Africa at the Internet Archive: Werner and Carpenter

Carrying on with public domain books for the month of November, I wanted to focus today on Alice Werner who was a scholar of Bantu languages; she was born in 1859 and died in 1935. Her first trip to Africa was in 1893 when she was 24 years old, and the study of Africa and African languages occupied the rest of her life. She taught at the School of Oriental Studies in London from 1917 until her retirement in 1930. For more, see Wikipedia.

Here are three of Alice Werner's books in the public domain that you can find at the Internet Archive

The Mythology of All Races:

Armenian and African

Myths and Legends of the Bantu

Natives of British Central Africa

The series title of that book is a good reminder of the role that linguists played in the British imperial project: The Native Races of the British Empire.

One of my themes this month is the way that public domain books have provided material for later books, especially children's books, and that is the case here; you will find a version of Alice Werner's story about the Grateful Python in a book of stories for children by Frances Carpenter: African Wonder Tales.

In Carpenter's book, the story appears as Pemba and the Python and the Friendly Rat. The illustrations are by Joseph Escourido; here is the friendly rat of the story's title:

Carpenter was a folklorist and author (more info at Wikipedia), and her book is especially useful because most of the sources that she relied on were French rather than English, so you will find stories here that you will not find in other story collections. You can find a list of sources in the acknowledgments page at the front of the book, and here is a list of the stories linked to specific pages at the Internet Archive: The Boom-boom-y Beast / Clever Kadra / The Tortoise and the Magic Drum / Who Can Break a Bad Habit? / Two Ways to Count to Ten / The Little Black Men and the Honeybees / A Dream of the Sphinx / The Monkeys and the Little Red Hats / The Girl Who Lived With the Gazells / The Battle Between the Birds and the Beasts / Strange Men With Tails / The Two Rascals / Pemba and the Python and the Friendly Rat / Polo, the Snake-girl / Omar's Big Lie / The Young Hunter and the Juju Man / The Jinni's Magic Flute / The Proud Camel and the Rude Monkey / The Bride Who Melted Away / Bomba, the Brave / The Bird That Would Not Stay Dead / The Six Horsemen / The Cannibal and His Sweet Singing Bird / The Enchanted Tortoise.

So, you can explore Werner's book and also Carpenter's children's book at the Internet Archive; they are all just a click away! And, if you're curious, there are more books by Frances Carpenter at Internet Archive also, including South American Wonder Tales, Tales of a Korean Grandmother, and Wonder Tales of Dogs and Cats, to name just three. :-)

African Wonder Tales

by Frances Carpenter