Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/507

 Pokomo Folklore. 469

Jonathan's reason or not, I did not succeed in taking down the words when repeating the record, and cannot now try it again until a permanent duplicate is made.

Other more or less fabulous beings are the kodoile, the iigojaina^ and the kitumisi. The first-named, one informant told me, was "a bear," — an animal, I believe, quite unknown in Africa ; but it appears that the translators of the Pokomo New Testament have used kodoile as an equivalent for "bear" in Rev., cap. xiii., v. 2. ("Dragon" in the preceding chapter is rendered by ngojaina.) The accounts of it are somewhat vague. The old men at Ngao tell me that it is like a leopard, but its colour is that of "a kind of cat " ; it is much dreaded, but its attributes seem at present somewhat obscure. The yigojama and kitiiniisi are both human or quasi-human in aspect, but the former has a long steel claw in the palm of his hand, which he strikes into people, should they be so unfortunate as to come within his reach, and then drinks their blood. He speaks, and his language is Galla. He is mostly solitary, but sometimes has a wife and children ; they live in the bush, but neither make shelters nor climb into trees. Possibly some solitary outcast Galla, rendered misanthropical by his experiences and armed with a spiked bracelet, or possibly with a weapon similar to the "tiger's claw " of India, originated the myth.

The following story about the yigojavia^ which was told me at Kulesa by Yonatan Kopo of the Ngatana tribe, was hardly intelligible at the time, but I have since obtained explanations and the continuation from Isaya, a Pokomo of the Denu clan (Buu tribe) from Ngao. The legendary hero of the story, Bombe, is said to have been a real man belonging to the Katsoo clan of the Buu tribe.

" Long ago a man [Bombe] was on the plains {yuaiida, the open steppe which skirts the Tana forest), and the

godyaina.
 * So far as I can trust my ear, the Pokomo say itgojaiiia and the Galla