Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/296

 26o Reviews,

changes into a man and courts a girl, who marries him and narrowly escapes with her life. But there are several important differences, (i) No moral is pointed as to the fastidiousness of the girl, who, in the other versions, refuses numerous eligible suitors, to put up with this very "crooked stick" at last. (2) He is discovered and driven away before the marriage takes place. (3) The incident is represented as the starting-point of the hyaena's predatory career — "Now henceforward we will always prowl about at night, and if we can ever seize any of the Wakamba stock we will do so." It also seems intended to account for his Kamba name mbiti, (cf Kikuyu hiti, also impisi, fist, siTid. other Bantu forms.) The villagers say to him, — "You are not Mutili," — the name he had assumed in his human form, —

" but Mbiti, because you eat meat raw " bithi (cf Swahili -bichi) :

a fair instance of popular etymology.

The " Hare and Tortoise " race story (p. 114) is here told of the Tortoise {JVgu) and the Fish-Eagle {Kipalala), — a bird of which the appearances in Bantu folklore are not very frequent, though Duff Macdonald {Africana, vol. ii., p. 354) gives a story in which he is cheated by another bird, but turns the tables on him. Two Hare stories introduce familiar incidents. The trick of planting cows' and goats' tails in the ground and pretending that the animals have sunk, is found in one of the stories collected by Dr. Elmslie {Folk-Lore, vol. iii.). The partnership of the lion and hare, the trick by which the latter gets rid of the former, (jumping over a fire), and that by which he (in the second story, p. 115) helps the monkeys to the Kamba crops, the A-Kamba to the Kikuyu women, and the Akikuyu to the Kamba herds, are incidents to which numerous parallels could be found, but space does not permit us to pursue the subject. The first story professes to account for the alleged fact that hares will frequently suck (or, as Mr. Hobley somewhat strangely puts it, " suckle ") cows or other domestic animals when grazing. Mr. Hobley remarks (p. 116):—

"The constant recurrence of these hare stories in native folklore makes one wonder why primitive man should have invested the hare with such extra- ordinary cunning, for the hare can hardly be said to be a beast which impresses itself greatly on the imagination of civilized mankind."