African Diaspora at Internet Archive: Suriname Folklore

I wanted to follow up yesterday's post about the Saramaka storytellers of Suriname with an earlier, and also remarkable, work on Suriname storytellers by writers who are familiar to readers of this blog, Melville and Frances Herskovits. The book is: Suriname Folklore, published in 1936.

As you would expect from the comprehensive anthropological approach taken by the Herskovitses in their other books, this book is huge, appx. 800 pages long, documenting over 150 stories with notes for each story. There is a long introduction, appx. 150 pages long, about the history and culture of Suriname. Then come the stories, over 300 pages, along with over 50 pages of riddles, and then over 200 pages dedicated to the songs and music. 

The stories (which are called "Anansi-tori") are presented in facing-text with creole on the one side, and an English translation on the other (click on the image for a larger view): 

The songs and dances have the musical transcription:

This book also has a companion volume, published 2 years earlier, in 1934: Rebel Destiny: Among the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana, also available at the Internet Archive. This book provides a narrative of the time that the Herskovitses spent in Suriname (Dutch Guiana at the time; more about the Dutch colonization of the Guianas in South America at Wikipedia).

You might remember the Herskovitses from their monumental book on the storytelling traditions of Benin: Dahomean Narrative: A Crosscultural Analysis., also available at the Internet Archive. This book, published in 1958, collects over 150 stories from Fon storytellers in Benin (French Dahomey) as told in the 1930s and then translated into English. 

You can find out more about the life and career of Melville Herskovits at Wikipedia, and thanks to Controlled Digital Lending at the Internet Archive, you can read the results of the Herskovitses' work for yourself; the books are just a click away:

Suriname Folklore

by Melville and Frances Herskovits

Rebel Destiny: Among the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana

by Melville and Frances Herskovits

Africa at the Internet Archive: Dahomean Narrative

Following up on yesterday's post with folktales from western African in Baba Wagué Diakité's books, I wanted to share this monumental work by anthropologists Melville and Frances Herskovits: Dahomean Narrative: A Crosscultural Analysis.

This book, published in 1958, collects over 150 stories which Melville and Frances Herskovits collected in Benin (French Dahomey at that time) from Fon storytellers in the 1930s and then translated into English. 

The detailed notes in the book make it a work of great scholarship (almost 600 pages long), but it is also very readable for a general audience. 

Before publishing this collection of stories, in 1938 Melville Herskovits published an ethnography of the people of Dahomey which can put those stories in context: Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom.

For more about Melville and Frances Herskovits, see Wikipedia. I will have more to say about them at this blog when I move on from writing about African folklore in Africa to books about African folklore in the Americas and the Caribbean like Herskovits's astounding book documenting the folklore of the Saramaka Maroons in Suriname on the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America: Suriname Folklore (and that book likewise has an ethnographic companion: Rebel Destiny: Among the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana).

Herskovits was one of the strongest advocates for the importance of African cultural heritage in the Americas, as he explains in The Myth of the Negro Past published in 1941.

The work of Melville and Frances Herskovits is a big part of how I came to undertake my own African reading project documented here at this blog, and I am so glad to see so many of their books available at Internet Archive, just a click away!

Dahomean Narrative: A Crosscultural Analysis

by Melville and Frances Herskovits