Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/42

30 (1705) and Kolbe (1719) as in use among the Hottentots; and, though some of them had come in contact with Christian teaching, it is extremely unlikely that they would have heard from the Dutch any divine name except the Teutonic "God," while no missionaries of the Roman Church entered the Cape territories before the nineteenth century. (If due to Portuguese influence, say at Delagoa Bay, it would have reached the Hottentots from the Bantu, and not vice versa.)

Before passing on to deal with Qamata, I would like to say a few words about this name Utixo. Callaway's excursus on the subject is still worth reading, especially in the light of the later information now available. He came to the conclusion that "the word Utixo is the laud-giving name of an ancient hero, and that it was given in consequence of some conflict in which he repulsed enemies more powerful in numbers than himself, by the stratagem of kneeling and so causing them to approach him under the impression that they could make an easy prey of him."

Theophilus Hahn, writing some ten years later, under the influence of Max Müller's solar mythology, strongly objected to the "Wounded-Knee" derivation of the name Tsui-xuap (which Moffat and Bleck had already identified with Tiqwa=Utixo). He brought forward, and supported with many learned and ingenious arguments, an etymology which would make the being in question the personification of the "Red Dawn." It was reserved for Professor Meinhof to perceive the connection between Tsui-xuap's "wounded knee" and some half-forgotten fragments of myth current among the Masai and Nandi of East Africa. (The North African origin of the Hottentot tribes, long ago suspected, has now been demonstrated on linguistic grounds; and, similarly, language, folklore and customs,