The World around the Mother as a Gift in African Folktales and Fountain of Radical Joy

ABSTRACT In this article, I analyse selected African folktales that foreground the role of mothers in the everyday. The purpose is to appreciate the cultural logic of their representation in relation to the other characters. In the folktales, family is defined around the mother. The father is either conspicuously absent or peripheral. The mother’s self-giving and love towards the family are often radical and come with great sacrifice. Although desirable, it is not always a given that the family reciprocates her commitment. I argue that, in these African folktales, motherhood is crafted as a “gift principle” without which the family cannot survive. This representation of motherhood as “care” is archetypical, as seen in the iconography of Mother Mary in Catholicism. Why does culture endow the mother with such a radical attribute of other-centredness? Is this simply symbolic or does it cohere with the lived experiences of mothers? I draw from scholarship on feminist ethics of care and on the gift economy and motherhood. I conclude that mothers function in the folktales as humanising agents responsible for quality life in the community.