By
Obododịmma
Oha
One of the
figures in African folklores that has great relevance to contemporary
struggles on the continent is the trickster. It is an interesting situation
where cultural and fictional characters resemble entities we find in real life, or reality mimicks fiction.
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 bandwagon 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 and religious people, in order to make their targets 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 this trickster deity, who
might just play a fast one on them and enact destruction. And so, esu has great
relevance as a trickster 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 these victims must have to be on their 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 important issues about them. The tortoise carries a
shell around, a shell that is made up of parts and linkages. It 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 is imagined to be 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 scan see things. It has multiple limbs, too,
and so its multitasking and access to targets, as well as to craft, are enhanced.
Moreover, it a silent creature (even though greatly vulnerable) and is an ideal
choice when it comes to watching and studying targets. Yet, 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, like killing 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 could be strength in apparent weakness!
Anyway, that
point is important as we reflect on the figure of the trickster and modern
African life, especially its morphing nature in the creative performance of trickster tales by children. That tendency to morph, to alter its form, is already 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 both admiration and condemnation) have been collected in one interesting Igbo text,
Mbediogo, which is studied at schools. Thanks to modern print culture: those
tales are preserved in print, instead of being stored only in our unreliable
heads of humans, 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. Surely, that was a special dessert for the mind! 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 any child 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 is that the case? With
individualism and desire for 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 European soccer league match or playing computer game, together? One
has to be an old-fashioned dictator to be able to do that!
The few
moments that one made efforts to get one’s children to like the mbe tales and
asked for volunteers to play the role of raconteur, to switch roles in order to encourage training and transmission through these young ones, ones got a shock, a
great shock! It is true that mbe tale 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, but their own mbe had become more scientific in
its exploits. Their mbe was not that distant and slow creature that had to
survive through cleverness. Their own mbe had grown with time, was smarter in
playing with his smart phones, driving big SUVs, 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 was quite different from mine; the freedom of the
raconteur to add salt and pepper greatly intensified. Perhaps what they had done was 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 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 must also vie 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 not 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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