African Folktales at Internet Archive: West African Folktales

After doing anthologies last week (all Week 11 on one page), I decided to switch back over to western Africa this week, starting with West African Folktales by Jack Berry, which is just a click away at the Internet Archive:

This is a brilliant collection of over 120 stories (!), with human stories, animal stories, all kinds of stories covering the most important story types represented in western African storytelling traditions. 

Jack Berry  was a professor of African Languages at Northwestern University (he was born in 1918, and joined the faculty at Northwestern in 1964; he died in 1980), and he spent four decades recording stories primarily in Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria. Internet Archive also has two of Jack Berry's linguistic works: The Pronunciation of Ewe and The Pronunciation of Ga, which are both languages of West Africa. The Ewe book contains a spider story with interlinear translation:

The folktale book contains a preface by Berry, "Spoken Art in West Africa," which provides a very useful overview of the beauty and complexity of these oral art traditions — stories, proverbs, riddles, and songs — along with the difficulties of recording the stories and also presenting the stories to English-speaking audiences. There's also an Introduction by Richard Spears who provides an overview of the history of Berry's folktale research, along with information about the storytellers with whom he worked.

And as you are reading the stories, be sure to check out the notes in the back also! There's even an index in the back of the book so that you can find all the Spider stories, for example... or, using the awesome power of the Internet Archive, you can do a search on Spider and, behold: so many Spider stories!

For those of you who are interested in how storytellers from West Africa shaped African American storytelling traditions (that's how I originally became interested in African folktales), then this is the book to read: if you read the stories here and then turn to the Brer Rabbit stories, you will see Brer Rabbit's adventures in a very new light, powered by the creative imagination of the storytellers of Africa. Enjoy!

West African Folktales

by Jack Berry