Ethiopian Folktales

Narrated by Marcos Damene

There were once two friends called Lave and Wallock. Lave was very mischievous and sharp and liked to play jokes on people.

One day he woke up and said to Wallock, “Why don’t we get rid of our mothers? They’re old hags who trouble us a lot.”

So Lave went to his hut and he took his mother across the river and hid her there, and he took a log to his house and started beating the log. Now Wallock thought that Lave was killing his mother so he went and killed his mother.

After some time Lave went to his mother and she made him some sesame and it had to be roasted and it was very good. So he brought the sesame over and there’s another black seed which is very bad but looks the same as sesame.

And he gave that bad seed to Wallock and said, “This is sesame and I’m eating sesame, so I think you should eat it too.”

So he tricked him into eating the bad seeds.

But Wallock became suspicious and thought that maybe Lave's mother had made the sesame. So he went around looking for her.

When he crossed the river, he found that she was still alive. He was enraged at the joke played on him by Lave, so he killed Lave’s mother, and he put her up in a tree and he made her smile in the death grin.

So when Lave went back to look for his mother he saw her smile from a distance.

And he said, “Please don’t smile, Mother. I haven’t brought you anything.”

But when he came nearer he found that she was actually killed. He knew Wallock had played this trick on him, but he didn’t know what to do. He thought he may as well make use of his dead mother’s body. So he carried her to the village and propped her against a tree.

Then he walked into the village and went up to the most beautiful girl and said, “My mother’s there under the tree. Please go and give her a water pipe and let her smoke some. But if she’s rude and refuses to smoke some of the pipe, then hit her.”

So the young girl took the pipe, and when she offered it to the old lady, there was no response so she hit her and she came back.

When she came back, he asked her what had happened.

She said, “She didn’t answer so I hit her.”

And he said, “What did she say then?”

She said, “She didn’t answer anything.”

So he said, “In that case you must have killed my mother. Come, let’s check.”

And they went and found the mother was dead.

So he said, “Because you’ve killed my mother, you have to marry me for compensation.”

So he married this beautiful girl and lived with her. But he was still very lazy and didn’t do much harvesting. So he went and began stealing corn and the like from another farmer’s harvest.

Now that farmer was very annoyed that a thief was coming, so that day he put a lot of sticky wax onto a tree and gum. So when Lave came and rested one hand against the tree, it got stuck. Then he used his other hand to free his first hand, but that got stuck. Then he tried using his legs and got completely entangled with the tree. He couldn’t do anything, so he had to scream for help.

So the villagers came and poured hot water on the wax so it melted and freed him. And they warned him not to do anything bad.

But Lave wasn’t the type to be so easily corrected. He confessed and repented, but he wasn’t really a good person.

So after some time he had an affair outside his house and had a child. It’s OK to have a child, but he committed the biggest sin of all. He said the child wasn’t his. So after some time the villagers realised that there was a child who didn’t have a father.

So they all sat around in a circle and said, “Let the child sit between us. He will come naturally to his father.”

So they all sat around and the child, who was just walking, sat amongst them. And immediately, as blood calls blood, he went running towards Lave.

So Lave quickly tied a necklace around the child’s neck and an anklet around his foot to symbolise that he had a father and he quickly went running away so that the others didn’t become angry.