Tricksters. On the Trail of the Bushongo

I'm finishing up this week of African stories about the tiny antelope trickster with a book that contains just one of these stories, but it is a long and elaborate story, and I also wanted to make sure to include it as an example of a tiny antelope trickster from the Congo: Torday. On the Trail of the Bushongo by Emil Torday.

The story is The Jackal and the Antelope, and it was told to the author by a Luba storyteller. You will see that the story features familiar trickster motifs, with the tiny antelope playing the role that can also be played the by trickster spider or rabbit or tortoise, depending on the specific culture. Torday makes the specific comparison to the African American Brer Rabbit:

You can find out more about Torday's ethnographic work in Africa at Wikipedia.

In addition to the anthropological books and articles that I've shared this week, I also wanted to make sure to share this resource that I found at the TVTropes website of all places: the trickster antelope shows up there on the page dedicated to Mende mythology. How great that someone created this page, bringing an African storytelling tradition into the TVTropes project!

I hope you have enjoyed learning about the tiny antelope trickster of Africa this week, and next week I'll feature stories about the tiny antelope trickster of southeast Asia!

On the Trail of the Bushongo

by Emil Torday

Tricksters. Folktales from Liberia

In yesterday's post I shared some stories from Liberia where the tiny antelope trickster was name "Nemo," and today I wanted to share more stories from Liberia, this time about "Nymo," a variant spelling of the same name for the royal antelope. This is an article that appeared in the Journal of American Folklore: "Folktales from Liberia" by Richard C. Bundy.

Richard Bundy was an American diplomat in the Legation of the United States at Monrovia,

Liberia, and he shared these abstracts of folktales he had collected with the editors of the journal. Of the 43 stories, 12 are about Nymo, but Bundy never identifies the trickster as being the royal antelope. It makes you wonder if this was just an editorial oversight in the preparation of the article for publication (the editorial notes comes from ECP, who would be Elsie Clews Parsons), or whether Mr. Bundy himself was not sure just what kind of animal Nymo was. Thanks to George Schwab's book (see yesterday's post), I am confident that Nymo is indeed the royal antelope, and you can enjoy his trickster adventures in the dozen stories that Bundy has reported here!

Folktales from Liberia

by Richard C. Bundy

in The Journal of American Folklore

Tricksters. Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland.

In this first post of this week of royal antelope trickster stories, I shared a photo that was published in a book by George Schwab, and that is the book I will be featuring today: Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland by George Schwab.

You can read about Schwab's career as a missionary and anthropologist based in Cameroon at Wikipedia. In this massive book (over 500 pages), Schwab includes a section on proverbs, riddles, and folktales, including folktales featuring the trickster royal antelope, as well as stories about the trickster spider; as we have seen elsewhere, the spider and the royal antelope are both important tricksters in Liberia. The royal antelope stories come from the Sapa (Sapo) people of Liberia, and in their language he is called Nemo. You will find a story about Nemo and Chimpanzee, Nemo and Tortoise, Nemo and Elephant, and Nemo and Goat.

Schwab also shares some fascinating details about cultural practices; for example, eating the meat of the royal antelope bestows cunning, as does eating the meat of the chevrotain (another very tiny antelope); this is on p. 365. Here is the photograph I had shared earlier from Schwab's book showing a captured pigmy antelope:

Poor little antelope! But he lives on in stories. Although there are only a few stories here in Schwab's book, it is precious evidence for the Mende storytelling traditions of Liberia later documented so carefully by Kilson in Royal Antelope and Spider. 

I'll be back tomorrow with more stories from Liberia; meanwhile, enjoy these stories about Nemo in Schwab's book today! 

Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland

by George Schwab

Tricksters. Ring of Tricksters

Yesterday I shared Cronise and Ward's collection of stories from Sierra Leone told in pidgin, and I promised a literary version of some of the stories today... so here it is: Virginia Hamilton's Ring of Tricksters: Animal Tales from America, the West Indies, and Africa.

This book is obviously a great trickster resource in general, and I wrote a post about this book back in November. In this post, I want to focus on her "cunnie rabbit" story: Cunnie Rabbit and Sipder Make a Match.

I like the eerie way that the illustrator, Barry Moser, has depicted the tiny royal antelope in that illustration: he may be small, but you can tell he is powerful, and in the story, both "cunnie rabbit" and the spider will manifest supernatural abilities.

Here's the royal antelope wrestling the elephant... and the tiny antelope wins!

Hamilton has done a brilliant job of keeping the qualities of the African English while modifying it just a little to make it easier to read. Here's a comparison of a bit of Cronise's version with Hamilton's version:

Cronise: Elephan' take he long mout', he wrap Cunnie Rabbit, he wrap um 'trong.He fling um, turn, turn um, he hebe um up, so he jam to de sky.

Hamilton: Elephant has his long snout out straight. He wraps Cunnie Rabbit in it and flings him. He turns, turns, turns him and lifts him up, way up. He jams Cunnie Rabbit to the sky!

So, if you find Cronise hard to read, enjoy Hamilton's story here, along with all the other stories in this book!

Ring of Tricksters:

Animal Tales from America,

the West Indies, and Africa

by Virginia Hamilton

Tricksters. Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider, and the Other Beef

For this week of royal antelope stories, today's book is an old and fascinating book of stories collected by a missionary in Sierra Leone: Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider, and the Other Beef: West African Folk Tales. The "cunnie rabbit" or "cunning rabbit" is the royal antelope and, just as in yesterday's book, the book contains stories about the trickster spider too.

Florence Cronise, an American missionary, heard these stories told by Temne storytellers at a mission school in Rotifunk, Sierra Leone, where she was stationed from 1884-1889. She recorded the stories in the pidgin English of the storytellers, and Henry Ward then arranged 38 of the pidgin stories inside a frame tale written in literary English, much as Joel Chandler Harris did with his Uncle Remus books.

The artwork is by Gerard Sichel. Here is his depiction of "cunnie rabbit," the royal antelope:

Here you can see the antelope digging a well:

Because the stories are written in pidgin, it takes a while to get used to. Reading out loud helps, and you can also find a glossary in the back of the book. Probably the most important thing to keep in mind is that the pronouns are not gendered: "he" could refer to a a male character or a female character, depending on context.

Tomorrow I'll share a literary version based on Cronise's collection, but for now, I hope you will find this resource useful to learning about royal antelope stories from the Temne people of Sierra Leone.

Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider, and the Other Beef:

West African Folk Tales

by Florence Cronise and Henry Ward

Tricksters. Royal Antelope and Spider

I promised African tricksters this week, and I've decided to focus on one of the tiniest and the most elusive because not many stories are recorded in English about this little trickster: the so-called "royal antelope" of western Africa, Neotragus pygmaeus, who is the smallest antelope in the world, just 10 inches high at the shoulder and weighing around 6 pounds. Here's a photo from Wikimedia:

And to get a sense of scale, here's a photo from Schwab's Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland, a book I'll be writing about later this week... and seeing this photo, you might guess how this animal got the name "cunnie rabbit" in Liberian pidgin (I'll have more to say about "cunnie rabbit" later this week):

There are actually a variety of these tiny antelope species in Africa, and also in Southeast Asia... and here's what's intriguing: the tiny mouse-deer is also a trickster in Southeast Asia, so I'll have more to say about that next week. For this week, the tiny trickster antelope of Africa will be the focus.

I'll start with a book I've written about before: Royal Antelope and Spider: West African Mende Tales by Marion Kilson.

When I wrote about that book before, I was focusing on the Anansi tales, whereas this time I'm sharing the book for its incredibly important contribution to our knowledge of royal antelope trickster stories. You can read about the Mende people, who live mostly in Sierra Leone, at Wikipedia; Kilson collected these stories in Sierra Leone in 1959 and 1960. She then returned to Sierra Leone in 1976 and did additional field work at that time. This book is the product of the work she did on those two stays. Later this week, I'll have a much older book from Sierra Leone which also features stories about the tiny antelope trickster.

As always, the Internet Archive edition of the book is super-useful because you can page through the book just looking at mentions of "antelope" by using the search feature set to antelope (click on the image for a larger view):

You can also search for "hagbe" which is the Mende name for the royal antelope; Kilson provides each story in Mende along with the English translation: search for hagbe.

Many of these stories involve both Spider and Royal Antelope together, which is even more fun. 

So, Kilson's book is absolutely invaluable; I will have some other royal antelope stories to share all this week, but her book is the single most important resource for documenting the adventures of this tiny African trickster, and I am so glad there is a copy at the Internet Archive! YAY ARCHIVE.ORG!

Royal Antelope and Spider:
West African Mende Tales

by Marion Kilson