Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/425

The Suk: their Language and Folklore. By Mervyn W. H. Beech. With Intro, by Sir Charles Eliot. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 191 1. 8vo, pp. xxiv+ 152. Maps and ill.

In this volume we have to welcome a useful addition to the shelf of recent books which throw a flood of light on the tribes of East and Equatorial Africa. The Suk occupy a tract from Lake Baringo to the north-west, separated from Lake Rudolph by the Turkana, and, as Sir Charles Eliot suggests in the Introduction, are probably a mixed tribe in course of formation round a nucleus of fugitives driven into the hills by raids. The bulk of the volume is occupied by a vocabulary and grammar, but the author has fortunately added to these, in the first forty-five pages, what ethnographical material he was able to gather during a residence of little more than a year,—in which time, of course, even an investigator with no other occupation could not prepare an exhaustive account of the beliefs and organization of a people. Little information is given about the many totemic and exogamous clans (e.g. elephant, rain, and bull-frog), but a thorough investigation is promised at a future date. The men have an age classification, the duration of each age being, roughly, fifteen years (a generation), and all circumcised in that period are counted as of that age. Names exist for ages up to those older than 120 (when the cycle recommences), though probably none survive 75, and the last four ages are used only in tales etc. (p. 6). Women are not circumcised at regular times, and are counted as of the age of the men they marry. There is no word for chief, and the old man at the head of a village family is called ki-ruwok-in (adviser). The only houses are unsubstantial shelters made by the women, and hence not used by unmarried men (p. 7). To stand upright in the doorway or inside is unlucky, and will bring cattle thieves (p. 8). An ox with one horn pointing forward and one backward (kamar) is a necessary possession for every warrior, and cow's urine is used to purify hands and calabashes (pp. 8-9). There are sex taboos (pp. 10, 17), and before drinking honey wine libations to the spirits of the dead are poured on either side of the threshold. There is a vague and benevolent Supreme Being and creator, to whom prayers are offered, but who "has nothing