This book, published in 1958, collects over 150 stories which Melville and Frances Herskovits collected in Benin (French Dahomey at that time) from Fon storytellers in the 1930s and then translated into English.
The detailed notes in the book make it a work of great scholarship (almost 600 pages long), but it is also very readable for a general audience.
Before publishing this collection of stories, in 1938 Melville Herskovits published an ethnography of the people of Dahomey which can put those stories in context: Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom.
For more about Melville and Frances Herskovits, see Wikipedia. I will have more to say about them at this blog when I move on from writing about African folklore in Africa to books about African folklore in the Americas and the Caribbean like Herskovits's astounding book documenting the folklore of the Saramaka Maroons in Suriname on the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America: Suriname Folklore (and that book likewise has an ethnographic companion: Rebel Destiny: Among the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana).
Herskovits was one of the strongest advocates for the importance of African cultural heritage in the Americas, as he explains in The Myth of the Negro Past published in 1941.
The work of Melville and Frances Herskovits is a big part of how I came to undertake my own African reading project documented here at this blog, and I am so glad to see so many of their books available at Internet Archive, just a click away!
by Melville and Frances Herskovits
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