Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/292

 256 Reviews.

They lorded it over the smaller tribes and appear to have bullied them more or less. Blood money owed to the latter was not usually paid by the five "cock " clans.

There are five recognised heads of these clans to-day, but the importance of being chieftain of a clan is not what it was years ago. Some of these men, however, are Government headmen to-day (Kinyanjui is head of the Achera), and have thus a dual standing in the District.

The Agathigia and remaining clans are said to have never had any recognised head, the five big clans being paramount.

The origin and derivation of the names of clans are unknown for certain. My informants cannot say whether the names come from the first head of the clan or from the ridge or district in which they formerly lived. The first is probably the correct solution and has been endorsed by information given to Europeans other than myself."^

If Mr. Tate's "9a Ambura" corresponds to "6. Akiuru or Mwesaga or Mburu," (the first two names, apparently, do not occur in Southern Kikuyu), we are right in counting it as a separate clan. The same is the case with the Agathigia and Airimu ; but, on the other hand, the " Angari or Aithekahuno " are taken by Mr. Routledge as one, so that the total number is thirteen.

We must conclude this necessarily very incomplete and inade- quate survey, of a book which has permanently enriched the records of ethnology, by a glance at the folk-tales. Two points of special interest emerge here, — the rainbow-snake ^ and the ilimii. The story called " The Giant of the Great Water " represents the former being as eating " the father and the young men, and the women and the children, and the oxen and the goats, and then he ate the houses and the barns, so that there was nothing left." Subsequently all the lost were recovered when the sole survivor of this destruction made an incision in the giant's middle finger, just as Masilonyane's cows (Jacottet, Contes Pop. des Bassoutos, p. 51) came out of the old woman's big toe. But in Masilo et Masilonyane this point is scarcely of the essence of the story, which belongs to a very wide- spread type in which the jealousy of one brother (or sister) leads to murder, and the murder is discovered by means of some part of

^'Journal of the African Society, April, 1910, p. 237.

'' For the rainbow-snake in West Africa, cf Dennett, At the Back of the Black Matins Mind, p. 142. The Zulus seem to retain traces of a similar con- ception, but the story in the text is the first I have met with which connects it with the swallowing story.