Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [203]
Among the Fon of Benin, which neighbors Nigeria, the trickster god Eshu appears as Legba, an attendant of the supreme god. Legba’s job is to do all the harmful things to people that god wants done. When Legba tires of this role, he asks god why he must always do the dirty work and get all the blame. The high god tells him that the ruler of a kingdom ought to get credit for all the good things while his servants take the rap for all the evil. Talk about archetypal!
In one story, Legba steals the god’s sandals, puts them on, and goes into the yam garden and steals all the yams. This time, the people are angry at god for stealing their yams. When the god realizes that Legba has tricked him, the deity decides to leave the world and instructs Legba to come to the sky every night and report on what happens on earth.
In another story, Legba asks an old woman to throw her dirty washing water into the sky. God is annoyed by the dirty water’s constantly being thrown in his face, so he moves away, where he can’t be bothered so easily. Again, he leaves Legba behind to report, which is why there is a shrine dedicated to Legba in many African houses and villages.
Legba’s counterbalance is Fa (or Ifa), the god of fate and destiny, who teaches healing and prophecy. To the Fon, everything is fated to happen, nothing is left to chance, and Fa represents every person’s fate. Divination or magic can help one discover their Fa. Whenever beginning work or starting a business, it is customary for the Fon to make an offering of food to Fa, but first give a taste to Eshu, to ensure that things go smoothly. The religions of Benin later influenced voodoo, one of the principal offshoots of the convergence of traditional African religions and Christianity in the Caribbean (see below).
Hare Alongside Spider, Africa’s most popular animal trickster is Hare, about whom stories are told all over the continent. One typical story tells how Hare challenges an elephant and a hippopotamus to a tug-of-war. But instead of tugging, Hare ties the ends of the rope to each of the animals. As they pull against each other, Hare’s land is plowed, which is exactly the job Hare was supposed to do for his wife.
Another story tells how Hare mixes up a message he has been given to deliver, and loses immortality for humans. When the moon sends Hare to tell people that they will die and then rise again, just like the moon, Hare confuses the message and tells people only that they will die. When the moon finds out what Hare has said, she beats him on the nose with a stick. Since that day Hare’s nose has been split.
The Hare stories made the transatlantic crossing with the many Africans taken as slaves to the Americas. Mingling with many similar Native American tales of trickster rabbits, the Hare stories became best known in America as the Br’er (short for “Brother”) Rabbit stories.
Having heard these stories told on a plantation, Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), a writer for the Atlanta Constitution, later collected them in a book called Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881). The character of Uncle Remus is a former slave who becomes a beloved servant of a Southern household and entertains the family’s young son by telling him traditional animal fables, using a Southern African-American dialect. Besides Br’er Rabbit, the best-known characters of the stories are Br’er Fox, Br’er Bear, and Br’er Wolf. Most folklorists today agree that the Br’er Rabbit tales are thinly veiled racial allegories.* More than just a trickster, Br’er Rabbit represents the clever slave who could outwit his master.
Yurugu (Dogon of Mali) The child of the Dogon Creator, Amma, and the earth is Yurugu, a rebellious god and trickster. While in the cosmic egg, Yurugu steals the yolk, because