African Myths of Origin

by Stephen Belcher

  ‘Do so,’ said Njambe. ‘I am going into the village, to the men’s hut.’

  As soon as he was out of the compound, Jeki rounded up his brothers. ‘Come,’ he called them. ‘Father has told us to harvest palm nuts, and so let us get to work.’ The brothers assembled at the foot of the great palm tree, staring up at the fronds which hid the huge bird.

  ‘Father said you alone should do this!’ protested the older brothers.

  ‘And I say you shall help me!’ answered Jeki. ‘If you do not, you shall die.’ He waved Ngalo over his brothers and they were cowed. They did not dare to disobey. The eldest shuffled up to the tree and tied the climbing-strap around the trunk. He stepped into the loop and pulled it round his waist. He shifted the cord higher on the trunk, and then stepped up, planting his feet firmly against the bark. Again he shifted the cord, again he moved his feet up. But when he was halfway up the tree, the Kambo bird leaned out over the fronds and saw him. Like a flash, the beak darted down and pierced the boy. With a twist of its beak, the bird gutted the boy and the empty carcass fell to the ground by the tree.

  ‘He did not know how to climb,’ said Jeki, and threw the body behind the nearest hut. ‘Now you shall try!’ he ordered, pointing to the next oldest. Trembling with fear, not daring to disobey, the second boy began the ascent. Soon he too lay behind the hut. So it went for all of Njambe’s children, all those who had beaten Jeki and whose mothers were preferred to Ngrijo.

  ‘I must do it,’ said Jeki, when he had laid the last on the great heap behind the huts. He dripped a bit of a magic potion he had at the trunk of the tree, and then slipped the loop around his waist and began the climb. As he went, he tapped Ngalo against the trunk each time he lifted the strap.

  The Kambo bird looked down over the fronds and saw yet another child climbing the trunk. It stretched out its neck and beak, and then thought. The tapping against the tree-trunk bothered it. This child was not like the others. It stirred uneasily on its nest.

  Jeki reached the top, just below the canopy of fronds. The bunches of palm nuts hung thick and spiky about him. He unsheathed his little axe, a tool that had been born with him, and swung it at the first bunch. Shhk! The stem was cut cleanly through and the bunch fell all the way down to the ground where it burst, scattering palm nuts across the courtyard and over the village. With only a few more such blows, Jeki harvested the abundant crop, and below him the palm nuts filled the courtyard and almost covered some of the houses.

  ‘I must get the bird as well,’ Jeki said to himself, and he scrambled up through the fronds until he was perched on top of the tree. But the Kambo bird had taken flight as soon as he laid his hands on the fronds. It soared above him in the sky. But it was not safe there. Jeki pulled from his pouch a piece of vine, one of the magical implements that had appeared at his birth. He stretched it and whirled it about, then threw it high into the sky. It whistled through the air, following the Kambo bird as it soared on the winds, and then it caught the bird and pinioned its wings so that the bird plummeted through the air. The vine caught the beak and bound it tightly against the bird’s breast. It twisted itself around the talons and pressed them into the bird’s feathers. The bird fell, trussed up, onto the fronds at the peak of the tree, in front of Jeki. With his foot, Jeki pushed it off the tree and it fell to the ground far below, landing on a pile of palm nuts. Then Jeki let himself down through the fronds, slipped into the climbing-rope, and made his way down the trunk.

  At the bottom, he took the bird, covered with palm oil from the nuts it had crushed in its fall, and set fire to it. It burned quickly to cinders, and Jeki ate some of the ashes and put the rest in his pouch with his other magical instruments. Then he turned to the compound entrance. Njambe had come from the village as soon as the palm nuts began to fly about, scattered by the fall of the bunches. He found his home awash with palm nuts. He had seen the corpses of his children piled behind a hut. He found the last token of his power being consumed by his strange offspring. He fell down, weakened and faint.

  Jeki put his father into his hut, on a bed, and then went into the forest. There he gathered certain herbs and leaves and roots and prepared them as he knew how. He returned to the compound and laid the bodies of his brothers out in a row. One by one he dosed the bodies with the compound he had prepared, and one by one they were restored: the parts that the Kambo bird had swallowed reappeared, the hearts began to beat, the eyes opened, and the children rose up.

  With the failure of this last attempt, Njambe ceased trying to kill his son, and the brothers, although they still disliked a child they considered a monster, also abandoned their attempts to destroy him. But a current of malice and envy still ran through all their conversations with him, and they always sought ways to belittle him despite his manifest powers. Njambe gave them fuel one day, when he revealed that Jeki was actually Ngrijo’s second-born child, and that the first, a daughter, had been lost to a spirit that took the form of a chimpanzee.

  ‘Ah, the second-born!’ said the oldest son when he next greeted Jeki by the waterfront. Jeki was puzzled but said nothing until each of the other children in turn greeted him with the same words. Then he went to his mother.

  ‘Mother, the children have been calling me the second-born. What do they mean by this? I am the only child in your hut, I am the only child to care for you.’

  ‘I cannot tell you what they mean. It is surely some trick. Disregard them.’

  Jeki was not satisfied with this answer. He went to his father, who now spent his days sitting in his compound watching the activities of his wives and many sons.

  ‘My father,’ Jeki greeted him. ‘The other sons have been calling me the second-born, yet I am the only child in my mother’s house. What is the reason for this?’

  ‘You do not know everything,’ replied Njambe, and his eyes gleamed. ‘You do not know why your mother’s hut stands at the water’s edge, away from the compound. You do not know what happened before I married my other wives. You are indeed still a child.’

  ‘But you know what happened,’ said Jeki, correctly guessing that his father wished to be prompted.

  ‘Indeed. Ngrijo bore a child, a daughter, and she would take her to the fields. There, a chimpanzee came down from the trees and cared for her daughter. One day, the chimpanzee took her daughter away. We searched for her, but we could not find her. The chimpanzee was a bedimo, a spirit, and it took your sister to the land of the spirits. Perhaps she is still alive there.’

  Jeki understood the hint. ‘Then I must go and look for her,’ he declared. ‘If she lives, she must be restored to her family.’

  ‘This task may be beyond even your powers,’ muttered Njambe, and turned away.

  Jeki returned to his mother’s hut and sorted through his amulets and charms and powders and implements. His mother asked what he was doing, and he explained. For once she did not protest at this adventure but sat watching him make his preparations. Finally, Ngalo said that he was ready.

  Jeki walked away from the waters into the heart of the forest, where the trees grew huge and all was silent about him in the sunless dark. He followed a path out of the village, and then, guided by Ngalo, followed other paths into the woods. At last he came to a clearing: nine paths led out of it.

  ‘Which is the right one?’ he asked, and Ngalo answered, ‘You must sort them.’

  Jeki waved a vine, and it twined around four paths to the left. He waved another vine and it twined around four paths to the right. One path lay before him. He stepped forward, and Ngalo spoke. ‘Do you enter the world of the bedimo as you would visit another village? Turn around.’

  Jeki turned around, and there before him was a great shining metal gate. He pushed, and it opened. Beyond, all was dark.

  ‘Before you enter, you must protect yourself,’ said Ngalo. ‘Living humans do not see spirits, but they may smell them. You must make yourself invisible and give yourself the smell of the spirits.’

  Jeki chose the right powder a
nd swallowed a little bit. He became invisible. He rubbed himself with a special gum and his body took on the smell of the spirits. Then he stepped through the gate and onto the path that led before him.

  He entered a strange dark land in which paths led over ground on which no grass or trees grew. Ngalo pointed him onto the right paths and he followed them until he began to see spirit dwellings on either side of the path. Several times he encountered spirits walking along the paths in the other direction, and each time they nodded to him in greeting and he wondered why they should greet him. He was not like them, he was not a spirit. He was a living human. How could they mistake him for a spirit? But when he voiced these thoughts Ngalo reminded him that he had taken the smell of a spirit.

  He came to a cluster of huts. Ngalo pointed him to one of them, indicating that his sister was inside. He entered. He saw not one girl alone, but a dozen, all virtually the same: young, attractive, cheerful, well dressed.

  ‘Which of them is my sister Engome?’ he wondered, and Ngalo helped him with a strategy.

  ‘I have come to claim my sister,’ announced Jeki, and the girls lined up in front of him.

  ‘Choose me,’ said each of them, their voices musical and tinkling.

  ‘Only one of you is my sister,’ answered Jeki. ‘I do not know where the others have come from.’ He waved an antelope’s horn at them, and a bee flew from the horn and buzzed about the room. Eventually it settled on the elaborate coiffure of the girl fourth from the left, and Jeki stepped forward.

  ‘You are my sister Engome,’ he said. ‘You are the daughter of Njambe Inono and Ngrijo, and you were taken from them by a bedimo in the form of a chimpanzee. Do you wish to return to the land of humans with me?’

  ‘I am your sister,’ agreed Engome, ‘and I wish to return. Take me with you.’

  Jeki gave his sister the gum with which to rub her body, and some of the powder which made her invisible. Then they left the hut and followed the paths back to the great metal gate that shut off the spirit world. As they passed the gate, it rattled shut. Then they skipped down the forest paths back to the village.

  There is no end to the stories about Jeki la Njambe and his deeds. He had countless other adventures, which can be heard and read in other places.

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  THE BAMUN KINGDOM OF CAMEROON

  The kingdom of Bamun (or Bamum), in south-central Cameroon, can perhaps be seen as typical of a number of the small polities established in the grassland areas. In these kingdoms, the ruling dynasty often claims a northern origin and an implicit connection to the nineteenth-century conquest of much of northern Cameroon (especially the province of Adamawa) by Muslim Fulani expanding their territory from Sokoto in northern Nigeria. Bamun is noteworthy in one regard: the invention of a local writing system by Sultan Njoya, the seventeenth ruler, at the beginning of the twentieth century. This retelling is principally based upon the history of the kingdom prepared by Njoya and translated into French in the 1950s.

  A trader came from Egypt to Bornu and married a local woman named Nejibu. She gave him three daughters, of whom the third had three sons. Mbuon, the eldest of the sons, led his brothers in migrations to the south and then in successful wars of conquest, and so Mbuon became king of the Mbuenkim.

  After a time, their northern kinsmen, descended from the first two daughters of Nejibu, sent messengers to find the travellers and to bring news back. To show how far away they had gone, the messengers tried to bring back a fish which they caught fresh on the day of their departure. But the fish had decayed so much it had to be abandoned before they got back. This gave rise to two names for this group: the Tikar, or distant ones, or the Baful, which means rotten.

  The Fon Rifum, king of the Mbuenkim, had three sons. Each of them went some distance from their father’s palace and established a fortified community, surrounded by a moat. When the father heard of this, he sent messengers to summon the sons to return. Instead, the three brothers collected all their followers and departed. When they came to a river, Nshare, the first brother, persuaded his siblings to let him cross first. But after his own people had crossed to the far bank, he destroyed the boat so his brothers could not follow; instead, one brother went upstream and the other downstream.

  Nshare continued on his way, conquering the peoples he found on his path and settling at last at Djimon. From Djimon, his line later conquered Foumban, and made that town their capital, and it was there that his descendant Njoya ruled. While in Djimon, Nshare decided that he must get one of the wardance costumes of his father, and so he returned in secret to Bankim, his father’s capital. There he tried to steal a costume from the storehouse where they were kept, but a guard surprised him and killed him. Since his companions had no means to carry his body back to Djimon, they cut off Nshare’s head and brought it back with them. It was preserved in the palace, and the hair taken to the site of the royal graveyard.

  FROM THE FOREST TO THE NIGER

  The Atlantic coast along the Bight of Benin (from Cameroon west to Ghana) used to be called the Slave Coast, in contrast to the Gold and Ivory Coasts further west because the dense populations near the Niger river as it reaches the sea provided a rich source for the Atlantic slave-trade. East of the river lived the many disunited Igbo-speaking peoples; on the west were the Yoruba whose city-states rose at times through conquest to the status of empire (the best known is Oyo, which flourished in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries). North of the Igbo, along the Benue river, were numerous other peoples. This region is generally considered the cradle of the Niger–Congo language family, from which peoples emigrated east and west towards other lands. This area is also the home of yam-culture, and archaeology shows that a pattern of semi-urban settlement is of considerable antiquity. Until the arrival of the Europeans along the Atlantic coast, the trade routes lay to the north, through the territories of the Hausa and the Kanuri to the Sahara.

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  THE IGBO

  The Igbo peoples offer tremendous variety in social and political systems. They were never unified by conquest and alliance; the suggestion of historians is that their cultural unity derived from a respect for shared institutions such as oracles (Eri and Aro-Chukwu). Inhabiting areas from the foothills of the mountains of Cameroon to the delta of the Niger, their practices and livelihoods varied tremendously. With colonization, the Igbo took to education as a means of advancement, and include writers such as Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta and Flora Nwapa among their stars. The following stories offer a representative image of Igbo political and religious traditions, but readers should not assume that these stories are valid for all Igbo. The first story is retold from a version published in 1932; the others are taken from more recent sources.

  ALE

  Ale is the mother of the earth. She gave her body to make the earth, and good things come from her. At the beginning of things, the bird Ogbughu the hornbill lost its mother; the mother died, and the hornbill could find no place to bury her. So the hornbill buried its mother in its head, and since that time the head is marked by a great outgrowth. The hornbill went flying over the waters that were there, and finally saw two great beings, a man and a woman, coupling in the water and moving actively. As they moved, land appeared from the water, and the woman cried out, ‘This is the land, in which those who die should be buried.’ And when she and the man had finished their business, Ale spread herself over the land and became one with it. This is why crops come from the land, and why humans return to earth when they die.

  ERI AND THE CITY OF NRI

  Chukwu, who is also known as Chi, created all. At the start of things, he let the man Eri down from heaven on a rope, and Eri alighted on an anthill which rose above the soggy ground of the plain. Eri complained to Chukwu, and they summoned a blacksmith and with his bellows and forge the blacksmith dried out the land so that Eri could walk upon it.

  Eri married and had children. Food was scarce, and he asked Chukwu to provide for them. Chukwu told him he should sacrifice his
son and daughter and bury them. Chukwu said that he would send down a person to perform the ichi scarification upon them, so they would be recognized.

  Very unhappily, Eri buried his son and his daughter. Then he watered their graves, as Chukwu had instructed. After three weeks, the yam grew from his son’s grave and the cocoyam from his daughter’s grave. It was after eating the cocoyam that Eri fell asleep for the first time. Chukwu told Eri that he should share this food with other peoples, but Eri was reluctant, for the yams had cost him two children. But in exchange, Chukwu created the eze title and appointed Eri’s people to grant and confirm it, and also gave the people of Eri the function of purification of the land from various defilements.

  Eri later sacrificed a slave man and woman, and buried their bodies; from these came the palm oil and the coconut. Some say that he sacrificed the slaves first, before he sacrificed his children, hoping thus to deceive Chukwu, and that is the reason Chukwu determined the ichi scar-marking to identify the children of Eri.

  Some time later, four guests came to visit Eri, each bearing a basket. They did not tell him their names. According to custom, he fed them and gave them a place to sleep. But in the night, he let a rat loose by the baskets and then listened. The rat went to the first basket and began to gnaw. One of the visitors woke, listened, and then called out, ‘Èke! Èke! A rat has entered your basket.’ Èke awoke and chased the rat away. The rat then went to the second basket, and Èke, hearing, called out, ‘Oyè! Oyè! A rat is at your basket.’ So Oyè awoke and moved his basket. Then the rat went to a third basket, and Oyè called out a warning, ‘Afo! Afo! A rat is gnawing your basket.’ Afo awoke and chased the rat away. Then the rat went to the fourth basket, and when it began to gnaw Afo called, ‘Nkwo! Nkwo! A rat is trying to get into your basket.’ So Nkwo awoke and chased the rat away.

  In the morning Eri was able to greet his guests by their names, and so they agreed to stay with him. They were four divinities, and they have given their names to the four days of the Igbo week.