Africa at the Internet Archive: Bulu Folk-Tales.

Carrying on with the public domain project for this week (and this whole month in fact), I have a collection of folktales from the Bulu people of Cameroon published by George Schwab: Bulu Folk-Tales.

As you can see, this is a compendium of three different articles published in the Journal of American Folklore over an eight-year period: 1914, 1919, and 1922. What I did was to combine those three items, which you can access separately at the Internet Archive into a single item. So, it's kind of like making a book (or booklet) that brings the 54 stories (!) together in one place. Here are links to the individual stories: The Pangolin and the Leopard / The Young Pangolin and the Pig Family / How Turtle Deceived Leopard Into Eating His Own Mother / How the Muon Monkey Destroyed Himself / How People Suffer Because They Resent a Change / The Evil of Too Much Talk / The Evil of Disregarding the Taboo of the Witch Doctor / Turtle Surpasses Man in Ingenuity / Akpwe Viper Pays for His Deception / The Animals Perish Because They Refuse to Listen to Nyok Hyrax / How Turtle Threw Leopard in Wrestling / How Turtle Saved His Life / Turtle Displays at the Expense of the Other Beasts / The Two Lepers / How Okpweng Antelope Got His Language / How Deceitful Boy Was Punished / Mole and Lemur / Turtle and Mian Antelope Dispute / How Wife Leopard Failed to Get Monkey to Eat / How Turtle Got Even With Eagle / Turtle and His Drum Escape / Who Was Responsible for the Trouble? / Mba Touraco Shows That He Is Richer Than Elephant / How Leopard's Foolishness Killed Him / How Lemur Would Have Killed Himself / Small Hornbill Proves That He Is Stronger Than the Other Birds / How Klpwa Francolin Obtained Pangolin's Daughter in Marriage / How Youth Came to Nothing / How Turtle's Greed Brought Him to a Sad End / How Bat Got the Honey / How Bat Threw Elephant in Wrestling / Why the Vines Are Holding and Choking the Forest-trees / Man Kills His Own Child / Why Small Bird Died / How Porcupine Got Even With Turtle / What Happens to Wives When They Think More Highly of Anything Else Than Their Husbands / Turtle Deceives Zoe the Civet Cat, Giving Leopard the Blame / How Turtle Inherited Leopard's Goods / How Knowledge Spoils Friendship / Hyrax's Advice Falls on Deaf Ears / Do the Things You Can Do / Dog Tries to Do Same as Elephant / Why the Sheep Are Always Found Guilty / Why Pangolin Dwells Alone in the Forest / Young Okpweng Antelope Learns Obedience at the Cost of His Life / How Pigeon Learned That No Man Stands Alone / How Turtle Got All Leopard's Food / How Men First Learned to Quarrel / Never Tell the Things of Taboo You Happen to See / Muin Listens to the Voice of Foolishness / Gorilla and Chimpanzee Escape From Leopard / Whose Husband Was He? / Why All the Birds Hate Hawk / How the Bees Lost Their Friends.

There's really no benefit to having the stories scattered among those three articles. This way, you can read them all together and, even better, you can search them all together. So if you are interested in elephants in the stories, now you can search them all at once.

And the final article from 1922 contains the Bulu text too (the preceding articles just had the English translations with notes about specific words and terms):

George Schwab (1876–1955) was a missionary in Cameroon, but also an anthropologist affiliated with Harvard University; you can read more about his life and career at Wikipedia. He also studied wildlife, and a variety of African rove beetle that he documented is named in his honor: Dorylophila schwabi. At the Harvard Peabody Museum website, I found this image of a carved wooden panel with a hunting scene that Schwab brought to the museum from Bangassou, Central African Republic:

And now you can enjoy the book-he-never-wrote: over 50 Bulu stories all together in one place: Bulu Folk-Tales.