ABC 39. Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears

Not it's time for the first #AnansiBookClub book of March! You can see the March Calendar at the website, plus all the Book Club posts here at the blog. The book is a double-plus for me: it's a chain tale (also known as a cumulative tale), which is my favorite folktale genre, and there is art by the Leo and Diane Dillon! The book is Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears: A West African Tale by Verna Aardema.

As you can see from the sticker on the cover, the book's illustrations by Leo and Diane Dillon won a Caldecott Medal. 

There's even a cartoon version, and it's available at the Internet Archive. It's very funky 1970s animation, back before the digital age!

I'll update this post throughout the week with information about the author and about the illustrators, along with information about other chain tales like this one. Aardema cites an acquaintance, Marcia Vanduinen, as the source for the story; she does not provide any bibliography or information about how she might have changed the story as she retold it.

So, the chain in Aardema's book goes like this: Mosquito - Iguana - Python - Rabbit - Crow - Monkey - Owl, and when owl refused to hoot for the sun to come, the night went on and on which led to a crisis for all the animals. King Lion then worked his way back down the chain of events to find out that Mosquito was the cause of all the trouble.

I personally love stories like this, and you can find these types of chain tales all over Africa; they are also very popular in India. You'll find them in other parts of the world too but it is my strong impression that the chain tales you find in other parts of the world got their start (by way of a chain of storytellers!) in either Africa or India.

For a chain similar to the one in Aardema's book, consider this story from Nigeria in Buchi Offodile's wonderful anthology of West African folktales: The Orphan Girl and Other Stories. The story is Why Mosquitoes Buzz. The chain in that story is clearly related to the version that Aardema heard from her friend: Mosquito - Man Tapping Wine - Machete - Man's Wife - Python - Rabbit - Guinea Fowl - Monkey - Branch - Chicken - Rooster. When Rooster doesn't crow, the sun doesn't come, leading to a crisis of unending night which prompts King Lion to summon all the animals before the god Agbara in order to find out who is the cause of all the trouble. 

In both Aardema's version and in Offodile's version, the story is told in a cumulative style, with the whole chain being reproduced step by step during the trial. To me, that is the most fun type of chain tale!  Here is how the final accumulation goes in Aardema's version:

And here is the final cumulative version in Offodile's version; notice that the inanimate objects, Machete and Branch, get their own lines in the accumulation, unlike Aardema's version which has only the animal actors.

And by a very nice coincidence, in the book we read at the end of February for Anansi Book Club, African Animal Tales by Rogério Andrade Barbosa, there is a chain tale from Guinea-Bissau that is similar to this one, but also different, as you can tell right away from the title: The Considerate Fly. This chain starts with a Fly who notices a Snake coiled around a piece of firewood. She warns the Snake to slither away before the people notice her and kill her. The Snake flees into a Mouse hole, scaring the Mouse who runs between the legs of a Pheasant who shrieks and wakes a sleeping Monkey who falls onto the head of an Elephant, causing her to run and trample a Bird's nest in the grass, who angrily sets fire to the grass, which burns the feet of a passing Antelope, who runs to the water to cool his feet and startles the Maidens bathing in the water who complain to the Chief. The Chief then works backwards: Maidens to Antelope to Bird to Elephant to Monkey to Pheasant to Mouse to Snake to Fly. Because the Fly's intentions were good, the Chief does not punish her. The artwork for this book is by Ciça Fittipaldi, and here you can see the Antelope with the burning feet who startles the bathing Maidens:

And back to Aardema's book, I hope you will enjoy the great art by the Dillons: there are LOTS of characters in the chain of events leading from the Mosquito to the endless night, and the Dillons pack the pages with illustrations of all the different characters, as you can see in this two-page spread with the dark background because it is endless night, all because of that Mosquito:

And see how the Iguana has sticks in his ears? That's because he doesn't want to listen to the Mosquito's foolishness... and that is just how all the trouble begins.

As I mentioned above, the Dillons won a Caldecott medal for this book, and they won the Caldecott again the very next year for Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions, for which Margaret Musgrove wrote the text. 

The Dillons also collaborated with Verna Aardema on this lovely book of stories from southern Africa: Behind the Back of the Mountain: Black Folktales from Southern Africa.

To finish up this week's updates, I wanted to mention another book by Verna Aardema which also features a chain tale: Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain. This is a story from the Nandi people of Kenya, and here you can see the source story that Aardema started from. To adapt the story for a children's audience in English, Aardema has taken the rhyming style of "The House That Jack Built" (which is probably the most famous chain tale in English) and adapted the Nandi story to go with that rhyming style, building the chain tale around a young cowherd. The result is very different from the structure of the original story, so it's useful to be able to compare the actual source Aardema worked with to see the changes she made.

And yes, ALL these books just a click away at the Internet Archive too, thanks to the power of Controlled Digital Lending: enjoy!

Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears:

A West African Tale

by Verna Aardema.

ABC 38. African Animal Tales

And here we are, altready time for the final #AnansiBookClub book of February! You can see the February Calendar at the website, plus all the Book Club posts here at the blog. As usual, the final book of the month is an anthology, and this month it is African Animal Tales by Rogério Andrade Barbosa (translated by Feliz Guthrie) and illustrated by Ciça Fittipaldi:

Rogério Andrade Barbosa is a Brazilian author (more at Wikipedia and at his website), and he wrote this book based on his experiences living in Guinea-Bissau (formerly Portuguese Guinea) where he worked for the United Nations. In retelling these ten animal stories, Barbosa has created frametales that set up each storytelling scene, and the illustrations by Ciça Fittipaldi are inspired by the Yoruban art traditions of western Africa. I like all these stories so much that it is going to be hard to select just a few favorites to write about in this blog post! I'll begin with the first story, which is a chain tale, so you know I am excited about that! It's the Considerate Fly, which begins with the fly doing a good deed... that sets off a chain of unintended consequences for which the fly is then called to account before the king. You can see the characters in the chain in this illustration:

If you remember the Aardema book illustrated by the Dillons, you will recognize how this chain of events takes shape, but the fly is much nicer than that mosquito, who just starts things by gossiping, unlike the considerate fly: Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears.

The Serpent's Bride is another story that will be familiar: a reckless woman ends up marrying against her family's wishes... and her husband turns out to be a deadly serpent. Her brothers rescue her, which is a typical story pattern, but what's different about this story is that her brothers sound just like the cast of characters lifted from a dilemma tale: seer, carpenter, hunter, and thief. All their skills are needed to rescue their sister from the serpent. In a dilemma tale, there would then be a debate about which of the suitors (not brother) most deserves to marry the rescued woman, but since these are brothers and this is not a dilemma tale about suitors, the story just ends happily ever after! In a sense she marries the four brothers because she vows never to fall in love again and instead spends her life happily taking care of her brothers "because they truly loved her and cared about what happened to her." And yes, the serpent turns out to have many heads, as you can see in the illustration: eeeek!

I was also excited to find this story about the honeyguide bird and the bee; the explanation of just why the honeyguide bird, here called the "casolo" bird, is one of my favorite folktale topics, and this is a great story involving the bee and the bird caring for their young ones, following the advice of a traditional medicine-doctor: The Casolo Bird and the Bee. Here you can see the doctor and the bird and the bee who have come for consultations:

Another animal aetiology story that I really liked was Why Dogs Sniff Each Other. It's about two rival dog-kings, and one of the dog-kings falls in love with the sister of the other dog-king. Here is the dog pleading his case, asking the other dog-king to let him marry his sister:

Things do not go well, with no happily ever after. What is really intriguing to me about this story is how much it resembles an Aesopic fable about why dogs sniff each other's butts. No, Aesop does not have this delightful set-up of the dog-king in love, but there is still enough in common between the two stories that it seems certain that two storytellers, somehow somewhere, met up, traded stories, and so we have perfumed dogs in both an African story and an ancient Roman story too! We'll never know where the story started, but it ended up on both continents, and it's fun to read in either version. Here's the story from Aesop if you are curious: The Embassy of the Dogs.

There are several trickster Tortoise stories in this book, and it includes one of my favorites, when Tortoise "haunts" the market in order to raid the market when everyone runs away in fear: The Cunning of the Tortoise. It has some other great folktale elements too, like the magical music and also the revenge that Tortoise gets on her accuser. Here's Tortoise playing the music that makes all the animals dance:

For a final update this week, I wanted to share this great animal story which explains why birds scratch the ground and why roosters crow in the morning. Yes, it's a story about birds, with the main characters being foolish Hawk and his uncle Eagle, but it's also a story about Sun and Moon: The Hawk and the Eagle. Here's the illustration showing Moon:

So, I hope you will take a few minutes to explore the book for yourself: so many good stories, and some wonderful artwork also! Enjoy!

African Animal Tales

by Rogério Andrade Barbosa 

ABC 37. Horses and Tortoises and Rabbits and Elephants...

It's time for the third #AnansiBookClub book of February, and you can see the February Calendar at the website, plus all the Book Club posts here at the blog. This week's book is actually an anthology, but a very short one, just 40 pages, and we'll do a more typical anthology for the final book this month. But first, here's the story anthology with a very VERY long title: Horses and Tortoises and Rabbits and Elephants and Birds and Hippos and Lions and Sisters and Frogs and Dogs and Hares and Jackals and Murder: Stories from Africa.

This book is the result of a community-based project from the African Women’s Network in Dublin, Ireland, featuring 10 stories written and illustrated by members of the collective. Most, but not all, of the stories are animal stories (as you can tell from the title), and each story indicates its country of provenance along with the name of the storyteller. The book is intended for use in elementary schools so that Irish children can learn about Africa and also for African children living in Ireland so that they can celebrate their heritage. It's a brilliant project, and I feel so lucky that the book somehow ended up at the Internet Archive, as it is not available from any traditional bookseller.

The variety of stories in this book is so much fun. The very first story, "The Learned Horse," is told by Jane Gatto from Kenya. It's a folktale that took shape in a Christian context, as you would expect in modern Kenya, which is a secular country but with a large Christian majority. There are many folktales where someone comes into possession of an object that is controlled by "magic" words... and, with a Christian twist, that is the story of this learned horse too!

I was also excited about the next story in the book, this time by Joan Maina, also from Kenya... it's the story of the race between the tortoise and the hare. In almost all African versions, the tortoise wins by a trick (the tortoise is one of the great tricksters of Africa after all!), and that trick is almost always a substition-trick, where the friends and relatives of the tortoise conspire to fool the speedy animal, which might be a rabbit, a deer, etc. In this story, however, the tortoise uses a different trick! Just see what happens: The Tortoise and the Hare. (You can click on the image for a larger view.)

I also like the way that this race is a race between romantic rivals, which is a theme that is almost always part of the "so-and-so was my father's riding horse" type of story, but which is less common in the slow-animal-wins-race type of story. So much good stuff going on even in this very tiny story!

And then look: in another story from Kenya, this one told by Joseph Muchina, it's another race, and this time the rabbit is the one who catches a ride! You can see him on the back of the cheetah there. What a great example of how the characters and events of a story can mix-and-match, so that sometimes an animal like rabbit is the trickster, as in this story, and sometimes the rabbit is trick (as in the previous story): The Clever Rabbit.

And here's another story from Jane Gatto of Kenya (she told "The Learned Horse" story above)... this is a famous African folktale, and there are some fun details in here; I especially like the birds dragging away the mattress at the end, ha ha. If you were in Helen Nde's Twitter Space this past Friday, you heard a version of this story during that session (it's online at the Internet Archive too! Why Tortoise's Shell Is Cracked). Here's Jane Gatto's version: The Birds' Party.

There's another of my favorite folktales in here too: the famous trickster story of the ungrateful animal who wants to eat his rescuer... in this case, a lion who was trapped in a cave! The trickster who makes everything right in the end this time is the jackal: The Lion in the Cave. It's a story from Zimbabwe told by Cheniwe Susan Mataka. Here's the lion trapped in the cave, and the lion definitely does not look happy in there (the artist has drawn the lion with a mane, but in the story, the storyteller makes the lion a she-lion, a lioness):

Plus you've all been wondering about the hippos on the cover of the book, right? I'll finish up this week's blog post with a link to that hippo story and another illustration. I don't want to give away any details, but suffice to say: if you are get advice from a person with supernatural powers, do what they say! Or else! Here's the story: A Wicked Man, another story by Cheniwe Susan Mataka of Zimbabwe. Yes, the hippo is in a bathtub:

So, that's it for this week's book and remember: all these stories await you, and more, just a click away at the Internet Archive. Enjoy!

Horses and Tortoises and Rabbits and Elephants

and Birds and Hippos and Lions
and Sisters and Frogs and Dogs and Hares
and Jackals and Murder: Stories from Africa

ABC 36. The House With No Door

It's already time for the second #AnansiBookClub book of February! You can see the February Calendar at the website, and you can also see all the Book Club posts here at the blog (along with additional information at the website about previous months). This week's book is something different: instead of a book of stories, it's a book of riddles! But it's also familiar because the illustrations are by... Ashley Bryan! The riddles were chosen by Brian Swann: The House With No Door: African Riddle-Poems.

Don't let the word "poems" in the title mislead you: the texts of the riddles are very short, and their poetic quality comes from the metaphorical, mysterious quality that pervades riddles just as it pervades poetry. 

What's really great about this book is that the illustrations make an essential contribution, just like in the best illustrated children's stories. The idea is that Ashley Bryan's bright, beautiful illustrations provide a clue to help you find a possible solution to the riddle.

I'll have more to say about Brian Swann, about Ashley Bryan, and about riddles in Africa (and in the African Diaspora too!) as I update this post all week long, but I'll just start with one of my favorite riddles in the book; this is an Amazigh riddle from Morocco: It is long, it is long, yet it does not reach the tail of a donkey. See if the illustration gives you a clue:

Did you guess what it is? You can see the answer there in the right-hand page: the road or the path. The riddle depends on the "trick" of dimensions: the road is long in its own dimension, but the tail of the donkey is on another plane, different from the road. The road can go on and on and on forever, but it will never reach (up) to touch the donkey's tail!

Here's another one; see if you can figure it out: Trousers rolled to his knees, the prince dashes about in his many-colored coat made without thread. I only figured this one out thanks to the clue in Ashley Bryan's illustration:

Did you figure that one out? It's the rooster! You can see how carefully Ashley Bryan has drawn the rooster with his trousers rolled to his knees, unlike the colorful peacock who has no trousers!

Are you read for another one? If you use the clue in the illustration, I'm sure you'll figure this one out. This is a riddle of the Lozi people of southern Africa: I make long journeys flat on my back. 

As you can see, the canoe is traveling on its back: don't let the person lying on his back in the canoe fool you... the canoes, after all, are all traveling on their backs, even when the people in them are sitting up. 

I'll share one more riddle here, and then in the rest of the updates, I'll have something more to say about the creators of this book, Ashley Bryan and Brian Swann. But first: one more riddle! This one is also from the Lozi people: Ever since he was born he's been standing like that, one hand on his hip.

Try to guess who he is before you look at the picture!

The answer is a cup! (Or mug.) The riddle gets you to see a familiar object in a new way, imagining the cup as having a body, with some of the same body parts as a human being. You see a man in the picture standing there with a hand on his hip, and then you see the mug, which also has his hand on his hip... so to speak. Compare the English proverb: "Little pitchers have big ears," which gives "ears" to pitchers, and then metaphorically applies to children, "the little pitchers" who have big ears too, so you have to be careful what you say in front of them.

Proverbs that use metaphors have a lot in common with riddles, and you might remember that Ashley Bryan also did a book of African proverbs where the illustrations, much like in this book, provide clues that help you to visualize and interpret the proverb. We read that book back in May; here's that blog post: The Night Has Ears. Here's an example from that book: A log may lie in the water for ten years, but it will never become a crocodile (a saying of the Songhay people of western Africa). Bryan uses the illustration to suggest the way that a log might ... might ... be crocodile-ish, but nothing compared to a real crocodile. 

And if you liked this book of riddles by Brian Swann, you might enjoy his other riddle books which you can find at the Internet Archive:

A Basket Full of White Eggs:
Riddle Poems

Touching the Distance:
Native American Riddle Poems

As you can see, that book is about Native American traditions, which is the focus of Brian Swann's work; he has published and edited many books of Native Americans stories, songs, and poetry. In fact, I relied on one of his books for the trickster project just a couple weeks ago: Algonquian Spirit: Contemporary Translations of the Algonquian Literatures of North America. You will also find many more books by Brian Swann at the Internet Archive.

All just a click away, thanks to the power of Controlled Digital Lending!

The House With No Door:
African Riddle-Poems
by Brian Swann

ABC 35. Head Body Legs

It's time to start a new month of books for #AnansiBookClub! You can see the February Calendar at the website, and you can also see all the Book Club posts from 2022 and 2023 here at the blog (and additional information at the website about previous months). To start things off this month, it's a writer we've read before here, Won-Ldy Paye, a storyteller from Liberia, and his collaborator, Margaret Lippert: Head Body Legs: A Story from Liberia.

And the wonderful illustrations are once again by Julie Paschkis. This particular folktale is perfect for visual storytelling, helping us to really SEE the strange situation that the story describes, when Head was all one, as were Arms, Body, and Legs. Here's where we first meet Head just rolling along:

You might recall a story from Somalia that we read earlier where "Head" was all on his own and was the hero of the story... but sadly, the author of that book, Elizabeth Laird, removed all of her books from the Internet Archive so you cannot read the story (I still can't get over my shock and disappointment about that), but I do have an illustration I can share from that earlier blog post: the story is "The Miraculous Head" in her book The Ogress and the Snake (which is out of print and not held by many libraries, but there are used copies out there at least for those with money to buy access).

Meanwhile, in Helen Nde's Twitter Space on Friday, she read a selection from Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-wine Tapster in the Dead's Town... and it resonated so much with this Liberian folktale, so I wanted to make sure to include that here! The story Tutuola tells is a "strange suitor" type of folktale, completely different from Paye's story here of how the body came to be, and what happens in Tutuola's story is like Paye's story in reverse: instead of how the body came to be, it's the story of how a body comes apart. It's an amazing story, like this entire novel! The story begins here: The Description of the Curious Creature, and things start getting very weird in this part: Return the Parts of the Body to the Owners; or, Hired Parts of the Complete Gentleman's Body to Be Returned. 

There are other African folktales with body parts as characters like in Head Body Legs, and one of my favorites is a Mpongwe story from Gabon is about Ear and Hands; it's an aetiological story about why mosquitoes buzz. You can read that story in Nassau's West african Folk Lore Tales: Why Mosquitoes Buzz. The story begins: "In the time of Long-Ago, in Njambi's town, Mosquito and Ear went out to take a bath together." I'd love to see Julie Paschkis illustrate this story too!

I also feel obliged to bring up a parallel from Aesop's fables, although it is nowhere nearly as imaginative and fun as "Head Body Legs." The Aesop's fable is one that would not really appeal to children (which is true of so many of Aesop's fables, which were never intended as children's stories to begin with), whereas "Head Body Legs" is a fun story for listeners of any age to imagine. The Aesop's fable is often called "The Belly and the Members," and it was made especially famous by being included in Shakespeare's play Coriolanus; it has its own Wikipedia article too (I laughed out loud to find myself in the footnotes of the article ha ha). You can find lots of versions in English here; here's a version as told by Joseph Jacobs with an illustration by Richard Heighway:

THE BELLY AND THE MEMBERS. One fine day it occurred to the Members of the Body that they were doing all the work and the Belly was having all the food. So they held a meeting, and after a long discussion, decided to strike work till the Belly consented to take its proper share of the work. So for a day or two, the Hands refused to take the food, the Mouth refused to receive it, and the Teeth had no work to do. But after a day or two the Members began to find that they themselves were not in a very active condition: the Hands could hardly move, and the Mouth was all parched and dry, while the Legs were unable to support the rest. So thus they found that even the Belly in its dull quiet way was doing necessary work for the Body, and that all must work together or the Body will go to pieces.

This illustration by John Tenniel (yes, the same Tenniel of "Alice in Wonderland") is more artistic, but still not likely to really inspire the reader's imagination:

I don't think even Julie Paschkis's illustrations could make this Aesop's fable a story that children would enjoy. Aesop was teaching a lesson about cooperation using the body's parts as a metaphor, yes, but without the same wild imagination or the positive direction that you will find in the Liberian folktale.

One of the things I really like about the way the authors and the illustrator work together is the way that the pictures themselves are doing part of the storytelling. For example, when Head, Arms, and Body are crossing the river, the text tells us that the current is strong (which would be hard to show in pictures), but the text does not tell us about the fish and, more importantly, the crocodile, which are there in the picture (click on the image for a larger view):

I'll finish up this blog post by including the two other books that Won-Ldy Paye, Margaret Lippert, and Julie Paschikis created together... and they are both available at the Internet Archive! And I like them both so much! Here are the previous blog posts about them: Talking Vegetables post and Mrs. Chicken post.

The Talking Vegetables

Mrs. Chicken and the Hungry Crocodile

So, I hope you will enjoy Won-Ldy Paye and Margaret Lippert's books, ... along with all the great art by Julie Paschkis. Plus maybe you'll want to read Amos Tutuola also; you'll find several of Tutuola's books at the Archive. As usual, I'll be back each day this week with updates about the story, the art, along with information about other books by these storytellers. Enjoy!

Head Body Legs: A Story from Liberia

by Won-Ldy Paye and Margaret Lippert

ABC 34. East African Folktales

Wow, here we are at the end of January already, with our final book for Anansi Book Club this month. You can see the January Calendar at the website, and you can also see all the Book Club posts from 2022 here at the blog (and additional information at the website about previous months).

Like every month, the final book is an anthology of stories, and in this case it's an anthology of very short stories by Vincent Kituku: East African Folktales from the Voice of Mukamba, which is part of the World Storytelling series from August House Publishers. 

Vincent Kituku was born in Kangundo, Kenya. After graduating from the University of Nairobi in 1985, he came to the United States for his graduate education, completing a Ph.D. at the University of Wyoming; he is now a motivational storyteller and writer based in Idaho. 

In this book Kituku shares 18 traditional Kamba folktales from Kenya, including both the Kamba text and an English translation. In the subtitle, "voice of Mukamba" means the voice of a member of the Kamba community. As Kituku explains in the introduction, Akamba refers to the Kamba community and Mukamba means a member of that community. He also explains how when he was an elementary school pupil in the 1960s, the use of Kamba language was forbidden in school, but he learned the Kamba stories from his mother, and it was important for him to pass them on both in the Kamba language and in English.

The illustrations are by Kelly Matthews based on designs from Kenyan batik art, and you can definitely get that batik feeling in the drawings, like in this illustration for Ndothya the drunkard and the Hyena... and from the Kamba version of the story, I learned that the Hyena's name is Mbiti!

This is a great story that will remind you of the Aesop's fable about the "boy who cried wolf" but this time it is the "man who cried hyena" instead! Another altered Aesop's fable is the story of two hunters who confront a fox, with one friend abandoning his other; in Aesop, it is the story of two friends and a bear. It's recognizably the same story, but considerably changed.

Other Aesop's fables appear here unchanged; there are many fables which move easily from one culture to another because they carry so little specific cultural baggage. In the Kamba story of the chicken and the shilling, a chicken finds a shilling but decides it has no value because the shilling will not fill her stomach. The moral of the story in this version is very much on the chicken's side: yes, a shilling is "worth" more than millet, but not for a chicken who just needs some millet to eat!

Another familiar Aesop's fable here is the story of the greedy dog carrying the meat over the water who gets greedy for the reflection he sees in the water.

Aesop's fables circulated for thousands of years back-and-forth literally all around the world, and that circulation continues even today, as this book shows. Some European fables clearly came from Africa, India, or the Middle East, while some African fables came from India or Europe, and so on. These tiny fables are very mobile, and they are very much at home here in this collection of Kenyan fables.

There are also some strong connections between the stories in this book and traditional African proverbs. No surprise, as the fable genre and the proverb genre often overlap! One of my favorites is the proverbial "water banana" ... and to understand why a "water banana" is proverbial just read this story: The Water Banana. The proverbial conclusion to the story is something like the English proverb, "Easy come, easy go," but much more vivid because it involves an actual series of events involving bananas and water: "A banana plant that is brought by water is taken away by water."

If you are interested in more proverbs, Vincent Muli wa Kituku has also written a book of Kamba-English proverbs: The School With No Walls: Where Lifelong Lessons Begin.

The Internet Archive's copy of that book is actually autographed by the author!

The proverbs are presented in Kamba and in English translation, along with a commentary. There are some illustrations by Susan Ballenger also:

Now, back to this week's book of stories: in addition to the fables and proverb-inspired stories, you will also find versions of classic African folktales that have been told across the continent for uncounted ages, like the story of the animal who is too lazy (or greedy or sleepy, etc.) to go get their tail when the tails are being distributed; in this case it is a story about a hamster. 

I was delighted to find a story about the trickster rabbit here, and I learned that the Kamba name for the hare is Kavuku: The Hare and the Hyena. The rabbit uses the power of his words to trick the hyena, and the story ends, like so many trickster stories, with the rabbit laughing at the fool who fell for the trick. As you can see from the illustration, the hyena's fear of the lion is a factor in the story.

Another widespread type of story in this collection is the messages-of-life-and-death, where death comes into the world because chameleon is slow to deliver the message. Sometimes the fast messenger is a fast animal, like rabbit, and sometimes a bird, as in this story: Chameleon and Raven. Sometimes the sender of the message is the Creator, as here, but often it is the Moon (who dies and comes back to life itself). Because Chameleon is so slow with the message of resurrection, Raven pronounces the message of death first, which is why there is death in the world. The Raven's message is really eerie too: Die and go down as deep as the roots of mangrove trees.

I'll be back tomorrow with another update to this post; for now, jump in and read some of the stories. They are all super-short, and you can see what you think of the interpretations that go with each story, since they are all meant to be teaching tales. Lots of ponder, and lovely artwork too!

East African Folktales

from the Voice of Mukamba

by Vincent Kituku