African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 656
one never mistreats orphans. For once you mistreat them, you die” (Herskovits 1958,
293).
Bikoi examines this compelling image of family in African cosmology and orphan
solitude as cosmic metaphor for all human tragedy:
A number of African people, indeed, consider that the universe has a
unique, supreme father, and that each group in nature constitutes a family,
with ancestors, parents, brothers…. Everything that involves one single
member of this family involves, beyond the specific group to which the
member belongs, the whole universe. Also, in the case of human beings,
the tragedy of orphans becomes a tragedy of life and their solitude, the
solitude of the society.
(1975, 121) (author’s translation)
Proverbs and insults from Basaa, Beti, and Bulu oral folklore reveal this universal regard
for community as it contrasts with the solitude, and ultimately the misery, that the orphan
represents. The Beti proverb, “Unfortunate orphan: never eats good food,” reflects the
literal and symbolic hunger that routinely befalls the orphan (Bikoi 1975, 110). And the
Basaa insult, “Mangy like an orphan,” vividly demonstrates the miserable condition
understood by the symbol of the orphan (Bikoi 1975, 104). The Guerze people of Guinea
refer to nice, durable shoes as “orphan’s shoes,” a metaphor that shows multifaceted
cultural understanding of the orphan motif; everyone knows that the orphan is too poor to
afford more than one pair of shoes and that she has to walk everywhere, so it is normal to
assume that an orphan would covet a single pair of shoes that would last a long time.
The orphan motif, with its themes of alienation, abuse, and journey, appears frequently
in postcolonial African literature. In her 1981 article “The Orphan in Cameroon Folklore
and Fiction,” Susan Domowitz looks at the theme of orphanhood in Mongo Beti’s Le
pauvre Christ de Bomba and Ferdinand Oyono’s Une yie de Boy. Both novels have
orphan protagonists who journey away from their traditional values and landscapes
toward a new world transformed by colonialism. However, unlike the orphan heroes of
oral tradition whose journeys have joyous endings, the fate of the literary orphans is not
so sanguine. Because they are “[b]ereft of the protection and familiar rules of traditional
society, the orphans of the novels stumble determinedly toward ruin” (Domowitz 1981,
355).
This variation of the traditional orphan motif echoes throughout Chinua Achebe’s No
Longer at Ease, in which the protagonist journeys away from his village (a kind of selfimposed
orphanhood) and a multilayered set of traditional and colonial Christian values,
to make his way in the city under a new set of rules. This literary orphan journey also
ends in ruin rather than self-actualization. The urban landscape in postcolonial African
literature (e.g., Thomas Akare’s The Slums, Alex LaGuma’s A Walk in the Night, Mongo
Beti’s Remember Ruben, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood) is often the setting
where tragic themes of orphanhood, that “vivid metaphor for colonialism” (Domowitz
1981, 355), are played out. Under traditional social systems, it is the orphan who
experiences hunger, solitude, alienation, and abuse. But for people living under colonial
and postcolonial systems, those challenges and abuses once reserved for orphans
permeate everyday existence.