Monday, May 31, 2021

African Proverbs at Internet Archive: Ashanti Proverbs

Following up on the Liberian proverbs post from yesterday, I wanted to share a book of proverbs available at Internet Archive: Ashanti Proverbs translated by R. S. Rattray. There are 800 proverbs in the book, grouped by subject, with the original Twi language version, plus Rattray's translation along with some commentary about the language and also the cultural context. 


Here's the photograph that appears on the right, showing Owusu Sekyere (Kuma), the chief of Mampon in Ghana:


So, on the one hand, this is an incredibly valuable book, both for English speakers and even more so for students of Twi (more about Twi). The proverbs in the book were originally collected decades earlier in 1879 and published at that time without any translation or commentary, so Rattray's efforts to provide translation and commentary are very welcome. 

At the same time, the book was published in 1916, and it is permeated with the racism and white supremacy of the British colonial project in Africa. The subtitle gives you a hint right from the start; the book's full title is: Ashanti Proverbs: The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People. Think about that enormous historical irony — Europeans calling the Ashanti people "savages" as they were engaged in their own cataclysmic world war that would leave twenty million dead and even more wounded.

As I see it, an important task for us now is to take these books from colonial times and see what we can salvage from them. The study of African languages was a major part of the colonial project, and collecting proverbs and folktales was usually part of that linguistic research. As a result, there are hundreds of books and articles about African folktales and/or proverbs that were published in English, French, and German. Sometimes the framing of the contents is repugnant (even really repugnant), but I believe we can still hear the African voices in those folktales and proverbs, even when the books in which we find them are part of a deeply racist colonial project.

In the case of this project, Rattray worked closely with Mr. Samuel Kwafo of Mampon (see photo of the chief of Mampon above) in preparing the translation and commentary. Rattray does not tell us anything about Mr. Kwafo beyond his name (in sharp contrast to the tribute Herskovits paid to Mr. Sie Tagbwe for commentary on the Liberian proverbs), but I suspect this must be the Samuel Kwafo shown in this picture: Ordination of the first native pastor, Samuel Kwafo, in Kumase 15th August 1909.


And I suspect this might also be the same Mr. Samuel Kwafo mentioned in Richard Emmanuel Obeng's autobiography, which prefaces his novel Eighteenpence"In the year 1888, my maternal uncle, Kwadwo Yeboah, arrived to take me back to Kwahu. I was delighted. A few days after our arrival, I visited the school. The Rev. Samuel Kwafo, then a Catechist, was in charge of the school."

Those are the only traces that I found of Mr. Kwafo through Google-searching, and I wanted to share at least that much since, of course, Rattray's name appears as the author of this book, with no trace of Mr. Kwafo except for the mention of thanks in the introduction.

Meanwhile, the name of Hugh Clifford does appear on the title page of the book: "With a preface by SIR HUGH CLIFFORD" (name in all-caps on the title page). More specifically: "His Excellency Sir Hugh Clifford, K. C. M. G., Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Gold Coast Colony." You can read more about his colonial exploits at Wikipedia. Clifford's contempt for Africans and African cultures comes through loud and clear in the preface to this book: white people are superior to all; he admits some grudging respect for "Orientals," and nothing but contempt for Africans — such was Clifford's colonial hierarchy. "Much has been said and written concerning the difficulty which the European mind usually experiences in comprehending the mentality of Orientals, but it is probably that the difficulties which beset a student of West African thought are far greater than any which are experienced in Asia. [...] To anyone who is acquainted with the proverbial wisdom of the East, the present collection will appear to lack the epigrammatic crispness of thought by which the former is characterized. This perhaps indicates that the mind of the people whose sayings Mr. Rattray is interpreting for us differs from our own more fundamentally than do the minds of the peoples of Asia."

As Rattray explains, Clifford provided the financial support in the form of a subvention that made it possible to publish the book. Clifford had no love for the proverbs (he expresses nothing but scorn for the proverbs in the preface); instead, Clifford's goal was to provide British colonial administrators with the linguistic and cultural knowledge they could use to dominate the African people over whom they ruled. Rattray was himself one of those civil servants (part of the Gold Coast Customs Service; more about Rattray at Wikipedia), but at the same time he was an anthropologist with a deep and abiding interest in both the proverbs and the folktales of the Ashanti people, and he also published a book of Hausa folktales; I'll have more to say about Rattray's other publications in later posts. Unlike Clifford, Rattray has a real admiration for these proverbs. As he explains, "These sayings would seem to be, to the writer, the very soul of this people, as of a truth all such sayings really are. They contain some thought which, when one, more eloquent in the tribe than another, has expressed in words, all who are of that people recognize at once as something which they knew full well already, which all the instinct of their lives and thoughts and traditions tells them to be true to their own nature."

As I explained in yesterday's post, I'm focusing on the animal proverbs, so I'm transcribing the animal proverbs from Rattray's book in a Google Doc, and I'm also making slides of the ones I think would be of general interest. I was especially excited to this a proverb about the tiny royal antelope, a.k.a. chevrotain, a.k.a. mouse-deer who is a trickster character in West African folktales; see this earlier post about cunnie rabbit. Here's the proverb: The elephant is big and bulky, but the tiny mouse-deer has the most experience and sense.


I also really liked this proverb about the baboon's red butt: The monkey struts about just like a conceited man, but its bottom is still red.


As I keep adding new animal proverbs to the collection, they'll appear in the slideshow (bottom sidebar of this blog) and also in the Padlet.

Sunday, May 30, 2021

African Proverbs: Kru proverbs from Liberia

Along with folktales of all kinds, proverbs are another special interest of mine, and one of the most exciting things about learning more about Africa and African traditions is learning about African proverbs.

Given the thousands upon thousands of African proverbs that have been translated into English and published in books and articles, I need some way to focus my collecting. So, no surprise, I have decided to focus on African proverbs that feature animals. (No surprise because my favorite stories are also the ones about animals.)

So, I started reading and taking notes today, and just by chance the first article I grabbed was Kru Proverbs from Liberia collected by anthropologist Melville Herskovits and his Kru colleague, Sie Tagbwe, as published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1930 (with a very moving tribute to Mr. Tagbwe who died shortly before the article was published). 

It's an exemplary collection: there are 199 proverbs, each with the Kru language version (more about the Kru people), an interlinear English translation, a more free English translation, plus a detailed commentary from Mr. Tagbwe to explain the meanings of the proverbs. I'm taking notes in a Google Doc for all the proverbs that mention animals; so far, that is almost half of the proverbs, or 25 out of 61 (I still have lots more to read!).

Of those 25 proverbs, there were 10 that seemed to me people would enjoy without lots of detailed notes about the cultural context, so I made Google Slides for each of those with an image of the animal, the proverb in English, plus a sort of footnote at the bottom of the slide containing information about the source plus a link to my Google Doc, along with the image credit, and a sentence or two of commentary if needed, especially if I changed the wording of the English. Here's the slideshow, and I've embedded that also in the sidebar of this blog down at the bottom:


I've also created a Padlet where I am putting the slides since that is a way to "see" all the slides at once (you can then click on an item in the Padlet and it will display at full size). Here's a link to the Padlet.


The main reason, though, for making the Padlet is so that I can have an RSS feed. That means as I add the new items to the Padlet, they show up in Inoreader, which means they also show up in the RSS feed on my homepage at LauraGibbs.net:


So, that's the overall plan for how I will be working on African animal proverbs along with the work I'm already doing on African folktales too. I may adjust the routine as I go along, but right now it's feeling pretty good. I promise hundreds more to come!

Meanwhile, I'm taking it as a kind of cosmic sign that I picked this article about Kru proverbs to get me started because it turns out the Kru people have a very distinctive style of animal proverb. There are proverbs that use imagery, just as you would expect. For example: It doesn't do any good to strike the ground after the snake has passed. You have to see opportunity in the moment; if you wait, it will slither away, quick as a snake slithers away.


But here's something really fascinating: in addition to proverbs with animal imagery, the Kru people also tells proverbs that are presented as "so-and-so" says proverbs, like this: Dog says, "Because I beg for food, I can't speak my mind." The meaning of the proverb is basically like the English "Beggars can't be choosers," but the proverb has a totally different feel to it by being presented in the animal's words.


As the article explains, this "(animal) says" is a distinctive Kru style of proverb. Of the 61 proverbs, I've read so far, 15 are in this "(animal) says" style. I'm excited to keep reading through the rest of the proverbs to see how many more of them I will find!

I'll be back with another post as I continue to work my way through this beautiful collection of proverbs. :-)


African Folktales at Internet Archive: Tales from the Story Hat

Verna Aardema had a long career as a writer of children's books inspired by African folktales. Earlier I had profiled what is probably her most famous book, the Caledecott-award-winning Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears: A West African Tale, which was published in 1975. 

The book I will look at today is a much earlier book, Tales from the Story Hat, published in 1960 with illustrations by Elton Fax; it's available for digital lending (two copies) from the Internet Archive. 


Aardema was born in 1911, and she worked as a elementary school teacher from 1934 until 1973, and she also worked as a journalist and writer during those years and beyond. Tales from the Story Hat was her first published book, and it was both a critical and commercial success. The book is no longer in print, but used copies are abundantly available, as is also the case with the sequel: More Tales from the Story Hat.

There are nine tales in the book, and Aardema provides detailed bibliography for each: three come from Henry M. Stanley's collection of stories from the Congo and Uganda first published in 1873 (a remarkable book that I'll write about in a separate post); since Stanley's book is in the public domain and available online, you can compare Aardema's adaptation of her sources. Another story is adapted from a legend reported in Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa, also available online, and in this case Aardema has taken a very sparsely told Igbo story and turned it into a really exciting story ("Wiki the Weaver"). Aardema also took a Fang story reported in a novel, Stinetorf's Beyond the Hungry Country, published in 1984 which you can read online at the Internet Archive if you want to compare Aardema's story to her source material. Two more of Aardema's stories comes from booklets published in Liberia which are hard to find anywhere, so that makes her stories here especially valuable, giving us (indirect) evidence for some Liberian folktales that are hard to track down otherwise. I'll have more to say about one of those Liberian stories below; it is a really exquisite fairy tale that seems to me ideal material for prompting students to write their own fairy tales using the same formula.

Meanwhile, in addition to those African sources, Aardema includes two stories from "LoBagola" (Joseph Howard Lee), one of the most fascinating literary tricksters of the 20th century. I'm not going to try to provide an account of LoBagola's life and career here, but he has a Wikipedia article. One of my future projects is to try to do a motif analysis of LoBagola's published stories to get a sense of just what Joseph Howard Lee took from African folktale traditions (that might have been known to him directly or indirectly) as well as elements of his own imagining. I have a long way to go in developing my motif catalogs, but I definitely think LoBagola merits our attention as an African American storyteller as well as being a trickster in real life. In any case, at the time Aardema wrote this book, she did not question LoBagola's self-proclaimed identity as a West African "savage," including his stories side by side with the stories she retold from African sources.

I'll close with some comments about the really exquisite fairy tale that Aardema tells from a Liberian source: Koi and the Kola Nuts. The story has many distinctive African features, like the kola nuts of the story's title, which might be of special interest to students who are fans of cola; more about that at the BBC: The little-known nut that gave Coca-Cola its name.


Here's how the fairy tale takes shape:

1. Village chief dies, and his sons inherit his property. The youngest son, who is a little guy and underrated by all, is away hunting and comes back to find nothing is left to give to him... except for a scraggly kola-nut tree. The boy, Koi, picks all the nuts, puts them in a bag and sets off to find a village where he will be respected as the son of a chief.
2. Along the way, Koi meets a snake who needs some kola nuts as medicine; he shares his nuts with the snake.
3. Next, Koi meets some ants who stole the devil's kola nuts and need to pay them back; he shares nuts with the ants.
4. Next, Koi meets an alligator who killed a dog and ate it, and now he has to make restitution in the form of kola nuts; he gives the last of the nuts to the alligator.
5. Koi arrives at a village where they mock him for his small size and poor appearance, even though he insists he is the son of a chief. The chief of that village sets Koi some impossible tasks.
6. I'm not going to spoil the whole story but suffice to say the snake helps him complete the first task.
7. The ants help him complete the second task.
8. The alligator helps him complete the third task.
9. The village chief decides to give Koi half the kingdom, recognizing that he is truly a great man after all.
10. The village chief also gives Koi his daughter in marriage, so Koi becomes not just a co-chief but also son-in-law.

I really like the fact that children who might only be familiar with European fairy tales will grasp the ways in which this West African story from Liberia shares the same overall "story form" as fairy tales they might already know.

Then, once students see that fairy tales have a "form" (formula), they can create their own, with their own heroines and heroes, their own magical helpers, their own quests and tasks, their own rewards, etc.

Of all the stories in this book, this one seemed the most likely to use a kind of writing prompt for students. There's also a single-story book edition of Koi and the Kola Nuts by Verna Aardema which is not available at Internet Archive but, interestingly, a version by Brian Gleeson with illustrations by Reynold Ruffins which is available for digital lending: here's the link. I'm surprised, and disappointed, to see that Gleeson does not credit Aardema, or any other source, for the story. The details which he shares with Aardema's story make it pretty clear (?) that she must have been his source. Wikpedia identifies the story as an Igbo story from Nigeria, but provides no citation for the source at all. If I find more information about the source of this story (I do have some Liberian folktale books yet to explore), I'll update this post.

Aardema's book:



Gleeson's book:




Saturday, May 29, 2021

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Week 2

Instead of a new book today, I'm going to end my second week of African folklore book recommendations with a Week 2 round-up, and I'll be back with new recommendations in the coming week. (And here's the Week 1 round-up if you're curious.)

There are links below to the individual blog posts, and you can see all the blog posts together on one page here: African Folklore books - Week 2


West African Folktales
by William H. Barker and Cecilia Sinclair
(book plus free audiobook also)
details at the blog post



Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears:
A West African Tale
by Verna Aardema
details at the blog post



The Orphan Girl and Other Stories
collected and retold by Buchi Offodile
details at the blog post



Anansi's Narrow Waist: An African Folk Tale 
retold by Len Cabral 
PLUS
 Len Cabral's Storytelling Book
details at the blog post



The Night Has Ears: African Proverbs
collected and illustrated by Ashley Bryan
details at the blog post



The Girl Who Married a Lion,
and Other Tales from Africa
PLUS
Children of Wax: African Folk Tales
collected retold by Alexander McCall Smith
details at the blog post



Hyena and the Moon: Stories to Tell from Kenya
by Heather McNeil
details at the blog post



Friday, May 28, 2021

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Hyena and the Moon

Since I wrote about a book with stories from South Africa yesterday, I decided to shift to a different region today: stories from Kenya in eastern Africa retold in Hyena and the Moon by Heather McNeil... it's just a click away at the Internet Archive.


McNeil's book is really exemplary in every way. She documents her travels through Kenya in detail with maps and photographs, and she provides detailed cultural background for the cultural groups that she and her translator, Peter Kagathi Gitema, worked with: the Kikuyu, the Turkana, the Akamba, the Kipsigis, the Taita, the Luhya, and the Samburu. 


The book features photographs, and also illustrations:

(one of the storytellers with her family)

For each story (there are 10 stories in the book, selected from among the 100 stories the author collected), McNeil provides her own version in English, and she also provides the word-for-word translation so that you can see how she has adapted the story, and she also provides notes to explain some of the choices she made. She interweaves Swahili words into the stories, with a glossary in the back. The stories each come with storytelling tips because McNeil really hopes that people will embrace these stories and retell them; the subtitle of the book is "Stories to Tell from Kenya."

There are very few books that I've found which provides such a rich context in which to encounter the written stories; it is a wonderful book.

In addition, Heather McNeil is the editor of a series of books like these; it's the "World Folklore series" from Libraries Unlimited publishers in Englewood, Colorado. 

And here's the link again for the stories from Kenya:

Hyena and the Moon: Stories to Tell from Kenya
by Heather McNeil



Thursday, May 27, 2021

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Books by Alexander McCall Smith

Earlier this week, I wrote about The Orphan Girl and Other Stories collected and retold by Buchi Offodile, a beautiful book that is part of the "International Folk Tale" series from Interlink Press (there are lots of used copies of books from this series at AbeBooks). Today, I want to profile another book from that series which is available for digital check-out at the Internet Archive: Children of Wax: African Folk Tales collected retold by Alexander McCall Smith. It's just a click away at Internet Archive.


That book was published in 1991, and the author explains that he collected these stories while traveling in Matabeleland in Zimbabwe (where he was born and grew up); they are stories of the Ndebele people

Then, another book appeared in 2005 with a different publisher but featuring the same stories from Zimbabwe, plus stories from Botswana collected by Elinah Grant (who translated them from Setswana into English), along with a new introduction: The Girl Who Married a Lion, and Other Tales from Africa. This book is available in multiple copies at Internet Archive for check-out:


And yes, this is THAT Alexander McCall Smith of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency; some of those books are also available at Internet Archive: all McCall Smith at Internet Archive. You can find out more about him at his website: AlexanderMcCallSmith.com, and at Wikipedia.

And for those of you who are Audible book users, there's a fantastic audiobook version of The Girl Who Married a Lion available at Audible; it's a great listening experience:


There are so many outstanding stories in this book! So, if you are looking for a great introduction to the storytelling traditions of South Africa, these stories from Zimbabwe and Botswana are a great place to start. And for more South African folktales, take a look at: Stories Gogo Told Me by Lisa Grainger. Another wonderful collection with stories from Zimbabwe and Botswana, plus Zambia and South Africa.

So many stories to enjoy! And check out the slideshow I made which I'll update as new book recommendations get added; it's embedded in the sidebar of the blog also.



Wednesday, May 26, 2021

African Folktales at Internet Archive: The Night Has Ears

Most of the books I'm featuring in this series of Internet Archive African folklore posts are books of folktales, but there are other genres I will want to feature also, such as riddles, and starting today: proverbs! Since I shared a riddle book illustrated by Ashley Bryan earlier — The House with No Door: African Riddle Poems — I thought I would start off the proverb books with one by Ashley Bryan also: The Night Has Ears. Thanks to the marvelous Internet Archive, the book is just a click away with digital lending:


As Bryan opens the book, he explains, "I grew up in a household of proverbs. My mother had a proverb ready for any situation, attitude, or event." (I'll note there that in Bryan's Beautiful Blackbird book, he used his mother's old sewing scissors to create the paper collages used as illustrations there!) Then, as he started doing research into African folktales, he kept finding references to proverbs everywhere. That's been my experience also; many stories include proverbs, and many of the people who collected African folktales also collected proverbs; the two genres go hand-in-hand. 

In this book, Bryan has done a beautiful job of pairing up illustrations and proverbs. Just like in the riddle book, the details of the drawings provide an occasion to think more deeply about the meaning of the proverb. For example, look at this beautiful page with the Yoruba proverb: Patching makes a garment last long. This type of proverb is literally true (which is not always the case with proverbs, like the proverbial watched pot)... but the real power of the proverb is in its application to many things, not just garments. This beautiful illustration of generations is a way to prompt about what it means for things to "last long" and why that is important, and how beautiful patching can be:


Folklorists who study proverbs are called "paremiologists" (from the Greek word for proverbs, paroimia παροιμία), and there is something they call "proverb literacy." Children who grow up surrounded by proverbs, as Ashley Bryan did, gain fluency in proverbs. Those children are able to understand proverbs, learn them, and use them independently. Over time, proverb literacy has been decreasing, and people of all ages find it increasingly hard to "get" what proverbs say, to understand the way that proverbs express meaning. I personally believe that teaching proverbial literacy is one of our most important tasks as educators. Books like this one by Ashley Bryan are a great contribution to that process!

The Night Has Ears: African Proverbs
collected and illustrated by Ashley Bryan


I'm using labels at this blog to organize the blog posts, so you can also click on this label Author: Bryan to see the three different books of his that I've featured so far, and that is just the beginning (I am a huge fan of all his work): much more Ashley Bryan to come! I'll just add for now this short video at YouTube: it's Ashley Bryan in action!





Tuesday, May 25, 2021

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Storyteller Len Cabral

Yesterday I featured a beautiful book of West African folktales, and of course Spider figured in those stories (The Orphan Girl and Other Stories by Buchi Offodile), and today I want to share a children's book about Spider: Anansi's Narrow Waist: An African folk tale retold by Len Cabral and illustrated by David Diaz. The book is just a click away at Internet Archive, and there are two copies available for digital lending. 


The story is driven by Anansi's charactistic greed — he wants the food, and he wants ALL the food... and he doesn't like having to wait either — and it explains how he ends up not just with a narrow waist, but also with eight legs. I don't want to spoil the plot, so I won't say more than that, except that it's a fun story, and a great way to introduce young readers to "aetiological" stories, i.e. folktales that provide an explanation for the way things are now, the cause (Greek aetion) of how they came to be. 

I'll also add that there's another Len Cabral book you can find at Internet Archive for digital checkout also: Len Cabral's Storytelling Book


This book features tips for beginning, intermediate, and advanced storytellers, along with lots of stories to tell with Cabral's own "telling guide" with information about how he himself presents that particular story. Anansi's narrow waist is one of the stories he includes in that book too, and here's a sample of what that looks like with his "telling guide" notes to the side:


So, I can highly recommend both of these books from Len Cabral that are available at Internet Archive: Anansi's Narrow Waist and Len Cabral's Storytelling Book. Enjoy! Maybe you will be inspired to tell / write / imagine stories of your own. 

Plus you can find out more at Len Cabral's website, LenCabral.com. And...... he's at Twitter: @Len_Cabral.


And I also found this recent video at YouTube... Len Cabral is Zooming!

Monday, May 24, 2021

African Folktales at Internet Archive: The Orphan Girl and Other Stories

Yesterday I wrote about a classic children's book based on a West African folktale — Verna Aardema's Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears — and you can find use these links to browse all this week's books, plus previous recommendations.

Today I want to follow up with a beautiful book of West African folktales which includes stories from all over western Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo. Yes, no kidding: all those countries! It's The Orphan Girl and Other Stories collected and retold by Buchi Offodile, published in 2001. It's just a click away at the Internet Archive thanks to digital lending:


The author grew up in Nigeria and returned to West Africa many times, collecting stories whenever he had the chance. All but a few of the stories in this book are stories that he collected (and there is detailed bibliography for the few stories he reprinted from other sources), and for each country there is a helpful map and introductory materials to help situate the country and its stories in the West African context. For example, here is how the Cameroon section begins:


There is also an extremely helpful introduction full of reminiscing about the stories, proverbs, and riddles he heard while growing up, along with a quick historical overview of West Africa.

The stories are organized by country, but you will find an index in the back of the book where the stories are grouped by categories, along with an index of African words and phrases used in the texts.

There are so many excellent stories in this book! One of my favorites is a story about how the trickster Spider managed to outwit God himself, Nyame, by managing to get a beautiful bride when he had only a single grain of corn to bargain with. In general trickster stories are always my favorites, but you will also find mythological stories here, fairy tales, along with cumulative tales, dilemma tales, and so on. Very highly recommended! 

So, if you are looking for a crash course in the folktale traditions of West Africa, this book is an ideal place to start... and it's just a click away, thanks to the Internet Archive.

collected and retold by Buchi Offodile


Sunday, May 23, 2021

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Why Mosquitoes Buzz

We're now in Week 2 of African folklore book recommendations that are available at the Internet Archive (here's Week 1), and I am really excited about today's book: it is by one of my favorite children's book authors, Verna Aardema (a prolific author of children's books inspired by African folktales), and it is my very favorite genre of folktale: a cumulative chain tale! This is one of Aardema's best known books, and it won the Caldecott Medal in 1976.

Here's the book: Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears: A West African Tale, and it is just a click away for borrowing at Internet Archive. The gorgeous illustrations are by Diane and Leo Dillon. There are multiple copies available for digital check-out:


The most famous cumulative tale in the English tradition is probably the house that Jack built, which is a nursery-rhyme story without much of a plot. This story, however, has a very dramatic plot, which starts and ends with a mosquito. I don't want to do spoilers, but I will just say that the characters in the chain of the tale are as follows: mosquito, iguana, python, rabbit, crow, monkey, owl, and finally lion, who puts a halt to the chain of events and walks everybody back through what has happened, discovering that the little mosquito is the one who set all these events in motion. You can see quite a few of the characters here on this page:

illustration by Diane and Leo Dillon

So, if you have not read this book before, you are in for a treat. I will have lots more chain tales to share going forward because, when I find them, I like to share them: I love chain tales! (If you're curious, I did a class project with chain tales from different traditions here: One Thing Leads to Another.) Chain tales are very strongly represented in African storytelling traditions; in fact, that was one of the reasons why I started studying African folktale traditions. I was working on chain tales in the storytelling traditions of India, where chain tales are enormously popular, and doing that research I kept reading about how popular chain tales are in Africa also... and it's true. Aardema just cites an acquaintance, Marcia Vanduinen, as the source for the story; she does not provide any bibliography. There is an Igbo story from Nigeria very similar to this one in Offodile's West African folktales, so maybe I will write about that book tomorrow.

For now, here's Aardema's wonderful book, just a click away at the Internet Archive:

Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears?
A West African Tale retold by Verna Aardema



Saturday, May 22, 2021

African Folktales at Internet Archive: West African Folktales

I'm going to start off this week's recommendations with a book that you can get from Internet Archive along with a free LibriVox audiobook too:  West African Folktales by William H. Barker and Cecilia Sinclair (who also did the illustrations). Here's a link to the Internet Archive book, and also the LibriVox audiobook.


These stories were collected in the early years of the 20th century from African students at a teacher training center in Accra, the capital of Ghana. 


Many of the stories focus on Anansi, "Spider," a sly, greedy, dangerous trickster. You will also meet Kweku Tsin, Anansi's good-hearted son who often outwits his father. In the stories, Anansi is sometimes like a spider, and sometimes like a man, and sometimes it is just hard to tell. In the illustrations, Anansi appears as a human; in this illustration, Anansi has all the wisdom of the world in a pot, and he's trying to hide the pot up in a tree.


Here's the audiobook:


So, you can read, listen, or read while you listen!



Friday, May 21, 2021

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Week 1

Instead of a new book today, I'm going to end my first week of African folklore book recommendations with a Week 1 round-up, and I'll be back with new recommendations in the coming week. :-)

There are links below to the individual blog posts, and you can see all the blog posts together on one page here: African Folklore books - Week 1

Stories Gogo Told Me by Lisa Grainger
details at the blog post



Beautiful Blackbird by Ashley Bryan
details at the blog post



How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have? by Julius Lester
details at the blog post



A Ring of Tricksters:
Animal Tales from America, the West Indies, and Africa
by Virginia Hamilton
details at the blog post



Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider, and the Other Beef
by Florence Cronise
details at the blog post



The House with No Door: African Riddle Poems
by Brian Swann and Ashley Bryan
details at the blog post