Table Of ContentMYTHS AND LEGENDS
OF THE BANTU
BY
ALICE WERNER
1933
Myths And Legends Of The Bantu By Alice Werner.
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C
ONTENTS
Preface
Chapter 1. Introductory
Chapter 2. Where Man Came From, And How Death Came
Chapter 3. Legends Of The High Gods
Chapter 4. The Heaven Country And The Heaven People
Chapter 5. Mortals Who Have Ascended To Heaven
Chapter 6. The Ghosts And The Ghost Country
Chapter 7. The Avenger Of Blood
Chapter 8. Heroes And Demi-Gods
Chapter 9. The Wakilindi Saga
Chapter 10. The Story Of Liongo Fumo
Chapter 11. The Tricksters Hlakanyana And Huveane
Chapter 12. The Amazimu
Chapter 13. Of Were-Wolves, Halfmen, Gnomes, Goblins, And Other
Monsters
Chapter 14. The Swallowing Monster
Chapter 15. Lightning, Thunder, Rain, And The Rainbow
Chapter 16. Doctors, Prophets, And Witches
Chapter 17. Brer Rabbit In Africa
Chapter 18. Legends Of The Tortoise
Chapter 19. Stories Of Some Other Animals
Chapter 20. Some Stories Which Have Travelled
Bibliography
1
P
REFACE
THERE is at the present day a widespread and growing interest in the
customs, institutions, and folklore of more or less 'primitive' peoples, even
among persons who are still a little shy of the word 'anthropology.' This
interest is of comparatively recent growth; but when one looks back over
the nineteenth century it seems almost incredible that Moffat could write)
in 1842, that "a description of the manners and customs of the Bechuanas
would be neither very instructive nor very edifying." Twenty years earlier
James Campbell, whom one suspects of a secret and shamefaced interest in
the subject, apologizes for presenting to the notice of his readers the
"absurd and ridiculous fictions" of the same tribe.
The apology is certainly not needed to-day-witness the collections of folk-
tales pouring in from every quarter of what used to be called the Dark
Continent, contributed by grave divines, respectable Government officials,
and all sorts and conditions of observers. In fact, so much new matter has
appeared since I first took the present work in hand that it has proved
impossible to keep pace with it. But I have endeavoured to present to the
notice of the reader fairly typical specimens of myth and legend from as
many as possible of the various Bantu-speaking tribes, confident that the
result will not be (if I may again quote Campbell) to "exhibit the puerile and
degraded state of intellect" among the said tribes.
I have been obliged, however, to my great regret, to omit some very striking
legends of the Baganda, less known than that of Kintu (familiar from several
other works, and, moreover, told at length in my own African Mythology).
But it would have been easy, given sufficient time, to expand this book to
twice the covenanted length.
A word as to the pronunciation of African names. No attempt has been
made to render them phonetically, beyond the rough-and-ready rule that
vowels are to be pronounced as in German or Italian, consonants as in
English, every syllable as ending in a vowel, and every vowel to be
pronounced. Thus it has not been considered necessary to put an acute
accent over the e in Shire (which, by the by, ought to be Chiri) and Pare.
2
Where ng is followed by an apostrophe, as in 'Ryang'ombe' (but not in
'Kalungangombe'), it is sounded as in 'sing,' not as in 'finger.'
African experts may discover some inconsistency in the rendering of tribal
names. One ought, I suppose, either to use the vernacular plural in every
case, as in Basuto, Amandebele, Anyanja, or to discard the prefix and add an
English plural, as in Zulus (too familiar a form to be dropped); but it did not
seem possible to attain consistency throughout. At any rate, one has
avoided the barbarism of 'Basutos,' though sanctioned by no less an
authority than Sir Godfrey Lagden Moffat, as will have been noticed, was
guilty of 'Bechuanas,' and I have not ventured to correct his text.
It may not be superfluous to point out that the person-class in the Bantu
languages has, in the singular, the prefix mu- (sometimes umu- or omu-, and
sometimes shortened into m-) and, in the plural, ba- (aba-, va-, ova-, a-). The
prefix ama- or ma-, sometimes found with tribal names, belongs to a
different class. It is probably a plural of multitude (or 'collective plural'),
which has displaced the ordinary form.
The titles of works cited in the footnotes have been abbreviated in most
instances. The full titles of such works, together with other details, will be
found in the Bibliography.
It is a pleasant task to convey my sincere thanks to those who have kindly
permitted me to make use of their published work: the Revs. E. W. Smith
and T. Cullen Young; Mr. Frederick Johnson (Dar-es-Salaam), for his
Makonde and Iramba tales, published in a form not readily accessible to the
general reader; Captain R. S. Rattray, who is better known nowadays in
connexion with the Gold Coast, but once upon a time did very good work in
Nyasaland; Dr C. M. Doke (University of the Witwatersrand); M. Henri A.
Junod; the Rev. Father Schmidt, editor of Anthropos, for permission to use
P. Arnoux's articles on Ruanda; Professor Meinhof, for matter appearing in
his Zeitschrift für Eingeborenensprachen (Hamburg), and his contributor, the
Rev. C. Hoffmann (another contributor, the Rev. M. Klamroth, is,
unfortunately, no longer living); the Rev. J. Raurn (and Dr Mittwoch, editor
of the series in which his Chaga Grammar appeared), for the story of Murile;
the Rev. Dr Gutmann, for some delightful Chaga tales; the Rev. D. R.
3
Mackenzie and the late Rev. Donald Fraser, for some very interesting
quotations from their respective works. If any others have been
inadvertently omitted I can only crave their indulgence.
A. W.
4
C 1. I
HAPTER NTRODUCTORY
Who are the Bantu?
BANTU is now the generally accepted name for those natives of South
Africa (the great majority) who are neither Hottentots nor Bushmen-that is
to say, mainly, the Zulus, Xosas (Kafirs), Basuto, and Bechuana -to whom
may be added the Thongas (Shangaans) of the Delagoa Bay region and the
people of Southern Rhodesia, commonly, though incorrectly, called
Mashona.
Abantu is the Zulu word for 'people' (in Sesuto batho, and in Herero ovandu)
which was adopted by Bleek, at the suggestion of Sir George Grey, as the
name for the great family of languages now known to cover practically the
whole southern half of Africa. It had already been ascertained, by more than
one scholar, that there was a remarkable resemblance between the speech
of these South African peoples and that of the Congo natives on the one
hand and of the Mozambique natives on the other. It was left for Bleek-who
spent the last twenty years of his life at the Cape-to study these languages
from a scientific point of view and systematize what was already known
about them. His Comparative Grammar of South African Languages, though
left unfinished when he died, in 1875, is the foundation of all later work done
in this subject.
The Bantu languages possess a remarkable degree of uniformity. They may
differ considerably in vocabulary, and to a certain extent in pronunciation,
but their grammatical structure is, in its main outlines, everywhere the same.
But to speak of a 'Bantu race' is misleading. The Bantu-speaking peoples
vary greatly in physical type: some of them hardly differ from some of the
'Sudanic'-speaking1 Negroes of West Africa (who, again, are by no means all
of one pattern), while others show a type which has been accounted for by
a probable 'Hamitic' invasion from the north.
1 Most of these languages, which had long seemed to be a hopeless chaos, have been found to belong to
one family, called by Professor Westermann the 'Sudanic.' Typical members of this family are Twi (spoken
in the Gold Coast Colony), Ewe, and Yoruba
5
But on questions connected with 'race' and racial characteristics
ethnologists themselves are by no means agreed, and in any case we need
not discuss them in this book.
The Bantu-speaking peoples, then, include such widely separated tribes as
the Duala, adjoining the Gulf of Cameroons, in the north-west; the Pokomo
of the Tana valley, in the north-east; the Zulus in the south-east; and the
Hereros in the south-west. Some are tall and strongly built, like the Zulus;
some as tall or taller, but more slender, though equally well formed, like the
Basuto-or even over-tall and too thin for their height, like the Hereros;
others short and sturdy, like the Pokomo canoe-men, or small, active, and
wiry, like some of the Anyanja. They vary greatly in colour, from a very dark
brown (none, I think, are quite black) to different shades of bronze or
copper. Colour may not be uniform within the same tribe: the Zulus
themselves, for instance, distinguish between ' black'-that is, dark brown-
and ' red '-or lighter brown-Zulus.2
It does not seem likely, then, that all these various tribes ever formed parts
of one family, as their languages may be said to do. But it may be assumed
that a considerable body, speaking the same language, set out (perhaps two
or three thousand years ago) from somewhere in the region of the Great
Lakes towards the south and east. Whether they came into Africa across the
Isthmus of Suez, bringing their language with them, or-as seems more likely
developed it in that continent need not concern us here. As they moved on,
separating in different directions (as our Teutonic ancestors did when they
moved into Europe), their several languages grew up.
The Bushmen
They did not find an empty continent awaiting them. The only previous
inhabitants of whom we have any certain knowledge are the Bushmen, the
Pygmies of the Congo forests (and some scattered remnants of similar
tribes in other parts), and perhaps the Hottentots.3 The present-day
2 The expression 'Red Kafirs,' however, so often heard in South Africa, does not refer to skin colour, but to
the custom of painting the body with red ochre or some similar mineral-a custom not without hygienic
justification, under the given conditions
3 I say 'perhaps' because, though we know that the Hottentots were in the Cape Peninsula long before the
first Bantu reached the Fish river, we do not know the relative times of their earlier migrations
6
Bushmen, most of whom are to be found in the Kalahari Desert, are small
(often under four feet in height), light-complexioned (Miss Bleek says
"about putty-colour"), and in various other respects differ markedly from
the Bantu. They live by hunting, trapping, and collecting whatever small
animals, insects, fruits, and roots are regarded as edible. They were driven
into the more inhospitable regions and partially exterminated, first by the
invading Bantu and then by Europeans-whose treatment of them is a very
black page in our history. The Bantu, however, in some cases killed the men
only, and married the women, which accounts for unusual types met with
here and there among the South African Bantu.4 And sometimes (as G. W.
Stow thought was the case with the earliest Bechuana immigrants) the
newcomers may have settled down more or less peaceably with the old
inhabitants. This I think not unlikely to have happened in the district west of
the Shire, in Nyasaland, where the local Nyanja-speaking population (calling
themselves, not quite correctly, 'Angoni') are small, dark, and wiry, and
seem to have absorbed a strong Bushman element. This fact, if true, may
explain some of their notions about the origin of mankind, as we shall see
later on.
The Bantu Languages
The Bantu languages, on the whole, are beautiful and harmonious. None of
them differ from each other much more than French does from Spanish or
English from Danish. No two, for instance, would be as far apart as English
and French, or French and Welsh, though all these belong to the same Indo-
European family. The words used are often quite different (we know that
English and American people, both speaking English, may use different
words for the same thing); but the grammar is everywhere, in its main
outlines, the same. It is scarcely necessary, at this time of day, to say that an
unwritten language may have a grammar,5 and even a very complicated one.
4 Indeed, tradition records that a certain Xosa chief chose a Bushwoman for his principal wife, so impressed
was he by her skill in preparing a certain kind of food to his taste
5 This is not the place to give details of Bantu grammar; but it may be explained that nouns are divided into
classes, distinguished by prefixes, which also serve to differentiate the singular and plural. The class which
consists of nouns denoting persons has, in the singular, the prefix Mu or M, in the plural Ba, or some
modification of the same; thus Mu-ila is one individual of the Ila tribe, Ba-ila more than one. Sometimes the
plural prefix Ama is used, as in Ama-ndebele. Other prefixes (Ki, Chi, Si, or Se- sometimes Lu) are used with
