Somalian
How the Dog Became Man’s Friend (2)
The dog is made of the human’s umbilical cord. The woman likes the man because she’s made of his rib. The man likes land because he’s made of dust, and that’s why men always fight over land.
The Dog, the Goat and the Donkey
Once there was a dog, a goat and a donkey who wanted to travel to another country. So they got on the bus. The dog had ten birr (the main unit of currency in Ethiopia). The donkey had five birr, but the goat had no money.
The bus ticket cost five birr. But when the dog gave ten birr to the conductor, he didn’t get any change. Because the goat had no money, she tried to hide herself in the bus. But the donkey paid his five birr. When the bus arrived at its destination they all got off.
The dog always runs after the bus shouting, “Give me my five birr! My five birr!” The goat runs away from the bus, saying, “The conductor will ask me for my money.” But the donkey doesn’t move. He’s already paid his five birr and he feels quite safe and happy.
The Lion, King of the Animals
Once there was a lion, a hyena, a fox and the other animals. When they were going in the forest, they were hungry but they saw a very fat camel. So the lion, being the king of the animals, jumped on the camel and killed it in the neck. We know that lions don’t like to eat the meat. They suck the blood away from the neck. So when he sucked the blood, the rest of the dead camel lay on the ground.
So the lion went to the others and said, “Let’s share it.”
Then the hyena said, “I’ll divide it. Let’s divide it into two equal parts. One half should be for the lion and the other half for all the other animals.”
Then the lion was angry and gave him a slap on the face and killed him. All the other animals were shocked.
So then the lion called the fox and said, “You divide it.”
So the fox thought for a long time. He didn’t want to get a slam like the hyena.
So he said, “Take it all. Take the whole camel.”
So the lion was very happy.
“Who told you how to divide it?” he said. “You divided it very well.”
The fox said, “The slam you gave to the hyena taught me how to divide it.”
All the other animals were angry.
“You are stupid, you are nothing. Why did you give it all to the lion?”
He said, “You are stupid. If I had given any to us I would be dead like the hyena.”
The Mother of Sons
Once there was a man with two wives in Puntland1. His first wife had only girls, but the second wife had only boys. Since the second wife had boys, he liked her and he called her “many poles” (to hold up the roof). But the other he called “woman with house”. Both of them lived side by side. The hut on the right by tradition is the hut of the first wife and the less important wife’s hut is on the left.
So he also closed the door of the first wife, and said, “You have to use the door of the second wife.”
He did this to encourage the second and discourage the first. Then he moved her from the right position on the land to the left. So the priority was given to the second wife.
They were nomads. When she had delivered seven girls and the other had delivered two boys, they had to move from that place as there was no rain and no grass. The man took the horse and the second wife and moved with her to a better place, leaving his first wife and seven daughters alone. He wanted them to die. Let them die.
They were alone, as the whole village had left. But fortunately the rain started at that very place and the grass grew, and they had a few goats and sheep and they lived healthily because God helped them.
The man, according to tradition, goes off and surveys for good grass. Then he comes back to his family and moves them to the new place. While he was searching, he came back to the old place, and found it had rained and there was water and new grass. And it was night, so he didn’t recognise that it was the place where he had left his first family.
He shouted, “Who is living here?”
And his daughter said, “It’s us, your children. Don’t you know us?”
“Oh, you’re here. And you had rain, and you have grass!”
“Yes, we have. So please come in. It is raining. I will make a fire and warm you.”
Then the father sat by the fire and the daughter came to the mother and said, “My father has come but he didn’t come to you. He said only. ‘That woman delivers nothing good.’ But God may still give you a son. Since he’s alone and he’s not with his second wife, if he wants you don’t be angry. So clean your body and use your perfume.”
So the woman prepared herself and he went to her house and slept with her and she became pregnant. But early in the morning the man went away back to his second wife and he moved her back near his first wife. He didn’t believe she could deliver a son and he didn’t wait for the delivery.
But the second wife saw the pregnancy and mocked and was cruel to the first wife, saying, “She cannot have a son and even this pregnancy is not legal.”
The husband didn’t want to upset his second wife so he didn’t admit he had slept with the first.
But the first wife’s daughter had advised her: “When my father sleeps, take off his ring and take one of his shoes, to prove he has been with you.”
So when everyone in the village said, “He was far away and maybe she went with someone else,” the first wife could say, “No, he came to me and here is his ring and his shoe.”
So they admitted it was the husband’s pregnancy.
But the husband said, “Even if the pregnancy is mine, I know it’s a girl.”
And the time came to move. The wife was nine months pregnant and about to give birth. She needed help. But he left her again and went away with the horse and the luxury and the second horse. And the first wife and seven daughters were left alone by the whole village.
As soon as they all had gone, the woman gave birth to a boy. She was very happy. The husband had named his sons by the other woman by the name of the heir, the name he liked best, but she took that name and gave it to her son.
Then she started to go after the others and reached them.
She took a stove, and an iron and said, “The ground has to move and the sky has to move. I have delivered a boy called Durbananti, the one who inherits the land.”
The man saw it and went to his second wife and said, “Your son is no longer Durbananti. That name is for the son of my first wife.”
She was shocked and died.
Degder
Once there were two men who were brothers. One has five boys and one has five girls. Both of their wives had died and they married again. The wife of the man with five girls quarrelled with him and hated his children.
He went away and when he came back she said, “Listen, you, man, husband, you must choose. Either you divorce me, or else you send away your children.”
Then the man said, “I have no relative other than this, so what can I do?”
She said, “If you want me, you must throw these small children away, otherwise I cannot be your wife.”
He accepted and consulted with his brother, saying, “What do I have to do? She said like this.”
His brother said, “You have to keep one, even if you throw the others, and give me also one, and the other three you throw away.”
But the man consulted with his wife again and the wife said, “No, it is impossible. You have to throw all. Otherwise you cannot be my husband.”
Then he accepted her advice and he took all the five children to the bush and they were in the bush, saying, “Our father!”
“Yes,” he said.
“Father!”
Then he made the grunting sound of a camel (camels live in the bush and you know where they are because of their grunting sounds).
So the father grunted like a camel and the children said, “Oh, our father is still here.”
But then he disappeared and ran away.
They called, “Father!” but all they heard was a grunt.
Then they went to look where the camel had been tied to the branch of a tree; the rope was there but the camel was gone and there was no father.
Then the children think, and say, “Father, only by the rope we see there is somebody, but no one else is there except lions and other wild animals.”
So they cry out in a sorrowful poem: “Alas we are alone!”
Then the sun goes down and they see a girl with sheep who is going back to her home, and they said to her, “You! We want to go back to our father, but our father disappeared. Can you take us to your house?”
“Sorry,” she said, “My mother is a degder, that is ‘long ear’. She eats human beings except me. Every night she eats human meat. If I take you to our house, she will eat you.”
“Please,” said the children, “We have nothing, and anyway, wild animals may eat us, so you are our only hope. Just for one night. Tomorrow night we will try to find some other way.”
So the girl said, “Please don’t let her see you. So when the goats go home they will kick up a cloud of dust. You must hide in the cloud of dust among the goats. Then there is a hole in the fence where the goats go through. Stop near the hole and escape through it quickly in the morning.”
So the children did this.
In the evening the degder sniffed the air.
“I smell people.”
The daughter said, “My breast is smelling. It’s me you smell. Do you want to eat me?”
“No! I am your mother. There’s another human.”
“No, it’s your daughter you smell. It’s my breast.”
The degder said, “I want to eat something.”
So the daughter brought her a fat goat and she ate it.
Then she said, “Cut the sheep’s tail and we will eat it. Fry it and put it in my ear because I have an earache.”
But as soon as the daughter put the tail in her ear, she died. As soon as degder died, the girl and all the people she wanted to eat sang:
“Degder has died!
The land now is peaceful.”
The children sang too.
And the men looking for girls to marry came too, and they said:
“Oh! Degder has died!
The land now is peaceful.”
Some of them looked at the biggest daughter who had reached marriage age and said, “We want to marry you.”
But she said, “I have my four little sisters who have nothing, so I can’t marry. I must look after them until they become big.”
So the men wanted to marry degder’s daughter.
But she said, “I am ready, but I will become a degder like my mother when I have had six children. My mother became degder after six children. So you will not like me then.”
But they said, “Whatever you become, we want to marry you.”
So she married and left.
The five girls went to a town and got jobs and became very rich. They earned. They were happy.
Their father and their stepmother had no children and they became too old and too poor. They came to their daughters’ house and begged. When they begged, the littlest girl recognised her father.
“Oh! This is our father! Are you not our father?”
“Yes, I am.”
“So come in.”
So they bathed him and gave him new clothes and he started to live a luxury life. Both were helpless, but they forgave them.
They became rich because the biggest one made injera (a flat, round bread usually made from tef, a grain cultivated in the highlands of Ethiopia), and the little ones went round and sold it in different markets for money.
While they were surviving like that, in the town where they were, was a small hole from which everyone got their water, but in the hole was a big snake. When the snake went down into the hole, people went and took the water. But if they saw the snake they wouldn’t go.
In that hole there was a lot of gold that the snake was guarding. When the people come for water and the snake comes out, the people run away.
But one day the smallest girl went to the well to get water, and the snake caught her and pulled her down into the water, and he mixed soap (Omo) with the water so that it became slippery and she couldn’t get out. The biggest girl became worried when the little one didn’t come home.
“Where is she? Why is she late? Perhaps the snake has caught her and pulled her down into the water!”
So she ran to the well and saw her little sister slipping as she tried to get out of the water. The snake was waiting till she died so it could eat her. But the big sister pulled out the little girl and took her home and made her better.
All night the big sister thought how she could kill the snake. She made a trap and took a sword.
Then when the snake thought, “Maybe the little girl has died now and she’s inside,” he came out of his hole to eat her, and the sword pierced him and he died there.
The big sister came back to check her trap and saw the snake has died. She took it out and took all the gold and they became rich.
The Boy Lion of Fafen
There was once a famous man-eating lion around Fafen. One day he came to the village and took a four or five year-old boy. He took him off into the bush without hurting him at all. And he dropped the boy near his den. The child ran away from the lion into the den where the cubs were living. The cubs didn’t hurt the little boy but began to play with him. And the lioness didn’t hurt him either.
Then when the lion and lioness brought meat for the cubs, the boy took the meat as well and ate with the cubs.
After several days, the lioness was hungry and wanted to kill the boy and eat him but the lion protected him and stopped her. Then he suspected that when he went off hunting people or cattle, the lioness might fall on the boy and eat him, so he didn’t leave the child, but put him on his back and the child rode on him to the bush. The lion put him down there and left him while he hunted for his family, and then when he went back the boy mounted him again and rode back. The lion always did this because he did not trust the lioness.
The cubs didn’t ever try to attack the boy. They were his friends.
The boy lived like this for two years. It happened in Fafen area. I have spoken to people myself who have seen the child.
Anyway, the child said his lion was the king of the lions because he didn’t trust any other lions or his own lioness.
“I was always sitting beside him, and when all the other lions came to his house they have a meeting, sitting around in a circle and discussing something in lion language. The other lions didn’t look at my lion. They just looked at me, and then he made a sign that they should be peaceful, and after that the lions didn’t look hungrily at me and did not try to eat me. “
So the child grew like this, and after two years the lions wanted to go hunting as a group, and the chief lion said to the others, “Wait for me,” and he took the child to the village where he had come from.
Near the village he dropped him and said, “Go home.”
So the child did, and when the lion saw he had entered his village he went back to the bush.
When the people saw the child they said, “Oh! We thought the child has been eaten already by the lion. But he was saved! How is it possible?”
And the child told them everything that had happened. That child is now a big person and he tells everyone his story.
Egal Sheeda
A long time ago there was a man called Egal Sheeda. One day, his bull went to the field of a neighbour and ate his crops. The neighbour came and protested to Egal Sheeda. Egal Sheeda promised that it wouldn’t happen again. But the next day the bull went again and ate from the neighbour’s field.
So the neighbour was very angry and came charging to Egal Sheeda and said, “You promised that your bull would not eat my crops. But today he has done it again.”
So Egal Sheeda said, “As you can see I cannot control the bull. So the only thing I can suggest is that you have to slaughter it.”
So they slaughtered the bull and brought the meat to Egal Sheeda. Egal Sheeda took the beef and went to the market and sold it. And when he returned, he told his neighbours he had sold the beef from the bull and got a lot of money.
So the neighbours were amazed and thought to themselves, “If we could slaughter our bulls and sell their meat, we can get money like Egal Sheeda.”
So they slaughtered all their bulls and went to the market. But that day nobody could sell their beef.
So the neighbours said to themselves, “Egal Sheeda has cheated us, so what shall we do about him?”
They decided to put him in a sack and throw him in the river so that he will die.
They went to Egal Sheeda’s house and grabbed him and put him in a sack. But before throwing him in the river, it was time for them to pray to God. So all the neighbours went to pray.
At this time, a farmer was passing by and he saw this sack sitting by the side of the river. And when he looked at it closely, he found out that a man was in that sack.
So he said, “What are you doing in that sack?”
Egal Sheeda said, “I’m going to be thrown into the river, so that I can bring gold to the town.”
The farmer said, “Let me be the one to bring the gold from the river,” because he wants to get rich.
So Egal Sheeda said, “All right.”
So he came out of the sack and put the farmer inside the sack and went away, taking the farmer’s many sheep and cattle.
Then the neighbours, after their prayer, came to the river and, thinking that Egal Sheeda was still in the sack, they threw it into the river. When they went home, they found Egal Sheeda with so many cattle and sheep, sitting at his home. They were surprised.
They said, “How did you manage to get out of the river? Where did you come from? And where do all these sheep and cattle come from?”
Egal Sheeda said, “You threw me into the river and I found so much gold lying on the river bed. I brought it out and sold it and bought all these sheep and cattle.”
So they said, “If that’s the case, let us all be put in sacks and thrown into the river so that we can get rich like you.”
So he put them in sacks and threw them into the river and they all died and he inherited all their property.