Iwin Artigo

The Transmission of the Oral Narrative from Africa to Brazil
Author(s): Ronald M. Rassner

Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 13, No. 3, Special Issue on Lusophone African
Writing (Autumn, 1982), pp. 327-358
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3819041
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THE TRANSMISSION OF THE ORAL NARRATIVE FROM
AFRICA TO BRAZIL
Ronald M. Rassner
Brazil has its body in America

and its soul in Africa.
Ant6nio Vieira
(ca. 1650-1699)1
Although it may appear odd to many Africanists, an article on the

Afro-Brazilian oral narrative does make sense in an RAL issue de-
voted especially to the study of lusophone African literatures.
According to Philip Curtin's figures, approximately 38 percent of
all Africans brought to the New World went to Brazil,2 by far the
largest influx of Africans into any country or region of the West-
ern Hemisphere. The figures for the nineteenth century alone are
even more remarkable: 60 percent of all slave traffic was directed
to Brazil.3 This great importation of Africans has led, in the past
fifty years, to an Afro-Brazilian consciousness movement, spear-
headed by such Brazilian scholars as Edison Carneiro and, more
recently Abdias do Nascimento. Nascimento has written that per-
haps 80 percent of the total Brazilian population of 110 million
are definitely "contaminated" (in his own sarcastic phrasing) with
African blood, making Brazil the second largest black country in
the world.4 Brazil must be regarded as a multiracial society, with
some groups maintaining African parallels in their customs and
literatures. Because of these demographic, historical, and socio-
logical links Brazil must now be included in lusophone African
studies.
The keen interest in trans-Atlantic transmission of oral narra-
tive traditions (principally folktales) has been rekindled by recent
work by the late William Bascom, Richard Dorson, Alan Dundes,
and Daniel J. Crowley. Using motif and tale type indices, they
have established an African origin for Afro-American narratives
from the United States and the Caribbean. These scholars, to para-
phrase Dundes, are concerned about not only origins but also the
social, political, semantic, and emotional functions of the narra-
tive.5
Although I am also concerned with the origin of individual
narratives, my article will add a different dimension to the com-
parative study of narratives, by examining the process of recon-
struction, i.e., the ability of individual raconteurs "usually un-
Research in African Literatures, Vol. 13, No. 3, Fall 1982

? 1982 by the University of Texas Press 0034-5210/82/030327-32$02.35
328 Ronald M. Rassner
named and unknown" to maintain structural parallels and corre-

spondences as well as word-to-word duplications in spite of tem-
poral shifts and spatial upheavals.6 I will focus my discussion on
the Brazilian oral narrative, for, as I will show below, the African
oral narrative has had a high rate of survival in Brazil.
Although the influence of African narrative on Brazilian narra-
tive has been substantiated, Bascom overlooked Brazil in his recent
series of articles "African Folktales in America."7 This is, I think,
because he lacked knowledge of the Portuguese language. Gerald
Moser brought to his attention the existence of several Brazilian
versions of "The Talking Skull Refuses to Talk" (K1162),8 and
other Brazilian versions of African narratives are well documented,
including "Deceptive Tug of War" (AT291), "Trickster Rides
Dupe Horseback" (K1241), "Holding the Rock" (AT1530), "Tor-
toise Dropped by Eagle" (A2214.5.1), "Ogre Imprisons Victim in
Drum" (G422.1), "The Eaten Grain and Cock as Damages"
(K251.1), and "The Rarest Thing in the World." (AT653A).9 I
will compare most of these Brazilian narratives with their African
counterparts below.
Essentially, then, this article is concerned with establishing
Brazil as the area par excellence for African diaspora studies. No
other area, with the possible exception of Surinam or Haiti, can
offer existing models of culture contact that can be used to ex-
plain the cross-cultural phenomenon. I refer here not only to the
evident parallels in music, religion, language, cuisine, and social
customs in areas such as Bahia with its strong Nago influence, but
also to the isolados scattered throughout the country.10 This arti-
cle will also attempt to answer a question posed by the interfer-
ence of writing in the reconstruction of oral narrative traditions:
Is there now such a thing as an oral tradition in the diaspora?
Emphasizing the Basis for Comparative Potentials: The African

Narrative
African oral narratives, perceived as a whole, have many common

images and patterns, even if they occur in widely separate parts of
the continent. This phenomenon, of course, will be debated by
anthropologists and the New Critics, who insist on an intracultural
perspective for each African society. The time has come, however,
for cross-cultural studies from Africa, not necessarily for Levi-
Straussian reductive purposes but simply to establish the clear-cut
intercultural and literary linkages. Take, for example, the similar-
329 TRANSMISSION OF THE ORAL NARRATIVE
ities between two narratives documented at opposite ends of the

continent at least fifty years apart in two unrelated languages.1
KABYL-BERBER (ALGERIA-MOROCCO,
XHOSA (SOUTH AFRICA, 1967) 1921)
A woman has two children, A ewe has two lambs.

one boy and one girl. The
mother dies.
The children live in a cave. They live in a grotto.
The boy leaves every day to The ewe pastures everyday,

hunt, brings back food. brings back grass.
He sings to enter closed cave: She uses password to enter:

"Tinini! Tinini! "The jug between the legs,
When the mothers say this (udder) and the hay between
She's lowing for her calf!" the horns."
Girl opens door, he enters, Lambs open door, she enters,

They eat. they eat.
A zim (ogre) hears song, A jackal hears password, tries

tries to enter. to enter.
Zim sings, voice different, Jackal speaks, voice different,

door not opened. door not opened.
Zim seeks advice: swallow red Jackal seeks advice: let ants
hot axe and five spikes. eat your throat.
Zim sings, enters, eats girl. Jackal speaks, enters, eats lambs.
(Ewe gets revenge.)
Structurally, the narratives have an obvious congruency, the

unprotected child in the cave, the song or password to enter, the
failure and success of the zim and the jackal, the pain they under-
go to succeed. Even the divergences have a potential analogy: the
ewe versus the boy as provider; the ogre versus an uncharacteristi-
cally unsuccessful trickster. The Kabyl password-phrase is not sung
as its Xhosa counterpart (at least not in Frobenius's transcription
and translation), but the Xhosa song concerns a cow calling her
calf, whereas the Kabyl phrase is spoken by a ewe toward her
lambs.
Linkages between linguistically related cultures are even more
obvious. I documented a Giryama ngano by Kazungu Gona in
1976, entitled "The Skull That Spoke."12 Compare its structure
with the Angolan Jelemia dia Sabatelu's "The Young Man and
the Skull':13
GIRYAMA (KENYA) MBUNDU (ANGOLA)
Three men go hunting. One man goes on journey.

One man gets lost.
He trips on skull. He asks, He sees skull, beats it with his

"Why have you died so far staff. He says, ". .. Foolishness
away from home? has killed thee."
Skull responds: Skull responds:

"Even you will come to "Foolishness has killed me;
die here." . .. smartness shall kill thee."
Man returns to camp, Man returns home (does not

tells others. finish journey), tells others.
They return to skull, he They return to skull, he tries

tries to make it talk, to make it talk, beating it.
beats it with limb.
Skull refuses to talk, Skull refuses to talk,

Man is killed. Man is killed.
Skull speaks. Others Skull speaks. Others hear.

don't hear.
North to south, east to west, structural, thematic, and linear

narrative parallels can be found. Certain narratives may correspond
in their inclusion of only one image. For example, I have docu-
mented another Giryama ngano, by Kadii Katana, which is struc-
tured around a repeated song. A man goes hunting, captures a
bird, and prepares it in the traditional way. At each stage in the
preparation, the bird sings: "Pluck me with care [or stab me ...,
split me ..., cook me ..., season me..., chew me . .] 1I
Pluck me with care,

Where I come from
I'm the child of Biririka.
I'm the child of Biririka.14
Ignoring the bird's warnings, the man eats and poisons himself. In
Chatelain's collection Joao Borges Cezar offers a similar image. A
man brings home a fantastic fish for his wife. As she prepares it,
we are told "the fish was (all the time) singing." Cezar, however,
gives only one stanza of the song:
When thou scalest me, scale me well!

When thou scalest me, scale me well!15
The woman ignores the warnings and eats the fish, which bursts
out of her "middle." Like the Giryama man, who dies from bloat-
ing of the stomach, she dies from bursting of the stomach.
My purpose in presenting these three brief examples of parallel
structures, or structural elements,16 is not to establish an overall
rule-ordering of congruencies or noncongruencies in African oral
narratives, although this work needs to be done. Rather, their
presentation is meant as an axiomatic introduction for the more
remarkable parallels that exist between Brazilian and African nar-
ratives. For just as these hypothetical correspondences hold in
diverse African cutures, so, too, do they exist in trans-Atlantic
cultures. Take, for example, a southern Brazilian narrative first
documented by Lindolfo Gomes in 1948. An old woman captures
a monkey who had previously tricked her into buying a butter-
covered pot of his own excrement. She catches him by means of
a bonecra de cera (wax doll), a parallel to the tar-baby motif. She
then orders the cook to have the monkey prepared, and it sings,
Behead me slowly,
since it hurts, hurts, hurts ...
I also have children,
Since it hurts, hurts, hurts....
The narrative structurally follows the Giryama (and Kimbundu)

versions, adding a humorous twist to the conclusion:
The cook began to skin it, and the monkey kept singing:
Skin me slowly,
Since it hurts, hurts, hurts . .

The black cook was terrified, and she went to call her mis-
tress who didn't want to hear about songs and ordered her to
continue with her work. And the monkey was singing, now as
he was placed in the oven:
Bake me slowly,
Since it hurts, hurts, hurts . . .
At the time of the party the table was surrounded by doc-

tors and wealthy people, with the monkey in the middle of
the platter. And later, upon being eaten, he kept singing:
Chew me slowly,
Since it hurts, hurts, hurts . . .
Since it hurts, hurts, hurts...
Everyone looked uneasily at his neighbor, but the old

woman tried to distract her guests, talking a lot and eating
the monkey with a vengeful appetite.
Suddenly she felt a queasiness in her stomach and ran to
her room. In a short while, the monkey came out, followed
by a pack of little monkeys all playing guitars, running
through the backyard, singing, "I saw the bottom of the old
lady! I saw the bottom of the old lady!""7
The singing while being prepared for eating, and the warning by
the animal not to eat it, appears to be almost unique to Africa and
the New World diaspora. I have found only one other variant, al-
though others must certainly exist.18 The Brazilian and Giryama
versions are essentially the same: the monkey asks to be prepared
slowly; the bird, using Swahili, asks to be cooked, kwa taratibu,
or, literally, "in a regular, steady, slow, easy-going fashion." Be-
low, I will show how other Brazilian narratives follow patterns of
narratives from Nigeria, Togo, Angola, and Kenya, from the most
unlikely comparisons to the most obvious.
The Brazilian Oral Narrative I: Structural Parallels
Brazilian folklorists have long appreciated the obvious links of

many of their narratives to Africa. In some respects, this apprecia-
3 3 3 TRANSMISSION OF THE ORAL NARRATIVE
tion has been a preoccupation. Sflvio Romero, who put together

the first important collection of Brazilian narratives, divided his
texts according to their probable origins, i.e., European, African,
and Amerindian.19 Those of African origin were only animal tales,
mostly trickster-oriented, with the monkey and tortoise (kdgado)
duping a variety of other animals. Two of the narratives, "Kagado
and the Sky-Party," and "The Vulture and the Frog,"20 parallel
the Ba-Ila narrative documented by Smith and Dale21 thirty-eight
years later in Zambia (the motif here is A2214.5.1). Another nar-
rative, "The Tortoise and the Lizard,"22 is motif K1241, identi-
fied by Dundes as of probable African origin.
Looking over Romero's collection of "African" narratives, all
of which were documented from the northeastern states of Sergipe
and Pernambuco, one is struck by the emphasis on the fact that
the clever trickster is wholly African. Also, early Brazilian folk-
lorists, such as Romero, seemed determined to exclude all non-
animal narratives from African sources. In his large section, "Tales
of European Origin," Romero includes one narrative about the
famous trickster Pedro Malasartes. In this narrative, of which no
other versions have been recorded,23 Pedro goes to the King and
asks for three jugs of olive oil. Note the following correspondences
with the Krachi (Togo) narrative documented by Cardinall in 1931
(K251.1, "The Eaten Grain and Cock as Damages").24
Romero (Brazil, 1885) Cardinall (Togo, 1931)
Pedro Malasartes deals with Ananse deals with Sky-God: Re-

King: Receives three jugs of ceives one corncob for one
oil for three mulatas. hundred slaves.
Obtains shelter from a chief; Obtains shelter from an old lady;

puts oil with hens-breaks oil puts corncob in roof; gives corn-
over hens; gets three hens. cob to hens; takes bushel of corn.
Deceitful exchange of three Honest exchange of bushel of

hens for three turkeys (as corn for hen.
above)
Deceitful exchange of six Deceitful exchange of ten

cattle for six sheep. sheep for one hen.
Honest exchange of gold for

cattle.
He exchanges the gold for a He exchanges the ten sheep for a

corpse; takes corpse, pre- corpse; takes corpse, pretends it
tends it is alive [sick]. is alive [asleep].
"If she [corpse] cries, beat "If he [corpse] doesn't wake up,
her." The people beat her. flog him." They flog him.
P.M. claims they caused her Ananse claims they caused his
death, takes three mulatas. death, takes a hundred slaves.
There can be no question that Romero's "Uma das de Pedro Mala-

sartes" is an African narrative, one with an African structure but
a European character.25 How is this so? Do we have here a suppor-
tive case for syncretization, the fusion-amalgamation of competing
cultures?
Pedro Malasartes [or Malazarte, Pedro Bad Tricks] is a tradi-
tional figure from the Iberian peninsula who represents the "con-
vergence of episodes from various European sources, the oral tales
of the Brothers Grimm, of Hans Andersen, [tales] from eastern
and northern Europe."26 Batchelor notes that Pedro has a com-
mon ancestry with Till Eulenspiegel, Puck, Robin Goodfellow, and
Pedro Urdemalas, all European tricksters.27 Cascudo also warns us
that Pedro had a double nature: "The first, older, more clever, a
mischiefmaker, always victorious; the second clumsy, idiotic, help-
less in words and deed. It is in this latter role that Malasartes has
been popularized in Portugal" [emphasis mine] .28
Of the two Portuguese versions I have located so far, one, in
Braga's Contos Tradicionais do Povo Portuguds, relates the adven-
ture of a Pedro of "congenital imbecility." In the other, from
Leite de Vasconcelos, Pedro plays some scatological tricks on
thieves, only to be caught by a tar-baby and killed.29 Versions of
Pedro's wilier and more successful Spanish cousin, Pedro Urde-
males appear, however, in Brazil.30 The point to be made here is
that the dual propensity for African parallels, leading to the adop-
tion of animal trickster figures and filling the vacuum that the
clumsy Portuguese Malazarte could not provide in Brazil, created
a clever trickster who is, in many Brazilian narratives, more Afri-
can than European. There is at least one more Malazarte episode
which is of unquestionable African origin, which I include in full:
HOW MALAZARTE KEPT THE WORLD FROM FALLING DOWN (AT1530)31
Once he [Malazarte] had the strongest urge to pass water
33 5 TRANSMISSION OF THE ORAL NARRATIVE
[verter dgua] . He leaned himself against a giant rock near a

pretty farmhouse. And, when he had relieved himself, the
farmer appeared, angrily asking him who had told him he
could do that there.
Pedro answered with a trick, "Ah! Good sir, since morning
I've been leaning here, without eating, without drinking, only
for the sake of others!"
"For the sake of others? How so?"
"I'm propping up the world."
"You're crazy!"
"But it's the truth, master, I came by in my usual quiet
way, but when I reached this place, an angel appeared to me
from the sky, and told me these words: 'By order of God the
Lord the world will end at midnight tonight.' Imagine my
fright. But the angel calmed me: 'There is one remedy to
avoid this-find something to hold up this wall, from this
moment on.' I told her that I would run to cut a stake ...
[But the angel said:] 'No, there is no time. In a minute, this
rock wall must be supported.' And she pushed me here where
I find myself, without moving my feet, if I leave, the world
topples."
"Really!"
"Ah! My dear sir, if you could do me the favor of taking
my place while I go there to the woods to cut a prop, every-
thing will be OK; only because if I stay here any longer, Ill
drop dead and with my death the world will fall down and
no one will escape."
The man decided to take Pedro's place, and Pedro prom-
ised to return immediately with the prop. And they're wait-
ing for him even today.
Amadeu Araujo has also documented a version of "Holding Up

the Rock" from Rio de Janeiro, and Ramon Laval includes a
Chilean version, all of which were missed by Bascom in his docu-
mentation of the tale type.32 It is possible that other Malazarte
narratives have African analogues, and the narratives surrounding
him must be researched properly. The existence of the two narra-
tives points to something more complex than syncretization: the
deep structure of the narratives exemplifies a cultural individuali-
zation more than admixture. An obvious tendency is to consider
a cultural fusion, which is certainly the case at the linear narrative
plot level (Pedro's name is Brazilian-Portuguese, he fools farm
owners and carters, typical Brazilian dupes, etc.). Structurally,
however, the two narratives are African-and the structure is the

thing. All superficial imagery cannot provide for a true syncretiza-
tion. It is possible to state that the Brazilian trickster Pedro Mala-
zarte is African first, European last. He is Ananse in disguise.33
A Dilemma Tale and an Academic Dilemma
Bascom has written that "the most common dilemma tale in Afri-
ca, with thirty-seven examples,"34 is AT65 3A: "The Rarest Thing
in the World." Versions of this narrative are found in eighteen
African countries, from East Africa to West Africa, including the
Malagasy Republic and the Cape Verde Islands. It is of African ori-
gin, since, as Bascom notes, this tale type is reported in small num-
bers from Europe."35 It has been reconstructed in Brazil, as docu-
mented by Lindolfo Gomes.
In the narrative three brothers love the same girl, but she is
unable to decide which of them she will marry. They journey very
far and meet a lion (which, of course, evokes images of Africa),
not the Brazilian onfa, wildcat or cougar. The lion, exhausted by
his escape from hunters, asks for help and, in return, rewards each
of the three brothers with one magic object:
a mirror in which one could see what happened far away, no

matter how distant; a pair of boots, which when worn would
transport one to where he wanted to be; and a candle, which,
when put in the hand of a dead person, would bring him back
to life.
They left, several days passed, and the one who had the
mirror wanted to look into it to see the girl whom he loved,
and he saw her dead and lying in a coffin, ready to be taken
to the cemetery.
He told his brothers about the vision and the three got into
the boots (the younger ones taking one bootleg, the older
one taking the other). And they left for their land in an in-
stant.
And there was the dead girl, surrounded by all of her

family, who were all crying pitifully. The brother who had
the candle put it into the girl's hand, and she revived im-
mediately, as if God had ordered it.
It was then that, by her father's order, she had to de-

cide which of the three brothers she was to marry. But she
couldn't decide because she owed her salvation to all three.
The one who had the mirror saw her dead; the one who
had the boots transported them in a trice to where she was;
and the one who had the candle revived her. How to choose?
The brothers also began to make claims, each one supporting
his own case. They were argued for many years and were
never resolved. Even today it is asked, which of the three
should be preferred: the one with the mirror, the boots, or
the candle? Let him who is able respond.36
The very existence of this dilemma tale, so widespread in Afri-

ca, confirms the substantial influence in Brazilian folklore, and it
confirms traditional perspectives in comparative diaspora studies,
which view the Africa-to-New World interchange as unidirectional.
Africans forced into the Western Hemisphere brought their strong
oral traditions and spread them in the bicultural (or multicultural)
contact process. Yet, there is another possibility, which creates for
the scholar a totally different kind of dilemma. It is possible that
Brazilian narrative influenced African narrative, that the trans-
Atlantic flow is not simply unidirectional but, rather, bidirection-
al.
A good example of this dilemma is found in the late nineteenth
century documentation of Brazilian-American narratives. Com-
parativists were struck by Hartt's and Smith's37 collections, which
contained narratives with (now) established African analogues.
The narratives centered around the jabuti (tortoise) and cutia
(hare) sagas, which parallel African trickster tales. The possibility
of an African influence on Amerindian narratives was long denied
by Brazilian folklorists. Some of them, including Raimundo Nina
Rodrigues, suggested that Brazilian slaves freed in 1888, returning
to Africa (especially Nigeria, Togo, and Benin), took with them
narratives learned from the Amerindians.38
A trained observer as astute as Nina Rodrigues would make this
only a conjecture, not a statement of fact. He suggested further
that substantial African contact with Amerindian societies was
possible and indeed probable. Runaway slaves had had intimate re-
lations with the indigenous populations since they were first taken
to Brazil in the early sixteenth century. The existence of Brazilian
maroon societies, or quilombos, has been long known, though
poorly documented.39
Can we dismiss this notion of a bidirectional trans-Atlantic

flow? No, not entirely. On the one hand, there has been no ade-
quate documentation on the effect of black Brazilians who re-
turned to Africa in the late nineteenth century.40 Could they have
carried Brazilianized versions of African traditions back to Africa?
Or of Amerindian or European narratives? (One is reminded of
Herskovits's European narrative in his Dahomean collection.)41 On
the other hand, problems appear, this time of anthropological in-
terference. Romero's 1885 collection contains a narrative entitled
"The Wildcat, the Deer, and the Monkey." It is analagous to two
Angolan versions published by Chatelain nine years later. The two
Angolan versions are very similar. Note the following parallels be-
tween Romero's narrative and a variant by Chatelain's informant,
Domingo de Lemos:
ANGOLA (KIMBUNDU) (A)42 ROMERO/BRAZIL43

I. Leopard tricks Antelope: I.Wildcat (Onfa) tricks Deer:
to pick up red ants. to cross river at its deepest.
to eat tiny sugar canes.
to eat green corn and burn to eat green bananas.
it up.
to insult women farmers. to insult farm hands.
to jump across [into] to "wear" a snake as
river with eyes shut. bracelet.
to fetch water with a
fish trap.
Leopard does all things Wildcat does all things
correctly. correctly.
Leopard kills/or eats twenty Wildcat kills one sheep;
sheep and goats; in- incriminates deer; deer
criminates antelope; killed.
antelope killed.
Leopard makes antelope's
family eat antelope
unknowingly.
II. Leopard attempts to trick II.Wildcat attempts to trick

monkey; monkey reverses monkey; monkey reverses
pattern. pattern.
A patterned image set is established in both narratives. The

leopard and on;a deceive the antelope and deer, respectively. The
on;a and the leopard then fall victim to precisely the same de-
ceits; the monkey wins out in both narratives. If we read Chate-
lain's notes, we discover that the Angolan version A had no second
pattern originally:
Of our present story we give two versions, one from the

coast-belt, on the lower Kuanza River, the other from the in-
terior, in the districts of Ambaca (Mbaka) and Malange (Ma-
lanji). They complete each other, and agree to a remarkable
extent with a third version which is current among the ne-
groes of Brazil. This version can be seen in the "Contos popu-
lares do Brazil," by Sylvio Romero, p. 151. The story con-
sists really of two tales; that of Antelope's foolishness and
death and that of Monkey's revenge on the criminal Leopard.
My peculiar informant of Bom-Jesus had given me only the

first part of the story, assuring me that it was the whole
story, and I believed him. But weeks after, at Loanda, on
perusing the above "Contos populares, "I found out my mis-
take. So, when I made a second stay at Bom-Jesus, I asked
for the lacking part. At first "Piolho " feigned to know no-
thing about it; but when he saw he could not evade the truth,
his surprise and amusement at being found out were reat.
Then he willingly told the second part of the story.
Chatelain's interference in this narrative undoubtedly seems in-

nocent, but one has to question his integrity. How much of the
"lacking part" did he describe to de Lemos? Although Jelemia dia
Sabatelu's version B also includes the inverted monkey pattern,
one must ask how much influence Chatelain had in Sabatelu's ver-
sions of the narratives, for Sabatelu spent considerable time with
Chatelain, even travelling with him to the United States.45
The Brazilian Oral Narrative II: Perfect Reconstruction
If there are instances of narratives in Africa that have been in-

fluenced by Brazilian narratives, they are most likely rare. One of
the problems, however, is that among the Afro-Brazilians, the
boundaries between what is African and what is Brazilian have
been erased. This is most obvious in the state of Bahia, which has
a large Nago population. (Nago is an old term for the Yoruba
people.) Studies by Bastide, Verger, Herkovits, Bascom, and others
have made readily available a large amount of scholarship concern-
ing African survivals in this state and particularly in the city of

Salvador.46
One perspective on the erasure of African-Brazilian boundaries
can be seen in following the process of oral narrative reconstruc-
tion. Nina Rodrigues made the first real analytical comparisons be-
tween the Nago of Bahia and the Yoruba of Nigeria.47 His analyses
included full translations of five narratives collected by A. B. Ellis
in 1894.48 It appears now that Nina Rodrigues's translations of
Ellis's Yoruba narratives, which were published in 1935, have be-
come a fixture in the Bahian oral tradition. Viewed from another
perspective, one could call this a case of interference by written
sources, if that is possible in the oral tradition, but can we con-
ceivably speak of the trans-Atlantic tradition as oral any longer?
The example of Chatelain exerting influence on an oral narrative
from a written narrative (which, of course, was originally an oral
narrative) dates from 1894, the year of Ellis's publication. With
the passage of time, the problem multiplies geometrically. I will
attempt, in the discussion below, to establish the case of written
interference as it has occurred, hoping to redefine this event in a
new light, regarding the trans-Atlantic tradition.
Nina Rodrigues's analyses begin with the translation of Ellis's
"The Tortoise and the Elephant" (K1241). He compares this with
Romero's narrative, "O Kagado e O Teyu"49 and his personal ver-
sion of an Ewe (Gege in Brazil) variant, "The Tortoise and the
Elephant."50 He continues with comparisons between Ellis's "Olu
and Sigo"51 and, again, his personal version of "The Girl and the
Golden Ear-Rings" (G422.1).52 Then he includes three compari-
sons that have questionable relations, i.e., three of Ellis's narratives
that did not, to Nina Rodrigues's knowledge, exactly parallel any
known Brazilian narrative. Of these three, only the last two in-
terest us.
Nina Rodrigues translated Ellis's "The Lizard and the Tor-

toise."53 The narrative concerns lizard's and, later, tortoise's theft
of yams hidden in a rock. It also includes the "Open, rock" and
"Close, rock" motifs, that the lizard masters and the tortoise for-
gets. Nina Rodrigues compares this narrative with Romero's ver-
sion of "The Turtle and the Sky-Party," mentioned earlier, only
because the conclusions are identical (in Ellis, the roach and ant
mend the turtle's shell, in Rometo, God mends the shell, and in
Nina Rodrigues, the Virgin Mary4 ). Later, he includes a compari-
son of Ellis's "A Mother Whose Daughter Made Palm Oil" and a
narrative taken from the Nagos of Bahia, "The Stepdaughter."
Structurally parallel, the narratives nonetheless retain their super-

ficial differences:
ELLIS (YORUBA)55 NINA RODRIGUES (NAGO)56

Girl sells the Iwin [goblin] Girl, mistreated by stepmother,
palm oil, she is short- can't sell all of her cornmeal,
changed one cowrie. loses part of it.
She insists on payment She decides to go off and look

from the Iwin, follows for fadas [spirits].
him a long, long way.
The Iwin tries to tell her to The girl meets an egret, who asks
return, to frighten her into for help, and whom she helps;
returning. the same with a turtle, a wildcat,
and a boy pounding beans; she
asks all of them for directions to
the road, and this they give her.
The Iwin gives her palm nut: She meets Yemanja, who asks
First test (girl eats ha-ha, or her to delouse her needled hair:
pulp remaining after oil, First test.
gives palm-oil to the Iwin).
The Iwin gives her a banana:

Second test (girl eats peel,
gives the Iwin the banana).
The Iwin instructs her how Yemanja chooses six gourds for
to pick three gourds: "break the girl: "Break two a half league
one when you're half-way, from here, two in the middle of
one at your house door, and the road, two inside your
third when you're inside house."
your house."
Girl receives (1) horse and Girl receives (1) horse and slaves,
slaves, (2) sheep, goats, and (2) livestock and herders(?)
fowl, (3) large number of and (3) great wealth.
cowries.
Reverse of pattern by head- Reverse of pattern by step-

wife's daughter. mother's real daughter.
Second girl eats palm nut Second girl helps no one, doesn't
and banana, doesn't listen delouse Yemanja.
to the Iwin.
She receives (1) lions, She receives (1) a snake that

leopards, hyenas, snakes; maims people, (2) ferocious
(2) more ferocious animals. animals, and (3) a wildcat that
eats her and all her people.
Nina Rodrigues's Bahian narrative, then, is structurally analogous

to Ellis's narrative. I have been unable to find another version of
the Bahian narrative. However, Ellis's narrative, or rather Nina
Rodrigues's translation of it, appears twenty-five years later in a
collection of Bahian oral narratives, Contos Negros da Bahia
[Negro tales of Bahia] compiled by Deoscoredes dos Santos,57
better known as Didi. In what becomes an amazingly perfect re-
construction that borders on plagiarism, three of dos Santos's
narratives are almost word-for-word replications of the Ellis text
and the Nina Rodrigues translation. Using Ellis's "Alo About a
Woman Whose Little Girl Made Palm-Oil" as a guide, note Nina
Rodrigues's translation and dos Santos's oral reproduction.58
(Included for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with Portuguese,
is my translation of dos Santos's narrative; what follows are ran-
com selections of Ellis's narrative from the beginning, middle, and
end with their respective counterparts.)
There are, of course, minor variations between the Ellis-Nina
Rodrigues text and the dos Santos text. These include repetition
through synonym, e.g., acabava to tinha terminado, chegou to
apareceu, partiu to foi-se, and so on (example A); deletions, e.g.,
dos Santos does not include "the country where the people stand
on their heads in their mortars and pound yams with their heads"
but rather states simply that they arrived at "a bank of the river"
(example B); addition of conjunctions; and finally dos Santos adds
a moralizing conclusion that the Ellis version lacks (example D).
These minor variations, however, do not change the fact that dos
Santos's text is strikingly similar to Ellis's, and the same can be
said of the two other narratives in dos Santos's collection, "The
Lizard and the Turtle" (Open, rock) and "The Elephant and the
Tortoise" (K1241).
ELLIS (1894) NINA RODRIGUES (1935) DOS SANT
(translation of Ellis)
A. [CONTO DA MUL
TINHA UMA FIL
My alo is about a "Meu alo e sobre mul- CANTE DE AZEI

woman whose little girl her cuja filha fazia azeite
made palm-oil. de dende. (Ellis): Um dia, qu
One day when she had "Um di quando a men- menina ja tinh
made palm-oil she took it ina acabava de fazer o do de prepara
to the market to sell. azeita de dend6, levou-o e tinha arrum
She stayed in the mar- a feira para vender. Ella os seus negoc
ficou na feira vendendo a foi a feira ven
ket selling her palm-oil
seu azeite ate ao escure- ficou ate escu
until it was quite dark.
And when it was dark, a cer. Quando chegou a Quando ch
oblin* [Iwin] came to noite o Iwin, fada ou noite, aparec
er to buy palm-oil, and espirito, chegou a ella, (Ararun, espi
paid her with some comprou azelte de dend6 prou azeite, e
cowries. a pagou-lhe com alguns alguns cauris
cawries. A menina con-
costa). A men
When the little girl tou os cawries, achou um
counted the cowries she os cauris, ach
que estava quebrado e estava quebra
found that there was one
pediu ao Iwin o que fal- a Fada que tr
short, and she asked the tava. O Iwin disse-lhe que
goblin for the cowry that nao tinha mais cawries. um perfeito.
was wanting. E a menina comecou a A Fada res
nao tinha mai
The goblin said that he gritar: "Minha mae me
had no more cowries, and atera se eu voltar para Entao a meni
the little girl began crying, casa corn um cawry que- a chorar dizen
brado."
ELLIS NINA RODRIGUES DOS SAN
"My mother will beat me -Nao posso

if I go home with a para casa com
cowry short." quebrado, poi
mae me batera
B.
So the little girl fol- A menina seguiu e Entao segu

lowed, followed a long, caminhou um caminho inharam mui
long way, till they came muito longo, ate chegar chegaram a m
to the country where the ao paiz em que a gente riacho. A Fad
people stand on their fica em pe sobre as cabe- disse:
heads in their mortars
9as dentro dos seus piloes
and pound yams with
their heads. e pila o inhame com a -6 jovem
cabeSa. de azeite-den
Then they went on Entao elles caminha- deves voltar.
again a long way, and
ram ainda um caminho
they came to a river of
filth. And the goblin muito longo e depois che- -S6 voltar
sang:- garam a margem de um receber o meu
"Oh! young palm-oil charco. E o Iwin cantou:
seller, Oh! joven mercadora -Cedo este
You must now turn de azeite de dende sangue no rio
back." cera e voce de
And the girl sang:- Agora deves voltar
atras.
-replicou a F
"Save I get my cowry,
I'll not leave your -Nao volta
track." A menina respondeu:
Then the goblin sang Emquanto nao receber
ELLIS
NINA RODRIGUES DOS SANT
again:-
meu cawry,
Oh! young palm-oil -Esta vend
seller, Nao deixarei tuas
floresta escura
Soon will lead this pisadas.
track, Replicou o Iwin: -Estou, mas
To the bloody river, voltarei.
Then you must turn Oh! joven mercadora
back." de azeite de palma,
And she:- Cedo este rasto -Esta vend
"I will not turn back." desaparecera montanha ped
And he:- No rio de sangue
"See yon gloomy Entao deves regressar. -Estou, mas
forest?" tarei sem receb
And she:- E cantaram. Ella:
cauri.
"I will not turn back." "Nao regressarei". Elle:
And he:- "Ves a escura floresta?"
Ella: "Nao regressarei". Dai andaram
"See yon craggy caminho comp
mountain?" Elle: "Ves a montanha
And she:- pedregosa?" Ella: "Nao que chegaram n
"I will not turn back. voltarei. Sem receber o dos Eguns (mo
Save I get my cowry meu cawry, nao deixarei
I'll not leave your teu rasto."
track."
Andaram ainda um
Then they walked on
again, a long, long way; caminho muito longo e
and at last they arrived at por fim chegaram a terra
the land of dead people. dos mortos.
ELLIS NINA RODRIGUES DOS SANTO
C.
She picked the ados Ella colheu os ados A menina colhe

(little gourds) as she was como lhe tinha sido en- cabacinhas como
told, and returned home. sinado e voltou para casa. ensinou e voltou
When she was half-way casa.
she broke one ado, and Quando estava a meio
behold, many slaves and caminho quebrou um ado No meio do cam
horses appeared, and fol- e eis que apparecem quebrou a primeir
lowed her. muitos escravos e cavallos cinha e apareceram
When she was at the que a seguiram. Quando muitos escravos e
house-door, the little girl estava a porta da casa, a que lhe seguiram.
broke the second ado, menina quebrou o segun-
and behold, many crea- do ado e logo appareceu Quando estava
tures appeared, sheep, muita gente, carneiros, de casa, quebrou
and goats, and fowls, cabras, aves, mais de duz- logo apareceu mu
more than two hundred, entos e a seguiram. gente, carneiros,
and followed her. Quando estava dentro de bois e muitas aves
Then, when she had casa, quebrou o uiltimo seguiram.
entered the house, the ado e de repente a casa
little girl broke the last ficou cheia a transbordar Chegando dent
ado, and at once the de cawries que salam casa, quebrou a ul
house was filled to over- pelas portas e janellas. De repente a casa
flowing with cowries, cheia de cauris po
which poured out of the quanto foi canto.
doors and windows.
ELLIS NINA RODRIGUES DOS SAN
D.
Half-way home the A meio caminho, a No meio do

little girl broke one ado, menina quebrou um ado ela quebrou a
and behold, numbers of e eis que numerosos cabaSa; ai apar
lions, and leopards, and leoes, leopardos, hyenas e por(So de bich
hyenas, and snakes, ap- cobras apparecem. Elles do atras dela d
peared. They ran after correram atras da meni- dentadas. Ja e
her, and harassed her, na, fatigaram-se e a mor- chegou a port
and bit her till she deram, ate chegar a porta quebrou a out
reached the door of the de sua casa. Entao ella ha, saindo bic
house. quebrou o segundo ado mais ferozes q
Then she broke the e sairam animaes ainda em cima dela,
second ado, and behold, mais ferozes que cairam a rasgando seu
more ferocious animals sobre ella, morderam-na Quando ela
came upon her and bit e rasgaram-na. A porta da a porta estava
her and tore her at the casa estava fechada e s6 nao tinha pes
door. The door was shut, havia em casa uma pessoa huma em casa
surda. A menina pediu a mae dela est
and there was only a deaf
person in the house. The ao surdo que abrisse a Na porta m
little girl called to the porta, mas elle nao ouviu. menina foi m
E ahi na soleira os ani- animais que lh
deaf person to open the
maes selvagens mataram havam.
door, but he heard her
a menina. E assim qu
not. And there, upon the
threshold, the wild beasts com as pessoa
killed the little girl. invejosas.
Reconstruction Redefined
Dos Santos is well known among Brazilian scholars and literati. Of

him Antonio Olinto has written:
Among the Negro Brazilian authors of today, I place

Deosc6redes M. dos Santos (nicknamed "Didi") in a very
particular sector. He is entirely different from every other
author, Negro or white. Belonging to the Bahian candombles
and the son of an important priestess of this Afro-Brazilian
religion of Yoruba origin, dos Santos creates on three levels:
the mythic, the artistic (he is also a sculptor and fashions
pieces of Afro-Brazilian sacred art and emblems of orishds),
and the oral. Because he was used to telling Yoruba stories,
Zora Seljan advised him to put them in writing; and they are
now in the books Negro Tales of Brazil [sic] and Tales of
Nag6. Besides these, he has written another precious book,
Axe Opo Afonja, which tells the history of the shrine direct-
ed by his mother, the famous Yalorisha (priestess) Maria
Bibiana do Espirito Santo.
Deoscoredes M. dos Santos's chronicle of African and
Afro-Brazilian cases has all the candor of oral literature, and
I would be inclined to associate this Yoruba author writing in
Brazilian Portuguese to Amos Tutuola, a Yoruba author writ-
ing in English. The Yoruba language in Brazil has retained its
ancient form, but to a modem African it sounds a little old
fashioned. That is why the verses in Yoruba that dos Santos
inscribes in his books, besides belonging "seamlessly" to each
story, also have the historic value of showing how Yoruba
was spoken at least one hundred years ago.5
All the narratives recorded by dos Santos in three collections

are verified by him and others as belonging to the current Bahian
oral tradition. Jorge Amado, possibly the best known Brazilian
novelist in the world (certainly he is the most translated), writes
in the preface to Contos Negros da Bahia: "A knowledge more
powerful and profound than a pedantic or bookish knowledge is
folk wisdom, coming from other ages, accumulating from genera-
tion to generation, and for which some men seem to be deposi-
tories. One of these men is the author of this book, Deosc6redes
dos Santos."60
There can be no question, therefore, of dos Santos's reputation
as a raconteur and compiler of Afro-Brazilian lore. Amado insists,
in his preface, that "these stories, gathered in this book, were put
on paper by Didi in a faithful reproduction of oral narratives,
heard in the countryside and the macumbas ["voodoo" ceremo-
nies] and in the atrium of old churches."61
Dos Santos has not plagiarized. Rather he has recorded a version
passed on to him from another source, and in doing so he has
erased the boundaries between oral and written and between Afri-
can and Brazilian. Indeed, Deoscoredes dos Santos performs an
African-Bahian oral tradition that now includes Ellis's Yoruba nar-
rative. It is, from my perspective, a case of "perfect" reconstruc-
tion (i.e., from oral sources to Ellis, from Ellis to Nina Rodrigues,
from Nina Rodrigues to oral sources to dos Santos; or even from
Yoruba oral sources to Nago/Brazilian oral sources to dos Santos).
The modern term plagiarism is hardly applicable when speaking
of an oral narrative-performance in an oral-aural society. The per-
formance is meant to be coded through competing and integrated
semiotic systems. A performer means to affect members of the
audience. Virtuoso performers add individual embellishments and
variations, which over time accrue and are passed on. The point of
performance is to communicate and, even more important, to
offer the word for the next generation. The distinction here be-
tween literary theft and literary generative repetition (the taking
of literary items encouraged by a preceding "author," i.e., the per-
former) fades as the oral tradition becomes, to some extent, a
written, as well as an oral, word. Young performers will take as-
pects of a performance from established performers, they will
essentially "steal" images, and this borrowing is commonly ac-
cepted. The same case could be made for dos Santos's translations
of Ellis's narratives.
The Afro-Brazilians, through Didi, who must be seen as repre-
sentative of them, literate or not, have accepted Ellis's version of
"The Girl Who Made Palm Oil" over Nina Rodrigues's "The Step-
daughter." The reason for this becomes obvious: the narratives
are structurally analogous, and the choice between the linear plots
is merely arbitrary. Dos Santos includes Ellis's version because it
has become an accepted version; Nina Rodgrigues's version does
not appear in any other documented form. Amado, dos Santos,
Zora Seljan, and Olinto cannot all be wrong; they attest to the fact
that these are Afro-Brazilian oral narratives, accepted and per-
formed in Bahia. The question of written sources, or indeed pla-
giarism, is immaterial.
Further Investigations: "Isolados" as a Test
One of the rare scholars to reflect upon the Brazilian isolados is

Roger Bastide. He has written:
We should not infer from this that marronage is always

synonymous with the survival of tradition; we also have to
take the demographic factor into account. In fact a small and
isolated community is liable to react in precisely the opposite
direction. Faced with a stark struggle for mere survival as a
human group, it tends to let its customs degenerate and to
lapse into a merely vegetable existence. One fact that has
always struck me about Brazil is that the small out-of-the-
way hamlets, the fishing villages hidden away by some creek
in the mountains, possessed neither folklore nor festivals, and
indeed gave signs of having nothing more positive than a
vague and rootless religiosity.62
Thus, this perspective would rule out the isolados as a testing

ground for oral narrative reconstruction. To make this judgement
for every isolado, however, would be presumptuous and erro-
neous. Bastide admits:
All one can say is that the two basic "variable factors" in-
volved are the temporal (date of each marron republic's con-
stitution) and the demographic variants. The latter depend on
the size of the population. Since all memories of the past will
be filtered through the sieve of informational exchange be-
tween individuals, the number of cultural features known will
depend, first, on the number of people in communication
with one another, and secondly, on their original position
(whether strategic or not) in the African social structure.63
Bastide gives us only one polarity of the Brazilian marron po-

tential. Although there are isolados that have either assimilated or,
through the absence of traditional communication, lost African
cultural ties, there exist numerous isolados, most of which have
not been researched. (Bastide gives no specific data from Brazil
and was reporting on information gathered from the states of Sao
Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Bahia.) Olavo Correia Lima has con-
firmed the existence of over twenty-two isolados in Maranhao
alone.64 As recently as June 1980, a Brazilian journalist wrote
about an isolado from Piauf, descended from a quilombo.65 There
is another polarity, that of an isolado that has maintained strong
traditions through individuals who have retained and passed on

oral narratives. This polarity must exist in Brazil.
Thus, the trans-Atlantic transmission of the Yoruba narrative
can be substantiated today among Afro-Brazilians. More impor-
tant, Brazil's isolados offer fascinating areas of research that are
pertinent to the question of intercultural literary linkages.66 If one
were to document oral narratives from a representative sampling
of these isolados, a narrative context could be established to com-
pare not only African, but also Brazilian narratives. Simultaneous-
ly, one could determine whether synchronic codes shift through
temporal and geographic upheaval and what has been the true
extent of cultural fusion, or syncretization, in Brazil. The solution
to the dilemma evoked by Deosc6redes dos Santos's renditions of
the Yoruba narratives may also be found in an isolado.
NOTES
1. This quote also appears in the introduction of Jose Hon6rio

Rodrigues, Brazil and Africa, trans. Richard A. Mazzara and Sam
Hileman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), p. 1.
2. The Atlantic Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1969), p. 268.
3. Ibid., p. 234.
4. Abdias do Nascimento, O Genocidio do Negro Brasileiro:
Processo de um Racismo Mascarado (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra,
1978), p. 87.
5. "African and Afro-American Tales," RAL 7, no. 2 (1976):
181-199.
6. Ibid., pp. 181-182. See Dundes's comments on Theo Camp-
bell's work.
7. RAL 8-12 (1977-1981).
8. See Moser's addition in RAL 9, 2 (1978), 257-258.
9. The sources for these narratives will become clear below. I
am essentially basing choices on Dundes's statistical formula.
10. The sociological term is isolado, or isolated community, in
Portuguese. These communities are more commonly known as
povoados isolados but have been referred to as isolados negros in
some recent literature. My preliminary research in Brazil (June-
August, 1980) reaffirmed the existence of various isolados in
northern and northeastern Brazil. The isolados are derived from
either of four possible circumstances: from quilombos [maroon
societies] that have remained isolated from mainstream Brazilian
civilization, from slaves who were abandoned by their masters

with the abolition of slavery in 1888 but who remained working
on the plantation, from slave communities that legally inherited
plantations after abolition, or from groups of Afro-Brazilians who
moved to and settled in a location as squatters, keeping their land
through the right of usucapion.
The isolados, along with other African survival models in Brazil,
will provide the various stages of culture-contact models, from
those with little or no contact (descendants from quilombos) to
those with a great deal of contact (descendants from abandoned
plantations). This idea is taken directly from John Szwed and
Roger Abrahams, "After the Myth: Studying Afro-American Cul-
tural Patterns in the Plantation Literature," RAL 7, no. 2 (1976):
211-232. They write, "Any argument about culture-flow is dif-
ficult to present, and needs as much ethnographic bolstering as
possible, but the problems of describing the forced dispersal of
African peoples in the New World is made all the more difficult
because of the inadequacy of the models of culture contact and
resultant change which have been used to explain such diaspora
situations" (211). For more information on African-Brazilian
parallels in religion and music, see note 46.
11. The Xhosa narrative is from Harold Scheub, "Narrative
Patterning in Oral Performances," Ba Shiru 7, no. 2 (1976): 10-
11, and the Kabyl narrative is from Leo Frobenius and Douglas C.
Fox, African Genesis (New York: Stackpole & Sons, 1937), pp.
77-79.
12. Rassner collection, ngano 37 (Tape 1, Side 1: 932-970) re-
corded on August 17, 1976, at 9 p.m. near Kakuyuni, Kenya, at
the home of Joseph Chombo, with an audience of five men, two
women, three young adults, and five children. The ngano is the
oral narrative performance of the Agiryama people of coastal
Kenya. The Agiryama do not distinguish between myth, legend,
history, and folktale; all are called ngano.
13. In Heli Chatelain, Folktales of Angola (New York: Negro
University Press, 1969), p. 243.
14; Rassner collection, ngano 15 (Tape 1, Side 1: 726-756),
recorded on August 16, 1976, at 5 p.m., near Goshi, Kenya, at
the home of Nyevu Fondo, with an audience of one man, three
women, six young adults, and fifteen children. This narrative is
included in my dissertation, "Narrative Rhythms of Giryama
Ngano," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison,
1980, pp. 55-57 and 287-289.
15. Chatelain, Folktales of Angola, p. 83.
16. Let me make it clear here that these are only "casual" struc-
tural analyses, for, unlike Levi-Strauss and others, I find it unnec-
essary to take the analyses to bipolar, diadic, triadic, or socioeco-
nomic interpretations.
17. Lindolfo Gomes, Contos Populares (episodicos, ciclicos, e
sentenciosos) (Sao Paulo: Comp. Melhoramentos, 1948), pp. 82-
84. This translation from the Portuguese and those that follow are
mine.
18. I must expose here my lack of knowledge as a folklorist. In
Homer's Odyssey, the Cattle of the Sun bellow as their flesh is
roasted on the spits. I have found another version, similar to Chat-
elain's, and to Katana's and Gomes's, documented by Alcee For-
tier, in "Louisiana Nursery Tales," Journal of American Folklore
2, no. 4 (1889): 37. The narrative was told by a black former plan-
tation laborer (the translation is by Fortier from French Creole):
POSSON [sic] DORE [THE GOLDEN FISH]

There was once a young girl who had a lover. It was a fine
young man, a prince, but the father did not want him to
court his daughter. He went to see an old wizard, who lived
in the woods, and said to him: "I pray you, wizard, make
that young man leave my daughter alone. I do not want them
to marry."
One day the young girl and the young man were seated on
the river bank; the wizard came and changed the young man
into a fish, which jumped into the water.
The father thought that the young girl would forget the
young man, now that he was a fish, and he did not watch her
any more; but every day the young girl would sit on the river
bank and sing: "Caliwa wa, caliwa co; waco, maman dit oui;
waco, papa dit non; caliwa wa, caliwa co."
As soon as she sang the water opened, and a beautiful red
fish, with a golden crown on his head, came near the young
girl. He brought her cakes, oranges, apples, for her to eat.
The father perceived that the young girl went every day to
the river bank. One day he watched her, and saw what she
was doing. The next day he brought his gun with him, and
when the girl sang, and the beautiful fish came, he killed it,
and took it home to cook it.
The young girl was told to cook the fish. When she took it
to cut it, the fish began to sing: "Cut me then, wa, wa; scrape
me then, wa, wa; mix me then, wa, wa; mix me then, wa, wa;
put some salt, wa wa."
When the fish was cooked they placed it on the table. The
young girl did not want to eat, and cried for her fish; but the
father was so greedy and ate so much that his belly burst, and
a quantity of little fish came out and escaped to the water.
After the dinner the young girl went to sit down on the
river bank, where they had thrown the scales of her fish. She
wept so much that the earth opened, and she disappeared in
the hole to go to meet her fish. When her mother came to
look for her, she saw only one lock of her daughter's hair
which was coming out of the earth.
19. Ironically, those narratives of Amerindian (Tupi) origin are,
for the most part, of African origin. These include the jabuti (tor-
toise) narratives collected earlier by the Couto de Magalhaes in his
0 Selvagem (Rio de Janeiro, 1876). For the debate over the origin
of these narratives, see Dundes, "African and Afro-American
Tales"; C. F. Hartt, Amazonian Tortoise Myths (Rio de Janeiro:
William Scully, 1875); Herbert Smith, Brazil, the Amazons, and
the Coast (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1879); T. F. Crane,
"Plantation Folk-Lore," The Popular Science Monthly 18 (1881):
824-33; and especially Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, Os Africanos
no Brazil (Sao Paulo: Comp. Editora Nacional, 1935), p. 295.
20. "Kagado e A Festa no Ceo [sic] ," pp. 143-145, and "O
Urubu e O Sapo," pp. 154-155, both in Silvbo Romero's Contos
Populares do Brazil, ed. Theophilo Braga (Lisboa: Nova Livraria
Internacional, 1885).
21. Edwin W. Smith and A. M. Dale, The Ila-Speaking Peoples
of Northern Rhodesia (London, 1920), II. Reprinted in Paul
Radin, African Folktales (Princeton: Bollingen Series, 1970),
141-142.
22. Romero, op. cit., "O Kagado e O Teyu," 145-146.
23. Ibid., pp. 15-17. Lindolfo Gomes's "De Como Malazarte
Vende o Cadaver da Velha" ("How Malazarte Sells His Mother's
Corpse"), Contos Populares, pp. 74-76, includes the use of his
dead mother in his adventures, but he makes no "trades" as in
Romero's version.
24. A. W. Cardinall, Tales Told in Togoland (London, 1931).
Reprinted in Radin, 28-32.
25. In checking the literature, I find that the motif-indices con-
firm the African origin of K251.1 Stith Thompson's index in-
cludes the Grimms' narrative "Hans Im Gliick" ("Johnny in
Luck"), and selected east Indian (subcontinent) narratives, in-
cluding F. A. Steele, Tales of the Punjab, and Leslie Milne, The
Shans at Home. These narratives are not K251.1, but rather N421:
Lucky bargains or Z41.5: Lending and repaying, progressively

worse (or better) bargain. These narratives do not include a "deal"
with the Sky-God or King, nor the use of a corpse as a final ex-
change. Thompson does include Joel Chandler Harris's "How the
King Recruited His Army" (Uncle Remus and His Friends), which
is definitely K251.1. Kenneth Clark, A Motif-Index of the Folk-
tales of Culture-Area V, West Africa, lists six West African ver-
sions, four from Togo (Cardinall, Himmelheber, Klipple, and
Shbnharl) one from the Ashanti (Rattray), and one from the Ewe
(Speiss). The existence of the narrative in Africa, the United
States, and Brazil, and not Europe or India, unquestionably con-
firms an African origin.
26. Luis da Camara Cascudo, Diciondrio do Folclore Brasileiro
(Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro, 1962), p. 445.
27. Courtenay Malcolm Batchelor, Stories and Storytellers of
Brazil (Havana, 1953), p. 134.
28. Lufs da Camara Cascudo, Vaqueiros e Cantadores (Rio de
Janeiro, 1939), p. 183.
29. The6philo Braga, Contos Tradicionals do Povo Portugues,
vol. II (Lisboa: J. Rodrigues, 1915), pp. 165-168; and quoted in
full in Silvfo Romero, Contos Populares do Brasil, pp. 224-225,
recorded at Cabaceiras de Bastos by J. Leite de Vasconcelos, Tradi-
foes Populares de Portugal (Lisboa, 1882), pp. 294 ff. Under
other names, one may make a case for other versions. See Cas-
cudo, Diciondrio, for full references.
30. Aurelio M. Espinosa, Cuentos Populares Espanoles I
(Madrid, 1946), PP. 407-416; see Lindolfo Gomes, Contos Popu-
lares, pp. 64-81; and L. C. Cascudo, Contos Tradicionais do Brazil
(Rio de Janeiro, 1947), pp. 261-270. The Spanish narrative, a
lengthy one concerning Pedro and his unsuspecting brother Joao,
is a patterned-image narrative, in which both brothers deal with a
man not unlike the Ashanti man in Rattray's "How Contradiction
Came to the Ashanti." See Radin, pp. 201-203.
31. Gomes, Contos Populares, pp. 76-77. Bascom determined
its origin as African in RAL 11 (1980); 479-510.
32. "A Pedra Amea~adora" (The Menacing Rock) in Amadeu
Amaral, Tradifoes Populares (Sao Paulo: Hucitec, 1976), p. 334.
"La Piedra del Fin del Mundo" ("The End of the World Rock"),
in Ram6n Laval, Cuentos de Pedro Urdemales (Santiago, Chile:
Imprenta Cervantes, 1925), p. 13.
33. Cascudo, Vaqueiros e Cantadores, p. 183. He does make it
clear that the Brazilian Malazartes resembles the Zulu trickster
Hlakanyana.
34. William Bascom, African Dilemma Tales (The Hague: Mou-

ton, 1975), p. 7.
35. Ibid., p. 7. See also Steven S. Jones, "The Rarest Thing in
the World: Indo-European or African," RAL 7, no. 2. (1976):
200-210.
36. Gomes, Contos Populares, vol. II, pp. 17-18.
37. See note 19 above.
38. Nina Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brasil, pp. 292-297.
39. For non-Portuguese readers interested in Brazilian maroon
societies, see Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the
Americas, ed. Richard Price (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1979), especially part four, pp. 169-226, articles by R. K.
Kent, Roger Bastide, and Stuart B. Schwartz. Also see my "Pal-
mares and the Freed Slave in Afro-Brazilian Literature," in The
Black Narrative in Latin America, ed. William Luis (Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1981). Those who read Portuguese should see Edison Car-
neiro, O Quilombo dos Palmares (Rio de Janeiro, 1945) and Decio
Freitas, Palmares: A Guerra dos Escravos (Rio de Janeiro: Edi(oes
Graal, 1978).
40. Antonio Olinto's A Casa d'Agua (Rio de Janeiro: Editora
Block, 1969), Michael Echeruo's Victorian Lagos (London: Mac-
millan, 1977), and Bruce Chatwin's The Viceroy of Ouidah (New
York: Summit, 1980) all deal with this subject. This trans-Atlantic
interchange, with variations, is the focus of Lorenzo Turner's
"Some Contacts of Brazilian Ex-slaves," Journal of Negro History
27 (1942), 55-67. See also J. Michael Turner, "Les Bresiliens: The
Impact of Former Brazilian Slaves upon Dahomey," dissertation,
Boston University, 1975, and his "Manipula;ao da Religiao: 0
Exempla Afro-Brasileira," Cultura, Ministerio da Educaqdo e Cul-
tura, Brasilia, No 23 (1976), pp. 56-63.
41. See Dundes, "African and Afro-American Tales," pp.
185-186.
42. Chatelain, Folktales of Angola, pp. 161-181.
43. Romero, Contos Populares do Brazil, pp. 151-153.
44. Chatelain, Folktales of Angola, p. 292, emphasis mine.
45. Ibid., p. 272.
46. Roger Bastide, As ReligiOes Africanas no Brasil (Sao Paulo,
1971); William Bascom, "Oba's Ear: A Yoruba Myth in Cuba and
Brasil," RAL 7, 2 (1976), 149-165; Pierre Verger, Dieux d'Afri-
que, Culte des Orishas et Vodouns a l'ancienne Cote des Esclaves
en Afrique et a Bahia (Paris: Paul Hartmann Editeur, 1954); M.
Herskovits, "The Negroes of Brazil," Yale Review 32 (1942-
1943), p. 263. Bastide, Bascom, Verger, and others have published

other texts on the subject.
48. Alfred Burdon Ellis, Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave
Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894).
49. Ibid., pp. 265-267; Romero, Contos Populares do Brazil,
pp. 145-146.
50. Nina Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brasil, p. 282.
51. Ellis, Yoruba-Speaking Peoples, pp. 260-263.
52. Nina Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brasil, pp. 285-287. This
narrative has analogues throughout Africa. For the best compara-
tive discussion, see Cascudo, Contos Tradicionais do Brasil, pp.
204-206. Joao Silva Campos includes another variant from Bahia
in "Contos e Fabulas Populares da Bahia," Revista do Instituto
Historico e Geogrdfico Brasileiro, vol. 172, 1937, "The Pouch,"
pp. 265-268. Alice Werner, Myths and Legends of the Bantu
(London: Harrap and Comp., 1933), pp. 180-182, includes
another version, which is much closer to the Brazilian version
than Ellis's. Cascudo suggests that this narrative was brought to
Brazil from Africa and to Portugal and Spain from Arabic sources
(hence, the importance of the Swahili version).
53. Ellis, Yoruba-Speaking Peoples, pp. 271-274, and Nina
Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brasil, pp. 297-299.
54. Nina Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brasil, p. 300.
55. Ellis, Yoruba-Speaking Peoples, pp. 244-249.
57. Deoscoredes dos Santos, Contos Negros da Bahia (Negro
Tales of Bahia) (Rio de Janeiro: EdiSoes GRD, 1961), pp. 103-
106.
58. The corresponding pages for these three comparisons are:
dos Santos, pp. 57-58,103-106, and 113-114; Ellis, pp. 245-249,
265-267, and 271-274; Nina Rodrigues, pp. 279-281 and 309-
312. The comparison of the "Girl Who Made Palm Oil" is dos
Santos (103-106), Ellis (245-249), and Nina Rodrigues (309-
312).
59. "The Negro Writer in Brazilian Literature," African Forum
2, no. 4 (1967): 17-18.
60. In dos Santos, Contos Negros da Bahia, p. 9.
61. Ibid., p. 10. Emphasis mine.
62. African Civilizations in the New World (New York: Harper
and Row, 1971), p. 62.
63. Ibid., p. 68.
64. Olavo Correia Lima and Ramiro C. Azevedo, Isolados

Negros no Maranhdo (Sao Luis, Maranhao: Grafica S. Jose, 1980).
Correia Lima has studied only three isolados and I have visited
two.
65. Paulo de Tarso Morais, "Mimb6, comunidade primitiva que

poucos conhecem," Jornal de Manha (Teresina, Piauf), July 15,
1980, p. 8.
66. I should add that the isolados exist in Venezuela, Panama,
Mexico, Jamaica, and the United States and in other New World
locations.

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The Transmission of the Oral Narrative from Africa to Brazil

Author(s): Ronald M. Rassner

Brazil has its body in America

Although it may appear odd to many Africanists, an article on the

Research in African Literatures, Vol. 13, No. 3, Fall 1982

named and unknown" to maintain structural parallels and corre-

Emphasizing the Basis for Comparative Potentials: The African

African oral narratives, perceived as a whole, have many common

ities between two narratives documented at opposite ends of the

A woman has two children, A ewe has two lambs.

The children live in a cave. They live in a grotto.

The boy leaves every day to The ewe pastures everyday,

He sings to enter closed cave: She uses password to enter:

Girl opens door, he enters, Lambs open door, she enters,

A zim (ogre) hears song, A jackal hears password, tries

Zim sings, voice different, Jackal speaks, voice different,

Structurally, the narratives have an obvious congruency, the

GIRYAMA (KENYA) MBUNDU (ANGOLA)

Three men go hunting. One man goes on journey.

He trips on skull. He asks, He sees skull, beats it with his

Skull responds: Skull responds:

Man returns to camp, Man returns home (does not

They return to skull, he They return to skull, he tries

Skull refuses to talk, Skull refuses to talk,

Skull speaks. Others Skull speaks. Others hear.

North to south, east to west, structural, thematic, and linear

Pluck me with care,

When thou scalest me, scale me well!

The narrative structurally follows the Giryama (and Kimbundu)

I also have children,

At the time of the party the table was surrounded by doc-

Everyone looked uneasily at his neighbor, but the old

The Brazilian Oral Narrative I: Structural Parallels

Brazilian folklorists have long appreciated the obvious links of

tion has been a preoccupation. Sflvio Romero, who put together

Romero (Brazil, 1885) Cardinall (Togo, 1931)

Pedro Malasartes deals with Ananse deals with Sky-God: Re-

Obtains shelter from a chief; Obtains shelter from an old lady;

Deceitful exchange of three Honest exchange of bushel of

Deceitful exchange of six Deceitful exchange of ten

Honest exchange of gold for

He exchanges the gold for a He exchanges the ten sheep for a

There can be no question that Romero's "Uma das de Pedro Mala-

HOW MALAZARTE KEPT THE WORLD FROM FALLING DOWN (AT1530)31

Once he [Malazarte] had the strongest urge to pass water

[verter dgua] . He leaned himself against a giant rock near a

Amadeu Araujo has also documented a version of "Holding Up

however, the two narratives are African-and the structure is the

A Dilemma Tale and an Academic Dilemma

a mirror in which one could see what happened far away, no

And there was the dead girl, surrounded by all of her

It was then that, by her father's order, she had to de-

The very existence of this dilemma tale, so widespread in Afri-

Can we dismiss this notion of a bidirectional trans-Atlantic

ANGOLA (KIMBUNDU) (A)42 ROMERO/BRAZIL43

II. Leopard attempts to trick II.Wildcat attempts to trick

A patterned image set is established in both narratives. The

Of our present story we give two versions, one from the

My peculiar informant of Bom-Jesus had given me only the

Chatelain's interference in this narrative undoubtedly seems in-

The Brazilian Oral Narrative II: Perfect Reconstruction

If there are instances of narratives in Africa that have been in-

ing African survivals in this state and particularly in the city of