African Folktales at Internet Archive: The Great Tug of War

With the theme this week being stories from southern Africa, that is a perfect excuse to share this book of folktales told by Beverley Naidoo: The Great Tug of War and Other Stories, and it's just a click away at Internet Archive.

There are wonderful animal stories in here: The Great Tug-of-War (which you see there on the cover), Little Animals Should Not Make Fun of Big Animals!, Who Shall Drink?, The Race, King Lion in Love, The Lion Who Danced With Dinner, The Hare and the Horns, and Does One Good Turn Deserve Another? You can find out more about Beverley Naidoo's life and work at Wikipedia and at her website: BeverleyNaidoo.com

The illustrations are by Piet Grobler, and he brings so much personality to all the animal characters (and you can find out more about Grobler's work at his website). Here is Tswhene the baboon carrying away Mmutla the rabbit (the animals have their Tswana names; see the list in the back of the book):

You'll also find this traditional African version of the "tar-baby" story, where it is Khudu the tortoise who smears himself with sticky stuff to trap the thieving rabbit:

I first became aware of Beverley Naidoo's work because of her edition of Aesop's fables, also illustrated by Piet Grobler, which takes an African-focused approach to the stories (an approach that I'm increasingly persuaded is what we need in order to understand the range of Aesopic stories); you can find her Aesop book at Internet Archive also: Aesop's Fables. 

Here is how Grobler depicted Aesop being captured and carried away to the north as a slave:

There are already some distinctively African animals in the Greco-Roman collection of Aesop's fables (which has always been part of the argument for an African component to the Aesop tradition in the ancient world), and Naidoo has recast the fables here with African characters, like this story about the goat and the fox in the well recast as a the story of a jackal and a klipspringer:

Whether you read Naidoo's retellings of traditional African folktales, or her African take on Aesop's fables, you get to enjoy Grobler's illustrations in both books. Both highly recommended!

The Great Tug of War

by Beverley Naidoo