Congo life and folklore

by John H. Weeks

54 Women I have borrowed (p. [324]).--The old word on the Congo for marriage was sompa nkento, which means to borrow a woman (see [notes 43] and [44]), for which loan the man paid something to the girl’s uncle. All members of the Church are married by Holy Matrimony, and the word sompa (or to borrow) has given place to kazala (to take as a wife).

PART II
Congo Folklore Tales
or
Stories told round the Congo Fire

INTRODUCTION
TO THE FOLKLORE TALES

For many years I have been collecting folklore stories such as are told round the fires of the Congo villages--stories that have been handed down from generation to generation; and are so well known that sentences from them are often quoted, and have thus become the proverbs with which the natives so freely interlard their talk.

To have printed all the stories collected would have meant a bulky volume; but these selected for publication are typical of those that remain, although every story has its own peculiarity of plot, explanation, or teaching.

Between most of the stories told on the Upper Congo and those related on the Lower Congo there is, as a rule, this marked difference: the former try to explain why things are as they are, i. e. why people steal, lie and die; why women run away from their husbands; and why some birds have nests and other birds none: the latter are didactic parables. The former are explanatory of habits and customs, and the latter contain the wit, the wisdom and the moral teaching of many generations, and sum up their view of life--that the cheat will himself be cheated; that the unreasonable will be outwitted by craftiness; the tyrant and bully will eventually be punished, and kindness rewarded with timely succour. I am of opinion that the former--the explanatory--stage indicates a more primitive state than the latter or teaching stage, still it would be a very interesting study to decide this point.

These stories belong to the Lower Congo, and more especially to the districts around San Salvador (Portuguese Congo), and Ngombe Lutete (or Wathen in Congo Belge). Some of the Upper River stories I hope to publish on a future occasion.

While living at San Salvador many years ago, the lads and I, on our recreation evenings, told each other tales, and it was then that I heard for the first time some of these stories; a few others I have culled from the pages of a native magazine called Ngonde ye Ngonde (= “Month by Month”), printed and published by our Mission at San Salvador; but by far the larger number were written for me by the teachers and boys of the Wathen Mission School to whom I gave exercise-books with the request that they would write out such stories as they could remember, or could gather from their friends.

I never suggested a story nor a plot to them, for to me personally they would lose their value if they were the result of any such promptings. It was not until a large number of them had been collected that any idea of presenting them in this form entered the mind of the collector. And folklorists may rest assured that the stories here set before them are genuinely native in plot, situation, explanation and “teaching,” and, wherever possible, in idiom also.

In these stories the different birds, insects, reptiles and animals speak, marry, attend markets, transact business and lay their cases for decision before the elders as though they were human beings. The heroes among them are endowed with those qualities most admired by the natives, while those that are “fooled” are the personification of such characteristics as awaken only their ridicule and contempt. ’Cuteness, craftiness and wit are at a premium in these stories, and it is curious to note that these qualities seem to be the peculiar property of the small animals, such as the gazelle, the mouse, the squirrel, etc.; and rarely the possession of the larger animals, as the elephant, buffalo and leopard; or when two species of the same order--the driver-ant and the small-ant--are brought into rivalry it is the latter that wins; two birds, as in “The Crow and the Dove,” it is again the weaker one who triumphs in the end.