The remaining meat is roasted at a fire and eaten by the villagers; the bones are collected at the place where the meat was roasted and are broken up and the marrow extracted and eaten. Beer is prepared, and next morning at dawn, some is poured on the bones and the hyænas come and carry off the fragments.
When they pour the libation of beer on the place of the fire, they pray as follows: “Twa oria ichua twa oria murimu utika choke muchi”—which means, “We put out the fire at the place where we roasted the meat, we put out the sickness so that it cannot return again to our village.”
Everyone must be awakened before the beer is poured out. The beer is put into an ox-horn and into a piece of gourd, ndayi, the former being held in the right hand and the latter in the left. The beer in the right hand is poured out first to appease the male ngoma, that in the left to appease the female ngoma.
From the ceremony taking place at the village it is clear that the people believe that the ancestral spirits alone require to be propitiated.
The Scapegoat Idea in Kitui.—If a village is afflicted by a serious sickness, the headman will call in a medicine man who concocts some medicine by grinding up the roots of the following plants: muthumba, kiongoa (an aloe), mulema, nthata, kivumbu, and mutaa. A small boy and girl are then chosen from among the inhabitants, the villagers all congregate together, and the small boy leads a goat twice round the group, followed by the little girl and led by the medicine man; the party then passes through the centre of the group of people. The medicine man next makes an incision in the right ear of the goat, and the blood from this is allowed to drip into a half gourd containing the above-mentioned magical [[36]]concoction, mixed with water. The villagers then form up into a procession and, led by the medicine man, run for some distance into the bush towards the setting sun, no one being allowed to look backwards. The medicine man then stops and throws the mixture of medicine and blood in front of him, and the people return. This ceremony is performed in the early afternoon, after two p.m. That night, the village head must cohabit with his wife. This point is considered a matter of such importance that the elder has to take the kithito oath that it has been done.
A Kikuyu Oracle.—There lives in South Kikuyu-land an elder named Kichura or Thiga wa Wairumbi wa Kaumo of the Kachiko clan and the Njenga generation or rika, who is credited with the extraordinary power of being the recipient of messages from the Supreme Being, and in consequence possesses the gift of prophecy. He was interviewed and cross-examined by the writer, and stated that at intervals, about twice a year, during the night, he falls into a deeper sleep than usual, a trance in fact, and that while in this condition he is taken out of his bed and statements are made to him by a voice, but he cannot see who gives him the message. The trance always occurs at night, and he is generally taken outside his house while in this cataleptic condition, but says that he never remembers being able to distinguish the huts or any familiar objects in the village. The interior of the hut appears to him to be lighted up, and the message comes with a booming sound which he understands.
He stated that one day when visiting an elder named Kibutu, he was seized during the night and taken bodily through the thatch of the roof, and was found on the top of the hut next morning. On another occasion a young man of the warrior class, mwanake, belonging to his village, was sleeping alongside him in his hut when he was temporarily carried off, and the young man’s hair all came off as if it had been shaved, and in the morning it was found lying in a heap on [[37]]the floor by the bed, the owner having no idea how this had occurred.
KIKUYU.