By
Obododịmma ọha
One of the
figures in African folklore that has great relevance to contemporary
struggles on the continent is the trickstser. That is an interesting situation
where cultural and fictional characters resemble entities we find in real life.
Is it the scammer hiding in one hovel
and deceiving innocent people to part with their millions? Or is it politicians
deceiving the electorate with their funny and grossly illogical appeals? Or, is it the pastor in three-piece suit deceiving his congregation with promises of
deliverance from their travails and making them part with their life savings?
Even at places of work, clever folks have made a resounding contribution to
the practice of office politics by deceiving fellow workers that they are
righteous people and religious people, in order to make them submit easily to
their wishes! Everywhere in contemporary life in the postcolony you see the
trickster at work and morphing also in order to be able to deceive vulnerable
targets.
In Igbo
culture, the trickster is mbe or mbekwu, the tortoise. In Yoruba, we have ịjapa
or ajapa (the tortoise, too)
featuring in secular tales and the deity, Esu
elegba, featuring in sacred or formal contexts. Even other deities are
afraid of the trickster deity, who might just play a fast one on them and enact
destruction. And so, Esu has great
relevance as a tricster in serious social contexts involving the big-time
players or leaders. One of them might just play Esu and foul the waters for others. That means that one just has to
be on one’s guard at the top where great things happen to society! Also, in
Ghana, the trickster is the Anansi or
spider.
All the choices
of the animals have noteworthy things about them. The tortoise carries a shell
around, a shell that is made up of parts and linkages. The animal is also slow
and clumsy in walking around, and hides
inside its shell when it senses a danger. It is, therefore, a vulnerable
and weak creature practically. It is then understandable that such a vulnerable
creature would be represented strong in mind, exercising the power of
cleverness to survive than just retreating into its shell, which is itself a
natural burden and handicap! The spider, too, is an interesting choice in the
folk imagination. The spider has compound eyes and can see things. It has
multiple limbs, too, and so its
multitasking and access to targets, as
well as to craft, is enhanced. Moreover, it is a silent creature (even though
greatly vulnerable) and so is an ideal choice when it comes to watching and
studying targets. This creature is selected in the culture, to exercise the
power of cleverness and deceive (even though the physical spider can do useful
things for us, kill other offensive insects by trapping them in its webs!) In
each case, the figure is a paradox, which suggests that there is greater power
to watch in those places and things we tend to overlook as innocuous. It says
loudly: there is strength in a seeming weakness!
Am I delaying
you, creating unnecessary suspense? Wait; you need to be armed with such
information in order to take in well the
jeep in the life of the tortoise as a modern city crawler!
It is
important as we reflect on the figure of the trickster and modern African life,
especially its morping nature: that tendency
to morph, to alter its form, is part of tricksterhood. Through morphing,
it further deceives and holds hostage! One would like to focus on the one that
one is a bit familiar with its folklore, the Igbo mbe. Tales about mbe’s
tricksterhood (which ironically also inspires admiration and condemnation) have
been collected in one interesting Igbo text, Mbediogo, edited by Ogbalu and studied at primary and secondary
schools. Thanks to modern print culture: those tales are preserved in print,
instead of being stored only in our unreliable heads, heads that are affected
by so many modern things! But one cannot overlook what one enjoyed in those
days when after supper we as children of the homestead gathered around the raconteur, mostly our mothers, and
listened to tales about mbe. Formal
primary education also helped as our primary school teachers sought to connect
home education with the one they dispensed and made us tell folktales in turns.
They knew how to create involvement in their teaching and how to ignite our
interest in schooling. We clearly saw, in the use of folktales in getting us to
be involved in our learning, that the education in local life had its great
relevance. In that case, when next that woman or uncle was going to tell a
folktale, no one would preach to you to wash the pot quickly and be there to
listen attentively.
Now, with
attention to Africa Magic, hip-hop tunes, etc, who bothers about mbe and learning of cleverness again?
These products of modern technology should have enhanced our transmission and
use of these tales, but this is not so. With individualism and privacy creeping
closer, the performance of tales after supper in African homes suffers a great
setback. One can have an interesting folktale for the family, to entertain and
relax nerves, but how do you get members of the audience who may be watching
soccer or playing computer game, together? One has to be an old-fashioned
dictator to be able to do that!
OK, I have
noticed that you are growing more and more impatient. This is an age of haste;
I have forgotten. I won’t delay you further!
The few
moments that one made efforts to get one’s children to like or tell the mbe tales and asked for volunteers to
play the role of raconteur, to switch
roles and encourage training and transmission through these young ones, one got
a shock, a great shock! It is true the enactment of mbe tales has variants and that each performer or teller my add
salt and pepper here and there, or a personal stamp, to enhance the
performance, but though asking for volunteers, I got to know that my mbe and their own mbe were no longer the same! The mbe in my old tradition could speak human language and do wonderful
exploits like getting a beautiful wife with just a grain of corn(Isn’t that a
clear 419 practice?), but their own mbe
has become more scientific in its exploits. Their mbe is not that distant, fictional, and slow creature that has to
survive through cleverness. Their own mbe
has grown with time, is smarter in playing with his smart phones, driving big
SUVs, decoding PINs from ATM cards, and becoming really superhuman. Yes, the
trickster tales in original Igbo tradition has traces of being into science
fiction and could do amazing things like being an aviator (by cleverness and
association) and a surgeon (breaking the ant into two and joining the bits with
a broomstick).
It was clear
that their own creativity is quite different from mine; the freedom of the raconteur to add salt and pepper greatly
intensified! Perhaps what they have done is to recontextualise the performance
of the tales and I was the one really backward as a practitioner! It is still the trickster, even if that mbe now drives a jeep and speaks English
(and not Igbo) with more authority as somebody who does not go to toilet! Must mbe in the folklore be saddled with its
natural shell? A shell is a shell, even if modernized and it is a jeep shell!
Indeed, that person that does smart things from his SUV and is able to deceive
some folks and make millions of dollars also vies with my own mbe in tricksterhood.
With this
situation, one wonders what people who wish to study the trickster folktale in
my ancient tradition have to do, whether they have they have to cross timeline
and recover the past that is now a bigger fiction. Or they have to study the
new orality that involves the trickster deceiving targets with messages on the
“smart” phone and cruising in a jeep and not wobbling around in shells.
Researchers of Igbo folklore that hope to recuperate the past of performances
may be wasting their time, or at most writing another fiction, that is a
metafiction involving their own fabrication. The trickster tales presented by
my young ones drives a jeep! Is that not creativity of the performance? Do not
be surprised if another variant says that the tortoise has an earache and so
cannot participate in a political debate in his country and will go to London
for a surgery, or that a previous
surgery on the tongue of mbe
made him lose his competence in his mothertongue he used to speak! And so mbekwu now speaks only English, which is
the next level and a fitting thing for jeeping.
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