East African Folktales Read online

  East African Folktales

  General Editor: J.K Jackson

  Associate Editor: Catherine Taylor

  FLAME TREE 451

  London & New York

  Series Foreword

  Stretching back to the oral traditions of thousands of years ago, tales of heroes and disaster, creation and conquest have been told by many different civilizations in many different ways. Their impact sits deep within our culture even though the detail in the tales themselves are a loose mix of historical record, transformed narrative and the distortions of hundreds of storytellers.

  Today the language of mythology lives with us: our mood is jovial, our countenance is saturnine, we are narcissistic and our modern life is hermetically sealed from others. The nuances of myths and legends form part of our daily routines and help us navigate the world around us, with its half truths and biased reported facts.

  The nature of a myth is that its story is already known by most of those who hear it, or read it. Every generation brings a new emphasis, but the fundamentals remain the same: a desire to understand and describe the events and relationships of the world. Many of the great stories are archetypes that help us find our own place, equipping us with tools for self-understanding, both individually and as part of a broader culture.

  For Western societies it is Greek mythology that speaks to us most clearly. It greatly influenced the mythological heritage of the ancient Roman civilization and is the lens through which we still see the Celts, the Norse and many of the other great peoples and religions. The Greeks themselves learned much from their neighbours, the Egyptians, an older culture that became weak with age and incestuous leadership.

  It is important to understand that what we perceive now as mythology had its own origins in perceptions of the divine and the rituals of the sacred. The earliest civilizations, in the crucible of the Middle East, in the Sumer of the third millennium bc, are the source to which many of the mythic archetypes can be traced. As humankind collected together in cities for the first time, developed writing and industrial scale agriculture, started to irrigate the rivers and attempted to control rather than be at the mercy of its environment, humanity began to write down its tentative explanations of natural events, of floods and plagues, of disease.

  Early stories tell of Gods (or god-like animals in the case of tribal societies such as African, Native American or Aboriginal cultures) who are crafty and use their wits to survive, and it is reasonable to suggest that these were the first rulers of the gathering peoples of the earth, later elevated to god-like status with the distance of time. Such tales became more political as cities vied with each other for supremacy, creating new Gods, new hierarchies for their pantheons. The older Gods took on primordial roles and became the preserve of creation and destruction, leaving the new gods to deal with more current, everyday affairs. Empires rose and fell, with Babylon assuming the mantle from Sumeria in the 1800s bc, then in turn to be swept away by the Assyrians of the 1200s bc; then the Assyrians and the Egyptians were subjugated by the Greeks, the Greeks by the Romans and so on, leading to the spread and assimilation of common themes, ideas and stories throughout the world.

  The survival of history is dependent on the telling of good tales, but each one must have the ‘feeling’ of truth, otherwise it will be ignored. Around the firesides, or embedded in a book or a computer, the myths and legends of the past are still the living materials of retold myth, not restricted to an exploration of origins. Now we have devices and global communications that give us unparalleled access to a diversity of traditions. We can find out about Native American, Indian, Chinese and tribal African mythology in a way that was denied to our ancestors, we can find connections, match the archaeology, religion and the mythologies of the world to build a comprehensive image of the human experience that is endlessly fascinating.

  The stories in this book provide an introduction to the themes and concerns of the myths and legends of their respective cultures, with a short introduction to provide a linguistic, geographic and political context. This is where the myths have arrived today, but undoubtedly over the next millennia, they will transform again whilst retaining their essential truths and signs.

  Jake Jackson

  General Editor

  Introduction to East African Folktales

  ‘There was only one road that ran right across the land,’ writes Ngugi wa Thiong’o of his native Kenya in his 1964 novel Weep Not, Child.

  It was long and broad and shone with black tar, and when you travelled along it on hot days you saw little lakes ahead of you. But when you went near, the lakes vanished, to appear again a little further ahead.

  The defenders of colonialism generally list the construction of roads and other such infrastructure among its signal ‘benefits’ for its subjects. Indeed, in Ngugi’s story, this one is rumoured by the local people to have ‘come’ (as though whisked in ready-made) to Kenya ‘with the white men’. It is interesting that, in the African context, what might have been a marker of modernity becomes a medium of enchantment – those magic ‘lakes’. And that the highway which we might have expected to serve as an instrument of regimentation and order becomes emblematic of infinite space and unencompassable mystery.

  And the road which ran across the land and was long and broad had no beginning and no end. At least, few people knew of its origin.

  In the passage’s most prosaic interpretation, they don’t know of its origin because their perspective is so parochial. Uneducated as they are, they know little of the world beyond their village. Again, though, there’s the suggestion that the ‘civilization’ the road stands for is an alien imposition which at some level hasn’t found acceptance here.

  Mapping Out Mystery

  Ngugi has been a bitter critic of colonialism. Weep Not, Child is set against the backcloth of the Mau Mau Uprising and its savage suppression by the British. He’s deeply suspicious of the tendency of European and North American commentators to mystify Africa as an obdurately unknowable place that somehow exists beyond the realm of rationality. How different is this enigmatic land from the ‘Dark Continent’ of the nineteenth-century Western imagination or the ‘Uncharted Africa’ the explorers set out to map – and subjugate? Despite this, his description does appear to acknowledge a refusal on his country’s part to submit to the outsider’s understanding.

  It’s a truism that European politicians and diplomats in the colonial period conjured Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and the other modern nations of East Africa into being as ‘lines on the map’, cutting right across the demarcations understood by the region’s people. But too much can be made of this historical heedlessness, Ngugi warns. ‘The study of African realities has for too long been seen in terms of tribes,’ he says. There’s too much talk of ‘traditional enmities’; ancestral hatreds. The important opposition has for him been between ‘imperialism’ and ‘resistance’. It’s one he sets out symbolically in his description of the road.

  Culture and Condescension

  Every human culture has its folklore, its heritage of fairy tales and popular beliefs. For some, though, there’s a tightrope to be walked. England’s status as a modern, developed nation isn’t compromised by the legend of Beowulf any more than France’s is by Perrault’s Puss in Boots or Germany’s by the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Other nations haven’t been quite so fortunate. The Irish, for example, have learned to be at least a little wary of what can feel like double-edged praise for a ‘Celtic’ patrimony which is seen as poetic … but at the same time perhaps a little unevolved. Something of the same might be said for other ‘Celtic’ lands like Wales, the Scottish Highlands, and even Cornwall. There’s be
en admiration – and even envy – for the ready access the cultures of these countries have appeared to have to the realms of the supernatural. But along with this a sense that they’re somehow not quite civilized.

  This condescension can of course be seen as rationalizing historical power-imbalances. English domination over what are now regarded as the United Kingdom’s Celtic fringes was established (with more or less violence) over several centuries. The belief that the peoples of the periphery were in some sense like charming children, incapable of ruling themselves, allowed imperial expansion to be presented as altruism. The effect is starker still in those regions of the world – in the Americas, Asia and Australasia – where, from the early-modern period onwards, the European powers established dominion over what it suited them to see as hopelessly ‘primitive’ indigenous peoples.

  The Construction of Savagery

  Africa was a special case. Europeans had viewed it as strange and exotic since ancient times. There was ‘always something new out of Africa’, the Roman writer Pliny had observed. Full of marvels it may have been, but that didn’t earn its inhabitants any particular respect – though in fairness the Romans saw almost all non-Italian peoples as barbarians to be subjugated or enslaved.

  The assumption of European superiority over those peoples living south of the Sahara in particular had been of long standing, but from the sixteenth century had become an essential pre-requisite to the justification of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Racist feeling had been ramped up even higher in the nineteenth century by the development of complicated ‘race theories’ which set existing hierarchies in pseudo-scientific stone. And, of course, from the 1880s on, provided a plausible rationale for the ‘Scramble for Africa’, in which the continent was carved up into colonies by the European powers. That, even by the uncivilized standards of other ‘Native’ peoples, Africans existed in a state of special savagery was the received wisdom in the industrially-developed world.

  Postcolonial Quandary

  So it isn’t difficult to understand why a twenty-first-century African intellectual like Ngugi would have his reservations about a view of his continent’s cultures that appears to accentuate the folkloric and the fantastical, the magical and the pre-modern. Yet neither is it hard to see why, despite this, he would feel drawn to traditions that in important ways delineate what might be called the ‘collective unconscious’ of modern Africa.

  After all, as we’ve already seen, every human culture has had its stock of myths and these have always tapped into what might be seen as civilization’s more apparently ‘primitive’ side. ‘Cinderella’, ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, ’Rapunzel’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ … all the classic European fairy tales – however many courtly refinements they’ve accrued in modern literary treatments – have been interpreted as articulating deeper, darker dreams and fears.

  Arguably, indeed, the deliberate suppression of local cultures by colonial occupiers from the 1880s has made the role of folktale that much more vital in East Africa. In most cases, the controlling authorities were British. In the first instance, Germany occupied Tanzania (along with Burundi and Rwanda), though these territories too were to pass to Britain after its victory in the First World War. Whoever the colonial master was, Christianity was effectively imposed along with European ideas and learning, and indigenous traditions were denigrated if not actively stamped out. But stories survived, slipping through the net as ‘entertainments’ – trivial and so intrinsically harmless. Even when – as sometimes here – they show the self-consciously ‘civilizing’ touch of a European collector, such stories contain the cultural DNA of the peoples who told them in more distant times.

  Like many other modern African writers, then, Ngugi has found that there’s no better way to the centre of his people’s psyche than through its folktales. Throughout his career, from early works like Weep Not, Child to the ambitious verse-novel The Perfect Nine (2018), he’s brought together characters and imagery from the legends of the Gikuyu with incidents and insights from contemporary life.

  A Perplexity of Peoples

  Important as it is that we understand the impact of European colonization on East Africa (and on the way it’s been perceived), it’s every bit as vital that we don’t stop there. For the region already had a complex history when the ‘white men’ first arrived – and its inhabitants belonged to a great many different groups. Ngugi’s dislike of the word ‘tribe’ makes sense, given its connotations of unthinking loyalties and atavistic hatreds, but an East African country isn’t quite like a European nation-state. His own Gikuyu – or Kikuyu – are for the most part concentrated in Kenya, where they are the largest of well over a hundred distinct ethnic groups, though there are significant numbers over the border in Tanzania too.

  To make matters yet more complicated, none of East Africa’s ethnic groups are known to be ‘indigenous’ to the region, strictly speaking – ironic, given that some of the oldest fossils of our ‘hominid’ ancestors have been found in the ‘East African Rift’. This wide, ‘rift’ valley, many thousands of kilometres in length, and up to 120 km (75 miles) across, has been formed over many millions of years by the slow but inexorable divergence of two tectonic plates right down the centre of the region.

  What became of these first hominid inhabitants and their immediate descendants simply isn’t known. The mass of the present-day population arrived as migrants. What are now known as the ‘Bantu’ peoples were participants in a large-scale population movement which took place almost a thousand years ago. It appears to have started in Central West Africa – roughly the area now occupied by Burkina Faso, Togo, Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Why it happened, we don’t know – some combination of environmental and political factors, presumably – but for some reason they upped-sticks and headed east and south. Ultimately, they would make it all the way to the continent’s southernmost extremity, forming a majority in what are now South Africa and Namibia.

  But smaller groups split off from the main migration along the way and founded settlements. Though there were considerable numbers of Bantu, they were farmers, so naturally settled down in small villages rather than big cities. Scattered over a vast area, these communities tended to be isolated and inward-looking. Despite important structural similarities, their languages gradually diverged. There are hundreds of different Bantu languages now, though many have no more than a few thousand speakers – such was the seclusion in which so many of these peoples lived.

  As with language, so with ideas and assumptions, beliefs and rituals. Though important commonalities were to remain between the Bantu peoples, they were gradually to go their own ways culturally. The Baganda are only the largest of several dozen Bantu peoples in Uganda, for example; the Sukuma the biggest in Tanzania.

  But the Bantu Migration was not the only large-scale movement of peoples to East Africa: the region’s northern parts are home to a number of ‘Nilotic’ peoples. As their name suggests, they drifted south from homelands in the Nile Valley in what is now South Sudan. Further north still, East Africa edges over into the area occupied by the ‘Cushitic’ peoples, centred on Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea. At times over the centuries, through direct migration or in war or commerce, groups from here extended their influence over territories to the south.

  The Swahili Strand

  Meanwhile, long before the Europeans came, coastal East Africa saw a softer sort of colonialism in the traffic of trading ships from Islamic countries like Arabia and Iran. Calling at offshore islands like the Comoros and Zanzibar, they also put in at inlets all along the mainland shore from northern Mozambique up through Tanzania and Kenya where other Bantu peoples had settled by this time. Trading luxury goods for gold, spices and agricultural produce, they also brought with them ideas and influences.

  A distinct people, the Kiswahili, grew up in this peculiar context, adopting Islam and speaking a hybrid Bantu-Arabic tongue. Centred on Zanzibar, they lived on the ad
jacent coasts of what are now Tanzania and Kenya too. To a lesser extent, however, something of the same occurred across much of the East African hinterland. Even where Islamic beliefs and ideas did not explicitly take hold, the language of ‘Swahili’ emerged as a lingua franca. Bantu-based, but with up to 20 per cent of its words originating in Arabic (plus a few from Portuguese and Hindi for good measure), it allowed easy communication across what we’ve seen was becoming a Babel of different Bantu languages.

  War and Peace

  East Africa’s different peoples haven’t necessarily coexisted in complete harmony. Exasperating as Ngugi wa Thiong’o found all the talk of ‘tribal’ hatreds, bitter resentments certainly exist. Mostly these have grown, not out of irrational prejudice but in competition over economic resources like water or grazing for livestock – much as enmities have formed in other ages and in other countries around the world.

  It’s true that, here as elsewhere, these hostilities have often outlasted and grown disproportionate to the disputes that initially began them. Rwanda’s Tutsi, traditionally pastoralists, were to find this in the 1990s. For generations, the Hutsu, a farming people and the overwhelming majority in the Rwandan population, had been irritated by the way the Tutsi trespassed on areas of grassland and streams and pools they saw as theirs. So it’s fair to describe the suspicion and the enmity between these groups as ‘ancestral’. That said, it took modern populist politicians, making use of twentieth-century media, to fan this feeling into that genocidal rage which saw the Hutsu slaughtering the Tutsi in their hundreds of thousands.

  Hills and Plains

  For the most part, though, despite their differences, East Africa’s peoples would seem to have much in common. Not least the shared experience of living in the relatively uniform environment of savannahs and shallow lakes which extends southward down either side of the rift from the Ethiopian Highlands and eastward from Rwanda – the ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’. Kilimanjaro, rearing up 5,895 m (19,341 ft), and a few other dormant volcanoes, stand out as the exception rather than the rule in an open landscape of plains and parkland. Rich in game, this has for a long time now been known to the outside world as the ultimate ‘safari’ country, but its inhabitants have been small-scale farmers (or coastal fishermen) by and large.