Tale
The Ewe People
Ewe gliwo
Anonymous · 1906
Synopsis
In the fables the Ewe told one another at evening gatherings, the spider Yiyi surpasses all the beasts of the bush in courage and cunning: she tricks the leopard by borrowing his garment soaked in honey, the elephant whose ear she wears like a garment before eating it, and even the chief, from whom she extracts money that she never returns; yet it is through her that wounds and death entered the world. Around her pass her daughter Yiyisa, seven hunters, three orphans, God, the antelope and the hyena.
Context
These fables were recorded in Ewe and translated into German by Jakob Spieth, a missionary of the Bremen Mission, and published in Berlin in 1906 in Die Ewe-Stämme, a work of nearly a thousand pages devoted to the Ewe peoples of German Togo, where they stand alongside the origin accounts and traditions of each people. Spieth notes that in the evening, by the fire, people first told the history of families and clans, and readily fables. An English translation of the work appeared in 2011. Even today, the audience interrupts the Ewe storyteller with songs which it takes up.
Who it is for
Brief fables in a bilingual edition, Ewe facing German, within a work of ethnography; a complete English translation exists.
Prizes and reception
The main early source of the Ewe fable; the work that contains it is still authoritative, even in chieftaincy disputes.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.