Why the Ajao Remained Unburied
A very short aetiological tale in which the birds and the rats each disown a dead bat because he lacks their distinguishing feature, so he is left without relatives and without a funeral.
This is the shortest tale in this section, about two hundred words, and one of the bleakest. The ajao, which Ellis glosses as "a kind of flying-fox, or large bat" , dies sick and untended. The neighbours summon the birds to bury him and they disown him because he has no feathers; they summon the rats and the rats disown him because he has no tail. Having no relations, he is left unburied. Recorded in English by A. B. Ellis in 1894 .
Ellis attaches it directly to a proverb in his own collection, which makes it one of the few documented instances in this corpus of a tale and an òwe printed as a pair by the same collector.
The tale
Ellis's teller opens: "My alo is of the ajao" .
The ajao lay in his house very sick, and there was no one to tend him. The ajao died.
The neighbours said: the ajao is dead; we must call his relatives to come and perform the funeral ceremonies, and bury him. And they went and called the birds, saying: your relation is dead.
The birds came, and when they saw that the deceased was an ajao, they said:
This is not one of our family. All our family wear feathers, and you see the ajao has none. He does not belong to us.
And they went away.
The neighbours consulted together. They said: the birds are right. The ajao has no feathers, and is not of the family of birds. He must be of the family of rats. And they went and called the rats, saying: your relation is dead.
The rats came, but when they saw that the deceased was an ajao they also denied him. They said:
This is not one of our family. Everyone who is of our family has a tail, and you see the ajao has none.
And they went away.
Thus the ajao, having no relations, remained unburied.
The proverb
Ellis footnotes the tale "See Proverb 179" , and his proverb 179 reads:
The Yorùbá is not given. Ellis prints his proverb collection in English translation.
Not provided in source (text recorded in English translation only).
The ajao (flying-fox) is neither rat nor bird .
Translator: A. B. Ellis
Notes. The corpus records the pairing rather than the Yorùbá, because Ellis does not supply the Yorùbá. What the pairing establishes is a relationship the corpus documents in general terms in yoruba-owe-proverbs and owe-proverbs-about-proverbs-metalanguage: a proverb is frequently the compressed residue of a narrative, and the narrative is what a hearer is expected to know. Anyone who has heard this àlọ́ hears the whole funeral in five words. owe-tortoise-ijapa-trickster notes the same relationship running the other way, where Owomoyela's proverb notes preserve fragments of tales otherwise lost.
What the tale does
The mechanism is a definitional test applied twice, and the tale is built so that both applications are correct. The birds are right: the ajao has no feathers. The rats are right: the ajao has no tail. Neither group lies, neither is shown as spiteful, and the neighbours who summon them reason carefully and in good faith, explicitly conceding that "the birds are right" before trying the rats. Everyone in this tale behaves reasonably and a corpse is left on the ground.
That is what makes it bleak rather than merely sad. There is no villain to blame the outcome on, and no moment where a different choice would have produced a different result. The tale locates the failure in the category system itself: a creature that falls between two kinds has no claim on either, and a claim on somebody is what a funeral requires.
The corpus notes as analysis that the tale is about burial specifically, and that the choice is not incidental. Yorùbá funeral obligation runs along kinship lines, and the dead are made ancestors by the people who own them; owe-death-mortality-ancestors collects the proverb material, and the wider treatment is in the section on the dead. To be unburied is not merely to be unmourned but to be left outside the process by which a person becomes something after death. The ajao's problem is not loneliness. It is that there is nobody whose business he is.
Read against the compound structure treated in owe-family-lineage-compound, the tale is a statement about how much depends on being claimable. The two co-wives tales in this section, alo-the-palm-oil-seller-and-the-goblin and alo-the-poor-woman-and-the-aranran-bird, both turn on the obligations that bind people inside a household, obligations severe enough that refusing a gift is an act of war. This tale shows the other face of that system: the person no household will claim gets nothing at all, including a grave.
There is a second reading available, marked as analysis. Ellis's teller opens the tale by noting that the ajao lay sick "and there was no one to tend him," which places the abandonment before the death rather than after. The funeral scene then confirms a state of affairs that already existed. On that reading the tale is less about classification than about the fact that some creatures live and die unattached, and that the community discovers this only when it needs someone to send for.
Variants
No Yorùbá-language version, no second collection, and no variant of this tale were located by this compiler. The record consulted is silent.
The bat-between-two-kinds is a widely distributed tale type internationally, most familiarly in the Aesopic tradition where a bat evades both sides in a war between birds and beasts and is rejected by both. This compiler notes the resemblance and asserts no relationship: the Yorùbá tale has no war, no evasion and no fault on the bat's part, and its subject is a funeral, which the Aesopic versions do not have.
Performance context
Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. There is no song. At this length the tale is a single move delivered twice, and it would function in a session as a short piece between longer ones, or as the kind of tale that sets up the proverb rather than the other way round.