Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/40

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SOME NOTES ON ZULU RELIGIOUS IDEAS.

BY A. WERNER.

I have been asked to examine some MS. notes discovered among the papers of the late Dr. Callaway, Bishop of St. John's, Kaffraria, from 1873 to 1886. Most of them are dated and were written between January and July, 1876, while two undated fragments probably—to judge by the handwriting—belong to the same period: these are, therefore, subsequent to the publication of the Religious System of the Amazulu—the third part of which was issued in 1870. There remain two longer undated MSS., one (11 pp. not numbered) dealing with the custom of uku-hlonipa, the other evidently cut from a note-book of which the pages had been numbered, and proving, on examination, to contain three separate texts. The first of these (numbered 296-303) is headed "Unkulunkulu," and is in substance the same (except for one or two points, to be noted later) as various passages in the published work—though not, so far as I have been able to examine the latter, precisely identical with any single one. Probably it formed part of the material collected for that work, and was left out of the final redaction, because all the essential points were contained in other accounts.

The second passage, occupying five pages (evidently cut from another part of the same book, as it begins on p. 339), is a note on hlonipa, not identical with any part of the larger one previously mentioned; and this is followed by another fragment concerning Unkulunkulu—also not contained in the published work.