Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/497

 Sot?ie Notes on East African Folklore. 463

Near Mombasa — e.g. at Jomvu — there is a good deal of mixture with Duruma and Rabai, and this is reflected in the Swahili spoken there, as when people say chiti for kiti, etc. — a corruption sometimes due also to Nyasa influence.

In the paper already referred to some attempt was made to distinguish two elements in Swahili folklore : the Bantu and the imported — chiefly Arabic, though including Persian' and Indian items. To these we may perhaps add a third, of demonstrably local growth, which has sprung up since Swahili was Swahili, though no doubt the germs may have been brought by the settlers from over-seas or pre-existed in Bantu folklore. Such are the tales told at Lamu deriding the incredible stupidity of the Shela people — the local legends of Mambrui, Ngomeni and other places, and per- haps the story of Liongo in its present form.

So many Swahili tales have already been collected, that I feared there might be little left to do in this direction — quite needlessly, as it proved. Few, if any, of the stories included in Steere's Tales seemed to be known at Jomvu or Mambrui, where I had most opportunities for inquiry, though I found them immensely popular when read aloud, and I have been asked again and again for " Sultati Darai'" or, as the people usually call it, " the story of the Gazelle." Of Kibaraka, so far as I was able to ascertain, only the two " Hare" stories seemed to be known. Biittner's collection ^ contains one tale which was almost universally recognized — the droll of the Gunya captain and the cargo of dates — but this belongs essentially to the northern coast, and is probably unknown at Zanzibar.

A few notes in passing on another story given by Biittner may not be out of place here. This is the one entitled Binti wa ngoinbe viia — " The Girl with (a dowry of) a

' Since writing the paper in question, I have succeeded in tracing the story of the "Heaps of Gold" ^Kibaraka, p. 89) to a Persian source. See Notes and Queries, nth Ser., vol. iv., 191 1, p. %2sqq.

^ Ant ho logic der Suaheli- Litteratitr (Berlin, 1894).