Look Around

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.

Twenty-nine Yorùbá proverbs built around Àjàpá the tortoise, the tradition's central trickster animal, presented with the original, a literal gloss, a named translation, and the situation each is spoken in.

A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá rescues a drowning hunter's son on condition of enslaving him, hides him inside a drum that appears to sing by itself, and loses him when he drinks himself unconscious at a dance.

A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá wins half a palace by provoking a mute king's daughter into speech through a false accusation of theft, recorded by Ellis in 1894.

A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá wins a wager by goading Erin the elephant into carrying him into town, then escapes execution by persuading the elephant that mud is more lethal than stone.

A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá delivers an elephant for sacrifice by promising him a kingship, with the Yorùbá text of the riding song as printed by Omolaye from a named informant.

A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá tastes a fertility medicine prepared for his wife three times and dies of it, with the Yorùbá text of the Alugbinrin pleading song from a named informant.

A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá abandons his market stall to judge a fight between a shrew rat and a squirrel, takes a side, and loses his nose for it, with the Yorùbá text of the Jómijó song.

A famine tale in which Ìjàpá wheedles the secret of a magic yam-store out of the lizard, loads himself too heavily to leave, forgets the opening words, and is smashed and mended by insects.

An Ọ̀yọ́ variant of the magic yam-rock tale in which the rock opens to a song rather than a command, and Ìjàpá betrays his friend by bringing the whole country to empty the store.

A tale in which Ajá the dog plants the leaves Ìjàpá threw in his face, grows a tree that bears agidi, and repays the insult exactly, with the tortoise killed by a falling stone when he tries the same song.

A drought tale in which every large animal fails to reach the water and the despised tortoise solves it by asking one question, then is trampled by the animals coming to thank him.

The Yorùbá tradition holds no single account of the marks on the tortoise's shell, and this file sets the four sourced narratives side by side to show what varies and what does not.

A tale in which Ìjàpá roasts a pig in a covered fire-trench and loses the whole carcass to a dog blacksmith who stalls him over a seventh knife, explaining why dogs keep away from tortoises.

An aetiological tale of the buje dye-shrub, in which a woman who refused every suitor is assaulted by the tortoise and flees into the bush, and which Ellis used to adjudicate a competing published version.

The borrowed-feathers tale in which Ìjàpá flies to the birds' festival disguised as a bird, is stripped of his wings, and falls onto stones laid by an enemy imitating his wife's voice.