Three fables of the Kanuri of Bornu, the old kingdom on the western shore of Lake Chad. A cat asks a hen to be her friend, and invites her to set out for a neighbouring town at cock-crow — but the hen's chick, sent to ask the hour, has open ears, and comes home with the cat's own words: "for what should eat her?" A toad and a rat dispute which of them can do more, and the rat learns why the toad passes through the great men untouched while he himself must keep to his hole. And in the beginning, when no beast of the forest had any sense at all, the weasel finds the bag that holds all the sense in the world, lifts it with a pigeon's advice, and shares it out only a little at a time.
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 III, Fables Nos. 1, 8 and 10, 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: the book's fables number twelve; three are read here. The other nine were read in full and left out under this shelf's standing rule that tales turning on depicted violence are excluded rather than softened: No. 2, "A Stork and Toads", in which the stork swallows the toads one by one; No. 3, "A Weasel and His Wife", a chain of beasts swallowing and killing in turn; No. 4, "A Jackal and a Hyena", whose monkeys are drowned and stoned in a famine; No. 5, "The Weasel and the Hyena", which ends with a torn-out tail and an ear torn off and eaten; No. 6, "A Fowl and an Elephant", whose closing coda records a fowl beaten till it cries to frighten elephants from a farm; No. 7, "A Cock and an Elephant", a war of the birds and the beasts; No. 9, "The Lion and the Wild Dog", in which a hunter's poisoned arrow wounds the lion; No. 11, "What Employment Our Lord Gave to Insects", in which the little red ants kill the merchant who refused their pay; and No. 12, "A Fable about Serpents", in which a serpent's bite kills a man in the dark. The book's opening story (Section II, No. 1, "A Story about Friendship") remains held for a separate ruling and is not read here. This Part 2 completes the shelf's reading of the book's tales and fables, apart from that one held story.
Narrated by Violetta. Music: opening and closing theme, "Convergence_at_Dusk", with the same theme between the fables.
Chapters:
00:00 Opening theme
01:23 A Hen and a Cat
06:45 The Toad and the Rat
13:09 How Sense Was Distributed
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