The natives of British Central Africa

by Alice Werner

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.