African Folktales at Internet Archive: Bantu Folk Tales

A few weeks ago I featured books of stories from the San (Bushman) people, and this week I'll be featuring books from other storytelling traditions from southern Africa, starting with a book by Phyllis Savory: Bantu Folk Tales from Southern Africa. This collection of 40 stories is just a click away at the Internet Archive:

I've written about Phyllis Savory before, and she'll be showing up in this blog again as she wrote many collections of African stories, with a focus on southern Africa (she was born in 1901 in Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia); you can see the Phyllis Savory posts on one page together as they accumulate. This particular book is an anthology of books she published that focused on different tribal traditions, bringing together stories from eight different Bantu peoples; for some of the stories, but not all, a narrator is credited in addition to the cultural/geographical identification.

There are illustrations by Jillian Hulme, like this one for the Lesotho Thunderbird story:

You can find out ore about the Bantu peoples at Wikipedia, and with its wide range of sources, this book makes a good introduction to the Bantu folktale traditions!

Bantu Folk Tales from Southern Africa

by Phyllis Savory