Bantu Beliefs and Magic / With particular reference to the Kikuyu and Kamba tribes of Kenya Colony; together with some reflections on East Africa after the war

by C. W. Hobley

TYPICAL MUTHURI YA UKURU.

(Elder of the grade of priest)

He does not sleep in an ordinary hut with his wife, but in a thengira or bachelor hut with another elder. When he is seized with one of his trances the other elder will wake up and find he has gone, but does not see him go or return.

The day following one of his seizures he collects the elders and delivers his message. He states that after one of these seizures he is very exhausted, and for three days cannot rise from his bed. His father and paternal grandfather had this gift or power. His father told him that his paternal grandmother had three breasts, two on her bosom and one on her back, but he did not say whether he considered that this had any connection with the other phenomena.

He stated that he believed the gift came from God and not from the ngoma or ancestral spirits, and that if he did not deliver to the people the messages he received he would be stricken with sickness. He says that he was invested with this power when he was a stripling, soon after he had been circumcised. One morning he woke up with his two hands tightly clasped, and he passed blood instead of urine for nine days. A big medicine man named Wangnendu was then called in, a goat was killed, and the medicine man tied rukwaru bracelets of the skin on to the patient’s wrists. The hæmaturia then stopped, and his hands relaxed, and he was able to open them, and it was found that he had fifteen mbugu in each hand. These are white stones such as are used in a medicine man’s divination gourd. The medicine man then brought a small medicine gourd and placed the mbugu therein.

Kichura still has the gourd with the thirty mbugu, and relates how on one occasion his hut was burnt down and his gourd was destroyed in the fire, but that the mbugu were found quite uninjured in the ashes. He was asked whether he considered that his powers were intimately connected with these stones; he declared [[38]]that he did not believe he could lose them, but if by some mischance, however, they should be lost God would give him some more, and that even if they were lost he would receive oracles as before.

He gave examples of the kind of messages he received. On one occasion, some time before the advent of Europeans, he was told that the Masai would be severely stricken with small-pox, and that subsequently many would settle among the Kikuyu, and shortly afterwards it happened accordingly. On another occasion he was told that a white race would enter the country and that they and the Kikuyu would live side by side in this country, and now it has come to pass.

He was seized before the great famine of 1900 and foretold its arrival. Later, he was told to inform the Kikuyu to sacrifice a white sheep, a red sheep, and a black male goat at the mugumu, sacred fig trees, and that the chief Kinanjui was to sacrifice a mori, white heifer, at the head waters of the Mbagathi River. These orders were obeyed, and the famine and small-pox were lifted from the land.

Early in the present season he was told that the maize and other grains would be lost by drought, and that the food now being planted (April, 1911) would come to a good harvest. He was also told that during the present year the young people would suffer greatly from dysentery, and that they were to sacrifice sheep at the sacred fig trees, and that the women and children were to put bracelets from the skins of the sacrificed sheep on their wrists. Many have done so, and those who have obeyed will escape the visitation. After this he says that small-pox will come from the west of the country, and attack people from Karuri’s (east slopes of Nandarua Mountain) to Limoru. The disease will gradually work its course eastward and decrease in intensity. When he delivers one of his oracular utterances the athuri ya kiama, elders of the council, bring him a sheep and a gourd of beer. He kills the former [[39]]and eats it, and the beer is returned to the elders to drink.

He says that sometimes when rain does not come he is accused of stopping it, but that such accusations are due to ignorance, as he is merely the unconscious and involuntary agent for utterances from a Supreme Power, and that all he can do in such cases is to take a sheep to a sacred fig tree, sacrifice it there, and pray for rain, just like any other elder who is qualified to do so.