Rest Days; A Sociological Study 25 



communal tabiis.'"^* We find general or communal gciiiias occa- 

 sioned by the death of a man from wounds inflicted by an enemy 

 or by a wild animal, by the death of a man from snake bite or 

 from cholera or smallpox, or by the death of a woman in child- 

 birth.^^ Besides these taboos following an accidental or unusual 

 death, there is the further custom when a death occurs in a 

 family, of tabooing the house generally for five days, during 

 which time no one but the inmates may go in or out. There are 

 even individual or family gcnnas occasioned by the death of 

 animals within the house. As a rule the taboos continue for one 

 day only.^*^ 



Very similar customs may be observed within the African area. 

 The Kafirs of South Africa allow no one to work in the fields on 

 the day after a death. ^^ The Basuto abstain from all public work 

 on the day when an influential person dies.^'^ Among the Nandi of 

 British East Africa a death furnishes one of the occasions when 

 all agricultural work is temporarily suspended. If the owner of 

 a plantation dies whilst his crops are ripening all the grain must 

 be eaten and none reserved for sowing, for otherwise the grain 

 would rot in the ground. ^^ Amongst the Akikuyu of the same 

 part of Africa where all the taboos connected with the corpse are 

 very prominent, the day after a death has occurred is regarded 

 as an unlucky day. " People will not travel, and goats and sheep 

 will not bear, and all the inhabitants of the village shave their 

 heads. The women will not go out for four days. On the 



" Hodson, in Transactions of the Third International Congress for the 

 History of Religions, Oxford, 1909, i. 58. 



^'^ Idem, in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1906, xxxvi. 96. 

 "We find among the Naga tribes that, if a woman died in childbirth (an 

 event of rare occurrence), the child was never allowed to live, because 

 they believed it to be an evil spirit, a disembodied ghost, incarnated in the 

 mother whose death it had caused" {idem, in Folk-Lore, 1910, xxi. 301). 



'"Brown, in Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1875, xliv. i. 316; 

 Woodthorpe, in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1882, xi. 71 ; 

 Hodson, ibid., 1906, xxxvi. 97. 



"Dudley Kidd, Tlie Essential Kafir, London, 1904, p. 253. 



" E. Casalis, Les Bassoutos, Paris, 1859, p. 275. 



" Hollis, The Nandi, p. 20. 



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