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Updated: May 17, 2025
So far as regards both their derivation and their psychological content, these usages and the conceptions on which they rest belong to a stage in cultural development no later than that of the angekok and the rain-maker.
A fool looks and says the drops are dead, they will never be one again, they will never again fall side by side. But I am a rain-maker, and I know the ways of rain. It is not true. The drops will drain by many paths into the river, and will be one water there. They will go up to the clouds again in the mists of morning, and there will again be as they have been.
The bulk of the tribe, which was large and powerful, did not share their chief's views. For instance, his uncle, Alulu, the head rain-maker and witch-doctor, differed from them very emphatically. He was shrewd enough to see that the triumph of Christianity meant his destruction, also the abandonment of all their ancient customs.
But if the career of a magician and especially of a rain-maker offers great rewards to the successful practitioner of the art, it is beset with many pitfalls into which the unskilful or unlucky artist may fall.
"Is there any objection to my having a hole in the roof?" asked the rain-maker; for this the secretary had been unable to tell him. "What! going to throw your bombs through it?" said the Governor, smiling heartily. But the rain-maker explained at once that his was not the bomb system, but a method attended by more rain and less disturbance.
Now then, Francisco, give me that rope." "Yes, Baas, I have been drinking," answered the dwarf humbly; "it is well to drink before one dies, since we may not drink afterwards and I think that the hour of death is at hand. Oh! Shepherdess of the heavens, they said down yonder at the Settlement that you were a great rain-maker: now if you can make the rain to fall, can you not make the sun to shine?
I replied that he must know all about it, as he was a regular rain-maker. "Of course I do," he answered, "but I want to know what YOU think of it." "Well," I said, "I don't think we shall have any steady rain, but I think we may have a heavy shower in about four days." I said this as I had observed fleecy clouds gathering daily in the afternoon. "Just my opinion!" said Katchiba, delighted.
"If he were a rain-maker," he taunted, "he would make a little when he wanted it, instead of walking miles with buckets," and the taunts rankling in Billy's royal soul, he retired to the camp to see about it. "Hope he does the trick," the traveller said, busy unpacking his team. "Could do with a good bath fairly soon."
As to the relation between the offices of chief and rain-maker in South Africa a well-informed writer observes: "In very old days the chief was the great Rain-maker of the tribe. Some chiefs allowed no one else to compete with them, lest a successful Rain-maker should be chosen as chief.
His dupes collected round his dead body, and waited patiently for his resurrection; they began to doubt only when the corpse began to putrefy. Among the Bari sorcerers an influential position is held by the "rain-maker," and the villagers lavish upon him, in days of drought, gifts of oxen, fruits and trinkets, as an inducement to evoke from the clouds their treasures of genial rain.
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