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.