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CONTENTS
The Folk-Lore Society
FOR COLLECTING AND PRINTING
RELICS OF POPULAR ANTIQUITIES, &c.
ESTABLISHED IN
THE YEAR MDCCCLXXVIII.
Alter et idem.
PUBLICATIONS
OF
THE FOLK-LORE SOCIETY
LV.
[1904]
JAMAICAN SONG AND STORY:
ANNANCY STORIES, DIGGING SINGS, RING
TUNES, AND DANCING TUNES
COLLECTED AND EDITED BY
WALTER JEKYLL:
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
ALICE WERNER,
AND APPENDICES ON
TRACES OF AFRICAN MELODY IN JAMAICA
BY
C.S. MYERS,
AND ON
ENGLISH AIRS AND MOTIFS IN JAMAICA
BY
LUCY E. BROADWOOD.
“A few brief years have passed awaySince Britain drove her million slaves
Beneath the tropic’s fiery ray:
God willed their freedom; and to-day
Life blooms above those island graves!”
Whittier
Published for the Folk-Lore Society by
DAVID NUTT, 57-59 LONG ACRE
LONDON
1907
CONTENTS.
PAGE Introduction (Alice Werner), xxiii Author's Preface, liii PART I.: ANNANCY STORIES, 1 1. Annancy and Brother Tiger, 7 2. Yung-Kyum-Pyung, 11 3. King Daniel, 14 4. Tomby, 16 5. How Monkey manage Annancy, 20 6. Blackbird and Woss-woss, 23 7. The Three Sisters, 26 8. William Tell, 29 9. Brother Annancy and Brother Death, 31 10. Mr. Bluebeard, 35 11. Annancy, Puss and Ratta, 38 12. Toad and Donkey, 39 13. Snake the Postman, 43 14. Doba, 46 15. Dry-Bone, 48 16. Annancy and the Old Lady's Field, 51 17. Man-Crow, 54 18. Saylan, 58 19. Annancy and Screech-Owl, 60 20. Annancy and Cow,INTRODUCTION.
Mr. Jekyll's delightful collection of tales and songs from Jamaica suggests many interesting problems. It presents to us a network of interwoven strands of European and African origin, and when these have been to some extent disentangled we are confronted with the further question, to which of the peoples of the Dark Continent may the African element be attributed?
The exact relationship between the "Negro" and Bantu races,—which of them is the original and which the adulterated stock (in other words, whether the adulteration was an improvement or the reverse),—is a subject quite beyond my competence to discuss. It seems certain that the Negro languages (as yet only tentatively classified) are as distinct from the singularly homogeneous and well-defined Bantu family, as Aryan from Semitic. Ibo, at one end of the area, has possible Bantu affinities, which await fuller investigation; the same thing has been conjectured of Bullom and Temne at the other end (Sierra Leone); but these are so slight and as yet so doubtful that they scarcely affect the above estimate.
The difference in West Coast and Bantu folk-tales is not so marked as that between the languages; yet here, too, along with a great deal which the two have in common, we can pick out some features peculiar to each. And Mr. Jekyll's tales, so far as they can be supposed to come from Africa at all, are not Bantu. The name of "Annancy" alone is enough to tell us that.
Annancy, or Anansi is the Tshi (Ashanti)[1] word for "spider"; and the Spider figures largely in the folk-tales of the West Coast (by which we mean, roughly, the coast between Cape Verde and Kamerun), while, with some curious exceptions to be noted later on, he seems to be absent from Bantu folk-lore. His place is there taken by the Hare (Brer Rabbit), and, in some of his aspects, by the Tortoise.
We find the "Brer Rabbit" stories (best known through Uncle Remus) in the Middle and Southern States of America, where a large proportion, at any rate, of the negro slaves were imported from Lower Guinea. Some personal names and other words preserved among them (e.g. "goober" = nguba, the ground-nut, or "pea-nut") can be traced to the Fiote, or Lower Congo language; and some songs of which I have seen the words,[2] look as if they might be Bantu, but corrupted apparently beyond recognition.
But the British West Indies would seem to have been chiefly supplied from Upper Guinea, or the "West Coast" proper (it really faces south, while Loango, Congo, etc., are the "South-West Coast"—a point which is sometimes puzzling to the uninitiated). Among the tribes to be found in Jamaica, Mr. Jekyll tells me are the Ibo (Lower Niger), Coromantin (Gold Coast), Hausa, Mandingo, Moko (inland from Calabar), Nago (Yoruba), and Sobo (Lower Niger).
Mr. Jekyll furnishes a bit of confirmatory evidence in the list of names (p. 156) given to children according to the day of the week on which they are born. These are immediately recognizable as Tshi. As given in Christaller's Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language called Tshi (1881), the boys' names are identical or nearly so (allowing for the different systems of spelling) with those in Mr. Jekyll's list. They are: Kwasi, Kwadwo, Kwabena, Kwaku, Kwaw (or Yaw), Kofi, Kwame. (Mr. George Macdonald, in The Gold Coast Past and Present, gives Kwamina, instead of Kwame, probably owing to a difference of dialect.) The girls' names are less easily recognizable, but a careful scrutiny reveals the interesting fact that in some cases an older form seems to have been preserved in Jamaica. Moreover, the sound written w by Christaller approaches that of b, which seems to be convertible with it under certain conditions, all the girls' names being formed by means of the suffix ba = a child. Conversely, ekpo in the mouth of a West Coast native sounds to a casual ear like ekwo.
Akosuwa [= Akwasiba] = Quashiba. Adwowa = Jubba. (Cf. dw = dj in "Cudjo"). Abeua = Cubba. Akuwa = Memba. Ya [= Yawa] = Abba. Afuwa = Fibba. Amma [= Amenenewa] = Beniba.The boys' names have "Kwa" (= akoa, a man, slave) prefixed to that of the day, or, more correctly speaking, of its presiding genius. These latter are: Ayisi, Adwo, Benã, Wuku, Yaw, Afi, Amin. The names of the days appear to be formed from them by the omission of the initial A (where it exists), and the addition of the suffix da, with some irregularities, which no doubt a fuller knowledge of the language would explain: Kwasida, Dwoda, Benada, Wukuda, Yawda, Fida, Memeneda (Meminda). The week of seven days does not seem to be known elsewhere in Africa, except as a result of Moslem or Christian influence. The Congo week of four days is puzzling, till one remembers that it, too, rests on a division of the lunar month: 7 × 4 instead of 4 × 7.[3]
The Tshi, Ewe and Yoruba languages are genderless, like the Bantu. (The word ba has come to mean "a daughter" when appropriated as a suffix to feminine names; but, properly, it seems to mean "a child" of either sex.) This fact explains the appearance of such personages as "Brother Cow" (see also Mr. Jekyll's note on p. 107), and the wild confusion of pronouns sometimes observed: "Annancy really want that gal fe marry, but he couldn' catch him."—"When the gal go, him go meet Brother Death,"—etc.
The few words given as "African" by Mr. Jekyll seem to be traceable to Tshi. "Massoo" (pp. 12, 13) is mã so = to lift. Afu ("hafoo," "afoo,"
Transplanted African folk-lore has a peculiar interest of its own, and one is very glad to find Mr. Jekyll doing for Jamaica what Mr. Chandler Harris, e.g. has done for Georgia. But the African element in the stories before us is far less evident than in "Uncle Remus," and is in many cases overlaid and inextricably mixed up with matter of European origin. At least eleven out of the fifty-one stories before us can be set down as imported, directly or indirectly, from Europe. I say directly or indirectly, because an examination of Chatelain's Folk-tales of Angola and Junod's Chants et Contes des Baronga shows that some tales, at any rate, have passed from Portugal to Africa. Such are La fille du Roi (Ronga), which is identical with Grimm's The Shoes that were danced to pieces, and with the Slovak-gypsy story of The Three Girls (Groome, Gypsy Folk-tales, p. 141). But in the absence of more detailed and direct evidence than we yet possess, it would be rash to assume that they have passed to America by way of Africa, rather than that they have been independently transmitted.
The eleven stories above referred to are: II. Yung-kyum-pyung, III. King Daniel, VI. Blackbird and Woss-woss, X. Mr. Bluebeard, XVII. Man-crow, XVIII. Saylan, XXI. Tacoma and the Old-witch Girl, XXVI. The Three Pigs, XXXI. Pretty Poll (another version of III.), XXXIX. Open Sesame (variant of VI.), VII. The Three Sisters. But some of these, as I hope to show presently, also have genuine African prototypes, and it is a question how far these fading traditions have been amalgamated with fairy-tales told to the slaves by the children of their European masters. The last named is one of a small group of tales (VII., XXIV., XXXIV., L.) which I cannot help referring to a common African original.
By far the greater number of the stories in this book, whether, strictly speaking, "Annancy stories" or not, come under the heading of animal-stories, and are of the same type as "Uncle Remus," Junod's "Roman du Lièvre," and numerous examples from various parts of Africa. It will be remembered that, in most of these, the difference between animals and human beings is not very clearly kept in view by the narrators. As M. Junod says, "Toutes les bêtes qui passent et repassent dans ces curieux récits représentent des êtres humains, cela va sans dire. Ils sont personnalisés par un procédé linguistique qui consiste à mettre devant le nom de l'animal un préfixe de la classe des hommes." (This is a point we must come back to later on.) "Ainsi mpfoundla, le lièvre ordinaire, devient dans le contes Noua-mpfoundla.... La Rainette, c'est Noua-chinana, l'Eléphant, Noua-ndlopfou.... Leurs caractères physiques particuliers sont présents devant l'imagination du conteur pour autant qu'ils donnent du pittoresque au récit. Mais on les oublie tout aussi aisément dès qu'ils ne sont plus essentiels à la narration." This feature constantly meets one in Bantu folk-lore: the hare and the elephant hire themselves out to hoe a man's garden; the swallow invites the cock to dinner and his wife prepares the food, in the usual native hut with the fireplace in the middle and the nsanja staging over it; the hare's wife goes to the river to draw water, and is caught by a crocodile; the tortoise carries his complaint to the village elders assembled in the smithy, and so on. M. Junod seems to me to overrate the conscious artistic purpose in the narrators of these tales: the native mind is quite ready to assume that animals think and act in much the same way as human beings, and this attitude makes it easy to forget the outward distinctions when they appear as actors in a story. No doubt this haziness of view is increased by the popular conception of metamorphosis as a possible occurrence in everyday life. When, as has more than once been the case, we find men firmly believing, not only that they can, under certain circumstances, turn into animals, but that they actually have done so, we may expect them to think it quite easy for animals to turn into men.
The prefix given by the Baronga to animals, when they are, so to speak, personified in tales, may seem a slight point, but it is not without interest. The Yaos in like manner give them the prefix Che (Che Sungula, the Rabbit, Che Likoswe, the Rat, etc.), which, though usually translated "Mr.," is of common gender and used quite as often in addressing women as men. In Chatelain's Angola stories the animals sometimes (not always) have the honorific prefix Na or Ngana, "Mr."; the latter is sometimes translated "Lord." In Luganda folk-lore the elephant (enjovu) is
Annancy, then, is the Spider, and as such he is conceived throughout the folk-lore of West Africa. If he seems, as he continually does, to take on a human character, going to Freetown to buy a gun and powder (Cunnie Rabbit, p. 282), or applying to a "Mory man" for amulets (ib. p. 139), he only behaves like all other animals, as explained above. A Temne authority (ib. p. 93) maintains that "Spider was a person" in old times, and did not look the same as he does in these days, "he done turn odder kind of thing now." But this looks like an attempt at rationalising the situation, possibly in response to European inquiries. The change of shape alluded to at the end of the Temne Tar-baby episode is comparatively a minor matter: he was formerly "round lek pusson," but became flattened out through the beating he received while attached to the Wax Girl. In the Gold Coast stories, too, Anansi is quite as much a spider as Brer Rabbit is a rabbit; but in Jamaica, though he still retains traces of his origin, they are somewhat obscured—so much so that Mr. Jekyll speaks (pp. 4-5) of the "metamorphic shape, that of the Spider," which he assumes, as though the human were his real form, the other only an occasional disguise. In "Annancy and Brother Tiger" we find that he has to "run up a house-top" to escape the revenge of the monkeys, which accounts for some of his habits to this day. In "Yung-kyum-pyung" (a version of Rumpelstilzchen, or Tom Tit Tot), the only hint of his spider character is contained in a mere allusion (quite external to the story) to his "running 'pon him rope." In "Brother Death," Annancy and all his family cling to the rafters, hoping to escape from Death; but it scarcely seems in character that they should be incapable of holding on long. They drop, one after another, Annancy last (p. 33). He is always in danger from Cows (p. 107): "Anywhere Cow see him, he reach him down with his mouth"; and he lives in a banana branch (p. 119) for fear of Calcutta Monkey and his whip. His moral character is consistently bad all through; he is a "clever thief"—greedy, treacherous, and cruel, but intellectually he does not uniformly shine. He has to call in the help of a wizard in his love affairs; "Monkey was too clever for him" on more than one occasion; he has to be extricated from the slaughter-house (p. 23) by Blackbird and his army of Wasps, and in "Man-crow" he is signally discomfited. In other cases his roguery is successful, and he is described as the greatest musician and "the biggest rascal in the world" (p. 62). Much the same is the character given to Mr. Spider in "Cunnie Rabbit." Not one amiable trait is recorded of him.
A Gold Coast story,[5] however, shows him arbitrating between a Rat and a Panther in very much the same way as the Yao Che Sungula settles the difficulty between the Man and the Crocodile,[6] making the latter go back into the trap whence he had too confidingly been released, in order to show how it was done. Once having got the ungrateful Panther back into the trap, the Spider advises the Rat to leave him there.
As there is a Gold Coast tradition which affirms the human race to be descended from the Spider,[7] it might be expected that he should sometimes appear in a more favourable light, and also that those peoples who had lost this myth, or never possessed it, should concentrate their attention on the darker side of his character. At the
We have mentioned the comparative absence of the Spider from Bantu folk-lore. I have been able to discover only two references to him in East Africa, both to be found in Duff Macdonald's Africana. The first is in a creation-myth of the Yaos (i. 297), which informs us that when Mulungu was driven from earth by the conduct of mankind, who had set the bush on fire, he went, being unable to climb a tree as the Chameleon had done, to call the Spider. "The spider went on high and returned again, and said, 'I have gone on high nicely,' and he said, 'You now, Mulungu, go on high.' Mulungu then went with the spider on high. And he said, 'When they die, let them come on high here.'" The other is in the story of "The Dead Chief and his Younger Brother" (ii. 322)—also Yao. The dead chief gives his brother four bags to enable him to overcome the obstacles which his enemies put in his way; he opens the first on coming to a large tree in his path—a wood-moth comes out and gnaws a way through. From the second bag comes out a manis (scaly ant-eater), which digs a way under a rock, and from the third (which he opens when he comes to the bank of a river) a spider, which "went to the other side," and, presumably (though this is not expressly stated), made a bridge with its web for him to cross.[9]
Mr. R.E. Dennett (Folklore of the Fjort, p. 74) gives a Lower Congo story, telling how the Spider brought fire down from Nzambi Mpungu in heaven, and won the daughter of Nzambi (Mother Earth) by so doing. In an Angola story (Heli Chatelain, p. 131) the Spider is mentioned as affording a means of communication between heaven and earth, by which the Sun's maidservants go down to draw water, and his daughter is ultimately let down to be married to the son of Kimanaueze. But the Spider only comes in incidentally; it is the Frog whose resourcefulness makes the marriage possible. The notion of the spider's web as a ladder to heaven is one that might occur independently in any part of the world, and there is no need to suppose these tales to be derivatives of the Hausa one given by Schön.[10]
So far, the appearances of the Spider in Bantu folk-tales are so infrequent as to be almost a negligible quantity. We find him, however, playing a tolerably conspicuous part in the folk-lore of the Duala. These, living in the German territory of the Kamerun, may be considered the north-western outpost of the Bantu race, and their language, unmistakable in its general character, has departed, perhaps more widely than any other, from the normal Bantu standard. Herr Wilhelm Lederbogen, formerly of the Government School, Kamerun, has collected a large number of stories, some of which are published in the Transactions of the Berlin Oriental Seminary (see Afrikanische Studien for 1901-1903). These comprise 67 "Tierfabeln" and 18 tales of the ordinary märchen type. The latter (some of them recognizable as variants of tales current in Bantu Africa) introduce animals along with human beings, and the incident of the Spider being consulted as a soothsayer repeatedly occurs. "Die Spinne tritt immer als Wahrsagerin auf" says the collector in a note. But the malignant aspect of Anansi seems to be absent.
The late W.H.J. Bleek, who supposed the animal-stories which he had collected from Hottentots and Bushmen to be characteristic of and peculiar to these races, had built up a somewhat elaborate theory, scarcely borne out by the facts as known to us to-day, in connection with this point. Briefly, it amounted to this: that a fundamental limitation in the Bantu race, which had prevented, and always would prevent, their advancing beyond a certain point, was denoted by the absence of grammatical gender in their languages, their supposed incapacity for personifying nature, and their worship of ancestors, as opposed to the alleged moon-worship of the Hottentots.[11] The Zulus, he says, believe that the spirits of the dead appear to them in dreams, and also show themselves to the waking eye in the shape of animals, usually serpents. "No personification of the animal takes place, however, such as we find, for instance, in the mythical world of our earliest [Teutonic] literature. The imagination of the ancestor-worshipper does not even, as a rule, show us the animal as possessing the gift of human speech; it is only supposed to perform acts well within its capacity as an animal, though such acts are considered, in the case of individual animals supposed to be possessed by the spirits of deceased persons, as emanating from the spirits." Thus, a serpent, known by various tokens to be an idhlozi, may enter a hut and consume the meat left for it, or it may engage in combat with other snakes which must be supposed to represent the enemies of the deceased. Animals thus revered by ancestor-worshippers always have the distinguishing characteristic that they have once been human beings; and spirits, unless they appear as animals, are always invisible. "A personification of the animal world (such as we find in our own fables), or even of other things (as in the mythologies of Europe), is utterly absent from this primitive, prosaic way of looking at things." The poetic impulse implied in such personification can only arise, in Bleek's view, among the speakers of a sex-denoting language. The linguistic argument I cannot here reproduce in detail; its tendency is sufficiently shown by the following quotation, which bears directly on our subject: