Tales from the Congo: Reading Diary B

The second half of Tales from the Congo involved a lot of tricksters. The animals higher on the food chain were usually the ones tricked. It doesn't seem wise to me to have tales like this. It seems that these stories give hope that the beasts of the wild could be tamed and reason. In some cases this is true, but if confronted with a leopard, I would hope that someone would run and not try to bargain with it. These trickster stories have been in other units that I've read through as well. I guess the moral is not to be too cocky. You can always be fooled by someone no matter how intelligent you are.

The story that caught my attention the most was Why the Crocodile Does Not Eat the Hen. It just seemed so absurd to me! The hen told the crocodile not to it because they were brothers. The crocodile was confused but did not eat the hen. Finally, a lizard told the crocodile that the hen was his brother because they both laid eggs. This may have been probable to people with no science knowledge, but it doesn't make a lick of sense to me. I guess it just depends on your definition of "brother".

This section of the unit overall, was harder for me follow. The morals were very similar, so that part made sense, but it seemed like some of the stories were stretching. It was as if the storytellers tried to tell the same story a million different ways. The first half of the unit would definitely be easier to get a good retelling out of.

Crocodile! UnTextbook.