Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/159

 Reviews. 137

about those of Kibiika there is none. They consisted of certain bundles now in the Museum at Cambridge, probably procured for it by Mr. Roscoe, though he is too modest to say so. These bundles on examination proved to contain portions of a human being, one being a jawbone. Now, it is customary to detach the jawbone from the corpse of a king or chief and to preserve it separately, much as this has been preserved, because the special portion of the body to which the ghost clings is precisely the jawbone. Moreover, while some natives say that Mukasa died and was buried on Bubembe, others declare that he simply dis- appeared ; and disappearance is one mode in which a king's death is announced, for it is not permissible to say that he is dead. Yet all these form together but a slender ground for the opinion that Mukasa and Kibuka were deified men. Equivalent stories of the birth, life, and death of gods were told in Greece. The birthplace and the grave of Zeus, for example, were well known. Nor can any dependence be placed upon the preserva- tion of personal remains : we need only refer to the universal relic-mongering of the Middle Ages in proof of this. Mukasa's wife, too, was the sister of the python Selwanga worshipped at the mouth of the river Mujuzi in Budu, the southern province of Uganda. When we add to these considerations the fact that the cult of Mukasa is known not only to the Baganda, but also to the Warundi, the Waziba, and the Wanyamwezi, two or three hundred miles away beyond the southern end of the great lake, our doubts will be more than confirmed.

The Baganda never formed their gods into a system or society like the Greek Olympus or the Norse Asgard. Some of them, like those mentioned above, constituted a family, but the rest were detached and independent, so far at least as our information goes. Wanga was believed to be one of the oldest of the gods. Tradition made him the father of the Earthquake god Musisi, who is reported to have been the father of Mukasa. According to the tradition accepted elsewhere by Mr. Roscoe, Mukasa's father, as we have seen, was Wanema, though Mr. Cunningham makes the latter "a great goddess with general functions." Besides Mukasa, Musisi, in Mr. Roscoe's tradition, is said to have had two sons, Wamala and Wanema. Wamala is noticed by Mr. Cunningham