Ìjàpá and the Babaláwo

This is a tale about Ìjàpá the tortoise, his wife Yáníbo, and a babaláwo who prepares a medicine to end her barrenness. Ìjàpá is told not to taste it. He tastes it, and his belly swells like a pregnant woman's. He is forgiven twice and killed by the third offence. It carries the best-preserved song in this section: seven call-and-response lines with the refrain Alugbinrin, published in Yorùbá with English glosses from a named informant 1.

The tale

As told by Pa. Oduremi Eluwole, aged 80, of Oke-Ola Modakeke, recorded 12 March 2022 and published by Bamidele Omolaye 1.

In the olden days Ìjàpá's wife, yáníbo, was barren. Ìjàpá tried hard to find some means by which she could conceive, and went looking for help from one herbalist after another. After some time he heard of one who was said to be powerful. He went to the man and explained in detail what had happened, and the babaláwo consulted and appeased the oracle.

Afterwards the babaláwo told Ìjàpá that his wife would conceive, and that he would prepare a concoction for her to eat. He warned Ìjàpá not to make any attempt to taste it. He made it, handed it over, and sent Ìjàpá home with it.

Then Ìjàpá smelled the aroma of the concoction and found it pleasant, and tasted it, thinking the small quantity he took would have no effect on his body. The reverse was the case. His stomach began to swell like that of a pregnant woman. He became very frightened and went back to the babaláwo, and when he got there he began to sing.

Alugbinrin is the refrain and is not translated by Omolaye, who prints it in the English column unchanged. It is one of the well-known Yorùbá tale refrains and its function is rhythmic and participatory rather than semantic. Where a refrain of this kind carries no lexical meaning, the corpus does not invent one for it.

The song is a legal defence set to music, and its comedy is entirely in the middle three lines. Ìjàpá does not deny the act. He concedes the instruction, "he said I should not have a taste," and then produces an elaborate accident to account for the tasting: a root in the path tripped him, his hand went down to the ground to break the fall, and his hand then went to his mouth in the confusion. Nobody in the room believes this, including the babaláwo, and the plea works anyway the first two times. That is the joke, and it is the same joke as the closing cry in alo-ijapa-singing-drum: Ìjàpá states the facts accurately and files them under the wrong cause.

After hearing the plea, the babaláwo had compassion, forgave him, healed the swollen stomach, and gave him another concoction to take home. Ìjàpá tasted the second one. His stomach swelled again, and he went back and sang the same song. The babaláwo was not pleased, but had empathy a second time, healed him, and gave him a third.

Ìjàpá tasted the third. His stomach swelled. Shamelessly, Omolaye's word, he went back to the babaláwo again, and this time the babaláwo refused to help, because he had warned him twice already. The stomach swelled until it burst, and that was how Ìjàpá killed himself with his own greed.

What the tale does

The mechanism is escalation against a fixed warning, and the structure is a rule of three that the audience can count. The tale is engineered so the children in the room know what is coming before the third tasting, which converts the last verse from suspense into judgement: they are watching someone do a thing they have already seen fail twice.

What is unusual in the cycle is that Ìjàpá dies. He is normally caught, beaten, shamed, smashed and repaired, but the tales generally return him to circulation. Here the ending is final, and it is final because the offence is not theft from a peer but disobedience to a babaláwo holding a medicine that was never his. Omolaye records the intended lessons plainly: children are expected to learn to be faithful, to abstain from being self-centred, to see the repercussions of greed, and to be obedient to every instruction given by elders 1.

There is a detail worth naming that the article passes over. The medicine was for Yáníbo, and its purpose was a child. Ìjàpá's greed does not merely endanger him, it consumes the thing his wife needed, three times over, and the tale ends with him dead and her still barren. The corpus marks this as analysis rather than as a reading Omolaye states: the swollen belly is a punishment shaped exactly like the thing he stole, a false pregnancy in the body of the person who ate his wife's fertility. That fit between crime and consequence is the tale's sharpest device and it operates without a word of commentary.

The wife's name is worth recording. Yáníbo, printed in the article without capitalisation or subdots, is the standard name of Ìjàpá's wife across the Yorùbá tale tradition, and it appears in the tale-opening praise formula quoted in alo-the-opening-formula-and-the-teller as Ìjàpá Tìrókò, ọkọ Yánníbo, Ìjàpá of the silk-cotton tree, husband of Yánníbo. It is also the title of Olagoke Ojo's Yorùbá-language collection Ìjàpá Tìrókò Ọkọ Yannibo (Longman Nigeria, 1973) 2. Spelling varies across sources between Yáníbo, Yánníbo and Yannibo, and the corpus does not adjudicate between them.

Variants

This tale circulates on the modern retelling site yorubatales.com under the title "How Tortoise (Ijapa)'s Stomach Became Hollow," which frames it as an aetiological tale about the tortoise's body 3. Omolaye's informant does not give it that ending: in his version the belly bursts and Ìjàpá dies, with no explanatory coda about the shape of the living animal. Whether the aetiological frame is traditional or a modern addition cannot be settled from the sources consulted, and the difference is recorded rather than resolved. The site carries no per-tale attribution and nothing is quoted from it here.

No second scholarly transcription of this tale was located by this compiler.

Performance context

Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo; the musical setting, compound duple metre on a hemitonic pentatonic scale with the lead singer setting the pitch, is described with staff notation in Omolaye's article 1. This tale is the clearest case in the section of a song that repeats. The same seven lines are sung three times at three separate visits, so the audience learns the refrain on the first pass and owns it by the third, and the last performance of it is sung by children who already know it will not work.