A Look at Laura's Bookshelf: ABC 26: The Magic Bojabi Tree

It's time for the third book on our November calendar for Anansi Book Club, and you can see all the Anansi Book Club posts at this blog (plus the previous months). So, here we go: The Magic Bojabi Tree by Dianne Hofmeyr.

The Archive actually has two copies of the book available for checkout, which is very handy (that means Helen and I can both be reading the book at the same time, ha ha).

Hofmeyr is a South African writer now based in London, and I'll be adding more about her to the post later this week. The gorgeous illustrations are by Piet Grobler, also from South Africa and now based in the U.K., and I'll have more of his work to share later this week also. Here you can see the animals, hungry and thirsty and desperate to eat the fruit of the tree, but the snake has coiled around the tree and will not let them eat until they say the name of the tree and its fruit:

As Hofmeyr explains in the introduction, there are many versions of this story told throughout Africa. The earliest published source of the story that I have found is in Robert Nassau's Where Animals Talk: West African Folklore Tales, published in 1912. His version of the story is titled Tortoise and the Bojabi Tree,

Nassau gives the African names the animals, and in this case they are Benga names; Nassau heard this story from a Benga storyteller (more about the Benga people).

Presumably using Nassau as her source, although he is uncredited, Edith Rickert published this children's book in 1923: The Bojabi Tree: An African Folktale.

The word "bojabi" is still in play here, but the animals have been de-Africanized in this version of the story, so instead of the very African cast of characters in Nassau with their Benga names, in Rickert's version you will find Tabby Tiger, Bruno Bear, Katy Crocodile, Robin Rat, Pinky Pig, Giddy Goat, Tommy Tortoise, etc. The story, however, is the same, sending off the animals one by one, each animal with their own little chapter in the book.

The illustrations are by Gleb Botkin (a fascinating character in his own right; see Wikipedia; for example, he founded the "Church of Aphrodite" in 1938), and since they are in the public domain, that means they can be repurposed. Some enterprising publisher could do a coloring-book version, for example, encouraging students to color the black-and-white drawings:

Rickert was a fascinating person in her own right; you can find out more about her at Wikipedia. She was both a literary scholarly and a cryptographer, and she credited her skills at textual analysis with her codebreaking experience working for U.S. military intelligence during World War I. She wrote two other children's books for children, and one of those two books, The Greedy Goroo, is a follow-up to this book; it's set in "The Bojabi Tree Wood," where Tommy Tortoise is King-of-all-the-Beasts. It was published in 1929, and The Blacksmith and the Blackbirds was published in 1928, which means they will be entering the public domain in the next couple of years, so hopefully copies will surface online when that happens.

Meanwhile, you can find more books by Dianne Hofmeyr at the Internet Archive also. She was born and raised in South Africa and is now based in London. Her book Zeraffa Giraffa is a true story about Zeraffa, a giraffe sent as a gift from Egypt to France in 1826: Zeraffa Giraffa.

Her book The Star-Bearer is about an ancient legend from Egypt, retold for children: The Star-Bearer.

And to finish off this week, I wanted to share two fabulous books illustrated by Piet Grobler and written by Beverley Naidoo who, like Dianne Hofmeyr, is a South-African-born writer now based in the U.K. Here are the two books: Great Tug of War is a collection of folktales, and Aesop's Fables is a wonderful re-imagining of Aesop's fables in an African setting:

The Great Tug of War

by Beverley Naidoo