Oldways

Zulu Trickster Tales

The jackal, the hyena, the hare, and the bull-frog of the Zulu folk tradition: stories of deception, greed, and the carnival reversal of the social order, told around the evening fire in the homesteads of KwaZulu-Natal.

In the cool of the KwaZulu-Natal evening, when the cattle have been brought in and the millet is on the fire, the children of the homestead gather around the grandmother — ugogo — and the stories begin. The jackal, who is the most beautiful of all the animals and the most cunning. The hyena, who is the hungriest and the most easily flattered. The hare, who is small, but who dances with kings. The bull-frog, who is foolish, but who is the only one of the animals to swallow the moon.

These are the Zulu trickster tales, and they are among the most important of the world’s cycles of animal stories. Their humour is sharp, their moral structure is rigorous, and their social purpose has been studied by folklorists from Henry Callaway in the 1860s to the present day. The tales have been told, in one form or another, in every household of the Zulu-speaking world for at least three centuries, and they continue to be told today.

The Animal Court of the Trickster

The Zulu trickster is not a single figure but a court of figures, each with a fixed character. The Jackal (impungushe) is the trickster proper — handsome, smooth-tongued, vain, and capable of seducing the daughter of the chief through sheer flattery. The Hyena (ingwe) is his foil: dull, gluttonous, greedy for meat, and easily led. The Hare (mangwena) is the small and clever one, the David who defeats the Goliath by being quicker, and the only animal to play a drum at the king’s wedding. The Bull-frog (iselulamanye) is the village idiot of the cycle, the fool who is given the moon to swallow and swallows it — explaining, in a single comic image, the lunar eclipse.

Other figures recur with a regularity that is almost theatrical. The Lion is the king; he is majestic, but he is also a fool, and his decrees are the ones the trickster works to overturn. The Elephant is the slow and powerful lord, easily outwitted. The Tortoise is the wise man of the cycle, present at the council, usually the one who sees through the trickster’s plan. The Sun (ilanga) and the Moon (inyanga) are themselves characters: the Moon is a man, the Sun is a woman, and they were once people of the village who were lifted into the sky for their kindnesses.

The social map is clear. The cycle is a comic, inverted court: the small defeat the great, the clever defeat the strong, the hungry defeat the rich. For a people whose everyday world was one of strict hierarchical order, the trickster tales were the breath of release, the comic kingdom of the campfire.

The Tales in Action

A typical tale of the cycle is “The Jackal and the King.” The Jackal, starving, comes to the Lion’s kraal and is given a place at the king’s table on the strength of a false claim: that he is the great magician of the East, capable of bringing rain. The Lion, who needs rain for his cattle, treats the Jackal with honour. The Jackal, in turn, postpones his rain-making for days, demanding ever greater honours. The Elephant, the wisest of the animals, sees through the trick and lays a trap: he leads the Lion’s son to a hidden pool of water, and shows the Lion that the Jackal has been drinking from a hidden gourd all along. The Jackal, exposed, is killed. The order is restored.

In “The Hare and the Elephant,” the small and clever Hare defeats the great and slow Elephant by inviting him to a great dance, then to a tug-of-war in which the Hare ties one end of the rope to a tree and pretends that the Elephant is pulling. The Elephant, exhausted, gives up, and the Hare is declared the champion of the world.

In “The Bull-frog and the Moon,” the Bull-frog, who has been promised the whole world as a meal, is given the Moon to swallow when the Moon rises red over the horizon. He swallows it — and there is an eclipse. The other animals, horrified, beg him to give it back. He refuses, until his wife points out that he cannot digest it. He coughs it up, and the night is saved.

The pattern is consistent. The trickster is a temporary victor, the king of the moment, but he is undone by his own appetite. The social order of the homestead is reaffirmed in laughter.

The Social Work of the Tales

The trickster tales of the Zulu are not told for entertainment alone. They are the school of the village, the curriculum in which the children of the homestead learn the shape of the world. A child who has heard the tale of the Jackal and the King will, in adult life, recognise the flattery of the chief’s councillor. A child who has heard the tale of the Hare and the Elephant will be alert to the small man’s cleverness. A child who has heard the tale of the Bull-frog and the Moon will know that there are gifts too great to keep.

The tales also do the work of social criticism. In a society where, traditionally, the word of the chief could not be questioned, the trickster tales offered a comic outlet: the chief is the Lion, the chief’s favourite is the Jackal, and the trickster’s eventual downfall is the village’s verdict on the follies of power.

The telling of the tales is itself a ritual art. Each tale is told in a particular way: the opening formula (“Long ago, when the animals still spoke…”), the comic exaggeration, the sound-effects of the drum, the call-and-response with the children. The grandmother’s voice sets the rhythm, and the children’s laughter marks the trickster’s downfall.

The Tales Beyond the Homestead

The Zulu trickster tales are not isolated. They belong to a much larger cycle of animal stories that runs across the whole of Southern and East Africa, and from there to the West African forest and the wider Atlantic world. The Zulu hare is the brother of the Anansi of West Africa, the spider who brought the stories down from the sky. The lion-king defeated by the jackal is the cousin of the Coyote stories of the Plains Indians. The bull-frog who swallowed the moon has his relatives in the trickster cycles of the San, the Sotho, and the Khoikhoi.

The most important early collection of the Zulu tales is Henry Callaway’s Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus (1868), which preserved in English the stories that Callaway had heard from his Zulu informants at the Ekukhanyeni mission. In the early twentieth century, the Swiss missionary Henri-Alexandre Junod gathered further tales of the Tsonga and Shangaan peoples, and these are now in the standard collection of Junod’s Folktales of the Tsonga. The American folklorist Zakes Mda has been one of the most important modern retellers of the Southern African cycle, in works such as The Whale Caller and Ways of Dying.

The tales are now taught in the schools of KwaZulu-Natal, performed by storytellers at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), and adapted for television and stage. The cycle remains, in a real sense, the living memory of the Zulu-speaking world.

Sources and Further Reading

  • Callaway, Henry. Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus. Trübner & Co., 1868. Reprinted. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  • Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford University Press, 1970. (Open-access, 2012.)
  • Scheub, Harold. A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature. African Studies Association, 1985.
  • Scheub, Harold. The African Storyteller. Charles E. Tuttle, 2000.

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