Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/366

358 Bay. In attempting to escape the boat was swamped and Makana was drowned. Meantime his countrymen regarded him as invulnerable and immortal, and refused to believe that he was dead. All through the wars between 1835 and 1851 they looked for his reappearance to lead them to victory, and to this day many of them will solemnly assert that Makana is not dead. The injunctions he laid upon his countrymen nearly a century ago are obeyed as if they were the words of a god. Before his time none except chiefs and their immediate relatives were buried. Makana ordered his troops to bury their fallen comrades as having perished in their country's cause. This led to sepulture becoming common. Now it is universal.

To thousands he is still the living man, or demi-god, and they relate legends of persons who saw him, and on whom he laid fresh injunctions not ten years ago. His personal effects and ornaments are, or at least were a short while ago, preserved waiting his coming, and men born decades after his death were ready, at an hour's notice, to throw off their allegiance to native chief or English Government, and follow his standard to victory or to death. From one point of view such devotion is very beautiful; from another it illustrates the vast distance there is between Western civilisation and African barbarism.

Such are a few of the legends current among a people whose ways were to me very familiar, and who often in the most unexpected manner remind one of the friends of his youth in the legends of ancient Greece and Rome. Whether any of them took their rise from a common origin it is impossible even to guess, but if not, then it is clear that man's habits of thought do not differ so largely as at first sight appears, and that from certain primitive ideas, common to the human race, grew the ancient civilisations of East and West, as well as the more modern developments of our own times.

That I am not able to give the legends in more minute detail is owing to the reason already stated. No one can