African Folktales at Internet Archive: Epic Traditions of Africa / Sundiata

For Week 20, I was planning to look at books that bring together different regions of Africa, and then when I picked out this first book, I realized I should do a week about African epics. So, here's the ideal place to start: Epic Traditions of Africa by Stephen Belcher just a click away at Internet Archive.

This book is a perfect introduction to the study of this topic, which is one of the most fascinating African storytelling traditions. The book is organized into the following chapters: Elements of Epic Traditions, Epics of Central Africa, Hunters' Traditions and Epics, Traditions of the Soninke, Sunjata and the Traditions of the Manden, Segou and the Bamana, Traditions of the Fula, and Emergent Traditions. 

There is also an extremely useful list of "Published Epic Texts" in an appendix, which reviews all the published editions, not just in English, of the epics referred to in the book: Lianja, Mwindo, Jeki, Ozidi, Wagadu, Sunjata (by far the most widely published), Hambodedio, Samba Gueladio, and more. It's organized chapter by chapter so that as you read the book, you can then take a look and see what texts are available for the epics in that chapter. You are in luck if you can read French because much of the most important work on the epics has been published in French, but you will also find lots of material in English also. 

To take one example, you might decide that you want to read the story of Sunjata (Sundiata)... and the Internet Archive is ready to help with Sundiata, An Epic of Old Mali, which is D. T. Niane's version based on a telling by the Djeli (griot) Mamoudou Kouyate, and now translated into English by G. D. Pickett.

You can find out more about the 13th-century king Sundiata and also about the epic at Wikipedia. 

And for a less traditional approach, there is a comic book version by the great Will Eisner, also available at Internet Archive: Sundiata, A Legend of Africa.

Eisner takes the storytelling perspective of "The Great Grey Rock" who is part of Sundiata's story.

Here's a page to give you a sense of how Eisner works with the graphic form to tell the story:

This book was published late in Eisner's life; he was in his 80s when the book came out in 2003, and he died in 2005. I think it is fascinating that he turned to the topic of African epic for one of his final works. You can read more about Eisner's remarkable life and career at Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, the Internet Archive abounds with books by and about Will Eisner: Eisner at Internet Archive.

Of course, Sundiata is just one of many African epics, and you can use Belcher's book to learn more and see if there is some African epic story you want to explore, and I'll use this blog to write about some more African epic stories this week.

Epic Traditions of Africa

by Stephen Belcher

Sundiata, An Epic of Old Mali

translated by G. D. Pickett.

Sundiata, A Legend of Africa

by Will Eisner