The Rhino’s Horn and Memory February 2, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient , trackback
Every so often Beach gets a post from a reader that practically writes itself and the extent of this blogger’s work is the cut and paste button. Here is one such example that goes in the well established oral transmission tag. The correspondent and author was Indranil. Can any reader help out Indranil and his daughter in their search for the Rhinoceros’ Horn?
I am writing to you because what I feel that I have stumbled upon an example of Prehistoric Memory. A few days back, I was reading out a collection of Folk Tales of Uganda (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/baskerville/king/king.html) to my daughter. The story was “The Story of Kibate”. Its a story of a man who saved an army by bringing fire from a rhinoceros’s horn. Suddenly I realized that the story may be talking about a volcano. And I am a professional geologist for last 20 years and working with govt. Nextday I searched the net and found that Mt. Elgon in Uganda really looks like a rhinoceros’s horn. (I am attaching two photo) Isn’t it amusing? However, Wikipedia describes it as extinct shield volcano with last eruption 24 MY ago. Now the question is, Is it Really Extinct? then how the folk lore was generated? How far memory can go back?
A few thoughts to add. The photographs could easily be taken as a rhinoceros horn (the rhino in the story is placed at the top of a hill).
But in the night the chief saw a fire on a distant hill, and he woke his men and told them to go there and bring back a pot full of fire with them. So a company of men set out, and when they came to the hill-top they found that the fire was on the horn of a rhinoceros. They begged the rhinoceros to give them some fire, but it said: ‘It is very dull living alone on the hill-top; the man who can tell me a funny story shall take the fire from my horn.’
However, the geography of the tale doesn’t work. Crudely the rhinoceros horn seems to be in the south-west of modern Uganda, in the kingdom of Ankole, close to the border with Tanzania. Mt Elgon, on the other hand, is in the north of the country, where though the attacking army in the tale apparently originated. Any thoughts or extra knowledge? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com This is a long shot but the motif of fire in a horn is a peculiar one.
15 Feb 2015: David B writes, ‘The story seems to be from a time when fire was mysterious and maybe a guarded secret. Perhaps there have been two ideas mixed up. One – a remembered place that looks like a rhinoceros, and two – a real horn, probably not from a rhinoceros though. Suppose the horn contained tinder and a fire stone or a fire drill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firelighting. To anybody watching fire being made and who didn’t understand the magic the fire must have come from the horn, where else could it have come from. Thanks David!
