Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/491

 SOME NOTES ON KAST AFRICAN FOLKLORE.

BY MISS A. WKRNER.

The folklore of the East African Protectorate — i.e., roughly speaking, the region lying between the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria — is interesting in many ways, and not least because it is made up, in varying degrees, of three, if not four, different elements. The groundwork is Bantu, which has been influenced by Semitic contact on the coast and Hamitic contact in areas where Galla, Somali, Masai or Nandi have impinged upon the Bantu tribes. There is perhaps a further element contributed by the aboriginal hunting tribes, who may or may not be racially akin to the Hamites.

This overlapping of cultures is well illustrated in the case of the Wapokomo, a Bantu tribe who seem to have absorbed an older population — viz. some of the tribe now variously known as Wat, Wasanye or Ariangulo, — just as some of the first Bechwana immigrants into South Africa intermarried with the Bushmen already in possession. For this there is the direct evidence of Pokomo tradition and of certain ceremonies (the mystery of the Fufuriye) avowedly borrowed from the Wasanye ; there are also the facts that the lan- guage contains numerous non-Bantu words not apparently of Galla origin.^ and that the people combine hunting and

1 Pokomo contains a great many Galla words, and the Korokoro tribe, on the Upper Tana, speak only Galla, having quite disused their own language. Most of the Wasanye, too, speak Galla. They say their own language was identical with that spoken by the so-called Waboni, in the forests north-east of the Tana. The specimens of this hitherto collected are insufficient to deter- mine the provenance of the Pokomo words in question. A distinct language is spoken by t!ie tribe called Juwan, of whom I saw some individuals at Witu.

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