Tricksters. Tortoise in African Animal Tales

It's time for a new week of trickster stories, and I've been missing the Tortoise, so it will be a week of Tortoise stories. I'll start with the book we just finished for Anansi Book Club this week because it features several great Tortoise stories: African Animal Tales by Rogério Andrade Barbosa (translated by Feliz Guthrie) and illustrated by Ciça Fittipaldi:

For background information, you can read the book club post. The first Tortoise story in the book is The Tortoise and the Leopard, and of course it is always satisfying to see Tortoise tricking Leopard, as happens in this story:

Next up is The Cunning of the Tortoise, and it combines some of my favorite trickster motifs: trickster haunting the market, trickster making the other animals dance, and also the trickster's revenge on their accuser, in this case Tortoise gets revenge on Monkey. Here is the dancing: even the pangolins are dancing!

Last up is The Tortoise and the Jackal, which is about a wonderful trick the Tortoise plays in order to a win a contest that involves eating something very VERY hot.

This book refers to the tortoise as "she," but I think that is the gendered animal name from Portugese, tartaruga, sneaking into the English text (the author of the book is Brazilian, and his Portuguese text has been translated into English... and later this week I'll have something to say about trickster tortoises from South America too! Meanwhile, enjoy this book, and the lovely art too!

African Animal Tales

by Rogério Andrade Barbosa