Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/499

 Sof>ie jVo/es on East African Folklore. 465

whose dowry was only ten or twenty cows, and have kept enough for them both to live on ; and the would-be seducer was a fool to imagine " )-ou could get for a quarter of beef what cost a hundred cows." The young man retired dis- comfited ; tile husband and the father owned themselves in the wrong, and the latter on his return home immediately made a sufficient settlement — viz. he returned the dowry^ with 100 head in addition.

It is only to be expected that Galla constituents should find their wa)' into the composite fabric of Swahili folklore, for Galla women, though less easily obtained than others, have always been much sought after as slaves. I knew an old lady at Mambrui, the widow of a Lamu Arab, who told me that she had been kidnapped as a child and sold to the man who afterwards married her. One of her sons is AH Marjani, headman of Fundi Isa. All of her children, whom I saw, were good-looking, and one daughter strikingly so. I suspected Galla blood in a very handsome woman of similar type whom I saw at Jomvu, but could get no infor- mation beyond a vague and unconfirmed statement that her mother had been an Abyssinian.

The diffusion of Arab tales in East Africa is very remark- able. I have heard them in a more or less complete form from men, women, young boys, and even from the most illiterate of caravan-porters. Unfortunately, I have hardly any of these written down in a complete form ; but I do not think I heard above one or two, if so many, which are included in any existing Swahili collection.

Mwana Mbeu binti Sadiki, of Shela, a very old woman (said to be over 100), living at Mambrui, told me two stories which I do not remember to have met with elsewhere, and which I here give in outline.

I. A princess courted by many suitors made it a condition that each should play a game of chess with her, losing his head if defeated. Finally a young man arrived, whose previous history is given as follows : A childless couple who