Tricksters. West African Folk Tales

In yesterday's post with the trickster Tortoise stories from Guinea-Bissau, I forgot to mention that a few months ago I did a week of trickster Tortoise books, so this week is just a continuation of the Tortoise adventures that started back in December. :-)

Since Tortoise is important in many west African storytelling traditions, today I wanted to highlight the Tortoise stories in this lovely anthology: The Orphan Girl and Other Stories: West African Folk Tales by Buchi Offodile. (This book is part of the excellent "International Folk Tale" series from Interlink Books.)

Buchi (Onyebuchi) Offodile, born in Nigeria, is a professor at the Kent State University Business School. In this book he has collected 41 stories from all over western Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte D’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. 

Only two of the stories actually have "tortoise" in the title, but you can use the power of Internet Archive search to find other Tortoise stories in the book too! Here they are: The Crown Made of Smoke, Foriwa's Beads, Everyone, How Tortoise Paid His Creditors, The Magic Drum, The Power of One, The Rubber Man, The Talking Tree, The Tortoise and the Pig, The Tug-of-War, and You Asked for It.

Seeing that list of stories is a great testimony to the importance of Tortoise as a folktale character throughout western Africa... and just for me, it's such a great reminder of why I truly love Tortoise. I go back and forth between Tortoise and Rabbit being my favorite trickster, and seeing this list makes me want to say — at least for today! — that Tortoise is my personal favorite. I hope you will enjoy the stories, and I'll be back with more of Tortoise's tricks tomorrow!

The Orphan Girl and Other Stories:

West African Folk Tales

by Buchi Offodile