THE FUSION OF AFRICAN AND AMERINDIAN FOLK MYTHS

An Essay from the Archives:
Vol. 16, No. 64 Pages 241–257 (December 1978)

My formal studies of the fusion of African and Amerindian folk myths began when I recreated six folktales I had heard in my childhood for a British Broadcasting Corporation programme. I wrote the six folk stories in dialect and broadcast them on the BBC 3rd Programme. They were entitled: “The Legend of Nameless Mountain”, “Anancy and Tiger”, “The Coming of Amalivaca”, “The Legend of Kaietuk”, “The Children of the Sun”, and “Kaie and Ichillibar”.

I wrote the stories in dialect because they belonged to an oral tradition and I was convinced that writing them in literary English for a broadcast would rob them of a pristine eloquence and clarity.

The dialect of Agricola, my village, was close to singing. In their original form, the stories had to be acted, danced, sung impregnated with hypnotic cadences and tonal magic as the storyteller spun them out for his audience. A good storyteller had to be an actor, a dancer, a bard, a magician with words. Great storytellers, on the other hand, became legendary figures—archetypes looming large between men and gods, the urbane and the demonic, terror and ultimate redemption—they created enduring images in the minds of those who came under their spell.

Agricola, pressed between a wall of rain forest and the muddy east bank of the Demerara River, was a village of 1200 when I was a child. In its small circumference lived the descendants of African slaves, Indian indentured labourers (Hindus and Moslems), native Amerindians, Portuguese from Madeira, a sprinkling of Chinese, and Creoles who were mixtures of all the polyglot races living in Guyana.

Agricola was more than a village, it was a world in microcosm. In the midst of its varied cultures presided over by the official British colonial one, it is remarkable that African and Amerindian folk myths could have fused and survived.

There were two extraordinary prophet-storytellers who hailed from Agricola—Prophet Wills, an ex-schoolmaster and renegade lay preacher, and Jordan, a shoemaker who was the founder and Christ of the Jordanite sect.

Prophet Wills was a wanderer, a nomad, he went from village to village prophesying, denouncing the evil ways of the villagers, making rain in seasons of drought or shouting back floods when the rain gods were too prodigal with their showers. He told his stories obliquely, resurrecting secret gods and devils from a forbidden Afro-Amerindian pantheon. Jordan seldom left Agricola. What he had in common with the Prophet was this: he never hesitated to bring biblical characters into his pagan mythopoetic folk legends—Judas, Amanja, and the Amerindian Kanaima were fused into one, Elijah, Legba, Master of the Crossroads, and Amalivaca, the Christ of the Arawaks, became a composite character. Jordan and Prophet Wills, with their wild and untramelled eloquence, brought legendary figures close enough to the villagers for listeners to feel the breath of characters like Anancy or Pia on their faces as the voices of these two prophet-storytellers brought them to life.

Jordan spun tales of redemption and escape. His serpent-tongue created a promised land which no Elysian Fields could rival, no Garden of Eden could match. He was a masterful creator of images. The reality he invented became more palpable, more real than the tawdry reality of Agricola itself, with its poverty and sickness; its collective claustrophobia induced by a vast forbidding forest pressing the village against the narrow, muddy riverbank.

The prophet was long-legged, wide-shouldered, a towering figure with red eyes that seemed to be fed perpetually by the burning cinders of his private obsessions. Jordan was small and deceptively quiet. He was forever concealing his power like a coiled snake. His voice was usually as gentle as the flutter of hummingbirds’ wings, but there were times when without warning it could thunder like the roll of Apinti drums.

They were both born storytellers and the tales they told were like fantastic coats of many colours adorning austere traditional themes. The themes were the eternal ones of the struggle between the forces of good and evil. The two, the wanderer and the one who never strayed far from his village, were troubadours, archetypal messengers, culture bringers and inspired interpreters who stood between God and the villagers. They were the maestros of the storytelling profession, the spellbinders who attracted crowds of listeners, not in Agricola but everywhere in Guyana that they choose to go. In the village itself, however, there were many anonymous practitioners of the storyteller’s craft, for folk legends were an intrinsic part of the extended family and its culture. In Agricola, with its semi-feudal economy, the extended family was not merely something we had inherited and took for granted, it was a necessary social unit for survival. The family storytellers were invariably older folk—grandparents, great-aunts and uncles or old friends of the family. The children would assemble at bedtime and the tales would be spun out by the Old Ones. The tales would amuse, instruct and at times fill the young listeners with a delicious sense of terror, for the family storytellers were like the maestros, educators handing down cultural secrets from one generation to the other, and instructors in the basic moral and ethical canons by which the family was supposed to live. Many of the tales showed how wrongdoing was punished and virtue rewarded.

When he was a boy, my grandfather told me there were older people who were well known as storytellers, and one of them (they took turns) would walk down the main street of the village after sunset calling the children by their family names to come out. All children of six years and older would answer the summons and assemble under a silk cotton tree (every village had its silk cotton and in the gloaming, its lofty crown seemed to scrape the skies while its vast, buttressed roots provided an almost magical backdrop for the storyteller). In my time, this tradition had been discontinued. I heard my stories from my great-aunt, my douglah nurse (Afro-Amerindian) or at forbidden sessions which Jordan or the Prophet held in cathedral depths of the forest.

It became apparent after I had written The Legend of Nameless Mountain that the story had evolved out of a tradition that was neither purely African nor Amerindian, but essentially Guyanese. Therefore, the Guyanisation of the African and Amerindian folk legends was a phenomenon that I, as inheritor of the end product, had overlooked until I transposed one story from an oral into a written form and examined its symbols, its structure and its meaning for the first time. But let us, at this stage, examine some important elements in the mythopoetic traditions of the two parent cultures—the African and the Amerindian—from which the Guyanese folk myth derived.

The African survivors of the Atlantic crossing, disoriented by the experiences of violent capture, a forced march to the coastal assembly point, the brutal waiting period in barracoons and the crowded journey for two months or longer in the dark, heaving holds of slave ships, arrived in the New World like a person who was born again. The gods they had appealed to had been mute; day and night, light and darkness, time and space had been transformed irrevocably for these dark survivors. The only certainties they knew were that they were still alive after the trauma of being violently uprooted; that sea-drums pounding in their brain for months had wiped out every familiar sound that they had ever known. In the New World, the newcomers had to reconstruct the entire fabric of myth and reality for themselves. Fortunately for the uprooted African, their folk myths, with very few exceptions, are impregnated with realism, and myth and religion were fruit from the same tree. Their gods, devils, mythological archetypes were in a profound sense organic entities in a Human World, and, in the African tradition, they were held accountable at all times to the communities that acknowledged them. This symbiotic relationship between people, gods and folk archetypes gave to the New World African a cultural resilience that made a significant contribution to his survival. Besides, the African brought with him, regardless of the mosaic of cultural groups from which he derived, a built-in ethic which bound him first, as a stranger in a strange land, to study and respect the host culture before he established elements of his own. This gave to the children of the African diaspora a means of surviving anywhere in order to do this. When the African arrived in the New World, he knew that the European who had brought him there was a usurper who had seized the land of the Indians, desecrated the graves and the altars of their ancestors, and sent countless of the ones who had welcomed them to the Forest of the Long Night. It was clear to the African slaves that in order to escape the terrible retribution that was certain to overtake their masters, they had to make peace with both the living and the dead in this new land. Their meeting with their Indian hosts was, therefore, a matter of profound cultural importance. The African had to recreate his vision of himself in the universe after being violently uprooted and brought to the New World as a slave and he knew that without the help and active collaboration of the Indian this would not have been possible. To use his master’s eyes to see himself and the world and to even appear to be an accomplice in his atrocious deeds would have left him, the African, with a permanent heritage of self-hatred, distorted self-images and guilt. In order to reconstruct his ontological system, the African was compelled by the logic of his own cultural past to establish relations with his Indian host independent of the white man. But it was the white man who created the meeting-points. At the beginning of the Columbian era, both Indians and Africans were enslaved.

In 1502 Ovando, the Governor of Hispaniola, introduced the first Africans to the domains he ruled. In 1505 Herrera, the New World’s first Spanish historian, tells us there was a major slave rebellion in which Indians and Africans joined forces against a common enemy. That this kind of united effort should have taken place after having known each other for only three years seems extraordinary, and it certainly baffled Herrera. Ovando, reacting to this and to other rebellions in nearby San Juan de Puerto Rico, wrote home to Spain suggesting that no more Wolofs (a general name given to Africans who were Moslems) be sent to the New World since “they walked rebelliously through the land” and no sooner had they set foot in the Indies than “they [began] to disaffect the Indians”. Neither Herrera nor Ovando seemed to have been aware of the fact that the African and Amerindian cultures were complementary ones; that for both of these peoples the land, the fields, the mountains and valleys could never be the object of private ownership; the life of the people was determined by the life of plants and animals, that is, by the life of the environmental surroundings which are in turn ruled by the rhythm of seasons. The Nature they conceived of was one animated by vital hidden forces of which man is but a part that must abide by their harmonious order. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Indians of North America could have been speaking for Africans and Amerindians everywhere when he said,

The earth was created by the assistance of the sun, and it should be left as it was…the measure of the land and the measure of our bodies is the same…. The one who has the right to dispose of land is the one who created it....

It was from this united vision of man and his environment that Africans and Amerindians created their profound cultural accommodations.

Both Amerindians and Africans saw themselves as part of a Human World which existed in stasis, and in the quietude of this state, future time hardly existed at all. If people occasionally erupted out of stasis, they disintegrated only to be reborn into the world-balanced-in-suspense which they left.

In the Mayan Popol Vuh, one of the most lucid and sophisticated genesis myths of the Americas, the states of stasis, disintegration and rebirth are clearly defined.

This is the story of how everything was in suspense, everything becalmed, wrapped in silence, everything immobile, silent and empty in the vastness of the sky.

This is the first account, the first reasoned utterance. There was neither man, nor animals, nor birds, fishes, crabs, trees, stones, caves, ravines, herbs nor forests; only the sky existed.

The surface of the earth had not appeared, there was only the calmness of the sea and the sky stretching into infinity.

Nothing made a sound, nothing moved or shifted or made any noise in the sky.

There was nothing standing erect, only the water sleeping, the sea, becalmed, solitary and tranquil. Nothing had the gift of existence.

There was only immobility and silence in the darkness, in the night. Only the Creator, the Originator, Tepeu, Gucumatz, the progenitors, were in the water surrounded by an indefinite translucency. They were concealed under green and blue feathers, that is why they called Gucumatz. It was their nature to be great and wise men, great thinkers. In this way the sky came to be and also the Heart of Heaven which is the name of God and the way he is called.

Then the word came into being. Tepeu and Gucumatz met in the darkness of the night, and they talked to each other and meditated; they reached an agreement, marshalling their words into thoughts.1

At this stage, when words were put together to create thoughts, the gods then abandoned the silence and their contemplative posture and set revolutionary changes in motion. But they were all creative changes. The Mayan worldview in this genesis myth is one that conceives of change but not of destruction. The story continues:

Then while they meditated, it was clearly manifested to them that at dawn man should appear. So they decided on the creation and the growth of trees and bees and the birth of life and the creation of man. This was resolved in the darkness and in the night by the Heart of Heaven called Hurricane.

The first is called Cacuhla Hurricane. The second is Chipe-Caculha. The third is Ruxa-Caculha. And the three are the Heart of Heaven.

Tepeu and Gucumatz then came together, and they conferred about life, and the light of existence; they decided on how daylight and dawn would come to pass and who should produce food and nourishment.2

The Mayans saw the creation of earth and the creation of man as almost simultaneous events.

“Let it come to pass! Let the emptiness be fllled! Let the water recede and empty the space. Let the earth break forth and settle.” Thus they spoke. “Let day come. Let the dawn break in the sky and over the earth! There will be no glory or greatness in our creation and formation until the human being exists, until man is formed.” Thus they spoke.3

The Popol Vuh continues in measured mythopoetic tones to show how all living creatures came to live on earth. It tells of how Man was first made the equal of the Creators, the Heart of Heaven and the Heart of the Earth. But, because this left Man knowing and seeing all things, it made him indifferent to the challenge of new creations, of propagation and the knowledge of change. Therefore

Heart of Heaven blew his breath in their eyes which misted as when one blows upon the surface of a mirror. Their eyes became blurred and they could only see what was near to them.4

This then was the first cataclysmic change to overtake Man, the first in what was to be an eternal cycle. The Africans, after one examines a great variety of their myths, do not on the whole share the almost universal preoccupation of Amerindians with the creation of the world. But the Popol Vuh, nevertheless, is close to African mythopoetic traditions. For African myths are impregnated with realism and in them gods and men are never far apart, and the former are eternally responsible to the people they both rule and serve. The genesis myth of the Amerindians around Lake Titicaca, for example, who saw the world beginning when the Great Serpent stirred in the depths of the sea, makes the whole conceptual framework of creators and creation far more abstract than that of the Popol Vuh. One of the West African myths which tells of the creation of men and not of the world was preserved by the Maroons of Jamaica.

Once the earth was created, the story goes, Damballa, one of the senior members of the pantheon of gods, created men by baking cakes. The burnt cakes were the ancestors of black men, those that were neither well baked nor underdone were the ancestors of brown men, while white men were sired by cakes Damballa neglected to bake at all. This story is also told by Amerindians in Guyana, but in their version they claim that the brown cakes, the most perfect ones, were their ancestors. One suspects that this particular version could well be Carib since Caribs are obsessed with a persistent fantasy of being a chosen people.

The Popol Vuh with its muted abstractions and its mythopoetic statements made with the clarity of a message sent by talking drums, was perhaps one of the first profoundly successful attempts to make the universe coherent and intelligible by the children of an Asian diaspora who had been wanderers in the Americas for so long.

The African, coming from a continent in which Homo sapiens made his appearance, had a longer and more continuous experience of belonging to a homeland than any other peoples. He carried in him mankind’s original memories. To have survived the savageries of slavery in the New World, to have retained essential elements of his African culture while at the same time quickly adjusting to and assimilating new ones—Amerindian, European, and in some instances Asian—remain a unique and miraculous achievement.

The slave from Africa and his descendants assimilated elements of European culture rapidly enough to ensure not only his own survival in the New World but also that of Amerindians and, later, of the minorities of colour like East Indians, Chinese, Afro-Portuguese from the Azores and others like the Indonesians in Suriname as well.

The legend of the Third Gift offers profound insights into the role of cultural intermediary and, in some cases, culture bringer that the African played in the New World. This legend was brought to the Canje River district of Guyana by members of the Ejau tribe. The Ejaus, an extraordinarily creative and gifted people, lived mostly in the Niger River basin in what is now Nigeria. They are fishermen, farmers, hunters and are famous for their skills in making weapons. It was a source of pride that the Ejau could have his weapons for hunting made to order—a stabbing knife, a cutting knife, a spear with the balance and feel of a precision instrument, or bows and arrows shaped like living extensions of the body, the arm the mind’s eye.

The Third Gift really deals with the symbolic and actual transition from a nomadic stage to one of permanent settlement. The legend tells us of a weary, itchy-rooted people driven by epochs of drought, hunger and destitution to a green place at the foot of a high mountain. The prophet who leads them there dies as soon as they begin to settle down. But, before he dies, he tells his people that they must send all the men of the tribe up the mountain, and the one who climbs to the highest point and brings back a gift for the people should be made Chief. In the young men’s first sally up the mountain, the one who climbed the highest brought back a shining stone—a marvel of indented surfaces and colours, and this stone was the symbol of the gift of work, for with it they could shape and sharpen their tools. The second gift that a young man brought back was a flower, symbol of beauty. But, implicit in this legend is the suggestion that, between the gifts of work and beauty was language, and language was not a gift but a necessary skill tied to the work-act. The spoken word becomes necessary when group activities—like ploughing, sowing, harvesting and the other varied and complex communal tasks—have to be coordinated.

In the legend, too, beauty and function were synonymous—girls wore flowers in their hair, the prows of canoes and doors had flowers sculpted on them. But, after having received the gifts of work and beauty, the people were still restless. They were still vulnerable to the primordial impulse to wander that nomads have buried in their beings. So, when the young men set out up the mountain for the third time, they knew that the one who climbed the highest had to bring back a gift that would be the most important of all. The winner of this contest of endurance and skill brought back the gift of fantasy, of imagination, of faith. He breached ramparts of Heaven above the clouds and reached the snow-capped peak of the mountain. Once there, he tried to bring back a handful of snow. But it melted on the way down to the warm plains. So, using words creatively for the first time, he painted a picture of the wonders he had seen, and the magic he imparted to the word made it possible for his people to share vicariously in what only gods had had a divine right to experience before the telling of this story.

In the legend Ika, the bringer of the Third Gift, tells us,

“I went up to the clouds and over and above them, and I don’t know how long it took because past the clouds was a brightness that blinded my eyes. Then, there came a time when all I felt was a soft carpet under my feet, and when I breathed in the mountain air, it was like drawing knife blades up my nostrils. When my sight came back, I found myself on the mountain top….”

“Lord! You must have seen the whole world from there, Ika!” a young man exclaimed.

“Yes, and while I stood up there, a soft white thing like rain started to fall…and yet it wasn’t rain because it fell like leaves when there is no wind. I gathered this downy whiteness in my hand, but the further down the mountainside I ran, the less of it I was holding, so I went back for more and ran down the mountain again. Four times I did this, and every time I was heading for home bird-speed, this magic thing melted in my hand. All I bring with me now is the memory of it, the feel of the sky and the bite of the wind…and the fire and ice burning my hand.”

And the people listening believed, for this quiet young man, when he did speak, could warble like singing-birds-sweet, and when he spoke, his words would grow inside your head like seeds.

Ika became prophet of the Jubas, for he had brought the best gift of all, the gift of Fantasy, of Imagination and of Faith. So, with the gifts of Work and Beauty and Imagination, the Jubas became poets and bards and creators, and they live at the foot of Nameless Mountain to this day.5

Fire and endless movement were eternal realities in the Amerindian cosmology and also constant factors in both the Amerindian myth and actuality. The bringer of fire to man in Amerindian myth, however, is not a cosmic figure like Prometheus, but Wao-uno, the white crane, a fragile and vulnerable creature.

When we delve into the primordial memories buried deep in the most ancient culture-stratum in the Americas, we discover Pia and Makunaima, the Children of the Sun, at once the most typical and most universal creations of Amerindian mythology. Paul Radin, commenting on this, writes:

the Children of the Sun! It is clearly recognizable despite many transformations. How, we may indeed ask, did this favourite story of the Southwest of the United States, of the Pawnee and Arikara or Nebraska and North Dakota, of the Winnebago of Wisconsin, come here?6

And by “here” he meant the Guyana Highlands, and the sacred mountain Roraima-of-the-red-rock. Perhaps the answer is that, in the millenniums that go back into prehistory, the original inhabitants of both North and South America had discovered how accessible these continents had always been from within, so that the migratory waves that carried the myth with them had woven it into a broad, cohesive and indestructible cultural matrix which remains miraculously intact to this day.

Pia and Makunaima, the legend goes, learned the art of making fire from Crane, having seen him strike his beak against a flint and the friction send off a shower of sparks. So, in the instant of seeing this almost capricious act of Crane’s, the Children of the Sun discovered the gift of Fire, and set out to perform gigantic tasks as builders, creators and culture-heroes.

The brothers placed huge rocks in all the rivers to detain the fishes: the rocks thus placed caused the great waterfalls. Crane was at first accustomed to catch his own fish, but finding Pia and Makunaima more successful fishermen after the river had been dammed, kept near to them and took their fish.7

Having brought the gift of Fire to man, and having tamed the rivers, Pia and Makunaima set out on a long journey with their mother, and when she became tired they took her to the vast and spacious tableland on the summit of Roraima, and this became her final home. After leaving his mother at the top of Roraima, the legend continues,

[t]hen came a change of occupation for Pia. He abandoned the hunt as the sole or principal occupation of his life, and travelled from place to place teaching the Indians many useful and good things.8

It is at this point that Pia assumes his stature as a culture hero. He evolves from the hunting stage, and having done this, he begins to codify the gains that have been made and to advance toward new achievements. He becomes a teacher, a prophet, a magician. But, in the midst of all these transformations, he must remain close to the roots of life. He does this through his Earth Mother. For, although he disappeared finally from men, he first remained a while with his mother on Roraima. And when he was about to depart, he told her that all her wishes for good would come true if she bowed her head and covered her face with her hands while she made her wish. This she does to this day, for

[w]henever the mother of these two heroes of our race is sorrowful, there arises a storm in the mountain, and it is her tears, that run down in streams from the heights of Roraima.9

Pia then became the father of all prophet-priests in the Americas. He is the ancestor of the piaimen. They are his spiritual descendants, the inheritors of this mythopoetic dreams. It is significant that Pia and Makunaima, the original culture-heroes of all the Americas, built the culture of this hemisphere on foundations of creative labour. Their first mission as culture- bringers was to transform the world for the benefit of all, and in the process to change their own natures. The acts of creative labour which they performed made it impossible to sit idly on the heights of Roraima with their mother. So, they returned to the human world where they would remain forever.

They thus established forever indissoluble links between the spiritual and material worlds.

Marx, in Volume I of Das Kapital, described labour in a way that would have made the Children of the Sun qualify as the first Heroes of Labour in the Americas. He wrote:

Labour is in the first place a process in which both man and nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates and controls between himself and nature. He opposes himself to nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms, legs, heads, the natural forces of his body in order to appropriate nature’s production in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same tine changes his own nature.10

It is against the background of the primordial myth of the Children of the Sun that the cruel and fantastic reality of the Columbian history of the Americas unfolded itself. And yet this myth, buried under borrowed cosmologies, must be resurrected if a genuine liberation of all classes and races in the hemisphere must take place. The indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Africans who joined them, at a stratum of destitution which pressed down upon them both like an incubus, shared at a psychic level a respect for the sun which bordered on terror. In the cosmologies of both peoples, the sun was cruel and the darkness kind. The symbols of the two peoples—black and white, darkness and light—were the opposite to what they had become in the European cosmology. White was for Africans and Amerindians alike, the colour of devils or of nemesis. On the other hand, it was in the cool darkness of the womb, the Forests of the Long Night, the Rivers of Night that men and gods found peace and sustenance.

In the plethora of Amerindian tales about the Children of the Sun, neither Pia and Makunaima nor their mother are acknowledged by Father Sun as kith and kin. Mother and sons live in the Human World while Sun lives in the wide indifference of the sky.

But, although Sun remains aloof from his sons and their mother in the myth, his organic links with man and his endless seasons of creative labour remain a constant. For Sun, even though he is distant, remains a pivotal and living element, the embodiment of movement and fire and a fantastic reality in the endless cycle of seasons. The Amerindian worldview is shaped by a dominant cultural impulse to merge with all living things around him. His art and crafts, his religion and ritual are collective enterprises that link him to a world within a cosmos. It is in this context that his links with Sun are established. Sun journeys daily across the sky. “Sun,” says the Guyanese poet A. J. Seymour, “is a burning fire turning on air,” and then the poet adds: “Sun’s in my blood today.” Seymour is, in his poem to the sun, echoing the Akan belief that the original life cell

is a divine element—a created thing which God has made for man and which he gave him as a gift, as it were[,] they believe that God, whom they sometimes call Nyankopon, shoots a particle of the sun’s fire into the bloodstream of the child, thus bringing the blood to life.11

Sun is, therefore, a dialectical entity in Amerindian and African beliefs: it is distant and yet it’s in the blood: It is a godlike being, and yet it has anthropomorphic links with the human world; and with the Amerindians, its most fundamental links are created through its eternal cycles of movement and its offspring Pia and Makunaima. The legend tells us, too, that the godlike remote Sun sweats, and that gold is the Sun’s sweat. Gold, for the Amerindian, was not in itself a sacred metal; rather it was a soft and plastic metal which could be used to sculpt sacred objects. The value of the gold lay in its being transformed through man’s genius and his reverence for the Sun into objects of worship.

The conquistadors melted down the sacred sculpture of the Amerindians with such greedy haste that the spiritual heirs of Pia and Makunaima, the priests and the magicians, accused them of “raping the sun”. It is interesting that the principal setting of the legend of El Dorado, the Golden City, was the Guyana Highlands, which extend to all points of the compass from Roraima. Roraima-of-the-red-rock—the ever fertile source of streams—is how the Amerindians address the sacred mountain in their poem-hymns.

From the summit of Roraima, it is as if all the vast spaces of the South American Continent are willing to reveal their secrets to you. One sees the limitless vistas of the heartland—the Llanos, the Pakaraima, Kanaku, Rupununi and Akarai sierras, and the forests like a petrified green ocean leading to the secret junction of the Orinocco and Amazon rivers.

This region, the Amerindians say, devours men and their dreams when the dreams are out of tune with the spaces around them.

It was in this region that Pia and Makunaima came to the parting of the ways. Pia became the prophet of hope, the purveyor of all things positive, the spiritual ancestor of the priest, the magician, the piaiman. Makunaima, his twin brother, on the other hand became the archetypal figure of evil, the spiritual ancestor of Kanaima. Kanaima is in the Amerindian cosmology the ultimate embodiment of evil, a symbol of terror, nemesis stalking human beings in cool forests of the night; he can transform himself into an animal, a reptile, a bird or a ball of fire.

This dialectical situation of the good Pia opposing the evil Makunaima is common to the foremost mythological archetypes of both the African and the Amerindian. The African equivalent to Pia and Makunaima is B’ra Anancy, the Spiderman. He is the embodiment of both good and evil, for in African religion and philosophy good and evil are in the eyes of the beholder and not necessarily in separate persons, objects or things where one is juxtaposed against the other. But Anancy as a trickster, the other side of Anancy the godlike figure, the rainmaker, the lightning rod, the thunder-axe, the guardian of the rainbow, is more benign than Kanaima, and it was as a benign and supremely clever trickster that he was brought by West Africans to the New World. For the uprooted slave the hard-pressed post-emancipation black peasant and those Amerindians whose destinies had become inextricably bound up with the black peoples—the black Caribs, the Seminoles, the Caribs of Dominica and those Afro-Amerindian communities on the vast littoral from Peru on the Pacific to Southern Brazil on the Atlantic—Anancy, with his agile brain and his invincible instinct for survival, became the foremost symbol of wish fulfillment. For Anancy the trickster, no matter how impossible the odds against him seemed to be or how mighty his opponents, inevitably came out on top, winning for himself food, women, land, respect and liberty without the cruel tasks that those escaping with him vicariously were compelled to perform for such trifling rewards.

B’ra Anancy, the Spiderman, God or Trickster, is an African archetype who finally linked man to all things in the universe. The choice of the spider as an archetype fits perfectly into the cosmological visions of the African peoples. The spider is shaped like the sun or like a wheel. The sun is a giver of life whilst the wheel is the most important of man’s inventions. Thus the spider is a symbol of man’s link with time, space, the mysteries of Nature and man’s creative labour. Wiener writes:

In Africa the spider is connected with an enormous number of tales. And among the Hausas, the rainbow is called “bakan gizzo” literally “the spider’s bow”, which indicates the relation which the divinities that came down from heaven bear to the spider. Indeed since the spider is the king of cunning and craftiness, all fables are told in his name.

An important point to note about Anancy, is that his bow, the rainbow, is called “Gajjimare”, god of rain and storms which has the shape of a snake “and is double gendered, the male part being red, the female blue...it lives in the storm clouds but is supposed to come out at night and is also said to inhabit all watering places…so a pot is kept full in every house.”12

Anancy, the trickster or god, was a para-symbolical figure, and hence a mythological archetype that could be transplanted in spite of the most daunting challenges. Anancy, the king of all cunning, linked as he was with all things human and divine, could stretch his bow, the Rainbow Serpent, across the Atlantic, and find there new watering places.

Anancy’s Rainbow Serpent had the same symbolic and mystical meaning for the Hausas, the Mandingos or the Bambara peoples of West Africa that Quetzalcoatl, the Shining Serpent, had for the Toltecs or the Mexicas of Mexico. The snake, a symbol of fertility, strength, mystery or terror, threads its way through the myths of Africa and the Americas. The Amerindians around Lake Titicaca believed that the world was created when the Snake God, stirring in the murky depths of the ocean, raised the earth on his back.

In parts of the Guyanas and the Caribbean islands, Anancy the godlike figure merged into the Amenindian piaiman, the Patamoona Blow-man and sorcerer, or else he fused with West African gods, like Legba, Master of the Crossroads, Shango, Damballa, or Obi-Myal. For the sons and daughters of the African diaspora, there was no single figure like Kanaima embodying the ultimate in evil, but there was Obeia, an aberrant cult of evil whose practitioners were regarded as pariahs and outcasts in Guyana and the Eastern Caribbean, although the original West African god Obi was a symbol of both evil and good. The myal cult in Jamaica is the more positive side in the Obi-Myal religion which was transplanted in a sundered form in the Eastern Caribbean and Guyana.

Anancy the trickster became the most popular folk hero for black peoples everywhere south of the United States. Afro-American adopted Brer Rabbit and Brer Tortoise, mythological archetypes from East Africa. There is even a folk tale in the American South in which Brer Rabbit wins out in a contest with Anancy, as if to mark, symbolically, the boundary beyond which the King of Tricksters could not trespass.

Language played an important part in forging the powerful links that were to bind the Amerindian and black peoples together. The African, creating functional oral languages out of the sophisticated and class-oriented European ones, was able to give to the Amerindian enough of the colonizer’s language to ensure his survival. The Caribs of Dominica, the only survivors of this courageous people in the Caribbean archipelago, no longer speak their own language. Only the older people have retained some words and phrases, but they all speak a French patois, taught them not by the French or the English, but by the black peoples of Dominica and the neighbouring islands with whom the Caribs have been in continuous contact for more than four centuries.

Caliban, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, accused Miranda, “You taught me language,” and indeed he could well have explained that the initial teacher of a language is in a position to make it an inheritance for bondage or for liberty. And Prospero the cunning, the cruel, the eloquent colonizer and his daughter Miranda were interested in a monopoly of liberty for themselves at Caliban’s expense. The Calibans of the Americas made of Prospero’s language an inheritance for liberty, not only for themselves but for Amerindians and all the oppressed races and classes that were to settle in this hemisphere.

For the African slave in the New World the myth became more heightened, more palpably real, more necessary to his survival. Somewhere in his psyche was an eternal dream of returning home and rejoining the spirits of his ancestors, and because of this his mythological archetypes were transformed to meet the new challenges.

Brer Rabbit and Tortoise were important folk archetypes from East and Central Africa which took root in North America. Brer Rabbit was in his African homeland Sungura the Hare. It is interesting that a millennium earlier Aesop, an African slave who had won his freedom because of his wit and his agile brain, had immortalized the Hare and the Tortoise in one of his fables.

Aesop’s original name was Luqman. He was a famous creator of fables in the Arab world, and is mentioned with respect by Muhammad in the twenty-first chapter of the Koran. Luqman was said to have been an Ethiopian, that is, a Negro slave. His stories were passed on to Greece where he became known as Aithiops. Aesop is the end product of the false assumption that Luqman’s name and country of origin were the same.

The mythological archetypes which took root in the Americas, Brer Rabbit and Tortoise in North America and Brer Anancy in the Caribbean archipelago and parts of South and Central America, were symbols of cunning and invincibility in the face of terrible odds.

A vivid symbol of this invincibility can be found in the Tar-Baby, a famous character in the Uncle Remus stories of the Afro-American. Tar-Baby is an archetypal symbol of the oppressed—black and indestructible, endowed with the strength and powers of resistance of both the male and the female. Its tormentors were themselves worn out raining blows upon its head and in the end the aggressor becomes the victim. Tar is black, plastic, capable of being poured into any mould; the harder it becomes, the more vulnerable it is, the more easily it can be pounded into dust; its strength lies in appearing to be soft and yielding. Finally, after it is pounded into dust, it can be melted down and returned to a pristine plastic form.

The Tar-Baby tale type, we have often been told, is of Amerindian origin, but it is one of those tales that has prototypes in both African and Amerindian folklore. The Africans brought to the New World as their particular prototype a wax-girl. Professor Van Sertima tells of how the Temme of West Africa believe that Anancy, the Spiderman, owes his grotesque shape to an encounter with the wax-girl. He became stuck to her and had to be forcibly detached.

The wax-girl and the Tar-Baby fused into one and the same symbol for both Amerindian and African in the face of the coloniser’s depredations.

For slaves anxious to conceal their persistent longing for freedom, the animal story was a perfect vehicle. To those unschooled in the subtleties of an oral tradition in which speech inflections, facial expression, gesture and the infinite variety of feelings that wove themselves in and out of the storyteller’s narrative, animal stories could easily be dismissed as infantile, but because of this, political, historical and cultural messages could be more safely woven into a seemingly amusing or innocuous story. The storyteller could also implant in every tale the idea of the moral right of the weak to struggle against the mighty by any means necessary.

For the slave the rabbit was a communal creature, swift, fragile, cunning, its habit of procreation legendary. It had survived down the ages when stronger and more ferocious enemies had in their pride rushed into extinction. The rabbit, too, was gentle, loyal, loving. Although each warren was a fortress unto itself, it lived and survived in groups. Its fear was so terrible that it could cause its death. On the other hand, this habit of fear made it acutely sensitive to all vibrations in air and land and sky. And whenever it conquered its fear and fought back, its rage was so sudden, so unexpected that predators with ten times its strength would pull back and in that instant of hesitation give it a final chance to escape. And finally it could adapt to any conditions of climate or geography and become an organic part of the rhythms of life, procreation and death in any environment in which it found itself.

The most important feature about the tortoise is its hard protective shell into which it can retreat and hide from most of its enemies. It is slow but has phenomenal endurance on land or in water. It is most vulnerable when it is uprooted. The eagle, its most formidable enemy, must carry it aloft and dash it to pieces on the rocks. It is a plodding, secretive creature, slow to anger, and deliberately acting the part of a buffoon so that its enemies could leave it alone or underestimate its strength and cunning. The only time that it is swift and graceful is when it is swimming underwater. But on land it is a creature of the Antaeus legend, strongest when its feet are planted firmly on the earth. Sometimes its whole bearing gives one the impression that it is immeasurably sad, as though it was burdened with the griefs of all other living creatures.

The folk archetypes etched on the palimpsest of my mind were the creations of gifted storytellers—the maestros and the family practitioners of the craft—and these stories form an important part of the spectrum through which I view the modern world.

When I took my swift journey from Agricola into the twentieth century, one that spanned a distance in time of three centuries, these stories helped me to survive the awesome psychological and social pressures that beset me. Today, the extended family in Agricola is dissolving, and smaller, disconnected and impersonal family units are taking its place. In this changing situation, the traditional storyteller is becoming an endangered species. There are still a few old people who remember the stories but the youth, preoccupied with other concerns, no longer listen to them.

Ivan Forrester, a poet, painter, musician and storyteller, is probably the last great exponent of the dying art. He is nearing middle age, and, in the tradition of Prophet Wills who died decades ago, wanders restlessly up and down the country, but in a very real sense he is prophet without honour in his own country and after him it is unlikely that there will be other storytellers of the same genre.

The Amerindians, who until recently functioned from isolated and often nomadic communities in the Guyana hinterland, are now having their forest sanctuaries violated. Their journey into the twentieth century, a longer one in time and distance than the people of Agricola had to take, is equally precipitate, and as far as the survival of their folk myths is concerned, disastrous. The extended family, which was also a built-in fact of life in their communities—one made up traditionally of families, clans and tribes—is also dissolving, and what is crystalliasing is an aberrant social growl.

The fusion of Afro-Amerindian folk myths, a matter of enormous cultural significance in the New World, offers us an opportunity to view the entire Columbian era through a spectrum of the Human World. The storyteller and the story were synonymous when the oral tradition was the one through which the indigenous culture was handed down from generation to generation. The stories now have to be transposed into a written form not just as dull ethnographical material for scholars but as living artistic creations.

 

1. Suni Paz, Popol Vuh. Unpublished translation.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Jan Carew, The Third Gift (Boston: Little Brown, 1975).
6. Radin, Indians of South America.
7. Radin.
8. Radin.
9. Radin.
10. Karl Marx, Das Kapital.

11   James H. Neal, Ju-Ju in My Life (George G. Harrap & Co).

12. Weiner, Africa and the Discovery of America, Vol. 2.