Jamaican song and story

by Unknown

INTRODUCTION.

Mr. Jekyll's delightful collection of tales and songs from Jamaica suggests many interesting problems. It presents to us a network of interwoven strands of European and African origin, and when these have been to some extent disentangled we are confronted with the further question, to which of the peoples of the Dark Continent may the African element be attributed?

The exact relationship between the "Negro" and Bantu races,—which of them is the original and which the adulterated stock (in other words, whether the adulteration was an improvement or the reverse),—is a subject quite beyond my competence to discuss. It seems certain that the Negro languages (as yet only tentatively classified) are as distinct from the singularly homogeneous and well-defined Bantu family, as Aryan from Semitic. Ibo, at one end of the area, has possible Bantu affinities, which await fuller investigation; the same thing has been conjectured of Bullom and Temne at the other end (Sierra Leone); but these are so slight and as yet so doubtful that they scarcely affect the above estimate.

The difference in West Coast and Bantu folk-tales is not so marked as that between the languages; yet here, too, along with a great deal which the two have in common, we can pick out some features peculiar to each. And Mr. Jekyll's tales, so far as they can be supposed to come from Africa at all, are not Bantu. The name of "Annancy" alone is enough to tell us that.

Annancy, or Anansi is the Tshi (Ashanti)[1] word for "spider"; and the Spider figures largely in the folk-tales of the West Coast (by which we mean, roughly, the coast between Cape Verde and Kamerun), while, with some curious exceptions to be noted later on, he seems to be absent from Bantu folk-lore. His place is there taken by the Hare (Brer Rabbit), and, in some of his aspects, by the Tortoise.

We find the "Brer Rabbit" stories (best known through Uncle Remus) in the Middle and Southern States of America, where a large proportion, at any rate, of the negro slaves were imported from Lower Guinea. Some personal names and other words preserved among them (e.g. "goober" = nguba, the ground-nut, or "pea-nut") can be traced to the Fiote, or Lower Congo language; and some songs of which I have seen the words,[2] look as if they might be Bantu, but corrupted apparently beyond recognition.

But the British West Indies would seem to have been chiefly supplied from Upper Guinea, or the "West Coast" proper (it really faces south, while Loango, Congo, etc., are the "South-West Coast"—a point which is sometimes puzzling to the uninitiated). Among the tribes to be found in Jamaica, Mr. Jekyll tells me are the Ibo (Lower Niger), Coromantin (Gold Coast), Hausa, Mandingo, Moko (inland from Calabar), Nago (Yoruba), and Sobo (Lower Niger).

Mr. Jekyll furnishes a bit of confirmatory evidence in the list of names ([p. 156]) given to children according to the day of the week on which they are born. These are immediately recognizable as Tshi. As given in Christaller's Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language called Tshi (1881), the boys' names are identical or nearly so (allowing for the different systems of spelling) with those in Mr. Jekyll's list. They are: Kwasi, Kwadwo, Kwabena, Kwaku, Kwaw (or Yaw), Kofi, Kwame. (Mr. George Macdonald, in The Gold Coast Past and Present, gives Kwamina, instead of Kwame, probably owing to a difference of dialect.) The girls' names are less easily recognizable, but a careful scrutiny reveals the interesting fact that in some cases an older form seems to have been preserved in Jamaica. Moreover, the sound written w by Christaller approaches that of b, which seems to be convertible with it under certain conditions, all the girls' names being formed by means of the suffix ba = a child. Conversely, ekpo in the mouth of a West Coast native sounds to a casual ear like ekwo.

Akosuwa	[= Akwasiba] = Quashiba.
Adwowa	= Jubba. (Cf. dw = dj in "Cudjo").
Abeua	= Cubba.
Akuwa	= Memba.
Ya	[= Yawa] = Abba.
Afuwa	= Fibba.
Amma	[= Amenenewa] = Beniba.

The boys' names have "Kwa" (= akoa, a man, slave) prefixed to that of the day, or, more correctly speaking, of its presiding genius. These latter are: Ayisi, Adwo, Benã, Wuku, Yaw, Afi, Amin. The names of the days appear to be formed from them by the omission of the initial A (where it exists), and the addition of the suffix da, with some irregularities, which no doubt a fuller knowledge of the language would explain: Kwasida, Dwoda, Benada, Wukuda, Yawda, Fida, Memeneda (Meminda). The week of seven days does not seem to be known elsewhere in Africa, except as a result of Moslem or Christian influence. The Congo week of four days is puzzling, till one remembers that it, too, rests on a division of the lunar month: 7 × 4 instead of 4 × 7.[3]