(Part II)
A society will achieve only what it aspires to with its collective imagination. Only dreaming and imagining will help us survive. When man gradually lost the habit of attending to his ancestral stories, he became alienated from nature, from himself and from the intuitive divine within. He will lose grip of the true pulse of nature.
The sincerest stories resonate from unknown and unknowable territory. It is our eternal yearning to reach such a heavenly realm and feel satisfied. It is there where the divine resides. It is there where our dreams and nightmares sprang, wrestled and ushered towards us. I sometimes thought there must be some nuanced drive that led us to the wilderness and the remote deserts.
During ancient times man was a child of purity, an imperturbable creature who quietly accepted his fleeting fate. He was like every other creature, like an ant, a spider, a tortoise, a butterfly anything; fortunate yet vulnerable, full of bliss and misery; being left with his fate for hunting, gathering, hiding, playing the fool in the deep and vast desert circle and in the jungle. However he was content in the face of nature with all those misfortunes. Indeed, man was an innocent being like the angels in the wilderness.
The ancient wisdom of humanity is kept in the form of stories. A story resides in the soul. A story seems verity, a doctrine. But for those who misunderstand it, it could be a crime, a curse. Yet to appreciate the soulful story one shall be born again in the spirit. There is no short route in this divination process. You should face the monotonous vast desert and make it out to achieve some sort of purified soul and elevated spirit. That must be what we lacked as a society in our modern era.
In the desert sphere, instinct is nobler and guiding than intellect. Tribal stories portray a virtue, a kind of unsurpassed credence in our innate self. Man recalls it from within — he never invented it. Hence, it is the medium of eternity. Stories are our version, our essence, our being, and our every authentic aspect. Especially for desert tribes, storytelling is a life line.
I have read a story of one unfortunate San tribe man named Kabbo [Oud Jantje Tooren] (1815-1876), a victim of colonization in the late 19th century in South Africa. This pitiful old man was caught by colonizers and criminalized as a rustler and thrown into jail. After serving a few months in a prison, a German Philologist Dr. Wilhelm Bleek approached and relocated him to his residence in the suburb of Mowbray to help them record his San people stories, mythologies, and folktales for three years. The German took Kabbo home as a prisoner and servant with a restricted freedom.
He lived with Dr. Bleek for three years, helping him ensure that his people’s stories and memories were collected and filed well. 12,000 pages of the San people’s stories, fables, and legends manuscripts were recorded. Today UNESCO regards those manuscripts among the rare written heritages of mankind.
But Kabbo was constantly alien creature amongst strangers who were not accustomed to his desertish impulses. He was devastated; simply because he was a child of simplicity.
One evening when the Moon, the desert beacon loomed over the horizon he expressed his sincere wish and ardent zeal to return to his home only for the sake of attending his people’s stories. Kabbo as any other desert man couldn’t resist the subtle coquettish illumination of the evening moon. For centuries, the desert tribes shared stories under the bluish glow of the moon, around the fireplace till dawn.
That evening, Kabbo forgot that he was captive as a rustler and expressed his cordial desire to return to the desert and attend his tribe stories:
“Thou knowest that I sit waiting for the moon to turn back for me, that I may return to my place. That I may listen to all the people’s stories, when I visit them; that I may listen to their stories, that which they tell; they listen to the Flat Bushmen’s stories from the other side of the place. They are those which they thus tell, [1 with the stories of their own part of the country too.]
They are listening to them; while the other !Xoe-ssho-!kui (the sun) becomes a little warm, that I may sit in the sun; that I may sitting, listen to the stories which yonder come (?), which are stories which come from a distance.[2 kabbo explains that a story is “like the wind, it comes from a far-off quarter, and we feel it.”] Then; I shall get hold of a story from them, because they (the stories) float out from a distance; while the sun feels a little warm; while I feel that I must altogether visit; that I may be talking with them, my fellow men.
(…) My fellow men are those who are listening to stories from afar, which float along; they are listening to stories from other places. For, I am here; I do not obtain stories; because I do not visit, so that I might hear stories which float along; while I feel that the people of another place are here; they do not possess my stories.”
The San people are among the oldest and rarest surviving tribes on the planet with the tongue of the earliest remarkable click language. They still grapple to exist as hunters and gatherers in the deep Kalahari Desert. They had been facing myriads of complications since the crude slavery times. Some two centuries ago, colonizers arrived and intruded into their sacred desert territory with strange regulations. Before the intrusion of colonizers San people were liberated creatures who had never experienced restrictions and who roam freely in the desert wild circle where the world stretches to the extremes of the stars, where everything is rare but free.
The desert tribe man is a patron of nature. If he sat to feed his meal under a bush or in his farm, initially he sprinkled tiny pieces of food three times in different directions. It is a sign of obedience, reverence, sharing, and remembering. It may seem like paganic worship or backwardness, but that is how the magic of dancing harmonically with the impulse of nature works.
The desert peasants saw the last handful of grains at their disposal and innocently waited for the rain. They were bound to accept their fate and what nature destined for them. Their sole struggle was with the soil; nothing more. They made all their dishes and utensils from clay, the soil… For them, God isn’t there above in the sky: but he is here beneath the soil. For the peasants everything valuable is here in the soil.
There was no limit to the imaginative stretch of their stories. I remember a very imaginative and profound Japanese story about a king and a skillful painter. It reads as follows –
Once upon a time in Japan, the king gathered all the skillful painters in the country and requested them to paint for him a REAL painted door. Everyone refused except one daring painter. He requests the king for two things – sufficient time and a guarantee that no one will look at what he is doing until it is done.
He was granted what he requested and began painting. It took him six years to consummate it in an isolated room. Finally when the king was in his late years he declared finishing the painting and took the king to that mysterious room to show that real painted door.
After entering through that real painted door, it is said that the two had vanished and never returned back.
Like the above piece of story, every tale is a magic window to slip into the limitless realm guided by the spirits. Each story could be an invitation to the greater or a message from the cosmic consciousness. The great storytellers of tribes were not only myth weavers: they were shamans and diviners too. In most cases, mythological stories are not only stories of fascination or stories to relate with; they may sometimes become the pillars of their own historical narratives. The Jews and their story of exodus across the Sinai desert can serve as a typical example.
A story cures and reaffirms the vow of existence. It manifests the oath of the divine — it enables man not to give up on the human condition, and to resist the chaos that surrounds him. It gives him solace. Attending stories sets him free. Listening to tales provides him with a multitude of imaginative wings. It enables him to have acumen and be prudent.
But now we have lost the habit of reading and listening to ancient stories so that we have robbed off our collective soul. That is why it is believed that to attack and damage the memory of a society means to attack its roots, to put its vitality at risk. Stories are the roots of human ancestry. Understanding stories must be the act of recognizing what makes us human, what were the roots of our ancestral spirit. We shall collect and carefully comprehend our ancestral stories in order to vitalize our innocence – the divine within.
Meanwhile, storytelling and mythological ways of living are about plurality. Even stories must be collected to be shared; unless they would turn up to be a curse. There is a wonderful Korean folktale about how a young prince collected plenty of wonderful stories only just to mercilessly keep them packed in a bag. The evening before the day of his wedding, one of his servants heard that those stories were plotting to disguise as a snake, a poisonous fruit and so forth to allure and kill the prince for restraining them, unable to reach the imagination of many more people. The prince was saved from demise with the help of his servant.
There is another intriguing legend around King Bakaffa (1721-1730) of Ethiopia from the Gondarian period. King Bakaffa at a certain age grows horns on his head. It was kept secret that only his barber knew of this bizarre occurrence. The king always covered his head to keep it hidden. Few years later, the king’s barber died. The king was forced to look for another barber. He showed his horns to the new barber secretly and seriously admonished him not to tell anyone; either wise his life would be at risk.
The new barber was so overwhelmed by his encounter with this unusual thing that he couldn’t resist his urge to share the secret to someone. That night he went out of his home, dug a tiny hole not far away from his house, whispered the secret three times at the hole, spit his saliva and buried it. He went back to his home with a certain sense of relief for at least whispering the secret to something – the tiny hole.
But the legend continues. A year later exactly on that place where he whispered the secret a bamboo emerged. When the bamboo got ready for harvest someone made a flute out of it. Astonishingly, it started to disclose the hidden secret kept behind ‘King Bakaffa has horns’ to anyone who played it. Immediately, the news spread all over the city.
There is another interesting story from India how a collection of stories and songs avenge a woman for not retelling and singing them. One day those stories and songs come out from the bag and disguise themselves as a stranger’s shoes and a coat that her husband suspects she had a hidden affair. The woman didn’t have any idea about what was happening. Her husband opts to sleep alone outside until he discovers the truth.
Each story like beings has its destiny. If one by any chance made a promise to narrate, perform, or spread it, it would stick to his name instantly and plead for execution. It will tremble as if it got spellbound by some clever magic and craved someone brave who could release it. Stories yearn for being narrated, circulated. They had an irresistible longing to be shared, discovered, nourished, and traverse beyond boundaries. Their persistence centered on the telling, retelling, spreading, and reverberating urge.
Being told and retold orally gave them the chance to thrive, evolve, reshape, and reemerge through every circumstance, level of understanding, and capacity of imagination down the ages. Had they been written myths might face the cruel fate of stagnation and forgotten. As a story wanders through, it could face some minor changes. Those changes gave it momentum, connections, breath, life; which would serve as wings for it to traverse overseas territories. Either wise, it would face the fate of being dormant and even obliterated. Sometimes stories might need to evolve to be in touch with the changing reality and every contemporary circumstance. Through the vehicle of the stories, gods, goddesses, deities, ideas, concepts, tricks manage to travel around the globe.
I myself like the San Kabbo yearn for stories, tales, and legends of my ancestors. Recently for the second round, I was on a brief trip to eastern Ethiopia Afar and beyond for the sake of collecting stories and analysis. I befriended the outcasts as soon as I immersed myself in the community; due to the fact that the purest and most authentic stories of any tribal society could be better grasped from the mouths of shepherds, bards, seers, outcasts, lunatics, elders, travelers and so on. Usually they are not part of the show and restrain themselves as rather reverent spectators rarely visible in the drama. Even in every ancient lore tradition, there always appears a certain fool or a lunatic who observes and reveals the truth.
In each of my single strands, the desert allured me with its mysterious patterns. Unknown and unknowable urge entices me to dazzle and dance with its hidden rhythmic vibrations. I believe there is nothing as eternally abundant as beauty in the desert circle. Here, the authentic splendor never vanished but, transcended, reverberated now and then. Though each tiny set of beauty perishes in the likes of withering leaves and a vanishing wisp every moment, the glamour will never vanish. It arises again in a constantly renewed, ever-changing manner.
However, the desert might be terrifying at times. In many ancient tribes lore tradition, the desert is regarded as the land of the Jinni’s, the dragons, nephilims, evil spirits. The desert is much more different than a place where birds sing, butterflies fly, and fields are full of hay. The frenzy of bloodthirsty hyenas, hawks, and owls rages. In fact, it is impossible to separate this eternal duality ‒ beauty and terror.
I was staggered by the desert’s grandeur prominence and enchanting acceptance when I first intruded into the Afar Desert. In the desert sphere, I attended stories of hunting, hunger, lullabies, mythological stories, tribal chants, words of elders, heroic songs and so on over and over again around the fire. My ancestors’ stories resonate over my childhood rivers and behind the mountains. I received a call; sometimes it catches me up in my dreams, in the middle of my deep sleep. There I wish to slip away in the middle of the night catching the tail of a Gazelle or following the tip of a fairytale like a magic thread. Life and eternity will be granted to anyone whoever steps in sincere submission to the utmost.
Authors Address: He can be reached at Email: lullabiesofeternity@gmal.com Website: https://www.yacobberhanou.com
BY YACOB BERHANOU
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 20 JUNE 2025
