Ìjàpá and the Singing Drum
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.
This is a tale about Ìjàpá the tortoise, a hunter's son named Sigo who falls into a flooded gully, and a drum that sings. Ìjàpá pulls Sigo out in exchange for Sigo becoming his slave, then hides him inside a large drum and tours the town exhibiting a miraculous instrument that sings its own words. He loses everything at the last performance because he cannot stop eating and drinking. The tale is recorded in English by A. B. Ellis in 1894 , and no Yorùbá original of it is known to this compiler.
For the call-and-response opening that frames every àlọ́, and the division of the genre into àlọ́ àpamọ̀ and àlọ́ àpagbè, see yoruba-alo. This tale carries its own opening formula, discussed below, which differs from the Ààlọ́ o / Ààlọ̀ exchange.
The teller's opening
Ellis records that the reciter of tales is an akpalo (in modern orthography apàlọ̀, the one who does the àlọ́), that a travelling professional teller is an akpalo kpatita, that he uses a drum, and that he opens by crying "My alo is about so-and-so" . Every tale in his collection begins that way, and this one opens:
My alo is something about a woman named Olu.
Ellis prints this in English only and gives no Yorùbá for the formula . It is a naming-the-subject opening rather than the tonal call-and-response pair treated in yoruba-alo, and the two are not alternatives to each other: the Ààlọ́ o / Ààlọ̀ exchange establishes that a story is beginning, while this line announces what the story is about. Whether Ellis's tellers also used the call-and-response frame and he simply did not record it cannot be settled from his text, and the record is silent on the point.
The tale
Olu had a son named Sigo, and Sigo decided to become a hunter. His father gave him a horse and his mother gave him a sheep, and they told him to go and hunt. He took his bow and arrows, mounted, and rode into the bush, travelling a long way until he reached the haunt of animals.
Then the sky darkened and the rain came down in torrents, so heavily that the water washed Sigo into a deep gully. He could not climb out, and he stayed there weeping.
When the rain stopped, Ìjàpá came by, always on the lookout for opportunities. Sigo stretched his neck up towards the lip of the gully and called out to him. Ìjàpá leaned over the edge and asked what he was doing down there. The flood washed me in, said Sigo.
What will you give me if I pull you out, asked Ìjàpá. I will be your slave, said Sigo. Very well, said Ìjàpá.
He climbed down and brought Sigo out, and then told him the plan: I am going to make a large drum, and I shall put you inside it. When we come to any house and I begin playing, take care that you sing well. Sigo understood.
Back in his town, Ìjàpá went to the king and boasted about the fine sound of his drum. The king ordered him to bring it and beat it in his presence. Very well, said Ìjàpá, send and call all the town to the dance. The king sent word through the town, and when everyone had assembled he called for the tortoise. Ìjàpá came into the middle of the assembly, struck the drum with the stick, and the drum sang.
The Yorùbá is not given. Ellis prints the song in English only .
No Yorùbá text preserved in source .
Idiomatic English Translator: A. B. Ellis
Sigo is the son of Olu; Ah! let me be rescued. His mother gave him a sheep, and told him to go and hunt; Ah! let me be rescued. His father gave him a horse, and told him to go and hunt; Ah! let me be rescued. Listen to what I say. He went to the elephant's haunt; Ah! let me be rescued. Listen to what I say. He went to the buffalo's lair; Ah! let me be rescued. The flood of the rain washed him into the cleft; Ah! let me be rescued. And so he became the Tortoise's slave; Ah! let me be rescued.
No Yorùbá text survives in Ellis for this song, so the three-layer treatment the corpus normally requires cannot be given here, and nothing should be reconstructed. What can be recovered is one piece of wordplay Ellis flags himself in a footnote: "There is perhaps some pun in this. Olu means a clapper, or anything to strike with, and ilu means a drum" . If that reading is right, the first line of the song is doing double work, naming Sigo's mother and naming the drumstick that is striking the drum as the song is sung. This is the kind of device the corpus documents throughout Yorùbá verbal art, where a name and a common noun are separated only by tone, and it is exactly what a translation into English destroys. Ellis marks his own reading as uncertain with "perhaps," and it is reproduced here with that uncertainty intact.
The people clapped their hands to their mouths in astonishment. The king had him beat it again, and they cried out at the marvel. Then Ìjàpá went home.
Before long the senior women of the household Sigo belonged to asked Ìjàpá to come and beat his drum at a dance of theirs. He said very good, and went. When he arrived they made ready gruel of Indian corn (ọ̀kà, in Ellis's spelling oka) and bought rum, and asked him to play. He beat the drum and the drum sang the same song again.
Then they gave Ìjàpá food, and he ate. They gave him rum, and he drank, and became drunk, and fell asleep.
While he slept they took his drum, removed the drum-head, took Sigo out, and put the head back exactly as it had been.
When Ìjàpá woke he took up his drum and began to beat it. A crow croaked inside it. He beat harder and faster, and the crow croaked louder and louder. And he cried out as loud as he could:
Why, when you were eating, did you not give something to eat to the drum? Why, when you were drinking, did not you give some of the rum to the drum?
He went home, took off the drum-head, and found a crow inside.
What the tale does
The mechanism is substitution, and it is set up so precisely that the audience sees it coming before Ìjàpá does. The drum has been established over two performances as an instrument that says true things: it names Sigo, his parents, the gifts, the flood, and the enslavement. When the drum-head goes back on with a crow inside, the instrument keeps its form and loses its content, and Ìjàpá goes on beating it in front of people, publicly, still expecting it to speak.
His closing cry is the joke and the judgement at once. Beating harder, he shouts a reproach at the drum for not having been fed and given rum. He is right about the cause and wrong about everything else: the drum was indeed not fed, because he ate and drank its share, and the thing inside it that needed feeding was a person he was holding as a slave. He diagnoses his own greed and misfiles it as the drum's grievance, and that misfiling is where the comedy sits.
Ellis noticed the pattern across his six tortoise tales and stated it in a footnote to the last of them:
In this tale, Tortoise's usual cunning fails him. It is to be noted that, whenever he is shown as being over-reached or unsuccessful, the want of success is due to greediness .
He names this tale as his first example, "where he eats and drinks till he falls asleep, so that Sigo is rescued from the drum" . That is a collector's observation made in 1894 on his own material, and it is worth recording as such: the tortoise is not defeated by a cleverer opponent but by appetite, which is the constant across the cycle described in yoruba-alo and visible in the proverb record collected in owe-tortoise-ijapa-trickster.
Note also who defeats him. Not the king, not a stronger animal, but the women of the household that Sigo belongs to, who ply him with food and rum and open the drum while he sleeps. The rescue is domestic and quiet, and it works by giving the trickster exactly what he wants.
Variants
The record consulted for this file preserves no Yorùbá-language variant of this tale and no second collected version, so nothing can be said about how it was told elsewhere. Ellis published it in 1894 from an unnamed source, and the corpus does not have a second attestation to set beside it.
The hidden-singer-in-a-container device is not unique to this tale in West African narrative, but this compiler has not verified a specific Yorùbá parallel and does not assert one.
On this source
Ellis was a British colonial military officer, and his book belongs to the colonial ethnographic literature rather than to Yorùbá scholarship. His framing chapter ranks the peoples he studied in "stages of progress" and treats Yorùbá religion as an evolutionary stage . That framing is an artifact of its moment and is not adopted anywhere in this corpus. The tale texts themselves are a different matter: they are among the earliest published Yorùbá folktale narratives available, they are given at full narrative length rather than in summary, and Ellis's footnotes preserve linguistic detail (the pun on olu and ilu, the gloss of ekuru, the greed observation) that a bare retelling would have lost. alo-ellis-1894-as-a-source sets out how this corpus uses him and where the caution applies.
The confidence on this file is marked medium rather than high because the tale exists here in a single English rendering by a colonial-era collector who names no informant, gives no Yorùbá text, and worked at a period when transcription standards were not what later Yorùbá scholarship established.
Performance context
Evening telling to a mixed-age audience, treated fully in yoruba-alo. Ellis adds one detail specific to his period: the professional travelling teller, the akpalo kpatita, carried a drum . In a tale whose entire plot turns on a drum that sings, a teller with a drum in his hands is not incidental, and the performance and the story would have used the same object. Ellis does not say the drum was struck during this particular telling, and this observation is the compiler's own inference from his description of the teller's equipment, marked as analysis rather than as recorded fact.
Sources
- [1]Ellis, A. B. (Alfred Burdon), The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa: Their Religion, Manners, Customs, Laws, Language, etc. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894), Chapter XIV, "Folk-Lore Tales," Tortoise Stories I, pp. 260-263; the akpalo and akpalo kpatita and the drum at p. 243; the olu/ilu pun footnote at p. 262; the oka gloss at p. 262; the greed footnote at p. 274; the "stages of progress" framing in Chapter XV, "Conclusions." Public domain, full text at https://archive.org/details/b21781370. Colonial-era source, labelled as such: Ellis was a Lieutenant-Colonel of the First Battalion West India Regiment, and his evolutionary framing of West African religion is an artifact of nineteenth-century colonial ethnography, not a Yorùbá account of Yorùbá tradition. The narrative texts are used here; the framing is not.