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'Mandoko' and 'Famine': Two Folktales From Chad
| Article
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12492 |
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Section : |
Culture
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
2,576 Words |
| Author
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Jan Knappert
Jan Knappert is a folklorist and specialist in African and
Oriental languages who is based in Belgium. |
Chad, a large central African nation, is bordered on the west by Lake Chad, between Niger and Cameroon, on the south by the Central African Republic, and on the north by Libya. Its eastern border with the Sudan is mainly desert, though once the kingdom of Waddai flourished there, along the pilgrims' route from Nigeria to Mecca, across the Red Sea from Suakin and Port Sudan. Less than four million inhabitants populate Chad's 495,000 square miles. The capital, N'Djamena (formerly Fort Lamy) has barely two hundred thousand inhabitants. Lake Chad or Tchad (the name means "water," pronounced tsade, in the language of the Buduma people, who row their reed rafts on the lake) shrinks to 10,000 square kilometers in the dry season. In prehistoric times, the lake measured 1 million square kilometers.
Chad became a French colony around 1900 and an independent republic in 1960. For the past few years, the Chadian government army, backed by the French, has fought off attacks from the Libyan army and air force. Libyans consider the Chadians heathens because they worship Chadian gods whom their ancestors have venerated for centuries. Though Islam is widespread in Chad, it is not the harsh, doctrinaire type of Islam followed in Libya, but a more syncretic version, anathema to Libyan extremist Muslims who tolerate only their own type of Islam: austere, inflexible, imperialistic, arrogant.
Chadians speak a hundred distinct languages and are divided into as many ethnic groups, each with its own customs. The size of the country and the diversity of its landscapes contributes to this division: high mountain ranges, vast deserts in the north, and navigable rivers (Logone, Shari) in the south, watering lush landscapes with tropical vegetation where rice and cotton are grown. These farmers and camel drivers have a surprisingly rich folklore. Fables, fairy tales, and songs have been recorded in many of the Chadian languages.
The attentive reader will recognize in "Famine" the tale of Hansel and Gretel, who were sent away to the forest to starve because their parents could no longer feed them. African tales are about real problems, but they often seem riddles to us. Does the father have the right to rule? No, he forfeited it by his inability to provide for his children. How can he provide for a nation? Thus many African tales discuss by implication political problems, which in turn are caused by economic problems. The moral of the first tale, "Mandoko," is the Swahili proverb: "Love the one who loves you, don't love the one who does not love you." The lion was perhaps the spirit of Mandoko's own mother, who came back for one night to find her
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