In Kitui if a man is on a journey and a death occurs in the village during his absence, his wives may not cut their hair till he returns and has performed the ceremonies necessary upon the occasion of a death. [[103]]
CHAPTER VII
THE CURSE AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS
(a) Thahu and its Connection with Circumcision Rites, etc.
Thahu, sometimes called nzahu, is the word used for a condition into which a person is believed to fall if he or she accidentally becomes the victim of certain circumstances or intentionally performs certain acts which carry with them a kind of ill luck or curse. A person who is thahu becomes emaciated and ill or breaks out into eruptions or boils, and if the thahu is not removed, will probably die. In many cases this undoubtedly happens by auto-suggestion, as it never occurs to the Kikuyu mind to be sceptical on a matter of this kind.
It is said that the thahu condition is caused by the ngoma, or spirits of departed ancestors, but the process does not seem to have been analysed any further.
We are now in a position to realise the attitude of the Kikuyu mind towards thahu, and it is considered that the term curse, in its mediaeval sense, expresses it. Everyone will remember in the Ingoldsby Legends the pitiable condition of the Jackdaw of Rheims after he had been cursed by the Cardinal for stealing his ring; now this would appeal to a Kikuyu, and he would at once say the jackdaw was thahu. In one of the cases of thahu, quoted hereafter, it is possible for a person to lay a curse maliciously on a whole village by breaking a cooking pot, and in another instance, a father can lay a curse on his son for disobedience. We thus have parallel instances from both higher and lower civilisation; in the first, the Cardinal curses the jackdaw with the help of the supernatural powers with which he [[104]]is invested by virtue of his sacred position, and in the lower culture it is apparently held that any person can inflict a curse by invoking the supernatural powers of the ngoma, or spirits, of the dead ancestors.[1]
The position has, indeed, changed but little. It would appear probable that as the priests gained power, they arrogated to themselves the monopoly of laying a curse upon their flock; but the freedom with which people use the conventional formula of curses to this day is evidence, however, that the power to inflict a curse was formerly at the disposal of all. It is nevertheless important to realise that when curses were believed to be effective, and in the case of malicious ones, punishable by native law, people were more careful about the custom than Europeans are to-day, when all belief in the power of a curse has died away.