Why Women Have Long Hair
An aetiological comedy in which a woman digs a pit to trap her enemy, falls into it herself, is pulled out by hair that stretches as they pull, and is envied into starting a fashion.
This is a short aetiological comedy explaining why women have long hair. A woman digs a pit at night in the path her enemy takes to the well, falls into it herself the next morning, and is hauled out by her hair, which stretches as her friends pull. She is ashamed, then proud, then jeered at the short-haired women until they were all jumping into the pit to have their hair pulled too. Recorded in English by M. I. Ogumefu in 1929 .
The tale
Two women quarrelled, and one of them went out secretly at night and dug a deep pit in the middle of the path leading from her enemy's house to the village well .
Early next morning, when all were going to the well for water with jars balanced on their heads, this woman fell into the pit and cried loudly for help .
Her friends ran to her and, seizing her by the hair, began to pull her out of the pit . To their surprise, her hair stretched as they pulled, and by the time she was safely on the path, her hair was as long as a man's arm.
This made her very much ashamed, and she ran away and hid herself .
But after a while she realised that her long hair was beautiful, and then she felt very proud and scorned all the short-haired women, jeering at them . When they saw this, they were consumed with jealousy, and began to be ashamed of their short hair.
We have men's hair, they said to one another. How beautiful it would be to have long hair!
So one by one they jumped into the pit, and their friends pulled them out by the hair .
And in this way they, and all women after them, had long hair .
What the tale does
The mechanism is a chain of four reversals in under three hundred words, and the comedy is in how fast each one turns over.
The trap catches the trapper. She digs the pit at night, in the dark, in a path she herself uses, and walks into it at first light. The tale spends no words on irony and simply reports the fall.
The injury becomes an asset. Being dragged out by the hair is a painful indignity, and the result is a feature she is at first so ashamed of that she runs away and hides.
The shame becomes pride. "After a while she realised that her long hair was beautiful." Nothing changed except her assessment.
The pride becomes a fashion. The short-haired women, who a moment ago had perfectly ordinary hair, are "consumed with jealousy" and reclassify themselves: "we have men's hair." Then they queue up to jump into a pit.
The corpus notes as analysis that the tale is about how a standard of beauty gets installed, and that it locates the mechanism precisely in scorn rather than in admiration. The short-haired women do not want long hair because long hair is beautiful. They want it because someone with it jeered at them, and their own hair became a defect the moment it was named as one. This is the same move the magician makes on the birds in alo-the-voices-of-birds, where a grove of contented brown birds agrees "that it was a great pity to be so ugly" as soon as somebody says so. Two tales in one collection, using the same device: a defect is created by being asserted.
The ending is deadpan and the corpus draws attention to what it does not say. There is no punishment for the woman who dug the pit, no reconciliation with the enemy she dug it for, and no comment on the wisdom of a whole village throwing itself into a hole. The quarrel that started everything is simply dropped. owe-enmity-quarrel-reconciliation collects the proverb material on quarrels, and owe-beauty-ugliness-appearance on appearance.
The enemy, incidentally, never appears again. She is the reason the pit exists and she never falls into it.
On aetiology and comedy
This tale sits at the light end of the aetiological range documented in this section, and it is worth marking the contrast. alo-why-the-tortoise-shell-is-marked gathers four narratives in which a body is permanently marked by violence and imperfect repair; alo-why-the-ajao-remained-unburied explains a fact about a bat by way of a corpse nobody will claim. This one explains a feature of every woman alive by way of a joke about a pit.
The corpus notes that the aetiological form itself carries no particular moral weight in Yorùbá àlọ́: it is a shape available for a tragedy, a punishment, a piece of ethical instruction, or a farce, and the teller chooses. That is the same argument made at greater length about competing explanations in alo-why-the-tortoise-shell-is-marked.
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, and Ogumefu's stated removal of songs (alo-ogumefu-1929-as-a-source) means this is not evidence of absence. At this length the tale is a single sustained joke with a repeated physical action, women being hauled out of a pit by the hair, which a teller can extend as long as the room keeps laughing.