African Myths of Origin

by Stephen Belcher

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  AFRICAN MYTHS OF ORIGIN

  STEPHEN BELCHER was born in Cairo, Egypt, the son of an American Foreign Service officer, and spent much of his childhood in Africa and Europe. He holds a doctorate (Ph.D.) in Comparative Literature from Brown University, and has taught at the University of Nouakchott (Islamic Republic of Mauritania), the Pennsylvania State University (USA) and at the University of Kankan in the Republic of Guinea. He is the co-editor, with John W. Johnson and Thomas Hale, of an anthology, Voices from a Vast Continent: Oral Epics from Africa, and the author of Epic Traditions of Africa.

  African Myths of Origin

  Stories selected and retold by

  STEPHEN BELCHER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2005

  4

  Copyright © Stephen Belcher, 2005

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 9781101491874

  Contents

  Introduction

  A Note on the Text

  List of Maps

  PART I. SOME GENERAL THEMES

  STORIES ABOUT HUNTERS

  1 The San Peoples of Southern Africa

  2 Pygmies of the Central African Forests

  3 The Songhay Hunters of the Niger River

  4 The Origin of Hunters’ Associations: Sanen and Kontron of the Manden

  5 How Hunters Learned about Magic

  6 The Animal Bride I: The Changed Skin

  7 The Animal Bride II: Sirankomi

  THE CATTLE-HERDERS

  8 Khoi-Khoi Cattle Stories

  9 Fulbe Stories of Cattle

  10 The Maasai of East Africa

  11 The Great Lakes I: The Origin of Cattle (Rwanda)

  12 The Great Lakes II: The Story of Wamara (BaHaya)

  13 The Chagga of East Africa: Murile

  TRICKSTERS

  14 Uthlakanyana, the Zulu Child Trickster

  15 Stories of Moni-Mambu of the BaKongo

  16 Ture, the Zande Trickster

  17 Eshu of the Yoruba

  18 Legba of the Fon

  19 Ananse the Spider, of the Ashanti

  PART II. STORIES OF KINGDOMS AND PEOPLES

  ANCIENT AFRICA

  20 Egyptian Stories

  21 Ethiopia

  PEOPLES OF THE UPPER NILE AND EAST AFRICA

  22 The Oromo of Southern Ethiopia

  23 The Shilluk of Southern Sudan

  24 The Luo of Sudan and Uganda

  25 The Gikuyu of Kenya

  26 The Swahili of the Coast

  KINGDOMS OF THE GREAT LAKES

  27 The Kingdom of Bunyoro

  28 The Kingdom of Buganda

  29 The Kingdom of Rwanda

  30 The Kingdom of Burundi

  CENTRAL EAST AFRICA

  31 Nsong’a Lianja, Hero of the Mongo

  32 The Kuba Kingdom of the Bushoong: Mboom and Woot

  33 The First Kings of the Luba

  34 The Kingdoms of the Lunda

  35 The Bemba of Zambia

  THE PEOPLES OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

  36 The Shona of Zimbabwe

  37 The Nguni Peoples of Southern Africa: Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi

  38 The Khoi-Khoi: Stories of Heitsi-Eibib

  THE CENTRAL ATLANTIC

  39 The Yaka of the Kwango River

  40 The Kingdom of Kongo

  41 The Fang of Gabon and Cameroon

  42 Jeki la Njambe of the Duala

  43 The Bamun Kingdom of Cameroon

  FROM THE FOREST TO THE NIGER

  44 The Igbo

  45 The Kingdom of the Nupe: Tsoede

  46 The Jukun Kingdom of the Kororofa

  47 The Bachama and Bata of the Upper Benue

  THE PEOPLES OF THE COAST

  48 The City of Benin

  49 The Yoruba of South-western Nigeria

  50 Borgu and the Legend of Kisra

  51 The Fon and the Kingdom of Dahomey

  52 The Akan-Ashanti and the Baule of the Forest

  THE MOSSI PLATEAU

  53 The Founding of Gonja

  54 A Dagomba Hero

  55 The Mossi of Burkina Faso

  56 The Dogon of the Bandiagara Escarpment

  LAKE CHAD AND THE CENTRAL SUDAN

  57 The Sara and the Sow of Lake Chad

  58 The Kingdom of Bagirmi

  59 The Kingdoms of Kanem and Bornu

  60 The Hausa

  THE KINGDOMS OF THE WESTERN SUDAN

  61 The Songhay Peoples of the Middle Niger

  62 The City of Djenne

  63 The Soninke

  64 The Maninka and the Empire of Mali

  65 The Bamana of the Middle Niger

  THE PEOPLES OF SENEGAMBIA

  66 The Mandinka of Senegambia

  67 The Sereer of Senegal

  68 Njaajaan Njaay and the Wolof

  69 The Futa Tooro

  70 Malick Sy and Bondu

  THE SAHARA

  71 The Tuareg of the Sahara

  Sources and Further Reading

  Index

  Introduction

  This book is an invitation to the worlds and the peoples of African mythology. It offers stories of animal-creators: Mantis, who made the moon from a feather coated with gall, or Ananse the spider who found the moon to settle a wager with the sky-god Nyame. Some stories, from the tropical forests, tell how chimpanzees once possessed arts and crafts, until humans stole them. For the most part, the protagonists are human. The stories tell of how their world was shaped and how their culture was established: by gifts from the spirits, through misadventure and accident, from conflict and rivalry. Some of the humans are exceptional by nature, such as Lianja who was born fully grown and armed to avenge his father. Others become so: Sunjata was a cripple during his childhood, until he rose to manhood and empire. The stories tell of migrations for all sorts of causes: to escape a monstrous crocodile, to escape the growing Ashanti empire, to escape a tyrannical father. The themes are as varied as the peoples who have created or adopted these stories as their narratives of origin.

  Africans have occupied every type of environment on their landmass: deserts and fertile river valleys, mountain-
slopes and swamps, the tropical forests and the savannah grasslands. They have adjusted their material culture and their social systems to the needs of the ecologies they exploit, as well as developing the technologies required to master their environment. Such diversification is hardly surprising; it was from Africa that humans dispersed, tens of thousands of years ago, into every habitable corner of our globe. But no other part of the world displays quite so much human variety as is to be found among the peoples of Africa. No generalizations are possible. Africa is home to some of the oldest human civilizations, and at the same time something close to the lifestyle of our stone-age ancestors has survived in isolated regions of the continent. The peoples of Africa speak thousands of languages, and each language represents a distinctive culture and way of life – comparable, perhaps, to those of the neighbours, but nevertheless individual and treasured by its people.

  Visitors may come to know a corner of Africa quite well, but local understanding cannot always be translated to other contexts. Every place has – or had, for admittedly modernization is homogenizing the cultures of Africa – its own texture of local specificities and interactions. These specificities may stem from the physical environment, for example, the important difference, for farmers, between the waalo and the jeeri lands along the Senegal river (jeeri lands are flooded only when the river overflows its banks and leaves pools, isolated from the regular course; the richer waalo lands are the floodplain), or ways of cultivating yams, or the wide variety of palm trees and banana trees available in certain areas of eastern Africa. More often, and less visibly, they apply to the social environment, to the ways in which people interact and the rules which they obey (and which strangers too often break). The joking relationship which exists among many clans and peoples in west Africa (particularly in the Mande world, whose peoples look back to the medieval empire of Mali) would be an example: the occasionally shocking insults which are exchanged are actually an affirmation of an underlying shared social bond. They are also a recognition of a shared history.

  IDENTITY AND THE PAST

  This shared history is not the documented political history of academic discourse, transmitted through memoirs and monographs. Rather, it is a shared perception of the past, as translated through recognized stories (in many variants) about that past. Stories articulate the content of the past (who did what, and when) and also its meaning: why certain events are important, what relationships they established, and how they connect to the present world. The common past of groups is the subject of this book. The past involved, however, is not the recent past (the last two or three centuries), but one more remote. The recent past is that of individual and documented history, and it extends three or four generations back from the present of a given speaker (perhaps more, in some special circumstances). The group’s past derives from a time much longer before that, from an era associated with and comparable to the time of creation in which the world took shape.

  In Africa, the recent past (since 1800) has also been marked by external disruptions: Islamic conquests in the interior, colonization and finally the transformations of modernization, and even before 1800 many areas were put into turmoil by the effects of the transatlantic slave-trade. Many of the older cultural configurations have become irrelevant, as lifestyles have changed and the movements of peoples have erased the long-established social alliances. But change does not completely erase what has been inherited from the more distant past: language, names, relationships, a sense of place and of self. What binds individuals into communities is not only the amalgam of shared practices and activities, the daily routine that allows reference to common experience, but also, often, a sense of common origin derived from knowledge of the stories about how the community came into being, how its institutions were established, and how they are justified. Knowing these stories, with something of their context and function, can be a key to understanding the cultures from which they arose.

  MYTHS

  A story that explains origins and the root-causes of things is called myth, and the word has acquired a tremendous range of associations ranging through the religious, spiritual and psychological domains. In the twentieth century the historical element of myths is no longer much considered. We moderns do not believe, as did the Greeks of old, that the infant Oedipus was really cast out with his feet bound, or that Orestes was pursued by a howling pack of Furies to the gates of Athens. We have substituted different modes of interpretation for the stories, viewing them largely as keys to self-improvement and spiritual growth, thanks to the work of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung and Joseph Campbell. But in this collection of stories the historical element regains its importance, for it supplies the function that unites them. It might be more accurate to call these stories ‘traditions of origin’, leaving out the word ‘myth’, for that phrase captures the defining criteria: the stories describe cultural origins for the peoples involved, and they are ‘traditional’ – meaning that they have been handed down from one generation to another, although always with changes and adaptations to keep them relevant to their contemporary audiences. These are not necessarily the stories associated with spiritual cults or religious practice, although they may echo the same world view. Cult myths have their own functions and rules (some of the stories included here do count as cult myths, and may serve as examples of the type in distinction to the historical traditions of origin).

  MYTHS AND FOLK TALES

  We must also set these stories apart from folk tales, although there may be overlap in form and content. Almost every African culture distinguishes between the sort of tale that serves for entertainment and narratives possessed of higher value or meaning. The stories retold in this collection are not casual tales to be recounted in the dusk, as the family gathers around the last embers of the cooking fire to pass time before sleep calls them. Many thousand tales of this sort have been collected and published. Such stories, folk tales, are clearly patterned; they have defined beginnings and often moral endings, and they frequently include songs as part of the action. The purpose may be morally normative, and content may explain or reinforce social customs, but the tools are those of fiction, invention and style. A large number of these tales belong to the realm of animal fable – stories of the trickster Hare or Tortoise or Spider and many other characters – and many of them have an aetiological function, explaining the animal’s shape or colouring or role in the creation of the world. But these often light-hearted stories do not have the cultural weight associated with the human actions of the past. They are a vehicle for the entertainment of adults as well as children, and they teach something of the culture’s vision of the human condition. But they do not define the group. That is the function of myths of origin.

  The stories told in this book are generally distinguished not by the artistry of their telling, but by their cultural importance. They might be the stories told by elders to young men and women during initiation rites, to teach the youth who they are and what their ancestors did. They might be the stories preserved by royal bards entrusted with the prestige of the lineage. They might be the accounts advanced in the course of judicial proceedings by clan elders, when discussing some tangled question of property rights or matrimonial obligations, or recounted in the privacy of chambers to explain some prohibition to a visiting anthropologist or historian. They are also the stories which people tell visitors to explain who they are, and how they differ from their neighbours. The content of the stories is generally known to everyone in the group, but not everyone in the group would feel entitled to tell the story, and it would not be considered a subject for ordinary narration (although the myths of one group may become the folk tales of their neighbours). For the group members, the information is often considered potent and possibly dangerous, best handled by specialists who have the knowledge and authority to dispense it. Artistic considerations of plot line and character are secondary to the importance of the content: the genealogies, the localities, the events that are commemorated in
current ritual or that have shaped the current social practices.

  Of course, some of the narratives are performed by specialists, and display a high degree of artistry and skill. These traits are not imitated or properly translated in these retellings of the stories, but readers who are interested might pursue the references to the royal traditions of Rwanda (Chapter 29), or to the epic traditions of the Sahel: the stories of Sunjata and the Bamana kingdom of Segou (Chapters 64 and 65) in particular offer rich versions available in English translation.

  THE WORLDS OF THE MYTHS

  When reading the stories, we should remember to respect specificities. The different myths resonate within particular cultures. The familiar interaction of humans and animals evident in the San hunter myths (Chapter 1) is not to be expected everywhere else; hunter-gatherers have a far more intimate relationship with the natural world than do the citydwellers of Benin (Chapter 48) or Djenne (Chapter 62). The time of creation (usually by the gods) is often almost taken for granted, and the focus is upon the earthbound human activities of the primogenitors. These persons often possess divine powers, and can shape or name the world around them, but they are of a later generation than the deities who created the world, and their scope is narrower. For some groups, such as the Yoruba, the Buganda or the kingdom of Rwanda, the connection of humans with heaven is direct, because it establishes a divine origin to the royalty of the kingdom. Elsewhere, and particularly where peoples had contact with Islam, such a connection made will be to the lands of the east: to Yemen or to Mecca, or more rarely to pre-Islamic rulers of Persia.