Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/156

 144 Journal of American Folk-Lore.

��NOTES AND QUERIES.

Sacrifice among the Wakamba in British East Africa. — In the summer of 1896 a mission station was established among the Wakamba in British East Africa. 1 The facts stated below are derived from letters from Mr. Willis R. Hotchkiss, a missionary connected with the station, and from Mr. Charles E. Hulburt, of Coatesville, Pa., the American director of the work, who has just returned from a trip to the mission field.

The Wakamba live in a mountainous country, about 325 miles from the coast, but still about the same distance eastward from Victoria Nyanza. They occupy a lofty valley, the elevation of which is about 5000 feet above the sea. The portion of this valley where the mission is located is about 15 miles south of the equator. Northward 90 miles rises Mount Kenia, 18,000 feet high, while about the same distance to the south is Kilmia Njaro, 19,000 feet high, — both snow-capped the year round. The nearest town, which consists of a fort and a few houses, is Machakos, on the line of the Uganda Railway, which is being built from Mombasa to Lake Victoria.

The Wakamba belong to what is known as the Bantu family of Africans, who are superior to the purely negro races. Keane describes the Bantus as of " lighter color, larger cranial capacity, smaller teeth, and less pro- nounced prognathism," than the negroes. "They are," he says, "distinctly more intelligent, more civilized, and more capable of upward development than the full-blood negro." 2

Mr. Hulburt says 8 of the Wakamba that they raise their own millet, corn, and beans, on which they live almost exclusively. They get their meat from the various members of the antelope family, which abound in vast numbers in the plains, together with the zebra, which may be found in droves of thousands, and of which the natives are very fond. They keep cattle, goats, and the African hairy sheep. They have no towns, as the people do not congregate, save as they live along the hillsides or valleys. The only commerce or exchange known among them, Mr. Hulburt declares to be the exchange of their daughters for a certain number of goats. The men are almost universally nude, while the women wear a curious apron made of skins, and sometimes worked with beads.

When the mission was established, the language of the Wakamba had never been studied by the outside world. It was necessary for the mis- sionaries to learn it by actual contact, without grammars or other helps. The information which Mr. Hotchkiss gives of their form of sacrifice is therefore quite new.

Writing under date of January 15, 1899, he says that, while they believe in a God, most of their religious exercises are devoted to the propitiation of evil spirits. They make offerings of goats, and, at certain seasons, of the

1 This mission is independent and self-governing. It is represented in this country by the Philadelphia Missionary Council.

2 Ethnology, p. 271. s T n a i etter to t h e wr i te r.

�� �