Ìjàpá and Erin: The False Coronation
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.
This is a tale about Ìjàpá the tortoise and Erin the elephant, in which a village needs an elephant for a sacrifice and cannot catch one, and Ìjàpá delivers him alive by telling him the village wants to crown him king. It carries a sung refrain that the audience joins, and unlike most tales in this section the Yorùbá text of that song survives in a peer-reviewed publication with a named informant .
This is the second of two distinct Ìjàpá-and-Erin tale types in this section. The other, in which Ìjàpá wins a wager by riding Erin into town and escapes into a swamp, is alo-ijapa-rides-the-elephant. Both are genuine; they are separate tales, not variants.
The tale
As told by Pa. Oduremi Eluwole's fellow informant Mr. Adisa Yusufu, aged 68, of Oke-Oniti, Oshogbo, recorded 26 January 2022 and published by Bamidele Omolaye of Obafemi Awolowo University .
A king of a certain village died, and the community wanted to install another. By the custom of the village they had to consult the oracle first, and whoever the oracle selected would be crowned. When the villagers performed the required rites, the oracle told them to make a sacrifice using an elephant as the object of the sacrifice, before they could install a new king.
This is close to impossible and the tale says so. Omolaye records the saying that a king who would capture an elephant does not exist, and notes that an elephant cannot be tied to a tree with a rope because the elephant will simply uproot the tree . The demand caused commotion among the elders and saddened the whole village.
Then Ìjàpá came and assured them he would bring an elephant into the village alive. Having heard him boast that he would bring it in unharmed and unhindered, the villagers let him try.
Ìjàpá baked cakes with a great deal of honey in them and went into the thick forest. When he found Erin he began to hail him: how Erin was the head of all other animals, how there was no animal who could act contrary to his instructions. When he saw that Erin was pleased with the praising, he told him why he had come. The villagers want you as their king.
Erin laughed at him and said that human beings were harsh and wicked.
Then Ìjàpá served him the honey cake. As Erin ate it, and it was very sweet, he changed his mind and decided to follow.
Ìjàpá told Erin that when he became king he would come and visit him. Then he asked whether he might climb and ride on Erin's back, so that the villagers could see how intimate they were, and so the journey would be faster. Erin picked him up at once and set off for the village. And as they went, Ìjàpá sang.
Call: A ó mérin J'oba Response: Èrèkú e we le Call: A ó mérin J'oba Response: Èrèkú e we le Call: Ní we le, ní we le, Response: Èrèkú e we le
- A ó we shall mérin take-the-elephant (mú erin, contracted) J'oba make-king (jẹ ọba, to be or become king)
- Ní we le with ease
- Èrèkú e we le the refrain, glossed by the article as "easily, easily"
Idiomatic English Translator: Bamidele Omolaye
Call: We shall install the elephant Response: Easily, easily Call: We shall install the elephant Response: Easily, easily Call: With ease, with ease Response: Easily, easily.
The article prints its Yorùbá with grave and acute accents but without any subdots: there is no ẹ, ọ or ṣ anywhere in the published text, as can be verified by searching the article itself . That is a typesetting loss, not a dialect feature, and it is reproduced here as printed rather than corrected, because supplying the missing subdots would supply a reading the source did not give. Readers should understand J'oba as standing for j'ọba, and the corpus flags the whole song as untoned in respect of subdots. The tone marks that are present are as the article printed them.
The song is doing something the translation cannot show, which is that it is true. A ó mérin j'ọba, "we shall make the elephant king," is exactly what the villagers intend to do, in the sense that the elephant is going to be seated on a throne. What it withholds is that the throne is a lid. Erin is carrying, on his own back, the animal singing an accurate description of his death, and the village is going to sing along with it. The refrain èrèkú e we le, rendered "easily, easily," is the part the audience takes, so in performance the children in the room are the ones promising that it will all be done easily.
After they had travelled some way Erin wanted to turn back. Ìjàpá quickly fed him another cake and he was happy again, and they went on.
Meanwhile Ìjàpá had already instructed the villagers: dig a very deep pit, cover it with fine and expensive cloth, and set an expensive chair on top of it as a throne. When the two of them entered the village Ìjàpá raised the same song again, and the villagers were filled with joy and sang along with him.
Then Ìjàpá asked Erin to sit on his throne. Erin sat, and sank into the pit, and the hunters shot at him until he died.
What the tale does
The mechanism is that the victim is destroyed by his own appetite for status, and the tale is careful to give him a chance to escape. Erin's first response is correct: he says human beings are harsh and wicked, which is a true assessment of what is about to happen to him. He is talked out of an accurate judgement by a honey cake. Later, on the road, he has second thoughts, and a second cake settles those too. The tale therefore stages the same choice three times, praise, cake, cake, and Erin fails it three times, so the audience cannot conclude that he was simply ambushed.
Omolaye records what the tale is told to teach, and it is more than one thing . Children are told it to learn that a problem focused on with determination will be solved; to be discouraged from greed and deceit and to be content with what they have; and, most pointedly, not to underrate anybody. He draws the last one out: looking at the fragile nature of the tortoise, one would have concluded that a tortoise could never bring such a huge animal into the community for sacrifice .
That last reading deserves attention because it sits oddly against the others. The tale is being used simultaneously to warn children off deceit and to admire the deceiver's competence. This is not a contradiction the corpus should smooth over. It is the standing condition of the Ìjàpá cycle, argued in yoruba-alo and visible across the proverb record in owe-tortoise-ijapa-trickster, where the same collection holds proverbs that praise the tortoise's expertise and proverbs that rank his cunning below a snail's. Which lesson a teller draws depends on the evening.
There is a further thing the tale is doing that no source states outright, so it is marked here as analysis. The plot begins with an oracle demanding an impossible sacrifice, and the community's alternative to Ìjàpá's trick is no king at all. The trick is therefore performed in the community's service and at the community's instruction: the villagers dig the pit, drape the cloth, set the chair, and sing the song. Ìjàpá is not stealing here, which is what he does in most of the cycle. He is solving a public problem by a method the public has agreed to, and the tale does not punish him for it.
Variants
The refrain is independently attested. The modern retelling site yorubatales.com carries a Yorùbá-language version of an Ìjàpá and Erin tale whose refrain is printed "Ẹrẹku - ẹwẹlẹ", which is recognisably the same refrain as Omolaye's Èrèkú e we le and is printed with the subdots that Omolaye's typesetting lost . That correspondence is worth recording, because two independent sources reaching the same refrain is real corroboration that the song is traditional rather than an artifact of one telling. It is not quoted as a text here, because the site carries no per-tale attribution and cannot be traced to a performance.
That site's version also sets the tale in a place called Jakọta and introduces a lion, Kìnìún, newly chosen as leader of the animals, with Erin resentful at being passed over . If that framing is traditional it supplies a motive for Erin's susceptibility that Omolaye's version leaves as simple vanity, but it cannot be confirmed from a sourced collection and is recorded here only as a difference between the two tellings.
Performance context
Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. Omolaye's article supplies performance detail that most sources for this section do not: the songs are in compound duple metre, sung on a hemitonic pentatonic scale, with the pitch set by the lead singer, and he provides staff-notation transcriptions . He describes the setting as moonlight storytelling, in the harmattan season particularly, with children gathering to listen after the day's work . yoruba-orin treats the wider song context.
The call-and-response structure here is the strict form: the teller calls a changing line, the audience answers a fixed refrain. That is the mechanism the name àlọ́ àpagbè refers to.