SOURCE: Elsie Clews Parsons, Folk-Lore of the Sea Islands, South Carolina, 75.
This story was told by Henry Bryan, a thirty-five-year-old boatman living on Daufuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina. It gives us a revealing comparison with the African analogue.
A VITAL DECISION
Once there lived a poor man who had three sons and three daughters. He managed to eke out a living by catching rats and selling them as food at the market. In the city there lived a rich man with four hundred slaves and many wives. He had no children. People used to torment him by asking, “Who is going to inherit your fortune?” One day even the king asked him that question. The rich man replied, “I have a son, but he is living in the woods.”
“I am going to give him my daughter as his wife,” the king replied.
“And I will try to find my son,” the man said.
The rich man had two hundred men. But he ordered them to stay where they were, and he alone went out into the forest.
That very day the poor man left home with his sons to go catch rats, and he told them, “If any of you let a rat escape, I will kill you!” They dug around in the ground where rats were living, and suddenly out jumped a rat, and the youngest of the boys couldn’t catch it. The father was infuriated, and he took an ax and struck his son with it. Blood poured out from his wounds, and he collapsed.
“Leave him there,” the father said. “He is no longer one of us.”
They left and before long the rich man came riding by, saw the boy and cleaned his wounds. Since he liked his looks, he dressed him in beautiful clothing and let him ride on his horse with him. At the next village, he sent a messenger to his commander at home and asked him to send all his men along with a horse for his son. Drummers welcomed the rich man back home, and the people shouted, “The rich man has found his son! The rich man has found his son!”
The rich man let his son march at the front with all his men, and the drummers drummed for him alone. The young man greeted the king, and then he was escorted to the rich man’s living quarters and was given a beautiful house to live in. Three young slaves came to bathe him and massage his limbs. His father sent him fifty slaves, along with horses, and everything that he could possibly need. The entire city celebrated the discovery of the rich man’s son.
Before long the king sent his daughter over with ten slaves. The young woman went to see the rich man’s son. She sat down next to him, and the two amused themselves for a while, for the son had no idea what he was supposed to do. But after three days, he married the young woman. The entire city celebrated and before long the young man had become, next to the king, the most beloved and the most powerful man in the kingdom.
In the meantime, the poor man was going everywhere possible to find out if anyone had seen his son. Finally, he found out that his son had married the king’s daughter and had become a powerful man. He went to the king and demanded to have his son back.
“Come inside and let’s discuss it,” the rich man said. “I don’t want anyone to hear us talking. Come live here with your entire family, and I will give you land and cattle. But you mustn’t say a word to anyone, otherwise I will be mortified.”
The poor man was dissatisfied with the offer. He went to his son and asked him, “Why would you want to stay here in the city? We used to get 100 cowries for each rat. Today they fetch 200. Your brother has already bought three sheep. Come back and live with us in the woods.”
The rich man came back and begged the father to leave the young man in peace. But the poor man would not give in, and the rich man finally said, “All right. I will give you back your son and accompany you for a stretch this evening.”
In the evening, they departed. First the poor man, then behind him on horseback the rich man, and finally the son. Right in the midst of the bush the rich man stopped and said, “I want to return home.”
“That’s fine. Farewell,” the poor man said. The rich man dismounted and took the young man’s hand.
“What do you want,” the poor man asked, “now that he has become my son again?”
The rich man drew his sword and gave it to the young man. “If you want to go with your father, then kill me. If you want to stay with me, then kill your father. Unless you come with me, I don’t want to return home.”
The young man stood between the two men with the sword drawn. Should he kill his father, the man who had raised him but who had also nearly killed him for the sake of a rat? Then people would say that he had killed him for the sake of the money. Or should he kill the rich man, the man who had helped him and made him wealthy, which meant that he would be returning to catching rats? He had no idea what to do, and if the three are not already dead, then they are no doubt still standing there.
SOURCE: Leo Frobenius, Atlantis: Volksmärchen und Volksdichtungen Afrikas, IX, 404–6.
Leo Frobenius (1873–1938) was a German archaeologist and ethnographer who set forth the idea of an African Atlantis, a civilization that marked a lost cultural idea. His multivolume collection of African lore was published under the title Atlantis, the site of which he claimed to have discovered. On January 30, 1911, the New York Times reported that “Leo Frobenius, author, leader of the German Inner-African exploring expedition, sends word from the hinterland of Togo . . . that he has discovered indisputable proofs of the existence of Plato’s legendary continent of Atlantis. He places Atlantis, which he declares was not an island, in the northwestern section of Africa, in territory lying close to the equator.”
The dilemma tale he included in his collection captures a moment of indecisive paralysis, a recognition that some dilemmas are so intractable that they lead to a dislocating silence rather than to a resolution.
THE STORY OF THE FOUR FOOLS
One day a wizard met a boy who was sitting by the roadside, upset and weeping bitter tears. He asked the reason for his tears, and the boy said, “My father’s parrot has flown away. If you can find it, I will give you a reward.” The wizard summoned a hunter, a carpenter, and a thief. He told them about the lost parrot and also about the reward for its return. They all agreed to do their best to find the parrot.
“Before we start, let’s each demonstrate our special skills,” one of the four said. “For the thief: I want you to go and steal an egg from that hen over there without letting the hen know what you have done.” The thief went and stole the egg, and the hen did not move at all. The hunter hung the egg up as a target, walked a good distance away from it, and proved his skill by hitting the egg. Then the carpenter showed what he could do by putting the egg back together again. They turned to the wizard, who could see that they each had a special talent.
The wizard decided that it was time to find the parrot, and he invited the four others to board his glass ship. “See that vessel over there?” he asked. “The parrot was stolen by the men on that vessel.” The four in the glass boat caught up with the vessel, and the thief boarded it. He caught the parrot, and then he set the table and sat down for a good meal before returning to the glass ship with the parrot.
When the men who had stolen the parrot from the king’s son discovered that it was gone, they gave chase to the glass boat. The captain of the vessel summoned a storm and sent rain down on the glass boat, which shattered. But the carpenter mended it, and the hunter fired away at the rain until it stopped.
The captain of the vessel sent down lightning, and it shattered the glass ship again. But the carpenter just mended it again, and the hunter shot at the lightning until it stopped. Eventually the four men reached land and took the parrot to the chief’s son and said, “Here is your father’s parrot.”
The boy was overjoyed to have the parrot back, and he told the four to choose whatever they wanted from his possessions. They could even ask for a wonderful hen that lay jewels, or anything else you might want. They chose the hen and went on their way. But they had not gone very far before the wizard said, “The hen belongs to me, because I told you about the parrot and where
it was.”
The thief then said, “No, the hen is mine, for I stole the parrot from the vessel.”
The carpenter then staked his claim, for he had twice mended the ship in which they were sailing.
Then the hunter said, “It really belongs to me, for I shot at the rain and the lightning.”
They argued for a long time and exchanged angry words. Since they could not reach an agreement, they finally did something wildly stupid. They killed the wonderful hen and divided it into four pieces, with each man taking his share. Now which of these four fools should have been given the hen?
This story excited a great amount of discussion. Some argued that this one should have had the hen, and others argued with great conviction that another should have had the hen. Each character had his supporters, but everyone agreed that they were all fools not to share the hen and let it lay jewels for them.
SOURCE: Adapted from John H. Weeks, Congo Life and Folklore, 43–45.
The four fools form a fine quartet, with one having magic powers, the second skills in hunting in the wild, the third in building domestic spaces, and the fourth in a lawful form of lawlessness. The coda to their story describes the kind of animated atmosphere fostered by stories that end with an invitation to discuss the terms of the tale.
PART III
ADDING ENCHANTMENT TO WISDOM: FAIRY TALES WORK THEIR MAGIC
African countries have rarely been seen as the source of fairy tales and wonderlore, stories in which magic and metamorphosis feature prominently. For primordial moments of fairy-tale production, folklorists have looked to India, where by the third century BCE a massive set of animal fables had been assembled in a collection known today as The Panchatantra. In nineteenth-century Europe, there was a rush to collect fairy tales, before the twin forces of urbanization and industrialization began eradicating their traces. The Brothers Grimm published their Children’s Stories and Household Tales in two volumes in 1812 and 1815 and succeeded in creating a canon that is still with us today. When the term fairy tale is invoked, the associations are with the Grimms, the Frenchman Charles Perrault, the Russian Alexander Afanasev, or with the Dane Hans Christian Andersen more than with Africa.
It is therefore all the more astonishing to find that the characters, motifs, and tropes of European fairy tales appear in kaleidoscopic variation in tales collected in African regions. If Africa has always seemed an outlier when it comes to fairy tales, the narratives printed here tell a different story. Suddenly another continent joins the fairy-tale network, with plots that resemble tales not only from Europe, but also from China, India, and Russia.
Folklorists have advanced two different, although not entirely incompatible, theories to account for the remarkable similarities found among fairy tales of all cultures. The first, known as the theory of migration or borrowing, proceeds along the assumption that nothing new is ever discovered so long as it is possible to copy. This theory, also known by the name of monogenesis, suggests that one parent tale in a fixed location spawned numerous progeny. The contrasting theory of polygenesis assumes that resemblances among tales can be attributed to independent invention in places unconnected by trade routes or travel. The Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp challenged the truth of monogenesis and diffusion when he asked: “How is one to explain the similarity of the tale about the frog queen in Russia, Germany, France, India, in America among the Indians, and in New Zealand, when the contact of peoples cannot be proven historically?” (Propp 16). It is somehow symptomatic that no African country is represented in his geographical inventory, more than likely because so few anthologies were available to him in twentieth-century Russia.
As Claude Lévi-Strauss tells us, the universe of mythology is “round” and therefore “does not refer back to any necessary starting point” (Lévi-Strauss 13). We cannot fix the origin of “Little Red Riding Hood,” which is ultimately about a girl, an animal, and an encounter in the wild any more than we can pinpoint where “Beauty and the Beast,” with its alluring bride and grotesque groom, was first told. In the tales that follow, we have full-throated variants of familiar tales, told in ways that make us sit up and take notice and understand how the global story consists of a multitude of local versions.
THE STORY OF DEMANE AND DEMAZANA
Once upon a time there lived a brother and sister, who were twins and orphans. They decided to run away from their relatives because they had been treated so badly.1 The boy’s name was Demane, the girl’s Demazana. They discovered a cave with two holes to let in air and light, and that was where they lived. A strong door, fastened from the inside, protected the cave.
Demane went out hunting in the daytime, and he told his sister that she must not roast any meat while he was away. The savory smell might attract cannibals to their dwelling. The girl would have been quite safe if she had done as her brother commanded. But she was wayward, and one day she took some buffalo meat and roasted it over a fire.
A cannibal named Zim smelled the meat and went to the cave, but he found the door shut tight. He tried to imitate Demane’s voice and asked to be admitted, but Demazana said, “No, you aren’t my brother, your voice is not at all like his.”
The cannibal went away, but after a little while he returned. This time he spoke in a different tone of voice: “Do let me in, sister.” The girl replied, “Go away, you wicked cannibal, your voice is hoarse, you are not my brother.”
The cannibal left, and soon met up with another cannibal, whom he asked, “What do I have to do to obtain what I want?” He was afraid to say exactly what he wanted because he feared that the other cannibal might want a share of the girl. His friend said, “You must burn your throat with a hot iron.” He did so, and then he no longer had a hoarse voice.
The cannibal presented himself again at the door to the cave, and this time he succeeded in fooling the girl. She believed that her brother had returned from hunting and was at the door. When she opened it, the cannibal grabbed her.
While the cannibal was carrying her off, the girl dropped some ashes2 here and there along the path. Not much later, Demane, who had found nothing that day but a swarm of bees, returned and found that his sister was gone. He figured out what had happened, and he also found the ashes and followed the path to Zim’s hut. The cannibal’s family was out gathering firewood, but he had stayed at home. Demazana was kept prisoner in a big sack, where Zim planned to keep her until the fire was ready. Demane said, “Give me some water, Uncle.” Zim replied, “I will, if you promise not to touch this sack.” Demane promised. Zim went out to get some water, and while he was gone Demane took his sister out of the sack and put the bees in it. Then they both hid.
When Zim returned with the water, his wife and son and daughter were also back with firewood. Zim said to his daughter, “There’s something nice for you in the sack. Go get it.”
Zim’s daughter opened it, and all at once the bees flew out of the bag3 and stung her hand. She cried out: “Something’s biting me!” Zim sent his son, and after that his wife, but the same thing happened. He was furious and drove everyone out of the hut. He put a block of wood against the door, and he opened the sack for himself. Bees came swarming out and stung his head, aiming at his eyes until he couldn’t see anything at all. There was a small opening in the thatched roof, and he forced his way through. Once outside, he began jumping up and down, howling with pain. Then he ran blindly ahead and fell headlong into a pond, where his head stuck fast in the mud. He turned into a block of wood that looked just like the stump of a tree. The bees made their home in the stump. No one could steal their honey, because if anyone stuck a hand in, they would not be able to get it back out again.
Demane and Demazana took all of Zim’s possessions,4 which were great in number, and soon they became wealthy people.
SOURCE: Adapted from “The Story of Demane and Demazana,” The Cape Monthly Magazine 9 (1874), 248–49.
Described as a “Kafir Nursery Tale” (Kafir, or Kaffir, is now considered a derogat
ory term for the Xhosa people), this tale was recorded in a monthly magazine published in Cape Town. Its preface elaborated on the cultural context for tales told to children: “Many ancient dames pride themselves upon an extensive knowledge of such stories, and from them little children hear them as soon almost as they begin to lisp. The girls retain them in their memory, and frequently laugh over them in after years, but with the boys it is different. Knowledge derived from a woman—even be that woman his grandmother or mother—is lightly esteemed by a Kafir man, and these stories soon come to be considered by the lads as old women’s fables, quite unworthy of their notice.” The anonymous collector of the tale selected it for its “reference . . . to cannibals.”
Splicing together two different tale types, “The Wolf and the Kids” and “The Household of the Witch,” the story moves from capturing to cooking, first telling how a monster gains entrance into the children’s home, then how the same monster prepares a feast of human flesh. Note that the monster is a human “cannibal” rather than an animal predator or a supernatural creature.
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The Annotated African American Folktales Page 14
