Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/70

 SOME NOTES ON EAST AFRICAN FOLKLORE.

BY MISS A. WERNER.

(^Continued from Vol. XXV. p. 457.)

Tales of Bantu Origifi. — I have examined a few of these in the paper already referred to, and recent experience tends to confirm the conclusions then arrived at. The imported stories seem, on the whole, more popular among the Swahili — at least the majority of the stories I heard from Swahilis are of this type; but others are also current whose Bantu origin is obvious at first sight. At Lamu I wrote down, in the local dialect, a version of a very wide- spread "Brer Rabbit" incident, of which, a little later, I obtained a fuller form from the Wapokomo. The Hare provides the Hyaena with food by beating a drum to summon all the animals of the bush. (In the Pokomo version, where it is the Lion who has this service rendered him, they are expressly invited to a dance and decoyed inside the house -^the lion being concealed in a pit within. I think we have remote echoes of this incident in the Jamaican " Annancy in Crab Country" and " How Monkey manage Annancy." ^) The Hyaena keeps all the meat to himself, and the Hare in revenge frightens him" with the dead lion's skin, which he leaves outside the burrow where the Hyaena is hidden.^

At Maunguja, near Mombasa, Mwenyi Ombwe told me the story of the Hare and Hyaena going on their

^]iiaka/i Sov_^ and Story, pp. 20, 70.


 * See " Le Petit Lievre " in Jacottet, Contes Popiilaires des Bassoutos, p. 18.