Africa at the Internet Archive: The Miracle Child

I wanted to follow up on yesterday's post about Elizabeth Laird's Ethiopian folktales project with another of her books; this one is about an Ethiopian saint, Tekle Haymanot, who lived in the 13th century. Here's the book: The Miracle Child: A Story from Ethiopia, by Elizabeth Laird and Abba Aregawi Wolde Gabriel (a priest in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church).

You can find out more about Saint Tekle at Wikipedia. Like the lives of holy people in any religious tradition, the stories here are a mixture of history and popular legend, and the Wikipedia article is helpful if you want to know about the more strictly historical accounts of Saint Tekle. The story of Tekle as a "miracle child" does not appear in Wikipedia, but it is at the heart of this book.

The beautiful illustrations are from an 18th-century Ethiopian manuscript held in a collection in London. The book contains helpful notes accompanying the images, identifying the characters and other important details you need to "read" the image, as here (click on the image for a larger view): The child and his mother appear twice in this picture. First, the little boy fills the baskets with flour. Then his mother, her tears dried, runs to bring him the oil pots. A guardian angel watches from above.

Here's another one: Saga Zaab sits in the covered chair of a great man while his son sits on the ground in front of him. Ethiopian children still learn the Bible in this way, resting their book or manuscript on a special wooden stand like this one. The pupil reads aloud from the book, and the teacher corrects him.

There are many storytelling parallels between the legends of this Ethiopian saint and saints' legends from western Christian traditions. For example, Saint Tekle confronted a dragon, cut it in half, and when he did so, Satan emerged from the entrails of the dragon and fled. You can see that Saint Tekle is shown here with wings; for more about the iconography of his wings, see Wikipedia.

So, this is a wonderful book both for learning about Ethiopian Christian storytelling both in words and also in images. 

Then, if you're curious to learn more about the ancient storytelling traditions of the Christian church in Ethiopia, check out this earlier post about the Kebra Nagast, the great national epic of Ethiopia composed in the 14th century.

It all awaits you at the Internet Archive, just a click away!

The Miracle Child: A Story from Ethiopia

by Elizabeth Laird and Abba Aregawi Wolde Gabriel