African Folktales at Internet Archive: African Mythology

Finishing up this week of reference works, here's another overview of African mythology, just a click away at Internet Archive: African Mythology: An Encyclopedia of Myth and Legend by Jan Knappert.

Jan Knappert did fieldwork in African starting in the late 1950s and through the late 1980s; this book was published in 1990. His own specialty was Swahili languages and literature; you can read more about him at Wikipedia. The book takes a story-focused approach (myth and legend), as you can see here in start of the Yoruba entry. 

Unfortunately, there is no bibliography for the individual entries, and only a brief bibliography is included in the back of the book.

The illustrations are by Elizabeth Knappert as inspired by African artworks. For A, there are Ashanti fertility figures:

For B a Bambara head-dress from Mali:

And so on, up until the final drawing for the letter Z, a rhinoceros head-rest from Zambia:

This book is part of a series which also includes Part of a series: Indian Mythology and Pacific Mythology, both by Knappert, plus British and Irish Mythology by John and Catilin Matthews (not available at Internet Archive), Chinese Mythology by Derek Walters, Dictionary of Festivals  by J. C. Cooper, Native American Mythology (not available at Internet Archive) by Page Bryant and Greeek Mythology by Richard Stoneman.

The books are not really reference works (scanty bibliography), but they make for enjoyable reading, and then you can explore stories and topics of interest to you by looking for yet more books at Internet Archive!

African Mythology:

An Encyclopedia of Myth and Legend

by Jan Knappert