The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  Ananse said, “It’s not one thing, it’s not things. There is no doubt that this is the work of Ntikuma.”

  Ananse smashed the dish and climbed back down. He took off the Oyoko cloth, put it down, and went off to the bush. On the way, he saw a very beautiful thing, a whip called Mpere. He said, “Oh, wonderful! This thing is more beautiful than the last. This whip is beautiful.”

  The whip said, “I am not called ‘beautiful.’ ”

  Spider said, “Then what are you called?”

  The whip said, “I am called ‘Abiridiabrada’ (Swish-and-raise-welts).”

  Spider said, “Swish a little for me to see.” And the whip fell upon him, “Swish, swish, swish.”

  Father Spider cried, “Pui! Pui!”

  A certain bird perched nearby said to Ananse, “Say Adwobere.”3

  And Ananse said, “Adwobere.” And the whip stopped beating him.

  Ananse brought the whip home. He climbed up to the ceiling and put it there. Aso finishing cooking the food. She said, “Ananse, come and eat.”

  Ananse replied, “Since you are still here on earth, perhaps you have not heard what I said. I shall not eat.”

  Ananse climbed up to the ceiling and sat down in a corner quietly. Then he came back down again, and finally he went away and hid off in a corner.

  Ntikuma climbed up to the ceiling. He said, “Oh, that father of mine has brought back something else.” Ntikuma said, “Mother, Nyiwankonfwea, Afudotwedotwe, come here. What Father has brought this time is even better than what he brought last time.” Then all of them climbed up on the ceiling.

  Ntikuma said, “This thing is beautiful.”

  The thing replied, “I am not called ‘beautiful.’ ”

  Ntikuma said, “What is your name?”

  It replied, “I am called ‘Swish-and-raise welts.’ ”

  Ntikuma said, “Swish a little for me to see.”

  The whip descended upon him and flogged them all severely.

  Ananse appeared and shouted, “Lay it on, lay it on, especially on Ntikuma, lay it on him.”

  Now when Ananse had watched and seen that they were properly flogged, he said, “Adwobere.” He took the whip and cut it up into small pieces and scattered them about. That is what made the whip come into the tribe. So it comes about that when you tell your children something, and they will not listen, you whip them.

  This is my story, which I have told. If it be sweet or if it be not sweet, take some elsewhere, and let some come back to me.

  SOURCE: Adapted from R. S. Rattray, Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales, 63–67.

  Whipping children may seem a cruel and unusual punishment, but it has been an astonishingly common practice, one dictated by biblical wisdom and other sources of authority. This version of the tale is transcribed from an oral performance by a collector who prided himself on fidelity to the words of the teller. In a version included by Peggy Appiah in a collection of Ananse tales, it is Ananse who is beaten. His son Ntikuma speaks the words that stop the whip. Ananse then begs his family to forgive him for his greediness. “Each day I have eaten the best food before you came home,” he confesses. “Forgive me. You see how I have been punished. Learn from me, my children. Take just what you need, share with others. The pot that helped us has been destroyed. You see what greed has done to your father.” As if the point needed driving home, a moral is appended: “That is how Kwaku Ananse was punished for his greed. May you all learn from this lesson, for greed always brings its own punishment” (Appiah 1969, 69).

  “How It Came About That Children Were (First) Whipped,” from R. S. Rattray, ed., Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales, 1930. By permission of Oxford University Press.

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  1 gun wad: a device used to keep ammunition in place in a gun-barrel

  2 Oyoko: a small town in the Ashanti region of Ghana, which gives its name to the resident clan

  3 Adwobere: cool and easy now

  HOW CONTRADICTION CAME TO THE ASHANTI

  Once there was a man called Hate-to-Be-Contradicted, and, because of that, he built a small dwelling all by himself and lived in it alone. A creature called the duiker1 paid him a visit, and they walked along together for a while and then sat down at the foot of a palm tree. Some of the palm nuts fell down. The duiker said, “Father Hate-to-Be-Contradicted, your palm nuts are ripe.”

  Hate-to-Be-Contradicted said, “That is the nature of the palm nut. When they ripen, three bunches are ready at once. I cut them down after they have ripened, and then I boil them to extract the oil. They make three water pots full of oil. Then I take the oil to Akase to buy an Akase old woman. The Akase old woman comes and gives birth to my grandmother who bears my mother, who in turn gives birth to me. When Mother bears me, I am already standing there.”

  The duiker said, “As for all that, you are lying.”

  Hate-to-Be-Contradicted took a stick, hit the duiker on the head, and killed him.

  Then along came the little abedee.2 Hate-to-Be-Contradicted walked for a while with him, and the two sat down under a palm tree, and the same thing happened. And that’s how it went with all the animals. Finally, Kawku Ananse, the Spider, went and fetched his cloth and his bag, slung the bag over his shoulders, and went off to visit Hate-to-Be Contradicted’s kraal.3 He greeted him, “Good morning, Father.”

  Hate-to-Be-Contradicted replied, “Y’aku,4 and where are you going?”

  He replied, “I’m coming to visit you.”

  And he took his stool and placed it under the palm tree.

  Hate-to-Be-Contradicted gave orders, “Cook food for Spider to eat.”

  While the food was cooking, Ananse and Hate-to-Be-Contradicted sat under the palm tree. Some of the palm nuts fell down, and Ananse took them and put them in his bag. He kept doing that until his bag was full. The food arrived, and Ananse ate. When he had finished eating, more of the ripe palm nuts fell down, and Ananse said, “Father Hate-to-Be-Contradicted, your palm nuts are ripe.”

  Hate-to-Be-Contradicted said, “It is their nature to ripen like that. When they ripen, three bunches are ready at once. I cut them down after they have ripened, and then I boil them to extract the oil. They make three water pots full of oil. Then I take the oil to Akase to buy an Akase old woman. The Akase old woman comes and gives birth to my grandmother who bears my mother, who in turn gives birth to me. When Mother bears me, I am already standing there.”

  Spider said, “You are not lying. What you say is true. As for me, I have some okras growing on my farm. When they are ripe, I join seventy-seven long hooked poles in order to reach them to pull them down, but even then I cannot reach them. So I lie on my back and use my penis to pluck them.”

  Hate-to-Be-Contradicted said, “Oh, I understand. Tomorrow I will come and take a look.”

  Spider said, “Sure!”

  While Spider was on his way home, he chewed the palm nuts that he had gathered and spat them out on the path. The next morning, when you could see things again, Hate-to-Be-Contradicted set out for Spider’s village. When Spider had returned home the day before, he said to his children, “A man will come here, and he hates to be contradicted. When he arrives and inquires after me, you must tell him that yesterday I told you that I was going off somewhere. My penis broke in seven places, and I had to take it to the blacksmith for repairs. Since the blacksmith could not finish in time yesterday, I went back to have the work finished.”

  In this illustration from Robert S. Rattray’s compilation Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales, the beating to death of Hate-to-Be-Contradicted undoes in some ways the message of the story.

  Not much later, Hate-to-Be-Contradicted came along. He said, “Where is your father?”

  The children replied, “Alas, Father went somewhere yesterday, since his penis was broken in seven different places. He took it to a blacksmith, but the man could not finish in time, and Father has left to have it finished. You, Father, didn’t you see the blood on the path?”

 
Hate-to-Be-Contradicted said, “Yes, I saw it.” Then he asked, “And where is your mother?”

  Spider’s child replied, “Mother, too—yesterday she went down to the stream, and her water pot would have fallen and broken if she had not kept it from doing so by catching it at the last moment. But she didn’t quite succeed in saving it from falling and returned today to do so.” Hate-to-Be-Contradicted did not say a word.

  Ananse returned. He said, “Cook some food for Hate-to-Be-Contradicted.” While the children were cooking the food, they used only one single little perch but a huge quantity of peppers. They made the stew very hot. When they finished cooking, they set it down before Hate-to-Be-Contradicted. Hate-to-Be-Contradicted ate it. The peppers pained him so much that he wanted to die. He said to one of Ananse’s sons, “Ntikuma,5 bring me some water.”

  Ntikuma said, “There are three different kinds of water in our pot. The water at the top belongs to Father, the part in the middle belongs to my mother’s co-wife, and the water at the very bottom of the pot belongs to my mother. I can only draw for you what belongs to my mother, and if I’m not careful while drawing it, I might start a tribal dispute.”

  Hate-to-Be-Contradicted said, “You little brat! You are lying.”

  Straightaway Ananse said, “Beat him until he is dead.”

  Hate-to-Be-Contradicted said, “Why should they beat me to death?”

  Spider said, “You say you hate to be contradicted, and yet you have contradicted someone. That is why I am telling them to beat you to death.”

  So they beat Hate-to-Be-Contradicted to death. Then Ananse cut up his flesh in little pieces and scattered them everywhere.6

  That is why you can find many people in the tribe today who hate to be contradicted.

  SOURCE: Adapted from R. S. Rattray, Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales, 107–9.

  Hate-to-Be-Contradicted encounters Ananse, the Trickster who loves to be contradicted. As half-man and half-spider, Ananse already incarnates the contradiction of nature and culture. Rejecting the stability and sterility of univocal truths, Ananse embraces division, discord, and the kind of disorder that will lead to higher truths. By contrast, Hate-to-Be-Contradicted lives in near solitary confinement, unable to tolerate difference and alterity. According to Lee Pelton, Ananse possesses a “double doubleness,” becoming Love-to-Be-Contradicted, contradicting the contradictor, and negating negation in a way that preserves a permanent state of tension. What Ananse does is to respond to Hate-to-Be-Contradicted in a way that enables him to triumph, not negating his position and confronting him directly, as did the duiker and the abedee, but responding to him “recursively and self-referentially, . . . taking it to such extremes as to nudging it toward destroying itself” (Marks-Tarlow 2008, 173).

  “How Contradiction Came to the Ashanti,” from R. S. Rattray, ed., Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales, 1930. By permission of Oxford University Press.

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  1 duiker: Derived from the Dutch word for “diver,” the term refers to a small antelope that can leap quickly into the bush.

  2 abedee: Ashanti word for antelope

  3 kraal: an enclosure

  4 Y’aku: a greeting

  5 Ntikuma: a species of spider

  6 Then Ananse cut up his flesh in little pieces: Many creation myths begin with the dismemberment of some kind of primordial being, and in this case a figure who is deeply opposed to division and self-division leaves bits and pieces of himself in a world that thrives on contradiction and resistance to it.

  PART II

  FIGURING IT OUT: FACING COMPLICATIONS WITH DILEMMA TALES

  Folktales generate talk. The stories gathered here show how they stimulate conversation and debate, evoking the great “What ifs?” Even when a character resolves the formulated dilemma, or when a narrator steps in to referee or issue a judgment, the audience may still challenge the wisdom of a decision and propose alternative solutions. Some folklorists see dilemma tales as modeling discussion for how to adjudicate disagreements either within the family or in a broader social context. Although these kinds of stories are often associated with African folklore, they can be found in other cultures too, as adivinanzas in Spain, as Fragen in Germany, and as choix difficile or cas de conscience in France. In English, they are called “unanswerable riddle stories,” “conundrum” and “problem tales,” and “folk problems.”

  The most common dilemma tale in Africa is listed in the standard classification system used by folklorists as “The Rarest Thing in the World” (ATU 653A; Uther I: 359). It is described as follows:

  A princess is offered to the one bringing her the rarest thing in the world. Three brothers set out and acquire magic objects: a telescope that shows all that is happening in the world, a carpet (or the like) that transports one at will, and an apple (or an object) that heals or resuscitates. With the telescope it is learned that the princess is dying or dead. With the carpet they go to her immediately and with the apple they cure or restore her to life. They dispute who is to marry her.

  There is magic in this tale but it is hardly practical. And whether wisdom can be extracted from the dispute among the brothers is questionable. But what is certain is that the tale makes us reflect on the value of different human aspirations—omniscience, mobility, and the power to heal.

  Dilemma tales, as William Bascom has pointed out, fall into two categories: stories that involve a contest and challenge listeners to choose the most skillful of the competitors and tales that require moral or ethical judgments. “The Rarest Thing in the World” gives us an example of the first type, and it invites us also to choose wisely and make a “just” decision. In the second type, an audience is asked to decide questions such as the following: “Who should inherit, the eldest or the youngest son?” “Are sons more desirable than daughters?” “Who is to be saved, a kind adoptive father or a cruel biological father?” These stories draw us into the dark shadows of decision-making, revealing that no decision is “right” or “just” and that there is always a loss of some kind.

  “The Cow-Tail Switch,” a West African tale collected by Harold Courlander, gives us a wonderful hybrid version. It tells the tale of a warrior who goes out on the hunt and perishes. Three of his sons possess magic powers, but it is not until they are urged on to find their father’s remains by a fourth, younger boy that they discover the bones of the missing, forgotten man. One assembles the bones into a skeleton; a second puts flesh on the bones; and a third breathes life into the bones and flesh. The reanimated father returns to the village and decides to give the gift of a cow-tail switch, the emblem of his tribal authority, to the youngest of the four sons, for it was he who honored the memory of his father by refusing to forget that he was gone. These are the tales relevant to developing social and cultural values, as judgments and decisions are weighed and evaluated. Riddles and dilemmas are meant to promote entertaining conversation as much as to stimulate competition. “The enjoyment of a riddle derives from the sharing of it by members of a group rather than from the challenge to the imagination it presents” (Finnegan 426; Messenger 226). The tales that follow include the two different types of dilemma tales, the one raising questions about merit and the other enacting moral inquiries. They take up issues both local and monumental, up close and personal as well as abstract and universal.

  WHO SHOULD MARRY THE GIRL?

  There was once a beautiful girl who lived with her parents in a certain village. All the young men wanted to marry her. Amongst the most ardent of her admirers were three men: a musician, a hunter, and a swimmer.

  One day when the girl went down to the river to wash her clothes, the three men hid nearby and watched her. As she started to do her washing, a crocodile came from the river to stretch himself out in the sun, and he saw the girl doing her washing. He made straight for her, but the poor girl did not notice him, and went on with her work.

  The crocodile reached her, opened his mouth and pulled her inside the water.


  The musician was the first to see what happened, and he began to play a tune on his harp.

  The evil crocodile was so impressed by the music that he sat in amazement with his mouth wide open as he listened. Then the hunter shot the crocodile with an arrow just as he was about to swallow the beautiful girl. The poor girl nearly drowned. At once the swimmer jumped into the river and pulled her out of the water.

  The three men were very proud that they had taken part in rescuing her. But the question remained: Who should marry the girl?

  What is your judgment?

  SOURCE: Gene Baharav, African Folktales Told in Israel, III, 22–23.

  This story was told by Zenebach Truneh, a student from Ethiopia studying at the International Training Center for Community Services in Israel. A visit to the Israel Folktale Archives inspired the instructor of a course offered there to ask his students to create their own collection of indigenous lore. As Dov Noy well-meaningly put it in his introduction to the tales assembled while the African students were in Israel: “These tales would raise the self-esteem of the story-teller and story-loving people and their trust in their own cultural heritage, used in class with foreign parallels, the stories would prove to young and adult pupils, that man is similar all over the world and that racial and religious differences are artificial and external.”

  TRACKWELL, DIVEWELL, BREAVEWELL

  De man had one daughter. An’ dere was t’ree men comin’ to see her. Dey was Trackwell, Divewell, an’ Breavewell. Dey said de man dat had de best right could marry to de daughter. De daughter went an’ got lost. After de woman leave de house, she went down to de river. Trackwell track her f’om de house to de aidge of de water. Dat was all Trackwell could do. She went into de river. Divewell went, an’ dive until he fin’ her. An’ after Divewell foun’ her, he brought her up on de sho’. An’ Breavewell breae his breat’ back into her. An’ it come a-disputin’. The fader said to de t’ree mens, “Which one of you is entitled to the daughter?” Trackwell said, “I am entitled to the woman, because she was los’, an’ I track her out.” Divewell says, “Your track didn’ done no good, because you couldn’ fin’ her. You track her to the aidge of the water. I had to dive out in dat ocean, take chance of my life, an’ hunt until I foun’ her.” Breavewell said, “All for that what you folk have done, the woman is mine, because she was dead, an’ I brough life into her again.” So the fader give her to Breavewell.