Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/466

 432 Traditions of the B Uganda and Bushongo.

has written a careful and trustworthy work on the people as "a compensating advantage" for the absence of written records. "In accordance with this system," he says, "an heir not only takes the office of his predecessor, but so impersonates him, that it is common to hear a man telling another that he is the father or the chief of a person who is known to have died years before. Similarly a woman belonging to a particular clan will claim to be the mother of a king who has been dead for several generations. Bear- ing this system in mind, and also taking into consideration the remarkably accurate memories of the people, their graphic power to recount the details of events long past^ and their conservatism in religious ceremonies" and social customs, the reader will recognize that it is possible to obtain from them a fairly accurate account of past ages." ^ Whether this " remarkable system of inheritance," as the author rightly calls it, is connected with the belief held by the Baganda in reincarnation,^ does not appear. We may, however, be permitted to suspect it. It is quite another question whether the claim he makes on its- behalf is justified. Neither conservatism in religious ceremonies and social customs, nor a power of memory considerable, even striking to us, and extending to details, is sufficient to warrant the exact transmission of purely oral registers of fact ; while " the graphic power to recount the details of events long past " points to a cultivation and development of the imagination destructive of such exact transmission. At different times throughout his book Mr. Roscoe himself challenges the traditions for which he claims such accuracy. They " are seen," he says in one place, " to need modifica- tion." Elsewhere he admits the exercise of the mythopceic faculty and the existence of aetiological legends in more versions than one, accounted as history and believed by the people.'^ Indeed, it takes very little reflection to perceive that where a man impersonates one long dead, and recounts

■•Roscoe, Baganda, 3, 136. ^ Ibid., 46. ^ Ibid., 136, 460.