Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/513

 Pokomo Folklore. 475

If really quite independent of European contact, this variant should not be without interest.

I was more successful with old Mpongwa, the non-mission elder of Ngao, where there are two villages side by side, — the Christian, which is being built with rectangular thatched houses of sun-dried bricks on either side of a broad street running away from the river, — and the ' Heidendorf' a cluster of beehive huts a little lower down on the river- bank. The Christians have their own elder, Nicodemus, but the vioro or "palaver-house," which is also the equivalent of the American " corner grocery," or the churchyard wall at Thrums, seems to be common to both. Mpongwa told me the tale of Mwakatsoo {alias Kitunguwe) and Muzee Nsimba, or " Old Man Lion." This is, I think, found in almost every collection of Bantu folk-tales that has yet been made, but I am writing at a distance from books and cannot give references from memory. The best-known is probably that to be found in Jacottet's Contcs Popidaires des Bassoutos. I believe that Mr. Walter Jekyll's " Annancy in Crab Country" is a far-off echo of the same original.® I give the story as nearly as possible in the old man's own words : —

" Old Lion built a stone house, and his kinsman was Mwakatsoo. Lion was hungry, and searched for all the beasts of the bush \bara, open bush country] and the forest. Mwakatsoo called all the animals together, elephant, hippopotamus, antelopes, giraffe, and the pig too, and the big palm-rat too. " Come, there is a 7iyambura dance at uncle's. There is a big dance. Let us play."

AH the animals came and stayed outside. Mwakatsoo said to them, — " Come, dance, there is nothing \i.e. no danger]." And [as for] the Lion, Mwakatsoo had buried him in the sand, leaving only one tooth sticking out.

They came in. The house had a big baraza, as long as from here [Ngao] to Meli [Chara]. All the animals went in. So the ^Jamaican Song and Story, p. 70.