Four more 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 great rain has put out every fire in the world, and the one fire left burns at a woman's house — but no creature may take a coal who has not first wrestled her little child, Goro, and beaten her; Deer, Elephant, Leopard, Cat, Spider and Cunning Rabbit all try, and the wonder is who finally wins the fire, and how. Then come two tales of twins: a riddle of three twins, in which a hog is shot through a hill and cooked before it is carried home, left for you to settle; and the fourfold twin brothers who set out to find their long-lost father, and of whom each does his own part — the finding, the joining of the bones, the giving of the body, and the giving of life. And last, from far up in the Mende country, the wonder of the old man who was left in a little bush house with mortars for his hands and feet, and was never seen again — because he had turned elephant.
Three of the tales are told as the tellers told them, with their passage notes declared: in "Goro," the wrestling is a formal contest every animal enters of its own will, and its falls are the tall aetiologies of the tale — Leopard's cut upon a stone and Spider's broken foot are one clause each; in "The Three Twins," the shooting of the hog through the hill is one clause in the riddle's premise, and no person is harmed; and "An Old Man Turns Elephant" rests on its premise, that the old man's companions, tired of caring for him, leave him in the bush hut where the change comes upon him — no harm is enacted or described.
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 Madame de Pamplemousse. Music: instrumental bed, "Tampa Across the Water."
Chapters:
00:54 Goro, the Wonderful Wrestler
09:46 The Three Twins
11:02 Which Twin Restored His Father to Life?
14:38 An Old Man Turns Elephant
Sierra Leone folk tales · Temne folk tales · West African folk tales · Florence Cronise · trickster tales · African folklore · world folk tales · free audiobook
