Beautiful African Folktale Books at Internet Archive

Over the past two years, I've been acquiring a big personal library of African folktale collections, mostly used books that I have been able to find on the cheap, some not-so-cheap. Meanwhile, during that time, the Internet Archive has launched an amazing controlled-digital-lending project so that many of the books I have been diligently collecting in my own personal library are also available for "check-out" at Internet Archive: it is a library for the people... for all the people! 

Previously, online books were limited to public domain materials, which are useful too, but often badly constrained by their colonial contexts. Now, however, thanks to the Internet Archive, there is a far wider range of African folktales online.

So, as I start indexing and slowly but surely summarizing the folktales in my personal library, I'm going to focus on the books that are also available for borrowing at the Internet Archive so that any reader of this blog can go take a look at the book for themselves. I'll be able to profile one or two books a week this way, so anyone who wants to give themselves a crash course in the beautiful folktale traditions of Africa can do so with books borrowed from the Internet Archive.

Today, I'll start with a lovely book published by Penguin Books (South Africa): Stories Gogo Told Me by Lisa Grainger, copyright 2007. Here's the online-borrowing link from the Internet Archive.

Grainger's book contains 44 stories collected from oral storytellers throughout southern Africa: Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa. Grainger provides the storyteller's name and additional information for each story, and the stories are fairly short, very nicely told, with abundant illustrations; the illustrations are by Celia von Poncet. So, for example, here's the illustration for the first story: the tortoise had taken feathers from all the birds so he could fly, but when the birds took back their feathers, the tortoise fell down, which is how his shell became cracked:

I've created a Google Doc for the book which quickly lists the table of contents, and I've written up summaries of two of the stories that were of interest to me; I'll be adding more summaries later: Stories Gogo Told Me GoogleDoc. You'll see an automatic table of contents at the top which provides links to the summarized stories, and those story summaries also show up in my Story Feed, as you can see here: there's the story about the tortoise, and a hilarious story about hippos who fling their dung. (More about the RSS feed and Diigo here.)

Later on, I'll add more story summaries; for now, I'll stick to just one or two summaries for each book in order to get the book pages set up, and then I'll go back in and do more story summaries.

In my first post here at this blog brainstorming about the projects I would like to undertake in the coming years, I mentioned how much I admire Sharon Elswit's Story Finder resource books. 

Now, with the amazing books made available by Internet Archive, I'll be able to focus my efforts on doing "story finder" type projects for books that everyone can access, either public domain books or else books that can be borrowed from the Internet Archive.

So, stay tuned for lots more African folktale book write-ups here... books that are just one click away, thanks to the Internet Archive! I had the Grainger book checked out just now to take those screenshots, but I've returned it, which means that wonderful book is just sitting there, waiting for you to check it out:

Stories Gogo Told Me by Lisa Grainger

online-borrowing link