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

online borrowing link