Lion

In the Kaguru animal tales the Lion is the image of sheer strength and lordly authority, the beast whose power the other animals fear. Yet the narratives return again and again to the pleasure of seeing that power undone: the diminutive Hare tricks, shames and defeats the Lion, so that the figure serves less as a hero than as a foil against which cleverness and the resourcefulness of the weak are measured. Beidelman reads such imagery as part of the wider Kaguru meditation on the ambiguities of authority and force in a society where power is always shadowed by the suspicion that it may be turned or overturned.

Domains

• authority and force

Powers

• rules the beasts by strength and dread

Relations

• rival: HareThe mighty Lion is a recurrent target of Hare's deceptions.T. O. Beidelman, Kaguru folktale corpus; cf. Alice Werner, Myths and Legends of the Bantu (1933), hare-and-lion tale type. (primary)

Sources

• Lion appears in Kaguru folktales as the powerful, kingly beast representing force and authority, characteristically outwitted by the smaller and cleverer Hare.: T. O. Beidelman, Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). (secondary); Alice Werner, Myths and Legends of the Bantu (London: George G. Harrap, 1933), on the pan-Bantu hare-and-lion cycle. (secondary)