African Folktales at Internet Archive: Limba Stories and Storytelling

You might remember when I shared Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa back in June, and I knew I would want to share her book of stories from Sierra Leone, which fits in perfectly with this week of stories from western Africa: Limba Stories and Storytelling. There are almost a hundred stories in here, plus riddles and proverbs too, all just a click away at the Internet Archive:

Finnegan recorded these stories in the early 1960s before it was feasible to do video recording, but her audio tape recordings have been digitized and put online as part of the World Oral Literature project, which means you can listen to them here: Ruth Finnegan: Limba Stories and Songs.

So, in addition to reading all the stories in Finnegan's book, you can get a sense of the oral performance by listening to the recordings from what is now sixty years ago in Sierra Leone. And Ruth Finnegan is still with us! You can read about her life and career at Wikipedia: Ruth Finnegan; she was born in Ireland in 1933, making her 87 years old... and she has a wonderful website also: RuthFinnegan.com.

You can read more about the Limba people at Wikipedia: Limba,  for fans of Anansi stories: there is a whole series of spider stories found in Chapter 3, stories about animals:

So, there is all kinds of goodness here: Finnegan's book is a work of serious scholarship written for an audience of anthropologists, but it also has wonderful stories here for you to read and enjoy!

Limba Stories and Storytelling

by Ruth Finnegan