The tale types this section searched for and could not source, the collections it could not obtain, and why there is no monkey-trickster cycle and no Yorùbá origin-of-death tale in this corpus.
A corpus that only records what it found misrepresents the search. This file records what this section looked for and did not find, which collections were identified but could not be obtained, and two specific cases where the material that circulates online would have led straight into an error.
The zero-fabrication rule that governs this corpus means that a category can be requested, searched for thoroughly, and end with nothing written. That happened several times here, and the empty results are themselves findings.
This is the most important negative finding in the section, and it comes with a trap attached.
What could not be found. No sourced Yorùbá tale with Ìjímèrè as a trickster protagonist, and no monkey cycle comparable to the Ìjàpá cycle. Extensive searching produced nothing this compiler could cite.
What Ìjímèrè actually is. The Yorùbá name for the patas monkey, Erythrocebus patas. Its principal presence in the verbal-art record located here is a proverb rather than a tale: Ìjímèrè ṣọ́gigùn, kóo má baà gungi aládi, patas monkey, mind the trees you climb, lest you climb an aládi-infested tree, said of someone who acts without discretion, aládi being a small black ant that nests on tree stems. The corpus records this at second hand from the research consulted and has not verified it against a named proverb collection, so it is marked medium confidence and is not given a three-layer treatment here.
The trap. Searching "Ijimere Yoruba" leads quickly to Obotunde Ijimere, credited author of The Imprisonment of Obatala and other plays in the Heinemann African Writers Series. Obotunde Ijimere was a pen name invented by Ulli Beier, a German editor and scholar long resident in Nigeria. The name means roughly "Monkey has come back." It is a literary pseudonym, not a folk figure, and a researcher who meets it without knowing that will conclude there is an Ìjímèrè tradition where there is none.
The corpus flags this explicitly because the error is easy, the name is prominent in library catalogues, and nothing on the face of those catalogue entries reveals it.
What monkeys actually do in the sourced record. Where monkeys appear in material this section could source, they are never tricksters:
alo-the-hunter-and-the-ape-with-sixteen-tails, the apes are a society with a leader, scouts and a deliberative process, and they are the victims.That is the whole of it. The corpus states plainly that it did not find a monkey trickster, and does not assert that none exists in the Yorùbá-language collections it could not obtain.
A Yorùbá origin-of-death narrative circulates widely: Olódùmarè sends a message of eternal life by a goat, the goat lingers to eat, a sheep is sent instead and garbles the message so that men shall die, and the true message arrives too late to be believed .
This section does not carry that tale, and the reason is that every trail the research followed led to secondary or tertiary retellings rather than to a Yorùbá primary source or a named collector. It is not in Ellis's folklore chapter or his index. It is not in Frobenius volume one. The standard comparative monograph on the type across Africa is Hans Abrahamsson, The Origin of Death: Studies in African Mythology (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1951), which this compiler has not obtained.
The specific risk is that the messenger-of-death type is very widely distributed in West Africa, and the version in circulation may be Ashanti or Krachi material that has drifted onto a Yorùbá label . Writing it up on the strength of unsourced online retellings would be exactly the failure this corpus exists to avoid. The honest position is that the tale may well be Yorùbá and this section could not establish it.
Anyone extending this section should check Abrahamsson 1951 and Bolaji Idowu, Olódùmarè: God in Yoruba Belief (Longmans, 1962) directly before adding it.
alo-the-dog-and-the-tortoise and alo-the-pig-and-the-tortoise, but both explain the dog's relationship to the tortoise, not to cats.Several search routes return "The Story of the Leopard, the Tortoise and the Bush Rat" as though it were Yorùbá . It is not. It comes from Elphinstone Dayrell, Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria, and is Efik or Ibibio material . Nigeria is not one tradition, and a tale collected in Calabar is not a Yorùbá àlọ́. The corpus records this because the misattribution is common and the tale is frequently reproduced without provenance.
These exist, are relevant, and could not be read by this compiler. They are named so that anyone extending this section knows where to go, and so that nothing here is mistaken for a complete survey.
Yorùbá-language collections. These are the principal gap, and no amount of English-language searching substitutes for them.
alo-the-opening-formula-and-the-teller.yoruba-alo. No excerpts, reviews or contents listings could be found. A closely related Adebisi Amoo, Àlọ́ Àpagbè (Ibadan: Evans Brothers Nigeria, 1987) appears in a published bibliography; whether they are the same work could not be established.English-language scholarly collections.
owe-tortoise-ijapa-trickster.One article. Olumide Olugbemi-Gabriel, "African Folktales and Social Order: A Study of Selected Yoruba Folktales," in Ademowo and Oladipo, eds., Engaging the Future in the Present: Issues in Culture and Philosophy (Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2015), pp. 46-55. Directly on topic; access blocked.
Recorded so that nobody repeats the work.
yoruba-ijala.Three consequences follow, and they should be read alongside every file here.
The section is built on what is open. Ellis 1894, Parkinson 1909, Ogumefu 1929, Frobenius 1913, one 2023 peer-reviewed article and one 2025 archive transcript. That is a sample shaped by copyright expiry and open-access policy, not by the tradition's own proportions. Three of the six are colonial-period British publications.
The Yorùbá-language record is almost entirely absent. Of the tales in this section, the songs surviving in Yorùbá come from one modern article and two nineteenth-century refrain words. The Yorùbá-language collections that would change this are listed above and none was obtainable.
The Ìjàpá cycle is over-represented here relative to what a full survey would show. Fifteen of this section's tale files are tortoise tales, not because the tradition is fifteen-sixteenths tortoise but because the tortoise material is what the open sources preserved at narrative length. Ellis prints four non-tortoise tales and six tortoise tales; Ogumefu prints thirty-one non-tortoise tales before her tortoise section begins, and this compiler could treat only six of them.
A note on this file's own sourcing. The negative findings above are reports of searches conducted for this section. Where a collection is named as unobtainable, the bibliographic details are as recorded in library catalogues and in the bibliography published at https://yorubatales.com/bibliography/; none of those works has been read by this compiler, and none is cited anywhere in this section as a source for any tale.
An Ọ̀yọ́ tale in which a hunter stakes his life against a village head's on the existence of a sixteen-tailed ape, plays dead to kill it, and wins a bet the community afterwards condemns.
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.
What A. B. Ellis's 1894 collection contains, why its tale texts are usable, and exactly where its colonial framing has to be refused.
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.
The extended Àlọ́ Ìjàpá opening formula in Yorùbá with interlinear glossing, the praise-name run for the tortoise embedded in it, and what the collectors record about the apàlọ̀ and his drum.
What John Parkinson's Ọ̀yọ́ tale collection contains, why its stated provenance is unusually candid for its period, and how to read its editor's comparative footnotes.