Adzanumee and Her Mother

There was once a woman who wanted one thing more than anything else in the world: a daughter. But she had no children at all, and the wish never left her. She could not be happy. Even in the middle of a feast she would be thinking, “Oh, if only I had a daughter to share this with me.”

One day she was digging yams in her field, and she pulled up one that was beautifully straight and well formed. “Ah,” she thought, “if only this lovely yam were a daughter, how happy I would be.”

To her amazement, the yam spoke. “If I became your daughter,” it said, “would you promise never to scold me for having once been a yam?”

The woman promised eagerly, and at once the yam turned into a beautiful, graceful girl. The woman was overjoyed and treated her with great kindness. She named her Adzanumee. The girl was a wonderful help to her mother. She baked the bread, dug the yams, and took them to sell at the market.

One day she was kept at the market much longer than usual. Her mother grew impatient waiting for her and said crossly, “Where can Adzanumee be? She doesn’t deserve that beautiful name. She is only a yam.”

A bird singing close by heard the mother’s words, and it flew straight to the tree where Adzanumee was sitting. There it began to sing:

“Adzanumee! Adzanumee!
Your mother is unkind—
she says you are only a yam,
you do not deserve your name!
Adzanumee! Adzanumee!”

The girl heard the song and walked home in tears. When her mother saw her she cried, “My daughter, my daughter! What is wrong?”

Adzanumee answered:

“Oh, my mother! My mother!
You called me a yam.
You said I did not deserve my name.
Oh, my mother! My mother!”

With these words she turned and set off toward the yam field. Her mother, terrified, ran after her, wailing:

“No, Adzanumee! Adzanumee!
Don’t believe it, don’t believe it.
You are my daughter,
my own dear daughter Adzanumee!”

But it was too late. Still singing her sad little song, the girl quickly changed back into a yam. When the woman reached the field, there was the yam lying on the ground. Nothing she did or said could bring back the daughter she had longed for so deeply and then treated so thoughtlessly.

Where this story comes from

“Adzanumee and Her Mother” is story XII in Barker and Sinclair’s West African Folk-Tales (1917). Its three short songs—the bird’s, the daughter’s and the mother’s—carry the turning point of the tale, and Sinclair illustrated the moment “The Bird calls to Adzanumee.”

Barker notes that alongside the Anansi and just-so stories the Gold Coast tellers had “the usual sprinkling of magic tales,” some much like European fairy tales. This yam-daughter tale, with a promise not to demean the daughter’s origin, is one of them; the songs on this page are lightly rephrased from the book’s English.

Read the original: West African Folk-Tales, Gutenberg ebook 66923

Best for ages 6–8 with an adult — a sad magic tale about hurtful words and permanent separation, with songs to read aloud.

Reading the story closely

The promise does not forbid saying the word “yam” in every situation. It forbids using Adzanumee’s origin against her. Her mother breaks it by saying she is only a yam and does not deserve her name. The important difference is between remembering where someone came from and treating that origin as a reason to value them less.

Read the three songs in separate voices. The bird reports the insult, Adzanumee repeats the injury, and the mother tries to deny it. What would an apology that accepted responsibility sound like? The magical ending is irreversible, but a real disagreement need not be: listening, apologizing and changing behavior can help repair trust.

Talk about it

• What promise did the woman make to the yam?
• How did Adzanumee find out what her mother had said?
• Why do you think one unkind sentence mattered so much in this story?

Related stories

• The Hunter and the Tortoise — a wonder lost through a broken understanding
• Farmer Mybrow and the Fairies — a careless word ruins a gift