After finding the two trees, the one green and the other hewn, in ancient Hebrew, in Old English, and in recent Lamba fable, one is prepared at least to meet them again in the story-telling of other peoples on the Central African plateau. During the same early years of the twentieth century when Clement Doke was collecting Lamba fable, another people of Bantu speech who were known at that time as the Bene-Mukuni occupied lands south of Ilamba and maintained a well-developed tradition of chante-fable, which they called ka-labi (meaning: ‘it opens a little one’s eyes’). The collector of the Bene-Mukuni’s oral tradition was Julius Torrend, S.J., who published several Mukuni stories about trees among his Specimens of Bantu Folk-Lore from Northern Rhodesia; Texts (Collected with the Help of the Phonograph) and English Translations.23
The Lamba, Hebrew, and Anglo-Saxon examples which I have used thus far have shown the two trees standing nearly side-by-side, or sometimes even merged in successive phases of the same nominal motif (the Lamba ogre’s fruit-tree). That arrangement occurred in Mukuni fable too, as in the tale “Mother, Come Back.”24
This is what a woman did.
She was then living in the bush, never showing herself to anyone. She had living with her just one daughter, who used to pass the day in the fork of a tree, making baskets.
One day there appeared a man just when the mother had gone to kill game. He found the girl making baskets as usual: “Here now!” he said, “there are people here in the bush! And that girl, what a beauty! Yet they leave her alone. If the king were to marry her, would not all the other queens leave the place?”
The man reports his discovery to the king, who sends a troop of men to fell the tree and bring him the girl:
So they put the axes to it. The girl at once started this song:
Mother, come back!
Mother, here is a man cutting our shade-tree.
Mother, come back!
Mother, here is a man cutting our shade-tree.
Cut! Here is the tree falling in which I eat.
Here it is falling.The mother drops as if from the sky:
Many as you are, I shall stitch you with the big needle. Stitch, Stitch!
The mother leaves only one alive to go and report the killing of the whole troop to their king. Hearing that report, the king is undeterred and sends a second company on the next day, who die in the same manner, stitched to death by the mother’s needle.
Like Grendel’s dam and the Lamba water-lizard, this ogress beneath the Mukuni tree of separation also collects the cutting tools of her victims:
Next morning early, the men ground their axes and went to the place.
They too found the mother gone, while the porridge was ready there, and the meat was hanging on the tree...
“Bring the axes.” Forthwith they are at the shade-tree. But the song is already started:
“Mother, come back,” etc. (as above).The mother drops down among them, singing in her turn:
“Many as you are,” etc. (as above).They are dead. The woman and her daughter pick up the axes.
But the king is not yet defeated:
“Halloo!” said the king. “To-day let all those that are pregnant give birth to their children.”
So one woman after another straightway brings forth her child. Soon there is a whole row of them.
There goes the whole band, making a confused noise.
When the girl sees that, she says: “There is no joke about it now. There comes a red army with the umbilical cords hanging on.”
This army of innocents cuts down the tree and carries the girl to town.
Being themselves instant products of separation from their own mothers, they naturally have the power to separate the girl from her mother. The mother in turn is helpless against the troop of babes, for they are the most awful spectres in Bantu folklore. All she can do is set an intolerable taboo on the employment of her daughter once they have brought her to civilization:
“Since you have carried away my child, I must tell you something. She is not to pound in the mortar, nor to go to fetch water at night. If you send her to do one of these things, mind you! I shall know where to find you.”
There is the mother going back to her abode in the bush.
The following day the king said: “Let us go a hunting.” And to his mother he said: "My wife does not pound in the mortar. All she can do is to stitch baskets.”
While the husband was away there in the open flat, the other wives as well as the mother-in-law said: “Why should she not also pound in the mortar?”
They force the girl to take up the pestle and pound grain. With each stroke of the pestle she sinks farther into the ground (as if she were the mortar) until she has completely vanished; but the pestle continues by itself to pound the earth at the spot where the girl has disappeared. The women call upon crane, crow, quail, and doves for help. Only the doves know the name of the girl’s mother and can summon her with their call: ‘Kuku! Ku!’ Finally the mother appears and extracts her daughter from the ground by means of medicine and song.
The shade-tree in the forest and the wooden pestle in the town stand in the usual relationship of unhewn tree-of-separation and hewn wood-of-unity. The girl’s place in the crown of the living tree separates her from the rest of mankind and from a Mukuni woman’s usual career. Her seclusion there engenders other separations too. The entire adult male population of the town except the king is divided from its families and lost under the tree. Then unborn babes are untimely separated from their mothers in order to approach the tree and separate the girl from her mother. The ground beneath the tree is as usual mortally dangerous to the men who visit it. Their attempt to take property from it in a free or lawless manner is met with the ogreish mother’s equally lawless destructiveness. The tree is the scene of absolute division and uncompromising hostility between sexes, and both sexes are untrammeled by any unifying conventions of civility.
The hewn wooden pestle is the opposite of the green shade-tree in many ways. Bantu men customarily shunned it and the work it represents with the same resolution they display here in this story by their determined advance toward the wild shade-tree. Like the Hebrew Tree of Life or the Old English Heorot, the Mukuni pestle is surrounded by strict rules of reciprocity, price, and requital. They are the same rules or laws of behaviour which neither of the opposing male and female forces in this Bantu story would acknowledge under the shade-tree. When they want her help in pounding whole grain for porridge (an important act of food-production) the women pay the price of the girl’s gradual withdrawal. Even the rate of her withdrawal is exactly metered by the rhythm of her cooperation, the number of her strokes with the pestle as she cracks the grain in the mortar. Then, pounding on the place where the girl has withdrawn into the ground, the pestle unifies the townspeople and the girl’s wild mother in a joint effort to restore and fix the girl in her new matrimonial setting. As it provides the rhythm for their songs when they call the birds and the focus for their reciprocal acts of demand, concession, and reconciliation, the pestle figuratively domesticates and blends the girl into the life of the town in a preternatural but perfectly logical extension of its actual function as an instrument for domesticating and blending whole grains in the preparation of meal for porridge.
Mother, daughter, birds, townswomen, and the girl’s husband are all thus united in a common cause by the visible and audible effects of the pestle, and by the reciprocity it evokes in the behaviour of everyone concerned, even the girl. She is initially as recalcitrant in the town as her mother was in the bush, but finally, as she emerges from the earth, she too submits to the new comity and mutual good will in the town.
Each text of oral fable is a forest of motifs growing on an old terrain of logic whose configuration was determined long before the present nominal motifs germinated and took root there. Which nominal motifs grow on that terrain depends upon the husbandry of the story-tellers in each particular local tradition, but the terrain itself decides what kinds of motifs—what generic motifs—they may plant upon it. Like good arborists everywhere, oral traditional story-tellers know what plantings or substitutions of motifs are possible, because they know what nominal motifs have thriven before on a given tract of story, and they make their own choices accordingly. Distributed in separate stories, their choices complement each other in such a way that a single narrative pattern may have much greater power to organize logically the diverse data of a people’s real world (represented in nominal motifs) than any one text of story alone would suggest.
So the wild girl’s place in the tree in the Mukuni story “Mother, Come Back” implicitly equates her with wild food as an occasion for conflict between men and a preterhuman person, in this case the stitching ogress who holds the tree and the girl. Eve and the apple are the same character in this story. The crown of the wild shade-tree where the girl rests is the place where wild fruit or lawlessly appropriated honey triggers a similar course of events in so many other Central African tales. Indeed, the equation of food and fertile womanhood (or progeny) is not only characteristic of African story, it is also itself a fundamental pattern in oral fable generally. We shall see more of it anon.
The identification of the girl with food in the present Mukuni story is reiterated (emphasized by repetition) several times after her initial appearance in the place where other, complementary tales (tales with the same pattern) would lead a Mukuni or other Bantu listener to expect the discovery of food. Initially, a single individual finds the girl where food is expected, but when the company of king’s men goes to take possession of her, they notice food instead of the girl:
They too found the mother gone, while the porridge was ready there, and the meat was hanging on the tree...
Finally the townswomen tame the girl in their king’s house as if she were grain, or an analogue of grain, a food-material raised like the girl outside the town, then imported and reduced to an urbanely useful form by pounding. As the girl herself moves from a wild state to a domestic one, the references to food keep pace with her, progressing from the mother’s game-hunting at the beginning, through the dressed meat and porridge at the tree when the last company of the king’s men dies, to the thorough, simultaneous, domestic processing of the grain and the girl together at the end of the narrative. Thus complementarity and emphatic repetition are both employed to reinforce the identity of the girl as an analogue of food throughout the tale.
It is plain to see from this example that complementarity is simply emphatic repetition at work across the boundaries of individual oral narrative performances (or their texts). Complementarity is to a whole tradition, to the sum of narrative performances, what emphatic repetition is within the confines of a single traditional performance or its text. But the fact of complementarity, which is obvious, is not so important as its consequences, which are not always so obvious, or so well-known. Complementarity means that a given pattern may govern the composition of many individual tales without necessarily being complete in any one of the tales. And even when a pattern is generically complete in one performance (as the pattern of the two trees is complete in “Mother, Come Back”), the scope of its generic meaning can still be grasped only by exploring the whole range of nominal variations on the pattern in other, complementary performances. But when a single pattern is distributed over more than one performance, then not even its generic outline can be seen in any one story alone, and there is no hope at all of understanding it properly unless it is heard together with its traditional complements in other tales.
Moreover, there is hardly any performance in an oral tradition of fable which is not defective in some of its patterns, for every tale is constructed of numerous patterns, and some are normally less perfectly reproduced than others. Were it not so, every tale would be a sufficient tradition of fable in itself, and while there are good performances and bad in any tradition, no one tale is ever quite that good. The hearing of numerous tales together as complements of each other is a luxury often beyond the modest resources of fable recorded from dead cultures, but it can be done to some extent with any moderately large, synchronously collected corpus of a living people’s oral fable. Julius Torrend’s Mukuni collection fits that description, and the two famous tales “How Can I Silence Katubi?” and “Let the Big Drum Roll” supply good examples of the two trees segregated into separate performances.26
“How Can I Silence Katubi?” begins like the Legend of Samson, with an ill-starred marriage and ineffectual opposition to it:
This is what some people did.
The son said: “Mother, go and find a wife for me, as I am now grown up.”
The mother said: “My child is now grown up.”
Other people said: “Dear me! He is not grown up yet.”
The mother got up and went to look for the wife...
Time passed. The wife gave birth to a child, and later on to another. At last she said to her husband: “Let us get up and go and see my mother.”
The husband said: “We will go.”
They got up, both of them. It happened to be a time of famine. On the way they found wild figs. The woman then said: “Do climb up and give me some figs.”
The husband went up the tree. He then began to shake the branches, and figs fell in abundance, the woman, meanwhile, and her children eating them.
Again he shook, and more figs fell, among them a particularly big one: “Wife,” said the husband, “do not eat that one fig; if you do I will kill you.”
“Hunger has no law,” said the wife. “Besides, really! Would you kill me, your wife, for a fig? I am eating it; let us see whether you dare kill me.”
The woman ate the fig. Seeing that, the husband came down and with an assegai pointed at her, said: “My fig, what has become of it?”
She said: “I have eaten it.”
He there and then killed his wife, his younger child just staring at him.
The murderer and his two children continue their journey to visit the dead wife’s parents. The youngest child chants riddles on the way:
Silence Katubi!
Silence Katubi!
My brother has become my mother!
My brother has become my mother!
Silence Katubi!What a lot of vultures!
What a lot of vultures!
Over the fig-trees at Moya’s,
What a lot of vultures!
The child continues to chant these verses when he reaches his mother’s native village, and eventually his maternal kin understand them:
The grandmother said: “Stop, baby.” She added: “We are just going to kill your father also.”
People then set to dig inside of a hut, to dig a deep, narrow hole...
He was called. As he entered the hut, he said: “We may as well sit just there on the mat.” And, as he said so, he tumbled into the hole. He died in boiling water (which was then poured over him).
Torrend’s gloss on the name ‘Katubi’ is helpful:
Katubi, lit., “Make-the-thing-white,” i. e., “Expose-the-truth,” is the name of the baby.
Torrend also noted that the fig tree of this tale was a recurrent (nominal) motif in Mukuni fable:
Moya is the name of a chief introduced here merely to localise the story. The fig-trees of Moya’s kraal are famous in both the Mukuni and the Tonga folk-lore.
Moya’s fig, a Mukuni equivalent of the Hebrew Vineyards of Timnah, is the familiar tree of separation, and of course the father is the ogre of the piece, who first liberally feeds and then kills his needy human dependent. Enigma (‘my brother has become my mother’) is the means of the bridegroom’s undoing in this tale just as in the Legend of Samson and its Lamba congeners. Vengeance is wrought upon the ogre, but that only adds new bereavement and deepens the tragedy. One must seek elsewhere in Mukuni fable for the hewn wood and the restorative retribution that attends it, as in the story “Let the Big Drum Roll:”27
This man was a young king. As he had gone with other people to trade, his companions noted that he was bringing back a large amount of goods. So, being mere blacks, they became quite jealous and said: “Let us kill him.”
This lawless acquisition of goods in the bush has no tree about it; the goods are not food, female, nor wild, nor is the adversary preternatural in this part of the story. The whole cluster of tree, ogre, and supporting motifs is missing until the dead man reappears in a preterhuman form that is able to invoke artifacts of hewn wood for his revenge:
He was then changed into a little bird, with pretty colours and cowries all over the body, which went and perched on the top of a tree in front of the criminals. He then sang:
Let the big drum roll!
-Chorus: Let the big drum roll!
It flaps the wings,
The little bird that has come out from the deep river,
From the great river of ‘them.’
Let the big drum roll!
Let the big drum roll!
Let the big drum roll!
At the great river of beads and pearls
I have found fowls which pound,
Using mortars hewn from blood trees.
Let the big drum roll!
Let the big drum roll!
Let the big drum roll!
Using mortars hewn from the blood-trees,
Their beaks are all white.
Here, Nemba, where are you?
Let the big drum roll!...Nemba was the sister of the dead chief.
When those people heard that song, they caught the little bird and killed it by beating it.
The dead man cannot return to life as man. No victims in tales composed according to this pattern do. But the bird is indestructible. The dead man has in it an avenger who, like Beowulf, will destroy the violators of property-rights and assure the enjoyment of the property by its rightful owners, the victim’s own kin and heirs. True to the international type to which he belongs, this Mukuni redeemer also accomplishes his mission of vengeance by turning the villains’ destructive techniques against themselves. They first try to destroy the tattling bird by beating it, then by burning it, and finally by pulverizing its ashes:
They had hardly resumed their march when they saw the little bird alive once more going ahead of them, and heard it sing:
“Let the big drum roll,” etc. (as above).Once more they caught it and killed it, then this time said: “Let us burn it to ashes.”
So they put it on the fire, reduced it to a cinder, then ground it to ashes.
But it got up again, flew into the air, and went on singing as before:
“Let the big drum roll!” etc... .
Yet, despite their ferocity, the culprits’ beating and grinding is nothing to compare with the relentless roll of the wooden drum and the steady pounding of the ‘mortars hewn from blood-trees’ in the bird’s song as it inexorably conjures the villains to death-by-burning at the end of the story:
Now those people are coming to the kraal: “You have reappeared!” -“We have reappeared.”
“And the king, where have you left him?” They answer: “On the road.”
Then: “Really? On the road! Come and see a little bird which is on the roof of the royal house.”
They at once said: “Let us kill it.”
Meanwhile some people are digging a hole in the ground. Then Nemba says: “No, don’t kill it. Let us hear the news first.”
Just then the little bird started its song again:
“Let the big drum roll!” etc.“Go into the hut, that you may explain to us exactly what the little bird sings.”
They went and sat down in the hut on the mat spread there, but then powowowo, they tumbled down into the hole. Boiling water was brought at once and poured on top of them. That is how they died.
So the bird incants exactly the same three acts of retribution against its persecutors—thumping, burning, and pulverization—which they had earlier inflicted physically upon the bird. But whereas the culprits use coarse, elementary methods—cudgeling, direct burning with fire, and crude grinding—the soul-bird incants more refined procedures of the same kind:
| Striking | Heating | Braying | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physical Acts of Living Men without Allies cudgeling |
burning |
with fire grinding |
without special tools |
| Incantation of a Dead Man with Allies drumming |
scalding |
with fire mortaring |
without special tools |
Thus, like all of his type, this Mukuni retributor also inflicts upon the original wrongdoers only those same injuries which they first inflicted on the innocent.
The culprits of this Mukuni story die like Beowulf’s envious enemies, at the bottom of a hole under falling water. And like Beowulf returning from the wynleasne wudu to Heorot, the soul-bird in the equivalent Mukuni telling moves from the wild tree where it confronts its enemies at the beginning of the tale to the royal house where it completes its victory over them at the end. There is thus at least one vestige of the wild tree even in this Mukuni narrative, and close scrutiny might reveal still other bits of hewn wood connected with the murderers’ lawlessness and the compensatory meting out of justice to them, for example in the sticks implied in the cudgeling of the bird and in the fire that burned it to a cinder. But these are only vestiges of other trees complementary to the wild green one that fleetingly presides as the vengeance-bird’s perch over the acts of discord and separation at the beginning of the story. The real inanimate ‘hero’ of the piece is the wood of unity, the hewn wood of the drum and mortars in the bird’s song. No less than five successive repetitions of the song in this chante-fable emphasize the central motifs of hewn wood and keep them at the center of attention as the tale progresses. The bird’s off-repeated song finally unites the spirit of the dead man with his kin in joint vengeance against the murderers.
The Mukuni narrator who told Julius Torrend “Let the Big Drum Roll” was a mature woman named Mumba. Torrend admired her knowledge of tradition and her narrating skill, and recorded numerous stories from her as well as consulting her about the details of other informants’ stories. As good oral narrators usually do, Mumba knew several nominal varieties of each generic motif in her repertory. She could embody the hewn wood of unity in a drum and in ‘mortars hewn from blood-trees’ in a story about retribution for murder like “Let the Big Drum Roll,” and then give it another, different form in a story of retribution for bride-denial and bride-theft such as her tale “What Do You Mean, Block of Wood?”28
How now? “You, my mates,” said a girl, “let us go and have a look at the village yonder, where lives the man Kasere” (that is, ‘the little dancer’ -Torrend’s note).
There is no delay. They already perceive the man there at a distance, and near him heaps of meat. “Yes, and no mistake,” they say, “that is a husband worth having.”
They come near: “You girls,” says the man, “why don’t you get married?”
“Well now,” they answer, “is a woman going to ask a man to marry her?”
“All right,” says the man, “just now we shall go and look for a wife.”
And so he did. But as soon as he appeared in sight, the girls disappeared.
Their mother, too, would you believe it? said: “No, you may come back another day.”
The refusal was evident.
The hewn wood of unity is a universal motif in African fable, as elsewhere in Old World story-telling, but only occasionally does one see the wood a-cutting as here in Mumba’s tale of an African Pygmalion:
Another day he came again in the same direction, but a tree of the kind What-is-it-good-for standing on the road caught his fancy. He set to work cutting it and stripping it of its branches, then began hewing it. He carved, carved, carved, and put it upright against a tree there in the forest. Then he went to buy a cowry, and came back to put it on the head of his block of wood. What do you think? He finds it turned all of a sudden into a maiden: “Enough! mother!” he said, “I have found the wife they refused to give me.”
Ovid says that Pygmalion too made shells the first gift to his carved lady (Metamorphoses X, 259-260):
...modo grata puellis munera fert illi conchas teretesque lapillos
...and now he brought it gifts that please girls, shells and polished stones
The bride brought to life from a statue remains nameless in both Ovid’s and Mumba’s versions of the tale, although the name of her creator and lover, Pygmalion or Kasere, is carefully pronounced in both cases. But Pygmalion’s carved bride was cut from ivory according to Ovid, not wooden like the Mukuni effigy. Still, there remains a close resemblance at least in the hue of the two different materials used for the carving in the ancient and modern forms of the story. If ivory was an ideal simile for feminine flesh in the classical world, then wood gotten from a tree of the kind “What-is-it-good-for” must be granted the same distinction in a Bantu setting. The name “What-is-it-good-for” results from a kind of metonymy or antonomasia that was common in Bantu fable. The tree it signifies is a euphorbia, or so-called ‘milk-tree,’ a species of the plant called spurge in English that is arboreal in Central Africa.
Many Bantu peoples strongly associated this tree with womanhood because of the thick white, milk-like sap which the live wood exudes when cut. This natural property of the live wood marked it as feminine in their minds, while in a similar manner the blood-red sap of the so-called ‘blood-tree’ in Mumba’s other tale “Let the Big Drum Roll” marked that wood as masculine.
Thus Mumba knew two nominally different varieties of hewn vengeance-wood, one masculine for use in a tale of male conflict over property, and the other feminine for use in a tale of dispute about possession of women.
But that locally significant variation on the name of the hewn wood in no way changes its vengeful purpose in Mumba’s stories. It will still be placed in the hands of an avenger who will use it to destroy those who have wronged him; an avenger who will imitate and inflict upon his enemies the same treatment they have inflicted on him or on his kith and kin. Nor does the local choice of blood-wood or spurge change the strong unifying effect which either wood in hewn form has upon the whole cast of characters in each tale. The bride made from the spurge-tree attracts the other persons of the story to her like a magnet:
On the following day he went to look for honey and brought some to his wife. When they had finished eating, they went to bed.
Next morning early, the man went out once more in search of honey. While he was away, people came and found the girl seated alone outside: “Give us fire and water,” they said. She brought fire and handed it to them, she brought water and gave it to them. There they smoked and smoked again (admiring her silently), then went back to their kraal.
As they reached the place, they said: “Is she not a beauty, the girl we have seen over there?”
The following day the king, having heard that, said: “Go and bring her here to me.”
Kasere is no sooner wived than he goes to search the forest for wild honey. Once again we have to do with a honey-trickster. We might have expected as much from his marriage, which is exogamic to a preternatural degree. Predictably, Kasere will not be able to keep his bride, and characteristically, he is separated from her while he is away at some unnamed bee-tree in the wilderness.
Mumba was indeed the fine narrator Torrend supposed her to be. Once she had embodied the wood of unity in Kasere’s bride, she lost no time implicating an opposite, wild tree of separation:
That day the man bethought himself of going once more in search of honey. The girl then said to him: “Some people were here yesterday, who asked for fire and water, and I gave both to them.”
“To-day,” said the man, “lock thyself in the hut.” He went off.
When those people came they found her seated outside. They took her away.
For a moment Kasere has had the best of everything. He is a wealthy man by Mukuni standards, as the heaps of meat around him proved to the girls who visited him at the beginning. Then he gets a wife who seems better than other women, not only because she is more beautiful than others, but also because she comes to him free of all the social entanglements and duties which a real woman of his own people would inevitably bring upon him. She is moreover a remarkably potent wife. At one and the same time she is the most beautiful of women, i.e., an ideal means for a man to get progeny, and is also made from a kind of wood that symbolizes the nourishing power of motherhood to many Bantu peoples. She is thus a living embodiment of the equation which I have mentioned earlier as another stock pattern in fable:
Food ~ Progeny
Kasere too does what he can as a male to reinforce that equation. First he surrounds himself with remarkable heaps of food, then gets himself a more perfect wife than other men have. That done, he thinks again of food-getting (the wild honey) and returns from it to pursue his abducted wife. His whole activity is encompassed in two cycles of pairing food and nubile woman:
| First Cycle |
l) Hunting and cutting meat 2) Hunting and cutting a wife |
| Second Cycle |
3) Pursuing bees to honey 4) Pursuing wife to king’s kraal |
There is no ground for hope that Kasere will regain the woman once the king has taken her away. Kasere the eater of wild honey may not keep his bride; the pattern of the honey-trickster tale forbids it. But Kasere the carver must do unto the wrongdoer as the wrongdoer has done unto him; the pattern of the vengeance-wood tale demands imitative retribution. The king has robbed him of a wife; now he must rob the king. He begins by again cutting wood:
The husband came home... . “Ugh! What!” he said, “they kept refusing me a wife, and now today they have taken this one! One whom I carved!”
He has soon made up his mind. Drums, that is the thing. He goes to cut them and adjust them. He loses no time: “Let us go,” he says.
He goes beating the drums and singing on the way:
My wife made by carving!
Chorus: What do you mean, block of wood?Stop that.
Chorus: What do you mean, block of wood?My husband, who gave them meat!
Chorus: What do you mean, block of wood?My wife, who gave them fire and water!
Chorus: What do you mean, block of wood?They were denying me a wife in the land.
Chorus: What do you mean, block of wood?The block that I carved!
Chorus: What do you mean, block of wood?Singing his riddling song, Kasere the little dancer excites the whole country on his way to the king’s house:
He came to a village occupied by common people. At once the principal woman of the place, good gracious, said: “Those who can accompany dances, come and see a dancer.”
Good heavens! They heard the song falling down: (as above).
Kasere begins to take tribute of those he meets:
“Come on,” says the woman, “throw presents to the man.”
They are showered upon him. They make him quite red.
He then asks: “Have you not seen people passing this way and carrying away a woman?”
“They have passed,” is the answer. “They have gone further.”
“What is she like?” he asks.
“Beautiful,” they say, “beautiful. She has a cowry on her head.”
He then goes further, singing on the way: “My wife made by carving,” etc. (as above).
He reaches another kraal... . “Come and see a man who beats the drum... .”
Then: “Come on, you who accompany the dance, throw presents to the man.”
At last he stops for a little rest.
Others help Kasere to find his abducted wife:
A little man then said to him: “Come near, I will tell you. That kraal over there, that is where your wife is, in the big hut.”
There goes the man, beating the drums once more: (song as above).
Good Heavens! He is in view of the place... . “Come and see a man who is on the road beating a drum.”
Now Kasere insinuates himself into the abductor’s compound:
As he comes near, he goes toward the king’s house, as if to go and pay homage. Then he starts again: (song as above).
“Good gracious!” says the king himself, “come and throw presents to the man.”
But he does not stop to receive any. He just goes on round the court-yard (beating the drum all the time).
He engages in a contest of will with his wife, calling to her in his song to make her come forth from her place of concealment:
A servant then says (to the king): “Shall we bring thy wife...?
He is already near the hut. Good Heavens! This is what he hears from within: “This is his wife, who has been carried away.”
The drums then roll with full sound:
My wife, a gift for them!
What do you mean, block of wood?
My wife made by carving!
What do you mean, block of wood?“Come,” say the people to the woman, “you too come and give presents to the man. All your mates have already thrown some to him.”
“All right,” says the woman, “go and throw him presents yourselves. I shall do nothing of the kind.”
The drums are at last at the door:
My husband, the carver!
What do you mean, block of wood?
My wife, a gift for them!
What do you mean, block of wood?Great Lord! “Let us just peep,” says the woman.
“Carry her out,” say some people.
In fact, their hands are already on her.
Finally Kasere completes his elaborate dancing-manoeuvres and strips the king of his prize:
Then they see the little man going on dancing like a fly around the king himself, and singing:
The tree which I carved!
What do you mean, block of wood?
They refused me a wife in the land.
What do you mean, block of wood?“Let us look outside,” she says at last. And she stands just at the door.
Heaven help me! Drum and song now sound and resound.
My husband, to give me to them?
What do you mean, block of wood?She now just lets her head appear with the cowry on it. By a rapid movement of the hand the husband takes this off... . Great Heavens! She is already transformed into a simple block of wood, no, she has become but a bush standing at the door... . Then the little husband comes home humming his own tune, while the king and those who had seized the woman remain there with their shame.
I collected a variant of this tale from a middle-aged woman at Senior Chief Mukuni’s compound outside Livingstone, Zambia, in August, 1969.
My source of a central African Flood story.
My informant did not know of Torrend’s printed tale, nor could I discover any reason why she should or even might have known of it. She nevertheless followed the same plot as in Mumba’s story, except that in her version a great flood issued from the bush to which the wooden bride had reverted, and spreading over the earth, drowned the king and all his company. The tale was told me in the presence of three other experienced women narrators from the same district, who said when I questioned them that the flood from the bush was the only ending of the tale which any of them knew.
It is tempting to think that Mumba was careful about reciting flood-stories into the phonograph of Julius Torrend, a Jesuit missionary. If ever a comprehensive survey of Central African Bantu oral fable had been made, it might be possible to determine which ending was the more common—the one assigning mere shame, or outright bodily destruction to the rapacious king and his court. In the absence of any such record, it is possible only to observe that there was a cataclysmic denouement of some sort to this story in Central African Bantu tradition.
Regardless of the ending, Mumba gave Torrend a splendid example of the story about two trees in this Mukuni tale. It is a decidedly short tale even by Mukuni standards, which did not require much length. Yet it contains fully developed examples of both the honey-trickster’s and the avenging carver’s stories, neatly coalesced in a single narrative. Even the seven stages of the honey-trickster’s story (Samson’s seven days of riddling/seven days of hunting competition in “What a Little Thing Did”) are perfectly reproduced in Mumba’s tale of seven journeys to secure marital rights:
- The girls’ visit to appraise the bachelor Kasere
- Kasere’s visit to the girls and their mothers to seek a bride
- Kasere’s journey to the forest to carve and animate his spurge-wood bride
- Kasere’s journey to the bee-tree and home to bed with the spurge-wood bride
- The first visit of the king’s people to Kasere’s home, ending in the command to abduct the bride
- The abduction
- Kasere’s pursuit
The honey-trickster traffics in riddles and in paradox. So too does Kasere, whose wooden wife paradoxically seems to be one thing (a real woman of flesh and blood), while in truth she is something else (a block of wood) quite incompatible with what she initially appears to be. She is an enigmatic object used at the same place in the story-pattern and for the same purpose as the verbal enigma of the sweet lion in the Legend of Samson, or the enigma of the alluring young woman’s identity at the close of the Lamba story “What a Little Thing Did.” And just as those riddles were unfair, so too is Kasere’s riddle unfair, because it conceals a preternatural identity, the identity of something that cannot be. Spurge may symbolize womanhood, but it cannot in reality be a woman. Finally the honey-trickster’s riddling ends, as it must, with a loss that is embarrassing to him, but even more embarrassing for his foes. Mumba’s telling of the conclusion is only a minor rearrangement of the data found in the Legend of Samson:
- Samson’s enemies get his riddle from him by means of his wife
- Kasere’s enemies take away his wife, who is a riddle
The alternative, cataclysmic ending to Mumba’s tale, whereby the king and all his company are destroyed, calls to mind another tale of vengeance-wood that is somewhat longer and better known in the Western world than any of Mumba’s tales will ever be: the so-called Troy Saga. Composite though it is, the ancient Greek legend about the Rape of Helen and her husband Menelaos’ pursuit of her with the help of his brother Agamemnon’s army is a replica of Mumba’s tale about the rape of Kasere’s wife. Like Kasere’s spurge-wood bride, who begins and ends her marital career as standing green wood (but who in the meantime betrays no hint of her arboreal nature), fabulous Helen in ancient Greek tradition was also a daimon or goddess of living green trees. The two aetiological tales that survive from ancient Greece to explain Helen’s deification as an object of tree-cults rationalize her arboreal connections specifically in conjunction with her marriage (to Menelaos at Sparta) and her demise (on the island of Rhodes, where she was venerated explicitly under the name Helene Dendritis—Helen of the Tree*).
Modern authorities disagree as to when in Greek antiquity the actual cults of Helen the tree-goddess arose, but they are united in recognizing her as a wood-daimon who,** like the African Kasere’s wife, came into the world by non-uterine means, and who was during her life-time the wife of two men whose rivalry over her caused a great communal uprising ending in the complete extinction of the initially more powerful faction. Furthermore, the pursuit and recapture of the abducted wife in both the old European and the modern African tales devolve upon wooden effigies and wood hewn expressly to accomplish vengeance. Despite nearly three millenia of difference in date, the Mukuni and ancient Greek versions of the story are so alike that a single summary serves them both:
Citizens of a distant, powerful kingdom visit the home of a wealthy but less powerful man. His wife, who is uniquely beautiful, entertains the guests while her husband is absent, then they abduct her to their city to be a wife of their royalty. When the rightful husband returns home and learns of the abduction, he equips himself and pursues his wife, alarming the whole country and acquiring help and tribute from others on the way. He (or a helper) makes an enigmatic wooden effigy which the abductor’s compatriots take into their city as a thing of value. After extensive manoeuvres outside, the husband eventually insinuates himself into the city of his rival by means of hewn wood (wooden drums or a dourateos hippos—the Trojan Horse sculpted in wood). There in the abductor’s city the wronged husband and his wife engage in a calling-contest, each trying to summon the other out of concealment. Finally the husband invokes the power hidden in the hewn wood to ruin the city.
The Troy-Saga is not just one tale, but many tales associated with each other by mutual association with the Siege of Troy, the oldest tale of oral traditional origin that survives in European literature. The part of it that is like Mumba’s tale of Kasere is only the beginning and the end, the framing story of the rape of a beautiful female wood-daemon and of retribution by her first husband through carved wood.
Mumba narrated that story as a single piece, with no interval between the abduction and the retribution, but the ancient Troy-Saga accommodates the whole Homeric Iliad and more besides in an enormous narrative interval between Paris’ taking of Helen and the Fall of Troy. This difference of treatment is instructive. It shows that although the pattern of story surrounding the two trees is quite definite in the number, character, and cohesion of its constituent motifs, yet it is also prodigiously elastic and tolerant of agglomeration with other patterns and their motifs.
*
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