Intro to African Folktales

Hello all!

I know that I said in my previous post that I would be beginning a series on African mythology. That having been said, some of my readers might be wondering why I have titled this post an intro to African folktales rather than to mythology.

African mythology is an immensely expansive term. The other mythologies I've discussed thus far have been fairly straightforward. Most of the gods of Egypt were worshiped throughout all of Egypt. The same is true of the Norse gods – their followers generally all held to the same deities and stories. Some variances did occur, such as the prominence of Demeter in a certain region of Greece (where worship of her sometimes was more important than worship of Zeus), or the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis in Rome. However, I could say with some certainty that a country worshipped x, y, and z gods.

The same cannot really be said of African mythology, making it a lot more complicated to explain.

Part of the problem lies in the vast number of tribes of Africa. Most tribes have their own religion. Some have the same, or similar, deities and stories. Others are vastly different. I have a book that is a collection of stories on the origin of fire from around the world. The chapter on African stories about the origin of fire contains no less than twenty variations, all of them quite different from one another. That's just one story, one common example – the rest of the mythology is the same.

Another problem lies in the influence of other religions. Parts of Africa were heavily colonized by Christians, who converted the locals. This effected the local beliefs, changing the stories of their mythology. Other parts of Africa were home to a large Muslim population, which had the same effect. Still, there remain pockets, particularly in the jungles of Africa, where small tribes have kept their stories intact and relatively unchanged for hundreds of years.

 

(The best image I could find on Google to show you just 100 of the different regional groups within Africa.  There are many, many more.)

All of this rather long-winded explanation boils down to one thing: African mythology is too wide of a topic for me to feel comfortable covering. I know a few stories from many different tribes, but if I were to discuss deities and myths from specific tribes I would want to do a series of posts on, say, Zulu mythology. To discuss the whole of African mythology is simply not something that I feel I am qualified to do – at least, not without a lot more research!

However...folktales are another matter entirely.

African folktales are blended with their mythology throughout all of the different cultures that I know of, and there tend to be a lot more similarities in the folktales than there do in the myths. The folktales of African cultures are generally designed to teach lessons, and they do so largely through the use of animals with personalities similar to those of humans. Throughout Africa one can usually find that elephants represent royalty, lizards often are the messengers of the gods, hyenas are dangerous and hunger for human flesh...there are distinctive characteristics for each animal, and those characteristics tell a cautionary moral tale for the human listeners.

(Perhaps the most famous is Anansi, the spider who is the storyteller in African folktales, and relies upon his wits to get him out of difficult situations.)

In the coming weeks I'll be doing posts on several folktales from various parts of Africa, during which time I'll talk about a lot of the different animals. I'm really looking forward to this, because it is very different from anything else I've done for the blog so far.

I'll see you guys next Monday!