Three tales of the Temne people of Sierra Leone, in West Africa, told at the mission school at Rotifunk, in the Protectorate, collected by Florence Cronise, and published with Henry Ward in their "Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider and the Other Beef" in 1903. The tales were printed in the Krio speech of the country; they are told here in a fresh rendering in plain English, faithful to every event, speech and turn of the tales as the tellers told them.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
A sick Mr. Turtle, calling at Mr. Leopard's door, lets slip that if Leopard were home he would ride him like a horse — and by a rope, a stick, and a pretended sickness, the boast comes true upon the road. Mr. Spider, who begrudges his wife and children their share of the rice, feigns sickness, feigns death, and is buried beside his farm-house, so that every night for a week he can rise and cook himself a stolen supper — until the seer who looks at the ground sets a girl of wax in the corner of the house, and the girl will not answer. And when every animal in the country lays down its horns and the crown is promised to whoever can blow them all without once leaving off, Spider fails, and Elephant fails, and the smallest trickster of them all finds a way to rest without ever seeming to stop.
Two of the tales close as the tellers closed them, in a single clause each: in the first, Leopard's flogging of Turtle is the coda that explains the marks on Turtle's back to this day; in the second, the townspeople's beating of the exposed Spider is the coda that explains why Spider is flat to this day.
Florence M. Cronise & Henry W. Ward, "Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider and the Other Beef: West African Folk Tales" (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Lim.; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1903).
Narrated by Violetta. Music: instrumental bed, "Desert Cello Rhapsody."
Chapters:
00:56 Mr. Turtle Makes a Riding-Horse of Mr. Leopard
03:36 Spider Discovers the Wax Girl
09:25 Cunning Rabbit Becomes a King
Sierra Leone folk tales · Temne folk tales · West African folk tales · Florence Cronise · trickster tales · African folklore · world folk tales · free audiobook
