African Folktales Read online

  Also by Roger D. Abrahams

  African-American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World

  Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South

  Copyright © 1983 by Roger D. Abrahams

  All rights reserved under International and

  Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by

  Pantheon Books, a division of Random

  House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously

  in Canada by Random House of Canada

  Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Cataloging

  in Publication Data

  Main entry under title:

  African folktales.

  (Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library)

  Bibliography: p.

  1. Tales—Africa, Sub-Saharan. I. Title.

  GR350.A348 1983 398.2′096

  83-2474

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80319-1

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  follow Bibliography.

  v3.1

  For Janet

  T

  hree storytellers met one day and began to tell stories. Each of them thought that he could excel the others. The first man said, “I will tell you the story of what I saw.

  “One day I went into the field and saw two birds fighting. One bird swallowed the other, and then in turn was swallowed by the other bird, so that the two birds swallowed each other.”

  The next one said, “One day I was going out to the field and I saw a man on the road who had cut off his own head and had it in his mouth eating it.”

  The third man said, “I was going to a big town and I saw a woman coming from the town with a house, a farm, and all her things on her head. I asked the woman where she was going, and she told me she had heard news that she had never heard before. I asked her what it was. The woman said she had heard the news that one man cut off his head and had it in his mouth eating it, so she was afraid and left the town. The woman passed and I went on.”

  Who told the biggest story?

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Introduction

  Part I. Tales of Wonder from the Great Ocean of Story

  INTRODUCTION

  DEMANE AND DEMAZANA

  THE PASSWORD

  THE THREE TESTS

  MONKEY STEALS A DRUM

  A MAN WHO COULD TRANSFORM HIMSELF

  TALE OF AN OLD WOMAN

  THE KING’S DAUGHTER WHO LOST HER HAIR

  PROFITABLE AMENDS

  THE MAN AND THE MUSKRAT

  THE HARE’S HOE

  WHY THE HARE RUNS AWAY

  THE TORTOISE AND THE FALCON

  RUBIYA

  THE FLYING LION

  A-MAN-AMONG-MEN

  A COMPETITION OF LIES

  Part II. Stories to Discuss and Even Argue About

  INTRODUCTION

  THE CONTEST OF RIDDLES

  LEOPARD, GOAT, AND YAM

  AN EYE FOR AN EYE?

  WONDROUS POWERS: MIRROR, SANDALS, AND A MEDICINE BAG

  THE DEVIL COMES BETWEEN THEM

  THE QUALITY OF FRIENDSHIP

  THE FOUR CHAMPIONS

  WHO SHOULD HE KILL?

  KILLING VIRTUE

  A SPIRITED CONTENDING

  LOVE CAUSED IT ALL

  KILLED FOR A HORSE

  THREE WIVES

  THE FIVE HELPERS

  MANY MIRACLES

  THEIR EYES CAME OUT

  HE STARVED HIS OWN

  THE SMART MAN AND THE FOOL

  FEMBAR’S CURIOSITY

  A FATHER’S ADVICE

  IS IT RIGHT THAT HE SHOULD BITE ME?

  TAKE ME CAREFULLY, CAREFULLY

  TIGER SLIGHTS THE TORTOISE

  THE NATURE OF THE BEAST

  THE DISOBEDIENT SISTERS

  RICH MAN, POOR MAN

  FINDERS KEEPERS

  THE LEOPARD WOMAN

  Part III. Tales of Trickster and Other Ridiculous Creatures: Tales to Entertain

  INTRODUCTION

  WHY MONKEYS LIVE IN TREES

  ALL THE LITTLE ANIMALS

  WHY THE DOG ALWAYS CHASES OTHER ANIMALS

  THE STORY OF HLAKANYANA

  CURSING THE BIRDS

  SAVING THE RAIN

  STUFFING THE HYENA

  CUTTING THE ELEPHANT’S HIPS

  THE CLEVER WAKASANKE

  THE TRICKSTERS’ ENCOUNTER

  HOW SQUIRREL ROBBED RABBIT OF HIS TAIL

  VICTIMS OF VANITY

  DEATH BY BURNING

  THE ANT’S BURDEN

  THEIR SOFT CROWNS DISCOVERED

  THE PIG’S NOSE AND THE BABOON’S REAR

  ONE TRICK DESERVES ANOTHER

  THE PLEASURE OF HIS COMPANY

  THE DOG EATS ALL THE ANTS

  NO LONGER FEAR THE COCK’S COMB

  HOW HONEY GUIDE CAME TO HAVE POWER OVER HONEY

  THE TRAPPER TRAPPED

  MEDICINE TO CATCH HIM

  FRIENDS FOR A TIME

  THE GREAT OVERLAND TREK

  THE SHUNDI AND THE COCK

  SPIDER OUTWITS THE RICH WOMAN

  SOFTLY, OVER THE HEAD OF THE GREAT

  TREACHERY REPAID

  THE GREAT DIKITHI

  THE WORK DONE BY ITSELF

  TWO FRIENDS FROM THEIR CHILDHOOD

  TALKING DRUMS DISCOVERED

  Part IV. Tales in Praise of Great Doings

  INTRODUCTION

  GASSIRE’S LUTE

  THE MWINDO EPIC

  Part V. Making a Way Through Life

  INTRODUCTION

  SALT, SAUCE, AND SPICE, ONION LEAVES, PEPPER, AND DRIPPINGS

  THE OLD WOMAN WITH SORES

  HOW IT PAYS SOMETIMES TO BE SMALL

  THE CLOTH OF PEMBE MIRUI

  THE WOOING BATTLE

  THE ORPHAN WITH THE CLOAK OF SKIN

  TUNGULULI AND THE MASTERS

  CHAMELEON INTO NEEDLE

  MOTHER COME BACK

  THE THREE SISTERS

  THE MESSENGER BIRD

  THE CHILD IN THE REEDS

  A WOMAN’S QUEST

  NEVER ASK ME ABOUT MY FAMILY

  A MAN MARRIES A LIONESS

  Bibliography

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Preface

  T

  o attempt to put a representative selection of the tales of Black Africa in a single work may seem futile to those who know the subcontinent. Like any such huge geographical region, there is a tremendous range of size, character, and complexity in the societies and cultures of Africa—a range that runs from the elegant and sophisticated ancient city cultures to the forest and desert peoples, who continue to live by the simplest hunting-and-gathering techniques. Immense kingdoms and nations coexist with very small bands, all with their own deep and venerable traditions.

  One of the greatest social and cultural achievements of all times came about in the subcontinent, when a great gardening people, within a few thousand years, brought a major portion of it under cultivation. Their accomplishment reflects the high value such an agricultural economy places on land and large expanding families.

  But Black Africa includes numerous kinds of wandering peoples: small bands like the forest people of the Ituri and the desert people of the Kalahari, both constantly on the move in search of food; the pastoral nomads, who, along with their people, move huge herds in a progress of watering places; the slash-and-burn agriculturists, who regularly move whole villages as their land plays out; and that widespread contemp
orary phenomenon, the wage-seeking emigrants, who move to plantation or city, and sometimes even return home. Moreover, there are innumerable peoples who follow the archaic religions of the Spoken Word and equally immense numbers who follow Christ or Muhammad, with all of the cultural implications carried by such religions of the Book. Finally, there are literally thousands of different languages spoken in this area, so many, indeed, that two of the great trade languages, Creole and Swahili, developed specifically as means for the various Africans to understand each other.

  In the face of such diversity and the immense geographical areas covered, how could one possibly hope to make any meaningful cultural statement through the putting together of a representative anthology? Fortunately, the question has been answered again and again for us, by Black Africans themselves, and by European and American observers: In spite of the range of culture-types, there are widely observable continuities, especially in the area of aesthetics, to be found in groups throughout the continent. The kinds of materials included in this anthology reveal a powerful tradition. These stories are related through their manner of performance to a number of other kinds of expression for which Black Africa is known to Westerners, especially dancing and drumming. It is a great tradition, one built on the common features of the many little traditions of those who live in the fruitful environment of close communities. As Jacques Maquet phrases it in his overview of historical and ethnographic writings, Africanity, a unity can be observed throughout the sub-Saharan region even by the observant traveler, a basically “cultural unity” emerging from a sense of “the totality of knowledge and behavior, ideas and objects, that constitutes [a people’s] common heritage …” (trans: Joan Rayfield [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972], p. 4).

  Naturally, this anthology is built on the backs of those who have observed these cultures firsthand and collected these tales in actual performance. And here the record is astonishing, for the oral repertoire of no other area of the world has been as widely reported. There are well over a thousand major collections, most of these made by missionaries and colonial officials around the turn of the century. They often reflect the bias of such reporters, but recently, more “objective” tellings have become available through the reports of anthropologists and folklorists. Of course, it was not until the advent of the tape recorder that such standards for objectivity could be really followed. Recording texts by hand is, obviously, far slower and less accurate than doing it by mechanical means, and the person doing the transcribing does tend to miss the more active details of performance. But even beyond the shortcomings of the method, it must be remembered that the missionary and the colonial administrator set down these stories with other objectives than the understanding of a culture and the place of performance within it.

  The tales were first recorded in a form intended to be used either for learning the language of the subject people or for the enjoyment of an audience back home already accustomed to reading folktales. But because the folktales already known were of an especially literary type—the marvelous tales of the Grimms, the more exotic Thousand Nights and a Night, other Oriental tales, and later Joel Chandler Harris’s collection of jocular trickster tales of the American South—the first collector-translators of African stories may have adopted the literary style already shown to excite the common reader. Or to put it in more positive terms, the great vigor, interest, and readability of these early collections of African stories emerges in some part from the conventions of style used in the existing Western popular folktale collections.

  The contemporary anthologizer, facing the question of whether these early efforts reflect the tales most characteristic of the world of Black Africa, must acknowledge that they do so only in part. They represent only the kind of stories that would be told to missionaries and colonial officials or, at best, were heard by them, in the process of living among “their people.” They are the most public sort of story, and moreover the kind most easily understood. But with greater study of various cultures by anthropologists—and recently by anthropologically trained Africans—it becomes ever clearer that these tales are only one segment of the African ocean of story.

  Recent inventions have made it possible to record actual tale-telling sessions and probe the broad spectrum of types more satisfactorily. Through them we have learned a good deal about the performance of these fictions: who performs for whom, under what conditions, and what the stories reveal about the lives of the people they belong to. However, when tales recorded in this way are transcribed verbatim, the first thing that impresses the reader is that they are often abundantly unreadable, even boring. The text, even when translated with some sense of style, is full of the repetitions and hesitations that are the rule in an oral performance, but hardly to be expected in a written one. Fortunately, a few recent collectors have taken such problems as a challenge, and have given us translations that are not only faithful transcriptions of stories as performed, but have rendered them in a wholly readable and enjoyable style.

  I have gravitated to the texts that have the greatest impact in the reading, the tales we can enjoy for themselves. (Our reaction, of course, is not of the same order and character as the involvement with oral performance in the home community.) Sometimes, it seemed that I was drawn to earlier accounts of missionaries precisely because they were not recorded as performed, but slowly dictated, or recalled, and reconstructed after a performance. Often, these are shortened texts that capture the essential plot and the moral or message of the story.

  I have also not hesitated to revise, to attempt to enhance the flow of the narrative. In the older texts, revision was necessitated by clumsy language—on the one hand, too literal an attempt at translation, and, on the other, too self-consciously literary in the nineteenth century fashion. Despite my revisions, however, you will immediately detect—and I trust enjoy—the wide variance in style and language, and be able to “feel” the range of flavor in the tales, from the traditional (i.e., Western) narrative to the short pithy fable, with elements of the grotesque, the exotic, the satiric, and the bawdy all finding their proper place.

  Though my hand was often hard at work on these texts, I have not tried to make them stylistically consistent. Rather, I have attempted to maintain the distinctive flavor of each, eliminating only those features that made them difficult to read and understand. Thus, the reader will encounter a wide variety of story types, told in many different “voices” and styles, some of which may seem downright strange at first.

  It is primarily with texts reported from story-telling performances that wholesale revision has occasionally been called for. In an actual performance, the storyteller takes listener-knowledge of the elements of community life for granted: nearly everyone in the audience already knows the story, knows each other, and has a great deal of common experience to be drawn upon in the telling. The result of this is twofold: The performance becomes at once overly allusive (narrative detail is decreased) and too concrete (extraneous social detail is increased). Typically, the tale-teller’s commentary has little to do with the action, but a great deal to do with how the audience interprets the story and enjoys the performance. If one wishes to read these stories as a way into understanding how the Tiv live, or the Kikuyu, the Bondei, or Kipsigis, then such detail provides extremely important clues to what the group likes to take for granted, what it exclaims over or laughs at. But for the reader who wishes to enjoy these stories as stories, such detail is simply a hindrance.

  In the introduction, I do, however, give a general explanation of the cultural context of the tales, and against that background, explain how these stories fit into the lives of those who continue to tell and listen to them. In oral cultures, storytelling is a fundamental way of codifying hard-won truths and dramatizing the rationale behind traditions. Thus, the tales will often end with “a message,” a point, a truth to remember as one confronts life’s problems. Told around the fireside or in the family compound, these stories would be known by everyone
—except children and strangers—and are so familiar that they might merely be referred to, rather than fully retold, as a way of making a point in a conversation or an argument. They provide the sources of allusion—allusions drawn upon in orations, in the singing of the praises of a great chief, or in a taunting-song aimed at one judged to be flawed. They might even come into play in interpretating the pattern of cowry shells thrown in a divination session. In other words, they embody the inherited wisdom—social, personal, and moral—of the people whose world we see through the filter of folklore.

  In transcribing and revising, I have made no attempt to include texts emerging from all situations in which stories are recounted. For example, there is a rich tradition of stories told in ceremonial settings or in celebration of past events. But, for the reasons noted above, there are not many texts available that satisfactorily illustrate these special occasions. More importantly, even where they do exist, the amount of special knowledge needed to understand the text renders it unusable for the purpose of anthologizing. I have, however, with one type of praise-song, the epic, included a major text, because its collector, Daniel Biebuyck, was able to work with the singing storyteller over a period sufficiently long to elicit the story behind the singing. Through The Mwindo Epic one is able to get a glimpse of one way in which stories are used beyond the single storytelling session, in a performance that extends many days.