African Folktales at Internet Archive: Dictionary of African Mythology

After yesterday's post about African Mythology A to Z, I wanted to follow up with another A-to-Z book: A Dictionary of African Mythology: The Mythmaker as Storyteller by Harold Scheub, just a click away at Internet Archive.

Scheub has collected 400 African stories in this book, arranged alphabetically by the first name of the story's protagonist. The stories are told in summary form, highly readable, with information about the cultural and geographical provenance of each story, as you can see in this screenshot of a Lamba story from Zambia: Kabunda, Whose Mother Brought Fire.

This is a wonderful book to browse through, and you can also use it as a reference book, especially since the Internet Archive version is searchable. So, for example, if you want to see all the Nigerian stories in the book, you can do that by searching:

There is also a monumental bibliography in the back of the book, running to over 25 pages, along with indexes and appendices with the myths listed by country, by language and culture, and by themes and motifs. The thematic index is the most useful since that's not something a computer-based search can generate. Unlike traditional tale type and motif indexes, Scheub has organized this index based on what he sees as the "grand myth" and its features: Beginnings - First Connections (between heaven and earth) - Separation - Struggle between God and Man - Second Connections - Endings.

This book was a labor of love for Harold Scheub, one of the great 20th-century scholars of African storytelling. I've written about other books of his in previous posts: The African Storyteller: Stories from African Oral Traditions and The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradition. 

So, find a book by Harold Scheub and plunge in. There is a wealth of stories in these books, each jus ta click away at Internet Archive.

A Dictionary of African Mythology:

The Mythmaker as Storyteller

by Harold Scheub