Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/188

 1 7 2 The Origin of Exogamy and Toteinism,

had answered all this and supplied the strongest possible evidence, in The Secret of tJie Totcvi (pp. 129-34), giving modern examples, examples of Highland clans (who are touchy on points of honour), examples from the Blackfoot Indians, and (pp. 25-6) the instance of Bakuena tribes who account for their tribal sacred animals {siboko) as the result of accepted nicknames.

On December 9, 1879, the Rev. Roger Price, of Molepole, in the northern Bakuena country, wrote as follows to Mr. G. W. Stow, Geological Survey, South Africa. He gives the myth which is told to account for the siboko, or tribal sacred and name-giving animal, of the Bahurutsi (Baboons). (These animal names in this part of Africa denote local tribes, not totem kins within a local tribe.)

" Tradition says that about the time the separation took place between the Bahurutsi and the Bakuena, baboons entered the gardens of the former and ate their pumpkins before the proper time for commencing to eat the fruits of the new year. The Bahurutsi were unwilling that the pumpkins which the baboons had broken off and nibbled at should be wasted, and ate them accordingly. This act is said to have led to the Bahurutsi being called Buchwene, Baboon-people, — which " [namely, the Baboon] " is their siboko to this day, and they having the precedence ever afterwards in the matter of taking the first bite of the new year's fruits. If this story be the true one," continues Mr. Price, " it is evident that what is now used as a term of honour was once a term of reproach." The Bakuena, too, are said to owe the origin of their siboko [the crocodile] to the fact that their people once ate an ox which had been killed by a crocodile. Mr. Price, therefore, is strongly inclined to think " that the siboko of all the tribes was originally a kind of nickname, or term of reproach, but," he adds, " there is a good deal of mystery about the whole thing."

This case, which I obtained from Mss., thanks to the kindness of Miss Burne, was published in 1905, in Mr. G. W. Stow's posthumous work, The Native Races of South