Tortoise Becomes King

Igbo · trickster tale

Tortoise decided he would be king, and told his wife to cook a feast for the day. She cooked it and brought it to him. He carried the food to an ant-heap beside the road and sat down to eat, without first giving the ant-heap its share. Every time he took a handful, the ant-heap bit him on the rump. When the food was gone he tried to stand, and could not. He shouted that he was a king, like his father before him.

Elephant came out of the bush and asked what he was doing. “Becoming a king,” said Tortoise, “and you cannot lift me.” Elephant tried and failed. Leopard came, boasted of the goats and cattle he killed in the bush, and failed too. Tortoise told each of them that he had put down roots in the land of his fathers.

Then Bush Rat came, tried, and could not lift him either. So he began to dig into the ant-heap to find what was holding Tortoise, and saw his tail. He bit it, and Tortoise came free. That is how Tortoise came to have a short tail.

An abridged retelling of a traditional story.

Source and version

Northcote W. Thomas, "Anthropological Report on the Ibo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria," Part III: Proverbs, Narratives, Vocabularies and Grammar (London: Harrison, 1913), Awka dialect narratives, pp. 70-72; recorded by Thomas as Government Anthropologist; text in the public domain (Internet Archive). Abridged from the English rendering in this historical collection, not independently translated from Igbo. Read the source

Other Igbo stories

Tortoise and Bush Cat

Tortoise and Bush Cat went to wrestle in the land of Tortoise’s mother. Tortoise made a deal: whatever goats they won would be theirs, and whatever they lost they would pay. Bush Cat did the wrestling while Tortoise sang to urge him on, and Bush Cat threw one man after another and won goat after goat. When Tortoise finally tried a match himself, he was thrown, and was tied to a tree because he had no goat to pay with. Bush Cat gave up one of his own goats to free him. At last Tortoise beat a small boy and was given a small goat. Ashamed of how little it was, he told Bush Cat to cut off one of its ears for them to eat on the road. Bush Cat held his half in his cheek without swallowing, and at the river Tortoise poured water into his mouth until the ear went down. Tortoise then demanded the ear back, claiming that it would have grown into a great ram and, in time, a flock. Bush Cat refused, so Tortoise led his people to strip Bush Cat’s house. Bush Cat went to the river and told what Tortoise had done. The river rose, swept away Tortoise’s house and everything in it, and Tortoise and his people with it.

Tortoise and Elephant

One day Tortoise went into the bush to Elephant and proposed that they be friends. Elephant agreed. Tortoise fetched a long rope and went to Hippopotamus, in the water. He told him that Elephant was boasting he could drag him out of the river. Then Tortoise went back to Elephant and claimed that he himself could pull him out of the bush. Elephant denied that Tortoise could do it, but Tortoise insisted. Tortoise tied one end of the rope around Elephant’s waist and left him there. He went down to the water, tied the other end around Hippopotamus, and climbed back up on the land. Elephant began to pull on Hippopotamus, and Hippopotamus began to pull on Elephant, and the two of them pulled against each other. Meanwhile Tortoise gathered all the animals of the bush. They came, and he told them that he had killed Elephant and Hippopotamus in a single journey. The animals cut up the two great beasts, and Tortoise took the names Killer of Elephant and Killer of Hippopotamus.

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