Lesson 3: Information from objects

(Source: Famous South African Folk Tales, Pieter Grobbelaar, 1985)

For the curious

Try to find more stories from the hunter-gatherers and shepherds of the Later Stone Age.

Lesson 3 Information from objects

Define

Object: something one can see and touch

Whoops! He crashed so hard into something that he had to sit back on his hind legs. ‘Can’t you look where you are going?’ asked the thing. It was a man of the veld. ‘I was looking for you!’ said Hare importantly, ‘Mother Full Moon sent me. She says you are the eland’s horn. No, she says you are Crane’s wishbone. I mean, she says, when you are dead, you are dead, and you will not live again.’ ‘Yes,’ sighed the man and hung his head. This was what he had always feared.

‘Perhaps it is the other way around!’ Hare called after him, for he was completely muddled now, but the man was already gone. Hare hung his head. He peered over his shoulder and saw Mother Full Moon’s face, red above the mountains. She looked angry. Hare slipped in under a bush. He ran through the dark places to his lair. But Mother Full Moon lay in wait for him. When he came around a high tussock of grass, she grabbed him by the hind legs. ‘Bad bunny!’ said Mother Full Moon. ‘You bungled everything!’ ‘But, Mother ...,’ pleaded Hare. Before he could say ‘Full Moon’ she smacked him in the face so violently that his lip split open. ‘You will have a harelip forever because you did not listen carefully to what I told you!’ said Mother Full Moon. ‘Yes, Mother,’ said Hare, ‘but how can I fix the mess I made?’ Then Mother Full Moon’s heart melted. ‘Go,’ she said, ‘go quickly and give my people the right message.’