Man, Mouse, Ape and Water Spirit

Culled from “Belief and the Problem of Women” by Edwin Ardener (1975)

According to the Bakweri of Cameroon (in a male rescension): “MOTO, EWAKI and MOJILI were always quarrelling and agreed to decide by a test which of them was to remain in the town and which should go to the bush. All were to light fires in their houses in the morning and the person whose fire was still burning on their return from the farms in the evening was to be the favored one.

Moto, being more cunning than the others built a fire with big sticks properly arranged, whereas they only built with small dry sticks, and so his was the only fire that was still alight on their return in the evening. Thus Moto remained in the town and became Man. Ewaki and Eto went into the bush and became Ape and Mouse. Mojili was driven into the water and became a water spirit (This version was given in 1929 by Charles Steane, a Bakweri scholar to B. G. Stone).

Moto is the ordinary Bakweri word for ‘human being of either sex’, and includes ‘woman’. Ewaki, Eto, and Mojili who are opposed to Moto by reason of his special skill with fire, lack of which relegates them to the bush, are in Bakweri belief all associated with women and their children, whom they attract into their domain. Mojili is responsible or young girls becoming mermaids (LIENGU, plural MAENGU) who are dangerous to men, and whose husbands are eto (pl. weto), the rats; while the attraction of human children to the apes of the forest is so great that the word ewaki must not be mentioned in from of children under seven, in case they fall sick and die. Mojili’s name has the same effect. Rites exist to control these manifestations.

[Moto, Eto, and Ewaki are ordinary words for ‘person’, ‘rat’, and ‘ape’. Mojili or Mojele is to the coastal Bakweri a spirit. For inland Bakweri his name is a euphemism for ‘ape’. It is likely that the term belongs to the animal world, but is borrowed from the fishing peoples. Probably it is the manatee.]

The possible marginality of women when men are defining the ‘wild’ is evident. Thus the idea of the denizens of the wild, outside Moto’s village being a danger or attraction to women and their offspring is comprehensible in a male model of the universe, in which female reproductive powers do not fall under male control. This is, however, inadequate. Bakweri women themselves bound their world as including the wild that Moto excluded. They go through rites by which they become LIENGU mermaid spirits, or spirits of the forest, generally in adolescence, and retain this feature of womanhood throughout their lives. The story of Moto gives the clue, for the three excluded ‘animal’ brothers all have the human gift of fire. Although the men bound of ‘mankind’ from nature, the women persist in overlapping into nature again. For men among the Bakweri this overlapping symbolic area is clearly related to women’s reproductive powers. Since these powers are for women far from being marginal, but are of their essence as women it would seem that a woman’s model of the world would also treat them as central.
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When we speak of Bakweri belief we must therefore recognize a man’s sector and a woman’s sector, which have to be reconciled. Thus the myth of Moto states the problem of woman for Bakweri men. She insists in living in what is for them the wild.
…
I have argued that Bakweri women define the boundary of their world in such a way that they live as women in the men’s wild, as well as partly within the men’s world inside the village fence. In modern times the world outside the fence has included the ‘strangers’, migrants who are allowed to settle there. Sometimes the strangers’ quarter is larger than the Bakweri settlement. Bakweri women have long traveled from stranger-quarter to stranger-quarter, entering into casual liaisons, while the men have complained (Ardener et al. 1960; E. Ardener 1962). This fortuitous overlap of the old wild and the new urban jungle may well account for the peculiar sense of defeat the Bakweri showed for so many years, which made them come to believe that Zombies were killing them off (E. Ardener 1956 and 1970). For the women’s part, it is possibly not sufficient to account for their notable conjugal freedom, as I have argued elsewhere (1962), merely on grounds that there are nearly three males to every woman in the plantation area. The Bakweri system of double descent similarly expresses the basic dichotomy. The patrilineage controls residence (the village), the inheritance of land and cattle, succession to political office p the men’s world. The matrilineage controls fertility, and its symbolic fertility bangle is found on a woman’s farm outside the village fence (E. Ardener 1956)

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