Essay: Animals in the Congo

Essay: The Stories From The Congo

I really enjoyed the readings from this unit.  I did notice that most of them were based around animals.  This shows how important animals were to the people in the Congo, no matter how new or old the story was. 

Most of the stories included antelopes and gazelles, which makes perfect since because those are the primary animals in the area.  In the United States those animals usually only exist in the zoos but in the Congo area, the antelopes and gazelles are very abundant.  They also viewed the animals differently than how we would view them over here in the states.  Spiders were looked up as powerful and the leaders, meanwhile, in the story, The Antelope and the Leopard, the antelope was the bad guy and the Leopard was overtaken and viewed as weak.

In the story of the vanishing wife, although animals did not play a huge role in the story, the story did end up being all about the fish.  The entire life of Buite was ruined by something as simple as not cutting off the head of the fish before giving it to his lovely wife.  But even the little details in the story reflect animals in the Congo, too.  The littlest boy’s name in the story that gave the un-beheaded fish to his mother was Parrot, as in the bird that lives in that area. 

The story of How the Wives Restored Their Husband to Life included an ox.  The three wives were so hungry that the only thing that could satisfy them was an ox, therefore the husband had to search for an ox and kill it in the wild.  On his search, he was killed by an ox which led to the wives having to use their powers to dream of the husband, the guide them to the husband, and to bring the husband back to life.

Another story in the unit that includes animals is the Turtle and the Man.  This particular story included a lot of the animals that are seen many times throughout the unit such as the ox, the antelope, and the leopard. 

None of these stories could be told without the help of animals either being the helpers, main characters, or the bad guy in the stories.  There are also many more stories in this unit that include animals. 

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