The Voices of Birds

This is an aetiological tale explaining why the most beautiful birds cannot sing. A magician, jealous because he has no singing voice of his own, persuades a grove of plain brown songbirds that their feathers are ugly, and offers to make them brilliantly coloured in exchange for their voices. They agree. He collects the voices in a calabash, swallows them, and becomes famous for his singing. Recorded in English by M. I. Ogumefu in 1929 1.

It is the nearest thing in this section to the wise-and-foolish moral comedy that Yorùbá tradition treats at length in proverb form, and the tale's persuasion speech is its whole substance.

The tale

A magician once passed through a grove in the forest where a great many brown birds fluttered from tree to tree and filled the air with songs 2. For a long time he sat and listened, enraptured by their beautiful melodies, but in the end he became very jealous, for he himself could not sing.

At last he felt that he must by some means possess the voices of these singing birds, so he called them all together and said 2:

It grieves me that the gods have given you all such poor, ugly brown feathers. How happy you would be if you were brilliantly coloured with red, blue, orange, and green!

And the birds agreed that it was a great pity to be so ugly 2.

The magician then suggested that by means of his charms he could give them all beautiful feathers in exchange for their voices, which were, after all, of very little use to them, since nobody came into the grove to hear them 2.

The birds thought over his words, and desired very much the beauty he promised them 2. So they foolishly agreed to give him their voices, which the magician placed all together in a large calabash. He then used his charms to turn the dull brown feathers into orange and green and red, and they were very pleased.

The magician hurried away, and as soon as he came to a deserted place he opened the calabash and swallowed its contents 2. From that day he had an exceedingly sweet voice, and people came from far and near to listen to his songs.

But the birds were satisfied with their bright feathers 2. And this is why the most beautiful birds are quite unable to sing.

What the tale does

The mechanism is a swindle conducted entirely by reframing, and every move in it is verbal. The magician takes nothing by force and tells no outright lie. He performs the exchange he promised: the birds asked for bright feathers and got bright feathers.

The theft is in three sentences, and they are worth separating.

First he installs a defect that was not there. "It grieves me that the gods have given you all such poor, ugly brown feathers." Nothing in the tale suggests the birds were unhappy about their colour before he mentioned it. Ogumefu's next line is the tale's sharpest: "the birds agreed that it was a great pity to be so ugly." They accept his assessment immediately and adopt it as their own.

Then he devalues what they have. Their voices are "of very little use to them, since nobody came into the grove to hear them." This is the pivot, and it contains the tale's best irony: he is standing in that grove because he came to hear them, and he sat listening for a long time, enraptured. He is living proof that the claim is false at the moment he makes it. The birds do not notice.

Then he offers the trade as generosity. The exchange is presented as him solving their problem, and they thank him for it.

The corpus notes as analysis that the tale locates folly precisely, and not where a modern reader might expect. The birds are not foolish for wanting to be beautiful. They are foolish for letting a stranger tell them what they are worth, and for accepting a valuation of their own gift from the person who wants it. owe-folly-wisdom-experience collects the proverb material on this kind of folly, and owe-beauty-ugliness-appearance on appearance as against substance.

The closing line does something the plot did not need. "But the birds were satisfied with their bright feathers." They never find out. There is no scene of discovery, no moment where they open their beaks and nothing comes out and understand what happened. They got what they asked for and are pleased with it, permanently, and the tale ends with the swindler famous and the swindled content. That is a bleaker ending than a punishment would have been, and it is delivered in a subordinate clause.

The aetiology

The tale explains a real observation: brilliantly coloured birds are frequently poor singers, and plain brown ones are frequently the best. It is the same explanatory move as alo-how-leopard-got-his-spots and the shell tales gathered in alo-why-the-tortoise-shell-is-marked, where a visible fact about an animal is made the residue of a moral event.

What distinguishes this one is that the fact it explains is a trade-off rather than a mark. The shell tales explain a scar; this explains why two good things do not occur together, and it answers with an exchange. The corpus notes that this is a more sophisticated aetiological shape, because it accounts not for one animal's condition but for a pattern across many.

On the wise and the foolish

The task this file was written toward included Ọlọ́gbọ́n and Òpè tales, the wise one and the fool, as a category of human-world moral comedy. This compiler could not locate a sourced Yorùbá tale collection organised around a named wise-man-and-fool pair, and does not assert that one exists in the form the category implies.

What the record consulted does support is that the wisdom-and-folly register is thoroughly present in Yorùbá verbal art and is carried principally by proverbs rather than by a tale cycle. owe-folly-wisdom-experience collects that material. In narrative, the nearest available material is this tale, together with Ogumefu's "The Three Magicians," in which a king "foolishly" refuses three magicians permission to go home and is answered by a demonstration of what they can do without his permission 1, and "The Ten Goldsmiths," a craft-and-judgement tale 1. Neither of the latter two has been read in full by this compiler and neither is presented here.

The corpus states this gap plainly rather than filling it. A category can be real in a tradition and thin in the accessible record, and the honest report is that the wise-fool comedy in the sources this section could obtain sits in the proverbs, not in the tales.

Variants

No Yorùbá-language version and no second collection of this tale were located by this compiler. The record consulted is silent on variation and on any song.

Performance context

Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. No song is recorded, though a tale about birds losing their voices would be an odd one to sing, and the corpus notes without asserting that its subject may be the reason. Given Ogumefu's stated omission of songs (alo-ogumefu-1929-as-a-source), the absence is not evidence either way.

The tale's shape in performance is a single speech with three moves, which makes it a teller's piece rather than an audience's: the magician's persuasion is the whole event, and it is delivered to a grove of birds who function as the room.