Ethiopian Folktales

Narrated by Yisahak Aldade

Once upon a time there lived a king who was renowned in his lands for being just and wise. He was a very nice king and he was loved by everybody. The king used to go everywhere in public with a turban on his head and people thought it normal and they didn’t know why he wore the turban. But the secret was that the king had a big sore on his head, which he didn’t want anybody to see. In fact the king had been born with this sore, but nobody had ever, ever seen it, so they thought that he was just going around because he liked wearing turbans.

Now one day the king was going to have a bath, so he took off his robes and his turban and he went in to have a bath. Now as a passer-by was walking, he peered in and he saw the king, and he saw that the king had a big sore on his head. So he was surprised and amazed that such a thing had been kept a secret for so long. The passer-by wanted to tell somebody, but he knew that the secret, told to somebody else, would be no secret at all, and he was scared of the king, because if the king found out that he had revealed the secret, he would take him to a certain place called Horlozi, where all the executions took place. And they would stand him at the edge of a cliff and chop off his head with a scimitar, and his body and his head would fall over the cliff. And he knew that the king would have him guillotined at this place. Therefore he was scared and he didn’t know what to do.

Yet at the same time, he felt that he couldn’t stay quiet with such a big state secret, he had to tell somebody, he had to tell somebody that the king had a sore on his head.

Well, he tried staying quiet for a few days, but the secret burned up inside him, it burned his insides, his intestines, his stomach, he had to get it out of him, he had to tell somebody. So in the end, he decided that he should do something about it before the secret burned his insides.

So he went to a river and dug a hole near the river, and he bent down and whispered into that hole: “The king has sore on his head. The king has a sore on his head.”

Then he filled up the hole with earth, and he went away, relieved that he had released the secret out of his body so that it would no longer burn him up.

Now as time went by, a year went by, some bamboo stalks grew around the river, and one of them grew exactly on the place where the man had dug the hole a year ago.

Then after some time, the king was giving a big feast, and he had invited some musicians over. And the musicians had come to play music. So in Wolayita, they’d got a long sort of a flute made from a bamboo stem, but it was actually around 2-3 metres long, and they had to play music on that. So they went to the riverside and cut some bamboos to make their musical instruments. Then they came back and on the feast they began to play.

What they wanted to play was a song praising the Emperor, so the song would have to go something like:

The Emperor is a lion, The Emperor is a lion, The Emperor is a lion.

And this would be accompanied by the flutes, which would make the music of:

The Emperor is a lion, The Emperor is a lion, The Emperor is a lion.

So when they started the music, the musician blew down heavily on the pipe, and the music came out, but it wasn’t to the tune of The Emperor is a lion. The flute started speaking itself, it started singing, and it went:

The Emperor has a sore on his head, The Emperor has a sore on his head.

The Emperor was furious that this musician would be so cheeky as to play such a thing in a public place, so he ordered him to be taken to Horlozi, and have his head chopped off.

So after this the Emperor called for a second musician. And the second musician came and he also played, and the flute still went:

The Emperor has a sore on his head, The Emperor has a sore on his head.

And he too was sent to Horlozi to have his head chopped off. The king was furious and stopped the ceremony of feasting, and he called the musicians, and he said, “What do you think you are doing? I brought you all here to praise me but instead you are insulting me.”

So everything was stopped and the king sent for some elders, the elders of Wolayita, called Heraga. And he called the elders and he told them to investigate into the mischief and to see what the truth was. So the elders began investigating, and they saw various aspects of the case, and eventually they themselves examined the flute and they blew it and they heard the flute coming out with the song The Emperor has a sore on his head.

So they went to the Emperor and they said: “In fact the two musicians that were killed, were innocent. The story behind it is that long ago a traveller saw the sore on your head while you were bathing, and he went and he whispered it into a hole in the earth, and this flute had grown on that hole. So the secret was in the flute, and when it was being blown, the secret came out.”

So that’s the end of the story, and there could be two morals behind it. One of them is that if you want a secret, then you should keep it only to yourself, because a secret can never remain hidden from everybody, and it will eventually come out. So it could be about secrets.

But the second moral, is that the truth can never be hidden, and even Mother Earth will spit out the truth eventually. So we could say that the truth might fade, but it will never die, and one day it will come out.