Àlọ́: Folktales and Riddles
The evening storytelling tradition, the call-and-response frame that opens it, riddles as a separate discipline, and the Ìjàpá cycle read as a body of ethical and comic literature.
Àlọ́ is the Yoruba word for both a folktale and a riddle, and the tradition divides it in two. Àlọ́ àpamọ̀ are riddles, from pamọ̀, to conceal: short puzzling statements requiring an answer. Àlọ́ àpagbè are the tales, from gbè, to join in or support: stories in which the audience sings the chorus. The division is by what the audience does. In one the listener must supply an answer; in the other the listener must supply a voice.
Both are performed in the evening, after the day's work, typically by an older person to children, and both are instruction as much as entertainment. This is the one genre in the section that nearly every Yoruba adult has direct childhood experience of, and it is the genre most thoroughly displaced by television and phones.
The frame
Àlọ́ does not begin without a formal exchange, and the exchange is the same every time.
Apàlọ̀: Ààlọ́ o Agbààlọ̀: Ààlọ̀
- Apàlọ̀ the-one-who-tells-the-àlọ́: Ààlọ́ o a-story, oh
- Agbààlọ̀ the-one-who-receives-the-àlọ́: Ààlọ̀ a-story
Teller: A story! Audience: A story!
Translator: Olumide Zaccheus Adegbodu
Yoruba as printed by Adegbodu ; the English is the standard rendering, given also as "Here is a story" and the response "Let us have the story".
The two words are near-identical and differ in tone: the caller's Ààlọ́ and the responder's Ààlọ̀ are tonally distinct forms of the same word, which is why English translation of the exchange always looks like pointless repetition. It is not repetition, it is a tonal call and answer, and it is the genre's signature. The vocabulary itself makes the roles a formal pair: apàlọ̀ is the one who does the àlọ́ and agbààlọ̀ the one who receives it, so the audience has a title, which is the clearest possible statement that the audience is a participant rather than a spectator.
The function is boundary-marking. The formula is a preamble demarcating ordinary reality from the coherent fictional world of the tale, and at the end the narrator returns the audience to waking reality with a closing formula, of which one recorded form is Ìdí àlọ́ mi rèé, "this is the base of my story" Nothing may be told without the frame, because the frame is what makes what follows a story rather than a claim about the world.
This is also, at the level of the genre system described in yoruba-oral-genre-system, an entextualising device in Barber's sense: the formula announces that what follows is a detachable, repeatable thing rather than ordinary talk.
Àlọ́ àpamọ̀: the riddles
Riddles are a training discipline. The consistent scholarly account is that they exist to test and develop the reasoning of the young, preparing them to think quickly and find solutions to unfamiliar problems . They are grouped with proverbs and tongue-twisters as the intellectual exercises of traditional Yoruba education, and traditional African education has been described as providing training in intelligence through riddles, which encourage both observation and logical association .
The material of the riddles is the immediate environment. The Yoruba habit of closely and attentively studying things is what produced àlọ́ àpamọ̀, and riddles are built on the appearance or behaviour of domestic items, animals, plants, birds, trees and people .
Note the shared frame: every riddle below opens with the same call and response as a tale.
A collection
1.
Apàlọ̀: Ààlọ́ o Agbààlọ̀: Ààlọ̀ Apàlọ̀: Onímú ń gbé imú rẹ̀ bọ̀ ọjà tú o. Ìdáhùn: Ọkọ̀
- Onímú owner-of-a-nose ń gbé imú rẹ̀ bọ̀ is bringing his nose coming ọjà tú the-market scatters
The owner of the nose comes bringing his nose, and the market scatters. Answer: a vehicle.
Translator: Olumide Zaccheus Adegbodu
Yoruba and answer as printed by Adegbodu, citing Adésuà 1978; the English translation is Adegbodu's .
Notes. The solution turns on personification: the vehicle has a nose, its bonnet, and people scatter to make way for it. Adegbodu reads the riddle as also teaching road awareness, and links it to the proverb ààbò ara ẹni ni ààbò ìlú, one's own safety is the town's safety .
2.
Apàlọ̀: Mo sunmí bàràkàtà, mo fi ewé bàràkàtà bòó. Ìdáhùn: Ilẹ̀ àti ìsánmọ̀
- Mo sunmí bàràkàtà I defecated hugely mo fi ewé bàràkàtà bòó I with a-huge leaf covered-it
I made a huge dropping and covered it with a huge leaf. Answer: the earth and the sky.
Translator: Olumide Zaccheus Adegbodu
Yoruba and answer as printed by Adegbodu, citing Adélékè 2008/2009; English translation Adegbodu's .
Notes. The joke works twice. On its face it is a child's scatology, which is why children remember it, and the answer converts the same image into cosmology: the earth is the thing on the ground and the sky is the leaf laid over it. Bàràkàtà is an ideophone of great width, used twice, and it is what carries the scale from the crude reading to the cosmic one. Adegbodu notes the hygiene lesson sitting inside it as well .
3.
Apàlọ̀: Kín ni ń bá ọba mutí? Ìdáhùn: Eṣinṣin
- Kín ni what is-it ń bá ọba mutí that with the-king drinks-wine
What drinks wine with the king? Answer: the housefly.
Translator: Olumide Zaccheus Adegbodu
Yoruba and answer as printed by Adegbodu, citing Bamgbose 2017; English Adegbodu's .
Notes. A riddle about rank. Nobody drinks with the king; the fly does, because the fly does not recognise rank. Adegbodu reads it as a lesson on the limits of power and on not being intoxicated by position .
4.
Apàlọ̀: Òrúkú tindí tindí, Òrúkú tindì tindì, Òrúkú bí igba ọmọ, Ó sán gbogbo wọn ní tòbí. Ìdáhùn: Ìṣápá
- Òrúkú tindí tindí / tindì tindì Oruku, with the praise-names tindí tindí and tindì tindì
- bí igba ọmọ bore two-hundred children
- Ó sán gbogbo wọn ní tòbí she tied all of-them in a-tòbí (a woman's waist-cloth)
Òrúkú tindí tindí, Òrúkú tindì tindì, Òrúkú bore two hundred children and tied a waist-cloth on every one of them. Answer: the sorrel plant, ìṣápá.
Translator: Olumide Zaccheus Adegbodu
Yoruba and answer as printed by Adegbodu, citing Ọlábímtán 1982; English Adegbodu's .
The first two lines are a tonal pair, tindí tindí against tindì tindì, the same syllables at different pitches, exactly the device the opening formula uses. English cannot reproduce it and Adegbodu's translation simply labels them praise names. Igba, two hundred, is the conventional Yoruba number for a great many rather than a count. The solution depends on knowing the plant: sorrel (Hibiscus sabdariffa) carries many seed pods each wrapped in a calyx, and the calyx is figured as a tòbí, the cloth a woman ties at the waist. The riddle is an oríkì of a plant, built like the praise poetry in yoruba-oriki, which shows how porous these genres are.
5.
Apàlọ̀: Kín ló ń kọjá lójúde ọba tí kò kí ọba o? Ìdáhùn: Àgbàrá òjò
- Kín ló ń kọjá what is-it that passes lójúde ọba in-front-of-the-palace-of the-king tí kò kí ọba that does-not greet the-king
What passes in front of the palace and does not greet the king? Answer: flood water.
Translator: Olumide Zaccheus Adegbodu
Yoruba and answer as printed by Adegbodu, citing Bámgbósé 2017; English Adegbodu's .
Notes. Greeting is obligatory in this culture and failing to greet a king is unthinkable, so the riddle's premise is an impossibility, resolved by naming something that is not a person. Adegbodu reads a drainage lesson into it too , which shows the genre's elasticity: a riddle is available for whatever instruction the teller wants to hang on it.
Àlọ́ àpagbè: tales with song
The name means call-and-response story, and it names the mechanism . The storyteller leads and the audience takes the chorus, so that tellers and listeners are active participants in an exercise that involves singing and dancing, and this underscores both the recreational and the educational value of the form .
The pedagogy is deliberate and its structure has been described precisely. The storyteller allows the children to be part of the telling, in a controlled atmosphere in which the teller retains authority over the whole activity, and the educational purpose is realised through the critical feedback the teller gets from a question-and-answer model at the end of each story . So the shape of an evening is: frame, tale with sung choruses, then questions.
Bamgbose's classification of Yoruba folktale themes divides them into three: moral stories, tortoise stories, and "why" stories, the last being aetiological tales explaining how something came to be as it is . The categories overlap, since most tortoise stories are also moral stories, and many are also why-stories, the tortoise's cracked shell being the standard example.
The songs inside the tales are treated in file 09, since they belong with the wider discussion of orin.
Ìjàpá: the tortoise
Ìjàpá is by a distance the most popular character in Yoruba folktale , and he holds the position that Anansi the spider holds in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and the Hare in East, Central and Southern Africa . His other names are Àhun, Abahun and Aláábahun, and the epithet Ìjàpá Ọlọ́gbọ́n Ẹ̀wẹ́, tortoise the crafty.
His character is fixed across the cycle. He is cunning, indolent, greedy, and proverbially lazy to the point of lacking the capacity for work . He is also small and physically weak, and this is the point of him: he is the figure who demonstrates that intelligence overcomes strength, and simultaneously the figure whose schemes rebound on him. The trickster is a mixture of good and evil rather than a hero or a villain, and Ìjàpá can be extremely helpful to others at one moment and extremely mischievous at the next.
A note on what he is not. Ìjàpá is the secular trickster and is distinct from Èṣù, who is a divinity and whose unpredictability is cosmological rather than comic. Popular writing conflates them constantly. yoruba-esu sets out why the identification is wrong, and it matters here because reading Ìjàpá as a god's avatar removes the thing that makes the tales work, which is that he is an ordinary greedy person with no standing.
The cycle as ethical literature: Ìjàpá and Ìgbín
The best documented single tale for reading the cycle as ethics is Ìjàpá àti Ìgbín, Tortoise and Snail, in the analysis of Olugbemi-Gabriel and Ukpi . The narrative, in their account:
Ìjàpá is newly married to Yannibo, the daughter of Ìgbín (Snail), and is saddled with feeding another mouth. Daily, without any farm or visible income, he comes home like every other farmer with robust yams, which Yannibo cooks for the family. Meanwhile Ìgbín, his father-in-law, is suffering a persistent and baffling theft of yam, pepper, tomatoes and vegetables from his farm. Unable to watch his farm be decimated, Ìgbín sets a trap. At dawn the next day he finds Ìjàpá, his beloved son-in-law, caught in it and in agony, with freshly dug yams and vegetables beside him.
Ìgbín drags Ìjàpá to a great baobab at the junction where the farm paths meet and ties him to it, with no chance of escape. Through the day Ìjàpá is the butt of crude jokes and receives insults and excoriation from everyone who passes, becoming a spectacle of shame.
Then the tale turns. At the close of the working day, the people returning from the farms find Ìjàpá still tied at the same spot, in great distress and exhausted by shame and punishment. And the table turns against Ìgbín, who is communally dismissed as an aláṣejù, one who has overdone it .
Two proverbs carry the reading.
Ìwọ̀ntúnwọ̀nsì ló yẹ ọmọlúàbí.
- Ìwọ̀ntúnwọ̀nsì moderation, measuredness ló yẹ is-what befits ọmọlúàbí the-person-of-good-character
Moderation is what befits a person of good character.
Translator: Olumide Olugbemi-Gabriel and Mbasughun Ukpi
Àlọ ni ti Ìjàpá, àbọ̀ ni ti àna rẹ̀.
- Àlọ the-going ni ti Ìjàpá belongs-to Ìjàpá àbọ̀ the-returning ni ti àna rẹ̀ belongs-to his in-law
Ìjàpá gets the first blame; the second blame is his in-law's.
Translator: Olumide Olugbemi-Gabriel and Mbasughun Ukpi
Both proverbs as printed with their English by Olugbemi-Gabriel and Ukpi; the literal glosses are the compiler's .
Àlọ and àbọ̀, the going and the returning, are the outward and homeward legs of a journey, and here they mark the two halves of the day and the two verdicts, the morning's on Ìjàpá and the evening's on Ìgbín. The published English, "first blame" and "second blame", makes the sense clear at the cost of the journey figure. Note also that àlọ, the going, is a different word from àlọ́, the story, differing in tone. Aláṣejù is built from ṣe, to do, plus jù, to exceed: the one whose doing goes past the limit, where jù calls attention to the limit of action and the end of individual freedom .
The ethical structure the authors draw out is a double judgement . Theft is not tolerated, and Ìgbín is right to punish his son-in-law regardless of kinship. But the same society expects Ìgbín, as an ọmọlúàbí, to be tempered by ìwọ̀ntúnwọ̀nsì, moderation, in his pursuit of justice, and his violation of that expectation turns the community against him. Ìjàpá's punishment is not left to the sole discretion of the wronged party; it is a matter for the community . The concepts in play, ọmọlúàbí, ìwọ̀ntúnwọ̀nsì and molẹ́bí (kinship), are the ones by which personhood is evaluated, and behind them stands ìwà, character, which Gbadegesin calls perhaps the most important moral concept, the thing a person is morally evaluated by . Of Ìjàpá it is said Ìjàpá ti ṣ'ìwà nù, tortoise has lost character . yoruba-iwa-and-yoruba-ethics treats these concepts directly.
This is why the cycle is worth taking seriously as literature. A tale that seems to be a joke about a greedy tortoise is running a two-sided argument about proportionality in punishment, delivered to children, with the punchline placed on the punisher rather than the thief.
The shape of the cycle
Recurrent structures across the tortoise tales:
Ìjàpá gets food he has not worked for, by theft, by trickery, or by exploiting a friend's generosity. Hunger and food are the cycle's constant subject, which is unsurprising in a farming society that knew famine.
The scheme succeeds, then overreaches. He is rarely caught at the first attempt. He is caught because he repeats the trick, or does it larger, and the moral is more often about excess than about the original dishonesty.
The body is the evidence. He is caught in a trap, stuck in a hole, unable to get through a doorway because of what he has eaten. The cracked shell is the permanent record.
The victim is a friend or a relative. Snail, Pig, Elephant, Squirrel, Python: the betrayal is of somebody close, which is what makes it a moral matter rather than a caper.
The community judges. The resolution characteristically involves everyone finding out, and public shame is the sanction, as in the passers-by at the baobab.
Where to find the tales
The scholarly collection is Oyekan Owomoyela, Yoruba Trickster Tales (University of Nebraska Press, 1997), by the scholar who also produced the standard Yoruba proverb collections . Ayọ Bamgbose's work supplies the classification . In Yoruba, Adun Amoo's Àkójọpọ̀ Àlọ́ Àpagbè (2010) is a compilation of tales in the language .
Two cautions on what is widely available.
Retellings are not transcriptions. Much of what circulates in print and online as Yoruba folktale is expanded English prose narrative, sometimes very good, based on remembered tales. It is a legitimate literary form and it is not a record of a performance. This corpus has not quoted from such retellings, and their absence here is deliberate rather than an oversight.
Tutuola and Fágúnwà are authored literature. Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard and D. O. Fágúnwà's Yoruba novels draw heavily on this narrative tradition and are not collections of it. The corpus makes this point in sources-primary-oral-texts and repeats it here because the confusion is persistent.
What is being lost
Àlọ́ was sustained by a specific arrangement: evenings without electric light, extended households, and elders with an audience of children and nothing competing for their attention. That arrangement is largely gone in urban Yorubaland. The genre survives in books, in schools, in animation and video adaptation, and in podcast and web collections, all of which change it from a participatory performance into a delivered product. The call-and-response frame is the first casualty, since a recording cannot hear the audience answer Ààlọ̀. File 14 treats the wider question.