Lilly's source for Zimani's Drum is the story "The Blind Man and the Hunchback" from Rattray's Folklore Stories and Songs in Chinyanja (a book I'll be featuring later this week). Zimani is the blind man who travels with the help of his brother Cikungwa. You can read the source story here online. You can see how Lilly worked with some essential plot elements from the original story while also transforming it into more of a feel-good story for children.
The San story comes from Bleek's book, Specimens of Bushman Folklore, and it is one of the stories told by Kabbo: "The Children Are Sent to Throw the Sleeping Sun into the Sky." I've blogged about Kabbo and Bleek's book here, and you can read that source story online. In this case, Lilly's changes to the story are much more dramatic, bringing the San mythological character Mantis into the story; you will find many stories about Mantis here in Bleek's book, and also in the book Mantis and His Friends.
The illustrations are by Charles Reasoner, and both his drawings of people and of animals are very lovely. Here are two pages of illustrations from the book about Zimani:
And here are two pages of illustrations from the book about the Sun:
You might also remember Lilly from a book I blogged about earlier, also illustrated by Reasoner: Wanyana and Matchmaker Frog: A Bagandan Tale.
These are lovely children's books and both have the added advantage of being based on public domain source material so that you can look and compare for yourself what story Lilly has told in these books and the stories that were recorded by Bleek and by Rattray over 100 years ago.
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