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

online borrowing link