How Leopard Got His Spots: Two Stories

Two explanations of the leopard's markings, printed one after the other by M. I. Ogumefu in 1929, with the second introduced as "another story" 1. In the first, the leopard eats a magic root that makes him invulnerable, and the hunter Akiti's poisoned arrows leave a dark mark wherever they strike without wounding him. In the second, a leopard prowling round a bathing hut is hit in the face with a soap-filled loofah and has been flecked ever since.

They are given together because their being consecutive in one collection is the interesting fact. alo-why-the-tortoise-shell-is-marked makes the same point at greater length using Parkinson's three shell-origin tales: the tradition tolerated competing aetiologies and a collector could print two without reconciling them.

The first story

At one time the leopard was coloured like a lion, and he had no dark markings 1. But he was pursued by Akiti, the renowned hunter, and feared that he might be slain.

To avoid this he ate the roots of a certain magic plant, which had the effect of making him invulnerable to any of the hunter's weapons 1.

Soon afterwards Akiti saw him as he slipped through the dense undergrowth of the forest, and though he shot his poisoned arrows, the leopard escaped 1.

But where each arrow struck him, there appeared a dark mark 1. And now, though hunters still pursue him, he is rarely caught, but his body is covered with the marks of the arrows, so that as he goes among the trees he looks exactly like the mingling of the sun and shadow.

The second story

According to another story, the leopard once had a very dark skin 1.

He was prowling one day in a beautiful compound, when he noticed a little hut in which a lady was taking her bath 1. Round and round the hut the leopard walked, waiting for an opportunity to spring into the hut and seize his victim, for he was hungry.

But as he passed the opening of the hut, the lady saw him, and, uttering a scream of terror, she threw at him her loofah, which was full of soap 1.

Original

The Yorùbá is not given. Ogumefu prints this couplet in English only 1.

Literal gloss

No Yorùbá text provided in source to gloss.

Idiomatic English

She flung it at him and he fled, But to this day the Leopard still Is flecked with soap from foot to head!

Translator: M. I. Ogumefu

Notes on the translation

No Yorùbá survives and nothing is reconstructed. This is one of only two verse passages Ogumefu prints anywhere in the material used in this section, and it is English rhymed verse: "fled" against "head," which is a translator's or an adapter's rhyme, not evidence of the Yorùbá. Whether it renders a sung chorus, and if so what the Yorùbá was, cannot be determined. The preface's admission that the songs of these tales "cannot here be given in full" 1 applies, and alo-ogumefu-1929-as-a-source sets out the problem.

What the two do differently

The first story is a hunter's tale and the second is a domestic joke, and they disagree about almost everything.

The leopard's original colour. Lion-coloured with no dark markings in the first; very dark-skinned in the second. The two cannot both be true, and Ogumefu makes no attempt to square them.

What the marks are. Arrow-strikes on an invulnerable body in the first; soap in the second.

What the leopard is. In the first he is a hunted animal who takes a sensible precaution and escapes, and the tale is on his side: he is "rarely caught," and the closing image is admiring, his markings making him look "exactly like the mingling of the sun and shadow" among the trees. In the second he is a predator circling a hut where a woman is bathing, and he is driven off by a thrown sponge and made ridiculous.

Where the marks came from morally. The first makes them a record of survival, evidence of every arrow that failed. The second makes them a record of humiliation.

The corpus notes as analysis that the pairing gives the leopard both faces the tradition holds for him, the formidable forest animal that cannot be killed and the greedy nuisance in the compound, and that this is the same double treatment owe-tortoise-ijapa-trickster documents for Ìjàpá in the proverb record. Neither is the correct leopard.

The first story's closing observation is worth pausing on independently, because it is the only aetiology in this section that explains a marking as camouflage. Arrows that did not kill him left a pattern that now makes him hard to see, so the failed attempt to kill him is what protects him from the next one. That is a more elegant idea than the plot needs, and it is stated in one clause.

Akiti the hunter

Akiti appears here as "the renowned hunter," named without introduction, which indicates a figure the audience is expected to know. Ogumefu's collection carries a separate tale about him at pp. 3-5 1, and this compiler has not read it, so nothing further is asserted about the character.

His presence is worth recording because named human protagonists are scarce in the material this section could source. alo-the-hunter-and-the-ape-with-sixteen-tails treats the one other hunter tale available, from a different collector, in which the hunter is unnamed. The corpus notes that a hunter cycle may exist in the Yorùbá-language collections it could not obtain, and does not claim more.

The hunter as a figure in Yorùbá verbal art is treated properly in yoruba-ijala, the hunters' chant being a genre of its own with its own performers.

Variants

These two are themselves the variant pair, and no third explanation was located by this compiler. No Yorùbá-language version of either was located, and neither has a second collector.

Performance context

Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. Both are short. The second ends on a rhymed couplet, which in performance would be the memorable part and is the likeliest candidate for a sung or chanted close, though the source does not say so.

Ogumefu's decision to print them consecutively, with "according to another story" as the join, may reflect how she received them or may be an editorial arrangement. The corpus records the arrangement and does not infer a performance practice from it.