African Folktales at Internet Archive: When Elephant Was King

I shared some dilemma tale books by Bascom and Jablow so far this week, and today I want to shift back to animal tales (my favorites), starting with this book by Nick Greaves: When Elephant Was King and Other Elephant Tales from Africa, and the book is just a click away at Internet Archive.

There are 25 different stories with elephants here, including stories from all over Africa. There are also some introductory chapters with zoological facts about elephants along with different cultural beliefs and superstitions. 

The illustrations in the bookare by Julia Bruton. There are lots of elephants, of course, like this one:

Plus other beautiful drawings like this one of the hare:

And this two-page spread of the buffalo:

When Greaves published this book (first edition in 1996 and then revised in 2000), the elephant population had gone down from 1.3 million elephants in African in 1979 to just half of that in the late 1990s. Those numbers have continued to decline; you can read more about that in this World Wildlife Fund article from 2018: The status of African elephants.

I've written about Nick Greaves before; here's a blog post about his book When Lion Could Fly, and you can also find out more at his website: NickGreaves.info. 

When Greaves wrote this book, he did so hoping to support elephant conservation, and that need is even more urgent today. So, you can use this book both to learn about the actual elephants of Africa, and also the stories that have been told about them all over the continent.

When Elephant Was King

and Other Elephant Tales from Africa

by Nick Greaves