Ṣàwárí

What M. I. Ogumefu's 1929 collection offers, and the disqualifying caveat she states in her own preface: the songs of these tales have been deliberately left out.

A cautionary tale in which a maiden follows a silent handsome stranger into the forest despite three warnings, and he turns out to be a leopard who hunts her back to the village.

Two competing aetiologies of the leopard's markings printed consecutively by one collector, one in which Akiti the hunter's arrows leave dark marks on an invulnerable leopard, and one in which a bathing woman throws her soapy loofah at him.

The tale of a woman who promises her first child to the spirit of the ìrókò tree in exchange for fertility, cannot pay, and is turned into a bird until her husband carves a wooden child to deceive the tree.

A tale from a country where the inhabitants are heads without bodies, in which one Head borrows a body, arms and legs to win a bride, and loses her when he returns them on the way home.

A tale of royal twins hidden from a law requiring their death, one of whom drowns the other for the throne and is exposed when first a fish and then the river itself sing what lies in the water.

An aetiological tale in which a jealous magician talks a grove of plain brown songbirds into trading their voices for bright feathers, explaining why the most beautiful birds cannot sing.

A childless queen who has been refused by every god steals a newborn from a sleeping woman by the roadside, and is exposed when the hungry baby quiets instantly at its real mother's breast.

An aetiological comedy in which a woman digs a pit to trap her enemy, falls into it herself, is pulled out by hair that stretches as they pull, and is envied into starting a fashion.