African Folktales Read online

  We see here an emergent contrast to Western forms, not only in the way work is carried out, but also in the way playing is done. Throughout this culture area, one kind of game predominates: the singing circle-game similar to such playground fare as “The Farmer in the Dell” and “Go In and Out the Window” (but in contrast to these games in Western society, in Africa both adults and children participate in these “ring-plays”). Individuals are placed in the center of the circle and carry on imitational and symbolic acts while the people forming the circle respond. The central figure is constantly replaced. But unlike “The Farmer in the Dell,” the African games call not for dramatic action, but for the same kind of response singing that characterizes the work song: one singer leads and the others respond (indeed, the response generally begins before the leader has finished). Many of the tales in this volume have songs embedded in them that are, in fact, in the same pattern as such games. They arise quite naturally in the trickster tales, where the ridiculous (but clever) hero plays at life, getting others to play along by leading games of this type.

  This emphatic focus on the community of performance is a central feature of life as well as art in Black Africa. Continuity and culture are a constant achievement, for the destructive forces of nature evidence themselves regularly. Such instability may arise, to some extent, from the characteristics of the African landscape. Once one ascends beyond the coastal escarpment onto the plateau, there are very few actual physical barriers to man or beast (in spite of the impenetrable jungle spoken of by explorers and adventurers). Given the lack of such physical impediments, the weather progresses with an inexorable character that seems to permeate these stories. Boundaries and contrasts must be hewn out of the environment by man. The very smallest geographical units, such as the village and the compound (or kraal), have the quality of man-the-maker written all over them. Because the battle is fierce and endless, the human conquest of nature must constantly be replayed, with vigor, and with respect accorded to both contenders—man and nature. The contrast between the home and the bush, the village and the wilderness, is imposing, the protection of the family fire and the community clearing all the more cherished because of it. Which is not to say that a victory over nature is ever celebrated here; on the contrary, it is the descending of nature’s vital spirit upon the community, rather than any sense of control over it, that is manifested in performance.

  This factor is supremely important in the stylistic development of Black African expressive culture, for their lore speaks constantly of the coordinating of many impulses to one overall effect. This effect, however, does not rely on the carefully realized harmonies, nor on the clear sense of beginning, middle, and end that we are used to expecting in most Western art forms. Rather, we have forms in Africa that highlight the steady thrust of life and art, an effect achieved through the interlocking of voices and the repetition, with variation, of the same basic patterns.

  This is one of the distinctive characteristics of African performance pointed out by Alan Lomax in his study of musical styles throughout the world. Lomax recognizes and builds upon the notion that music is commonly an extension and a stylization of the ways people interact. Black African singing, as Lomax evokes it, involves “wide-voiced, superbly cohesive, polyphonic choralizing … endlessly rich, rhythmic and orchestral traditions.” These involve “a sociable overlapping of parts” in which a “polyrhythmic interaction between voices” underscores the sense of moral community that emerges in the spirit of celebration and argument.5

  This interactive style relies on getting the greatest variety of timbres and textures into play—even at the expense of ensemble effects. When this is combined with the different meters, imposed one upon another, we have the characteristic African sound and rhythmic effects that have attracted (and been learned and imitated by) Westerners wherever they have encountered them. This aesthetic organization is precisely what is so enthralling about the deep samba of the Brazilian Carnival and the jump-up rhythms of Jamaican reggae that have influenced Western popular music for the last ten years.

  But it has entered Western consciousness most fully and forcefully through traditional jazz. Though this form of music uses traditional European instruments and has a strong Western-style sense of beginning and ending, the interlock and overlap of the instrumental voices is the most characteristic dimension of the music—and this is the African contribution. Each instrument underscores the distinctiveness of its “voice” by displaying the melody in the style of that instrument—drawing upon the improvised ornamentations (or “riffs”) associated with it—and pushing its possible range of tonal effects as far as possible. Each instrument remains separate, even at the point at which all of them play together. Moreover, as many have pointed out, jazz seems to involve a kind of discussion among the instruments concerning the melody; and, in the “hottest” sessions, the discussion turns into both an argument and a boasting session, a process often called “jamming” or “cutting” by the jazzmen themselves. Such an aggressive display does not undercut the aesthetic effect of the piece, of course; it enhances it.

  In the contrast, the contest, even the potential conflict of voices, we can feel the vibrancy of the African creative impulse most fully. Through the powerful coordination of these effects in the face of possible chaos, the African artist achieves his or her sense of mastery; and the manifestations of this achievement across the spectrum of cultural expression are extraordinary.

  The master-drummer, for instance, must dominate through his playing, and compel the attentive response of the other drummers joining him. He does this not only through the vigor and subtlety of his playing—“his laying down the beat” (to use another jazz term)—but also by his introduction of variations to which the others must respond, even to the point of altering the basic meter from time to time. I draw upon the example of drumming, not only because here one can perhaps witness the relationship between the individual and the collectivity in its purest form. In African drumming, we not only have to attend to variation in meters and timbres, but we can also feel the meter of the master-drummer pulling against, and away from, that of the others. Indeed, African drumming style characteristically joins a number of metrical lines. We can actually see the same kind of aesthetic effect occurring in a wide range of African visual traditions, especially in ways of dressing, and in woven ground covers and blankets.

  African styles of dress often call for the imposition of high contrast in hue and texture as an indication of rank and dominion. Vivid colors in a variety of cloth types are juxtaposed, setting up a brilliant and arresting image. As in the music, one often finds the widest variety of both textures and pulses superimposed one on the other to establish this vibrant sense of life in the everyday.

  Similarly stylized, if in more subdued tonalities, are the great West African woven fabrics, which operate like drum orchestras. By setting up contrasting pulse systems, they instruct the eye to respond multi-metrically, much as the ear and body do to polyrhythmic drumming.

  As one would expect in such an aestheticized environment, the vivid contrapositions within cloth and costume are paralleled by dramatic contrasts between the ornately decorated and the stripped down, the spare. Many visitors to Africa have noted, for instance, how different one culture is from the next in terms of dress, one having the simplest kind of togalike covering and the other the more complicated overlapping, multilayered style. Similarly, within some of the more stratified groups, one class or caste will be typified by their “hot” style of dressing, dancing, or speaking, while another (usually a dominant group) will be characterized by their restrained style and their owning “the right to silence.” Here we can usefully contrast the hot world of the Burundi with the cool environment valued by the Wolof. Among the former, all the men are expected to have developed the power of speech to a high art, and to enter into argument easily and with eloquence. In contrast, the Wolof (along with many other cultures from the Senegambian area), regard the performe
r-caste griot as an overheated half-animal: the more civilized classes manifest themselves through the spare style.6

  II

  I mention these other expressive resources because storytelling itself is part of a large performing complex, one that exists not only to provide entertainments for traditional (oral-aural) peoples, but that is at the center of their moral lives as well. Moreover, storytelling—as pure narration—seldom arises by itself in this part of the world. Stories involve a singing, a dancing, an acting-out of themselves. The audience participates actively in the singing and the dancing songs; the acting-out, through impersonation and masking and comic costuming, imposes a kind of distance through performance mastery. I have outlined this pattern of performance not as an academic exercise in comparative aesthetics—though the pattern is very different from the Western tradition—but as a means of underscoring the relationship between art and life in sub-Saharan Africa.

  It would not be overstating the matter to note that in Black Africa, art is life and vice-versa, not a mere reflection of humanity and community, but a directly engaged commentary on how things are or should be; rather than just imitation, they heighten and intensify humanity’s most important concerns. While we may not be able to define clearly either the Western or the African aesthetic per se, we do know that the difference between the two is great, and due in no small part to the relative importance of performance in each culture. In Africa (traditional Black) art is not set aside from “real life”—it cannot be among a people who do not make such distinctions. It is not just that the Western analytic distinctions between art and life are not meaningful in dealing with African expressive culture, but that the distinction actively threatens the lifeblood of community. Elimo P. Njau, at the first meeting of the Congress of Africanists, eloquently made just that point, which was then echoed by the other participants:

  Before African art was known in its own right, before African music was known as music in its own right, African art and music were the true cement of the African community.

  African art and music were so much part and parcel of the daily life of the community that when you talked about art and music you actually talked about the people themselves, their daily activities, their day-to-day aspirations as a community, their joys together, the enemies they fought together and the tears they shed together.7

  The danger of losing the context of a tale is a small but significant by-product of the fracturing process often associated with Aristotelian thought—a process in which a community and its expressions or its arts are separated out into different piles. The very act of collecting and codifying, as we’ve seen, invariably distorts the “meaning” of a story. I have made the point already that, even as the subcontintent urbanizes, folktales have been maintained as effective devices for passing on the knowledge and wisdom of the ancestors. Though this is probably true of folktales told throughout the world, too often we forget that as Westerners, we learn these stories through books that underscore their imaginative and imaginary qualities. Equal emphasis should be placed on their effect on and importance to human interaction.

  These stories are African; they have African concerns and obey codes and conventions of organization and use. One of the first cultural complications this causes for a Westerner is the fact that in their African setting these tales are called upon not just to deliver a specific message, but to initiate talk about that message. In other words, unlike most of the stories we are accustomed to encountering: in books, these come from communities that continue to use stories as ways of pulling apart current subjects and piecing them together again—both through the story itself and, as we’ll see soon, through the discussion and argument that story engenders.

  It is precisely the way that the storyteller “grabs your shirt” and thrusts you into the tale that isn’t there in the folktales we read in literary collections such as those of the Brothers Grimm, where what we find on the whole is a record of stories as remembered by old people who no longer tell them actively. In contrast, the African stories here were recorded while still flourishing in social and cultural environments in which the artful employment of speech in all dimensions of community is encouraged and applauded.

  Unfortunately, this quality of immediacy in an African story, including the noise in which it lives, is very hard to capture on paper. Among the attempts to record storytelling as it occurred at a specific time and place, and to record it in such a way that other major situational factors are also conveyed, it is, perhaps, Laura Bohannon’s novelistic accounts that come closest to succeeding. In Bohannon’s “anthropological novel,” Return to Laughter,8 describing her work among the Tiv of Nigeria, she provides us with a description of a tale-telling scene which, though not wholly characteristic of the look and feel of a usual storytelling—the scene occurs after a smallpox epidemic has passed through the village—is nonetheless especially vivid. Her description focuses not on the stories, but rather on the noise out of which the performance emerges, and the performer’s mastery of the tumult. She dramatizes the way in which the immediate situation is drawn upon in the stories and wedded to their universal qualities, and how the continuities and the interlayering of voices may be seen to work together in an actual performance context.

  A few nights later we sat under the cold moon of the harmattan in a circle in Kako’s homestead yard. My pressure lamp was carefully placed, under Kako’s personal direction, to illuminate the storytellers as they passed before us and the assembled elders. Gradually the people gathered from the neighboring homesteads. They brought their wives and children, and they brought wood for the fire and stools to sit on. The homestead was full of preparatory bustle as people borrowed coals to start their fires and jostled each other for a place close to the front. Then, places staked out with fire and stool, people circulated to greet each other, as people do in a theater lobby. The air was filled with happy hum of an audience sure of good entertainment.

  Behind Kako’s reception hut there was a great deal of coming and going, whispering and giggling, very much like the noise of people plotting charades. Cholo, who was to tell the first tale, squatted before us in brief, friendly greeting and gave me news of his sister: Atakpa was well; her co-wife had been blinded by smallpox. “It makes more work for Atakpa. They’re both after their husband now, to get them a little wife to help.”

  “Cholo!”

  “I’m coming,” Cholo shouted toward Kako’s reception hut. He glanced at the gathered audience and left. He waved Ihugh to join him. Soon Ihugh was running toward his hut, consulting with his uncles, and then back to join Cholo behind the reception hut. People settled down to wait, with anticipation.

  Cholo came out before the lamp, and, with many gestures, began the story of the hare and the elephant.

  The hare went hunting one day. He armed himself with a club made of cane grass and, knowing his weapon weak, wore a ferocious mask to petrify his prey with fear.

  Here Cholo began to sing, stopping to instruct us all in the chorus of his song: nonsense syllables with a rousing rhythm and a lilting tune. I got interested. This would be far more fun than mere storytelling.

  First the hare met a mouse. The mouse screamed with fear when he saw the terrible mask, but instead of standing trembling and ready to the hare’s club, the mouse turned to flee.

  Again Cholo waved us into the chorus.

  As the hare pursued the mouse, his mask slipped down over his eyes. But the hare has long ears, and he was able to follow his prey by the rustling in the dry grass. In his flight, the mouse ran straight into an elephant and the elephant also began to run. The hare, unable to see, now followed the elephant and beat him with his cane club. The elephant, thinking this was the tickle of the mouse’s whiskers, ran ever faster.

  Again the chorus. Then Cholo disappeared. I had enjoyed the song, and prepared for the next story. But this one was not yet finished. Cholo returned. This time he was the hare. To his head he had tied two waving fronds as ears, over his
face a cloth daubed with mud, and in his hands a weak blade of cane grass. He mimed his story, dancing before us, searching for game, finding the mouse, and pursuing it blindly.

  Then out came the elephant, roaring: a long bed tied to a man’s back—those huge, splay feet could be no one’s but Ihugh’s—covered with two dark togas that swayed with the elephant’s dancing. The youngest children screamed most satisfactorily and had to be comforted by their parents, while the older children told them with great superiority that the elephant was really a man. Cholo now struck the elephant boldly with his grass blade, now used it as a baton to wave us all into his song and chorus. One or two of the young men beat sticks against their chairs, the better to mark the rhythm while the hare and the elephant danced. In a final surge of enthusiastic singing and dancing, the hare and the elephant disappeared.

  Immediately one of Ihugh’s cousins sprang into the center of the circle and began his tale of the goat who was a blacksmith and how he was tricked by the hare. He too had a song for his story, for the fables themselves are common property, and a storyteller makes his fame with his songs and dancing. Again I found myself laughing wholeheartedly and joining in the singing. I was enjoying myself immensely.

  As the evening wore on, other men also rose to tell their stories, pressing brothers and cousins into service in the charades and commandeering props from the women of the homestead. A pot tied snoutlike over the face made a hippopotamus. Sheepskins, leaves, and cloth-covered stools created strange monsters and sprites. There was not a single dull story. The audience wouldn’t allow it. They were as loud in their criticism as in their praise, and people will shout down any fable teller who fails to hold their attention: “That’s too long.” “Your song’s no good.” “You’ve got the story wrong.” “Learn to dance.” Sometimes it needed only the momentary inattention of part of the audience to embolden one of the other storytellers to jump into the center even while another fable was being told. Then for a few moments we heard two tales, two songs at once. Soon people would take up only the one chorus and the other fable teller would sit down.