Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/495

 Some jVo/es on East Afj-ican Folklore. 461

needle, by which alone he could be killed.^ He is said to have lived about A.D. 1300, and to have harried the Wapo- komo and Wasegeju, his principality — or rather that of his brother, Shah Mringari — being Shaka, a few miles north of Kipini. He seems to have been of Persian origin. He imposed on the Wapokomo the tax known as the " tribute of heads" (Kuyavya vitswa) — viz. two slaves from each of the smaller villages and four from the larger. This was ultimately commuted for a payment of thirty loads of rice, known to have been levied by the Sultans of Witu within the memory of people now living. (Shaka was conquered by Pate, and the Nabhan sultans of Pate fled to the main- land and established the principality of Witu, somewhere about 1837 — hence their succession to the inheritance of Liongo.)

If the above date is correct, and the poems attributed to Liongo genuine, it is certain that the Swahili language already existed in literary form by the end of the thirteenth century A.D. And it seems probable that Pokomo is the Bantu speech whence it is most immediately derived. As has often been stated, the islands of the Lamu archipelago and the adjacent mainland ^^the " Bajun " coast) are con- sidered the original home of the Swahili ; and I have found that the Swahili of, e.g., Mambrui call that region "Swahilini," expressly limiting the name to the country north-east of the Tana. The Wapokomo and the Wasegeju would thus have been the nearest neighbours of the early settlers ; there does not seem to have been any contact with the Wagiryama or other " Nyika " tribes before the middle of the sixteenth century. At the time when the coast towns were founded the Wanyika were well out of reach at Sungwaya.

Pokomo shares with Swahili the tendency (most marked in the Lamu dialect of the latter) to drop a consonant

' See Sir J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, part vii., " Balder the Beautiful," vol. ii., appendix iii., p. 314.