There is one very curious point which these and other stories of the kind have in common--that though these professional jokers, so to call them, have the better of all the animals with whom they ordinarily enter into a contest of wits, there is one ... who always has the better of them all, even of the jokers themselves--the tortoise. He appears under that name in the translation of the bushman’s tales; he is, of course, Uncle Remus’s Brer Tarrypin and he has no less credit in South American stories. Why is the tortoise credited with such wisdom? One wonders.... Is it just this--that the bright little up-looking head and eyes, when put forth, suggested the idea of intelligence? It is something of a serpentine head and we have read a piece of folklore which tells us that the serpent was the most subtle of all the beasts of the field. Surely the meaning of the tortoise symbol, stumbled upon thus unexpectedly, goes far to explain the difficulty. To the native mind the ‘serpentine head,’ appearing between the walls of shell, as naturally pictures the clitoris as does the serpent its male counterpart. By a train of thought not difficult to follow, this particular part of the body has grown to symbolise femininity in general. For Africans, therefore, tortoise stands for the feminine qualities of persuasion--sometimes, perhaps, not untinged by guile--as opposed to the more forceful male attributes. It may be remembered that, in Pliny’s day, a powder made of a whole tortoise shell was thought to be an aphrodisiac. A few days later, in an Mbari house close to Okpala market-place, the two emblems, snake and tortoise, were found modelled side by side in the very centre of the first row of symbolic figures. Further on at Obogwe, where the Mbari house is built in two separate sections--the first, dedicated to the Thunder God Amade Onhia, usually contracted into Amad-ongha, and the second to his spouse, the Earth Goddess Ale or Ala--the phallic serpent was found in a position of great prominence in the shrine of the male deity, while tortoise was seen, modelled alone, in that of the goddess. Another example in which the two symbols were found, this time again in juxtaposition, was upon the main post of the shrine of the Juju Ogboloma at Tema near Degama--one of the principal Kalabari Jujus. Here, as so often, the two are combined with the figure of the sacred crocodile.[1] [Illustration: FIG. 2. Phallic serpent (Eke) and tortoise (Naba), Okpala.] [Illustration: FIG. 3. Chief juju at Tema.]