Ndau materials, ACLS Collection
Culture:
Date: 1921, 1947, undated
Contributor: Boas, Franz, 1858-1942 | Simango, Columbus Kamba | Rumberger, Joseph Paul | Hunt, George
Subject: Linguistics | Mozambique--History | Food | Children | Crafts | Witchcraft | Religion | Death--Philosophy | Personal names | Marriage customs and rites | Games | Ethnography | Kinship | Music | Biography
Type: Text
Genre: Theses | Vocabularies | Notebooks | Stories | Songs | Illustrations | Sketches
Extent: 218 p., ca. 1850 slips and 39 notebooks
Description: All Ndau materials in the ACLS collection are by C. Kamba Simango working with Franz Boas in the 1920s, or are derived from this. Three sets of texts (items AfBnd.4, AfBng.1 and AfBng.2) written by Simango describe topics including general home life, food, childrearing, marriage, religion and beliefs about death, and some autobiography. Some texts appear to have been later published as "Tales and Proverbs of the Vandau of Portuguese South Africa" (1922). The text items also include lexica, marginalia by Boas, a song, kinship terms and an illustration, and item AfBnd.4 "Texts on Ndau culture" also includes description of George Hunt's Kwak'wala language work. Item AfBnd.3 "Ndau lexica and ethnographic slips" contains ethnographic notes of mostly unidentified topics, but especially witchcraft, and 39 short notebooks of mostly Chindau lexica. The two main Chindau lexica (both "Chindau lexicon", items AfBnd.1 and AfBnd.2) total around 1700 slips. Zulu culture is also sporadically referenced in the above items. Finally, "An Analysis of Chindau, A Bantu Language of South East Africa" (item AfBnd.5) is an MA thesis by Joseph Rumberger derived from these materials. Boas published "Ethnographische Bemerkungen über die Vandau" in Zeitschrift Für Ethnologie 55(1), 1923 (in German) describing his work with Simango.
Collection: ACLS Collection (American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native American Languages, American Philosophical Society) Mss.497.3.B63c