Reading Notes: Nigeria, Part B

African Spurred Tortoise (Flickr)

For Part B of this week's reading in the Nigeria unit, I found the story "How the Tortoise Overcame the Elephant and the Hippopotamus" to be the most fascinating to me.  The story begins when the Tortoise boasts to the Elephant and the Hippo, claiming that neither of them are strong enough to pull him with a rope from the water.  The Elephant takes the Tortoise up on his bet, offering twenty thousand rods.  When the test comes, though, the Tortoise cheats by tying the rope to a rock in the stream.  The Elephant pulls and pulls, but because the rope is tied to the rock, it does not budge.  However, the defeated Elephant doesn't realize the Tortoise's trick, because the Tortoise re-ties the rope to his leg before exiting the water.  For a while, the Tortoise is content with his earnings, until the money runs out.  He goes to the Hippo this time and presents the same challenge, and the Hippo accepts, although he asks that the roles be reversed--he wants to try to pull the Tortoise into the water this time.  Once again, the Tortoise tricks his opponent by tying the rope to a nearby tree when the Hippo isn't looking.  Because neither the Elephant nor the Hippo realizes that they have been deceived, they both decide that the Tortoise must be stronger than he appears, and they ask him to be their ally.  As a compromise, the Tortoise sends his son to live with the Elephant on land, while he lives with the Hippo in the water.  The story concludes that this legend is why there are some terrestrial and some aquatic tortoises.

I'm not as familiar with the tortoise as a trickster character in folklore, which seems to be a common thread in these African stories.  As a result, the tortoise was probably one of the most interesting characters to me.  I also thought that the "moral" of the story at the end was unexpected, because I thought it would end poorly for the Tortoise, that he would have some kind of negative consequence for his trickery.  But ultimately the story concluded with an etiological message about why there are different types of tortoises.  If I were to retell this story, I would want to adjust the ending to include a minor moral consequence of some sort for the Tortoise.

Bibliography: "How the Tortoise Overcame the Elephant and the Hippopotamus," by Elphinstone Dayrell.