Before coming across Miss Piggy, I dug up a series of Hausa tales recorded by an English army officer, and published in Man in the years immediately preceding the First World War. Tremaine's versions read very strangely - I have noticed that more recent versions of the same tales seem more natural, and have wondered whether this is because Tremaine recorded them badly, because his informants were not good story tellers (he mentions that he found that the stories would vary in length depending on whether he offered to reward the teller for each story, or for the time spent telling them) or whether it is not that, as Hausa speakers have been drawn more fully into the modern world, so their tales have been reshaped to fit European notions of how stories work.

Women play a major part in these stories, and are often far more active than are the women encountered in European folk-tales. One I particularly like tells the story of a voracious young woman, who, after a number of interesting adventures, is offered the post of the king's number one wife - an honour which she will only accept once the king has beheaded all his other wives.

But the tales are also peopled by partial beings ; one of them tells a story the main protagonist of which is a skull, who manages to win the woman of his dreams by borrowing bits and pieces of body from his friends and relations. In another one, Tramaine introduces a Maasai woman's head, which works witchcraft upon a group of Ashanti warriors returning from a cattle-raid. In a foot-note, Tremaine rather coyly leads us to understand that the head is, in the original, a vagina. So it comes as no surprise when, in yet another story, a young woman who has been sent to have her child in her father's house, and, being a slave, does not know where to go, finds herself at the door of a hut at which stands a large prick. This organ is accompanied by a dog which translates the noises made by the prick into comprehensible messages.

In some, at least, of the tales, sex and food are brought into close correlation. The voracious young woman is sent away from home by her parents because she will eat everything she finds - including bones that are hundreds of years old, which she digs up from the ground. Wandering into exile, she comes across a dozen dogs and scoffs them down ; after a detour into the jungle, she is unable to speak, but barks instead. Apparently, however, she is sexually potent, for when she arrives in a town, the king immediately makes her his wife, and is besotted by her.

The Maasai vagina halts the Ashanti warriors and demands that they give her some blood from a bull that they have stolen. Later, the vagina punishes one of the warriors for telling tales by opening him up and extracting his heart, kidneys and liver ; these she/it cooks and serves up to the young man's mother, who thinking they are a gift from her son, wolfs them down for her breakfast.

In the story from PNG, women are eatable. In the Hausa tales, they - or their sexual organs - are voracious consumers. In both cases, the distribution of meat is an affair that cannot be pursued without the concourse of women.

Comments to me at tmason@timothyjpmason.com.