African Folklore Story of Huzuni the Sad Frog

African Folklore Story of Huzuni the sad frog is a heart-wrenching story of a mother who was cruel and cold towards her two loving children. Adamou and Touka have more need of a kind mother than a cruel beating.

African Folklore Story of Huzuni the Sad Frog

Huzuni the sad frog

As the elders say, there was a woman who lived in the town of Witu who had two children ages 8 and 6 whom she treated brutally. The children hide away one day and whispered together one day. The boy, Adamou, said to his sister, "Little sister, are you happy with our mother?"

"No," answered the little girl, whose name was Touka. "She yells me and beats me for no reason, and I can never please her."

"She was angry with me this morning," said Adamou, "and she beat me until I could cry no more.”

"Let us run away," said Touka. "The animals and the trees will be good to us. They love us and we will be happy together."

That night the two children ran away from their cruel mother. They went far, far into the forest, and at last, they found a cave in which no one lived.

When the mother found that her children were gone, she was very angry. She set off to scour a high mountain pass in the South, covered plains and grasslands for 3,000 miles seeking signs of the children’s footpaths but she never did find it.

Slowly, her anger turning into worry, she searched through the forest to see if she could find her two children along pleading aloud to anyone who could hear "If my children would only come again, I would do everything I could to make them happy!"

"Do you think she tells the truth?" asked the trees.

"I do not know," answered the sky. "She never treated them well when they were with her."

"Please help me!" yelled the mother, "Earth, will you tell me where my children are?"

Adamou told the trees, sky and animals an evil woman was looking for him and his sister to kill them; so the trees would not tell the mother where the children were hiding.

For a long time Adamou and Touka were happy in the forest, for there was no one to yell at them and to beat them, but at last, sadly there was no food, no warmth and death came to Touka quickly.

Adamou sat alone in the unhappy cave weeping for his dead sister.

Then suddenly in his loneliness and sadness, he threw himself down from a high tree and was killed at once.

All this time the children were living and dying in the forest, the mother had been looking for her children, and at last, she saw her son lying at the foot of the tree. Then she too wailed and cried aloud, for she was sorry that she had treated her children so cruelly.

She prayed to the Gods to make her children live, but they could not make them a live again as a human boy and girl.

The Gods said, "You two shall be frogs, and your names shall be Huzuni meaning sadness, you frogs are special, because you will appear to humans only during a Green moon and you shall make your home in the marsh with the reeds and the rushes of the Tana River. There you shall wail as loud as you please for the death of your innocence and the cruel way your mother treated you during your human life.

A crab walks, so walks his children. - African Proverb from Liberia