did with ants. He also turned
offending men into baboons. In Bushman myth, little as we really know
of it, we see the usual opposition of fable and faith, a kind creator in
religion is apparently a magician in myth.

(1) Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874.

Neighbours of the Bushmen, but more fortunate in their wealth of sheep
and cattle, are the Ovaherero. The myths of the Ovaherero, a tribe
dwelling in a part of Hereraland "which had not yet been under the
influence of civilisation and Christianity," have been studied by the
Rev. H. Reiderbecke, missionary at Otyozondyupa. The Ovaherero, he says,
have a kind of tree Ygdrasil, a tree out of which men are born, and
this plays a great part in their myth of creation. The tree, which still
exists, though at a great age, is called the Omumborombonga tree. Out of
it came, in the beginning, the first man and woman. Oxen stepped
forth from it too, but baboons, as Caliban says of the stars, "came
otherwise," and sheep and goats sprang from a flat rock. Black people
are so coloured, according to the Ovaherero, because when the first
parents emerged from the tree and slew an ox, the ancestress of the
blacks appropriated the black liver of the victim. The Ovakuru Meyuru or
"OLD ONES in heaven," once let the skies down with a run, but drew them
up again (as the gods of the Satapatha Brahmana drew the sun) when most
of mankind had been drowned.(1) The remnant pacified the OLD ONES (as
Odysseus did the spirits of the dead) by the sacrifice of a BLACK ewe, a
practice still used to appease ghosts by the Ovaherero. The neighbouring
Omnambo ascribe the creation of man to Kalunga, who came out of the
earth, and made the first three sheep.(2)

(1) An example of a Deluge myth in Africa, where M. Lenormant found
none.

(2) South African Folk-Lore Journal, ii. pt. v. p. 95.

Among the Namaquas, an African people on the same level of nomadic
culture as the Ovaherero, a divine or heroic early being called Heitsi
Eibib had a good deal to do with the origin of things. If he did not
exactly make the animals, he impressed on them their characters, and
their habits (like those of the serpent in Genesis) are said to have
been conferred by a curse, the curse of Heitsi Eibib. A precisely
similar notion was found by Avila among the Indians of Huarochiri, whose
divine culture-hero imposed, by a curse or a blessing, their character
and habits on the beasts.(1) The lion used to live in a nest