Africa at the Internet Archive: Stories Told in an African Forest

For the month of November, I'm going to be focusing on public domain books of folktales from Africa, which means books published before 1926 (new books enter the public domain each year; in 2022, the books published in 1926 will enter the public domain at last!). 

Public domain folklore and mythology books are often problematic because of their racist and colonial context, and that is especially true of books of African folklore. At the same time, these books are still valuable; the key, I believe, is to examine each book critically, looking for the ways in which the actual African storytellers manage to convey their stories, despite the ways in which the colonizing authors have appropriated those stories for their own purposes.

I'm working on this public domain project for the month of November in conjunction with NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. No, I'm not writing a novel, but when I get to the end of the month, I hope to have a collection of public domain stories, with annotations, that I will be able to publish as a free ebook (and yesterday I published a free ebook of 100-word stories from African traditions; more about that: Tiny Tales from Africa: The Animals).

So, starting off, I've chosen a book published in 1893: Stories Told in an African Forest by A. J. Mounteney Jephson, which is just a click away at the Internet Archive, and always available there (no check-out required since it is in the public domain). The scanned copy at Internet Archive is autographed by the author, as you can see:

There are 8 stories in the book, and I've linked to each one directly here: Mahomet / The Lion and Mr. Hunger / The Leopardess and the Dog / Kintu / Daoud the Fisherman / Kilindi / The Cat and the Rat / The Monkey and the Ape.

Jephson heard these stories told in Swahili by the men of Zanzibar who were porters for the so-called "Emin Pasha Relief Expedition" into the Sudan in the late 1880s; you can find out more about that at Wikipedia. Jephson's own diary from the expedition has also been published; you can find that at the Internet Archive also: The diary of A. J. Mounteney Jephson: Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, 1887-1889. 

This particular collection of stories is something Jephson originally prepared for a children's literary magazine and then decided to publish as a book instead. The illustrations are by Walter Buckley (see below). The storytelling style is highly literary, but at the same time Jephson does try to convey something of the oral storytelling occasion, including the debates that sometimes took place after a story was told as the members of the audience and the storyteller presented their own points of view. He also includes some Swahili words and phrases.

The preface to the stories is written for young readers, and it is unabashedly racist in every way. As such, it is has some historical value for documenting the prejudices of the colonial adventurers like Jephson, but he offers no particular insight into the stories there.

I picked out two stories to transcribe and annotate for my NaNoWriMo project. The first is one of my favorite African folktales: The Lion and Mr. Hunger. I first became aware of this story from reading a version from Zimbabwe in Alexander McCall Smith's The Girl Who Married a Lion, and Other Tales from Africa, which is just a click away at the Internet Archive also:  Greater Than Lion; here's an earlier blog post about that book. (That book is not in the public domain, but it's available for digital check-out at the Internet Archive thanks to the miracle of controlled digital lending, yay!)

You can read Jephson's version of the story here, and it has some great illustrations; here you can see Rabbit coming to visit Lion:

The other story that I picked out is the story of The Cat and the Rat, which also has some charming illustrations; here are the cat and the rat sailing away in the canoe that they have made from a manioc root:

While the illustrations for the animal characters are very charming, the depiction of Africans, as on the book's cover, is caught up in racist stereotyping of the worst sort, as you can see. The depiction of the Africans as child-like here on the cover echoes the awful subtitle of the book: "By the Grownup Children of Africa," where Jephson infantalizes the storytellers whose stories provided him with this book.

So, rather than including the actual cover in the slideshow slide for this book, I'll just include the title page. The book contains some good reading and valuable stories but, as with so many African story collections in the public domain, caution is required, and a strong stomach for some of the racist garbage that you will find in the book's preface and commentary.

Stories Told in an African Forest 

by A. J. Mounteney Jephson