ABSTRACT
Walking through the buyagu, the garden site, a week or ten days after the first inaugural ceremony, we see most of the plots covered with cut weeds, branches and saplings, and only here and there a solid wall of tangled greenery, where a plot has been left untouched. There is that part of the moon of Milamala, when the spirits are being received in the village, feasted, and then expelled, for the refuse to dry. Soon after the yoba, the driving away of the spirits, in the second half of the moon of Milamala or early in the moon of Yakosi, the gardens are ready for burning. The burning of the gardens (gabu) has a double function. In the first place, the mass of faded and dried greenery is best cleared by burning; and in the second place, the ashes form an excellent manure when washed into the soil by the rain. As Motago'i, one of my best informants, put it (Text 29 Part V, Div. VI, § 14): “If we were not to burn the leaves on the soil, it would become sterile and not fertile.” I did not often come across this realisation of the fertilising value of ashes, but, besides Motago'i, one or two others, including Bagido'u, were ready to admit that ashes were favourable to the growth of plants.
