The moral of these tales is: Do not appoint a jackal! How to recognize a jackal?  The genius of the storyteller is that he can disguise the problems of real life in the furry skins of animals.  Evil characters are like these jackals.  They have only one purpose: their own interest, and they will pursue it with ruthless persistence, with lying and slander.  They will use the noble lion (read: the head of the department, the director, the prime minister) for their own ends, even at the expense of the country they live in.

The noble ox is their victim because he has influence on the king in competition with theirs.  He has to die.  How?  By the king’s own hand.  Yet it is the king who is to blame.  He had all the power.  All he needed was wisdom.  Then he could have seen through the malice of his parasitic ministers.  He could have realized that the ox was innocent.  The main problem for anyone in a position of management is still: Who can be trusted?  Who is capable and who is a charlatan?  The liars look innocent; the honest look shy and gauche.  The ox had to die because, as they say in Africa:

The innocent black monkey pays
When big baboon has stolen maize.

The more one studies these old fables, the more one can admire them for their truthful psychology in a nutshell.  They are the best teaching device ever invented—which is why they will not die.  If they end glumly, the message is: Don’t let it happen to you!

Jan Knappert is a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.  Born in Holland, he received a degree in Sanskrit, Hinduism, and Buddhism from the University of Leiden in 1948.  He followed this later with degrees in Semitic languages, Islam, Indonesian languages and linguistics, Swahili literature, and a number of African languages.  He has written many books, including Myths and Legends of Indonesia (Heinemann, Singapore, 1977), Malay Myths and Legends (Heinemann, Singapore, 1980), Islamic Legends (Brill, 1985).