Bùjẹ̀ the Slender
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.
This is an aetiological tale explaining the origin of the bùjẹ̀ shrub, whose fruit pulp blackens on exposure to air and is used to stain the skin. A woman named Bùjẹ̀, who has refused every suitor including the king, is assaulted by Ìjàpá after he tricks her into carrying him, and after he proclaims it publicly she covers her head, runs into the bush, and is transformed into the plant. Recorded in English by A. B. Ellis in 1894 .
The tale turns on a rape. It is presented here because it is part of the documented record, because Ellis attached to it the most substantial piece of variant criticism in his folklore chapter, and because omitting it would misrepresent what the nineteenth-century Ìjàpá material contains. It is summarised rather than dramatised, and the corpus does not soften what the source says happened.
The tale
Ellis's teller opens: "My alo is about a maiden named Buje, the slender" .
There was a young maiden named Bùjẹ̀ the slender, whom all the men wanted. The rich wanted her, and she refused. Chiefs wanted her, and she refused. The king wanted her, and she still refused.
Ìjàpá came to the king and said: she whom you all want and cannot get, I will get. I will have her, I. And the king said: if you succeed in having her, I will divide my palace into two halves and give you one half.
The wager is the same one Ìjàpá makes in alo-ijapa-and-the-dumb-princess, with the same stake, half a palace, offered by a king for access to a woman who has refused him.
One day Bùjẹ̀ took an earthen pot and went to fetch water. Ìjàpá, seeing this, took his hoe and cleared the path that led to the spring. He found a snake in the grass and killed it, and laid the dead snake in the middle of the path.
When Bùjẹ̀ had filled her pot and was coming back, she saw the snake in the path and called out for someone to come and kill it. Ìjàpá ran up with his cutlass, struck at the snake, and wounded himself in the leg. Then he cried out, and the lament is the tale's set piece:
The Yorùbá is not given. Ellis prints the lament in English only .
No Yorùbá source text preserved in the record .
Idiomatic English (Ellis's rendering, as printed) Translator: A. B. Ellis
Buje, the slender, has killed me. I was cutting the bush, I was clearing the path for her. She called to me to kill the snake, and I came quickly. Buje, the slender, Buje, the slender, I have killed the snake, but I have wounded myself in the leg. Oh, Buje, the slender, Buje, the slender, take me up on your back like a child. Take me up on your back and hold me close.
No Yorùbá survives, and nothing is reconstructed. The structure that does survive is the repetition of the name, five times in a short passage, in the manner of a chanted appeal rather than ordinary speech. Ellis records that Ìjàpá "cried this many times" , so in performance it is a refrain. The corpus notes that the lament is constructed as an accounting of services rendered, the bush cut, the path cleared, the snake killed, the injury taken, and that every item in it is false: he laid the snake there himself and wounded himself deliberately. It is a claim on obligation built entirely out of manufactured debts.
At last Bùjẹ̀ took him up on her back, and he assaulted her.
Next day, as soon as it was light, Ìjàpá went to the king and said: did I not tell you that I would have Bùjẹ̀ the slender? Call all the people of the town to assemble on the fifth day, and you will hear what I have to say.
On the fifth day the king sent out his crier and the people came, and Ìjàpá cried out: everybody wanted Bùjẹ̀ the slender, and Bùjẹ̀ refused everybody, but I have had her.
The king sent a messenger with his stick to summon her. When she came the king said: we have heard that Ìjàpá is your husband; is it so?
Bùjẹ̀ was ashamed and could not answer. She covered her head with her cloth and ran away into the bush. And there she was changed into the plant called bùjẹ̀.
Ellis notes that the pulp of the fruit of the bùjẹ̀ shrub turns black when exposed to the air, and is used to stain the skin in imitation of tattooing, leaving marks like lamp-black . He records the same metamorphosis independently in his chapter on transformation beliefs, where he lists "the shrub buje, whose fruit is used to stain the skin in imitation of tattoo marks" as a Yorùbá belle of that name who was metamorphosed .
What the tale does
The mechanism is a public accusation that the victim cannot answer, and the tale is precise about where the harm lands. Ìjàpá's assault is a private act; what destroys Bùjẹ̀ is the assembly on the fifth day. He does not need her to agree, or the king to believe him: he needs the town summoned and the claim made aloud. Her transformation follows not the assault but the question put to her in public, and the tale says exactly what she does with her body at that moment, she covers her head with her cloth.
The corpus reads this, marked as analysis, as a tale about the mechanics of shame rather than a tale about a trick that worked. owe-shame-reputation-being-seen collects the proverb material on being seen, and the operative fact there is that reputation is a public possession: what is known about a person by the town is a different order of thing from what is true. Ìjàpá converts a private violence into a public fact, and the public fact is what she cannot survive.
The moral neutrality of the ending deserves to be stated plainly rather than smoothed. Ìjàpá is not punished. He presumably keeps the half palace. The king, who wanted her himself and financed the scheme, is not criticised. The person who is removed from the community is the woman, and she removes herself. Ellis appends no comment. Compare alo-ijapa-and-the-dumb-princess, where a similar wager on a woman's body and voice ends with the flat line "that is how Tortoise succeeds in everything." These two tales together are the strongest evidence in this section for the argument set out in yoruba-alo, that the Ìjàpá cycle is not a moral system delivering just deserts, and that reading it as children's moral instruction accounts for only part of what is in it.
Whether the tale was understood by its tellers as approving Ìjàpá, or as an explanation of a plant, or as a warning to young women about the cost of refusing suitors, or as something else entirely, the record consulted does not say. Ellis reports no commentary from his tellers on any of his six tortoise tales. The corpus records the silence rather than filling it.
Ellis on the competing version
This tale carries the most substantial piece of source criticism in Ellis's folklore chapter, and it is worth reproducing because it is a rare documented instance of a nineteenth-century collector adjudicating between published variants and reporting what his informants said about the disagreement.
Ellis writes that a version of this story circulates "among the English and Americans" in which Bùjẹ̀ is ravished by a deformed man rather than by the tortoise, and attributes it to T. J. Bowen, an American missionary, in Central Africa (Charleston, 1857), a work Ellis says he has not himself seen. He then reports:
All natives are agreed that this version is incorrect, and that Tortoise was the ravisher .
His proposed explanation is linguistic: that Bowen learned the story from a Yorùbá speaker using French, and that la tortue, the tortoise, was confused with le tortu, the crooked or deformed one. He adds that a hearer who had never heard of the anthropomorphic Tortoise, thinking it impossible that Bùjẹ̀ could be violated by a tortoise, would naturally suppose the narrator meant le tortu .
Three things in this are worth separating, per the corpus rule on distinguishing kinds of claim.
What the tradition says of itself. Ellis reports that his Yorùbá informants unanimously identified Bowen's version as wrong and the tortoise as the correct actor. That is a reported native judgement on a variant, and it is the most valuable part of the footnote.
What the collector documents. Ellis records a discrepancy between two published sources and states that he has not read one of them. That is honest and it is the standard a corpus should want.
What the collector speculates. The la tortue / le tortu mechanism is Ellis's conjecture, offered with "the only probable explanation seems to be." He supplies no evidence that Bowen's informant spoke French, and this compiler has not verified Bowen's text. It is an ingenious guess and it is presented here as a guess.
The underlying point survives whether or not the etymology is right: a European reader's assumption that a tortoise could not be the actor in this tale is precisely the assumption that the Yorùbá anthropomorphic Ìjàpá defeats. yoruba-alo and owe-tortoise-ijapa-trickster both make the point that Ìjàpá is a personage rather than an animal, and this footnote is the clearest nineteenth-century evidence of what goes wrong when a reader forgets it.
Variants
Beyond Bowen's version as reported by Ellis, no other collection of this tale was located by this compiler, and no Yorùbá-language text. The record consulted is silent on regional variation.
Performance context
Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. Ellis records that the lament was cried "many times," making it the tale's repeated element. Given the content, nothing in the sources consulted indicates what audience this tale was told to, and this compiler will not assume it was told to young children merely because most àlọ́ were.