Tortoise's Deception: The Use of Threat at the Market Place

Abstract

Ventures are attempts of people with efforts to improve their situations.These ventures are made with the hope of achieving successes. But some time not everyone can make efforts. Some people are lazy and so cannot achieve their goals by the dint of handwork. Such people resort to violence. This does not only obtain in the human society, in the Igbo man's culture, which are the land of human beings; land of animals in the folktales, tortoise is the trickster. He is the protagonist of folktales. He is very little in comparison to elephant, lion, tiger, dog and other animals. He does not work for his living. He hopes to cheat. During a certain famine, he resorted to threats of violence that scared animals away from the market place. This made animals to leave their wares for him. He then carted everything into his house and so solved his problem of hunger and starvation. When it was about to leak, he cunningly dealt with the being that wanted to report him. This story uses tortoise to symbolise human beings that use threats of different sorts to snatch people's possessions from them. Such people abound in Igboland.