Ethiopian Folktales

Narrated by Lemu Wachile

Once upon a time there was a hardworking farmer with a wife and two sons. He was quite rich because he worked so hard. But he wanted his children to have a good life, so he never made them work, but he and his wife did it all.

After some time, his wife died and still he didn’t want his children to work, so he did the field labour and all the housework too. But as time went on, he became old and sick, and he started to worry about what would become of his children when he died, because they wouldn’t be able to take care of themselves.

So he thought about this for a long time and he called his sons and said, “Look, my inheritance to you is a lot of gold. I’ve hidden all my gold in the fields, so it’s up to you to plough them and find the gold.”

And he called his neighbours and said, “I’m going to die and my children don’t know how to look after themselves. So please cook for them and look after them until they can do it for themselves.”

So the neighbours provided them with food for some time.

And the brothers didn’t want to be robbed of the gold so they did the digging themselves. They dug one field after another and after they had dug all the fields they found no gold.

So the brothers sat down and one asked the other, “Do you think our father cheated us?”

But the other brother said, “No, I think our father was saying that the farming profession is a golden profession. And if we dig up all the fields and we plough we can become rich.”

So like all the other farmers they sowed wheat in the fields they had dug and became very rich.