Extra Reading: South Africa B

Here I am doing some extra reading for Week 10, finally getting around to the rest of the stories from South Africa!

The Dance for Water. There are some great moments in this "tar baby" story: the tortoise has covered himself in pitch, and at first Rabbit thinks this is a stone step they have kindly placed there for his convenience! And the false plea here involves getting Lion to grab Rabbit by the tail and fling him, whereupon he slips out of his skin. I could use this to do a great mash-up of different tar-baby/briar-patch motifs. I especially like that it is the tortoise again who is the rabbit's rival.

Jackal and Monkey. This is a "trading places" story like Brer Rabbit Guarding the Goober Patch, and I really like this one with Brer Possum and more here. I bet it would be fun to do a switch where I take African American elements to use in the African story; that is kind of the reverse of the experiments I've been doing so far.

 

The Story of Hare. What a great story! Plus the part at the end about the rabbit summoning the hail with his whistle was so cool. The parallels between this and the Wattle Weasel story are so impressive; I just don't understand how/why anyone would reject the African origins approach to the Brer Rabbit corpus. And this "white-striped weasel" really does look like a skunk even though he is a weasel! 

 

The White Man and Snake. This is the brahmin-tiger-jackal story with just one judge, hyena, before going to the jackal.

 

Jackal, Dove, and Heron. This is a story about a very cruel jackal and why the heron's neck is bent.

 

Elephant and Tortoise. What a bizarre story! It involves casting lots for rain, which is very cool... and also an inside-the-elephant's-body type of story, where the Tortoise chews his way out. There is also a LONG list of animals who petition the tortoise for water.

 

The Judgment of Baboon. This has the potential to be a great story but the telling of it is really mangled. I think I have to rescue this story from itself because the chain of blame is great, and the idea that the judge is punished in the end for making a foolish judgment is a fun twist. I wonder if I could make that work...? Anyway, I think I want to try! Comments on the similarity of this story to Chad Gadya here, and it really is a puzzle. I wonder if anybody will ever trace the real history of that chain tale!

 

When Lion Could Fly. This is a very cool and weird story about a lion who can fly, but who loses that ability when Toad breaks the bones that Lion keeps in a kraal. I would be excited to find an African American version of this story, but I guess that is not likely; the un-natural elements make it unlikely to carry on in the African American tradition. But still: it would be nice to find this! (And of course that's why we need a decent motif index that really works for African story traditions, not just one that piggybacks on European indexes.)

 

Lion Who Thought Himself Wiser Than His Mother. This is a lion-learns-to-fear-man story and interestingly features the lion's mother as the one who warns him.

 

Lion Who Took a Woman's Shape. There is so much cool supernatural stuff in this story: the lion puts on a woman's skin, but the cows can tell this is not the woman (and there are other clues), and in the end, the women use magic to grow back into life the woman whom the lion ate. Really intense!