ABC 18: Rabbit Makes a Monkey of Lion

Because I'm out of town for about half of this month, our Anansi Book Club schedule is a little different. We're just reading three books this month, and it's already time for our second book (see the September schedule... plus you can see all the Anansi Book Club posts at this blog) — and I'm so excited about this new book because it has art by......... Jerry Pinkney! The book is Rabbit Makes a Monkey of Lion: A Swahili Tale by Verna Aardema, and it's just a click away at the Internet Archive!

I've written a lot about both the prolific author Verna Aardema (whose main focus was African folktales) and the amazing artist Jerry Pinkney at this blog; you can find all their posts with these links: Verna Aardema and Jerry Pinkney. They also collaborated on a fabulous book of riddles: Ji-nongo-nongo Means Riddles, which you can also find at Internet Archive!

The main characters as you can guess from the title are Rabbit and Lion, but Rabbit also has partners in crime. Here's Rabbit and Bush-Rat:

And here's Rabbit and Tortoise. Yes, that's right: you get two tricksters in this book. Both Rabbit and Tortoise are part of the story!

I'll have more to say in the next few days about Aardema's source for this story, and also about the folklore associated with the honeyguide bird, who is another important character in the tale. 

The source for the main part of this story is "The Hare and the Lion” in Bateman's Zanzibar Tales, and that happens to be one of the stories I included in the Reader's Guide Anthology. That book has illustrations by Walter Bobbett, but of course they are nothing to compare to Pinkney's artwork. Here's Bobbett's lion; as you can see in the caption, Bateman uses the Swahili names for the animal characters, so the rabbit is Soongoora (Sungura), the lion is Simba, the rat is Bookoo, and so on.

You can also read the Swahili version of the story that Bateman started from in Steere's Swahili Tales: Sungura na Simba / The Hare and the Lion (click on the image for a larger view):

It is always fascinating to be able to compare the source(s) that a writer uses when they retell a folktale, and in this case you can see a wonderful character that Aardema added to this story: a honeyguide bird. Since the story involves honey, adding in this character makes perfect sense, and it resonates beautifully both with the ecology and also with folktale tradition, as the honeyguide bird is a character you can find in many African folktales! More about the honeyguide bird: Meet the Greater Honeyguide, the Bird That Understands Humans.

You can also read about the honeyguide bird at Wikipedia. Here is how Jerry Pinkney draws the bird as a character in the story:

And of course this post would not be complete without a link to Jerry Pinkney's brilliant illustrations (include some amazing two-page color spreads) for Julius Lester's monumental adaptation of Joel Chandler Harris's stories, stripping out all the repugnant Uncle Remus frametale, rendering the rabbit in wonderful, readable glory. You can read all about Lester and Pinkey's Brer Rabbit here, and yes, it's available at Internet Archive: The Complete Tales.

Here's one of those two-page color spreads: wow!

So, just jump in and enjoy Aardema's version of the story AND the illustrations. It's full of classic African folktale animals and trickster motifs, and just a click away at the Archive, thanks to the power of Controlled Digital Lending!

Rabbit Makes a Monkey of Lion:

A Swahili Tale

by Verna Aardema