Tololwa Mollel is an Arusha Maasai, now living in Canada, but he spent his childhood in Tanzania on his grandfather's coffee farm near Mount Kilimanjaro. The Orphan Boy is inspired by one of his grandfather's stories, and the illustrator, Paul Morin, traveled to Maasai country to do research for the illustrations, and they are really beautiful:
The Princess Who Lost Her Hair is a story told by the Akamba people who live in Kenya just below Mount Kenya. The gorgeous illustrations for this book are by Charles Reasoner:
You might recognize Reasoner's style from the book that I featured in the first blog post for this week: Warrior Son of a Warrior Son, by Melinda Lilly; here's a link to all the books so far with Reasoner's illustrations.
I've written about Mollel's work previously; this links to a blog post with information about four other books he has written based on African legends: Ananse's Feast: An Ashanti Tale; The Flying Tortoise: An Igbo Tale; The King and the Tortoise; Rhinos for Lunch, and Elephants for Supper: A Maasai Tale, all of which are available at Internet Archive. You can find out more about his wonderful work at his website: TololwaMollel.com.
So, enjoy: you've got a half-dozen wonderful books here which share the stories both of eastern Africa along with stories from western Africa also, all just a click away at Internet Archive.
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