Previously, the only African folktale books available online were public domain books, most of them published a hundred years ago or more and very much mired in their colonial context. There were a few Creative Commons books (a big shout-out here to Open Book Publishers for their World Oral Literature series), but for the most part, the only online book resources were public domain.
Now, however, thanks to the digital borrowing opportunities provided by Internet Archive, there are literally hundreds of excellent African folktale resources online. I'm in the process right now of updating my Diigo bookmarks with all these great books from Internet Archive. I've added a link in the page navigation at the top of this blog that goes to my African folktale bookmarks at Diigo which are available online, and there's also a live stream of the latest books; you can also see that stream at the bottom of this post.
It's going to take me a while to add all these Internet Archive borrowing links to my records... and each one is such a pleasure to add! I'll also profile some of my favorite books here at the blog. For example, a particular treasure is William Bascom's monumental collection of African dilemma tales, which runs about $30 as a used book... but now everyone can read Bascom's book online thanks to the Internet Archive. The dilemma tale is one of the most distinctive African folktale forms; if you want a jumping-off point to start learning about African folktales, this is a perfect place to start... and thanks to the Internet Archive, it's just a click away: borrowing link.
As I add new online book bookmarks at Diigo, the new entries will pop up here automatically; you can also subscribe to the RSS feed directly.
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