"Today is the day of the outbreak. Do you, women of the market, go to him and tell him what you have heard, that today I make an end of him.

"You robber, today is the seventh day, today I dance the victory dance over you, today, on the seventh day, I pass the bounds, today is the day I kill you.

"I rob you of your shadow. Go like the wind that casts no shadow. I rob you of your shadow, like the bee that stings and leaves the sting.

"I swing the pot for you, destroyer. Stumble on your way like the grasshopper with its head torn off, that cannot find its way.

"Be tossed about by life, become a dead stump. Cast no shadow. Have the falling sickness of the banana stock whose roots are rotten. Fall like it.

"Be disturbed as a sun calf (meteor). Fall constantly, like the water of a waterfall. If you embrace your wife, engender water and call it a child. On the same day may your wife bear ten children without arms, without legs, without eyes. ’What does that mean?’ someone says. They will tell you, ’That is fate. It is the vengeance for that cow. He made a claim and you would not give him what is his. You said, I have a charmed life. What can he do to me? He swung the curse pot against you and you would not relent. You let him go through to the seventh day, and he passed the bounds.’

"Today I slay you. The curse pot will tear you from your sib, today, you and your sons. You kept the cow that is mine and your outrage is alone responsible.

"Death, your death, is here. Today it is done. I send the destroyer to destroy you and yours. But he shall not destroy your sib brothers.

"He shall rob you of your first-born son. Then he will kill the next, and when he has killed him he will kill the middle one. Destroyer, when you come to the youngest, to the one of the old mother, then pause. Perhaps he has a wise mother who will warn him to come and suck my breast. If he comes not I will send you again to settle with him and end it.

"Destroyer, if he seeks to pacify and reconcile you in my absence, have nothing of it. Continue to kill, and exterminate his household. "Robber, today I finish you! Hu hofa, hu rumara—die, rot!"

At sundown he repeats his curse before the dwelling of his adversary, closing as the sun sets with a last curse which compares its setting with his downfall and disappearance.¹

The death rate in Africa is high (one missionary woman thinks that as many as 85 per cent of children die in infancy among the Ila) and there is little doubt that death or other misfortune will visit the house of the man in the course of time, and if he has been obdurate up to that point he will weaken. In that case he will be obliged to pay extra.

¹Gutmannn/an/an/an/an/an/a, , 629–630 (C. H. Beek’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. By permission). [For the whole cursing episode, see pp. 619–669.]