Thus far we have dealt mostly with short tales, or with discrete episodes in longer tales that manifest the story-pattern of the Two Trees. But the discovery of the Green and Hewn Wood pattern in the Troy-Saga reveals that the same story-pattern is also sometimes the undergirding which supports and unifies much longer and more complex narrative. This reality can be observed even in the case of the modern African narrator Mumba herself, who could put the wild and hewn wood strictly side by side as when she told Julius Torrend the tale of Kasere, or separate them with wide intervals of other story-material, as she did in a much longer tale which she knew by the catch-word title “Kapepe.”
The Bantu word Kapepe is a proper noun meaning in English ‘little feather,’ and it refers to a feather-badge worn as a divinational fetish by Kalombe, the hero of Mumba’s other tale. The personal name Kalombe means ‘Little Blood-Wood Tree.’ Like Mumba’s other hero Kasere, Kalombe too was a tormented bridegroom, and the tale about him is also a wedding-story.
Torrend wrote that “Kapepe” was ‘one of the most popular stories all over the Zambesi region’ and that it was by nature ‘rather long.’ He heard the tale from several narrators besides Mumba, and he listed her among three Mukuni women (Munje, Mumba, and Rumba) who ‘know the story quite well.’ The main Mukuni text which Torrend chose to publish with his own English translation was ‘from the mouth of a man called Mwana Mbirika, who has given the whole story twice on the phonograph.’29 But he annotated Mwana Mbirika’s text copiously with Mumba’s comments where her telling of the story differed in substance from the man’s, and he inserted in brackets bits of text from Mumba’s version into Mwana Mbirika’s text wherever Mumba told things not found at all in the man’s version. In the end there was no great difference, and it is apparent from Mumba’s recorded comments that she sanctioned Mwana Mbirika’s performance, for her whole concern in commenting was not to change but only to clarify and embellish the story as he had told it. It was the same tale of precocious childhood and marriage for both of these Mukuni story-tellers, and it was full of trees.
The Bene-Mukuni had two kinds of chante-fable, as did many Bantu and other equatorial African peoples. One was a kind of narrative told with intermittent singing of a single tune, like Mumba’s tale of Kasere or “Let the Big Drum Roll.” The verses of the song in such a tale were sometimes quite numerous, and like the tune itself might (or might not) undergo considerable alteration from one reprise to another. The reprises too might be few or many in number. Yet regardless of how elaborate variation and repetition might make it, this simpler kind of story-telling was characterized by the rule: one tune to a tale.
The other, more complex kind of chante-fable was stylistically only a concatenation of performances in the simpler manner, with the tale divided into episodes, each having its own tune linked in series with the others. This kind of tale was also subject to reprise in its sung portions, but here the narrator not only repeated or varied one tune at a time, he might also take up again one or another of the tunes used before and repeat them in alternation with other, new tunes. With the participation of a chorus or individual choral respondent that was usual in this tradition, these multi-cantata performances took on the character of oratorios, and like oratorio in Western music, they were usually quite long. One example of this many-tuned African species of chante-fable from the Banyanga (eastern Congo) took twelve days to perform, though it did not contain twelve days’ worth of narrative (since a good part of the performer’s time was taken up in use of the tunes for dancing).30 The tale called “Kapepe” among Torrend’s Bene-Mukuni (and still remembered by that name among the Mukuni, Leya, Lenje, and Tonga peoples whom I visited north of the Zambezi in 1969) was composed in this same complex form of chante-fable.
Not surprisingly, the Mukuni hero named Kalombe or Mandu in the tale “Kapepe” had a series of adventures that runs step-for-step parallel to those of the Nyanga hero Mwindo in the twelve-day performance from the Congo mentioned above. The likeness of Mwindo and Mandu suggests that their story might be a kind that lent itself readily to long narration, or perhaps even required it. In any case, “Kapepe” in Julius Torrend’s experience was regularly a long tale with a number of tunes. Its length was certainly not the result of anyone’s piecing together several randomly chosen short tales with single tunes to make from them one long story with many tunes. The agreement of Torrend’s other informants with Mwana Mbirika’s performance shows that “Kapepe” was a discrete tale in Mukuni tradition with a traditional stability of content. The sinews of that content are the traditional patterns in it, such as the pattern of story about two trees, and they bind together the various episodes of the tale with their different songs into a narrative unity that would remain indissoluble even if the narration were somehow interrupted and the narrator forced to tell the episodes separately on different occasions.
Torrend identified fourteen distinct songs in Mwana Mbirika’s performance, and divided the published text into fourteen corresponding episodes.31 In summary, they are as follows:
A dreadful rumour circulates among the women of a village whose chief has just gone away on a protracted hunting-expedition. According to the rumour, he desires any of his pregnant wives who may bear a child during his absence to rear the child carefully if it be a girl, but cast it out to die if it be a boy. One wife bears a son and carries it into the reeds near the river where she abandons it on a piece of bark floating on the water. A “little old woman,” who lives like a wild creature alone in the bush, discovers the baby and undertakes to raise it, predicting that it will become a great man. Its natural mother takes food to the bush, where the old woman feeds the child, and it matures precociously.
Mumba said that the infant’s name was originally Kalombe, “but the little old woman changed his name to Mandu,” the name which Mwana Mbirika used throughout.
A female cousin of Mandu goes hunting for edible rodents with her girl-friends, and discovers Mandu living in a hole in the ground. They dig him up, and report their finding in the village. Mandu’s mother bids them not to tell what they know to the chief when he returns. The girl-cousin’s name is Ngoma, “Drums.”
Torrend recorded the next episode from Mumba; his other informants did not know it. In it Mandu hews wood wherewith to unite his various kin and friends with each other and with himself:
When the chief returns home, he finds a diseased baby girl born in his absence, but no male children. Mandu, still living in the bush, carves drums and startles the townspeople with his unexpected drumming. They ambush the mysterious drummer and deliver him to the chief, who recognizes and embraces him as his son. A fight ensues between the chief and the little old woman from the bush over possession of the boy, but the chief and townspeople appease her with gifts and with their display of devotion to the son whom she has reared. His natural mother then tells Mandu to go and marry the daughter of the Rain-Lord.
Travelling toward the Rain-Lord’s city, Mandu sees a pretty little bird that permits him to touch it. He tries to capture it in order to take a feather from its plummage, and pursues it for two days until it comes to rest atop the half-ruined hut of a little old woman. She explains that the bird is her food-scout and cannot be captured. Mandu declares his intention to marry the Rain-Lord’s daughter, mercifully extracts worms from a foul ulcer on the old woman’s body, and receives in return a night’s lodging and a small feather from the bird.
Kapepe, the little feather from the beautiful bird that scouts for food, instructs Mandu how to pass the obstacles that he encounters on the way to the Rain-Lord. The obstacles are excrements, a river, a herd of hostile elephant, a precipitous mountain, bush buffalo, lion, and an entanglement of snakes.
After the blood-wood (Kalombe) and drums (Ngoma) in the first and second episodes, a third tree now appears in the tale:
“On reaching the place, he goes and sits down under a tree with his arms folded over his knees. (This is the attitude taken by boys when they go courting.” -Torrend).
The rest of the episode is about shelter.
The people of the place offer Mandu lodging in one of four different huts. Each time he consults his feather fetish whether to accept, and on its advice he accepts the fourth, seemingly most ungracious offer: 1) the hut of his intended mother-in-law, 2) the hut of a female slave, 3) the hut of the Rain-Lord’s niece, and 4) an abandoned hut standing in ruins.
After shelter in the fifth song comes the subject of entertainment in the sixth:
Mandu’s hosts bring him sitting-mats, drink, and food, which he accepts or rejects at the bidding of his feather-fetish. He 1) rejects a mat belonging to his intended mother-in-law, but accepts one from his bride-to-be. He 2) rejects wine that is a commingling of his future parents-in-law in disguise; 3) he rejects two kinds of food which are his father-in-law and mother-in-law in disguise; and 4) he accepts the same two kinds of food when his bride-to-be brings them to him personally.
With shelter and food provided by the eight steps of the fifth and sixth episodes, it remains only for Mandu to gain the bride for whom he has come to the Rain-Lord’s strange city. He has acquired what he needed in each of the two previous episodes by progression through a series of four decisions, each correct choice bringing him nearer to his goal. In a similar manner, he is also required to make four choices in order to get his bride.
The problems of identification and selection which Mandu and Kapepe had to solve were simpler in the fifth episode than in the sixth. In the fifth episode the questions demanded simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers without nuance or equivocation; only three answers of ‘no’ and one ‘yes,’ in that order, were necessary. But there was enigma and duplicity in the preternatural combinations which the Rain-Lord’s people presented to Mandu and his feather in the four progressive steps of the sixth song. There each of the four problems had two components (two mats; two intended in-laws in the wine; two intended in-laws disguised as two dishes of food; two dishes brought by the Rain-Lord’s daughter) and the right choice involved distinctions of either/or as well as of ‘yes’ and ‘no.’
Considering this larger progression from four simple questions in the fifth episode to four manifold ones in the sixth, it would be surprising if the next four problems of identification about to be posed to Mandu concerning his bride were not even more difficult in some respect than those he had to solve to obtain food and shelter. So in the seventh episode, the problem is to select the right woman as bride, and none of the alternatives is the right one, although the pressure upon Mandu to accept what is offered him mounts at each step.
Four imposters are brought to Mandu to take as his bride, each more beautifully dressed and more desirable than the others. Each of the women in this progression represents a diminishing degree of incestuousness for the future husband of the Rain-Lord’s daughter:
Mother-in-law
Mother-in-law’s younger sister
Rain-Lord’s niece
Sister-in-law
On the advice of his feather, Mandu correctly refuses all of them.
Measured in terms of the avoidance of incest, the progression in the seventh episode brings Mandu very near to claiming his intended bride. It stops just short of that goal. In that respect the seventh episode is unlike the two before it. Each episode since Mandu’s arrival at the Rain-Lord’s city has contained a progression of four steps:
Fifth Song: four steps to inferior shelter
Sixth Song: four steps to food of ordinary quality
Seventh Song: four steps to a matchless bride
Clearly the number four in this tale signifies wholeness or completion. Yet the daughter of the Rain-Lord is such a peerless bride that something beyond common completion is required to win her. Marriage with her represents more than mere fulfillment; it is perfection, at least one step beyond any ordinary marital attainment. So another test of recognition with her as the winner’s prize lies ahead in a subsequent episode (the ninth song).
But the significance of four as the measure of completion in this tale exceeds the individual progressions of four questions to be decided in each of the fifth, sixth, and seventh episodes. There is additionally an overriding scheme of four at work in the progression of episodes themselves. This larger, framing progression concerns Mandu’s accumulation of an adult man’s assets:
Fifth Song: housing
Sixth Song: nutrition
Seventh Song: affinal kin
Obviously the fourth member of this larger progression must concern getting the bride herself, i.e., the consummation of Mandu’s marriage. But since the marriage was deferred beyond completion of the four tests of recognition in the subordinate progression within the seventh song, one may also readily expect to find it deferred beyond the eighth song in the larger progression of whole episodes. And in fact Mwana Mbirika did just that. He built his tale with four-stage progressions both great and small, the small ones nestled within the great ones as in a set of Chinese boxes:
| Fifth Song · |
Sixth Song · |
Seventh Song · |
Tenth Song · |
four tests to obtain shelter |
four tests to obtain food |
four tests to obtain marital kin |
four tests to obtain the right to move the bride |
|---|
So at the eighth song Mwana Mbirika interrupted the immediate sequence of four episodes (with four tests of Mandu’s manhood in each) in order to return to an even grander progression of four which he had begun much earlier, in the very first episode. Instead of consummating Mandu’s marriage in the eighth song, Mwana Mbirika paused to consummate his hero’s manhood in another aspect, by completing the four-stage progression of Mandu’s experience with trees. Born into the world as Kalombe, the Little Blood-Wood Tree, Mandu had hewn the wood of unity in his boyhood (the drums carved and beaten to announce his approach to the settlement in the second song) and then sat under the Rain-Lord’s shade-tree to signify his maturation to marriageable age. Now the narrator makes him leave his comfortable seat as a suitor beneath the third tree and accept the more hazardous rôle of provider as he climbs to the top of a fourth tree:
The Rain-Lord commands his daughter’s suitors, who are Mandu and two competitors, to fetch him bark from the top of a great Baobab tree if they wish to marry the girl. The fully grown Baobab (Adansonia digitata) being a perilous tree to climb, with an enormous trunk, smooth, slippery bark, soft wood that breaks easily, and no low branches, the first two suitors who attempt the climb fall to their deaths; but Mandu with the help of his feather nimbly ascends, gets the bark, and comes safely down again.
The progression of four trees with the Baobab as its final member dwarfs and subsumes the lesser progression of four four-stage episodes in the subsidiary plot about Mandu’s courtship. His successful progress through the various series of four tests in the Rain-Lord’s town are momentous for his future, but the grander progression of trees represents the continuity of his entire career and marks the principal stages of it before as well as during his marriage-suit, indeed from his very birth to the day of his wedding. The series of trees in the substance of the story is subordinate only to the sequence of fourteen songs as an overall organizational scheme in this long tale.
| First Song ⬇ |
Second Song ⬇ |
Third Song ⬇ |
Fourth Song ⬇ |
1st tree (green): Kalombe |
2nd tree (hewn): drums |
Journey to an old woman living alone |
Journey to a young woman surrounded by society |
| Fifth Song ⬇ |
Sixth Song ⬇ |
Seventh Song ⬇ |
Eighth Song ⬇ |
Ninth Song ⬇ |
3rd tree (green): shade-tree at the Rain-Lord’s city; 4 tests to obtain shelter |
4 tests to obtain food |
4 tests to obtain marital kin; 5th test adumbrated; First day of courtship ends |
4th tree (hewn): Baobab |
Consummation of marriage by completing a 5th test; Second day of courtship ends |
|---|
With the grand progression of four trees completed in the eighth episode, the story is ripe for the bride to go to her husband:
The Rain-Lord’s People shave his daughter bald, cover her in ashes, and give her only a fragment of animal skin to wear on her wedding-night. They dress one of the bride’s slave-women in finery even more sumptuous than the women wore in the seventh episode, and send the two of them to Mandu’s ramshackle quarters. As the two women approach his hut, the Rain-Lord’s daughter lightens and Mandu thunders. His feather tells him which is his bride, and he passes the nuptial night with her.
Mandu began life as Kalombe, the Little Blood-Wood Tree, in a state of separation from the rest of mankind so absolute that no real infant could have survived it. He survived because he possessed the remarkable power of attraction of his namesake—the same unifying power that the blood-wood had in Mumba’s other tale “Let the Big Drum Roll.” Kalombe’s attraction for his mother is perhaps only natural; in any case she continues to take food to the wild for him even after she has relinquished all other control over his fate. Beyond her, his power of attraction beguiles first the little old wild woman and then his young cousin Ngoma (‘Drums’), who both join with his natural mother to raise Katombc outside the village. Thus three generations of women dwelling both within and without the confines of the town stand united at the end of the first episode in the common cause of protecting and rearing Kalombe.
In the second episode, Kalombe renamed Mandu manifests in himself the very essence of hewing when, all untaught, he carves the drums wherewith he soon attracts and unites the entire personnel of the story, male and female, young and old, around himself. But this perfect unity precipitates the first gesture of separation seen in the tale since Kalombe began to exert his unifying power at the time of his abandonment. This first breach of the newly achieved social solidarity in Mandu’s village occurs when his mother tells him that he should woo the daughter of the Rain-Lord, which means that he, the new-found focus of perfect unanimity in the village, must leave it and go to live at least for a time among strangers with whom not comity but conflict will be the dominant mode of life. From this time forth separations and rifts of all kinds multiply in the career of Kalombe/Mandu, and other trees both living and cut are introduced to mark each major new phase of the separative and reunifying processes.
In short tales, the difference between the two extremes of unity and separation is measured by a journey between just two trees, with perhaps at most only a single intermediate stage like the wooden flute “Going-right-away” in the Lamba tale about the Sons of Squeezer. Or sometimes, in very short tales like the Mukuni “How Shall I Silence Katubi?” only one of the two trees is carefully articulated, while its opposite appears elsewhere in some other, suppletive tales. It is interesting to note that the Mukuni narrator of “How Shall I Silence Katubi?” was an adolescent named Mwana Rumina who was only fifteen years of age. His relative inexperience as a traditional narrator may be a reason why only one of the expected two trees appeared in that story. Yet even experienced and altogether knowledgeable story-tellers like Mumba sometimes gave one of the trees much more prominence than the other and used no intermediate motifs between them at all, as in “Let the Big Drum Roll.” But when it came to telling a long story in complex style like the tale of Kapepe, Mumba agreed with her fellow Mukuni story-tellers that the two trees must proliferate into many trees and be arranged in progressions to show more gradually the same movement between separation and unification that would occur abruptly between only two trees in a short tale. So we have not just two trees in the nine episodes of Mandu’s youth and courtship, but four.
Those four trees are in turn arranged in pairs of two, one pair belonging to the tale of Mandu’s boyhood, and the other pair to hiswooing of the Rain-Lord’s daughter. The two halves of each pair are of course green wood and hewn; but the two pairs themselves replicate the same contrast on a grander scale. Thus, the woods of Mandu’s boyhood are green (Kalombe, the Little Blood Wood Tree) and hewn (the drums), but both taken together emit primarily the notion of hewing and of cut wood, for while Kalombe is named (and resides in the wilderness like) the living tree, it is nevertheless he who spontaneously carves and beats the wooden drums that are the cut and purely civilized implements of social consolidation. By contrast, the pair of green and cut trees in the period of Mandu’s courtship are, despite the usual internal difference between them, nevertheless predominantly an unhewn set of arboreal images, for only the bark is taken from the Baobab—a hewing that is literally only skin deep—while the Rain-Lord’s shade-tree (as an inviolable green sanctuary against the scorching equatorial sun) is utterly remote from even the faintest suggestion of hewing. Thus, even in larger progressions of nominal tree-motifs that multiply the basic dualism of the cut and uncut trees and impart graduated nuances of local meaning to them, the fundamental opposition of green and hewn wood persists with its stable polarity of generic meaning.
The third, greenest, and most unhewable of the four trees is the one beneath which Mandu introduces himself to the people whose princess he has come to woo and marry. He indicates to them by the courting attitude which he assumes under that tree and by the words which he speaks there that he has come to separate the Rain-Lord’s daughter from that place and from her kin in that place, and to take her away as his bride (fifth episode). Then in the crown of the Baobab tree he finally wins the right to possess the girl, which is reciprocally the duty of the Rain-Lord to separate his daughter from her people and give her to the foreigner Mandu. When finally at the consummation of their marriage they are left alone together in the tumbled-down hut, both Mandu and the girl alike have been substantially alienated from their respective kin.
Still, the process of separation is not complete in the ninth episode. Though separated from their respective kin, Mandu and the girl are at last maritally united; they are still in her native town; and now Mandu might think of returning to his own village with his bride, since that was the normal course of events in Mukuni marriages. Those facts constitute at least three more circumstances wherein further separations might occur:
1) Mandu from his bride’s town
2) the bride from her native town
3) Mandu from his bride
If indeed these three separations were to occur, then a fourth possibility would also arise:
4) the bride separated from her husband’s village
With so many potential occasions for the play of unity and division still remaining in the tale, it would be strange if there were not also more trees forthcoming to preside over the successive stages of that play. The tenth episode accordingly supplies two more trees, the fifth and sixth in the overall arboreal progression of the whole narrative.
The events of this episode occupy the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth days of Mandu’s sojourn in the city of the Rain-Lord. The Rain-Lord ordains five lethally dangerous labours for his new son-in-law. On the first day he commands Mandu to 1) hoe and trample mortar in a pit; on the second day, to 2) cut down all the branches from the crown of a live thorn-tree, and 3) fetch dry branches for fire-wood from an old woodpile infested with termites; on the third day, to 4) help the Rain-Lord forge lightning-bolts; on the fourth day, to 5) repair a damaged roof with patching material of bark. The Rain-Lord conjures the object of each labour to separate Mandu from his city: 1) the mortar-pit to engulf him; 2) the thorn-tree to carry him up into the sky; 3) the woodpile to incinerate him; 4) the hammer to pull him away by its centrifugal force; 5) the roof to fly away and transport him. Mandu asks the Rain-Lord to hold his feather-badge while he does the prescribed work so that the valuable fetish will not be soiled or damaged. He conjures the feather to inflict a corresponding injury on the Rain-Lord for each of the Rain-Lord’s attempts to hurt him. At the end of the labours the Rain-Lord yields and Mandu remains in the city.
The four days of exercise which the Rain-Lord requires of Mandu are the Lenje version of another international narrative pattern. Lords of the sky in fable commonly resist young men who come claiming rights of kinship by threatening them with four kinds of peril. The generic motifs of the pattern are:
1) danger of being swallowed
2) danger of falling
3) danger of being crushed
4) danger of being roasted
There will be other examples of this pattern farther in these pages. Of course Mwana Mbirika knew the pattern only in its familiar Lenje dress:
1) Mandu threatened by ingurgitation into the gastrogenous contents
of the mortar pit;
2) Mandu in danger of falling from Baobab, thorn-tree, and rooftop;
3) Mandu imperiled by the Rain-Lord’s hammer;
4) Mandu burning in the woodpile.
The Mukuni narrator linked this pattern with the pattern of the two trees by making Mandu climb the trees and undergo the prescribed risk of falling from them. The pattern of the sky-lord’s four tests thus dictated that the trees in this part of the story should be alike in being heights from which to fall. Simultaneously, the pattern of the Two Trees’ story dictated that each of the trees should have an ominous preternatural beneath it (the Rain-Lord) contending with his human guest about enjoyment of food or nubile women (the food/progeny pattern).
The pattern of the Two Trees’ story also requires, however, that the trees presiding over Mandu’s marriage be diametrical opposites in other ways. Accordingly, Mandu climbs the enormous, glaubrous, and soft-wooded Baobab during the day preceding his wedding-night, but on the following day he climbs the thorn-tree, a tree of naturally modest size, yet so spiny and of such hard wood that no man would ever conceivably climb it, or even cut it for any purpose except to fell it at ground level and be rid of it. And unlike the live Baobab whose bark-fibre was useful, a living thorn-tree could yield nothing but deep and painful lacerations, while a dead one was good only for firewood. Consequently, another difference between the Baobab and the thorn-tree is the utility of the one when alive and standing versus the utility of the other when felled and dead.
Mandu approaches both of these sequentially proximate but typologically very different trees in exactly the same manner, climbing them to take wooden material from their crowns as the Rain-Lord commanded. Yet the results of that identically repeated action are as different as the trees themselves; they, and not Mandu, determine the profit or loss of his labour. Indeed, the trees not only decide what becomes of Mandu’s effort, they also decide what becomes of Mandu himself, moulding him in their own image even while he works. Like the fibre from the living Baobab, Mandu is useful as social binding-material before his wedding when he serves to connect his own people with those of the Rain-Lord. But after his marriage he is like the thorn-tree. He cuts the thorn-tree’s wood in such a way (in the crown of the tree) that it must inevitably injure him as much as he injures it. For each cut he inflicts upon the tree, it will reciprocally inflict laceration upon him, and the blood must run from his wounds as freely as does the sap from the tree’s.
When finally Mandu and the thorn tree have cut each other down according to this absolute mutuality of injury, neither of them is good for any better purpose in the Rain-Lord’s eyes than to be burnt as firewood. Mandu accordingly goes on the same day directly from the impossible job of cutting the thorn-tree to the woodpile for a test of his flammability. There the Rain-Lord tries to infest him with termites as though he were the same as any other stick or splinter of felled wood left to decay in Central Africa, where the ubiquitous ‘white ant’ (termite) attacks even living trees when they have been injured.
The conclusion is thus inescapable: Mandu’s experience is identical with that of the two trees that frame his wedding-night. Before his wedding, he is figurative binding material, intangibly and in a social sense like the bark which he brings down from the Baobab for physical ligatures; but after his wedding he is only an economic substance to be consumed in the service of his new kin like thorn-wood in their fires. He and his trees are simply human and arboreal forms of the same principles, with the sole difference that Mandu, the animate representative of those principles, is with the passage of time capable of metamorphosis from one aspect of the principles to another, whereas the inanimate trees are not. Being inanimate, they can only succeed each other in a dynasty of separate existences (i.e., a progression of multiforms), woodenly following one after the other in a series of graduated but mutually exclusive contrasts and contradictions. The Baobab cannot be like the thorn-tree, nor can their different utilities ever be reconciled in their own persons. Mandu experiences the same contrasts and contradictions as do they, but differently. For him they are only stages in the unbroken cycle of his whole life, and he has an ability to escape contradiction which no tree has: the power to change. Therein lies the essential difference ’twixt the man and his trees, and the maintenance of that distinction is every wit as important in the story “Kapepe” as is the obvious analogy of Mandu with the trees. He and the trees are exactly identical, but only for a moment and in certain momentarily primary respects.
As Kalombe, Mandu was in his infancy identified with the blood-wood tree, but in time his name was changed. Ceasing to be wood, he became a hewer of wood and made the socially unifying drums when he was a boy. In a parallel manner, he is briefly identical with the thorn-tree on the second day of his marital career, but on the fourth day he comes into a new character as repairman of his father-in-law’s wooden roof. That wood is like the wood of Heorot in the Old English epic of Beowulf, already completely hewn and domesticated before Mandu’s coming. And Like Beowulf, Mandu is charged with responsibility only for that hewn wood’s preservation. Thus, after his marriage, he no longer hews new things from wood as he did when he made the drums in his youth; yet he is still a woodworker, and the progression in his maturity parallels that found in his childhood: from identity with wood to former of things wooden. So the progression of trees and other motifs of place make Mandu’s marriage a major demarcation in his life, second only to his birth:
| Place of Beginning | Identity | Product |
|---|---|---|
| Shallows of the River | Bloodwood Tree | Drums |
| Place of Beginning | Identity | Product |
|---|---|---|
| Mortar-Pit | Thorn Tree | Roofing |
The Rain-Lord commanded Mandu to climb the Baobab as a way of preventing marriage with his daughter. By his unexpected success in the Baobab, Mandu won the right to possess the girl in her native village. Having thus failed to prevent Mandu’s divisive entry into his city and into the circle of his kin, the Rain-Lord next attempted in the tenth song to purge the intrusive son-in-law out of his community. Purgation of an entrenched opponent being harder than mere opposition to a newcomer, the Rain-Lord correspondingly used more violent means in the second instance than in the first: two trees instead of one, and magical attempts to make the trees act against Mandu instead of leaving the outcome of the perilous climbing to natural chance in the case of the Baobab. But Mandu meets the Rain-Lord’s concerted effort to force his departure in the tenth episode with an even stronger determination to remain, and he succeeds. He unites himself definitively with his new affinal kin and asserts his right to remain in their village by enduring the trials of service to them and their chief on the thorn-tree and roof-top. Like the second episode before it, the tenth episode also ends in perfect unification of all the tale’s personae.
If Mandu’s reward for climbing the Baobab was possession of the girl (partially alienating her from her kin), then his reward for climbing the thorn- and roof-tree is the right to carry her away from her native village to his (thus alienating her completely from her kin at least in a physical sense). The perfect unity that crystalized around Kalombe and his drums in the second song ended paradoxically in Mandu’s separation from his people. In the same manner, the perfect unity achieved in the Rain-Lord’s city in the tenth song ends with Mandu’s paradoxical decision to leave that city in the eleventh song. Mandu’s and the Rain-Lord’s postures toward each other in the tenth episode (Mandu wanting to remain and the Rain-Lord wanting to expel him) are reversed in the eleventh, where Mandu struggles to depart while the Rain-Lord exerts all the obstructive force which he can deploy as lord of waters to stop Mandu’s homeward progress:
Mandu and his bride leave the Rain-Lord’s city on the seventh day after his arrival there as suitor. Her people give the bride provisions, slaves, and cattle, and Mandu gives her his feather-fetish and wild-cat shin (a badge of royalty) to carry on the journey. She lags behind as they walk, and Mandu summons her to follow more promptly. She replies in song, calling Mandu by a new name: Ximutemambaro, ‘Child of Woodcutter.’ The bride looks back toward her father’s city twice during the journey, and laments that the Rain-Lord has forsaken her. Her father causes a torrential rainfall each time, which paralyzes the bride’s procession. But Mandu conjures the sun to shine and the procession resumes its march.
Mandu outdistances his wife’s company and sits down to await them under a big shade-tree beside a stream on the outskirts of his native forest.
The patterns found in long tales are not different from those in short ones. They are only more extended and more frequently repeated in the telling, while the essential ideas which they convey are more completely and more intricately developed. The same generic motifs cluster around the recurrent pairs of contrasting trees in “Kapepe” as in any single-tuned Lenje (or other Central African Bantu) story about the Two Trees. “Kapepe” has its exogamic bridegroom Mandu, its ogre under the tree (repeated in the eighth and tenth episodes), its riddles of identity before marriage (sixth episode), its seven days of contest for possession of a woman, its host and guest who, meeting under green wood, find their expectations of each other inverted by untoward fortune, and its hewer of wood with his characteristic policy of an eye for an eye, who inflicts upon a preterhuman figure the same injuries which that disguised ogre attempts to inflict on him. If certain motifs of this familiar cluster are still missing, one may reasonably anticipate that in a tale as long as “Kapepe” they too will eventually appear. Experience teaches a hearer of Central African tradition to expect, for example, that sooner or later one of the trees in “Kapepe” will yield wild food which some trickster will try to use hurtfully. And the exogamic bridegroom will somehow lose his bride...
The bride overtakes Mandu at the shade-tree where he awaits her, and bids him go onward with her entourage through the forest to his own village while she pauses to bathe in the stream. A honey-guide calls to Mandu in the forest, and he follows it to a bee-tree. Taking some of the honey from it, he returns with the honey to his wife’s entourage, but an imposter has meanwhile taken the wildcat skin from his real wife and assumed her place in the procession. He gives some of the honey to this substitute bride, and they march on together toward his village.
The true bride pursues them from the west, singing as she goes. Mandu and his mother recognize the substitute at the threshold of his house because she does not have his feather-fetish. Mandu rushes back along the path by which he has just come and meets his real wife.
Mandu’s people welcome his bride to his village with great feasting. She will not eat, but consents after much persuasion to taste a little beer.
The Rain-Lord’s daughter cannot endure life in Mandu’s village because its people are immoral. After ten days she flies home to her father’s city with Mandu in pursuit. He is unable to overtake her until she has reached the city, where they then reside together permanently.
The shade-tree in the eleventh episode is an obvious twin of the one at the beginning of the fifth song. Both are liminal motifs, the first standing on the threshold of Mandu’s married life in his wife’s village, and the second verging on married life in his own village. Mandu goes from sitting under those trees to climbing first the Baobab and then the bee-tree, where in each instance he obtains economically useful material.
So in “Kapepe” there are not just two trees as in short tales of the same pattern, but eight trees arranged in two parallel progressions with four nominal arboreal motifs apiece. The pattern is still generically two-fold, but nominally eight-fold in this particular tale. The same contrast between unification and separation obtains between the two progressions as between two single trees in short tales, and internally each of the two progressions moves from domestic to wild imagery, from hewn to unhewn wood (or vice versa) as is usual in tales with only two nominal motifs of trees. The numerical elaboration of the two generic motifs into eight nominal ones simply permits a fuller, more leisurely application of the Two Trees’ pattern to a greater variety of situations. Tales like Mumba’s “Let the Big Drum Roll” and “What Do You Mean, Block of Wood?” apply the Two Trees’ pattern to single courses of action or single phases of experience like marriage or crime-and-punishment; but the more elaborate form of the pattern in “Kapepe” provides the plot for an entire male career from birth to middle-age. The first of the two progressions of trees in “Kapepe” provides the framework for a course of primarily social events, while the second organizes a narrative about economic activities; correspondingly, the first progression coincides with Mandu’s bachelorhood, and the second with his being a husband.
| UNITY | ⇔ | SEPARATION |
| Mandu as juvenile & ceremonial hewer |
Kalombe | Ngoma (Drums) |
Rain-Lord’s Shade-Tree |
Baobab |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Becoming completely domestic |
Domestic, hewn |
Wild, unhewn |
Becoming partly domestic | |
| Unity aborning |
Unity perfected, Mandu departs |
Terrestrially liminal |
Aerially liminal | |
| Little Blood-Wood (Kalombe) [green] becomes... |
Dry wood | Green wood | partly green, partly dry | |
| ...Child of Woodcutter (Mandu) |
Cutting for ceremonial manufacture |
Man underneath awaits wife |
Cutting for ceremonial manufacture |
|
| Food brought to Mandu |
Man and wife soon to be joined |
| Mandu as adult & practical hewer |
Thorn-tree | Roof | Mandu’s Shade-tree |
Bee-tree |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Becoming completely domestic |
Domestic, hewn |
Wild, unhewn |
Becoming partly domestic | |
| Unity aborning |
Unity perfected, Mandu departs |
Terrestrially liminal |
Aerially liminal | |
| Green, then dry |
Dry wood | Green wood | partly green, partly dry | |
| Cutting mostly practical, partly ceremonial |
Binding for practical repair |
Man underneath awaits wife |
Cutting entirely practical |
|
| Man and wife soon to be separated |
Mandu brings food |
|||
| 1st tree: Green wood as hewer’s alter-ego |
2nd tree: wholly dry and domesticated by hewer |
3rd tree: wholly green and untouched by hewer |
4th tree: Dry/green, cut/uncut, domestic/wild |
Torrend observed rather shyly that “Kapepe” was like the Biblical legend of Moses. He gave only a thumbnail sketch of the likeness, but few know it, and it is worth knowing.
In this tale, as in others, the narrators take, of course, all the liberties of fiction, but, even so, there are in it too many details reminding one of the authentic story of Moses to allow us to reject as entirely absurd the notion that some parts of it sound like an echo, however faint, of Mosaic traditions.
We have, in suggestive combination, a chief ordering the murder of newborn boys, a boy taken to the river and deposited there in some sort of cradle, a woman taking care of him, and the very mother of the boy knowing all about it, while a near relation, called Drum or Drums, is also in the secret. There is also a wonderful feather with some of the magic power of Moses’ wand. Then the filth which blocks the way of our hero makes one think of the plagues of Egypt. The river Putu, which he has to cross, is said to be somewhere in the direction of Egypt. Here, as in Exodus, we have a high mountain and a plague of snakes. By our hero, as by Moses, the Lord is found on a high mountain. In both narratives lightning and thunder play an important part. In both narratives the hero, to secure the treasure upon which he has set his heart, has to go twice to the mountain of God.
And after all, what did the author of the original tale mean by speaking of “a daughter” or “the daughter” of God “coming with water from the clouds?” It is quite possible that he may have meant “the law of God” given to the hero amidst thunder and lightning. A number of passages of the tale are evidently meant to teach certain Mukuni laws supposed to come from God. And one of its notable features is that the sight of wrong-doings is enough to make the daughter of God run away.
What is beyond doubt is that the present narrators have not sought their inspiration in the Bible. They are perfectly illiterate, and the principal narrator, Mwana Mbirika, has probably never entered a church.
Just as this is going to press I note in Anthropos (1909, p. 946), the following observation of Father Trilles: “In our Northern Fam tribes, far from all European infiltration, in villages which had never seen a white face, I found a legend in which the principal actor, Bingo, saviour of his people whom he frees from the persecutions of an enemy nation and whom he leads through a thousand dangers to the land they are going to occupy, reminds one strongly of the Moses of the Bible... .”32
It is now many years since Julius Torrend published those words, and we are still no nearer to an exact understanding of the relationship between Central African and ancient Near Eastern fable than he was, for not even a basic description of Central African tradition has yet been compiled. But even the scant data which he made available from one people shows the kinship between Moses’ burning bush and fabulous staff on the one hand (Exodus 3 and 4) and the two trees in African fable on the other.
Walking alone in an uninhabited place (“the far side of the wilderness”), Moses finds a bush so resolutely green that not even the flame of the angel of Yahweh will burn it (Exodus 3:1-3). There the mortal visitor Moses meets a supernal host, Yahweh, who without bidding or any offer of recompense promises to feed not only Moses but also his whole people with milk and honey (3:8). As the lonely interview between man and preterhuman progresses beside green wood in the wilderness, it appears however that the preternatural being is mortally dangerous as well as gratuitously bountiful. Moses hears Yahweh proffer an unheard-of deliverance and riches, but is also hideously infected with leprosy by the same donor, who does this awful thing to him even as he makes the spectacular promise of plentiful good things (4:6). Here in the wilds of Mount Horeb where Moses is not only remote from his own people but also separated from all other human company of any kind, he hears Yahweh describe how the Hebrews are likewise to go forth into the wilderness after separation from their host Pharaoh, whose one-time kindness has in the course of history been unaccountably turned about, and so become a deadly oppression. But the Hebrews who have thus experienced a reversal of their expected good fortune in Egypt are soon, says Yahweh, to observe the ogreish Pharaoh’s reversal of fortune; for whereas Pharaoh has made the Hebrews his victims, Pharaoh is paradoxically soon to be the victim of the Hebrews. Moses in the role of trickster is to be the agent of this turnabout, but not before he too experiences an unanticipated reversal of his own personal fortune. For, having endued him with amazing magical power (Exodus 4), Yahweh then paradoxically pursues Moses and in Exodus 4:24 attempts to assassinate him. As the husband of Zipporah, a Midianite woman, Moses is of course an exogamic bridegroom whose marriage among aliens now brings trouble upon both himself and his foreign affinal kin, as Zipporah is quick to say (4:25) and to repeat (4:26).
So the notions of separation, gratuity, and an unpredictable deadly danger cluster about Moses’ burning bush (that will not be burnt) just as they do about the green wood of the heroes elsewhere in the Old Testament or in modern African fable. Meanwhile the ideas of unification, recompense, reciprocity, and the meting out of punishments to ogres as ogres mete out injuries to men cluster about the hewn wood of Moses’ staff. It is this piece of wood cut and fashioned to human purpose which Yahweh in the bush on Mount Horeb specifically designates as the ceremonial implement for uniting Hebrew allegiances on the one hand and for the practical exaction of penalties against the Egyptians on the other hand. Both functions are merely extensions in logic of the same staff’s ordinary uses in Moses’ shepherding of his animal flocks. Thus, unity (not only of the Hebrews as one people, but also of the Hebrews and Yahweh in a common cause), a justice that exactly retaliates hurt for hurt, and a divinely guaranteed prediction of escape from mortal danger all attend Moses’ wooden staff just as they attend Beowulf’s lance-shaft and Heorot, Mandu’s hewn trees, or the flutes of Mr. Squeezer.
Thus experience with a living tradition of oral fable shows once again that no tradition is intelligible in isolation from the continuum of story-telling in other languages all around it, whether past or present. As Lamba fable revealed a pattern shared between the Biblical Legend of Samson and the Fall of Man earlier in this discussion, so now the tales told by a Lenje woman named Mumba and her fellows reveal formal kinship between the Legend of Samson and the tale of Moses, for it too is a multiform of the Two Trees’ story. Like Samson denied his alien bride, so Moses also struggled to acquire alien property which in the end he could not himself enjoy. If, as some think, the Legend of Samson was originally a Philistine story which the Hebrews borrowed from northerly neighbors, then the immediate cognates of the Mosaic legends point southward into Africa.
Indeed ancient Hebrew legends surviving in the Old Testament abound with multiforms of the Two Trees’ pattern. Abraham under the Oak (or Terebinth) of Mamre in Genesis 18 is another founder of Hebrew nationhood who, like Adam before and Moses and Samson after him, met fatefully with a preterhuman agent and the preternatural, paradoxical effects of that agent under greenwood. There Abraham supposed himself to be Yahweh’s benefactor, but in the endit was Yahweh who benefitted Abraham with theremarkable gift of Isaac. Not, however, before the supernal being had alloyed his unbidden generosity with the fearful danger of an equally gratuitous reprisal for Sarah’s indiscrete laughter. But what Yahweh gave him gratis under the green tree in Genesis 18 Abraham is obliged to repay completely in Genesis 22, and for that purpose of requital he hews wood (22:33). So capriciously exigent a demand from the erstwhile benefactor at the green wood is of course only to be expected in the regular pattern of the Two Trees’ story. Yet in the end the incident of the sacrifice of Isaac is governed by the hewn wood which Abraham has cut and Isaac carried upon his back to the place of sacrifice. Accordingly, the whole episode concludes purely as a test of the true mutuality of Abraham’s and Yahweh’s devotion to each other, and the hewn wood triumphs in the sworn and proven unity of Yahweh and Abraham’s descendants forever.
Like “Kapepe,” the legends of Abraham and of Moses are long tales full of progression, a device of oral narrative patterning whereby great tales are made from basically simple and easily remembered designs. But they remain stories of a trickster’s encounter with a preternatural who offers his human client food/progeny in the presence of a green tree, and of the preternatural’s alternate helping and hurting, mitigated by a champion who hews wood (as Moses did when he caused the hewing of acacia for the ark and the tabernacle) to unite his people and to limit the preternatural’s depredations against them. The ancient Jews well knew (without necessarily understanding) that fabulous champions and saviours are hewers of wood, and they constructed the written chronicles of their legendary beginnings as a nation accordingly, on the firm bedrock of a fundamental pattern in oral fable.
