African Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean Islands

A poor man goes to the seaside and takes a fishing boat (pirog). For a week he fishes. Nothing. He rows out to a little rock (lilot), where he catches the Queen of the Sea. He is about to strike her when she says, "Lift your eyes, look at God (Bondyé). I'll give you a goat. You won't have to come to the sea any more. You'll say, 'By the virtue of the goat the queen of the sea gave me, I want to see everything I need!'" On the way home he is intercepted by his komer (godmother of his son). Knowing he has no such thing as a goat, she takes him a little food, invites him to her house, and while he's asleep swaps his goat for one of hers.

At home, when he tries out the queen's formula, the goat defecates in the children's bed. He decides to go back to the queen of the sea and kill her. This time she says she'll give him a little snuffbox; he is to repeat the same formula. Again the komer intervenes, giving him coffee and taking him home. She swaps snuffboxes.

At home he says the formula; bees come out and sting the children. He says, "Tonight I'm sleeping at the seaside." At 5:30 A.M. he takes the boat to the island, he fishes till 6:30 P.M., and he's about to strike the queen until she says, "This is the last time you're coming here. Today I'm going to give you a cane/walking-stick (rotin)," and the same formula. Again the komer intervenes, taking him home and giving him food and drink. While he's asleep, she tells her daughter to swap sticks—but the rotin hits her till she cries out. The komer tries; she too gets hit; she shakes him and says, "Get out of here!" He says to the rotin, "Do what you have to do." It hits her so hard that she confesses what she's taken.

He takes his things home and says the formula. Everything he needs comes to him, and thereafter he lives rich with his family.

"The other day, I met this guy and said to him, 'Konper, do something for me.' Zot! he socked me and just then I up and left" (Carayol and Chaudenson, Contes créoles 135-40).

The story was collected in 1969 from an unnamed storyteller in the Indian Ocean archipelago of Seychelles. It encloses internationally popular motifs—an animal that fulfills wishes, a neighbor who steals magic objects, a magic cudgel that beats a person and effects the recovery of what was stolen—within a poverty-to-riches frame (Aarne and Thompson 205-06). European readers of Grimm might remember another version as "The Magic Table, the Gold Donkey, and the Club in the Sack." Audiences in other Southwest Indian Ocean islands know it too (Haring, Index 414-15; Decros).

Folktales told in this region manifest the skill of verbal artists in manipulating and varying symbol systems. Tales like this one were learnt from Africa, modified in Madagascar, and brought to Seychelles, the Comoros, Mauritius, and Réunion with forced or unforced immigration. Imported tales stayed in memory; if useful, they were remodeled. Every generation remembered and recreated occasions when African verbal artists critiqued social life. The trans-shipping of slaves through Madagascar and the long history of cultural convergence in all the islands brought about creolization in folktales.

The story typifies this multicultural history. The plot of "The Table, the Ass, and the Stick" could have reached the islands from Africa or Europe, but the tale as told in 1969 was no standardized import from either place. Unpredictably, it compounds different regional symbols. Take the villain of the piece, for a start—the komer, who is posed against both the fisherman...