I am happy in thinking that not only have Mr. Mills’ efforts in
investigating the customs and beliefs of the Lhota tribe succeeded in
putting them on record while there was yet time, but they have also
incidentally contributed not a little to revivify their observance. For
there is no question but that they had begun to lose their hold. The
prohibition of head-hunting alone was bound to act in that direction.
In one small and decaying village (Lisio) Mr. Mills found that there
had been no Puthi, and therefore presumably no communal ceremonies, for
twenty years. There is now a Puthi and the ceremonial life of the
village has acquired fresh vigour, and I have some hopes that the decay
that had set in may be thereby staved off, for it cannot contribute to
healthy life to be deprived entirely of all public and communal
ceremonies, and to revive them may do good. Again, at Okotso, when I
first knew it, about a third of the village had turned Christian: the
remainder, having observed that no immediate disaster seemed to follow
the forsaking of ancestral customs, but being in no wise desirous to
take up the burden of the angel of the Church of Impur, who looks with
disapproval on tobacco and the national dress and insists on total
prohibition as regards fermented liquor, had lapsed into a spiritual
limbo in which they observed no religious customs at all. The “morungs”
had fallen into decay and the young men would not take the trouble to
renew them; the village ceremonies, if observed at all, were observed
in the most perfunctory manner, and the community as a whole took
neither part nor interest, giving at best an apathetic conformity not
perhaps entirely unparalleled in modern Britain. How far it is due to
Mr. Mills’ interest in Lhota custom I do not know, but the
non-Christian population of Okotso has certainly reformed, rebuilt its
“morungs,” and re-instituted the Oyantsoa in its fullness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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