Ethiopian Folktales

Narrated by Yisahak Aldade

In the south of Ethiopia, locusts swarm every five to ten years and they bring complete disaster on to the ground. They eat up all the crops and then they are away, leaving famine behind them.

Now, one year the locusts swarmed, they filled the air and the sky became dark and they settled down on all the crops in the area and they ate everything up and the people were shouting, and everyone was angry at them, but they gave no notice. They finished everything and they flew away.

Now after they flew away, a few very weak locusts had remained because they could not keep up with the swarm, so a few of them stayed behind. But they no longer were the greedy enemy, and they immediately began to become peaceful, and they lived in harmony with the people and the cattle. They would hop around in the grass; when people walked by they would not hop higher than their ankles or their knees. As cows went, they moved out of their way. Eventually, with time, they turned into green grasshoppers. So they lived peacefully in the area, moving out of the way of people and cattle, and living peacefully with everybody and everything.

And the years went by and by.

Then after another five years, people were walking through the grass, and the grasshoppers became very arrogant, they jumped higher than their knees. Some ran into other people’s legs, others on their shoulders, and some even jumped up onto people’s heads.

“How come these grasshoppers are becoming so arrogant?” the people wondered.

And they said to the grasshoppers, “We used to live together peacefully, we had peaceful co-existence. What’s wrong with you now?”

And the grasshoppers said, “Well things are not the same any more. Look at the horizon, can’t you see the clouds over there. What do you think those are? Those are a swarm of locusts, and they are coming, and we are going to take control again, things will no longer be as they used to be.”