Reading Notes Week 9: Nigeria Stories, Part B


These Nigeria folk tales are the type I especially like. I’m not sure if it is because of the simplicity or the actual stories themselves, but overall, they are quite to my liking. My favorite story out of the bunch was the one about the hippo and the tortoise. All of these stories have plots that are easy to follow along, but in the traditional folklore way, they have seemingly random conflicts throw in. What I mean by random can be seen in the Hippo story and the Elephant vs bush cow story. For the first, the hippo invites all these animals to eat with him and his seven wives, but once his guests get there, he proclaims that they aren’t allowed to eat unless they can call him by his name. For the elephant story, the monkey who is trying to tell the chief about the fight happening where it shouldn’t gets heavily distracted on his way to tell, then once he gets there, it takes him a little while to tell the chief something. I’m not really sure what this adds to the story other than maybe comedy or showing the listener that monkeys are silly. For the hippo one, I like how the story progresses, but I’m not sure how they came up with this conflict.

Again I liked the stories that explained why things are the way that they are – why hippos are always in the water, why elephants/bush cows fight whenever they see each other, and why people aren’t allowed to keep cocks as pets. I need to try and come up with my own story that involves such a thing – why do certain animals behave as the way the way that they do? Overall, this has been my favorite unit so far.



Folk Stories From Southern Nigeria by Elphinstone Dayrell (1910)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction to Andrew

Image
Hi! My name is Andrew Barton and I am currently a senior here at OU. My major is pre-medicine/biochemistry, so obviously this class is a little out of range from what I normally am taking during the semester. Right now, being a senior, I am applying to medical school. This is definitely not an easy process, but I am almost done with the application aspects of it. If I had to choose as to what medical school I could attend, it would be OU, since this is my home and I would be absolutely privileged to serve the community, especially where help is needed most. This summer, I went on one vacation to Seacrest Beach in Florida. For the remainder of the summer, I took Quantitative Analysis here at OU. The class wasn’t too terrible – the only “bad” part of the class was that lab was four times a week from 10:30-1:20. Other than those two things, my summer was pretty relaxing. I’m involved in a few student-led organizations at OU, with the primary one being Soonerthon. I have served o...
Read more

Week 3 Story: Justice

Image
Walking up to the gleaming Palace of Three, Armistice could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. No one was allowed past the white gate – what his grandfather had told him of his parentage must have been true. Armistice had a normal childhood, at least by mid-world’s standards. Living within the country had taught him the true value of things: justice, vengeance, and power – in this order, specifically, he was told how to rise up in the world, to be a representative of the place where he came from. He didn’t want to disappoint his teachers. That’s why he walked past the gate, why he was told of his relation to one of the three. Armistice didn’t simply want power to control his own fate, he wanted to control the fates of everyone around him – no one could get in his way. He was in front of the large marble door now – he could see the engravings of past revolts, with Vengeance coming down upon the masses with her fiery whip. Next to these revolts was Power, the weak...
Read more