Africa at the Internet Archive: Anansi again!

For today's western Africa post, I want to feature two more Anansi books, both by famous children's book authors that I've featured in earlier posts at this blog. The first is Verna Aardema, with her book Anansi Does the Impossible: An Ashanti Tale.

The story originally appeared in Aardema's book The Sky God Stories (also available at Internet Archive), and when that book went out of print and the rights reverted to Aardema, she republished this individual story with illustrations by Lisa Desimini. Here is Anansi preparing for the task of capturing Snake alive, for example:

I've featured MANY of Verna Aardema's African folktale books in previous posts, and you can see all those Aardema posts with this link.

The other book I want to feature today is Gerald McDermott's Anansi the Spider: A Tale from the Ashanti.

Gerald McDermott wrote and illustrated children's books featuring folktales and mythology from around the world; you can find out more about his career and his mythological pursuits at Wikipedia. This book was his first, published in 1972, and it received a Caldecott Honor award. 

McDermott's style of storytelling is very spare, and the beautiful illustrations do a lot of the work here... and what's really fascinating is that the copy of the book at Internet Archive has annotations! Someone has pasted in their own additions to the story right there in the text, as you can see here for example when Anansi emerges from inside a fish: "Out came Anansi, all wet and wobbly."

You can also see more of McDermott's books at Internet Archive. I featured McDermott's book about the African trickster rabbit in an earlier post: Zomo the Rabbit: A Trickster Tale from West Africa.

I am a fan of all the trickster, but especially Rabbit, since it was my fascinating with African American Brer Rabbit stories that led me to begin this African folktale project to begin with. So, both Rabbit and Spider await you at Internet Archive!

 Anansi the Spider: A Tale from the Ashanti

by Gerald McDermott

Anansi Does the Impossible: An Ashanti Tale

by Verna Aardema

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Zomo the Rabbit

I've focused on stories about trickster Tortoise and trickster Spider in western Africa this week (see all this week's posts on one page)... but the trickster Rabbit / Hare is part of west African storytelling too, so I'll end this week with a book of rabbit stories: Zomo, the Rabbit by Hugh Sturton, which is just a click away at Internet Archive.

As you can see, Zomo the Rabbit is on the run from the other animals who are all fed up with his tricks and pranks. Here's how the cover looks wrapped around the book (photo of my copy at home):

These are Hausa stories that Hugh Sturton collected during the years that he lived and worked in Nigeria; you can read more about the Hausa people at Wikipedia. 

I'll also add another Zomo book here, this one by Gerald McDermott (who wrote other trickster books too like about Anansi and Coyote): Zomo the Rabbt: A Trickster Tale from West Africa.

I originally became interested in African folktales when I started working on Brer Rabbit stories back in 2019, so finding rabbit stories from west Africa like this is very exciting for me. The majority of Brer Rabbit / Compere Lapin / Tio Conejo stories told in the Americas and the Caribbean come from Africa, and the more I learn about African folktales, the more I appreciate the African American stories — and, yes, I'll be doing a guided tour of African American story traditions at Internet Archive after I finish this tour of African story resources, but that will be many months from now: there are still so many beautiful African books yet to share.

Just as an example of African / American connection, here's an incident from the McDermott book about Zomo the Rabbit: in order to win wisdom from the Sky God, Rabbit must carry out some difficult tasks, and for one of those tasks he must catch the Wild Cow. He manages to get the Cow's horns stuck in a tree:

Well, Brer Rabbit also tricks a cow into getting stuck in a tree too; here's an illustration for Joel Chandler Harris's story of how Miss Cow Falls a Victim to Mr. Rabbit. Here you can see the cow stuck in the tree while Brer Rabbit and his family are toting the milk home:

The version of the story that Harris collected had become disconnected from the larger story of the Sky God's wisdom, but it is still connected by an unbreakable thread to the African storytelling traditions of west Africa; I'll have lots more to say about Brer Rabbit later on! 

So, for your reading pleasure, here is the trickster rabbit of western Africa: enjoy!

Zomo, the Rabbit

by Hugh Sturton

 Zomo the Rabbt: A Trickster Tale from West Africa

by Gerald McDermott