African Folktales at Internet Archive: Umbundu Folk Tales from Angola

Following up on the book of stories from Angola yesterday (see that post), here's another wonderful book of stories from Angola: Umbundu: Folk Tales from Angola by Merlin Ennis, just a click away at the Internet Archive:

There are 95 stories in this book; of special interest to me is a great sequence of tortoise stories!

Merlin Ennis was a missionary who had lived in Angola for forty years starting in 1903; he returned to the United States in 1944 and died in 1964; this book was published in 1962. While in Angola, he translated the Bible into Umbundu. You can read more about Umbundu, a Bantu language of Angola, at Wikipedia.

As Ennis explains in the preface to the book, he collected stories throughout his 40 years in Angola, and the stories in the book represent only a small portion of the stories he heard. He does not give the names of the storytellers, but he does thank Ricardo Chindemba Muelehombo, an Angolan teacher who worked with Ennis transcribing the stories in Umbundu; Ennis then did the translations into English. There is also an appendix of Umbundu proverbs. 

In addition, there are comparative notes by Albert Lord, who is most famous for his work on the oral traditions of epic in the Mediterranean and the way that modern oral performance radically changed our understanding of Homeric epic from the ancient world. His book The Singer of Tales is a wonderful book to read, and it's available at the Internet Archive in a recent edition edited by Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy, just a click away at Internet Archive.

And since the focus this week is on southern Africa, I also want to mention this book which is available at the Internet Archive: Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa, edited by Duncan Brown, a collection of essays published in 1999 covering a wide range of topics.

An older book like Ennis's does not attempt to capture the oral performance dimension of these traditional stories, but performance has been a focus of more recent studies of African storytelling, and the Internet Archive is a place where you can go to find books both old and new!

Umbundu: Folk Tales from Angola

by Merlin Ennis