Four tales of Somba the hare and Katere the jackal from the Mossi country of the Volta plateau, in what is today Burkina Faso. Somba courts Njaka's daughter with three impossible bride-gifts — a wild buffalo's milk, a panther's skin and an elephant's tooth — and is refused all the same. He rides to the great market at Wagadugu on Katere's back, saddle, bridle and all. He has a whole field cleared, sown, weeded and harvested without raising a hand to the work. And in the last tale a partnership breaks up over stolen honey, which is why the hare has only a stump of a tail to this day.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Source: Leo Frobenius, "Atlantis: Tales from the West Sudan" (Erzählungen aus dem Westsudan), Atlantis Vol. VIII (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1922), Chapter VIII, "Tales of the Mossi" — Tales 99, 100, 105 and 106, read in book order in a fresh English translation from the German made for this episode. Public-domain text; the reading follows the Internet Archive copy of the 1922 edition.
Notes on the reading: the animal names are the book's own, glossed as its appendix gives them — Somba the hare, Katere the jackal, Uobogo the elephant, Jugumde the camel, Baga the dog, Njaka the small antelope, Padere the wild buffalo, Abaga the panther. Wagadugu is modern Ouagadougou. One sentence is kept exactly at the source's weight: the second tale closes by remarking that in old times a chicken sacrifice was made where Katere's tracks were seen on the market-place, a custom the book itself notes had already fallen out of use.
Six other tales of the same chapter were read in full and left out under this shelf's standing rule that stories turning on depicted violence are excluded rather than softened: No. 98 (Somba kills and cooks children entrusted to him), No. 101 (a goat's legs torn off and eaten), No. 102 (children found dead; the panther kills the antelope), No. 103 (the thief beaten to death), No. 104 (the elephant dies with his heart cut), and No. 109 (the lion mutilated). This Part 1 is a first selection from the chapter, not the complete Mossi collection; more of the chapter remains for later parts.
Narrated by Bruno. Music: opening and closing theme, "Winter_Palace_Rhapsody_2".
Chapters:
00:00 Opening theme
01:34 Njaka's Daughter and Somba
10:55 Katere, Somba's Riding Horse
14:10 Somba, Uobogo and Jugumde
21:06 Somba, Katere and Baga
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