I just realized that I promised earlier this week, when writing about Zimani's Drum, that I would share Rattray's classic collection of Chinyanja stories this week, but I forgot to do that... so, since this is the last post for this week, I want to make sure to do that: Some Folklore Stories and Songs in Chinyanja by R. S. Rattray.
Chinyanja (also Chewa or Nyanja) is a Bantu language that is spoken in Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe; you can find out more at Wikipedia. The book has the Chinyanja stories in the front, and then literal English translations in the back. There are trickster animal stories about both the rabbit, whose name is Kalulu in this language, and also about the tortoise, who is Kamba. In addition to the 24 stories, there is also a section of riddles and proverbs, and don't miss the detailed notes in the back.
You probably recognize Rattray's name by now; this is one of his first linguistic projects, published in 1907. I've written about some of Rattray's later projects here at the blog: his book of Hausa Folklore, plus his book of both Ashanti Proverbs and his Akan-Ashanti Folktales. You can find out more about Rattray's life and career at Wikipedia.
I also want to include in today's post another classic collection of African stories from this same time period: Folktales of Angola collected by Heli Chatelain and published way back in 1894.
This amazing book contains 50 folktales in the original Kimbundu text (like Nyanja , this is also a Bantu language; more about Kimbundu) with English translations and also detailed explanatory and comparative notes in the back of the book, including information about the storytellers.
Because these books are in the public domain, that means they are available not just for digital check-out at the Internet Archive; you can access the books at any time and download them in a variety of formats. So, an abundance of traditional stories await you in these books, with the original language texts so that you can look up specific words if you are curious; I'm always curious to learn the names of the animals in different languages, and you can also see the patterns of words in the lyrics to the songs too. There are not beautiful illustrations in these books like in other books I've featured this week, but there are some beautiful stories!
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