As understudies and assistants to shamans, "medicine-men," and "doctors," children among many primitive peoples soon become acquainted with dance and song.
In Ashanti, boy musicians, singers, and dancers figure in the processions of welcome of the chiefs and kings, and young girls are engaged in the service of the fetiches (438. 258). At a funeral dance of the Latuka, an African tribe, "the women remained outside the row of dancers dancing a slow, stupid step, and screaming a wild and most inharmonious chant, whilst boys and girls in another row beat time with their feet." Burchell, while _en route_ for the Kaffir country, found among certain tribes that "in the evening a whole army of boys would come to his hut and listen with manifest pleasure to the tones of his violin, and would repeat the melodies he played with surprising accuracy" (546. 3, 199). The _meke-meke_, a dance of the Fiji Islanders, "is performed by boys and girls for whom an old musician plays"; at Tahiti the children "are early taught the 'ubus,' songs referring to the legends or achievements of the gods," and "Europeans have at times found pleasure in the pretty, plaintive songs of the children as they sit in groups on the sea-shore" (546. 35, 180, 208). In some of the Polynesian Islands, young girls are "brought up to dance the timorodea, a most lascivious dance, and to accompany it with obscene songs" (100. 62). At Tongatabu, according to Labillardiere, a young girl "sang a song, the simple theme of which she repeated for half-an-hour" (546. 31). Wallaschek calls attention to the importance of the child in song in the following words (546. 75):--
"In some places the children, separated from the adults, sing choruses among themselves, and under certain circumstances they are the chief support of the practice of singing. On Hawaii, Ellis found boys and girls singing in chorus, with an accompaniment of seven drums, a song in honour of a quondam celebrated chief. Even during supper with the Governor, table-music was performed by a juvenile bard of some twelve or fourteen summers, who sang a monotonous song to the accompaniment of a small drum.... In Fiji a man of position deems it beneath him to sing, and he leaves it to his wife and children, so that women sing with women only, and children with children."
