Cautionary Tales and What They Threaten

Àlọ́ are told by an older person to children in the evening, and a large proportion of the tales collected in this section are warnings 3. This file sets the cautionary tales side by side to ask what they warn against, how they punish, and what that says about the pedagogy. It does not retell them; each is told in its own file.

Two findings are worth stating at the top. The endings are considerably more severe than a modern reader expects. And the punishment these tales reach for most often is not injury or death but being found out in public.

What is actually warned against

Sorting the cautionary material in this section by its subject gives a shorter and stranger list than the phrase "moral instruction for children" suggests.

Marrying an attractive stranger. alo-adun-and-the-borrowed-body, alo-the-head-who-borrowed-a-body, alo-the-leopard-man. Three tales from two collectors, and in all three the danger is a handsome man from elsewhere whose appearance is not his own. In two of them the appearance is literally borrowed and repossessed on the road home.

Promising what you cannot deliver. alo-oluronbi-and-the-iroko. A vow made in desperation, enforced without mercy against a woman who could not have known what she was promising.

Taking the good portion. alo-the-palm-oil-seller-and-the-goblin. The tests are about deference, and the girl who eats the oil and gives away the dregs dies for it.

Being talked out of what you have. alo-the-voices-of-birds, and by extension alo-why-women-have-long-hair. Both turn on somebody accepting a stranger's assessment of their own worth.

Meddling in other people's quarrels. alo-why-the-tortoise-nose-is-small. Omolaye states the intended lesson directly: mind your own business and stay away from fights 1.

Greed, in nearly every tortoise tale. Ellis reached the same conclusion across his own six in 1894 and wrote it down: whenever the tortoise is over-reached, "the want of success is due to greediness" 2.

Disobeying an instruction from someone who knows more. alo-ijapa-and-the-babalawo, where the instruction is given three times and the third disobedience is fatal.

What is largely absent is as informative as what is present. There is very little here about lying as such, almost nothing about violence between people, nothing about theft from strangers as opposed to theft from friends, and no tale in this section that warns a child about disobeying a parent directly.

How severe the endings are

Set out plainly, the cautionary tales in this section end like this:

• A girl is torn apart by wild animals on her own doorstep while a deaf person fails to hear her calling. (alo-the-palm-oil-seller-and-the-goblin)
• A baby is killed and eaten, and its bones thrown down at the woman who brought it; she is tried and executed. (alo-the-poor-woman-and-the-aranran-bird)
• A woman is assaulted, publicly proclaimed, and flees into the bush to become a plant. (alo-buje-the-slender)
• A tortoise's belly swells until it bursts and kills him. (alo-ijapa-and-the-babalawo)
• A man drowns his twin brother and, exposed, takes poison. (alo-the-twin-brothers)
• A mother loses her child permanently to a tree-spirit, in one of the two attested endings. (alo-oluronbi-and-the-iroko)

The corpus notes as analysis that this severity is not incidental to the form. A tale told in the evening to children who will hear it again next year does not need to be gentle to be bearable, because the frame does that work: yoruba-alo sets out that the opening formula marks off a fictional world from waking reality, and the closing formula returns the audience to it. A child who has answered Ààlọ̀ knows what kind of thing is being told. The severity is available precisely because the frame is secure.

It is also worth noticing that the severe endings are not distributed by desert. The girl in the goblin tale cheats and dies; the girl in the leopard tale ignores three explicit warnings and gets home alive; Bùjẹ̀ does nothing wrong at all and is destroyed. These tales are not a system that assigns outcomes to conduct.

The characteristic punishment is exposure

This is the strongest pattern in the section and it holds across tales that otherwise have nothing in common.

Look at what actually destroys people in these tales:

• Bùjẹ̀ is not destroyed by the assault. She is destroyed on the fifth day, when the town is assembled and the claim is made aloud and the king asks her a question she cannot answer. (alo-buje-the-slender)
• Olúrónbí is turned into a bird whose punishment is to sit in a tree singing her own case, in public, on repeat. (alo-oluronbi-and-the-iroko)
• Ìsọ̀kun is undone by a hungry baby crying through a celebration she convened. (alo-isokun-and-the-baby)
• The murdering twin is exposed when a river sings while he is walking with his nobles under the royal umbrella, at the height of public display. (alo-the-twin-brothers)
• The ìyálé is tried before the king, who asks the assembled people what should be done. (alo-the-poor-woman-and-the-aranran-bird)
• Ìjàpá, repeatedly, is caught in ways that make him a spectacle: tied at a path junction where everyone passes, in the analysis of Ìjàpá àti Ìgbín in yoruba-alo; beating a drum that croaks in front of a crowd in alo-ijapa-singing-drum.

The mechanism is consistent: the wrong is done privately and the sanction is public knowledge of it. owe-shame-reputation-being-seen documents the same logic in the proverb record, where reputation is treated as a possession held by the community rather than a feeling held by the individual.

The corpus draws out one consequence, marked as analysis. If exposure is the punishment, then the tales are teaching children to model an audience. The question a child takes from these tales is not "is this wrong" but "what happens when this is known," and those are different questions producing different conduct. Whether Yorùbá tellers would have described the pedagogy that way, the sources consulted do not say.

Who does the punishing

Rarely a god, and rarely a parent.

The community, most often: passers-by at a baobab, an assembly asked what should be done, a town that rejects a king in horror, people who declare after the fact that no one should make such bets.

A specialist, where the wrong is against knowledge: the babaláwo who refuses the third healing.

The offended party's own power, in the tales with supernatural actors: the ìrókò spirit, the àranran, the goblin.

Nobody at all, in a striking number of cases. A stone falls with no one present in alo-the-dog-and-the-tortoise. The apes in alo-the-hunter-and-the-ape-with-sixteen-tails are simply outwitted and the hunter is never sanctioned. Ìjàpá keeps the half-palace in alo-ijapa-and-the-dumb-princess and in alo-buje-the-slender.

The corpus records that this last category is large enough to prevent any reading of the section as a consistent moral system, and yoruba-alo makes the same argument from a different direction.

A caution for a modern reader

Two of the tales in this section contain material a present-day adult reading to a child would need to handle: alo-buje-the-slender turns on a rape, and alo-the-twin-brothers reports a former custom of killing twins at birth. The corpus presents both because they are in the documented record and because omitting them would misrepresent what the nineteenth and early twentieth century collections contain.

Nothing in the sources consulted indicates the audience for either tale. yoruba-alo describes the genre's typical setting as an elder telling children in the evening 3, and it does not follow that every recorded tale was told in that setting to that audience. This compiler does not assume that the Bùjẹ̀ tale was children's material, and marks the question as one the record does not answer.