Bantu Totemism.
It has been observed that civilised theories are often anticipated by savage myths. The following extracts from a MS. work in the possession of Miss L. C. Lloyd, the collaborateur of the late Dr. Bleek in his Bushman Reports, show that Mr. Lang's theory of the origin of totemism has been anticipated implicitly by some totemic tribes of South Africa, and explicitly by their civilised observers.
"'Tradition says that about the time the separation took place between the Bahurutshe and the Bakuena, Baboons entered the gardens of the former and ate their pumpkins before the proper time for commencing to eat the fruits of the New Year. The Bahurutshe were unwilling that the pumpkins which the Baboons had broken off and nibbled at should be wasted, and ate them accordingly. This act is said to have led to the Bahurutshe being called Bachwene, Baboon-people, which is their Siboko to this day; and their having the precedence ever afterwards in the matter of taking the first bite of the New Year's fruits.'" [Letter from the Rev. Roger Price, of Molepolole, in the Northern Bakuena country, to G. W. Stow, 9th December, 1879.]
"'If this story be the true one,' continues Mr. Price, 'it is evident that what is now used as a term of honour, was once a term of reproach. The Bakuena, too, are said to owe the origin of their Siboko to the fact that their people once ate an ox which had been killed by a crocodile.' Mr. Price is strongly inclined to think 'that the Siboko of all the tribes was originally a kind of nickname or term of reproach, but,' he adds, 'there is a good deal of mystery about the whole thing.' The Siboko of the Bangoaketse, another branch of the Bakuena, is still the Kuena or Crocodile. The Bamangwato, another great offshoot of the same parent stem, however, changed their Siboko at the time of the separation from the Bakuena. The chief Mathibe, under whom the separation took place, had for his head wife a woman of the tribe of Seleka, living near the Limpopo. The forbidden animal or Siboko of that tribe being the Phuti (putie) or Duiker[1] (Dutch), when the Bamangwato adopted that, instead of the Kuena.'" (G. W. Stow, MS. 812, 813.)
- ↑ Duiker, a kind of antelope, Cephalophus fuergens. (Proc. Zool. Soc., 1881, p. 763.)
