Konkomba Tales: the python's blotches and the tortoise's shell
The Konkomba have a large and well-documented body of folktales — around a hundred collected — and they are unusually blunt.
The Oti and eastern Northern Region; Konkomba market at Accra is a different thing entirely but shares the name.
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Listening to Konkomba Tales: the python's blotches and the tortoise's shell
Konkomba Tales: the python's blotches and the tortoise's shell
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Konkomba Tales: the python's blotches and the tortoise's shell
The Konkomba have a large and well-documented body of folktales — around a hundred collected — and they are unusually blunt. The animals are not charming. Fairness is the recurring subject, and the tales are frequently about someone getting exactly what they set up for themselves.
Why the python is blotched. The python was smooth once and vain about it. He goes to a feast or a gathering he was not entitled to attend, or he takes a share that was not his, and he is marked for it — burned, splashed, branded — and the marks do not wash off, and every python since is born wearing the evidence.
Why the tortoise's shell is cracked. This one is told everywhere in West Africa and the Konkomba version is a good one. The birds are invited to a feast in the sky. Tortoise persuades them each to lend him a feather so he can come too, then goes ahead of them and tells the hosts his name is All of You — so that when the food is set down and the hosts say "this is for all of you," Tortoise eats everything. The birds take their feathers back and leave him up there. He calls down to his wife to lay out all the soft things in the compound so he can jump; she is told otherwise by an angry bird, and lays out the hard things instead. He jumps. The shell breaks and is mended in pieces, and it has never been smooth again.
The rabbit tales. In the Konkomba cycle the trickster is often the hare rather than the spider — smaller, faster, and consistently the one who wins by knowing how greedy everyone else is. These are the direct northern cousins of the Br'er Rabbit stories of the American South.
If you visit Ghana. The Oti and eastern Northern Region; Konkomba market at Accra is a different thing entirely but shares the name.
The Konkomba have a large and well-documented body of folktales — around a hundred collected — and they are unusually blunt. The animals are not charming. Fairness is the recurring subject, and the tales are frequently about someone getting exactly what they set up for themselves.
Why the python is blotched. The python was smooth once and vain about it. He goes to a feast or a gathering he was not entitled to attend, or he takes a share that was not his, and he is marked for it — burned, splashed, branded — and the marks do not wash off, and every python since is born wearing the evidence.
Why the tortoise's shell is cracked. This one is told everywhere in West Africa and the Konkomba version is a good one. The birds are invited to a feast in the sky. Tortoise persuades them each to lend him a feather so he can come too, then goes ahead of them and tells the hosts his name is All of You — so that when the food is set down and the hosts say "this is for all of you," Tortoise eats everything. The birds take their feathers back and leave him up there. He calls down to his wife to lay out all the soft things in the compound so he can jump; she is told otherwise by an angry bird, and lays out the hard things instead. He jumps. The shell breaks and is mended in pieces, and it has never been smooth again.
The rabbit tales. In the Konkomba cycle the trickster is often the hare rather than the spider — smaller, faster, and consistently the one who wins by knowing how greedy everyone else is. These are the direct northern cousins of the Br'er Rabbit stories of the American South.