The Story of the Blind Man, the Cripple, the Poor Man, the Thief and the King

Prior to his 1909 appointment as Government Anthropologist, Northcote Thomas was a member of the Councils of both the Folklore Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute. His work in Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone involved recording oral traditions on wax cylinder phonographs, which he subsequently transcribed and published in articles for the journal Man and in his Anthropological Reports. This specific recording was included in the 1914 publication titled Anthropological Report on the Ibo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria; Part IV: Proverbs, Stories, Tones in Ibo, as detailed in the Phonograph recording Archives.

The Traditional Nigerian Folktales project by [Re:]Entanglements has worked to revitalize these recordings. Yvonne Mbanefo of the Igbo Studies Initiative provided contemporary Standard Igbo renderings, translations, and re-recordings of the stories, while Ugonna Umeike of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, created illustrations based on Northcote Thomas's original photographs.

The narrative follows a blind man, a cripple, and a poor man who each receive yams and meat from a king during a famine. In each instance, the king advises the recipients to keep the gift secret. However, when a thief later asks the king for food, the king instead instructs him to rob the blind man and the cripple, specifically telling the thief to spare the poor man to avoid being reported. The thief successfully robs the blind man (who cannot see him) and the cripple (who cannot chase him).