Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/151

Rh He was chiefly occupied with two Bantu tribes, the Wamakonde and the Wamakua, who with some detached branches of the Wayao and some intrusive Angoni inhabit the country between the Lukuledi and Rovuma rivers. His drawings and a large number of his photographs are excellent. As Miss Werner remarks too, it was a happy inspiration to collect and preserve native drawings. Their value as records of this kind of artistic development among the tribes in question, and as data for comparison, will increase if other travellers will follow the example. English anthropologists have not left us entirely without such specimens from various peoples; but they have not recognized their importance, and have not accumulated them systematically.

The student of folklore will turn with interest to the questions of social organizations, institutions, and beliefs. But for the reasons I have indicated he will hardly be satisfied. The paragraph, for instance, on page 314, on the marriage rules of the Makonde, is far from clear. It does not appear why a Makonde youth must marry his maternal uncle's daughter, especially as the author goes on to say that in the next generation the youth must marry the daughter of his father's sister. This difficulty is only partially removed by Miss Werner's note on a subsequent page; and it is evident that a little more minute enquiry on Dr. Rivers' plan might have been successful in explaining the position. Probably Makonde society is undergoing a transformation, as Miss Werner suggests, from matrilineal to patrilineal descent. This appears to be hinted at on p. 311; but Dr. Weule did not follow up the clue. Not having the original before me, I do not know whether he wrote on p. 307 matriarchate or mother-right. The example given is certainly to be referred to the latter, and the word matriarchate is perhaps a slip of the pen on the part of author or translator.

Is it true to say that the ceremonies at a first pregnancy are "at bottom only a pleasant setting for a number of rules and prohibitions inculcated on this occasion by the older women?" Have they no ritual effect in themselves? It would be contrary to what we know of other ceremonies. For the details of the puberty rites, so far as the author was allowed to witness them