How the Tortoise Helped the Animals
A drought tale in which every large animal fails to reach the water and the despised tortoise solves it by asking one question, then is trampled by the animals coming to thank him.
This is a drought tale in which the animals find water they cannot drink because the creatures living in it sing them away, and every large and powerful animal fails in turn. The tortoise, mocked and told to go away because he is nobody, solves the problem by asking a single question. The animals then come to thank him, cannot see him, and trample him, and the footmarks are the marks on his back. Collected by John Parkinson from Ọ̀yọ́ informants and published in 1909 .
It is the first of the three shell-origin tales in Parkinson's sequence and by a distance the most interesting, because it inverts the usual moral shape of the cycle: here Ìjàpá is neither thief nor cheat but the only competent mind in the room.
The tale
In a drought, the animals consulted the babaláwo, who at that time were the ground-rats . The chief ground-rat took Ifá, which Parkinson glosses as "nuts of the palm-tree with the shell on," and asked when there would be water. And the rat said: yes, there will be water tomorrow. Then he continued: go to a certain place and you will find a big stream.
The first animal who went to verify this found the water, but could not approach and drink because of the multitude of fishes, snails and crabs who sang out .
Ti barua, ti barua, o, i gi, ti barua, ti barua.
None can be given. Parkinson supplies no translation and no gloss.
None available. The line is printed untranslated. Translator: Ìpilẹ̀ṣẹ̀ editorial rendering, unreviewed
This is the only Yorùbá text preserved in Parkinson's tortoise tales, and it is printed in 1909 orthography with no tone marks and no subdots . It is reproduced here exactly as printed. No translation is supplied because Parkinson supplies none, and this compiler will not reconstruct one: without tone marks the line is genuinely ambiguous, and a guessed reading would be a fabrication dressed as scholarship. The corpus records it as an untranslated chorus and marks the record silent on its meaning.
What can be said is structural. The line is repeated in the same shape three times in the telling, functioning as the fixed audience refrain against a changing narrative, which is the àlọ́ àpagbè mechanism described in yoruba-alo. Whether it is lexical Yorùbá, a distorted phrase, or non-lexical vocables of the Alugbinrin and Jómijó kind seen in alo-ijapa-and-the-babalawo, the record consulted does not establish.
Then the animals wanted to choose another animal, and Afafa, which Parkinson glosses as "a beast like a small dog," said he would go and drink . But the others said no, you make too much noise, and Parkinson notes in an aside that Afafa barks greatly at night. You can do nothing, they told him. And Afafa was annoyed, and went into the bush, holding himself aloof from the others until this day.
So they sent another animal, and the fishes and crabs sang again, and he could not drink . So they chose their King the Elephant, and the Elephant too was obliged to say: I have been, but could not drink.
Then the stag offered to go, saying he would kill all these beasts with his horns; but when he got to the river he could do nothing . Then said the leopard: I will kill them all with my claws. But the fishes all sang, and he had to come back, having been unable to do anything.
While they all consulted, the tortoise came in and complimented them, and said: what do you here ? And they said: you go away.
But the tortoise said:
I only came to see what is the matter, for three days you have had a meeting. What then is wrong?
And some said, go, you are nobody, but others said, stay, never mind his size, hear all his words . And they told him all the circumstances of the case.
Then the tortoise said he would assist them, but they all mocked, saying again: go away; now you know what we have done . Go.
Still the tortoise remained, and said the sentence the tale turns on:
If I can't do it, yet will I show you the way. Who told you of the river?
And they said: the ground-rat.
Then answered the tortoise: the matter is simple. Go to him and say, we see the river but we cannot get near it.
And they did as he said, and went to the ground-rat, and said: we have seen the river for three days but could not approach. Then said the rat: why did you not come to me at once and tell me the first time?
Then he said: call the vulture. And they called him and sent him with one animal to the river, and the rat directed that the vulture should hold himself in readiness when the animal began drinking. When they got to the edge of the river the vulture came down and stood on the bank, and when the other animal began to drink, the fish all called out their chorus. But the vulture dug his beak into the water and, pulling them out, flung them on the bank, so that from that day all the toads and frogs live on the margin of the river; and the animals all drank, while the rats still worship the Ifá, and if you go to their holes you will see the nuts there to this day.
Then, having drunk, the animals all went to the tortoise to give thanks, but when they got to the place where he was they could not see him, but trod upon him, and it is their footmarks you see upon his back to this day, while to avoid their treading he still lives under the leaves.
What the tale does
The mechanism is that the problem was never the fish. It was that nobody went back to the diviner. Five animals attack the symptom in ascending order of force, the noisy one, an unnamed one, the Elephant who is their king, the stag with his horns, the leopard with his claws, and every escalation fails identically. The tortoise contributes no strength, no plan and no trick. He asks who told you of the river, and sends them back to the person who already had the answer.
This is a tale about consulting properly, and the diviner's own line makes it explicit: why did you not come to me at once and tell me the first time? The Ifá system is treated in ifa-ese-verses, and what this tale dramatises is the ordinary discipline of it, that a consultation is a relationship rather than a single transaction, and that the client who receives a direction and hits an obstacle is supposed to return. The animals treated the divination as a fact delivered and closed. The tortoise's whole insight is procedural.
The characterisation is the striking part. Ìjàpá here is not the trickster at all. He arrives politely and compliments the assembly, he is told twice to go away and told once that he is nobody, and he stays. His answer to the mockery, "if I can't do it, yet will I show you the way," is a modest and accurate description of what he then does. He takes no food, cheats no one, and asks for nothing. The corpus notes in owe-tortoise-ijapa-trickster that the proverb record holds both an admired and a mocked tortoise without resolving them; this tale is the narrative counterpart, and it is evidence that the cycle's range is wider than the greedy schemer that dominates alo-ijapa-and-the-rock-of-yams and alo-the-tortoise-and-tela.
The ending is the cruellest in the section and the tale seems to know it. The animals who mocked him come to thank him, and cannot see him, because he is small and on the ground, which is the exact quality they despised him for. Their gratitude injures him in the same way and for the same reason their contempt did. And his response is to move permanently under the leaves, so the tale ends with the one animal who helped everybody deciding to live out of sight. The corpus marks as analysis the observation that this is an aetiology of two things at once, the marks on the shell and the tortoise's habit of concealment, and that it explains the second as a learned response to being valued by people who cannot be bothered to look down.
Three further aetiologies are folded in: why Afafa keeps apart from the other animals, why toads and frogs live at the water's edge, and why palm-nuts are found in ground-rat holes.
Variants
Parkinson's editor appends a long comparative footnote identifying this as a variant of a widely distributed African tale type in which animals are prevented from drinking, naming a Hottentot version, "The Story of a Dam," recorded by Thomas Bain in the South African Folk-lore Journal Vol. I p. 69; a Ronga tale in Junod p. 127; a Basuto form given by Jacottet as "Le Chacal et la Source"; Tete, Bemba and Chinamwanga versions; and "La Caverne des Animaux" (Malinke) in Monteil's Contes Soudanais. The editor notes that in most Bantu versions, as here, the tortoise is the successful hero .
None of those are Yorùbá, and the corpus records them as the editor's comparative apparatus rather than as variants of the Yorùbá tale. What the footnote establishes is that a very widely travelled story is here told with a Yorùbá diviner, Ifá palm-nuts, and a Yorùbá aetiology attached, which is the ordinary condition of folktale material and not a reason to doubt the Yorùbá telling.
No second Yorùbá collection of this tale was located by this compiler.
Performance context
Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. The chorus recurs at least three times as the successive animals fail, and Parkinson's printing of it with "&c." after the first full statement indicates that his interpreter repeated it in full each time and that Parkinson abbreviated in print. The tale is therefore more sung in performance than it appears on the page.