Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/469

 Traditions of the Bagauda and Biishoyigo. 435

succession amongst the Thonga calls to chieftainship the younger brothers of the deceased chief, so some of these names may well belong to brothers. Therefore it does not follow that eight names correspond to eight different generations."' Accordingly the Thonga pedigrees are anything but trustworthy. We have no means of knowing when the persons whose names appear in, at all events, their earlier stages lived, or even whether they are not purely mythical. It seems certain that they did not live at the time to which the ordinar\- calculation of generations would approximately assign them. The pedigrees, it is probable, are simply lists of real or mythical personages whose names remain in the native memory, strung together in one way by one depositary of tradition, in another way by another. Both of these learned men would doubtless do so in perfect good faith, and to them the result would equally represent the genealogy according to native ideas. They would be quite undisturbed by the discrepancies that give trouble to a white enquirer.

There are, however, two Bantu peoples whose traditions traverse a much longer period of time ; and a serious claim has recently been put forward that these traditions should be regarded as genuine historical evidence. One of these peoples is the Baganda and the other the Bushongo.

The Baganda were, when discovered, the most highly civilized of the Bantu. The royal stock is supposed to have descended from Galla or some other Hamitic invaders, who conquered the country and subjected it, much in the same way as Anglo-Saxon England was subdued and settled by the Normans under William the Conqueror, the two peoples ultimately fusing into one. The adjacent countries of Unyoro, Toro and Ankole had been previously attacked and conquered by similar but probably more numerous bands, who still, under the name of Bahima, form the aristocracies of these provinces, now all brought

"Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe (Neuchatel, 1912-3), i., 20-26.