Africa at the Internet Archive: Bulu Tales from Kamerun

Since I wrote about Bulu stories from Cameroon yesterday, I wanted to follow up with some more Bulu stories, beginning with an article published by Adolph Krug in the Journal of American Folklore in 1912: Bulu Tales from Kamerun, West Africa.

The article contains 24 stories; here are direct links to each one: As You Contest in Wrestling, Remember the River Yom. / The Tortoise and the Elephant / A Youth and His Father-in-law / The Son of a Man and the Son of a Ghost / The Two Hunchbacks / How Zambe Created Man, the Chimpanzee, and the Gorilla / The Little Squirrel and the Viper / The Dog and the Chimpanzee / The Two Brothers / The Story of the Fool / The Tortoise and the Monkey / The Tortoise and the Leopard (first version) / The Tortoise and the Leopard (second Version) / The Tortoise and the Leopard Quarrel About Their Villages / Three Men Who Quarreled About an Elephant / The Young Snake and the Young Frog / The Tortoise and the Leopard and the Python / The Dog and the Pangolin / The Man Who Died and Left Children / The Boy and the Girl / The Dunce Who Found Out Deception / The Story of the Hungry Elephant / The Son-in-law and His Father-in-law / The Tortoise Who Waited for Toadstools.

Adolph Krug was an American missionary in Cameroon, arriving in 1904 at the age of 31 and spending 39 years there, returning to the United States in 1942 for an operation, but he died not long afterwards. You can find out more about the Bulu people at Wikipedia; they live in southern Cameroon:

Krug had a great interest in folktales and legends, and in addition to this collection from 1912, there is a later collection published in the Journal of American Folklore from 1949: Bulu Tales. 

After Krug's death, over 400 stories were discovered in manuscript form; this article is a selection of 33 of those stories. The editor, Melville Herskovits (a renowned anthropologist whose books I will need to write about in another post), notes that while there are some variants in the collection, there are appx. 300 different story types documented here. Just imagine how marvelous it would be if someone were to get access to Krug's papers in order to publish the rest of the stories he collected!

Here is a link to those tales individually: Zobeyo Mebe'e, the Creator and His Friend, Nkpwaevo / Much More Is Coming Later / Three Boys / The Foolish Smoker and the Hunter / The Man Who Ate His Own Children / Three Men / The Three Women / Three Men Who Went Courting / The Englishman and His Pet Animals / The Boy Who Was a Hunter / The Man Who Lost His Wife and Children / How the Older Brother Saved the Younger / The Man and the Half-Witted Boy / The Boy with the Bow-Gun / The Man Who Set Traps for Game / The Man Who Had Four Sons / Nyamenduu and His Squashes / The Woman Who Was Too Proud / The Youunde and the Mvele People / Lawyer and the Young Village Man / The Fool Who Caught a Leopard Alive / The Tortoise Marries the Daughter of Zobeyo Mebe'e / The Boy with the Bow-Gun / The Tortoise Who Stole Some Honey / The Tortoise and the Hippo and the Elephant / How the Tortoise Outwitted the Leopard / How the Leopard Caught the Porcupine / How the Leopard Used to be Afraid of Sheep / The Children of the Leopard and the Children of the Otter / The Dog Who Went Courting / The Viper Has His Fortune Told / The Tortoise and the Antelope / The Lazy Bat.

Because this collection is not in the public domain, I cannot combine the two articles the way that I did for Schwab's Bulu stories, but you can access both collections online at the Internet Archive separately.

One of the great advantages of public domain stories is that they can be freely reprinted in anthologies, and one of the Bulu stories that Krub published in 1912 appears in this very nice anthology of creation stories by Maria Leach, which you can find at Internet Archive: The Beginning: Creation Myths around the World. 

The story from the Bulu people is Zambe on pp. 140-142.