The Tortoise and Tela

This is an Ọ̀yọ́ telling of the magic yam-rock tale, in which the friend who holds the secret is a man named Tela rather than a lizard, the rock opens to a sung spell rather than a spoken command, and Ìjàpá's offence is not merely loading himself too heavily but bringing the entire country to strip the store bare. It ends with the tortoise smashed on the rock and reassembled by insects, the joins visible on his back. Collected by John Parkinson and published in 1909 1.

The closely related version in which the lizard holds the secret is alo-ijapa-and-the-rock-of-yams, and the two are compared with the other shell-origin narratives in alo-why-the-tortoise-shell-is-marked.

Provenance

Parkinson states his sources at the head of the article, and the statement is worth quoting because it is more than most collectors of the period supply:

The following tales, told to me for the most part by natives of Oyo, have been left as far as possible in the phrases of the interpreter, himself a Yoruba 1.

So: Ọ̀yọ́ provenance, transmitted through a named-as-Yorùbá though unnamed interpreter, with the English deliberately kept close to that interpreter's phrasing rather than smoothed into literary style. That is a transmission chain with two links in it and Parkinson is honest about both. No Yorùbá text is given for this tale, and the English is at one remove from the teller.

Parkinson also groups his tales explicitly. He notes that "Stories VIII., IX., and X. tell how the tortoise got the marks on his back" 1, which means a single collector recorded three distinct aetiologies for the same physical fact from the same region. That is unusual and it is the strongest evidence in this section that the Yorùbá tradition did not hold one canonical explanation of the shell.

The tale

The tortoise was a very sensible animal, and very friendly with a man named Tela. There was a dearth of food in the land. Tela knew where he could get food and the tortoise did not, and now and again Tela went to this place and ate there while the tortoise was sick with hunger.

Then the tortoise said: you are a friend, yet you never show me where you get food; you look fat, but I get nothing to eat.

And Tela answered, in a line that tells the audience exactly how the tale will end:

I thought of taking you, but I know you to be wise, and I fear that you will go to my place without my permission, so that I do not tell you.

One day, however, Tela promised to take him, and when they came to the place the tortoise found it was a rock. And Tela sang.

Original

The Yorùbá is not given. Parkinson prints the song in English only 1.

Literal gloss

No Yorùbá text recorded; literal gloss unavailable.

Idiomatic English

This rock must open because the owner of the house has come! I "Prince Tela."

Translator: Unnamed Yorùbá interpreter

Notes on the translation

No Yorùbá survives for this spell, so the three-layer treatment cannot be given and nothing is reconstructed. What can be observed is that the English is visibly not idiomatic English, and Parkinson told us why: he kept the interpreter's phrasing. The broken apposition at the end, "I 'Prince Tela'," reads like a name being asserted rather than a sentence being completed, which is what an opening formula does. The corpus notes as analysis that a spell of this kind works by naming the speaker's right to enter, so the awkwardness in English may be preserving something real about the Yorùbá rather than merely failing to render it.

The rock opened and they went inside and ate to their satisfaction. Afterwards the tortoise tried to take food home to his wife, and they parted, each to his own home.

On the second day, when Tela was away, the tortoise went around the country and invited all the people to come to Tela's place and get food. They made arrangements for a certain day, and when they arrived at the rock the tortoise sang the spell himself, and the rock opened, not knowing it was the tortoise who sang. And the animals finished all the food in the store.

When they had finished, the tortoise said: I will be the last to go. So they all went, and while the tortoise was going, the middle of the rock fell on him.

In a short while Tela grew hungry and went to the rock to feed, and saw the head of the tortoise projecting. And Tela said: how is it that I find you here? When I brought you here the day before yesterday you promised you would not come, but now you have come and friends with you.

But the tortoise said: get me out and don't talk.

And Tela, being hungry, began to sing as before, and the rock opened. Now Tela was very hungry, and, not staying to talk because of the food he thought lay before him, went in and saw that all was eaten and nothing was left.

He was so angry that he caught the tortoise and was about to crush him, when the tortoise said: have patience and I will tell you all. Then, he continued, to admit a fact, there is something that always makes me tell things I ought not to tell.

Then said the hungry Tela: I have no time for this sort of thing. And he broke him on the rock and smashed him all to pieces.

Afterwards the big ants and all manner of insects collected and put him together again. They all did the best they could, but they could not mend his back properly, and so the joins where they mended him show on the back of the tortoise to this day.

What the tale does

The mechanism is that the betrayal is predicted, permitted and then executed exactly as predicted. Tela says at the outset that he fears the tortoise will go to the place without permission, names the reason as the tortoise's own wisdom, and takes him anyway. The tale therefore does not treat Ìjàpá's character as a surprise to anyone, and it does not treat Tela as a fool for trusting him: it treats trust as something extended with the risk fully in view. owe-friendship-trust-betrayal collects the proverb material on the same problem.

The scale of the offence is what separates this version from the lizard version. In alo-ijapa-and-the-rock-of-yams the tortoise steals extra yams for himself and is trapped by his own load. Here he convenes the entire country, and the store is emptied by a crowd he assembled. This is theft organised as hospitality, and it is done with a borrowed voice, since the rock opens because it cannot tell who is singing.

Ìjàpá's confession is the best line in the tale and the corpus draws attention to it as a piece of characterisation rare in the cycle:

To admit a fact, there is something that always makes me tell things I ought not to tell.

He is not excusing himself by denial, as he does in the Alugbinrin song in alo-ijapa-and-the-babalawo. He is naming a compulsion, and locating it outside his own will, "there is something that always makes me." This is the closest the recorded cycle comes to giving the trickster an account of himself. Tela, who is starving, refuses to hear it, and the refusal is not presented as a moral failing on Tela's part. The tale simply notes twice that he is very hungry, which is its explanation for why a reasonable man destroys someone mid-sentence.

Note also who repairs him. In Ellis's version a cockroach and an ant come because he calls them by name. Here the big ants and all manner of insects "collected" on their own initiative, with no summons recorded. The mending is presented as something that just happens to a smashed creature, and the imperfection of it is stated flatly rather than lamented.

Variants

See alo-why-the-tortoise-shell-is-marked for the full comparison. The immediate relatives of this tale are Ellis's lizard version 2 and the Bouche 1880 Nago version summarised by Parkinson's editor, which follows Ellis's plot rather than this one 1. Parkinson's own sequence supplies two further shell aetiologies with entirely different plots, alo-the-dog-and-the-tortoise and alo-the-tortoise-helps-the-animals.

Performance context

Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. The spell is sung three times in this tale, by Tela on the first visit, by the tortoise on the raid, and by Tela again at the rescue, so the audience has a refrain to carry and the third performance of it is the one that reveals the empty store. That structure, a song that changes meaning through repetition without changing words, is the same device used in alo-ijapa-and-the-babalawo.