Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/497

 PokoDW Folklore. 459

dof^. baboon, and small monkey called ngoto ; but half the nation eats the monkey called cliima, and half also eat lion, — which half not specified. The hippopotamus is eaten by some and avoided by others of the same tribe, e.g. the Wabuu.

The names of the clans, with rare exceptions, suggest nothing in this respect. Many of them are compounded with kvia. This, I am told, is a word of the Upper Tana dialect. I could get no explanation of it, but suppose it to have the same meaning as it has in Swahili, viz. " relations, family, kin." Sometimes the second half of the compound has a recognizable meaning in present-day Pokomo, — and I hope by further enquiry to increase the number of these examples ; sometimes one can get no other explanation than " sindo tii " (" it is only a clan name "). Mbare, in Kifiambarc, is the up-river equivalent to Jizare, the name by which the Kulesa and Ngao people designate two kinds of wading birds, (the smaller, I think, is a white ibis). But no one seems to be aware of anything which might lead us to suppose that it was the totem of the Kinambare. My informants denied that they abstain from eating it, and I could not elicit the smallest hint that they have any special ideas about it at all. Kinangombe, Kinamongo, and Kinahafa are compounded with words meaning, respectively, "cattle," "back" (or, more probably, "the further side" of the Tana), and "here." There is another clan (of the Wakilindi) called Mamboo, which seems to mean " people of the hither bank" {niboo). Gomeni is the name of a place ; Uta, I thought, was " people of the bow," but bow is uJia, not 7ita, in Pokomo, and I now find that Uta is also a Galla clan. A little light is thrown on this matter by the statement that many clans have alternative names, one of which is Galla. The Galla were for many years the tyrants of the VVapokomo, continually raiding and harassing, when not actually enslaving them, and, — as is the case with some tribes exposed to the incursions of the