Jamaican song and story

by Unknown

We have mentioned the comparative absence of the Spider from Bantu folk-lore. I have been able to discover only two references to him in East Africa, both to be found in Duff Macdonald's Africana. The first is in a creation-myth of the Yaos (i. 297), which informs us that when Mulungu was driven from earth by the conduct of mankind, who had set the bush on fire, he went, being unable to climb a tree as the Chameleon had done, to call the Spider. "The spider went on high and returned again, and said, 'I have gone on high nicely,' and he said, 'You now, Mulungu, go on high.' Mulungu then went with the spider on high. And he said, 'When they die, let them come on high here.'" The other is in the story of "The Dead Chief and his Younger Brother" (ii. 322)—also Yao. The dead chief gives his brother four bags to enable him to overcome the obstacles which his enemies put in his way; he opens the first on coming to a large tree in his path—a wood-moth comes out and gnaws a way through. From the second bag comes out a manis (scaly ant-eater), which digs a way under a rock, and from the third (which he opens when he comes to the bank of a river) a spider, which "went to the other side," and, presumably (though this is not expressly stated), made a bridge with its web for him to cross.[9]

Mr. R.E. Dennett (Folklore of the Fjort, p. 74) gives a Lower Congo story, telling how the Spider brought fire down from Nzambi Mpungu in heaven, and won the daughter of Nzambi (Mother Earth) by so doing. In an Angola story (Heli Chatelain, p. 131) the Spider is mentioned as affording a means of communication between heaven and earth, by which the Sun's maidservants go down to draw water, and his daughter is ultimately let down to be married to the son of Kimanaueze. But the Spider only comes in incidentally; it is the Frog whose resourcefulness makes the marriage possible. The notion of the spider's web as a ladder to heaven is one that might occur independently in any part of the world, and there is no need to suppose these tales to be derivatives of the Hausa one given by Schön.[10]

So far, the appearances of the Spider in Bantu folk-tales are so infrequent as to be almost a negligible quantity. We find him, however, playing a tolerably conspicuous part in the folk-lore of the Duala. These, living in the German territory of the Kamerun, may be considered the north-western outpost of the Bantu race, and their language, unmistakable in its general character, has departed, perhaps more widely than any other, from the normal Bantu standard. Herr Wilhelm Lederbogen, formerly of the Government School, Kamerun, has collected a large number of stories, some of which are published in the Transactions of the Berlin Oriental Seminary (see Afrikanische Studien for 1901-1903). These comprise 67 "Tierfabeln" and 18 tales of the ordinary märchen type. The latter (some of them recognizable as variants of tales current in Bantu Africa) introduce animals along with human beings, and the incident of the Spider being consulted as a soothsayer repeatedly occurs. "Die Spinne tritt immer als Wahrsagerin auf" says the collector in a note. But the malignant aspect of Anansi seems to be absent.

The late W.H.J. Bleek, who supposed the animal-stories which he had collected from Hottentots and Bushmen to be characteristic of and peculiar to these races, had built up a somewhat elaborate theory, scarcely borne out by the facts as known to us to-day, in connection with this point. Briefly, it amounted to this: that a fundamental limitation in the Bantu race, which had prevented, and always would prevent, their advancing beyond a certain point, was denoted by the absence of grammatical gender in their languages, their supposed incapacity for personifying nature, and their worship of ancestors, as opposed to the alleged moon-worship of the Hottentots.[11] The Zulus, he says, believe that the spirits of the dead appear to them in dreams, and also show themselves to the waking eye in the shape of animals, usually serpents. "No personification of the animal takes place, however, such as we find, for instance, in the mythical world of our earliest [Teutonic] literature. The imagination of the ancestor-worshipper does not even, as a rule, show us the animal as possessing the gift of human speech; it is only supposed to perform acts well within its capacity as an animal, though such acts are considered, in the case of individual animals supposed to be possessed by the spirits of deceased persons, as emanating from the spirits." Thus, a serpent, known by various tokens to be an idhlozi, may enter a hut and consume the meat left for it, or it may engage in combat with other snakes which must be supposed to represent the enemies of the deceased. Animals thus revered by ancestor-worshippers always have the distinguishing characteristic that they have once been human beings; and spirits, unless they appear as animals, are always invisible. "A personification of the animal world (such as we find in our own fables), or even of other things (as in the mythologies of Europe), is utterly absent from this primitive, prosaic way of looking at things." The poetic impulse implied in such personification can only arise, in Bleek's view, among the speakers of a sex-denoting language. The linguistic argument I cannot here reproduce in detail; its tendency is sufficiently shown by the following quotation, which bears directly on our subject:

"The form of a sex-denoting language, by exciting sympathy even for creatures not connected with us by human fellowship, leads in the first instance to the humanization of animals, and thus especially gives rise to the creation of fables. Even on the lowest stage of national development, we find the Hottentot language accompanied by a literature of fables, for which we may vainly seek a parallel in the literatures of the prefix-pronominal languages."

The validity of Bleek's theory was seriously doubted by the late Dr. C.G. Büttner, in 1886, and the masses of fresh material which have come to light during the last forty years, have completely altered the aspect of the question. The Hottentot myth of the Hare and the Moon, to take but one example, which appears among the Zulus as the tale of Unkulunkulu and the Chameleon, is told by the Anyanja (of the Shire Highlands and Lake Nyasa) of the Chameleon. The Duala have the same Chameleon story; and there is a Gold Coast version, in which the two messengers are the Sheep, who linger on the way to graze, and the Goat, who arrives first with the tidings that man shall not return after death. The Krūmen of the Ivory Coast say that Nemla (a small antelope probably representing, if not identical with, the "Cunnie Rabbit" of Sierra Leone), maliciously, not accidentally, rendered inoperative the remedy against death provided by the fetich Blenyiba. Who is responsible for the original version it is perhaps impossible to settle. But there can be no question of recent borrowing; and supposing that the Bantu did derive the myth from their predecessors (now represented by the remnant of the Bushmen, and perhaps the Pygmies), this would surely prove them at least capable of assimilating fresh ideas and thus advancing beyond the line so inexorably traced for them from the beginning. It may be remarked in passing that there seems some probability of the Bantu Anyanja in the Shire district having largely absorbed, instead of exterminating as was elsewhere the case, a smaller-sized race who previously occupied the country. In the same way, the Abatembu of the Cape Colony are the descendants of a Bantu clan amalgamated with the Bushman tribe of the 'Tambuka, and traces of similar fusion could no doubt be discovered elsewhere. But we doubt its being necessary to the introduction of animal-stories into folk-lore,—or, in general, of ideas connected with the personification of nature.

The Zulu tales which Bleek had before him present a character very different from that of the Hottentot beast-fables. But a comparative study of Bantu folk-lore suggests at least the possibility that they may have been developed out of animal-stories. Hlakanyana is conceived of as certainly human, and reminds us of Tom Thumb; but some of his adventures are identical with those of the Hare, the Jackal, or Brer Rabbit. Cakijana shows still clearer traces of animal origin. The episode of Hlakanyana's demanding a digging-stick in exchange for the birds he accuses his companion of having eaten, and the sequence of exchanges which culminates in his acquiring a cow,[12] is in substance the same as the story told by the Anyanja about the Hare (kalulu) which was given in Folk-Lore for Sept. 29th, 1904. This again reminds us of "The Man who Lived by Overreaching Others" (Dr. Elmslie in Folk-Lore, vol. iii.), and of a Sukuma story given by Herrmann,[13] in which a boy gives his grandmother some honey to keep for him, and, coming back after a time, and finding she has eaten it, makes her give him some corn in exchange. The corn is then exchanged for an egg, the egg for sticks, the sticks for a knife, and the knife for a cow's tail, for which, by the same trick as in Dr. Elmslie's story, he obtains a cow. There is no suggestion of trickery in the Nyanja story, whereas it is brought out very strongly both in Hlakanyana and the Sukuma example.

We shall have occasion to refer, later on, to more than one instance where a story is found in two forms, one having animals, the other human beings, as its characters.

The animals figuring in folk-tales must necessarily vary with the locality of the tale, and in cases where a story has travelled (or possibly where the same idea has arisen independently in different places) it is interesting to note the changes in its dramatis personæ. Thus, the incident of the race between the swift creature and the slow seems to be found in the folk-lore of every country. In Africa the winner is always, so far as I know, the Tortoise, as Brer Terrapin is in "Uncle Remus." The Jamaica version in the volume before us substitutes the Toad, while the defeated party is the Donkey. In a Konde (North Nyasa) variant, the protagonists are the Elephant and the Tortoise, in a Duala one, the Ngoloñ (a large kind of Antelope) and the Tortoise. Another version of the Duala story, contained in Märchen aus Kamerun, by the late Frau Elli Meinhof, has the Hare and the Tortoise, but with the explanation that by "hare" is meant "eine kleine Antilopenart, eseru genannt." The curious thing is that Njo Dibone, the native authority for the tales, himself suggested the name of "hare," but added "Hase ist nicht wie hier,[14] sondern hat kleine Hörner." It is not stated whether he had himself seen the European hare, but apparently he thought the two animals so far similar that Hase would be the nearest available rendering for eseru. This may throw some light on the question why the Dorcatherium gazelle, or possibly the Royal Antelope, Neotragus, is called "Cunnie Rabbit" in Sierra Leone English.

The Tortoise plays a conspicuous part in the folk-lore both of Bantu and West African Negroes. In Yoruba tradition he takes the place of the Spider with the Fantis, all mankind being descended from him. Perhaps this is not strange, when we consider how much there is about him which would appeal to the primitive mind as uncanny and mysterious. A recent writer in the West African Mail[15] says on this subject: "The original conception of the tortoise culminated in a belief concerning its attributes that, in the eyes of these [Niger] Delta natives, elevated it to the sovereignty of the beasts of the forest.... Absolutely harmless and inoffensive in himself, the tortoise does not prey on even the smallest of insects, but subsists entirely on the fallen fruits of the forest"—or, in some cases, on fungi. "In the gloomy forests of the Delta there are only two enemies capable of doing him any serious harm. The one is man, who is able to lift him up and carry him bodily away, which, however, he does not do, except in those instances in which the animal is regarded as sacred, and required in connection with certain religious ceremonies. His other and most dangerous enemy is the python, who having first of all crushed him by means of the enormous power of constriction which it can apply, swallows him alive, shell and all. But pythons large enough to do this, unless the tortoise happens to be very young and small, are very scarce, so that he has not much to apprehend in that quarter. To the elephant—herbivorous, like himself—he is too insignificant, for unlike the mosquito or the sand-fly, he has no sting; and although they meet in fable, in real life the hippopotamus and himself are not much thrown together. From the leopard or the bush-cat, he has nothing to fear, for their teeth cannot penetrate his shell, nor can [their] claws do him any damage. Thus it is that ... the tortoise has been practically immune from attack and therefore destruction—a fact that in a great measure explains his longevity."