Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/506

 468 Pokoino Folklore.

not aware of its existence among any Bantu tribe, unless it is the Kikuyu, wl^o would have borrowed it from the Masai. A song sung by children to this bird runs as follows; —

'■^ iVzooiii mityoive^ hiiyii iidiye inpungu Mpuiigit iiiitleiiji kvoa baba, nzoonj viuyowe. Hiiyii ndiye mpuugu, bibi, nzooiii viuyowe, Huyit udiyc inpungu, »ipungii inulcnji huyu."

i.e. " Come and see, this is the vipungii, the mputtgii who flies on high at my father's, come and see. This is the inpungu, grandfather, come and see. This is the mpungu, the mpungu who flies on high."

Another very unlucky bird is the hoyembc, seemingly a kind of ibis or heron, which is not eaten by any tribe of Pokomo, apparently because it lives on fish. If men see it in front of them, when going to fish, they at once turn back.

I should add that I have hitherto failed to identify the inpungu. All enquiries at Ngao, which is about a day's journey below Kulesa, have elicited only the fact that the people know the mpungu, but, by their description, it must be an entirely different bird from the above, being like the cJialikoko (fish-eagle, Haliaetus vocifer), but larger and also different in colouring. Nor do they seem to be aware of any sinister reputation attaching to a bird of the name.

I find that the inpungu song of which I have a phonograph record is not the same as the one given above, which was dictated to me by the singer at my request, after taking the record. Many natives seem to find a difficulty in remembering the words of a song unless they are actually singing it, (when it requires a good deal of practice to be able to catch and take them down). In the same way, I found that some Kikuyu young men could not, so they said, sing the song of which I wanted a record, without going through the motions of the dance which it usually accompanied, and they were unable to do this in the absence of the other performers. Whether this was