Why the Ajao Remained Unburied
A very short aetiological tale in which the birds and the rats each disown a dead bat because he lacks their distinguishing feature, so he is left without relatives and without a funeral.
Di person wey collect am
Di source wey dem check no name any collector.
How dem dey perform am
Evening telling, treated in `yoruba-alo`. There is no song. At this length the tale is a single move delivered twice, and it would function in a session as a short piece between longer ones, or as the kind of tale that sets up the proverb rather than the other way round.
Di tale for short
This is the shortest tale in this section, about two hundred words, and one of the bleakest. The ajao, which Ellis glosses as "a kind of flying-fox, or large bat", dies sick and untended. The neighbours summon the birds to bury him and they disown him because he has no feathers; they summon the rats and the rats disown him because he has no tail. Having no relations, he is left unburied. Recorded in English by A. B. Ellis in 1894. Ellis attaches it directly to a proverb in his own collection, which makes it one of the few documented instances in this corpus of a tale and an òwe printed as a pair by the same collector.
Di tale
Ellis's teller opens: "My alo is of the ajao". The ajao lay in his house very sick, and there was no one to tend him. The ajao died. The neighbours said: the ajao is dead; we must call his relatives to come and perform the funeral ceremonies, and bury him. And they went and called the birds, saying: your relation is dead. The birds came, and when they saw that the deceased was an ajao, they said: > This is not one of our family. All our family wear feathers, and you see the ajao has none. He does not belong to us. And they went away. The neighbours consulted together. They said: the birds are right. The ajao has no feathers, and is not of the family of birds. He must be of the family of rats. And they went and called the rats, saying: your relation is dead. The rats came, but when they saw that the deceased was an ajao they also denied him. They said: > This is not one of our family. Everyone who is of our family has a tail, and you see the ajao has none. And they went away. Thus the ajao, having no relations, remained unburied.
Di different versions
No Yorùbá-language version, no second collection, and no variant of this tale were located by this compiler. The record consulted is silent. The bat-between-two-kinds is a widely distributed tale type internationally, most familiarly in the Aesopic tradition where a bat evades both sides in a war between birds and beasts and is rejected by both. This compiler notes the resemblance and asserts no relationship: the Yorùbá tale has no war, no evasion and no fault on the bat's part, and its subject is a funeral, which the Aesopic versions do not have.