Part Two continues the shelf of the Kagaba — the Kogi people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in the north of Colombia — with three short texts from the recordings of the German ethnologist Konrad Theodor Preuss, printed with his German translations in the journal Anthropos between 1921 and 1927. Two were told by the Kagaba priest Miguel Nolavita of Palomino. The English you hear is a fresh rendering of Preuss's German, made for this shelf.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
In the first text, the younger brothers Kasifigui, Ulabafigui and Tairona bring the stone seikui — axe and knife in one — to Priest Namsiku: a red stone axe for the dry season and a green one for the rain, carried in the hand at the dances that call the seasons forth; and the telling closes in later days, when Don Carmen Campo brings iron tools instead. In the second, the termite mounds come up from the savanna by the sea and build only so far into the mountains and no farther, and the last of them, high in the Sierra, may not enter the huts at all. The part closes at Noavaka with the chengi shell — the shell that is handed round at the close of the salt dance — which Priest Aluafuiko and the younger brother Matuna brought from the friends at Taganga, because it would be needed at the last song and dance, and at the baptism.
Of the texts screened in book order for this part, three are told here. Set aside by name under the house rule — each because its plot turns on depicted killing or cruelty — are Namsiku's Dealings with the Younger Brothers Kasifigui, Duguinaui the Mask-Maker, the Misdeed and Punishment of Sekuisvutsi, and Grandmother Munkula, Victor over Zuimakane. What otherwise remains in the corpus is songs, prayers and invocations, which are not tales and are not counted; with this part, the narrative texts of Preuss's Kagaba corpus that can be told under the house rule have all been told, in Parts One and Two together. No more than that is claimed.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:48 The Stone Axe
3:17 The Termite Ants
4:30 The Chengi Shell
Konrad Theodor Preuss, Kagaba texts from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Anthropos XVI/XVII–XX (1921–1927) — public domain. Fresh English translation made for KacheliTV.
Narrated by Scratch. Music: opening and closing theme, "Convergence at Dusk" — the same theme is also heard as a short separator between the stories; the tales themselves are read dry.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
Colombian folk tales · Kogi Kagaba myths · Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta · Konrad Theodor Preuss · South American folk tales · etiological tales · world folk tales · free audiobook
