. This reminds me of a story current among the Wadoe^ of a chief who could only be killed by being struck by the

3 For mwiko being ascertained by a doctor, cf. Congo tnpangu (p. 308, sztpra).


 * It is given in Dr. Velten's Safari za Wasivahili, p. 179.