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Have
you ever had the opportunity to listen to little children, especially
those who live with their parents in the cities, perform folktales? If
you have, then you could not have missed their wonderful innovations in
the retelling of the tales: the reinvention of the characters, the
contemporaneous nature of the plot, the modernity of the entire
rhetoric. I watched my children perform tortoise tales recently and was
thrilled to find that the tortoise in their tales was no longer the
tortoise I used to know.

The tortoise of my
children’s tales wears jeans and a baseball cap, eats hamburgers at Mr.
Biggs, drives a Hummer Jeep, flies airplanes, and plays hip-hop! New
tortoise is a hi-tech crawler that also flies! Old tortoise once tried
to fly and borrowed feathers from birds to actualise that dream. But
greed overtook him in the skies when he attended a party in the company
of birds. Having adopted the name “Unu niile” (All of You), he wanted
to consume alone everything that was presented at the party, with the
argument that the hosts said the things were for “Unu niile.” The birds
in anger took back their feathers and tortoise had to make a risky fall
back to the earth, ending up with a shattered shell. It took the ant
and the snail that, again, were cheated by tortoise in the payment of
fees, to bring the broken pieces of the shell back together.

New hi-tech
Tortoise, on the contrary, has learned to fly without borrowed wings
and feathers. He needs new myths to act a present-future.

The tortoise in
the folktales I learned in my village would find this new tortoise made
and animated in the city too ambitious. The tortoise of my old cultural
imagination had to walk awkwardly in his shell, made of fragments
pieced together, following from the myth of the Great Fall of Tortoise
from the sky, that explains the form of the trickster’s shell.

However, one still
cannot help admiring the sense of temporal appropriateness in the
children’s performance. They obviously find the temporal and spatial
settings of my own version so very distant. They cannot reconcile the
idea of a tortoise with a shell going to marry a beautiful lady – the
king’s daughter! Why, he has to be truly human to be able to do that!
And he has to be awfully rich too! The tortoise of the moment has to be
well read, has to be computer-literate, and has to have access to the
Internet. He has to be a 419er! OK, let’s say he’s occasionally on the
run when the police go after him, sometimes making it to Dubai,
sometimes to Switzerland, but we hope he has a trick up his sleeves,
otherwise he has messed up the story! The new theory of child-performed
folktales requires that storytellers make and tell their own stories.
Don’t tell someone else’s stories. If you do that, you are not a good
storyteller but a “kopi-kata” (from “copycat”). Also, it is wrong in
this tradition to condemn or correct another person’s story. The story
is theirs, not yours. An owner of a story is the owner of the story. As
in Second Life creations and computer games, storytellers have the
freedom to create the type of characters they want and give such
characters the behaviour and values they prefer. So, Tortoise in the
New Theory of child performance becomes more unstable as a signifier,
more unpredictable (except maybe in the trait of being a trickster),
and adaptable to changing circumstances.

These children
demonstrate great courage in altering what they have received from
culture. They don’t want to be passive transmitters of cultural
scripts. No, they choose to rewrite culture, to place it in the present.

In the tradition of
the Old Performance in which I had my own training the teller of a
tortoise tale had to mimic animal talk to create a realistic picture of
the inner setting of the story. Tortoise had to speak Igbo as if he had
a piece of kola nut in his mouth. He had to talk animal, act animal, be
animal in the real sense. The grist of the performance was a
literalisation of the animal character, even if the animal had been
personified. This literalization also extended to the assumption that
such animal characters belonged only to the inaccessible past of the
Igbo culture, not to the present, and also not to the culture of other
ethnic or racial communities. Thus the question of the old tortoise
being presented as speaking English was considered unrealistic.
Tortoise, in the tradition of the New Performance, has learned not just
English, but also the big boy slang of the city. New tortoise is a
happening guy.

Today’s tortoise
could be a politician, a pastor, an Area Boy, a police officer, a
professor, even a journalist. Children as performers are doing things
with tortoise and other animals in our animal farm. Indeed, old things
have become new in the life of child oral performer.