African Folktales at Internet Archive: Treasury of Basuto Lore

For today's book, I want to feature a collection of South African stories: The Treasury of Basuto Lore by Edouard Jacottet. This book was published in 1908 which means that it is available at any time, not just for digital checkout.

This book is a work of monumental scholarship for its time, with the Sotho text (more about the Sotho language) presented side by side with the English translation.

There are also detailed notes for each story that explain specific linguistic details and which also point to variations on the story published previously in other South African collections like Callaway (more about Callaway's Zulu stories here). 

So, using the resources of the Internet Archive, you can look at these early written records of story performances, and compare them to more recent books that present the legends of South Africa, seeing how the stories both persist but also change over time and from one storyteller to another.

And what about Edouard Jacottet? His life and death are the subject of a recent book, published in 2005, about the mysterious circumstances under which he died in Lesotho in 1920: Murder at Morija: Faith, Mystery, and Tragedy on an African Mission by Tim Couzens. The book is not available at the Internet Archive but there are abundant used copies available at Abe and other online booksellers.

Jacottet's book has also been a source for the authors of children's story books, like Anne Rockwell's When the Drum Sang: An African Folktale, which tells the story of Tselane, a young woman, Tselane, kidnapped by a monster. 

Rockwell also did the illustrations: 

So, Jacottet's book is another example of a work of real scholarly value (the Sotho text plus all those footnotes!), while also providing a story source for children's book authors to work with as well: public domain texts are valuable both for scholars and students around the world, and for aspiring writers too. It is full of marvelous stories about heroes and heroines, magic, animals, all kinds of tales, just a click away at the Internet Archive.