The Dog and the Tortoise: The Agidi Tree
A tale in which Ajá the dog plants the leaves Ìjàpá threw in his face, grows a tree that bears agidi, and repays the insult exactly, with the tortoise killed by a falling stone when he tries the same song.
This is a tale about Ìjàpá the tortoise and Ajá the dog, neighbouring farmers. Ìjàpá eats his food in front of the hungry dog and throws the wrappings in his face. The dog plants the leaves, they grow into a tree bearing the same food, and when the tortoise later comes hungry the dog eats in front of him and explains why. Ìjàpá returns alone to sing the fruit down and is killed by a falling stone instead. Collected by John Parkinson from Ọ̀yọ́ informants and published in 1909 .
It is the third of three shell-origin tales in Parkinson's own sequence, treated together in alo-why-the-tortoise-shell-is-marked .
Agidi
Agidi is glossed by Parkinson as "corn crushed and sieved and boiled, then wrapped in leaves" . The wrapping matters to the plot: the food is carried and eaten in a leaf parcel, and it is the discarded parcel, not the food, that the dog plants. A tale about a tree that bears cooked wrapped food only works in a tradition where cooked wrapped food is an ordinary thing to be carrying to a farm.
The tale
A dog and a tortoise made friends, and their farms lay next to one another .
One day, when they went to their farms, the tortoise bought agidi and took it to the farm . The dog neglected to buy any. When at last they stopped work to eat, both were hungry, and the tortoise began to eat his agidi and did not give any to the dog. When he had finished he wrapped up the leaves and threw them in the dog's face.
Then the dog took these leaves and planted them in his farm . After some time they grew and bore agidi.
Now it happened one day that the tortoise came to the farm having forgotten to buy agidi . When they had finished working and the time to eat had come, the dog went to the leaves he had sown and began to sing.
The Yorùbá is not given. Parkinson prints the song in English only .
(No Yorùbá text recorded in source)
The agidi of the leaf must fall on me.
Translator: John Parkinson's interpreter
No Yorùbá survives, and nothing is reconstructed. The English is Parkinson's interpreter's, kept close to the original phrasing by the collector's stated method . The line is a command addressed to the tree, in the same grammatical shape as Tela's rock-spell in alo-the-tortoise-and-tela, "this rock must open." Two tales from the same collector, the same region and the same sequence use the same construction for a magic instruction, which is weak but real evidence about the form such spells took in the telling.
As he sang, so it fell and opened. Then the dog ate, and the remnant he threw away, giving none to the tortoise.
As they went home the tortoise said: how is it that you, who are my friend, have no pity, that you eat while you know I hunger?
So the dog answered him:
Do you not remember the last time when you threw the leaves in my face having eaten the agidi? My agidi is the fruit of the same leaves which I planted after you had done this.
Then said the tortoise: never mind, there is nothing so bad in that . But he thought: I can get the agidi for myself.
One day the tortoise went alone to the farm, and when he had finished his work and was hungry, he went to the dog's farm and began to sing at the fruit, desiring that it should fall . But no agidi fell. Instead a big stone fell, smashing the tortoise to pieces.
Then came all the ants and insects and mended him as best they could, but they never managed to get all the marks from his back where the pieces joined together. So these marks remain until this day.
What the tale does
The mechanism is exact reciprocity, and the tale is structured as a matched pair of scenes so the audience can see the symmetry. In the first, the tortoise has food, the dog is hungry, the tortoise eats without sharing. In the second, the dog has food, the tortoise is hungry, the dog eats without sharing. Same farm, same meal, same refusal. The only difference is that the dog explains himself and the tortoise did not.
That explanation is the moral centre. The dog does not take revenge in kind and leave it at that; he tells the tortoise precisely what he is doing and why, which converts a petty cruelty into a lesson delivered on the record. And the source of the dog's food is the insult itself: he planted the leaves that were thrown in his face. The corpus notes as analysis that this is a remarkably precise image for how an injury can be made productive, and it is doing work that the bare phrase "he got his own back" would lose, because the dog did not retaliate, he cultivated.
The tortoise's response is the second thing worth noticing. He says "never mind, there is nothing so bad in that," which is a concession, and immediately thinks "I can get the agidi for myself," which is not. He has understood the grievance and learned nothing from it except that there is a tree worth robbing. The corpus collects the proverb material on this in owe-gratitude-ingratitude-reciprocity.
The stone is the tale's judgement and it is delivered without a speaker. Nobody catches the tortoise, nobody beats him, and the dog is not present. The tree simply gives him a stone instead of food. Compare the other shell tales, where a farmer beats him (alo-ijapa-and-the-rock-of-yams), a starving man smashes him (alo-the-tortoise-and-tela), or grateful animals tread on him by accident (alo-the-tortoise-helps-the-animals). Here the punishment has no agent at all, which makes it read less as retribution than as a property of the world: the song works for the one who planted and not for the one who did not.
Variants
No Yorùbá-language version and no second collection of this specific tale were located by this compiler. It is a distinct plot from the other shell aetiologies rather than a variant of them, and the four are compared in alo-why-the-tortoise-shell-is-marked.
Parkinson's own tale XI, alo-the-pig-and-the-tortoise, also pairs Ìjàpá against a dog, but with the roles differently arranged: there the dog is a blacksmith who out-tricks the tortoise, and the tale ends by explaining why dogs run about. Whether the two dog tales were understood as connected by their tellers is not recorded.
Performance context
Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. The song is sung twice, once successfully by the dog and once fatally by the tortoise, and the audience will have joined the first performance before discovering what the second one does. That structure, an audience singing along with a trick that is about to kill the singer, is the same one that operates in alo-ijapa-and-erin-the-false-coronation.