African Folktales Read online

  I have also not drawn upon the legends, the genealogies, and the histories of the various African cultures. Again, histories require too much apparatus to make them understandable to the outsider, understandable in the sense of enabling the reader to recognize what of interest about them makes them memorable—and thus retellable. In the main I have drawn upon stories told as fictions, and told all the way through, not just used allusively. These are stories that are commonly told in the evening, in a public setting, and that are an important medium of entertainment and instruction.

  The arrangement of this volume does attempt to base groupings on the uses of the stories rather than on the more usual criteria of form or content. However, because a great many of these stories seem strange to Western tastes, the first section, by way of introduction, is given over to a few wonder tales of the kind that Europeans and Americans are most accustomed to, but that are found here in typically African renderings. The sections that then follow are: shorter stories used to introduce a subject for moral discussions; moral stories specific to the problems of keeping family and community together (and which, therefore, might be called domestic dramas); tales told in praise of great deeds; and finally, a large section of outrageous stories, told primarily to entertain, about the antisocial doings of one or another trickster figure.

  An anthology of this sort owes a tremendous debt to the hundreds of collectors and scholars who brought this material together in a meaningful way. I am especially in the debt of Harold Scheub, who brought a bright, enduring, and comprehensive order to the matter of Africa in his African Oral Narratives, Proverbs, Riddles, Poetry & Song: An Annotated Bibliography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978). An equally useful work in a more descriptive and discursive style is Ruth Finnegan’s fine survey, Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Kofi Awoonor’s The Breast of the Earth (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975), is an African poet-anthropologist’s evocation of the place of oral and written performance in his Africa. Isadore Okpewho’s The Epic in Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), focuses just on the singing of heroic tales on the subcontinent, and he examines closely and analyses clearly a number of epic texts, both oral and written. And William Bascom’s African Dilemma Tales (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), devoted only to that form of enigma does the job (as always) with superb thoroughness. In the more analytical vein of the tale index, so beloved of comparatist-folklorists, Africa has been well-served, if not yet so comprehensively, as Europe and India. The majority of these have been doctoral dissertations and remain unpublished. Here the documents I found myself calling on most often—all available through University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, Michigan—were: Kenneth W. Clark’s A Motif-Index of the Folktales of Culture Area V. West Africa (1958); Mary A Klippie’s African Folktales With the Foreign Analogues (1938); E. Ojo Arewa’s A Classification of the Folktales of the Northern East African Cattle Area by Types (1966); and Winifred Lambrecht’s A Tale Type Index for Central Africa (1967).

  In addition, three review essays were of immense assistance with the forest-for-the-trees problem: Philip M. Peek’s “The Power of Words in African Verbal Arts,” (Journal of American Folklore 94 [1981]: 19–43); Dan Ben-Amos’s, “Introduction: Folklore in African Society,” (in Forms of Folklore in Africa, ed. Bernth Lindfors [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977: pp. 1–36]); and Richard M. Dorson’s “Africa and the Folklorist,” (in African Folklore, ed. Richard Dorson [Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1972: pp. 3–67).

  If this book demonstrates a bias toward the West African Kwa-complex (which includes the Yoruba, Dahomey, Bini, and Ewe peoples), it is because so many of my friends and mentors have worked in these areas: the late Melville Herskovits and William Bascom, Dan Ben-Amos, Kofi Awoonor, E. Ojo Arewa, and Robert Farris Thompson. My deepest thanks to all of these for many favors. In addition, Donald Cosentino, Robert Cancel, Daniel Biebuyck, Elizabeth Tucker, Charles Bird, Lee Haring, and Bernth Lindfors all willingly shared their insights into this vast literature, as did Veronika Görög. Peter Seitel taught me a good deal about how to study one tradition, the Haya, with both sensitivity and depth in understanding the cultural complexities. John Szwed helped me talk through many of these matters, always adding significant perception from his very special point of view. Richard Dorson, by organizing and inviting me to the African Folklore Institute, in a real sense started my thinking in this direction. And Kay Turner was my able and hard-working graduate assistant during the gestation of the work. Ronald Rassner has suggested some useful changes.

  Above all, this book owes its existence to André Schiffrin and Wendy Wolf, who dreamed it up, and again and again to Wendy, and her colleague, Nan Graham, for keeping at me, and for perceptive revision and prodding, editorial and otherwise. But in the long run, this is Janet’s book—for she not only talked the whole matter through, over and over, but she subtly worried it into being.

  Introduction

  O

  ne of the most common of all stories in Africa describes the encounter of a man and a human skull in the bush. Among the Nupe of Nigeria, for instance, they tell of the hunter who trips over a skull while in pursuit of game and exclaims in wonderment, “What is this? How did you get here?” “Talking brought me here,” the skull replies enigmatically. Naturally the hunter is amazed and quickly runs back to his village, exclaiming about what he has found. Eventually, the king hears about this wonder and demands that the hunter take him to see it. They return to the place in the bush where the skull is sitting, and the hunter points it out to his king, who naturally wants to hear the skull’s message. The hunter repeats the question: “How did you get here?” but the skull says nothing. The king, angry now, accuses the hunter of deception, and orders his head cut off on the spot. When the royal party departs, the skull speaks out, asking the hunter “What is this? How did you get here?” The head replies “Talking brought me here!”1

  Others tell the story with an even more pointed punch line, the skull, for instance, saying, “I told you to keep your mouth shut!” To the Nupe and the many other Africans who use this story, the mere mention of the talking skull is enough to deliver its message. The punch line alone has become a proverb and is used to remind someone that uncontrolled speech is a sign of moral laxness.2

  This strange tale is characteristically African in a variety of ways. Like many of the stories in this volume, it contrasts the village as the place of order with the bush as the locus of mystery, of destructive natural forces, even of death. It also demonstrates another of the most pervasive features of these tales: the use of them to introduce a discussion of how to act correctly. And the device of the separation of body parts is also observable in a number of the stories included here. For instance, the comic enigma tale, “Their Eyes Came Out,” deals with separable eyes. In a more serious vein, the three tales in “A Competition of Lies” detail how a spirit achieved human form by borrowing parts of the body from a number of unwitting donors.

  But perhaps the most interesting feature of “The Talking Skull” is not the way in which it is characteristic of other tales, but rather that it is a story about storytelling. To the reader who comes to these stories in book form, it is important to recognize that in their African settings (and in oral cultures in general), the spoken word carries great power manifested in several ways. Besides directly addressing deep matters of life, the spoken word can actually create bonds and bring about personal or social transformations—a capacity of words we tend to forget in these duplicitous times (except perhaps when the speaker is wearing robes). This potency of spoken language must be remembered when discussing tales—because tales are, in the ears of their hearers, permissible lies. As Sony Camara’s Manding-informants repeatedly told him, their stories are neither a record of reality, nor pure fantasy. Though they are “stories that happened at the beginning of time,” they describe things as they happen today. The tale “relates a drama which comes to a head on this side of
the reality of the event. It is not a part which is definitely completed: it is an impending drama. It may burst out any time and anywhere.”3

  Stories also have specific meaning in the lives of those who tell them, referring to personal situations and to particular people. As in traditional cultures throughout the world, the performance of certain tales is associated with specific storytellers. And just as each person knows everybody else’s “business”—that is, their personal stories—so everyone is presumed to know all the tales of their group’s traditional repertoire. The storyteller also will assume such knowledge on the part of the audience except when it is composed exclusively of children, knowing that because the stories are all familiar, listeners will be constantly judging his or her ability to tell the tale. In short, there is continual monitoring of the telling of stories—whether of a tale or just of gossip—in a manner similar to that in which actual behavior is judged all of the time. This is the way of the small community worldwide, for the well-being of the group resides in the sharing of this kind of knowledge, through which family and friendship networks are woven into the web of community.

  We tend to think of folktales as the purest of fictions, so self-contained and logical in development that they are lit from within and need no explanation. The fable and its message are one; the ideal book of folktales would need no introduction. But there are numerous reasons why these African stories cannot totally speak for themselves, reasons that exist because of the ways of storymaking and storytelling in this part of the world.

  This book is a record of traditions that still live in many places in Black Africa. The stories in it find their fullest vitality in the compounds and villages that remain the living situations of a great many Africans today. There, circumstances demand that actions be fictionalized so that they may be talked about as if human behavior in general, were the subject of the tales rather than what A did to B yesterday. As in small communities throughout the world, stories have become ways in which people who know each other intimately may discuss each other without having to get overly personal. Stories operate, like proverbs, as a means of depersonalizing, of universalizing, by couching the description of how specific people are acting in terms of how people have always acted. This is the element of storytelling that we who read books and live in cities tend to discard and forget—the farther away from the village and the oral world we go, the farther behind us we leave it.

  I

  The Africa of our storytellers is, to begin with, an immense area, including all of the land south of the Sahara Desert. This encompasses regions of deserts, of mountains, of plateaus, of rain forests, a massive savannah, and as vast an array of coastal environments as one can encounter anyplace in the world. An area over three times the landmass of the continental United States, it is predominantly a vast plateau, with swells and basins, a plain of ancient hard rock on which a wide variety of people have wrested a living from the tropical soil. This they do in the face of the incursions of both desert and rain forest.

  In the area from which these stories come, the domestication of animals and crops accounts for the food resources of the great majority of the population. The means and manner of domestication of crops and cattle, and the complexity of social arrangements differ, of course. This focus on domestication is of no little importance to an understanding of these stories, for one theme that informs and energizes them is hunger, indeed the constant threat of starvation. In tropical gardening (compared to temperate agriculture), there is no fallow winter season and no chance to build up humus and its associated nutrients in the soil. As a result, tropical lands tend to play out fairly quickly, and a community may of necessity find itself moving often to secure farmable lands. Scarcity is so dramatically threatening because many of the cultures affected by it subscribe to a world view that places a high value on potency (the Bantu’s Muntu, for example); they constantly monitor the relationship between family and community resources—how many hands can be counted upon to help—and responsibilities—how many mouths must be fed. The anxiety is intensified during times of drought, but every year brings a time of want before the harvest comes in.

  Nothing strains the web of culture so much as the threat of starvation. We see such matters under constant discussion throughout these tales. Bonds are repeatedly strained or broken because someone steals food, or because children are neglected when crops fail. Therefore, no theme is more important or receives more attention, than the building of families and of friendship ties to provide that strength which, even in the face of natural disaster or perilous human responses to it, ensures a community’s survival. Reading these stories, one realizes how great the achievement of family and community is, and how constantly that achievement must be recreated under test.

  The intensity of feeling about family and community is reflected in the high value placed on both verbal and behavioral affirmation of traditional practices. Again and again, these stories exemplify the ways in which a parent and child should act in line with past practice, or how husband and wife would treat each other by conforming to long-approved practices.

  We have already seen an example of the stress laid on custom in the story about the talking skull, where indirect emphasis on the cautionary decorum of traditional speech provides the moral center of vision. But in a great many stories the argument for maintaining a traditional practice is explicit—often, again, on the cautionary ground of what happens to those who don’t keep up the tradition. Consider the grisly story of Hornbill, as told by the Wayao, which details what happens when a community member loses sight of how traditions tie its members together.

  Once Hornbill lived in a village but wouldn’t conform to the customs “of the people.” This was not received well, especially his refusal to attend burial rites (so necessary to consign the dead to their place apart from the living). Again and again, he was asked to pay respect to the dead and accompany the funeral procession of a fellow villager. But he always refused. Then his own child died, and no one came to offer help in preparing the body or in carrying it to the grave site. Not knowing how to do it properly, Hornbill tied the body up, put it on his head, and left the house looking for the burial place. “Ku notubwe kwas?” (which, in fact, the Hornbill still cries), “Where are the graves?” he asked the first person he bumped into. “I don’t know” was the reply. He wandered on, always asking the same question, “Where is the graveyard, the graveyard?” and always getting the same reply. Eventually, the child’s body became so rotten that it began dripping down his back. He has been wandering ever since, forever searching, and asking, “Where is the graveyard, the graveyard?”4

  The need to maintain tradition has particular resonance for the storyteller. For he is the oral weaver who, through the spell of words and action, must reassert for his audience the flexible strength of the spun threads from which the fabric of life is woven. It is a serious responsibility, one that is carried out not just in the telling and singing of tales, nor just in the other forms of verbal art like divination or speechmaking, but one that spills over even (or especially) into musical and dance performance as well. As in many cultures, these various forms of expressive display draw their energy and purpose from the same basic set of social needs and values. Within the distinctive stylistic features of each category of performance, they all carry the same simple messages about the shared concerns of community.

  An African is characteristically unable to resist an opportunity for performatory display of the joys and demands of living, and opportunities for such display present themselves in surprising variety in daily life, even in areas that to a Western mind might seem less than inspiring. Collaborative activity in farming or cattle tending, for example, provides a constant topic to be explored. The work songs associated with Black Africans throughout the world most fully display the prime value of cooperation and of the coordination of energies needed to forge community. Early visitors to Africa (and Afro-America), reported astonishment at the gleaming hoes
descending together in the sun, their downward and upward motion coordinated by the singing of the workers. The importance of such hoeing and singing is a central feature in one episode of the tale of “Mandu.”

  In the village, the question of the role of the individual in the family and community arises constantly, as does the issue of initiative in a world that must stress the subordination of individual will to the good of the group. We meet this subject again and again in story performance, and once more the theme is explained and elaborated upon by another type of performance: the work song. In these, one person does the chanting, the others respond; anyone may seize the role of song leader. Naturally it is the strong-voiced who most commonly will do this leading. But it is a role which is passed around, and one which may be contended for, as the three storytellers in “A Competition of Lies” show us. There are, within the system, then, places in which the competitive use of individual voices is encouraged. A number of the most important traditional forms of stylized activity draw upon this theme of competition; life itself is depicted by high-contrast antagonism, both between individuals and larger principles, such as male and female, age and youth, weak and strong.