Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/235

 Collectanea. 1 99

the patient was old enough to understand the fearful decision.

The poor child turned over on the bed with a groan, and was a

little later found to be dead.

Thos. J. Westropp.

{To be continued^

Fifty Hausa Folk-tales.

The Hausas, as I have tried to prove elsewhere,^ have probably come from somewhere near Ethiopia, and are a mixture of Arabs and Berbers with Copts and many local tribes between the Nile and the Niger. The following tales are a selection from those I collected during 1908 and 1909 in Jemaan Daroro (N. Nigeria). Women and children are usually the best story-tellers, but I found them difficult to get hold of and more nervous and easily tired than the men, so that I had to rely mainly on my own sex, the narrators being Privates Ba Gu(d)du and Umoru Gombe of the ist N. Nigeria Regt.,the Sa(r)rikin Dukawa (Chief of the Leather workers), Mamma, a personal servant, and Ashetu, a policeman's wife; the stories contributed by them are marked respectively B.D., U.G., S.D., M., and A. Of these by far the best Hausa was spoken by Mamma. All were of course illiterate. The most serious difficulty one encounters is to keep pace with the narrator. To stop him for an explanation is often to disturb him so much that he loses the thread of the tale. Many of the speeches also are sung in a falsetto voice, and this alters the sounds and even the accents of vowels. Again, the story-teller, if paid so much per story, is apt to skip certain parts which he thinks would puzzle the listener, and if paid by time he may add on parts of other tales to avoid the trouble of thinking out a whole fresh one. Lastly, as Mr. Hartland remarks in The Science of Fairy Tales (p. 18), " It is by no means an uncommon thing for the rustic story-teller to be unable to explain expressions, and indeed whole episodes, in any other way than Uncle Remus, when called upon to say who Miss Meadows was : " She wuz in de tale. Miss Meadows en de gals wuz, en de tale I give you like hi't wer' gun ter me." Dr. Steere, speaking of a collection of Swahili tales by M. Jablonsky which I

"^ Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol. xviii., pp. 767-75.