Tricksters. More West African Folktales

Carrying on with this week of trickster Tortoise stories, I used the same strategy as yesterday: I started with a wonderful anthology of West African folktales, knowing that there would have to be lots of tortoise stories, and there were! Fifteen stories to be exact. The book is West African Folktales by Jack Berry.

And I found the stories using the super-power of search at the Internet Archive, just searching for Tortoise.

Here are the stories; most but not all of them have tortoise in the title, and search is what lets you catch the ones without the title word: How Tortoise Won by Losing, The Elephant, the Tortoise, and the Hare, Tortoise Buys a House, Tortoise and the Singing Crab, Spider Meets His Match, How Tortoise Got Water, Tortoise and All the Wisdom in the World, The Bag of Salt, Why Tortoise Is Bald, Tortoise Sheds a Tear, Tortoise Disobeys, Dog Is Betrayed, Foriwa's Beads, Tortoise and the Stew Bowl, and Why Singing Tortoises Are Solitary.

Of course you can do the same thing searching for Spider! 

Jack Berry [1918-1980] was a professor of African languages at various European, American, and African universities, and this book is the culmination of his work on West African storytelling traditions. Berry recorded the stories over a period of forty years, working with storytellers in Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria. The preface to the book, “Spoken Art in West Africa” (originally written in 1961) provides a very useful overview of the beauty and complexity of these oral art traditions — stories, proverbs, riddles, and songs — along with the difficulties faced both in recording the stories and also in presenting the stories to English-speaking audiences. The book was unfinished at the time of Berry’s death, but Richard Spears completed the final editing and wrote the introduction.

So, enjoy Tortoise and Spider and all the stories that Berry has documented here, and I'll be back with more trickster Tortoise tomorrow.

West African Folktales

by Jack Berry