Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/147

 Reviews. 121

delay in payment of the bride-price may have helped to perpetuate the position of the malume among a people reckoning descent through the father. But by far the most probable account deduces it from the authority and responsibilities of the brother in a family of uterine descent. Not to mention the true Negroes, many of the Bantu tribes north of the Zambesi and in the Congo area are organized on the basis of uterine descent, while in South Africa the Herero are in what appears to be a state of transition from the uterine to the agnatic family. Where kinship is reckoned exclusively through the mother, the head of the family is one of her uncles or brothers. His rights over the children extend some- times to life and death, more often to sale or pledging for the debts of the family ; and the corresponding responsibilities for their maintenance and protection rest upon him. The bride- price very often includes no more than the right of cohabitation ; at most it is only one of the means by which the transfer of the potestas and of kinship is effected. There are numerous examples among the Bantu of West Africa and the Negroes where the payment of bride-price results in the transfer of neither. In these cases the father may obtain the potestas by advancing money or goods to his wife's family by way of loan upon security of the children, or more rarely by specific purchase. Such a transaction, if common, leads ultimately to the reckoning of kinship through the father ; for paternal kinship is usually conceived in that stage of civilization in terms of property.

With one exception the Bantu folk-tales given by Dr. Theal are incorporated from his well-known Kaffir Folk-Lore, published nearly thirty years ago. His preliminary observations on the morality of the stories are just. But this morality is by no means peculiar to the Bantu. It pervades the folklore of the Negroes and of all races in a similar degree of culture. The stories are largely concerned with animals ; but these animals are not simply " animals that spoke as human beings," as in the fables of more civilized nations. They are much more. No line of cleavage existed in the imagination of the story-tellers between man and other animals. All alike were animated by human reason and human passions, and even their outward shapes were evanescent and interchangeable. There was, in short, complete confusion