African Folktales at Internet Archive: Rabbit Makes a Monkey of Lion

In yesterday's post about Bateman's Tales from Zanzibar, I wrote about how useful public domain story collections are because they provide storytelling material to inspire other storytellers and also artists, and today I get to write about one of my very favorite book illustrators, Jerry Pinkney, because Pinkney did the illustrations for a book by Verna Aardema inspired by one of the stories in Bateman's book: Rabbit Makes a Monkey of Lion: A Swahili Tale. This beautiful book is just a click away at Internet Archive:

I would have liked a book based on this story no matter who did the illustrations because this is a wonderful series of tricks and tricksters featuring both rabbit and turtle stealing lion's honey, with some help from the honeyguide bird. I don't want to spoil the twists and turns in the plot, but here you can see some of Pinkney's depictions of the main characters: rabbit and the honeyguide bird, bush-rat, turtle, and lion.

And this one is a bit of a spoiler: it shows turtle getting away from lion!

This book was published in 1989, so we can trace its publication lineage back over one hundred years, first to Bateman's book in 1901, and then to the book of stories in Swahili published by Steere in 1870; you can see Steere's literal translation of this story along with the Swahili text here: Sungura na Simba / Hare and Lion. (The hare is sungura in Swahili,  and the lion is simba.)

So, yay for the power of the public domain and also for the amazing art of Jerry Pinkney. I'll have lots more to say about Pinkney later when I move on to African American stories, as he did the very best illustrations ever done of the Brer Rabbit stories, which feature some of the same animals you see here. Enjoy!

Rabbit makes a Monkey of Lion: A Swahili Tale

retold by Verna Aardema

with illustrations by Jerry Pinkney