"Enough already!" said the father.
The mother agreed. "I'm ready to throw this baby out the door and let the hyenas have him!"
A hyena was passing by and heard the mother's words.
"Food!" she thought to herself, and she stood outside the door, waiting for the mother to throw the baby out as she had promised.
So the hyena waited.
And waited.
Finally giving up, the hyena shouted, "Humans are such liars!"
The parents wondered who was shouting at them, and when they opened the door, they glimpsed a hyena running off into the darkness.
Inspired by: "The Story of the People and the Hyena" in Lamba Folklore by Clement M. Doke, 1927.
Notes: You can read the original story online. Compare Aesop's fable about the wolf and the baby, and compare also the hyena who listened to people talking in this story: The Hyena's Cry (from Uganda). It is the existence of that other variant which really makes me think this is an old African folktale that traveled north to become part of the Aesopic corpus.
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