SMALL- POX AMONGST THK BA-RONGA. 695 



at the chief's residence and decide to proceed to the general 

 inoculation. 



A regular religious act is performed by the man indicated 

 'by the divinatory bone.'^ ; it may be the chief himself, or his son, 

 or his uterine nephew. In his prayer the officiant will say : " We 

 want to go and take small-]x>x. May it not do too much harm ! 

 Let it pass away soon and go to Shiburi, to Nkhabelane !" — 

 Shiburi and Nkhabelane are two very remote districts of the 

 Ba-Thonga country. 



Then the first proclamation is made, which each of the 

 headmen will bring back to his village: " Tlulan psilaiven," z'ic, 

 Keep each of you in his sleeping place. The sh\ilao (pi. psilao) 

 means the part of the hut occupied by the husband and the wife 

 respectively. Each hut has tv^'o' psilao, the one of the husband, 

 at the right side, the side on which the door is opened, and that 

 of tlie wife, at the left side. The signification of the proclama- 

 tion is therefore the following: Let husband and wife keep apart 

 from each other without sexual intercourse during the whole 

 period of the epidemic. There is another term of a more 

 euphemistic character to express the same thing, z'/r., Kiikulaii 

 tiyindlu — Sweep the huts! This is taboo! (Psa yila). What is 

 the reason of this prohibition ? 



•This strange law is enforced in many other circumstances, 

 as I explained in another place.* From a general study of the 

 subject one must infer that, in ihe eyes of the Ba-Ronga and 

 ]>robably of most o'f the Native Tribes of South x\frica, conjugal 

 relations place married people in a state of defilement, which is 

 •most dangerous for people suffering from certain diseases. For 

 ir.stance, married people must- not enter the hut of a patient 

 seriously ill : he would die. They must not take in their arms 

 a newly-born child: its uml)ilical cord would get swollen and 

 infected. They must not jienetrate into the circumcision lodge: 

 this may prevent the wound of the initiated youths from heal- 

 ing. In the case of small-pox the disease may prove fatal if 

 there were a breaking of the law of continence inside the huts. 

 Llence the taboo, yila. a term which always indicates danger. 



But is this the only explanation? There seems to be 

 another, deeper reason for the prohibition. It sometimes hap- 

 pens that the ordinary course of life is su.spended amongst the 

 tribe, and that the whole communit>- or part of it is in a way 

 put outside of the pale of society, and remains for a time as it 

 were " in the margin." These periods are therefore called 

 " Marginal Periods." Strange to say. the law of continence is 

 enforced in all these ]>eriods. even when there is no disease to 

 fear, and one may infer from this fact that when Native society 

 passes through abnormal circumstances necessitating the pro- 

 clamation of such a marginal period, the act upon which the 

 continuity of the life of the tribe depends is, and must be, sus- 

 pended also. There are amongst Natives certain rites which a 



* Revue de Socioloffic et d'Ethnographie: Paris. Ernest Leroux 

 (1910). 



