Africa at the Internet Archive: Jambo, Sungura!

I wanted to start out Week 34 (!) with two books of stories from eastern Africa by Eleanor Heady: Jambo, Sungura! Tales from East Africa and When the Stones Were Soft: East African Fireside Tales, both just a click away at the Internet Archive.

Heady traveled to Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania in the late 1950s with her husband, Harold Heady, a forester and ecologist. On those travels she collected stories from Swahili storytellers and later published three books based on those stories; the Internet Archive has two of them (and if they acquire the third, Safiri the Singer, I'll be sure to update this blog post).

The illustrations for Jambo, Sungura! are by Robert Frankenberg. 

The illustrations for When the Stones Were Soft are by Tom Feelings; these come from a pair of stories about why dogs came to live with men, and why cats chose to live with women:

You might remember his work from an earlier blog post; he did the beautiful artwork for Arnott's Tales of Temba.

He also illustrated these two beautiful books about Swahili words and numbers written by his wife, Muriel Feelings: Jambo Means Hello: A Swahili Alphabet Book and Moja Means One: A Swahili Counting Book.

You can find out more about Feelings in this Wikipedia article; here's a picture of him at work in his studio; he's one of my favorite illustrators. 

Enjoy! So much goodness inspired by the stories of eastern Africa awaits you:

Jambo, Sungura!

Tales from East Africa

by Eleanor Heady 

When the Stones Were Soft:

East African Fireside Tales by Eleanor Heady