African Folktales at Internet Archive: Maasai Folklore

Yesterday I wrote about two public domain story collections from Uganda and a contemporary children's book inspired by one of those stories, and today I'll be doing the same with a public domain book of stories from the Maasai people: Alfred Hollis's The Masai: Their Language and Folklore. Since this book was published in 1905, that means it is no longer under copyright and is always available at Internet Archive, including download options:

The Maasai are a people of eastern Africa, living in what is now Kenya and also in northern Tanzania. You can read more about them at Wikipedia. The language that they speak, Maa, is a Nilotic language, related to the languages of people in South Sudan such as the Dinka and Nuer. Because Hollis wanted to document the Maa language, the stories in the book have an interlinear presentation with the Maa and English interwoven, followed by an English version of the story using English word order (click on the image for a larger view):

That's a screenshot of a story called "The Woman and the Children of the Sycamore Tree," and you can hear an audio reading of that story by the fabulous Eartha Kitt on this record which is available at Internet Archive also: Folk Tales Of The Tribes Of Africa, which is a selection of stories from Paul Radin's anthology (which I wrote here about last week). 

In that recording, Eartha Kitt is reading the text of the story as it appears in Hollis's book (and also in Radin's anthology), and that's one of the great things about public domain texts: anyone can now produce their own audio versions of public domain books. For thousands of free public domain audio books, just take a listen at LibriVox! (I mentioned the LibriVox production of West African Folktales in an earlier post for example.)

Hollis's book also provides storytelling material for storytellers who want to adapt the materials in their own way, as Ashley Bryan did with the story of the lion and the ostrich chicks; that Maasai story appears in his book The Lion and the Ostrich Chicks, which contains the Maasai story plus three other African tales, and yes, this beautiful book is available for digital check-out at the Internet Archive, just a click away; I wrote about this book in an earlier post at this blog.

Bryan is not the only children's author who has told a version of that Maasai story; Verna Aardema likewise worked with the same story in her book The Lonely Lioness and the Ostrich Chicks, also just a click away at the Internet Archive.

And with Hollis's book, you can even take a look at the Maasai version of the story told in the Maa language and learn a few words if you want, like the ostrich, e-sidai, and the lion, ol-ñgatuny:

You can also compare the very spare traditional version with the much more elaborate versions of Bryan and Aardema which take the outlines of the story and fill it in with much more detail, along with the artwork (Bryan does his own illustrations, and the art in Aardema's book is by Yumi Heo). Perhaps you will even be inspired to tell your own version of this story, or perhaps you will become fascinated by some other stories in Hollis's book. It all awaits you at the Internet Archive!