“Hale!” “Halele!”
Once upon a time there was a king who owned a magnificent cockerel. He loved it more than anything. The cockerel ate from the king's plate and slept beside his bed, and no one was allowed to chase it away, even when it pecked at the poor people's rice in the market.
Fed on everything it wanted, the cockerel grew. It became as big as a goat, then as big as a zebu. People began to be afraid, but no one dared complain: it was the king's cockerel. One day, the cockerel swallowed a goat. The next day, a zebu. The king said nothing.
Then the cockerel, now a monster taller than the coconut palms, began to swallow people. It devoured the farmers, the fishermen, the notables, the soldiers… and in the end the king himself. There was no one left in the land. No one, except a little boy whose mother had hidden him, when danger struck, in a large rice jar.
When the child came out of his hiding place, the village was empty and silent. He heard the monster snoring under the mango trees, its belly enormous. The child took his father's big knife, crept up silently and, with a single stroke, slit open the monster's belly.
Then, one by one, out came the goats, the zebus, the farmers, the fishermen, the notables, and even the king, all of them dazed. They looked at the child who had saved them. And it is said that, that day, the land gave itself new rules, so that never again would a powerful person's whim endanger a whole people.
Power that knows no limits ends up devouring everything, including the one who fed it.
What we know about it
“Le coq du roi” (“The king's cockerel”) gives its title to the third volume of tales collected in Mayotte by Noël J. Gueunier from the storyteller Madjidhoubi Saïd, in a Malagasy dialect (Kibushi). The volume is devoted to the theme of power: an ordinary animal, raised by a king, becomes a monster that devours the whole population, except the young hero who makes it possible to restore order.
Our version takes up this outline and the most widespread form, in Africa, of the tale of the “swallowing monster”, whose belly is slit open to free those it has swallowed; the details are our own.
Further reading
- Voices of the archipelago Noël J. Gueunier, avec le conteur Madjidhoubi Saïd, Contes comoriens en dialecte malgache de l'île de Mayotte (4 volumes), 1990 – 2011. Peeters, then Karthala.
- Voices of the archipelago Marie-Françoise Rombi, Trois pauvres, deux tyrans, deux princesses. Conte mahorais, 1979. Cahiers d'études africaines, vol. 19, nos. 73–76, pp. 549–578.