Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/144



the year 1906, shortly before leaving Salisbury, the capital of Mashonaland and Southern Rhodesia, I overheard a young Manyanjaboy telling my little son what appeared to be the old tale of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. I questioned him and found that he knew a large number of other tales which, after a little persuasion, he allowed me to take down verbatim. During the two years he had been with us he had been a very silent boy, though gentle and amiable. Now that we were leaving the country he seemed able to reveal his store of tales; but he was rather shy. He told me in all fifty-six stories, using, not his own native Chinyanja speech (a dialect of Central Africa), but the broken-down Zulu so widely spoken in South Africa from Natal to the Zambesi. This language is very useful, especially in Rhodesia, where one's household staff is usually a mixed one and may comprise, for instance, a Matebele, a Shangaan, a Blantyre native and a Mashona or two from different villages; none of these could understand each other without this common medium, which they also use in speaking to us. It has not much grammar, but a larger vocabulary than most white people trouble to learn and of course each tribe that uses it works in a good many of its own words as well. I did not alter nor add to nor in any way shape the stories, endeavouring to take them down as literally as possible. Sometimes, however, in the case of the tedious repetitions in the manner of "The House that