ABC 30: A Pride of African Tales

And it's here already: we're moving on to the final book of the December Calendar for Anansi Book Club (taking a week off at the end of the month for the holidays), and you can also see all the Book Club posts so far this year here at the blog (and additional information at the website about previous months). The anthology for this month has so many good stories in it, as told by Donna Washington and illustrated by James Ransome. The book is A Pride of African Tales (I really like the play on words right there in the title!)

You can find out more about storyteller Donna Washington at her website: DLWStoryteller.com, and you can also find her at Twitter: @dlwstoryteller. For more about James Ransome, see Wikipedia.

There are six stories in this book, which makes it perfect for this post; I'll update each day with information about one of the stories. For all the stories, you will find excellent notes and bibliography in the back of the book.

I'll start with the first story which is, appropriately, about Anansi! The story is called Anansi's Fishing Expedition, and as you can see, Ransome has depicted Anansi in his human form:

Anansi has a sidekick in this story named Onimi. Anansi thinks he is going to take advantage of Onimi but, as you might have guessed, things turn out just the opposite of what Anansi expects: this a story of the trickster tricked! Here is Anansi talking to his partner in the marketplace:

For more Anansi stories, Washington recommends three books, all of which are available at the Archive: Peggy Appiah's Ananse the Spider, Joyce Cooper Arkhurst's Adventures of Spider, and Harold Courlander and George Herzog's Cow-Tail Switch.

The next story comes from the Congo: The Boy Who Wanted the Moon, and the boy in the story is the one that you see on the book's cover. The little boy, a prince, is greedy (like Anansi), but not a trickster; he is just greedy: "the more he had, the more he wanted." When he claims to have everything, the other children mock him for not having the moon, so he decides he wants the moon too. As you can imagine, this does not go well! The king spends ten years building a tower to the moon, but the project ends in disaster. I won't give away the ending, but it explains an important part of the world, the origin of a specific animal. Try to guess before you read the story!

Washington's source for this story is Aardema's Tales from the Story Hat, which is where I first encountered this folktale also, and I just recently learned about a brilliant re-use of that story embedded inside a beautiful piece of speculative fiction, a short story titled "Egoli" by T. L. Huchu which you can read online at Brittle Paper's AfricanFuturism anthology. Many thanks to Wole Talabi for introducing me to this fantastic story! 

It's a very different version of the boy-who-wants-the moon — not a fairy tale, but instead a historical legend connected to the Rozvi Empire of the Shona people of southeastern Africa who drove the Portuguese out of their territory in the 17th century, fighting back against colonization. This Shona story is still recognizably the same as the fairy tale story from the Congo to the west. 

The next story in Washington's book, Shansa Mutongo Shima, comes from the Tabwa people who live in the Democratic Republic of Congo and across the border in Zambia, along the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, and you can read more Tabwa stories in Robert Cancel's book Storytelling in Northern Zambia. The story Washington tells is about a proud woman who recklessly agrees to marry a stranger, but of course he is not what he appears to be. Unlike other stories of this type, the reckless woman realizes something is wrong and takes matters into her own hands!

Washington explains that the next story, The Roof of Leaves, was inspired by an actual event recounted by Colin Turnbull in his book The Forest People about the Mbuti people of the Congo. If you've ever had a fight with someone you love, you will appreciate this very sweet story!

Next up is a fairy-tale type of story that is found all over the world: the man whose supernatural bride imposes some kind of restriction (in this case, not to look inside a basket), but of course you know the husband is not going to be able to resist! What is remarkable about this story is the ending, which manages t put a positive spin on the traditional story. The supernatural bride is one of the heavenly women descending from the sky of on golden threads as you can see here: The Wedding Basket.

And with the final story in the book, we reach one of my all-time favorite folktales AND one of the most famous and widespread stories throughout Africa and the Diaspora. The version that Washington retells here comes from Cameroon: The Talking Skull.

If you want to get a sense of the range of this story, there is an entire chapter devoted to its African and Diaspora versions in William Bascom's brilliant African Folktales in the New World, just a click away at the Internet Archive.

So, have fun with all these stories in Washington's, and read "Egoli" too if you have time (you'll be glad you did, I promise!), and I'll be back with more updates each day this week about the other four stories in this lovely book from Donna Washington. Enjoy!

A Pride of African Tales
by Donna L. Washington