African Folktales at Internet Archive: Zanzibar Tales

Carrying on with this week's theme of stories from eastern Africa (see all this week's posts on one page), I want to focus on a public domain book today, showing how public domain books can appear in multiple formats at the Internet Archive, which offers readers more and different kinds of access than the more recent books which are only available for digital check-out to read in your browser. If you search on Bateman's Zanzibar Tales, you will see these different options:

I'll explain what all these different book options are below, but first some context about the book and its stories. You might have heard the name "Zanzibar" before without knowing just where it is. Zanzibar is an island off the eastern coast of Africa, and it is now part of Tanzania:

This stretch of islands has sometimes been called the Spice Islands (for their production of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and black pepper), and it is a region of Africa sometimes referred to as the Swahili Coast; you can find out more about Swahili, a Bantu language, at Wikipedia.

The stories in Bateman's book, published in 1901, were first written down in Swahili by a Christian missionary, Edward Steere, and he published the stories both in Swahili and a literal English translation back in 1870. That book is also available at Internet Archive, which means you can see the Swahili text if you want, and also learn about the storytellers from whom Steere collected these stories: Swahili tales as told by natives of Zanzibar.

Now, on to the reading options for Bateman's book at Internet Archive! There is the usual browser-based option, with a copy of the book contributed by Cornell University Library. If you want to read online, search the contents of the book, see high-quality scans of the illustrations, this browser-based book is the right option for you:

There's also a version from Project Gutenberg, another long-running digital library which has a strong partnership with Internet Archive. If you want to download an epub or Kindle version of the book that includes the illustrations, or access a digital text that has been carefully proofread by human proofreaders, then the Project Gutenberg option is the way to go! (I used the excellent digital text from Project Gutenberg for my own Diigo/GoogleDoc project of collecting African animal story texts.)

Even better, like many Project Gutenberg texts, there is also a free audiobook version read by volunteers at the LibriVox project, and that is also accessible here at the Internet Archive:

I can even embed the audio here in the blog post! You can click on a track and listen right here in the blog post:

You can also embed the audio for individual stories. There's a helpful page here at Internet Archive that describes all the different audio-embedding options.

So, thanks to the hard work and generosity of both the paid staff and the volunteers at Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and LibriVox, these public domain texts have taken on new life in new formats, and you can choose the format that best suits your needs as a reader, writer, teacher, or student! Since the book is in the public domain, you can retell the stories in your own way and even re-use the illustrations if you want.

There are some wonderful stories here, including tales about the trickster rabbit (called Sungura in Swahili) plus other animal tales, a genius chain tale ("Goso the Teacher"), and also some elaborate fairy-tale type stories, including the tragic story of the magic gazelle, which is like "Puss in Boots" but way (WAY) more intense! All the stories are very much worth reading and provide a great introduction to the blend of African and Islamic elements of the storytelling traditions of Zanzibar.

Zanzibar Tales

by George Bateman,

just a click away at Internet Archive