The jungle folk of Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

“Whatever other estimate we may form of the African,” wrote Leighton Wilson, than whom no one has ever known the African better, “we may not doubt his love for his mother. Her name, whether she be dead or alive, is always on his lips and in his heart. She is the first being he thinks of when awakening from his slumbers and the last he remembers when closing his eyes in sleep; to her he confides secrets which he would reveal to no other human being on the face of the earth. He cares for no one else in time of sickness; she alone must prepare his food, administer his medicine, perform his ablutions and spread his mat for him. He flies to her in the hour of his distress, for he well knows if all the rest of the world turn against him she will be steadfast in her love, whether he be right or wrong.

“If there be any cause which justifies a man in using violence towards one of his fellow men it would be to resent an insult offered to his mother. More fights are occasioned among boys by hearing something said in disparagement of their mothers than all other causes put together. It is a common saying among them that if a man’s mother and his wife are both on the point of being drowned, and he can save only one of them, he must save his mother, for the avowed reason that if the wife is lost he may marry another, but he will never find a second mother.”

Following the legend of the snail, several fables are told as we sit by the camp-fire. There is a fable called, The Chimpanzee and the Ungrateful Man:

“There was once a poor man who had but one wife and one child, and they lived in a small house in a far-away bush town near which was a stream with fish. The man was a hunter, and with his spear he hunted game in the forest, but the woman made fish-traps of basketwork and caught fish in the stream.

“One day when the man was hunting in the forest the woman took her babe and went to look at her fish-traps. She put her babe on the bank and herself went down into the water. Soon the babe began to cry; but the mother heard not for the noise of the running water. Now there was a mother chimpanzee in the top of a great tree near by. The chimpanzee had her home there in a safe place; but when she heard the babe she felt pity and she came down to the ground and taking the child in her arms, nursed it to sleep.

“The mother, having removed the fish from the traps, came up the bank to get her babe, and lo! there sat a great monkey and the babe sleeping upon its breast. She screamed with fright, and screamed again, so that the chimpanzee, afraid lest the hunter might come, put the babe down and ran into the forest. The woman snatched her babe and ran home very much frightened. She told the story to her husband but he only laughed.

“However, the next time the woman went to work at her fish-traps the man followed her and hid in the thicket. Again the woman laid down her babe and waded into the stream and again the babe began to cry and again at length the kind chimpanzee ventured down the tree and quieted the babe on her breast. Then the man thinking only of procuring a big feast of meat drew stealthily near with spear in hand and aiming it right at the heart of the chimpanzee suddenly hurled it with all his might. But the chimpanzee, seeing him just in time, held out the babe to receive the flying spear which pierced through its body. The horrified father had slain his own child.

“The chimpanzee laid the dead babe on the ground with the spear still sticking in it, and fled to the forest. But before disappearing it turned and said: ‘I was doing you a kindness in taking care of your babe. Therefore the evil that you would have done me has fallen upon yourself.’”

There is a very common fable in which the turtle teaches the wisdom and prudence of not interfering in other people’s palavers. The leopard and the python had a quarrel. The leopard visits the turtle and asks his help against the python. The turtle says to the leopard: “Come again to-morrow evening.”

Then the python comes to the turtle and asks his help against the leopard, and the turtle says to the python: “Come again to-morrow evening.”