Lang: African Tales
Motikatika [p1, p2]
To be honest, this is one creepy tale. When I began to read it, I didn't know what to expect. It started out as a typical and innocent folktale, both in terms of the story's writing and the events that happened. A woman falls sick one day, and her husband goes to painstaking lengths to satisfy her hunger. After she gets better, he demands that she go to painstaking lengths to satisfy his thirst. So she goes to a golden lake and gets water for him. After the woman got water from the lake, I kind of expected to end there, with the sort of 'if you ask a favor of someone, you'll have to pay it back in full' moral. But an unexpected twist happened instead. An ogre came out of the lake from where the woman wanted water, demanding her death. So the woman promises her kid's life instead of hers, and she goes on her way. Little does she know, however, that her kid is a magician and has listened to her deal with the ogre.
So he outwits them both. His mom comes up with different signals four separate times to show the ogre which one is her son, but each time, he escapes (by consulting his magical bones). In the first, she shaves his head on both sides and hangs a necklace of white beads around his neck. He escapes by making all the children look like him and going outside when they hear 'Motikatika'. (Since the ogre is afraid of the punishment of eating anyone who hasn't wronged him, he goes back and devises another plan with the mother to snatch Motikatika. The second time, his mother calls him when the ogre is with her. To not disobey her, he turns himself into a mouse and comes to her. The third time, he is told to pick beans for dinner (and the mother hopes that the ogre can get Motikatika. To again not disobey his mother, he turns into a bird and picks the beans. The fourth time, (the ogre's really annoyed by this point) the woman tells the ogre to kidnap the person under the white coverlet during the night. So Motikatika switches his blanket and his father's; thus, the tale ends with the ogre eating the father.
I was not expecting that. But as the woman cries, Motikatika gives his reason for using his father for the sacrifice by (correctly) saying that the father sent the mother to the lake with the ogre in it (though I don't think the father deserved his fate).
Jackal and Spring
This was an interesting tale as well. So the animals build a well, though the jackal doesn't help at all. They pull a 'Little Red Hen' on him, and don't allow him to drink from the well. And to make sure he doesn't, they decide to put a guard next to the well. The first guard is the rabbit. He gets tricked because the jackal says that he will give the rabbit honeysuckle if the rabbit ties his hands and feet together. The rabbit does so because the jackal also says honeysuckle can stop thirst (which for some reason the rabbit believes. After tying the rabbit up and taking a drink from the spring, the jackal leaves.
Now. I can understand why the rabbit gets tricked. After all, it was his first time dealing with the jackal with regards to the spring. Having said that, it's pretty ridiculous that the hare gets tricked as well. Knowing how the rabbit got tricked, he should have understood that the jackal was only trying to get him out of the way to drink water. Then again, sometimes characters in classic stories are morons. The tortoise is the only one who successfully protects the spring, as he ignores the jackal's promises and holds his leg tightly to prevent him from moving (for so long that the rest of the animals come back.
Hassebu [p1, p2]
Like all of the tales of this unit I've read, this story leads to an unexpected ending. Though it's not unexpected when you think about the beginning of the story. Hassebu's a kid who learned to read in school and then was enrolled in a bunch of different trade schools, and he failed to learn anything in any of those trade schools. And since his mother didn't want to force him to do anything, he sits in his house for a time. One day, randomly, he asks what his dad (who's deceased) did for a living, and she says that he was a doctor. So he takes one of his dad's books and starts reading.
At this point, you're like 'oh, so he's going to become a doctor, right?'. And since this is a folktale, you think that he's going to study and work his way up to becoming the most famous doctor in town or in the kingdom or something over a steady period of time.
But because this is Lang's African tales, things definitely don't go according to how you're expecting. So his neighbors ask his mom if they can borrow him to haul wood from the forest, and she says yes. So he does the job dutifully, and things are looking good.
But then his luck changes. He happens to find a huge well of honey (I have no idea how it came to be in the first place) and him and his neighbors decide to ditch the wood hauling and go for selling honey instead (it's easier and much more profitable). So they do this for three months with no problems. But when there's only a little honey left in the well, Hassebu volunteers to get it. So he goes. The problem is that his neighbors decide to leave him there just to get more money. And off they go, telling his mother that he died because of a lion.
Back to Hassebu. After exploring the cave for a long time, he finds a way out, happening upon the King of the Snakes. He ends up leaving and getting captured by the Vizier. Someone in the palace foretold that a person with a particular mark would be able to cure the sick Sultan by showing them where the King of the Snakes was. The only way to cure the sick Sultan was to boil the King of the Snakes' skin. Long story short, Hassebu is beaten and rats the King of the Snakes out and the King of Snakes foretells the future (to make sure Hassebu doesn't die).
And guess what? Hassebu ends up becoming the Sultan's favorite doctor. Forgot about that, didn't you?
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