Four tales of the Nyanja-speaking peoples of British Central Africa, the country about Lake Nyasa that is Malawi today, gathered by R. Sutherland Rattray during his years at Blantyre and in Central Angoniland and published in his "Some Folk-Lore Stories and Songs in Chinyanja" in London in 1907 — fresh English renderings made for this episode from Rattray's book, in which each tale is printed in Chinyanja with his own English beside it.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
A father-in-law demands that his son-in-law guard the maize with arrows, and the young man answers with a question no court can get past: how do you wound the winds? A tortoise challenges an antelope to a race, and is somehow always already in front. A baboon invites a tortoise up a tree to drink beer, and the tortoise answers with a beer pot set in the middle of a burned patch and a cup that must never be touched with dirty hands. And a second tortoise, too slow to hoe and unable to fell a tree, finds a friend whose help wins him his place — and repays the debt by speaking, hidden, from a grave.
Declared passage notes, exactly as the tales tell them: in "The Chief of the Kuka and His Son-in-Law," a guinea-fowl is caught in a falling-trap and cooked, told in a clause and not depicted; the case is a comedy of two impossible demands, wounding the wind and browning gravy before a fire. In "The Tortoise and the Baboon," the beer is the tales' own social world, named as told. In "The Tortoise and the Lemur," a mourning and the election of a new chief at a grave form the tale's frame, told in the tale's own belief world.
R. Sutherland Rattray (1881–1938), "Some Folk-Lore Stories and Songs in Chinyanja, with English Translation and Notes" (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1907), Part II, Nos. XV, XVI, XXII and XXIII. These are tales of the Nyanja-speaking peoples, billed by their people and their collector — not the whole of Malawi. Five of the book's ten folk tales are excluded by name under this shelf's register, and one is held for a ruling; no completeness is claimed.
Narrated by Bruno. Music: instrumental bed, "The Spring Remembers."
Chapters:
01:18 The Chief of the Kuka and His Son-in-Law
05:00 The Tortoise and the Antelope
06:00 The Tortoise and the Baboon
07:17 The Tortoise and the Lemur
Malawi folk tales · Chinyanja folk tales · Chewa folklore · African folk tales · R. S. Rattray · world folk tales · free audiobook
