Compère Bouki

Also Known As: also Compair Bouki, Bouki, Bouqui; Tonton Bouki or Uncle Bouqui in Haiti; B’Bouki or B’Booky in the Bahamas; from the Wolof word bukki, “hyena”, with the French title compère, “godfather” or “old friend”
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Cajun Mythology, African American Folklore, Caribbean Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Bouki is the greedy, slow-witted animal of the Louisiana Creole tales, a hyena in name whose appetite always runs ahead of his sense.
Role in Mythos: He is the standing dupe and rival of the trickster rabbit Compère Lapin, the one whose schemes fail so that the rabbit’s can succeed.
Relation to Humans: He does not deal with people at all; he is a figure in stories told aloud to them, first by enslaved West Africans and their descendants in French Louisiana and the Caribbean. Listeners are meant to laugh at him and to take the point that strength and hunger without wit get a body beaten.

A kettle is coming to the boil in a clearing, and beside it stands Compère Bouki, singing. The song is meant for the monkeys in the trees. It tells them there is something good in the pot. He has a game to offer: he will climb in first, and when he calls out that he is cooked, they must pull him out. Then it will be their turn. The water is barely warm when he calls. The monkeys haul him out and climb in, pleased with themselves, and Bouki stokes the fire.

When they scream that they are cooked, he puts the lid on. If you were really cooked, he tells them, you would not be able to say so.

That is Bouki at his best, which is to say his worst, and it is one of the few times he wins anything. The win does not last. A small monkey gets away and tells the rest. The next time Bouki sings his song at the kettle, the monkeys are ready, and it is Bouki who goes into water that is truly hot. He shouts that he is cooked. They give him back his own answer, word for word, and leave the lid where it is.

The tale was written down in Louisiana Creole and published in 1895 by Alcée Fortier, a professor at Tulane who collected stories from Black Creole tellers in New Orleans and on the sugar plantations of St. James Parish where he grew up. Fortier was a white scholar from a planter family, and the tales were not his. He is the door they came through into print. His book, Louisiana Folk-Tales, is the first sizeable record of a character the tellers had been passing along for generations by then.

They had carried him a long way. Bouki is a Wolof word. In Senegal, bukki is the hyena, and in the tales of the Wolof and their neighbours the hyena is the greedy fool who is forever outwitted by Leuk the hare. Enslaved Senegambians were brought to French Louisiana in large numbers in the eighteenth century, and they brought the pair with them. The hare became Lapin, the rabbit. The hyena kept his African name, because French had no better one and Louisiana had no hyenas. So the word stayed and the animal faded. Nobody on the bayou could have said what a bouki was. He was just Bouki, the one who gets fooled.

The French gave both animals a title. Compère means a child’s godfather, and by extension an old friend and neighbour, and so the two are bound together like family. It is a poor sort of friendship. Lapin is small and quick and lives on his wits. Bouki is bigger, stronger and always hungry, and he trusts the rabbit again every single time.

Fortier’s tales show how it goes. One morning Bouki finds Lapin cooking birds’ eggs, and the smell of them frying is more than he can stand. He claims a toothache to beg a taste. Lapin gives him one and warns him not to go raiding nests. Bouki goes straight out and strips every nest he can find. The birds call a meeting on the bank of a bayou to learn who the thief is, and Bouki, who cannot keep his mouth shut, gives himself away. They fall on him in a cloud of beaks and wings and come close to killing him.

In another, the two friends overhear the elephant and the whale agreeing to divide the world between them, the land to one and the sea to the other. Lapin decides to take them both down a peg with a long rope and a tug of war in which each great beast thinks it is pulling against the rabbit. Bouki wants no part of it. He is frightened, and he hangs back and watches. He is a coward. The tales are quite plain about that.

His powers, such as they are, are size, a loud voice and an endless stomach. In the kettle story he even shows a flash of real cunning, but he can only play a trick once, and he never guesses that it might be turned around. Greed is the handle anyone can pick him up by. Offer him food and he stops thinking. He cannot keep a secret, cannot hold his temper, and cannot remember that the rabbit has cheated him before.

He travelled as well as any hero. In Haiti he is Tonton Bouki, Uncle Bouki, and there he has become a man: a hard-working, gullible countryman who is forever taken in by the sly Ti Malice. The American folklorist Harold Courlander gathered those stories in the 1930s and published them in 1942. In the Bahamas he is B’Bouki, the foil of B’Rabby. In Louisiana he was still being told at the end of the twentieth century. In 1997 a Creole storyteller named Enola Matthews, of Jennings, was filmed telling a tale of Bouki, Lapin and the possum for a state folklife project, in the same language Fortier had heard a hundred years before.

No story tells where Bouki came from or how he finally ends. He has no birth and no death. He is simply there at the start of each tale, hungry again, with the rabbit at his elbow.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Compère Bouki?

Compère Bouki is the greedy and foolish animal character of Louisiana Creole folktales. Bouki is the rival and constant victim of the trickster rabbit Compère Lapin. The tales were first published in quantity by Alcée Fortier in Louisiana Folk-Tales in 1895.

What kind of animal is Bouki?

Bouki is a hyena by origin, because his name comes from bukki, the Wolof word for hyena. Louisiana had no hyenas, so the tellers there kept the name without a clear picture of the animal, and the tales do not describe him. In Haiti, Bouki is told as a human being.

Where do the Bouki and Lapin stories come from?

The Bouki and Lapin stories come from Senegal and the surrounding region of West Africa, where the hyena Bouki is outwitted by Leuk the hare. Enslaved Senegambians carried the tales to French Louisiana in the eighteenth century. The hare became the rabbit Lapin, and the hyena kept his Wolof name.

What happens in the story of Bouki and the monkeys?

In the story of Bouki and the monkeys, Bouki tricks a troop of monkeys into climbing into a boiling kettle and covers it when they cry out that they are cooked. One small monkey escapes and warns the others. The monkeys later trap Bouki in the same kettle and answer his cries with his own words.

Is Bouki the same character as Uncle Bouki in Haiti?

Bouki of Louisiana and Uncle Bouki of Haiti share the same West African root and the same name. In Haiti, Tonton Bouki is a gullible countryman who is fooled by the trickster Ti Malice. Harold Courlander published a collection of the Haitian stories in 1942.