African Myths of Origin (Penguin Classics) Page 3
Against these grim external comparisons, one can set a more local picture of amazing progress in the past century. Julius Nyerere, father of Tanzanian independence, titled one of his works We Must Walk While They Run, referring to the great differential of means between the industrialized world and his own country, best known for its game parks. But the walk has been steady, despite the obstacles (which often include the new governments). The peoples of Africa are integrating with the modern world, while striving to balance the new with that part of the old which defines their identity. They do not wish to lose the human traits which characterize so much of their community life, and which ensure (or used to) that every individual exists in a network of relationships of support and obligations which gives him or her a meaningful place in the world. To that end, this book is an attempt to give outsiders some keys to the many worlds of African cultures.
A Note on the Text
There is no uniform set of sources from which to develop a collection of African myths. Although there have been numerous anthologies, collections and studies (those I found most useful are listed in the notes at the end of the book), none offers the scope and focus which are the purpose of this book: the traditions of origins of a significant number of groups across the continent, including kingdoms and stateless peoples. Consequently the nature of the sources varies tremendously.
The stories all come from published sources. I have retold them in my own words, aiming at a clear and engaging English narrative which gives the content and details that seem significant, but is not to be confused with an original source. For each narrative, I have consulted as many variants as I could find, in languages I could read, and have used them all in the retelling. I have not tried to reproduce an ‘original’ text or narrative style, although there may be some variation due to my understanding of the originals. In most cases, the versions I located were not ‘original’, reliable transcriptions with accompanying information on the circumstances of recording, but narratives assembled by missionaries, visitors and scholars, each reproduced in its own way, often with some expurgation or other form of transformation.
In some cases, particularly for the kingdoms of the Sahel, I have been able to use documents produced by Africans, in Arabic or in other languages, and translated by scholars such as H. R. Palmer (Sudanese Memoirs; see notes to Chapter 50) or O. Houdas (Tarikh es-Soudan; see notes to Chapter 61). This category would include more modern material: Sir Apolo Kaggwa’s history of the kings of Buganda is invaluable as a written source created around 1900 by a member of the royal court; and similar texts were prepared by Sultan Njoya of Bamun, or Mwata Kazembe XIV of the Lunda. There is also valuable modern scholarship: Christopher Ofigbo’s Ropes of Sand (see notes to Chapter 44) is an invaluable study of Igbo historical traditions, and guided my own research.
Source(s) used in the retelling and suggestions for further reading are given in Sources and Further Reading at the end of the book.
List of Maps
1. Peoples and states across the continent
2. Peoples and states of eastern Africa
3. Peoples, states and cities of western Africa
PART I
SOME GENERAL THEMES
STORIES ABOUT HUNTERS
The original human lifestyle is foraging mixed with hunting. Humans have adapted to it, they are quite successful at it, and they find it satisfying enough so that the practice has persisted into the modern era, although in ever more isolated regions. In Africa, the pressures of population growth, agriculture and development have forced the few full-time hunting hands that remain into marginal territories which in many cases are nowhere near as hospitable as their earlier habitats.
Africa offers a number of well-known hunting-gathering groups: the San peoples of southern Africa (once known as ‘Bushmen’), the Pygmy groups of the equatorial forest zones, and, along the savannahs of the Sahel, various now-vanishing groups such as the Sorko and the Nemadi. Other less-well-known groups are scattered across the continent. It would be wrong to think of these groups as representing the ancestors of humanity, although they may have kept more closely to our ancestors’ methods of subsistence. Just as much as any citydweller of London or Tokyo, the surviving hunter-gatherer bands are the heirs of human evolution and development, and they have adapted their culture and practices to their changing environments in dynamic fashion.
For human groups to subsist entirely on the produce of the natural world requires a very low density of habitation (although in relatively fertile areas such as the central African forests or the regions of the great lakes the carrying capacity of the land may be much higher). With the higher population density allowed by agriculture, hunting becomes a subsidiary activity performed by individuals or groups who may or may not be descended from separate hunting populations absorbed by the larger mass of settled agriculturalists. While in southern Africa the San groups were forced to flee from intruders, in central Africa many Pygmy groups exist in a symbiotic relationship with their larger neighbours, providing hunting services in exchange for the product of plantations (especially bananas). Many of the settled groups such as the Mongo clearly survive with a mixture of hunting and agriculture of some form. In much of west Africa, however, the hunting groups have entirely lost their ethnic identities; instead, we find hunting associations or brotherhoods, set somewhat apart from the majority groups of the culture. In some cases these hunting associations helped to form the nucleus of kingdoms (see the story of Biton Kulibali, in Chapter 65).
Hunting tends to be a male activity; foraging and the collection of vegetable foods is the female specialization. It is tempting to see some of the current divisions of labour practices in Africa, where women keep gardens or mind fields, while men engage in heavy group work such as land-clearing and the like, as a reflection of this inherited pattern. Hunting is often a group activity which serves to bond men together, but it is equally often now a solitary activity. Among settled groups the hunter is seen as an adventurer, bold and brave, daring to confront the perils of the world outside the sphere of human order (not all of the perils are physical). The hunter is also dangerous because he deals in death and provides an entry into the human community for the forces of chaos which threaten the fragile stability of society. The members of specialized hunting groups are reputed to possess unparalleled knowledge of the natural world, in part because of their skilful exploitation of a far greater variety of natural resources than is common among settled populations. The hunter-gatherer’s detailed knowledge of the environment translates easily into the occupation of healer and diviner, and in many cases hunters have turned to such practices when hunting itself became impossible.
Because of these deep cultural associations and beliefs, hunters count as mythical figures across Africa, and they occupy a central place in the traditional lore of almost all the peoples of the continent. This section offers a selection of stories intended to illustrate the range of practices: the first two chapters present stories from hunting-gathering peoples (the San of the southern plains and the Pygmy groups of the forests); the third represents a hunting group that is now part of a larger, sedentary society (the Songhay-speaking Sorko of the Niger river); Chapter 4 gives several version of the foundation myth of hunting associations from Mali, and Chapters 5 to 7 offer representative stories showing the figure of the hunter in west Africa. These last stories are very widespread across the cultures of west Africa, and it would be problematic to assign any definite ethnic or linguistic origin to them. Readers will also note the occurrence of hunters in many of the stories given in Part II (for example, Chapters 33, 55, 61, 65).
1
THE SAN PEOPLES OF SOUTHERN AFRICA
Around the edges of the Kalahari desert in the modern states of South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, a large and diverse number of hunting groups have survived into recent times with something of their former culture and organization. They have endured ecological competition from encroaching farmers, occasio
nal attempts at outright extermination by groups who considered them subhuman, and the upheavals of modernization, and clearly few still live as did their ancestors of the relatively recent past. But some have survived well enough to support several generations of anthropologists engaged in studying them, and so they are well documented.
The San peoples, as they are called in preference to the derogatory ‘Bushmen’, generally subsisted in small, nomadic, family-based groups, gathering together only in certain seasons and under certain conditions of abundant food. Typically, men wandered further from the camp while hunting; women and children remained the core of the group. Modern analysis suggests that although hunting seems to have been the more prestigious activity, the contribution of women’s foraging actually provided the bulk of the groups’ food supply.
The San languages belong to the Khoi-San family, a very diverse group marked by the use of clicks, that was once spread across southern Africa (in the following stories, the signs ‘’ and ‘=’ indicate different click sounds). Despite the very small populations involved, the surviving groups are fairly diverse linguistically and culturally. The stories of this chapter are taken from two groups: the first three were collected in the mid-nineteenth century from the Maluti group near the Cape of Good Hope, which has now disappeared. The last two were collected some twenty years ago among the Juhoan groups of the Kalahari desert of Botswana. The stories deal with a time before people, animals and other things had become set in their final shape, and in some cases explain how that process occurred.
THE BATTLES OF KHAGGEN
Khaggen, whose name means Mantis, was the first person. He brought everything else into being: the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the animals. He had a family: his wife, his son Cogaz, a daughter, and other children as well. One day, after he had scolded his daughter, she ran away and went to live among the snakes. Their chief married her and she lived with them, but she did not eat their food.
Khaggen sent his son Cogaz to fetch the daughter; he gave his tooth to his son, to give him powers. Cogaz came to his sister, and his arrival made some of the snakes very angry at the intrusion of this human. But the chief told them to control their anger, and that it was all right if a person came to visit his sister. The sister prepared food for Cogaz, and then they both tied bundles of grass around their legs. They left the snakes’ camp. Some of the snakes followed and tried to bite them, but their fangs could not pierce the bundles of grass.
The chief of the snakes and some of his followers saw the attacks made on Cogaz and his people. They knew that there would be retribution, so they built themselves a platform and climbed on it. After the bad snakes returned to camp, a flood came down upon them and the waters rose very high on the mountainside. Many snakes were drowned, but the platform was high enough to save the chief of the snakes and his followers. Later Khaggen told them to stop being snakes and to become human. He struck each of them with his walking stick and they left their snake-skins on the ground and became humans.
Khaggen later sent Cogaz to rescue another woman who had been taken by giants with axes who were accustomed to kill women and pour out their blood. Cogaz took Khaggen’s tooth and succeeded in getting the woman, and they started on their way back. Khaggen was worried and sent out a bird to bring news, but the first two birds he sent brought no news back; it was only the third bird, a black and white one, that reported that Cogaz was coming and that the giants were following him. When the giants attacked Cogaz, he used Khaggen’s tooth and it made him a refuge built very high up, so he was safe from the giants. From this vantage, he would shoot poisoned arrows at the giants, so that some of them died. Then he played his flute so that they fell asleep. Khaggen decided that the giants were bad, and so he cut his sandals and his hunting bag into pieces and turned the leather fragments into wild dogs and sent them to chase the giants away.
Another time, Khaggen sent Cogaz out for wood with which to make bows. While Cogaz was alone he was captured by the baboons. When they learned he was getting wood to make bows, they decided that Khaggen planned to kill them, so they killed Cogaz and placed his body in a tree and danced around it, singing a song. Khaggen knew what was happening through his charms, so he went to the place of the baboons and found them dancing and singing. The song they sang was abusive of Khaggen, saying he only thought he was clever, but when they saw Khaggen approaching they changed the words. But Khaggen heard a little baboon child singing the original words, and he told them all to keep singing as they had done before, so they did. While they were singing, Khaggen took pegs from his bag and went behind each baboon and drove a peg into its behind, and then sent them to live in the mountains and eat baboon food. Then Khaggen brought down the body of Cogaz and with his magic he brought it back to life.
Later, Khaggen met an eagle collecting honey from a hive on a cliffside and asked the eagle for some. The eagle gave him a honeycomb and then told him he might have what was left on the rocks, but when Khaggen climbed up to lick the remaining honey he found that he was stuck and could not come down. He sent a message to his son Cogaz, asking advice, and Cogaz advised him to cause water to flow down the cliffside and to come down with the water. He tried it, and found he could do it, so he went up and down the cliff three times in the water. But while he was doing this the eagle came and tried to kill him, throwing spears at him, but the spears passed on either side or below Khaggen. Then Khaggen caused hail to fall down and kill the eagle. He returned home and told his son Cogaz what had happened with the eagle, and Cogaz warned him that these continual fights would lead eventually to trouble. But this was not the end of the adventures of Khaggen. He killed a woman who would throw men in a fire and eat them, and he killed a creature in the water that would drag people below by the feet, and yet others again.
KHAGGEN CREATES AN ELAND
Kwammanga, who was the son-in-law of Khaggen, threw away an old part of a sandal, which Khaggen picked up. He took it to a secluded place on the riverbank among the reeds, and placed it in the water. Every day he would come to the scrap of leather, the old shoe-piece, and rub it with honey. Quickly it stopped being a piece of a shoe and became an eland. But it was still very small. He would call out ‘Kwammanga’s shoe-piece’ when he arrived, and the eland would come to him. This went on for some time; Khaggen would go and find honey and then take it to the eland and rub it on the eland’s sides. The family began to wonder what was going on.
When the eland was getting large, Khaggen decided to bring his grandson Ichneumon, the son of Kwammanga and his adopted daughter, with him. When they came to the place in the reeds where the eland lived, Khaggen told his grandson to go to sleep. But Ichneumon did not fall asleep; he only hid his head under his cloth. When he thought his grandson was asleep Khaggen called out, ‘Kwammanga’s shoe-piece’ and the eland came to him. It had grown very large. Khaggen rubbed it with honey and then it went away. Ichneumon sat up and called after it.
‘What is it?’ asked Khaggen. ‘Why are you calling?’
‘There was a person there,’ said Ichneumon.
‘No, that was not a person,’ said Khaggen. ‘It is just a piece of a shoe which your father threw away. It is nothing special.’
Ichneumon told his father Kwammanga about the creature he had seen in the reeds, and his father said they must go together to see it. When they came, the eland came to them. Kwammanga speared it and it fell down dead. He was butchering it when Khaggen arrived, bringing honey for the eland, and Khaggen scolded him for having killed the eland before he had been given permission. But Kwammanga said that they needed the food, the eland gave good meat, and Khaggen should simply gather firewood. But Khaggen continued to complain that they had killed the eland without consulting him; if they had brought him along and waited until he told them to kill the eland he would have felt much better.
He saw the eland’s gall, where they had thrown it away. Gall is foul-tasting, and people consider it useless. Khaggen decided he would do something with it. Whe
n he approached it, the gall threatened to burst and cover him all over, leaving him foul-smelling and rank. But Khaggen was determined. So he hid his shoe in his bag and followed the others as they were carrying the meat back to their camp. Then he said he had lost his shoe, the string had broken, and he must go back and look for it. Ichneumon said he had put it into his bag and was simply planning something tricky, and Kwammanga said that Khaggen surely had seen the eland’s gall and wished to do something with it. But despite them, Khaggen turned back and went to the gall. He pierced it, and the gall burst, covering him with mucus so that he could not see. He stumbled about, feeling the ground with his hands, and he found an ostrich feather; with it he brushed the gall from his eyes. Then he threw the gall-coated feather into the sky and told it to become the moon, and to give light at night, and that it should wane and wax again.
QWANCIQUTSHAA
Qwanciqutshaa was a great chief, in the same way that Khaggen the Mantis was a chief, but he had no wife. On one occasion, a woman was grumbling about the stick she had been given to dig up the ant larvae, because she said it was crooked. Her words made a baboon nearby very angry, because the baboon thought she was talking about its tail rather than her stick. So it threw stones at her and she ran away. The night before, she had dreamed that a baboon would come to marry a certain woman who had refused to marry Qwanciqutshaa, so she went to the woman and warned her about the dream and the baboon who had attacked her. So the woman sank into the ground and travelled a certain distance, and then emerged from the ground. She did this again and again, like someone swimming through water. When at last she came out of the earth, she was in the camp of Qwanciqutshaa. She found him there butchering some meat. He had just killed a small antelope. He was surprised to see the woman come out of the ground. He asked her why she had come, and she told him she was running away from the baboon. He asked her to help him wash up after his butchering. She brought water, but she spilled it; when he asked her why she had spilled the water, she explained that she was frightened. So Qwanciqutshaa hid her in his hair.