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)


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