Ìjàpá and the Rock of Yams

This is a famine tale about Ìjàpá the tortoise and a lizard who has found a rock that opens to a spoken command and is full of yams. Ìjàpá talks his way into the secret, loads himself with more than he can carry, cannot remember the words to get out, and is smashed by the farmer and mended imperfectly by a cockroach and an ant. The mended places are the rough parts of the tortoise's shell. Recorded in English by A. B. Ellis in 1894 1.

This is one of four documented narratives explaining the marks on the tortoise's shell. The others are alo-the-tortoise-and-tela, alo-the-dog-and-the-tortoise and alo-the-tortoise-helps-the-animals, and they are compared in alo-why-the-tortoise-shell-is-marked.

The tale

Ellis's teller opens: "My alo is about Tortoise" 1.

There was a famine, and a great scarcity of food throughout the country.

One day the lizard was in a plantation looking for something to eat when he found a large rock full of yams. The owner of the plantation was near the rock. He cried "Rock, open," and the rock opened. He went in, took yams, came out again, said "Rock, shut," and the rock closed.

The lizard saw all of this, and heard what the man said, and went home.

Next morning at cock-crow he went to the rock, said "Rock, open," went in, carried out yams to take home and eat, said "Rock, shut," and the rock shut. He did this every day.

One day Ìjàpá met the lizard on the road carrying yams, and asked him where he got his food from, comrade.

The lizard said: if I were to tell you that, and take you to the place, I should be killed.

No, said Ìjàpá, I will not say a word to anyone. Please take me.

Very well then, said the lizard. Come and call me tomorrow morning at cock-crow, and we will go together.

Next morning, long before cock-crow, Ìjàpá came to the lizard's house. He stood outside and cried kekere-ke, the Yorùbá word for the crow of a cock, which Ellis derives from keke, the cry of the hen, comparing it to the English "cackle" 1. He cried it again. Then he went in and woke the lizard, saying the cock has crowed.

Let me sleep, said the lizard. It is not yet cock-crow. Very well, said Ìjàpá. And they both slept until cock-crow.

Then the lizard got up and the two went together. As soon as they arrived the lizard said "Rock, open," went in, took yams, and came out.

It is time to go, he said. Take your yams and come.

Wait a minute, said Ìjàpá.

Very well, said the lizard. Rock, shut. And he went away without waiting.

Inside, Ìjàpá helped himself. He put yams on his back and yams on his head; he put yams on his arms and yams on his legs.

The lizard had already gone home. He lit a fire, then lay on his back with his feet in the air as if he were dead, and stayed like that all day.

When Ìjàpá was ready to go, he wanted to make the rock open. But he could not remember what he ought to say. He said many, many words, but not the right words, and the rock stayed shut.

By and by the plantation owner came. He opened the rock and found Ìjàpá inside. He took him and beat him, and beat him badly.

Who brought you here, asked the man. It was the lizard who brought me, replied Ìjàpá.

Then the man tied a string to Ìjàpá and took him to the lizard. When he reached the house he found the lizard lying on his back with his feet in the air as if he were dead. He shook him and said: this bald-headed elf says it was you who took him to my plantation and showed him my store of yams.

I? said the lizard. You can see for yourself that it is impossible. I am not in a state to go out. I have been sick here for three months, lying on my back. I do not even know where your plantation is.

Then the man took Ìjàpá and smashed him. And Ìjàpá, groaning and moaning, said in a pitiful voice:

Cockroach, come and mend me. Ant, come and mend me.

And the cockroach and the ant mended him. And the places where they mended him are those parts of Tortoise which are rough.

What the tale does

The mechanism is that the trickster is defeated by a better trickster, and the tale is unusually careful about how the lizard wins. The lizard does three separate things right. He states the risk honestly when first asked, which makes his eventual agreement look like friendship rather than carelessness. He leaves on time, saying "Rock, shut" and going without waiting, which is not cruelty but ordinary prudence at a stolen store. And he prepares an alibi in advance: the fire lit, the posture of a three-month illness held all day. That last detail means the lizard knew Ìjàpá would be caught and would name him. He is not lucky. He has modelled the tortoise's behaviour correctly.

Ìjàpá's own failures are stacked in a specific order, and each is a variation on wanting more than the arrangement allows. He extracts a secret that was not offered. He tries to accelerate the schedule by faking a cock-crow, which is his one piece of genuine cunning in the tale and which fails immediately. He delays leaving in order to load his body past the point of function. And then he cannot recall two words, which is the tale's cleanest joke: the price of the extra yams is the sentence that would have let him carry any of them out.

Ellis noticed the pattern and wrote it into a footnote on this tale, the last of his six:

In this tale, Tortoise's usual cunning fails him. It is to be noted that, whenever he is shown as being over-reached or unsuccessful, the want of success is due to greediness 1.

He lists his examples, and this one he glosses "here his greediness makes him stay behind, to get more yams" 1. That is a collector's generalisation across his own corpus, made in 1894, and it is the single most useful analytic sentence in his folklore chapter.

The famine setting is not decoration. The corpus notes throughout owe-hunger-food-plenty that hunger is the constant subject of this cycle, and the tale is careful that the lizard is also stealing. Neither animal owns these yams. The farmer beats one thief and is deceived by the other, and the tale does not moralise about the theft at all: what it punishes is greed and what it rewards is foresight.

The repair

The ending converts the tale into an aetiology, and the mechanism is worth stating precisely, because it is not that the shell was cracked and stayed cracked. Ìjàpá is smashed to pieces and then reassembled by two insects that come when he calls them, and the marks are the seams of an imperfect repair. The tortoise is therefore a mended object, and the mending is a kindness. The corpus notes as analysis that this is a strikingly generous ending for a punishment tale: the last thing that happens to the thief is that two of the smallest creatures in the world come when he calls and put him back together.

Variants

This tale type is attested three times independently in the nineteenth-century record, which is unusually strong evidence for a single Yorùbá tale.

Parkinson, 1909. The same plot with a man named Tela in the lizard's role, collected from Ọ̀yọ́ informants and told with a sung opening spell rather than a spoken command. It is a distinct enough telling to have its own file, alo-the-tortoise-and-tela.

Bouche, 1880. The editor of Parkinson's article notes that a similar story, with the lizard in the role, is given in Bouche, Étude sur la langue Nago (Bar-le-Duc, 1880), and that the Nagos are a subdivision of the Yorùbá. That version, per the editor's summary, matches Ellis's rather than Parkinson's: the tortoise remains behind to load himself with yams after the lizard has gone home, fails to get out not knowing the spell, and is caught by the farmer 2. This compiler has not seen Bouche directly and reports the editor's summary as such.

The same editor also notes a related Akra (Gã) story, "The Spirits in the Rat-Hole," in Zimmermann's Grammatical Sketch of the Akra or Ga Language (Stuttgart, 1898, as the date is printed by Parkinson's editor), p. 193, where the roles are taken by the spider and his son 2. That is a neighbouring tradition rather than a Yorùbá variant, and it is recorded here because the spider-trickster comparison is the standing one for this figure, discussed in yoruba-alo.

Performance context

Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. There is no song in Ellis's version, but there are two lines of performed sound, the faked cock-crow kekere-ke and the pitiful call to the cockroach and the ant, and both are voice work rather than narration. Parkinson's variant replaces the spoken command with a sung one.