FOLK-STORIES
Methods of story-telling. Animal stories. _Brer Rabbit._
Borrowed tales. Value of native folk-lore.
We have mentioned that one of the great amusements, both of children and
grown-up people, is story-telling—_ku imba ntanu_. This means literally
‘to sing a story,’ and points to the way in which tales are usually told.
Most of them contain short pieces which are sung, and are known to every
one—so that, when the narrator comes to them, the audience all join in.
Steere points out that these sung parts are very common in the Swahili
tales, and that the language found in them is older than what is usually
spoken, or than the rest of the story.
Another curious point is that, when a man is telling a story late at
night—say, beside the camp-fire or on a journey—at every pause in his
narrative the hearers exclaim in chorus, ‘We are all here!’ As the tale
goes on, the responses become fewer and fewer, and at last, when no one
is left awake to answer, the recitation stops.
The stories told by the Bantu of British Central Africa are, broadly
speaking, of three kinds. First, we have legends about the origin of men
and things, such as we noticed in the fourth chapter, with which may be
grouped the traditions telling whence the different tribes came, and how
they reached their present homes. About these last I shall have something
to say in the next chapter. Secondly, we have the kind of animal story so
well exemplified in _Uncle Remus_. And, thirdly, tales in which people,
animals, and sometimes preternatural beings are mixed up together in a
series of more or less marvellous incidents—like our own fairy stories,
in fact. Some of these we can trace as imported; but they are none the
less curious on that account.
The animal stories seem to be the commonest and best known among the
Anyanja—at least, nearly all the stories I could induce natives to tell
me were of this kind. The tales collected by Mr. Macdonald, and published
in _Africana_, however, belong largely to the first and second classes.
Some are like very faint and far-off echoes of the _Arabian Nights_;
these have probably been heard on the coast by Yaos who have gone down
with trading-parties, and retold in the villages on their return. An
example of this kind is ‘The Story of the Chief,’ which will be given
later on.
Every one knows the delightful _Uncle Remus_ tales, and will remember the
cunning and resourcefulness of ‘Brer Rabbit,’ who, with his family, ‘wuz
at de head er de gang when any racket wuz on hand, en dar dey stayed!’
It is now generally agreed that these stories came from Africa; and
wherever any Bantu folk-tales have been written down, there we are pretty
sure to find Brer Rabbit, under one alias or another. The Anyanja call
him _Kalulu_, the Yaos _Sungula_—generally _Che Sungula_, ‘Mr. Rabbit’;
though naturalists remind us, by the bye, that he is not properly a
rabbit but a hare. One comes across the Kalulu by himself in the bush,
and he makes a form in the grass, not a burrow in the ground. If I can
trust my recollection of him, he is a little smaller than an English hare.
I cannot help feeling surprised that some writers on African folk-lore
have chosen to ‘translate’ _sungula_, or its equivalent in other Bantu
languages, by ‘fox,’ because the character assigned to the hare is in
their opinion more appropriate to the fox. By doing so, we spoil one of
the most characteristic features in the stories, and, moreover, lose an
important distinction; for the place given by the Bantu to the Hare is
occupied in Hottentot folk-lore by the Jackal.
Of course the animals in _Uncle Remus_ are not all the same as those
in the African tales; as some of the latter do not live in America,
better-known ones have been substituted for them. Thus the Elephant,
the Hippopotamus, the Lion, and the Python have disappeared, so has
the Crocodile (‘Uncle Remus’ lived in Middle Georgia, where there are
no alligators); and I fancy that Brer Wolf and Brer Fox have taken the
place of the Hyena, who sometimes gets the better of the Hare for a time,
but is always worsted by him in the end. The Tortoise (a land and not
a water tortoise, usually) is as clever as Brer Terrapin, but is more
bloodthirsty and vindictive—a kind of Shylock. The Baboon (_nyani_) does
not seem to have an American counterpart, and the Cat, the Cock, and the
Swallow, though one does not see why, have also dropped out.
A somewhat puzzling creature in the Nyanja tales is the Dzimwe, sometimes
translated ‘elephant,’ though the native explanations are rather hazy,
and leave one with the impression that he is a kind of bogey—perhaps
akin to Chiruwi. One boy actually states that _dzimwe_ (or, in the
Likoma dialect, _jimwe_) sometimes means ‘an elephant,’ and sometimes ‘a
spirit.’ In the present case, it seems more satisfactory to take it as
the former; though in one or two stories we have the elephant under his
proper Nyanja name of _njobvu_. In neither case does he act up to his
reputation for wisdom, for in the end he is always cruelly victimised by
the Hare.
The latter’s manners, I think, must have been softened by his sojourn in
the States; for only on rare occasions—as when he puts an end to Brer
Wolf with the boiling kettle—are his actions really cruel. We cannot say
the same of the Kalulu; yet it would be a mistake to conclude, from the
enjoyment with which these stories are received, that the African natives
are a bloodthirsty and ferocious race. What they enjoy is the cleverness
with which the tables are turned by the weaker party on the stronger,
who seemed to have him entirely in his power. And, after all, generation
after generation of English children have been fascinated by _Jack
the Giant-Killer_, without being precisely horrified by the murderous
stratagem practised by Jack on the Cornish giant.
The native does not recognise such a clear distinction between animals
and human beings as we do. Animals do not speak, it is true, but, for
all he knows, there may be nothing to prevent their doing so if they
choose. He believes (and acts on the belief) that certain human beings
can change themselves into animals and back again. So, in telling stories
about animals, he seems continually to forget that they are not human,
or perhaps, rather, he assumes that their habits, abodes, and domestic
arrangements are very much the same as those of his own people.
One of the most typical of the Kalulu stories is the following, told me
by one of the Blantyre native teachers. Being an educated man, accustomed
to composition and dictation, he was able to give it in a very clear
and connected form; whereas it is difficult, and sometimes impossible,
to make sense of those written down from the dictation of village
children, who perhaps did not know the stories very well to begin with,
and continually lost the thread when entreated to go slower or repeat a
phrase.
‘The Hare and the Elephant were once friends, and the Hare said, “Come,
man, and let us go and look for food.” And they went to a village and
said, “We want to hoe for you, if you will give us food”; and the
head-man said “Good.” And he let them hoe in his garden, and gave them
some beans to eat there in the garden (in the middle of the day). And
they went to the garden and cooked those beans. (They could make a fire
as soon as they arrived, and put on the pot with the beans, so as to
let them cook slowly while they worked.) When they had finished hoeing,
the beans were done, and the Elephant said, “I am going to the water to
bathe, do you look well after the beans, and we will eat them together
when I return.” Then he went away and took off his skin, and ran, and
came to the place where the Hare was. (We are to understand that he was
quite unrecognisable in this condition.) When the Hare saw him, he was
afraid, thinking that he was a wild beast, and he ran away; and the
Elephant ate up those beans, and went back to the water, and put on his
skin again, and returned, and said, “Have you taken off the pot with the
beans?” And the Hare said, “No, my friend, there came here a terrible
wild beast, and I ran away, and it ate those beans.” And the Elephant
said, “No, you are cheating me—you ate those beans yourself—it was not
a wild beast, no!” And the next day they went again to hoe, and cooked
their beans. When the beans were nearly done, the Elephant said to the
Hare, “I shall go and bathe—we will eat the beans when I return.” And
he did just the same as before. When he returned and asked if the beans
were ready, the Hare answered, “The wild beast came again to-day and has
eaten the beans.” The Elephant said, “My friend, it is very deceitful of
you to eat the beans twice over, and not let me have any!” And the Hare
said, “Now, I am going to make a bow—if it comes again I will shoot it.”
Next day, they put on their beans again; and the Elephant took the bow
which the Hare had made, and said, “You have not made it well—give it to
me; I will make it right for you.” And he kept on paring and shaving it,
a little here and a little there, till he had made it too thin in one
place, and said, “Now it is good; if the wild beast comes, you can shoot
it.” Then he went down to the water, and took off his skin, and ran, and
came where the Hare was. When the Hare saw that wild beast coming, he
took his bow to shoot it, and the bow broke. So he ran away again, and
the Elephant ate the beans, and came back as before, and asked, “Did you
shoot the wild beast?” And the Hare answered, “No, my bow broke, and I
ran away.” Next day they put on the beans once more, and the Hare went
aside and made his bow, and hid it. When the Elephant went away to bathe,
the Hare took his bow and held it in his hand, and took a barbed arrow,
and when the wild beast came once more, he shot him through the heart,
and the Elephant said, “_Mai! mai! mai! mai!_ (mother!) Oh! my friend,
to shoot me like this, because of those miserable beans! I meant to have
left some for you to-day, that you too might eat!” And the Hare said,
“Ha! my friend!—then it was you who finished up those beans by yourself,
and I thought it was a wild beast!” The Elephant said, “Ha! to shoot me
with a barbed arrow!—you have hurt me, my friend!—and how shall I get
this out?” And he tried to pull out the arrow, and died. And the Hare ate
the beans by himself, and went home.’
Another story in which these two figure is given by Mr. Macdonald under
the title of ‘The Fox and the Hyena’; but this is in two parts—in the
first, the Hyena plays a series of tricks on a long-suffering creature
called the _mbendu_, apparently a kind of civet-cat; in the second, he
tries to repeat these tricks on the Hare (for this is a case where ‘fox’
is used to translate _sungula_), and fails. In my version, the Hare is
cheated at first, and learns by bitter experience; the closing incident,
too, is different. The Hare and the Dzimwe went on a journey together,
begging food (as native travellers do) at all the villages they came to.
At the first, the Elephant said, ‘Let us ask for sugar-cane and _bango_
reeds’ (which are uneatable); he then took the sugar-cane and gave the
Hare the _bango_. At the next village he acted in the same way with
millet and pebbles. At the next, the people had been cooking porridge;
and the Elephant, in order to secure both the Hare’s portion and his
own, sent the latter back to gather some ‘medicine’ leaves from a tree
he had noticed on the way, saying that the _nsima_ would not be good
without them. The Hare, however, produced some from his bag; he had run
back on the road, just after passing the tree, saying that he wanted to
look for an arrow he had dropped, and had then picked the leaves. The
Dzimwe was so disgusted at being outwitted that he would not eat, but
left all the _nsima_ to the Hare. Next day, however, when they reached
another village, he contrived to get him out of the way for a time,
and, on his return, refused to share his porridge with him (an almost
unheard-of thing in native manners), alleging that, in the interval,
‘many strangers’ had arrived, and eaten up all the cooked food in the
village, so that there was barely enough for himself. The Hare then
retired, stripped off his skin, tied _maseche_ rattles to his legs, and
came and danced at the door of the hut where the Elephant was eating. The
latter, thinking that he was a _chirombo_, fled and left him to finish
the porridge. Subsequently, he was induced, by a stratagem not detailed
in my version, to strip off his own skin, which the Hare hid while his
back was turned. ‘And he said, “Who has taken my skin?” and since he was
without a skin, he died of the heat.’
Brer Rabbit’s methods of disguise are less drastic. ‘He slip off en git
in a mud-hole, en des lef’ his eyes stickin’ out’; and when Brer B’ar
passed by and said, ‘Howdy, Brer Frog, is you see Brer Rabbit go by?’
answered, without turning a hair, ‘He des gone by.’ He plays the same
trick on Mrs. Cow; but this time by hiding in a ‘brier-patch.’ In a
Basuto story, he cuts off both his ears and pretends to grind meal on a
flat stone; the hyenas in pursuit of him fail to recognise him, and ask
him where the Hare has gone.
The trick by which the Hare induced the Elephant to destroy himself, is
repeated with endless variations in other stories. In fact, it is found
in all countries and all ages. The Cornish giant, already referred to,
is one of the best known examples, and no doubt the men who chipped
flints in Kent’s Hole laughed themselves into fits over something of the
same sort. In one Nyanja story the Swallow invites the Cock to dinner,
and pretends to fly into the pot where the pumpkins are cooking. In
reality he disappears into the shadows of the _nsanja_, and then shows
himself up aloft, afterwards alleging that his temporary presence in the
pot has greatly improved the flavour of the pumpkins. The Cock, when
returning the invitation, tries the same experiment, and is cooked most
effectually. In another tale, the _ntengu_ bird treats the wild-cat in
the same way.
Apparently the Hare meets his match in the Tortoise—though the famous
race is by the Anyanja related as taking place between the Tortoise
and the Bushbuck (_mbawala_). On one occasion these two hoed a garden
together, and the Hare cheated the Tortoise out of his dinner, as, on
another occasion, the Elephant cheated him. The Tortoise, however, had
his revenge a little later, when they were sowing ground-nuts; he crawled
into the Hare’s seed-bag, as it lay on the ground, and ate up the supply.
The Hare took this defeat so much to heart that he ‘went away and cried.’
All over the world we find tales intended to explain how animals came by
this or that peculiarity which is striking enough to catch the attention,
but has no obvious use. Thus, the Calabar people tell how the Tortoise
fell off a tree and broke his shell to pieces, and had it stuck together
again, so that the joins are visible to this day; and the Hottentots say
that the Hare has a split lip because the Moon threw a piece of wood at
him. We know how Brer Rabbit lost his long, bushy tail, through letting
it hang in the water while fishing. The Anyanja also think that the Hare
once had a long tail, and there is a story which relates how he had a
piece cut off it at every village he passed through; but I have never
been able to secure it in detail. There is a Yao tale to the effect that
baboons are descended from a woman who ran away to the Bush because the
chief had killed one of her children. She refused to shave her head (in
mourning), and hair subsequently grew all over her body.
The Spider, who on the Guinea Coast is the principal figure in the
animal stories, is, so far as I know, almost absent from Bantu folk-lore.
One exception I have already referred to, in a Yao creation-myth; in
another Yao tale he crosses a stream and makes a bridge for a chief to
escape from his enemies. Here, however, he does not take a specially
prominent part, being only one of four helpers provided by the spirit
of the chief’s elder brother. The Spider is very prominent in the
folk-lore of the Duala, who have probably borrowed him from their western
neighbours.
We have mentioned that the natives see nothing strange in men assuming
the forms of animals—they believe that it happens every day. Their
stories give us many instances of the converse process—animals taking
human shape whenever it suits them. Thus a girl marries a lion who has
turned himself into a man, and, finding out his real nature, runs away
from him. Another I give as I have it written down.
‘A person (a girl) refused (all) men; there came a baboon; he took off
the skin from his body and was turned into a man. The Angoni woman
married the baboon, and he hoed the crops, and his companions came from
the Bush and ate the crops of his mother-in-law’s garden, and (so) he
went (with them) into the Bush.’
But a better example still is that of the ‘Girl and the Hyena,’ which
Mr. Macdonald thinks is intended as a warning to girls not to be too
fastidious in their choice of husbands, and to accept those first
suggested to them, lest worse befall. It might equally well be a warning
against marrying a stranger from a distance, and certainly shows the tie
between brother and sister in a very pleasing light. Here it is, as told
me by Katembo at Blantyre.
‘There was a woman who refused all husbands, and at last there came a
hyena, and she said, “I want this one.” (So they were married), and the
husband said, “My wife, let us go home.” Her brother, who had sore eyes,
followed after them, and she (saw him and) said, “Where are you going?”
The brother crouched down and hid in the grass, and when they were out
of sight he followed them again, till he came to the village. When his
sister found he was there, she hid him in the hen-coop. When it was quite
dark, a number of hyenas came outside the hut and sang:
“Here is meat, we will eat it; but it is not fat enough yet.”
‘The girl was asleep, but her brother heard them, and as soon as it was
light he went and told her that they meant to eat her. She would not
believe it, so he told her to tie a string to her little finger that
night before she went to sleep, and leave the end outside the hut, so
that he could take it with him into the chicken-house. In the middle of
the night the hyenas came again, and, when he heard them, he pulled the
string and woke his sister; so she, too, heard them singing:
“Here is meat, we will eat it; but it is not fat enough yet.”
‘In the morning she said, “I heard them, my brother.” Then he said to
her husband, “Brother-in-law, lend me an adze, I want to make myself a
big wooden top” (_chinguli_).[28] When he had finished it, he put it
into his sister’s baskets (the luggage she had brought from home), and
fastened it firmly, and put his sister into the baskets, and sang:
“_Chínguli chánga, nde, nde, nde,_
_Mpérekezéni, nde, nde, nde,_
_Kúli amái, nde, nde, nde,_
_Chínguli chánga, nde, nde, nde._”
That is, “My top! take her home to her mother!”
‘It flew up and flew away over the Bush, and the hyenas followed; but he
repeated the same song again, and they flew on till they were just above
their mother’s village. Then he sang again, _Chínguli chánga_ (and so
on, as above), and the people heard it in the air over their heads, and
looked up, and saw them; and the _chinguli_ came to a stop, and let them
down right on top of the grain-mortar. And then the brother said, “My
sister wanted to send me back because I had sore eyes; but they would
have eaten her at that village, and I have brought her home.”’ In another
version, the mother follows this up with some more good advice, pointing
out what she owes to her brother, and warning her ‘never to do it again.’
A favourite Yao story is that of the python (_Sato_) who was befriended
by a man when caught in a bush-fire. He appealed first to a passing herd
of buck to stop and save him, but they, considering that he had just
eaten one of their number, not unnaturally refused. Then a man passed by
with a hoe in his hand, and, on being assured that the python would not
devour him, hoed up a piece of ground all round him, and thus saved him
from the fire. The grateful python told him to come back in four days’
time, which he did, and found that it had changed into a young lad, who
took him home, entertained him with plenty of beer, and finally presented
him with two pieces (1 piece = 16 yards) of calico and a magic bottle,
which was to be opened in presence of his enemies.
When the man went home, he found there was war; his family had fled, and
the enemy were occupying the village. He opened his bottle, and they were
immediately annihilated. He then went to hoe in the gardens, leaving his
bottle and other property in his hut. Another detachment of the enemy
arrived—they took possession of the village and all that was in it,
pursued him to his garden, and took him prisoner. He was tied up, with
his neck in a gori-stick, with a view to being killed next day. During
the night he felt a rat gnawing his feet, and asked it to go to the
chief’s house and bring the bottle. The rat did so, and the man said, ‘I
will pay you in the morning.’ When the people were all assembled, and the
man was brought out into the _bwalo_ to be killed, he opened his bottle.
‘The people who sat there when he held it up were dead and gone’—there
was no one there! So he rewarded the rat with two cows.
Animal stories sometimes vary in having one or more of their characters
replaced by human beings: thus there is one in which the Antelope sets a
trap and catches a Leopard in it. He spares the Leopard’s life, but meets
with no gratitude, for the latter eats all his children, and then his
wife. He appeals for help to a number of animals in succession, without
getting it, till the Hare takes the case in hand, and induces the Leopard
to put his head once more into the trap, and show how he was caught. Once
in, the Hare advises the Antelope to kill him. Now the same story is
told to explain why there should be a standing feud between crocodiles
and men. The Crocodile behaved very much in the same way as the Leopard,
and finally jumped on the man’s back and made him carry him. The Hare
intervened, heard the whole story, and then asked the Crocodile to show
him how he got into the trap, with results as above.
The Yao tale of the Hyena and the Bees is a version, with animal actors,
of a story which, in various shapes, is probably found throughout the
whole of Bantu Africa. The Basuto tell it of a girl called Tselane, who
was carried off by a cannibal. He put her into a bag, which he threw
over his shoulder, and started for home. On the way he stopped at a hut,
which turned out to be her uncle’s, and laid down his sack while he went
in to rest. Tselane’s relatives discovered her plight, let her out, and
put in a dog and a quantity of venomous ants in her place. Consequently
the cannibal, when he had shut himself up in his hut to enjoy his feast
alone, died a miserable death. In the Yao story, the Hyena steals the
fox’s (or jackal’s) cubs, and puts them into a bag; but the mother
contrives to substitute a swarm of bees for them before he carries them
off. ‘So the Hyena and his brethren died.’
There is a rather curious Nyanja story, introducing a being very like the
_Chiruwi_ mentioned in Chapter III. Some children went out into the Bush
to gather _masuku_ fruit. While they were out, it came on to rain, and
the stream which they had crossed easily was full when they reached it on
the way home, and too deep to ford. While they were considering what to
do, there came along ‘a big bird, with one wing, one eye, and one leg,’
and carried them over, strictly charging them to tell no one at home that
it had done so. One boy, however, told his mother what had happened; the
rest all denied it, and asked people not to listen to him, saying they
had crossed in the ordinary way. Next time they went to look for _masuku_
they forded the stream, and some of them held out a branch to the boy who
had talked, to help him over; it was rotten, and broke, and he was swept
away by the current. They called out after him, ‘You told.’
Mr. Macdonald gives a story which in some respects reminds one of Grimm’s
‘Frau Holle,’ though not so much as does a Ronga one given by M. Junod
under the title of _La Route du Ciel_. Both of these, though differing
greatly from one another, are evidently the same tale. In the Yao one,
a woman who has been persuaded by a trick to throw her baby into the
water, and has seen it swallowed by a crocodile, climbs a tree in her
distress, and says, ‘I want to go on high.’ The tree grows up with her
and carries her to a strange country, where she meets, first, leopards,
then the _Nsenzi_ (a large kind of water-rat, or perhaps a bird), and
lastly, some great fishes, who all show the way to Mulungu. When she
reached ‘the village of Mulungu,’ she told her story. ‘Then Mulungu
called the crocodile, and it came. Mulungu said, “Give up the child,”
and it delivered it up. The girl received the child and went down to her
mother. Her mother was much delighted and gave her much cloth and a good
house.’
Her wicked companions were now envious, and, wishing to enjoy like good
fortune, began by throwing their babies into the water. They climbed
the tree and reached Mulungu’s country, but gave rude answers to the
leopards, the _nsenzi_, and the fishes. ‘Then they came to Mulungu.
Mulungu said, “What do you want?” The girls said, “We have thrown our
children into the water.” But Mulungu said, “What was the reason of
that?” The girls hid the matter and said “Nothing.” But Mulungu said,
“It is false. You cheated your companion, saying, ‘Throw your child into
the water,’ and now you tell me a lie.” Then Mulungu took a bottle of
lightning, and said, “Your children are in here.” The girls took the
bottle, and the bottle made a report like a gun. The girls both died.’
In the Ronga version, likewise, the wicked sister is killed by lightning.
‘Le ciel fit explosion et la tua.’ This story, which might almost be
classed among religious legends (as, in fact, is done by Mr. Macdonald)
has, in its simple way, something very pathetic about it.
The imported stories are interesting, as showing how their ideas and
incidents have been translated, so to speak, into African. ‘Rombao,’ in
Mr. Macdonald’s collection, told by a native of Quillimane, is perhaps
of European origin. The names are Portuguese, and the theme is the
familiar one of the Goose-girl; but it may be an Arab or Indian story
which has acquired a Portuguese colouring on the Mozambique coast. M.
Junod’s ‘Bonawasi’ is one of the Arab ‘Abû Nuwâs’ stories, which seem
to be current all down the Swahili coast. Most of the Swahili tales in
Steere’s collection are Arab, and some can be recognised in the ordinary
editions of the _Arabian Nights_. It is curious to watch the gradual
changes in the details, as these stories travel farther and farther
into the interior. Harry Kambwiri, the Yao teacher who dictated the
Hare story already given, once told me one which, he thought, must be
‘a story of the Azungu.’ He had got it from a Yao boy who had been to
Zanzibar. I recognised it afterwards as the story of ‘The Three Blind
Men,’ in _Kibaraka_. The Sultan’s treasure-chamber has become simply
‘the chief’s money,’ and the story is somewhat obscured by the loss of
the distinctively Mohammedan touches. The ‘Story of a Chief,’ already
referred to, was written down by one of the Yao boys educated at Domasi.
It runs as follows:—
‘There was a chief who had ten sons, and three of them were poor. And
the father brought three tusks of ivory to give to his three poor sons.
The sons then said, “Let us go to the coast, let us buy goods.” And they
called up men to carry their goods. Then they set off on their journey
and came to the coast. When they arrived, they built a grass house and
slept there one day. In the morning one of them set off with his tusk to
buy goods, but his brothers did not know that he had gone to buy goods.
And he bought a precious glass for looking into every land.
‘Then the second one set off and bought a mat for flying with into every
land. Then the third bought a medicine for making people dead or alive.
But each of these did not know that the others had gone to buy goods.
‘Afterwards, he who had the glass began to look into it. When he looked,
he saw that in the land of his home there had died his friend. Then he
told the others that there was a mourning, and they asked, “How do you
know that at our home some one has died?” And he answered, “Because I
looked in my glass.” Then he gave them the glass that they might look,
and they saw their friend dead. Afterwards they began to grumble, saying,
“If only we had medicine for flying”; and the second brother produced his
mat. The others said, “Make us fly that we may reach our home to-day,
that we may be at the funeral, because he was a friend of ours.” And he
placed them on the mat, and they flew, and came to their village on the
same day.
‘When they arrived, they again began to grumble, saying, “If only we had
medicine to make this man alive, we would make him alive.” Then came the
one who had medicine for making alive, and made the man alive again.
‘But afterwards there arose a dispute as to whom the man should belong.
The one who had the glass said, “He is mine, because I saw him.” The one
who had the mat answered, “I flew and conveyed you.” Then answered he who
had the medicine, saying, “Did I not come and make him alive?” But the
one with the mat said, “Could you have brought the man to life without
him who carried you there?” The sons were then about to quarrel and came
to the father, bringing the man with them. And the father said, “You have
all done foolishly, because you bought precious things which take away
all peace; you wished to excel beyond all men, but you have failed.”’
This story, it was found on inquiry, had long been known to several of
the Domasi villagers. We see that the trading voyage has become the usual
journey to the coast, and the magic carpet a mat; the claiming of the
man as a slave (regardless of the fact that he is previously spoken of
as a friend to be mourned), is a local touch. On the Lower Congo (see
Dennett, _Folk-Lore of the Fjort_) we find a tale which is evidently
the same as this, of two wives who between them brought their husband
back to life. It is found in M. Junod’s collection under the title of
_Les Trois Vaisseaux_; we have also a Swahili version, and one from the
Kru coast in West Africa. The excellent moral does _not_ suggest the
_Arabian Nights_; but whether it is due to some shrewd old villager who
had had sad experience of squabbles over the proceeds of prosperous
‘Coast _ulendos_,’ or is a reflection added by Peter Mlenjesi on his own
account, may be left undecided.
There is yet another kind of story, which may be dismissed very briefly,
as specimens of it have occurred in another connection. It contains
nothing miraculous or even very wonderful, and is usually of a more or
less humorous character, turning on absurd incidents of daily life, the
little failings of husbands and wives, quarrels between neighbours, and
the like; and might almost be considered as a rudimentary novel or farce.
‘The Man with the Bran-Porridge’ (Yao), and ‘The Man with Two Wives’
(Nyanja), are good examples of this.
These Bantu folk-tales are sometimes contemptuously dismissed as
pointless and inane; and so, perhaps, they are, in translation, for it
requires great skill in the language and knowledge of native ways to
translate them intelligently, even when they are fairly well told. So
much has to be supplied, or explained, which, in the original, is simply
taken for granted, or has to be gathered from gesture and intonation. But
though their literary value may be small, they are always instructive
as a picture of native manners and ideas, which they illustrate by many
little graphic touches. Besides, they furnish a kind of mental training
to the people themselves. I have no hesitation in introducing here a
quotation from M. Junod, because, though he is speaking of the Delagoa
Bay natives, it will also apply to other Bantu tribes.
‘Every young man, every girl, knows one or two tales which he or she is
always willing to repeat. Sometimes, even, they are expected to amuse the
company with a story, told by way of forfeit, when they are the losers
in a game. Beginners often get confused and break down. They mix up the
incidents, or lose the thread of the narrative. “That is too much for
you!” (literally, “that has overcome you,”) says the audience, and a more
skilled reciter then takes the stage. Next time, the novice will acquit
himself better. Besides, when the young people have come to an end of
all they know, there remain the old women, who are the real repositories
of tradition. Some of them know ten, twenty, or thirty tales, and I
know more than one who could go on the whole evening, every day for a
fortnight, without completely exhausting her stock.... Children exercise
their memory in this way, and accustom themselves to speak in public;
and it is perhaps to this custom that the South African races owe their
extreme facility in expressing themselves.’[29]