United States or Rwanda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
One night during the annual Sohrai festival the men of the village were going from house to house singing and getting rice beer to drink; and one young man named Chandrai got so drunk that when they came to the house where the two witch-women lived he rolled himself under the shelf on which rice was stored and fell asleep.
Are you going away?" Then the girl began to cry and sobbed out that her mother had taught her witchcraft and married her to a bonga; and it was for fear of the bonga that she did not like to be alone in the dark; and because she had refused to "eat" anyone her mother intended to "eat" her and so she had no hope of living to see the Sohrai.
When grown-up people die they become ancestral bongas and sacrifices are offered to them at the Flower and Sohrai festivals; and when children die they become bhuts. When a pregnant woman dies, they drive long thorns into the soles of the feet before the body is burned for such women become churins.
There was another girl; her friends noticed that when she came home with them in the evening after planting rice she was very careful not to fall behind or be left alone and they used to laugh at her for being a coward. But one day she was gathering Indian corn with a friend and as they talked she said "You will all have lovely dancing at the Sohrai." "You!" said her friend: "won't you be there?
Chandrai's object was to get away from the witches' house for he was afraid to speak there; but when they were out in the open he stood up and told the villagers all that he had seen and heard the two witches do; they remembered that he had been missing for a whole day during the Sohrai festival and believed him.
He said "Kill them outright or you will bring disgrace on me; when I heard the lament I thought it was a man, but now I learn from you that it was a crab. I forbid you ever to do the like again." And at the time of the Sohrai festival the farmer called together all his household and sang them the song and explained its meaning to them, and the men who heard it remember it to this day.
Presently, the two began to talk and the elder woman said "Well what with the pigs and the goats that have been sacrificed during this Sohrai we have had plenty of meat to eat lately and yet I don't feel as if I had had any." "That is so," answered her daughter-in-law; "fowls' and pig's flesh is very unsatisfying."
When the girl learnt that she must sid atang by "eating" her father or brother or mother she began to make excuses; she could not kill her father for he was the support of the family; nor her only brother for he was wanted too at the Baha and Sohrai nor her mother who had reared her in childhood.
Word Of The Day