Yesterday I wrote about an Afro-Cuban trickster rabbit tale, and today I wanted to write about an African rabbit book for children, so I picked one written and illustrated by Gerald McDermott; in this book, the rabbit (or hare) has his Hausa name, Zomo, and the story comes from Nigeria: Zomo the Rabbit: A Trickster Tale from West Africa.
This is also a "trickster seeks endowments" story, like the rabbit story from Cuba yesterday. Here you can see the Sky God sending Zomo on his quest, this time involving Big Fish, Wild Cow, and Leopard.
This version of the story involves a very fun twist at the end. Even though this "trickster seeks endowments" has been told thousands of times, each version has little twists and turns of its own, especially in the ending, and I like the ending to this one very much.
As these stories were re-created in the Americas, they often lost some of their supernatural dimensions. For example, the story of Rabbit and Cow because, in the Brer Rabbit stories of Joel Chandler Harris, a story about Rabbit getting milk from Cow to feed his family; you can read that story here:
In the Hausa story, it's the same motif: Rabbit tricks Cow into getting stuck in a tree, and then is able to milk her. This is how McDermott depicts the scene:
McDermott did a series of these "trickster" books, including Spider, Coyote, Tortoise, Monkey, and Raven, all of which you can find at the Internet Archive.
Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the story of Zomo today!
by Gerald McDermott
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