Three stories of the Kanuri of Bornu, the old kingdom on the western shore of Lake Chad. A learned priest who knows every book refuses to take his one friend — a heathen who keeps none of the rules — with him to Mecca, and learns at the mosque gate which of the two our Lord counts a heathen. A Servant of God understands the speech of every beast, bird and rat in the house, until his wife makes him tell her why he laughs. And a cunning girl, set to twine thread for two rival suitors racing to sew a dress, settles the contest — and chooses her own husband — by the length of a thread.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Source: S. W. Koelle, "African Native Literature, or Proverbs, Tales, Fables, & Historical Fragments in the Kanuri or Bornu Language" (London: Church Missionary House, 1854) — Section II, Stories Nos. 2, 3 and 5, read in book order. Koelle wrote the tales down word for word from Bornu tellers and printed them in Kanuri with his own English translation; this reading is a fresh English rendering of that printed translation, made for this episode. Public-domain text; the reading follows the Internet Archive copy of the 1854 edition.
Notes on the reading: "heathen" is the tellers' own word in these stories — the word the first tale itself turns inside out — and is kept as they used it. The second story closes with the teller's own moral about secrets, kept whole as recorded. One further story of the same section was read in full and left out under this shelf's standing rule that stories turning on depicted violence are excluded rather than softened: No. 4, "An Old Man Who Had Six Sons", in which four sons die in turn — in battle, by hanging, by murder and by a robber's killing. The book's opening story, No. 1, "A Story about Friendship", is held for a separate ruling and is not read here. This Part 1 is a first selection from the book, not the complete Kanuri collection; the book's twelve fables remain for later parts.
Narrated by Mira. Music: opening and closing theme, "Three_Pairs_of_Yellow_Eyes".
Chapters:
00:00 Opening theme
01:32 A Priest Who Had a Heathen Friend
16:14 A Servant of God
21:29 A Cunning Girl
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