Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/539

The Life of a South African Tribe. By Henri A. Junod. Vol. I. The Social Life. Neuchatel: Attinger Freres, 1912. (Macmillan.) 8vo, pp. 500. Ill.

Some fourteen years ago M. Junod, a Swiss Protestant missionary, published an account of the Baronga of Delagoa Bay, reviewed in these pages (Vol. X., p. 225). Up to that time no study so careful and detailed of the life, the institutions, the beliefs, and the practices of a Bantu people had issued from the press of any country. But the author was not satisfied. There were points on which he was conscious that his information was defective; there were other points on which he came to think he had misinterpreted the evidence. Meanwhile his sphere of missionary activity had enlarged and extended to other branches of the same people, embracing large districts in the Transvaal as well as in Portuguese territory. Impressed with the vast importance of an accurate understanding of the natives alike from a practical and from a scientific point of view, he set himself to further enquiries. Some of the fruits of those inquiries he has already given to the world in the pages of the Revue d'Ethnographie et de Sociologie, in communications to the South African Association for the Advancement of Science, and elsewhere. The volume now published is the first part of a new work intended to give a connected, and so far as possible a complete, account of his researches. Realizing that "the public interested in South African affairs is essentially an English-speaking public," and a great portion of the Thonga tribe being settled in British territory, he has adopted the bold expedient of writing in what to him is a foreign tongue. For this British readers will be grateful to him and to Mr. G. D. Fearon, who kindly revised the English; and they will heartily congratulate him on his success, for the work betrays few traces of foreign idiom, and the instances in which any ambiguity or difficulty in seizing the author's meaning are discoverable are rare indeed. He has dedicated the book to the Rt. Hon. James Bryce, who was the first to awaken in him a desire to undertake a scientific study of the primitive life of the native,—in fact, to make him an anthropologist,—not the least of the many services rendered by that eminent man to the causes of human knowledge and practical politics in its most liberal sense.