Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/505

 The Bantu Element in Swahili Folklore. 441

genus as it ; his smallness is like its, and his cunning as great as its : he resembles it in all respects."

It will be remembered that many of Hlakanyana's adventures are identical with those attributed to the Hare. Many of the best-known stories are told, sometimes of animals, sometimes of human beings. The identification of Abu Nuwasi with the Hare is another curious point. Abu Nuwasi, we are told, was a real man : the dates of his birth and death (762-815) are given, and he was a noted poet in his day and a favourite at the court of Harun al Raschid. He seems to have attracted to himself all the eccentric and not always edifying anecdotes current among the people in his own day and later ; and these stories appear to have become very popular on the Swahili coast, judging from the number to be found in the four collections I have mentioned. One of them has reached Delagoa Bay, and is given in M. Junod's collection (Chants et Contes des Baronga), under the title of Bonawasi, which the editor quite excusably takes for a native's corruption of the Portuguese Bonifacio. Most if not all of Abu Nuwasi's adventures have come from Arabia ; but I think that he has also acquired some which originally belonged to the Hare : in any case the Swahili are fond of calling the Hare, by a sort of pun, Kibwana Wazi, which might mean "the clever little master," though wazi properly means " open, clear, manifest." (It might, however, come from waza, " to think, ponder.") The usual word for the Hare is sungura, — Yao, sungula, corresponding to the Nyanja kalulu, — which is a real hare, though somewhat smaller than an English one, and not a rabbit. I do not understand why Schleicher, in the preface to his Afrikanische Petrefakten, should say that the snngnra is the spring-hare or jerboa, {Pedetes cajfer). In one of the Swahili Tales already referred to, the Hare is called not sitngura, but kititi, probably as a kind of pet name, as it seems to mean simply " a little thing."