Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/470

 436 Traditions of the Baganda and Bnshoiigo.

under British rule. Indeed some of these bands, according to Sir Harry Johnston, must have penetrated much further to the west; for their blood (if not their customs) is discernible in various parts of the Congo basin. These invasions of the regions between the Victoria Nyanza and Mount Ruwenzori began, the same author beHeves, about two or three thousand years ago. If so, they must have settled in the more westerly districts — Unyoro, Toro and Ankole — for something between five hundred and fifteen hundred years before they attacked what is now the Kingdom of Uganda.^ Its history is summarized by Mr. Roscoe and Sir Harry Johnston in a rationalized form from the native legends, which we may believe are very numerous.

The list of kings given by the former comprises thirty- four (now thirty-five) names, beginning with Kintu. Kintu, according to the legends, was not merely the first King of Uganda: he was the first man. He came into the country (whence is not stated), and naturally found it empty. He was accompanied by a single cow, on whose milk he lived, for there was no other food. Fortunately for him, Nambi, the daughter of Gulu, King of Heaven, fell in love with him, and he married her. But her father only consented to the match after the suitor had performed a number of tasks of the kind with which every one who is conversant with folk-tales is familiar. In returning from heaven to earth laden with supplies by his father-in-law, Kintu and his wife, by an act of disobedience to Gulu, " brought Death into the world and all our woe," in the person of the lady's brother, Walumbe.^

8 Johnston, Uganda Protectorate, 6cx3, 678; Id., George Grenfell and the Congo, chap. 21, passim.

^Roscoe, 460; Johnston, U.P., 700. Cf. a version current among the Banyoro, Johnston, U.P., 606. This story of an ancestor who appeared no one knows whence, and was without parents, is not unique in Bantu tradition. Such a tale is told of Vere, the ancestor of the Wabuu, a tribe of the Wapokomo (Miss Werner, y^ Afr. Soc, xii., 363), and probably of others also.