The Woman Who Raised the Sky

Reach! Reach as high as you can, but you cannot touch the sky. 

How did the sky get up there, so far away? Long ago, it was just overhead. Here's what happened:

A woman took her pestle for pounding fufu. The pestle was long, and the woman was strong. Each time she lifted the pestle up, boom: it hit the sky! She kept pounding the fufu in the mortar, and the pestle kept hitting the sky: boom! boom! Every time her pestle hit the sky, the sky went higher and higher.

That is why the sky is so high today.

Photo: Pounding fufu in Ghana. 

I first read this story when I was indexing African folktales earlier this summer, and I knew that I wanted to try to tell the story in 100 words! Here is where I first saw the story: Specimens of Folk-Lore of the Gã-People on the Gold Coast by C. Fleischer and M. B. Wilkie, published in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute in July 1930, which is free to read online at JSTOR. 

You can read more about the Ga people of Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) at Wikipedia. There's an article about fufu too, which is made of boiled plantains that are pounded in a mortar with a pestle, and here is a wonderful essay all about fufu: The Truth About Fufu by Kofi Akpabli, which also has a version of this story. That's where I found this wonderful video: listen to that sound!