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The Hunter and the Boa: An African Dilemma Tale
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18391 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1990 |
3,044 Words |
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Bernard Binlin Dadie
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“The Hunter and the Boa” is reprinted from The Black Cloth: A Collection of African Folktales by Bernard Binlin Dadie, translated by Karen C. Hatch, copyright © 1987 by The University of Massachusetts Press.
Bernard Binlin Dadie - novelist, dramatist, poet, and minister of cultural affairs of the Ivory Coast - was born in 1916 and came of age under French colonial rule. Like others in his generation of African-French writers, Dadie sought to rediscover the oral literature of his ancestors. The Black Cloth was published in 1955 in French; an English translation did not appear until some thirty years later. All the stories in this collection - the re-creations of traditional folktales as well as the original compositions - are steeped in the African oral tradition. Speaking at the First International Congress of Africanists at Accra in 1962, Dadie spoke of that tradition as a “luxuriant folklore, whose roots strike deep into the earth… [its] values have provide their worth, and continue to mould the consciences of men in our villages.”
Dadie's are not merely literary tales, they are wisdom stories. Because of Dadie's tremendous skill, the reader never loses the sense of the presence of the griot, the traditional storyteller, as the writing transports him into the African universe far more effectively than folklorist's transcriptions.
The story that follows is representative of a type of folktale that has traditionally formed an integral part of moral training for a great many Africans. Such tales are widespread on that continent, although still not very familiar to most of the rest of the world. The storyteller often concludes his
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