Reddy, Reddy, come when you're ready, they taunted.
We'll go on ahead.
take your time, Reddy
just keep chewing on your cud.
Your hide's in safekeeping
up in the rafters
so count yourself fortunate,
Red Woman!
Yoruba diviner's recitation, in Judith Gleason's Oya, In Praise of An African Goddess
The hunter's wives taunt the new "red" wife of their husband, whose family and lineage, unlike their own, is uncertain. After many years of jealousy of the woman and her children, the wives get the hunter drunk and tease the truth out of him: The red wife is a buffalo woman whom the hunter trapped when he found and hid her buffalo skin, which she had hidden in an ant hill after she transformed herself into a woman to sell her locust-seed spice in the market.
In the taunting of the co-wives, the red wife learns where her buffalo hide is hidden. She reclaims it, softens it with water, and transforms herself back into Buffalo Woman, the Goddess Oya. When she leaves the human village, she breaks off a bit of her horn and gives it to her children, instructing them to hold it while calling her name,
Oya, whenever they need something, and promising to answer.
Oya, Buffalo Woman, virtual oil on canvas © 2005 Sage Starwalker
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