414 S.A. NATIVES AXD PRIMITIVE FOLK CUSTOM. 



(v. 4) that teu or twelve men have wives in common, and 

 chiefly brothers share with l:)rothers and father with children. 

 I need not continue, yon can innd plenty of other European 

 examples in the Eiicyclopcrdia Briiannica. I only want 

 us to realise that we must not think the trace of 

 polyandry in Sesuto a strang'e thing, much less their 

 highly safeguarded polygamy. There is still a tradition 

 of monogamy among the Basuto. for I was told last 

 Friday, as I sat in the midst of three old ladies learned in 

 native lore, that if a man of the elephant clan married a second 

 wife, she ran the risk of promptly turning into an elephant. 

 " And do they ever marry a second wife?" I asked; they had to 

 acknowledge that they do without disaster. tonpora, 

 mores \ After marriage the next step is childbirth, which need 

 detain us very little. The child is not only washed, the head for 

 some reason being smeared with mest by way of soap, but 

 passed over the fire, through the smoke. Whether this has 

 anything to do with the Semitic passing through the tire to 

 " Horrid Moloch,'' I do not know. It may be a mere form of 

 baptism by fire as well as water. In Portugal, according to 

 Sebillot, the child is made to hold its hands over a fire. Perhaps 

 the idea is that the life which comes " Out of the Deep " 

 mysterious must be purged with fire and water, before it can 

 safely, for itself or others, enter upon this world. The 

 beginning of life, like the end of it, is strongly taboo: The 

 Roman was sprinkled with water or stepped over a fire after 

 a funeral (when the Mosuto washes in water in which is steeped 

 wild aloe); the black baby uses both methods on his appearance. 

 The Mosuto father does not see his child for a month, and 

 then its face only. My old ladies the other day emphatically 

 expressed their frank disgust at the European custom of 

 showing babies to men soon after birth. They make an 

 exception in my favour as I am a priest and not a man, as one 

 said. They also strained a point in favour of the doctor, but 

 all this is very degenerate. Compare the idea of the evil eye 

 causing babies to be spirited away and a fairy changeling sent 

 in return, which occurs so often in our fairytales. The Romans, 

 by the bye, recognised to some extent this taboo. The lust ratio 

 at which the father viewed and accepted the child (and named 

 it) was the eighth day after birth for a girl and the ninth day 

 for a boy; the Greeks did this on the tenth day. The Sesuto 

 naming takes place when the father appears on the scene in 

 the second month and sacrifices a sheep. 



Education we have l^ut touched on in speaking of 

 puberty rites, but we may linger a moment over that 

 important part, fairy stories, which we have just men- 

 tioned. While witchcraft is a very serious matter in 

 native life, and its neutralisation by witch-doctors, a large 

 part of what remains to it of i-eligion, ghosts are rare in the 

 sense of ghostly appearances, though souls of ancestors come 

 back in dream and vision and give peremptory orders to the 

 living. The only representative, however, of the fairy class, so 

 far as I can make out, is the tJiokoIosi, a little creature which 

 makes mischief and frightens girls. It has been supposed that 



