Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/370

348 described. This special saucepan is called nsansilwa, and is always kept near the fire so as to have hot water at any time for washing the baby etc. The bead must be dropped in within two days after the birth, and may be dropped in by a parent on behalf of a son. Only a member of those clans into which the girl could marry would drop in a bead. Although the marriage money will only be paid later, no one else could claim the girl. If a person thought unsuitable, or a stranger (though it is unlikely a stranger could get into the house), put in a bead, it would be returned to him; but, if there was no real kinship or clan reason why the person dropping in the bead should not in due time marry the girl, the return of the bead would be resented as a gross insult. As the saucepan is well guarded during the two days, only a small percentage of girls is actually bespoken in this way.

Birth house and charm.—The house in which a birth takes place is called kialakazi, and the new mid-rib or frond of a palm is shaken out and put over the door in order to ward off dangers of two kinds. In the first place it prevents molestation of the inmates of the house if a quarrel arises in the town, and in the second it warns persons who have eaten things which are the mpangu tabu of the child not to enter the kialakazi. For example, if the mpangu of the child is goat's meat, any one who eats goat's flesh must refrain from entering the house, or the child will become sickly, and perhaps die. From some kialakazi fire must never be taken out, though fire may be taken in. At the end of the first month the palm frond is removed, as the child is then regarded as strong enough to be unaffected by such malign influences. The same sign of a new palm frond is used by a person in a town, or by a whole town, to indicate neutrality in any local war, and ensures respect by the local antagonists.

Food tabus.—In the neighbourhood of Wathen Station the women will not eat ngola (the cat-fish or baghre) for fear of barrenness, and around San Salvador, for the same reason, women will eat no birds except ngumbe (an African pheasant) and nkelele (guinea-fowl) until they have given birth to a boy and a girl. A tabu called nkamba,—usually forbidding the eating of one of the