Abstract
IT is anticipated that further light will be thrown on the much-disputed origin of the Bashgali, or ‘Bed Kafirs' of Afghanistan, by recent investigations of their language and customs by Dr. George Morgen-stierne, of the Goteborg High School, Sweden. In the meantime, The Times correspondent at Simla reports in the issue of August 17 that a German botanical expedition, which has worked its way through the Hindu Kush to the Chitral, has come into contact with the Red Kafirs among other strange tribes of Nuristan. The Red Kafirsso-called to distinguish them from the Black Kafirs, whom some ethnologists regard as having negro affiliationsare sometimes credited with an origin which legend traces to Arabia, while on another view it has been suggested that they are descendants of the soldiers of Alexander. The most probable theory is that both racially and culturally they preserve a strain of the same stock as the Aryan invaders of India. Although they have been converted to Islam, they retain a number of pagan customs, in which some would see traces of ancient Greece, It is probable, however, that the resemblance is no more than generic, and that the strange customs reported of them are a debased survival of beliefs of the primitive Arya. Thus it is said that although they believe in one chief god, they also recognise forty or fifty other deities, to whom sacrifices are offered on high places, while the dead are placed in sacred groves. One of the most interesting features of their customs is a song and dance ritual in connexion with a central altar. Dead heroes are commemorated by wooden equestrian statues, which are sometimes accompanied by figures of an attendant and the hero's wives seated behind on chairs. The general character of these statues and their technique have been made the basis of a suggested connexion with the statues of Easter Island, and thought to point to one possible source of the ‘Aryan’ strain which some would see in Polynesia.
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Red Kafirs of Nuristan. Nature 136, 330 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136330a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136330a0