The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales From Africa by Alexander McCall Smith

  (Chosen as a book that represents cultural diversity)

 

This collection of African tales reads like legends or folk tales. The title story, The Girl Who Married a Lion, tells of a woman who marries a fine young man, but her brother does not trust him. He tells his sister that her new husband is really a lion. She laughs at her brother for speaking so foolishly, but the brother doesn’t give up. He goes to his father and tells him that he thinks his new son-in-law is a lion. His father also laughs at him, and explains that the new son-in-law is a decent, kind man.

The marriage works out well and they are together for many years. They have two children, young boys, who are also good people. Still, the brother refuses to be around his brother-in-law, refusing to accept that he is a human being and not a lion.

Then one day, his sister comes to him. She says she is worried because her husband’s things smell strange. They wait until the husband is out of the house, and they go back together. He brother smells his things, and he decides that they all smell like a lion.

He goes back and tells his father what he has smelled and devises a plan to test if he really is a lion. They tie a goat up outside of his house and then wait until morning. When the sun rises, the goat is gone, and all that remains are the bones of the goat. They surmise that this is proof that he is indeed a lion. They get spears and run him out of town.

Then the wife confesses that she is worried that her two sons may also be lions. They devise another plan to test them. They make a cage out of tree limbs and put the boys inside. Then they hide in the woods and wait for the lions to come. Eventually, two lions come, they smell the cage, and they begin to roar and claw at the cage. The brother and the father deduce that if the children were indeed lions, then the other lions would not attack and try to eat them. This proves that the children were indeed not lions.

I do not wish to seem culturally insensitive, but these stories do not impress me in any way. With respect to the story above, even if one could ignore the concept of a man being a lion, several of the elements of the story seem illogical. First, why would the husband’s things only start to smell of lion after years had already passed. Would they not have smelled of lion from the very  beginning? Second, the goat being eaten during the night could have occurred by the husband, or by any random lion that came from the forest. The fact that it was eaten only proves that there was a lion, but not that he was the lion. Finally, if such a test were to work to prove that the husband was or was not a lion, why would the brother not have conducted such a test years earlier, perhaps before his sister married the man?

I do understand that legends from all cultures, including my own, often lack basic logic . Still, this faulty logic is often used to portray some sort of message or to create some effect that is more powerful than the logic would have been. However, I see no such reason in these stories.

Smith, A.M. (2004). The girl who married a lion and other stories from africa. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.