Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/290

 2 68 Reviews.

intellectual powers, their language is a startling monument of this. Chivemba is closely akin to the Luba languages of the Congo, and a look at the brilliant grammar of the latter languages by Dr. Morrison, published a few years ago by the Presbyterian Tract Society at New York, will confirm the saying of the authors that "the copious vocabulary and the almost unlimited capacity of forming derivatives according to fixed laws makes us wonder at the genius of the race which evolved it." A fair idea of the possi- bilities of Chiluba may be got from the fact that the Baluba near Lake Moero use thirty-seven different tenses in their common speech. None of our European tongues shows such a marvellous logic as the Bantu languages do ; the closest resemblance to them can be found in the newer, artificial, international languages.

Besides their qualities the defects of the Awemba are men- tioned : their want of an aim in life, their thriftlessness, improvi- dence, and lack of sense of the value of time. The greatest obstacle to progress is, however, apart from their conservatism (which, I think rightly, is mentioned among their qualities), the intensity of their sexual nature. The apparent absence of will-power is ascribed to the fact that the individual has merged his volition in that of the clan. The authors prove the presence of a strict code of sexual morals, and deplore that the natives are very far from living up to it.

The plateau native is emphatically a man of rehgiosity rather than a man of religion. Like most Bantu people he accepts one Supreme God, Leza, the incomprehensible, the greatest of all spirits, creator of life and death, more a nature-force than a deity : the African First Cause. Leza is responsible for creation in all its forms, and for death (natural) and decay; "he brings about in fit and proper time the death of old age." He is above the flattery of worship, and prayer is reserved for spirits less exalted, not so remote from humanity, spirits that have qualities and faults in common with man, the spirits of the ancestors and of nature, chief among which is Mulenga. The nature spirits represent those phenomena of nature against which primitive man has to wage war ; the ancestral spirits may be tribal (when spirits of chiefs), or family (when those of a deceased member of the family). The former have priestesses, doomed to celibacy, and are capable of