African Folktales at Internet Archive: Lion and the Ostrich Chicks

After focusing on the work of the extended Bleek family over the past two days, with their Specimens of Bushman Folklore and also The Mantis and His Friends, plus their Khoekhoen book Hottentot Fables and Tales, I wanted to shift back to an author I've written about before, the African American artist and illustrator Ashley Bryan (see previous Bryan posts). who included the San (Bushman) story "Son of the Wind" in his 1986 collection, The Lion and the Ostrich Chicks, a book which is just a click away at the Internet Archive, thanks to digital lending.

The book contains four different folktales retold by Bryan and with beautiful artwork as you would expect:: "The Lion and the Ostrich Chicks" (a Masai story), "Son of the Wind" (a San story), "Jackal's Favorite Game" (a Kimbundu story), and "The Foolish Boy" (a Hausa story). Bryan worked from published sources, and all the sources he used for this book are available at Internet Archive! For the San story, he relied on Bleek and Lloyd's Specimens of Bushman Folklore which I wrote about this week, and he also used Chatelain's Folktales of Angola, Hollis's Masai: Their Language and Folklore, and Skinner's Hausa Tales and Traditions.

The San story, "Son of the Wind," is about what happens when the Son of the Wind loses his ball and goes blowing into the world to find it and becomes friends with a human boy. The boy's mother tells him the secret name of the wind, but makes him promise to keep the secret, in case he accidentally causes a mighty wind storm. Here's a picture of the two boys playing:

You can compare Bryan's version to his source here in the Bleek and Lloyd book. Bleek and Lloyd's book is an entirely different kind of project: Bryan created a book for children with beautiful illustrations, while Bleek and Lloyd produced a book for scholars with the San language text side by side with the literal English translation:

The teller of this story was Han-kasso, and there is a portrait of him in the Bleek and Lloyd book. He as Kabbo's son-in-law, and he lived with the Bleek family for two years (1878-1879), contributing  34 stories to the collection.

For me, this is one of the most valuable services that the Internet Archive provides for people exploring African folklore throughout popular retellings like Ashley Bryan's beautiful books: you can enjoy Bryan's presentation of the story, and then you can also go back and look at the same source that Bryan himself used, and sometimes even learn about the storyteller at the start of the writing-down of the story.

 The Lion and the Ostrich Chicks

written and illustrated by Ashley Bryan