The hare, the elephant and the hippopotamus
Told by Veillées des Grassfields
The hare was the smallest beast of the Grassfields, but none had a nimbler tongue. One day the elephant shoved him off the path: 'Move aside, gnat! What can you do against my strength?' The hippopotamus, by the river, mocked him the same way. Stung, the hare answered each in secret: 'I am stronger than you. Tomorrow, let us pull a vine; you shall see.'
At dawn he handed one end of a long vine to the elephant in the forest and ran to give the other end to the hippopotamus in the water, neither knowing of the other. 'When you feel me pull, pull with all your might!' he told each. Then he shook the vine in its middle.
The elephant pulled, the hippopotamus pulled. They heaved all day long, sweating and puffing, each certain he was fighting the tiny hare. At dusk, exhausted, they followed the vine to see their opponent… and came face to face, ashamed. The hare, meanwhile, was already asleep, full of their pride.
From that day on, the elephant and the hippopotamus never again mocked the small.
The tale's moral
« Strength without wit is always led by the cunning of the weak. »
More tales to discover
The cunning hare, a shared figure across Africa
There is a character found, under a thousand names, in almost all of Africa: the small cunning animal who triumphs over…
Leuk the Hare and Bouki the Hyena
Dakar
In the savannah of Senegal, everyone knows Leuk the hare, the cleverest of animals, and Bouki the hyena, as greedy as…
The bat and his secret
Littoral
The bat and the mangrove rat were inseparable friends. One day the bat invited the rat to taste his soup, the most…